A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors.
The NSA is subject to Congressional oversight, contractors are not. 70% of our intelligence spending is unaccounted and unregulated. It's not the NSA you need to worry about spying on you, it's AT&T. When questions started surfacing about their role in spying on Americans, they responded by asking Congress for a liability shield. AT&T doesn't depend on Congress for their budget, the NSA does.
I have a live version of Kubuntu running on a machine downstairs. I could install the live version to test that hardware, network compatibility and that it could find the shared network printer and backup drives. It didn't cost anything and the few minor problems resolved online. Actually, there weren't any problems, all I had to look up were some installation instructions. Didn't need to buy anything, call anyone, wait for anything. Tomorrow I can install it if everything else checks out. What risk am I taking adding that OS to my network?
Microsoft support, like Dell's support, used to be THE reason to stay with Windows on Dell hardware. But lately they've both let their support slide. There's no reason to stay with them. There's no risk trying Linux. You can test everything before committing. And it doesn't cost...how much are MSFT service calls going for these days?
Geeks will find a way get out from under providers like AT&T. It'll be something like self-discovering mesh networks over wifi, packet radio or some other type of hobby system that will grow until it becomes a carrier and this nonsense will start all over again. But, until then, it'll be a wide open frontier.
Sometimes I think retardedness like this is a good thing because it pushes geeks to start looking around for an alternative. Or, if none exists, developing one.
So, if Comcast is so universally evil, I've certainly never seen it...
It's a good point. I don't think any company is universally evil or they wouldn't be in business very long. I've had good experiences with companies that have pages of complaints online (cough*direcTV*cough). I've never experienced any of those problems. I get really good service.
And, likewise, I've had very real and very serious problems with companies other people have had no problems with at all.
I'm not sure the problem these days is universal evil as much as universal inconsistency. Stupidity raised to a high enough level is indistinguishable from malice. And one customer just doesn't impact a company's bottom line that much anymore.
Idiots. Keep reading your MoveOn.org "press releases"
It's no worse than you watching Fox News. Our country is being gutted, everything we stand for as a nation undermined and you're still supporting them?
With your user number, you'd think you'd be old enough to have learned something. What an embarrassment that you continue to support such a lying, corrupt administration. We are all the poorer as a nation because of you.
Does anyone besides me wonder if there's a peaceable solution to our differences? Sometimes I wonder if we're going to have to have it out with you and your kind to get our country back. How can we move forward when a third of the nation is okay treating the Constitution like it's just a piece of paper?
The school owes IBM money and California farmers are paying higher prices for farm labor because of the border crack down. I say have the school send all the kids out to harvest lettuce and have their wages go to pay back IBM. They even have school buses to drive them out to the fields. Might have to chain them together so they don't wander off and get lost and we could make their parents buy them little orange jumpsuits so we could spot them if they tried running off.
The farmers get cheap labor, IBM gets its money and the kids all learn to swing a lettuce knife with deadly accuracy before they get to high school. Okay, a few of them will lose fingers, maybe hack a little arm off. Bo-ho liberal whiners. Here's a bandaid. It's a win-win-win for everyone.
If it works out we could start renting them out to companies doing asbestos remediation, hauling trash, put them to work in shoe factories and get those back in the US again! Then we could take all that money they're making and role back the property taxes for all us old people.
From now on, schools will only be licensed for PCs actually using Microsoft software,
And people wonder why I set up my latest business venture on a non-Microsoft platform. It's bad enough trying to deal with quarterly taxes, reporting, regulators...why would I want to add another profit leech to that mix?
it will be till somebody pokes around the prepackage and finds it able to only load approved state software, calls home, etc.
Then they'll be lucky to be running Linux. They can download a clean install from almost anywhere, blank the state software and start over. Download free tools to monitor their network traffic and watch to see if the hardware or BIOS has been borked.
But their plan was foiled by loading OSS on that machine, otherwise they would have gotten away with it. A fortunate oversight, don't you agree?
Why do some software developers only see one way to make money in software? Software development has several revenue models that work quite well. Seems a little whiny and narrow-minded to think there's no way closed and open source can co-exist.
By this interpretation of the law anyone with a camcorder at a back yard cookout or public event is committing a felony, unless you have permission from everyone there. Unless they call out every exception, then TV news crews are roving criminal bands. It's ridiculous. The fact they're police officers is irrelevant. There's no expectation of privacy in a public place and the same standards should apply to audio as video.
but it's that very effort that makes it cost prohibitive to do it across a broad scale
That's a good idea. Poisoning the data well.
I'm wondering if a secure proxy would defeat your ISP's snooping? For some reason I was thinking it's possible to snoop https traffic. Difficult, but possible. It would certainly be a pain the rear and an ISP would need a good reason to go to all the trouble. Especially with so many, many people who wouldn't bother. All the search engine would have is the proxy IP, all your ISP would have is one IP address. It would be possible to match up those records, but who has the resources for that effort?
I could have tolerated the ending of the Sopranos if Deadwood was still there to help you fogetaboutit. But they canceled that, too. Didn't even bother to wrap it up. Suck ending to the Sopranos, no Deadwood and instead some stupid surfer show that doesn't even make sense and Big Love which should be renamed Big Snoozer. No decent concert series, their comedy shows have gone down the toilet and all the movies you want to see are available on Netflix. C'ya.
That giant sucking sound you hear today are millions of people just like me canceling their subscription.
Looked like it worked pretty well for the top players. Some of them may have collected 10K for the top slot on a particular week and almost ended up with a cool million. Save for the efforts of a few heads up players they might have gotten away with it.
It's also worked pretty well for the Republicans.
That doesn't make it right, but it's hard to argue with success.
No such thing as a conflict of interest in the Bush administration. No bid contracts funneled to Cheney's former company and a lawyer that used to represent Microsoft put in charge of the Justice Department's anti-trust actions against Microsoft:
The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes.
At a minimum this guy should have recused himself from handling any DOJ matters related to Microsoft. But in Republican ethics there is no such thing as a conflict of interest and job qualifications are determined by party fund raising ability and attending Oral Roberts University.
Come on, let's hear you neocons start whining about how the Democrats do it, too. That seems to be your major justification for just about every corrupt practice you've supported the last 10 years. The Democrats rob banks, that means we can too! My neighbor smokes pot, that makes it okay for me! Instant self-justification: Add generous helping of hypocrisy, spin well and serve. You can justify anything.
Or fall back on the old standard: Blame Clinton. Which is it today?
I think that as long as companies like Novell and Xandros keep thinking of the community of only being made up of their paying customers, they are missing the point of free software and ultimately will be missing out on the crucial developments that they require to maintain profitability.
It goes a little deeper than that for me. Myself and many fellow Xandros users spent hours helping each other out and paying Xandros for their distro in the perhaps naive belief that we were helping make Linux profitable and approachable. That paying a company to pay developers would speed along the adoption.
And Xandros pays us back by getting in bed with Microsoft and tops it off by acting surprised when we start installing Ubuntu over the Xandros partition.
Can you say "Duh!" boys and girls? I knew you could!
Seems as though a patent for artificial life, belonging to one Victor Frankenstein, has already expired. Along with a sub-category submitted by Abby Normal, signed off by The Man with Two Brains.
That's the question I kept asking through the Clinton years...
There's no comparison in scope or depth of the deceit. It's also no justification for Bush. If he's got such an exalted moral compass then isn't his the greater evil? And what about the majority of Republicans supporting those lies? Coloring yourself the party of morality and ruling by corruption and lying. Your shame is greater...or would be if you had any. A liar, a hypocrite and a fraud. Faithful to failed, incompetent leadership.
But by all means continue to strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.
How blatant do the lies have to be before it's justified? How can someone lie to you so much and so often yet you...apparently...seem to still support them?
Saying Bush cherry picks statistics and manipulates data to mislead the public (i.e. lying) cannot be doubted by a reasonable person. The truth doesn't have many friends these days, might ask yourself if you're one of them.
I liked Xandros...used to like them anyway. It was a nice distro for people who still had one foot in the Windows world. Not sure I even care why they got in bed with Microsoft, they are tainted by the association.
If Microsoft's strategy is to create a clear winner among Linux distributions, they're doing a fine job. Although I'm completely mystified why they would think that was a good idea.
So a presidential hopeful wants somebody who at least knows how technology works to be a technology adviser?
We're talking about Steve Ballmer. He understands how technology works the same way a chef understands bovine psychology.
For the last six years we've had the problem dictating the solution. John McCain has just gone on record promising to continue that tradition. It's obvious who he's trying to appeal to and it's not you and I.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just like to say I'm thrilled to be able to say this.
If Vista was a bigger percentage of the PC market, there would be more exploits for it.
Pay back's a bitch, ain't it?
This is the real problem:
A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors.
The NSA is subject to Congressional oversight, contractors are not. 70% of our intelligence spending is unaccounted and unregulated. It's not the NSA you need to worry about spying on you, it's AT&T. When questions started surfacing about their role in spying on Americans, they responded by asking Congress for a liability shield. AT&T doesn't depend on Congress for their budget, the NSA does.
since MS support is really very, very bad
I have a live version of Kubuntu running on a machine downstairs. I could install the live version to test that hardware, network compatibility and that it could find the shared network printer and backup drives. It didn't cost anything and the few minor problems resolved online. Actually, there weren't any problems, all I had to look up were some installation instructions. Didn't need to buy anything, call anyone, wait for anything. Tomorrow I can install it if everything else checks out. What risk am I taking adding that OS to my network?
Microsoft support, like Dell's support, used to be THE reason to stay with Windows on Dell hardware. But lately they've both let their support slide. There's no reason to stay with them. There's no risk trying Linux. You can test everything before committing. And it doesn't cost...how much are MSFT service calls going for these days?
Geeks will find a way get out from under providers like AT&T. It'll be something like self-discovering mesh networks over wifi, packet radio or some other type of hobby system that will grow until it becomes a carrier and this nonsense will start all over again. But, until then, it'll be a wide open frontier.
Sometimes I think retardedness like this is a good thing because it pushes geeks to start looking around for an alternative. Or, if none exists, developing one.
So, if Comcast is so universally evil, I've certainly never seen it...
It's a good point. I don't think any company is universally evil or they wouldn't be in business very long. I've had good experiences with companies that have pages of complaints online (cough*direcTV*cough). I've never experienced any of those problems. I get really good service.
And, likewise, I've had very real and very serious problems with companies other people have had no problems with at all.
I'm not sure the problem these days is universal evil as much as universal inconsistency. Stupidity raised to a high enough level is indistinguishable from malice. And one customer just doesn't impact a company's bottom line that much anymore.
Idiots. Keep reading your MoveOn.org "press releases"
It's no worse than you watching Fox News. Our country is being gutted, everything we stand for as a nation undermined and you're still supporting them?
With your user number, you'd think you'd be old enough to have learned something. What an embarrassment that you continue to support such a lying, corrupt administration. We are all the poorer as a nation because of you.
Does anyone besides me wonder if there's a peaceable solution to our differences? Sometimes I wonder if we're going to have to have it out with you and your kind to get our country back. How can we move forward when a third of the nation is okay treating the Constitution like it's just a piece of paper?
The school owes IBM money and California farmers are paying higher prices for farm labor because of the border crack down. I say have the school send all the kids out to harvest lettuce and have their wages go to pay back IBM. They even have school buses to drive them out to the fields. Might have to chain them together so they don't wander off and get lost and we could make their parents buy them little orange jumpsuits so we could spot them if they tried running off.
The farmers get cheap labor, IBM gets its money and the kids all learn to swing a lettuce knife with deadly accuracy before they get to high school. Okay, a few of them will lose fingers, maybe hack a little arm off. Bo-ho liberal whiners. Here's a bandaid. It's a win-win-win for everyone.
If it works out we could start renting them out to companies doing asbestos remediation, hauling trash, put them to work in shoe factories and get those back in the US again! Then we could take all that money they're making and role back the property taxes for all us old people.
This is brilliant! Brilliant I tell ya!
From now on, schools will only be licensed for PCs actually using Microsoft software,
And people wonder why I set up my latest business venture on a non-Microsoft platform. It's bad enough trying to deal with quarterly taxes, reporting, regulators...why would I want to add another profit leech to that mix?
it will be till somebody pokes around the prepackage and finds it able to only load approved state software, calls home, etc.
Then they'll be lucky to be running Linux. They can download a clean install from almost anywhere, blank the state software and start over. Download free tools to monitor their network traffic and watch to see if the hardware or BIOS has been borked.
But their plan was foiled by loading OSS on that machine, otherwise they would have gotten away with it. A fortunate oversight, don't you agree?
Just put the RAM in the internet tubes and let the trucks take it over to where it's going and drop it off.
You guys always complicate this technical stuff so much.
I just want to do my job and make a living.
Why do some software developers only see one way to make money in software? Software development has several revenue models that work quite well. Seems a little whiny and narrow-minded to think there's no way closed and open source can co-exist.
By this interpretation of the law anyone with a camcorder at a back yard cookout or public event is committing a felony, unless you have permission from everyone there. Unless they call out every exception, then TV news crews are roving criminal bands. It's ridiculous. The fact they're police officers is irrelevant. There's no expectation of privacy in a public place and the same standards should apply to audio as video.
This is completely insane.
but it's that very effort that makes it cost prohibitive to do it across a broad scale
That's a good idea. Poisoning the data well.
I'm wondering if a secure proxy would defeat your ISP's snooping? For some reason I was thinking it's possible to snoop https traffic. Difficult, but possible. It would certainly be a pain the rear and an ISP would need a good reason to go to all the trouble. Especially with so many, many people who wouldn't bother. All the search engine would have is the proxy IP, all your ISP would have is one IP address. It would be possible to match up those records, but who has the resources for that effort?
You think it's worth what it takes to set up?
Wait, don't cancel...
Too late. HBO sleeps with da fishes. (drops gun, walks away)
I could have tolerated the ending of the Sopranos if Deadwood was still there to help you fogetaboutit. But they canceled that, too. Didn't even bother to wrap it up. Suck ending to the Sopranos, no Deadwood and instead some stupid surfer show that doesn't even make sense and Big Love which should be renamed Big Snoozer. No decent concert series, their comedy shows have gone down the toilet and all the movies you want to see are available on Netflix. C'ya.
That giant sucking sound you hear today are millions of people just like me canceling their subscription.
Looked like it worked pretty well for the top players. Some of them may have collected 10K for the top slot on a particular week and almost ended up with a cool million. Save for the efforts of a few heads up players they might have gotten away with it.
It's also worked pretty well for the Republicans.
That doesn't make it right, but it's hard to argue with success.
No such thing as a conflict of interest in the Bush administration. No bid contracts funneled to Cheney's former company and a lawyer that used to represent Microsoft put in charge of the Justice Department's anti-trust actions against Microsoft:
The official, Thomas O. Barnett, an assistant attorney general, had until 2004 been a top antitrust partner at the law firm that has represented Microsoft in several antitrust disputes.
At a minimum this guy should have recused himself from handling any DOJ matters related to Microsoft. But in Republican ethics there is no such thing as a conflict of interest and job qualifications are determined by party fund raising ability and attending Oral Roberts University.
Come on, let's hear you neocons start whining about how the Democrats do it, too. That seems to be your major justification for just about every corrupt practice you've supported the last 10 years. The Democrats rob banks, that means we can too! My neighbor smokes pot, that makes it okay for me! Instant self-justification: Add generous helping of hypocrisy, spin well and serve. You can justify anything.
Or fall back on the old standard: Blame Clinton. Which is it today?
I think that as long as companies like Novell and Xandros keep thinking of the community of only being made up of their paying customers, they are missing the point of free software and ultimately will be missing out on the crucial developments that they require to maintain profitability.
It goes a little deeper than that for me. Myself and many fellow Xandros users spent hours helping each other out and paying Xandros for their distro in the perhaps naive belief that we were helping make Linux profitable and approachable. That paying a company to pay developers would speed along the adoption.
And Xandros pays us back by getting in bed with Microsoft and tops it off by acting surprised when we start installing Ubuntu over the Xandros partition.
Can you say "Duh!" boys and girls? I knew you could!
Seems as though a patent for artificial life, belonging to one Victor Frankenstein, has already expired. Along with a sub-category submitted by Abby Normal, signed off by The Man with Two Brains.
Park rangers report a rash of picnic basket thefts by large robotic creatures with teddy bear heads.
Aye, Boo Boo?
Dick Cheney ordered it bombed as a possible Al Qaida hideout.
That's the question I kept asking through the Clinton years...
There's no comparison in scope or depth of the deceit. It's also no justification for Bush. If he's got such an exalted moral compass then isn't his the greater evil? And what about the majority of Republicans supporting those lies? Coloring yourself the party of morality and ruling by corruption and lying. Your shame is greater...or would be if you had any. A liar, a hypocrite and a fraud. Faithful to failed, incompetent leadership.
But by all means continue to strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.
but just see an opportunity to bash Bush.
How blatant do the lies have to be before it's justified? How can someone lie to you so much and so often yet you...apparently...seem to still support them?
Saying Bush cherry picks statistics and manipulates data to mislead the public (i.e. lying) cannot be doubted by a reasonable person. The truth doesn't have many friends these days, might ask yourself if you're one of them.
I liked Xandros...used to like them anyway. It was a nice distro for people who still had one foot in the Windows world. Not sure I even care why they got in bed with Microsoft, they are tainted by the association.
If Microsoft's strategy is to create a clear winner among Linux distributions, they're doing a fine job. Although I'm completely mystified why they would think that was a good idea.
Who knows with Ballmer at the helm.
So a presidential hopeful wants somebody who at least knows how technology works to be a technology adviser?
We're talking about Steve Ballmer. He understands how technology works the same way a chef understands bovine psychology.
For the last six years we've had the problem dictating the solution. John McCain has just gone on record promising to continue that tradition. It's obvious who he's trying to appeal to and it's not you and I.