You bring up an interesting point there, I mean heres some guy crying about not abusing their powers in the military, and we have new stories rolling in every day about fresh atrocities, torture, innocent civilians getting blown away, and more. And here's some random tootling about professionalism. Do the make you take a hypocratic oath in the military before they brainwash you?
The degree of risk isn't the point. When you shoot Achmend the Arab, he stays good and shot. When you arrest Jimbo the gangbanger, he's back again and large as life in a few years, if he doesn't walk in the first place, or his fellow knuckledraggers don't decide to track down where your kids are going to school and give them a crash course in addictive narcotics. You move you family over to Iraq then come back to talk to me about having no idea. I'll celebrate with you in twenty or thirty years, how does that sound?
War is hell man, war is hell. I guess you shouldn't have voted Gee Dubyaw back in then, should you. But hey don't worry, he and his pals will make good bank on the sacrifice. Should be able to afford that second mansion in no time at all.
Err, who is beating who for not fucking their friends? Have you got links to any of the exciting three way police action, or is this all anecdotal? Basically you are accusing the police of being wife beaters who pimp out their wives. Have you got any sort of evidence for this accusation, or are you just dribbling? Because you know, it sounds to me like you are just dribbling. Alternately you might be a jeepaholic. Fear not, my friend, help is at hand, and there is a support group near you. Join today and beat this terrible addiction, detrimental to both yourself and society as a whole; remember the first step is admitting you have a problem. I don't know if there are any support groups for overuse of caps lock though.
You know even when I was writing that, I was saying to myself, I just know some jarhead is going to jump in with two boots and start weeping about his war experience. Congratulations, sir, you are not only eminently predictable (a true credit to your training), you are, in fact, a cliche. Just Like Nam Baby!
Being a police officer is NOTHING like being in the army or military. And this is what I see a lot of people around here just aren't comprehending. Its not like a war, where you fight your enemy and go home. The police are already home. And they can't open up with assault rifles on their enemies, because there enemies are the same people they have to protect. They have none of the release valves a typical soldier in a warzone has, despite being to all intents and purposes in many cases in a warzone themselves. Being in a war is easy, fight, live or die. Your family will never have to face the meth dealer that you busted five years ago.
Okay we have a name tag Sealbeater, sitting on a spam domain filled with google adwords links, and the sig is, wait for it...
Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!! I'd be a bit more cautious about throwing around accusations of assholery if I was you, my son. Glass houses and all that. Thankfully I am not, so although its something of a gaffe to feed the trolls, I am feeling generous today.
The poster in question was referring to that particular case, not to broadly general rules of conduct. Also you refer to "cops" and "civilians" as being something different, which leads me to believe that you have a view of the police as being some sort of military force out to dominate your world with an iron fist. Inferiority complex much? Of course, as you so eloquently put it, survival of the fittest, and you do have the fucking guns, apparently, so the police are just a rival militia to you.
I seriously doubt this will make a dent, Davey Crockett, but for the benefit of the other readers, let me tell you how it is. The police have to deal with serious assholes all the time. They wake up at 2am for their shift at 3am, and straight away they are dealing with halitosis laden drug dealers, drug addicts, wife beaters, child molesters, thieves, career criminals, fraudsters, you name it, they come eyeball to red glazed eyeball with them. People that you would literally cross the entire town, never mind the road, to avoid, people for whom prison is a holiday home, or in more extreme cases a brothel. And here's the kicker; the police have to play by the rules. If they don't, the lawyer will let said scumbag roam free, and the last thing you want is Johnny biker boy cruising the streets looking for your home address with a hard-on.
Of course the nasty types don't feel any such need to play by the rules, so let me ask you. After ten years of waking up at 2am and not going into a nice office to look at the HR lady's shapely backside, but wondering if you will make it home in more or less one piece, what kind of person will you be? I'll tell you, it depends on the person. Some police officers deal with it well, some have outlets for their frustrations, some have family that support and understand them. Some don't or just don't deal with it well in any case. So that's where good cops go bad; avarice, stress, fear, or just plain frustration at seeing the same shitheads walking out after two years and doing the same things to pretty much the same people. Before you start bawling like the survivalist microbe that you are about the bad, naughty cops, you walk a mile in their shoes. Or even better, walk ten years in their shoes.
Yes, there are bad police officers, and they need to be taken out of circulation just like the career criminals. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is the worst idea anyone could ever have. Be polite to the police, and generally they will respond in kind. This has been my experience in every case.
Magna Carta is the most significant early influence on the long historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law today
Constitutional law for which country? You know, there are a few more than the UK in Europe.
and exist only by way of a sovereign state's decision to limit the state's own power
Aha but you didn't say that. In fact you seemed to be coming from the perspective that all European law is based on some sort of royalty and rights derived therein. I wonder what the French have to say about that? You know, the ones that executed their nobility wholesale. Spare me the revisionism, there is a reason you can't edit posts on slashdot, and its not the legendarily lackadaisical management.
Equally clearly, you have never read, for example, Schmerler's The Law of International Insolvencies and Debt Restructurings.
Oho well let me just drop everything for a few weeks while I click on your referrer link and wade through this tome of dubious vintage. If you have a point to make, make it, and stop depending on others to make your arguments for you. To paraphrase that saying about poor debaters, you use third parties like a drunken man uses a streetlamp; for support rather than illumination.
rife with ad hominen and straw man.
Ad hominems and straw men, the latest pretenders to the Godwin throne.
While you may not be able to solve the latter, you can at least be nice.
This is the internet, its founded on rage. Everyone knows that. Twaddle.
Suggest away, it isn't going to make you any more right. As I pointed out, the magna carta may have been a big deal in England, but it was in no way applicable to the rest of Europe. So it does not have the same characteristics, and resembles them in as much as it is written on paper with ink.
You are confused about what I am saying...
Nope, you blundered and are trying to mislead your way out of it. Let me quote you here directly: "and exist only by way of a sovereign's decision to limit their own power". A sovereign. How else is one supposed to interpret that?
As well, it is incorrect and presumptuous to say that every country has the same regulatory authority for seizure in lieu of arrears.
But isn't that exactly what you were saying with regard to the EU? Not to mention that what I said is perfectly valid, every government does have these powers and will operate in exactly this way. This top down bottom up assumption of rights is a large mound of twaddle. I don't know who modded this up, but its either a very clever troll or someone who is honestly mislead. In any case I call this a win, since I got to use the word twaddle in a conversation.
Remember kids, although they may be the only ones that speak American, the UK != the EU.
Yeah but nobody is trying to wipe out MS. That would cause a whole lot of trouble. This is merely a punitive action. And if MS doesn't play with the other kids, it will go to 4 million a day, and 8 million a day, until they finally realise who pwns who.
Interestingly, and more fundamentally, Microsoft's assets exist only and precisely because sovereigns grant them...and their rights can be quashed within the EU as a matter of implicit state power
What sovereigns? First of all the Magna Carta was an English document that pertained only to England, not Europe as a whole (the UK is about 10% of the population of the EU), and second of all the Magna Carta has been almost entirely revoked, several times in fact.
What you are really trying to say is that if a company is in flagrant violation of the directives of sovereign governments, those governments can apply such sanctions as they see fit. If the company refuses to pay fines, company assets can be siezed in lieu of payment. Exactly like anywhere else in the world, including the united states. I have no idea where you are getting this "royalty owns everything, not like in the US" idea. Model of law they are working under, my arse.
Probably the latter. Chairmen who have to answer to shareholders will choose short-term small profits over long-term huge profits everytime.
The problem isn't long term over short term profits, people everywhere make 30-year investments all the time. Its called buying property, and no one is saying thats a bad idea (unless you're in a bubble area). In fact with decent initial investments, everyone can make a good living while the space mining program gets off the ground (nyuck nyuck). The big problem is reliability of that investment. No one can say for sure if all that money isn't going to go spiralling down the drain, and the reason for that is cost to orbit. It doesn't matter how much value you are returning, when the cost to get up there reduces that value below current prices. Remove cost to orbit issues, and space is wide open.
But the wealth is up there, insane treasures beyond the dreams of Midas. Lets take for example the relatively close Amun Asteroid, about $20 trillion dollars worth of useable materials. I recall one geologist said it was something like three times the total amount of metals mined in the history of the human race. And that is just one SINGLE asteroid. How many million or billion more are there, in our system alone? The first to economically tap into that reservoir will revloutionise human existence, to the extent that our current economic issues would become moot. What price can you put on a car or a computer if they are manufactured in orbit for pennies by robots?
But what if your ISP offered you Microsoft's new gonzo search engine at full speed? And while it wasn't as good as Google, it was 90% as good?
See now thats very interesting. What makes you think Micrsoft is going to be more willing to pay these fees than google? But of course they can easily afford to, they have mountains of money. So while google and yahoo dwindle to shadows of their former selves, MS waits out the storm from their multiple market pedestal, and mops up the remainder. They can then lobby to get the net neutrality laws in place when everyone else is gone under, and come out as heroes. I'm not saying its that involved a conspiracy, but any way you slice it, these new charges work in their favour.
If it weren't for Microsoft, we'd be paying for a copy of Netscape 6.87 based on the Netscape 4.x codebase instead of running Firefox. Thank you, Bill Gates.
Has everyone forgotten Internet Explorer? Fuck you, Bill Gates, with your first to market bundled bullshit that has exposed every grandmother that tried to venture onto the internet to credit card fraud and zombification. Say what you like about Nutscrape, it at least didn't have its hooks deep in the OS.
This is about as stale as it gets at this stage, so I'll just knock the legs out from under your core argument first: IT is Information Technology, not as you seem to think callcentres and nerds in beige slacks doing tech support. Information Technology IS computers. So boom, there goes the first half of your post.
And as to the second part, you didn't respond to the point I made, to whit that when megashaft were in their infancy, loose IP laws allowed them to pick and choose. Once they had a foothold, they proceeded to lock it down with lobbied laws so that no one else could do it. Thats why the EU is currently turning them over a spit-grill. Or is the EU jealous too? Not corrupt enough for you?
You are a shill, and I sincerely hope you are getting paid well, because the rest of us are paying the price for the likes of you. Accusations of troll etc are just common sense at this point. I'll wrap this up finally by saying you are starting to bore the shit out of me, like a broken record, so feel free to waffle on in your own burbling manner. No one is listening.
This is just too easy. Tell me, did you buy the account, or have you been shilling since back then? Shilling is an interesting term, its like FUD; they both have one thing in common, they were bought into common usage by microsoft (or as I like to refer to them, a Certain Unnamed Monolithic Software Corporation, or CUMSoCk).
You may be stunned to know people were making international telephone calls, bouncing stuff off satellites and flying around in jet planes back in the '60s. Back then it was still mostly called Engineering.
And you remember all those whirry round tapes in NASA flight control? Computers.
At no stage did I even *suggest* "IT" hadn't had an (incredible) effect on civilisation.
Yeah you did. And you're doing it again in theis post. You aren't the author of the bible, by any chance, are you?
I was questioning the original poster's implication that modern civilisation would fall apart without it. Since, being extremely pessimistic, a world without "IT" would be roughly like the 1950s (or, say, a better life than half the world's population has right now), I think his claim was just a *teensy* bit exaggerated.
What the fuck. You think you can just pull out computers and everything will run as per the 1950s? Theres not much I can say in the face of such monumental ignorance. If you pull out the computers today, we all die in about four weeks, without an economy, from starvation.
Uh, hello ? DOS ? The IBM PC ? Commoditisation of the personal computer ? Ubiquitous interface ?
None of which were produced by microsoft, all of which were either stolen under looser IP laws (that durn freewheeling again) or "borrowed", which amounts to the same thing, and then locked down by silver-spoon-billy.
but they are unquestionably one of the primary reasons you can go out and buy a US$300 PC and then run hundreds of thousands of programs on it and why the average person can sit down in front of the average computer and be able to use it.
Try again, young man. The reason you can do all of the above are Dell and their rather nifty production and supply lines. That gilly bates managed to secure a good contract with IBM and then Dell says nothing about the quality of his products. I rather wish I had his family connections, however.
So has everyone else.
Aaaaand we have more burbling of the brown stuff. What about that whole open source movement there. Seeing a lot of patents in that direction? No? Thats why they'll win. When CUMSoCk is regulated to the history books just like the robber barons of old, OSS will be everywhere.
Those ten or so old computers I've got at home - none of which have a single piece of Microsoft software on them
Ah come on, this is easy enough, you don't need to make my points for me. I don't feel its sporting.
Microsoft was the *underdog* until the early '90s.
And I didn't like them back then either. But then again I never could abide useless people, and of all the parasites this world has produced, hereditary-william is the worst. So far.
Get some fucking perspective. About the *worst* thing Microsoft has done is put another company out of business, and you're trying to say they're up there with corporations selling engines of death and destruction, getting wars started for the sake of profit, stopping farmers growing food, restricting the availability of life-saving drugs and using slave labour ?
Oh fuck off. If you value the freedom of your brain, you'll step up and bring that hegemonous pile of shit to bay, like Europe is doing right now, as the US lawmakers failed to do, since the cheques didn't bounce. How are the cheques these days anyway?
Maybe if you're a thirteen year old kid who thinks "modern civilisation" equates to ipods, Myspace and mobile phones.
What. Information Technoology. The stuff that lets me talk to people in Cambodia and Australia instantly. The stuff that has enabled almost all of the massive leaps forward in technology over the last thirty years, from jet planes to medicine. And this is what you trivialise to Myspace.
"IT" has only been a significant part of "civilisation" for - at a stretch - thirty years (realistically, closer to ten).
So have effective ICBMs. You want to tell me they haven't had an effect on civilisation?
I also feel compelled to point out that Microsoft has been one of the key factors in making "IT" so important in the first place.
MS has been terrible for IT. They have supported the locking down of algorithms and business methods via patents, which has had a chilling effect on innovation and the freewheeling, anything goes culture of pre-MS days, all in the name of a few bucks for silver-spoon-in-his-mouth gates and his corporate cronies. You probably don't remember what that was like. All in all, you have my vote for most asinine post of 2006. Congratulations, u r teh winnar! And what flute modded this up? Methinks we have shills amongst us.
Oho yes and I just found the wikipedia article about ball lightning. Apparently fireballs of this sort can carve trenches in peat bogs (and if you have ever gone turf cutting, you will know thats no mean feat).
I really wouldn't underestimate mankinds ability to turn anything into a weapon, especially balls of sizzling plasma. Actually, what this put me in mind of was the ancient "batteries" discovered a while back. FTA
The tank contains two electrodes, one of which is insulated from the surrounding water by a clay tube.
Sounds remarkably similar. A lightshow, the remnants of some yet earlier technology, or a weapon of the ancients? Or just a battery? The scientists note that they produced this effect by mimicking the effects of lightning and water; is it far fetched to wonder if the ancients noted the same correlation?
Slashdot Mirror
You bring up an interesting point there, I mean heres some guy crying about not abusing their powers in the military, and we have new stories rolling in every day about fresh atrocities, torture, innocent civilians getting blown away, and more. And here's some random tootling about professionalism. Do the make you take a hypocratic oath in the military before they brainwash you?
The degree of risk isn't the point. When you shoot Achmend the Arab, he stays good and shot. When you arrest Jimbo the gangbanger, he's back again and large as life in a few years, if he doesn't walk in the first place, or his fellow knuckledraggers don't decide to track down where your kids are going to school and give them a crash course in addictive narcotics. You move you family over to Iraq then come back to talk to me about having no idea. I'll celebrate with you in twenty or thirty years, how does that sound?
War is hell man, war is hell. I guess you shouldn't have voted Gee Dubyaw back in then, should you. But hey don't worry, he and his pals will make good bank on the sacrifice. Should be able to afford that second mansion in no time at all.
Err, who is beating who for not fucking their friends? Have you got links to any of the exciting three way police action, or is this all anecdotal? Basically you are accusing the police of being wife beaters who pimp out their wives. Have you got any sort of evidence for this accusation, or are you just dribbling? Because you know, it sounds to me like you are just dribbling. Alternately you might be a jeepaholic. Fear not, my friend, help is at hand, and there is a support group near you. Join today and beat this terrible addiction, detrimental to both yourself and society as a whole; remember the first step is admitting you have a problem. I don't know if there are any support groups for overuse of caps lock though.
There should be.
Yeah and theres a Support Group for Jeepaholics as well. What's your point?
You know even when I was writing that, I was saying to myself, I just know some jarhead is going to jump in with two boots and start weeping about his war experience. Congratulations, sir, you are not only eminently predictable (a true credit to your training), you are, in fact, a cliche. Just Like Nam Baby!
Being a police officer is NOTHING like being in the army or military. And this is what I see a lot of people around here just aren't comprehending. Its not like a war, where you fight your enemy and go home. The police are already home. And they can't open up with assault rifles on their enemies, because there enemies are the same people they have to protect. They have none of the release valves a typical soldier in a warzone has, despite being to all intents and purposes in many cases in a warzone themselves. Being in a war is easy, fight, live or die. Your family will never have to face the meth dealer that you busted five years ago.
You know shit, son.
Okay we have a name tag Sealbeater, sitting on a spam domain filled with google adwords links, and the sig is, wait for it... Its survival of the fittest...and we got the fucking guns!!! I'd be a bit more cautious about throwing around accusations of assholery if I was you, my son. Glass houses and all that. Thankfully I am not, so although its something of a gaffe to feed the trolls, I am feeling generous today.
The poster in question was referring to that particular case, not to broadly general rules of conduct. Also you refer to "cops" and "civilians" as being something different, which leads me to believe that you have a view of the police as being some sort of military force out to dominate your world with an iron fist. Inferiority complex much? Of course, as you so eloquently put it, survival of the fittest, and you do have the fucking guns, apparently, so the police are just a rival militia to you.
I seriously doubt this will make a dent, Davey Crockett, but for the benefit of the other readers, let me tell you how it is. The police have to deal with serious assholes all the time. They wake up at 2am for their shift at 3am, and straight away they are dealing with halitosis laden drug dealers, drug addicts, wife beaters, child molesters, thieves, career criminals, fraudsters, you name it, they come eyeball to red glazed eyeball with them. People that you would literally cross the entire town, never mind the road, to avoid, people for whom prison is a holiday home, or in more extreme cases a brothel. And here's the kicker; the police have to play by the rules. If they don't, the lawyer will let said scumbag roam free, and the last thing you want is Johnny biker boy cruising the streets looking for your home address with a hard-on.
Of course the nasty types don't feel any such need to play by the rules, so let me ask you. After ten years of waking up at 2am and not going into a nice office to look at the HR lady's shapely backside, but wondering if you will make it home in more or less one piece, what kind of person will you be? I'll tell you, it depends on the person. Some police officers deal with it well, some have outlets for their frustrations, some have family that support and understand them. Some don't or just don't deal with it well in any case. So that's where good cops go bad; avarice, stress, fear, or just plain frustration at seeing the same shitheads walking out after two years and doing the same things to pretty much the same people. Before you start bawling like the survivalist microbe that you are about the bad, naughty cops, you walk a mile in their shoes. Or even better, walk ten years in their shoes.
Yes, there are bad police officers, and they need to be taken out of circulation just like the career criminals. But throwing out the baby with the bathwater is the worst idea anyone could ever have. Be polite to the police, and generally they will respond in kind. This has been my experience in every case.
Magna Carta is the most significant early influence on the long historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law today
Constitutional law for which country? You know, there are a few more than the UK in Europe.
and exist only by way of a sovereign state's decision to limit the state's own power
Aha but you didn't say that. In fact you seemed to be coming from the perspective that all European law is based on some sort of royalty and rights derived therein. I wonder what the French have to say about that? You know, the ones that executed their nobility wholesale. Spare me the revisionism, there is a reason you can't edit posts on slashdot, and its not the legendarily lackadaisical management.
Equally clearly, you have never read, for example, Schmerler's The Law of International Insolvencies and Debt Restructurings.
Oho well let me just drop everything for a few weeks while I click on your referrer link and wade through this tome of dubious vintage. If you have a point to make, make it, and stop depending on others to make your arguments for you. To paraphrase that saying about poor debaters, you use third parties like a drunken man uses a streetlamp; for support rather than illumination.
rife with ad hominen and straw man.
Ad hominems and straw men, the latest pretenders to the Godwin throne.
While you may not be able to solve the latter, you can at least be nice.
This is the internet, its founded on rage. Everyone knows that. Twaddle.
Let me suggest a definition: vis-a-vis
Suggest away, it isn't going to make you any more right. As I pointed out, the magna carta may have been a big deal in England, but it was in no way applicable to the rest of Europe. So it does not have the same characteristics, and resembles them in as much as it is written on paper with ink.
You are confused about what I am saying...
Nope, you blundered and are trying to mislead your way out of it. Let me quote you here directly: "and exist only by way of a sovereign's decision to limit their own power". A sovereign. How else is one supposed to interpret that?
As well, it is incorrect and presumptuous to say that every country has the same regulatory authority for seizure in lieu of arrears.
But isn't that exactly what you were saying with regard to the EU? Not to mention that what I said is perfectly valid, every government does have these powers and will operate in exactly this way. This top down bottom up assumption of rights is a large mound of twaddle. I don't know who modded this up, but its either a very clever troll or someone who is honestly mislead. In any case I call this a win, since I got to use the word twaddle in a conversation.
Remember kids, although they may be the only ones that speak American, the UK != the EU.
Yeah but nobody is trying to wipe out MS. That would cause a whole lot of trouble. This is merely a punitive action. And if MS doesn't play with the other kids, it will go to 4 million a day, and 8 million a day, until they finally realise who pwns who.
Interestingly, and more fundamentally, Microsoft's assets exist only and precisely because sovereigns grant them...and their rights can be quashed within the EU as a matter of implicit state power
What sovereigns? First of all the Magna Carta was an English document that pertained only to England, not Europe as a whole (the UK is about 10% of the population of the EU), and second of all the Magna Carta has been almost entirely revoked, several times in fact.
What you are really trying to say is that if a company is in flagrant violation of the directives of sovereign governments, those governments can apply such sanctions as they see fit. If the company refuses to pay fines, company assets can be siezed in lieu of payment. Exactly like anywhere else in the world, including the united states. I have no idea where you are getting this "royalty owns everything, not like in the US" idea. Model of law they are working under, my arse.
Probably the latter. Chairmen who have to answer to shareholders will choose short-term small profits over long-term huge profits everytime.
The problem isn't long term over short term profits, people everywhere make 30-year investments all the time. Its called buying property, and no one is saying thats a bad idea (unless you're in a bubble area). In fact with decent initial investments, everyone can make a good living while the space mining program gets off the ground (nyuck nyuck). The big problem is reliability of that investment. No one can say for sure if all that money isn't going to go spiralling down the drain, and the reason for that is cost to orbit. It doesn't matter how much value you are returning, when the cost to get up there reduces that value below current prices. Remove cost to orbit issues, and space is wide open.
But the wealth is up there, insane treasures beyond the dreams of Midas. Lets take for example the relatively close Amun Asteroid, about $20 trillion dollars worth of useable materials. I recall one geologist said it was something like three times the total amount of metals mined in the history of the human race. And that is just one SINGLE asteroid. How many million or billion more are there, in our system alone? The first to economically tap into that reservoir will revloutionise human existence, to the extent that our current economic issues would become moot. What price can you put on a car or a computer if they are manufactured in orbit for pennies by robots?
I've been working on...
We can barely keep an occupying force together in one country of 24 million.
So fuck off out of that country and stop interfering with other countries, mmmkay?
Hahahaha, ah yeah. Looks like we have some upset editors here.
I found my earlier rejected submission much more interesting... Chinese spies flood silicon valley, FBI responds with hundreds of agents nationwide! Tag this story as "STORY HIJACK" so editors will get the picture and post better stories next time... :D
Meh, article is a dupe from last year anyway...
But what if your ISP offered you Microsoft's new gonzo search engine at full speed? And while it wasn't as good as Google, it was 90% as good?
See now thats very interesting. What makes you think Micrsoft is going to be more willing to pay these fees than google? But of course they can easily afford to, they have mountains of money. So while google and yahoo dwindle to shadows of their former selves, MS waits out the storm from their multiple market pedestal, and mops up the remainder. They can then lobby to get the net neutrality laws in place when everyone else is gone under, and come out as heroes. I'm not saying its that involved a conspiracy, but any way you slice it, these new charges work in their favour.
wear gloves when you shop and wipe everything down with Vodka before you take them off.
Funny, my last girlfriend said the same thing to me...
If it weren't for Microsoft, we'd be paying for a copy of Netscape 6.87 based on the Netscape 4.x codebase instead of running Firefox. Thank you, Bill Gates.
Has everyone forgotten Internet Explorer? Fuck you, Bill Gates, with your first to market bundled bullshit that has exposed every grandmother that tried to venture onto the internet to credit card fraud and zombification. Say what you like about Nutscrape, it at least didn't have its hooks deep in the OS.
They weren't fast enough, smart enough, mean enough or have deep enough pockets to be real contenders in the market.
Or have Daddy's network of contacts to help them out, unlike William Gates III...
And yes boys, if you want to find a date, respecting the object of your affections may be a good place to start!
Or, as the boys in Gnome are finding out, a little late to the game perhaps, buying her affections works a lot better.
Bleh. they found a lot of them. And that article was just the first thing that came to hand, you can find far more authoritative sources if you look.
This is about as stale as it gets at this stage, so I'll just knock the legs out from under your core argument first: IT is Information Technology, not as you seem to think callcentres and nerds in beige slacks doing tech support. Information Technology IS computers. So boom, there goes the first half of your post.
And as to the second part, you didn't respond to the point I made, to whit that when megashaft were in their infancy, loose IP laws allowed them to pick and choose. Once they had a foothold, they proceeded to lock it down with lobbied laws so that no one else could do it. Thats why the EU is currently turning them over a spit-grill. Or is the EU jealous too? Not corrupt enough for you?
You are a shill, and I sincerely hope you are getting paid well, because the rest of us are paying the price for the likes of you. Accusations of troll etc are just common sense at this point. I'll wrap this up finally by saying you are starting to bore the shit out of me, like a broken record, so feel free to waffle on in your own burbling manner. No one is listening.
This is just too easy. Tell me, did you buy the account, or have you been shilling since back then? Shilling is an interesting term, its like FUD; they both have one thing in common, they were bought into common usage by microsoft (or as I like to refer to them, a Certain Unnamed Monolithic Software Corporation, or CUMSoCk).
You may be stunned to know people were making international telephone calls, bouncing stuff off satellites and flying around in jet planes back in the '60s. Back then it was still mostly called Engineering.
And you remember all those whirry round tapes in NASA flight control? Computers.
At no stage did I even *suggest* "IT" hadn't had an (incredible) effect on civilisation.
Yeah you did. And you're doing it again in theis post. You aren't the author of the bible, by any chance, are you?
I was questioning the original poster's implication that modern civilisation would fall apart without it. Since, being extremely pessimistic, a world without "IT" would be roughly like the 1950s (or, say, a better life than half the world's population has right now), I think his claim was just a *teensy* bit exaggerated.
What the fuck. You think you can just pull out computers and everything will run as per the 1950s? Theres not much I can say in the face of such monumental ignorance. If you pull out the computers today, we all die in about four weeks, without an economy, from starvation.
Uh, hello ? DOS ? The IBM PC ? Commoditisation of the personal computer ? Ubiquitous interface ?
None of which were produced by microsoft, all of which were either stolen under looser IP laws (that durn freewheeling again) or "borrowed", which amounts to the same thing, and then locked down by silver-spoon-billy.
but they are unquestionably one of the primary reasons you can go out and buy a US$300 PC and then run hundreds of thousands of programs on it and why the average person can sit down in front of the average computer and be able to use it.
Try again, young man. The reason you can do all of the above are Dell and their rather nifty production and supply lines. That gilly bates managed to secure a good contract with IBM and then Dell says nothing about the quality of his products. I rather wish I had his family connections, however.
So has everyone else.
Aaaaand we have more burbling of the brown stuff. What about that whole open source movement there. Seeing a lot of patents in that direction? No? Thats why they'll win. When CUMSoCk is regulated to the history books just like the robber barons of old, OSS will be everywhere.
Those ten or so old computers I've got at home - none of which have a single piece of Microsoft software on them
Ah come on, this is easy enough, you don't need to make my points for me. I don't feel its sporting.
Microsoft was the *underdog* until the early '90s.
And I didn't like them back then either. But then again I never could abide useless people, and of all the parasites this world has produced, hereditary-william is the worst. So far.
Get some fucking perspective. About the *worst* thing Microsoft has done is put another company out of business, and you're trying to say they're up there with corporations selling engines of death and destruction, getting wars started for the sake of profit, stopping farmers growing food, restricting the availability of life-saving drugs and using slave labour ?
Oh fuck off. If you value the freedom of your brain, you'll step up and bring that hegemonous pile of shit to bay, like Europe is doing right now, as the US lawmakers failed to do, since the cheques didn't bounce. How are the cheques these days anyway?
Maybe if you're a thirteen year old kid who thinks "modern civilisation" equates to ipods, Myspace and mobile phones.
What. Information Technoology. The stuff that lets me talk to people in Cambodia and Australia instantly. The stuff that has enabled almost all of the massive leaps forward in technology over the last thirty years, from jet planes to medicine. And this is what you trivialise to Myspace.
"IT" has only been a significant part of "civilisation" for - at a stretch - thirty years (realistically, closer to ten).
So have effective ICBMs. You want to tell me they haven't had an effect on civilisation?
I also feel compelled to point out that Microsoft has been one of the key factors in making "IT" so important in the first place.
MS has been terrible for IT. They have supported the locking down of algorithms and business methods via patents, which has had a chilling effect on innovation and the freewheeling, anything goes culture of pre-MS days, all in the name of a few bucks for silver-spoon-in-his-mouth gates and his corporate cronies. You probably don't remember what that was like. All in all, you have my vote for most asinine post of 2006. Congratulations, u r teh winnar! And what flute modded this up? Methinks we have shills amongst us.
Oho yes and I just found the wikipedia article about ball lightning. Apparently fireballs of this sort can carve trenches in peat bogs (and if you have ever gone turf cutting, you will know thats no mean feat).
I really wouldn't underestimate mankinds ability to turn anything into a weapon, especially balls of sizzling plasma. Actually, what this put me in mind of was the ancient "batteries" discovered a while back. FTA
The tank contains two electrodes, one of which is insulated from the surrounding water by a clay tube.
Sounds remarkably similar. A lightshow, the remnants of some yet earlier technology, or a weapon of the ancients? Or just a battery? The scientists note that they produced this effect by mimicking the effects of lightning and water; is it far fetched to wonder if the ancients noted the same correlation?