Well reading Forbes is very similar to ready the Pradva in the 70s/80s. It says what the "power that are" want.
So you can translate the article into: "We who get into Forbes what we want do not like the GPLv3. GPLv2 was bad enough we could not steal those wacko artists work, but v3 is even worse we cannot force them to play with our rules. No Patents, No DRMs comme on, how do we create cushy monopols then ?"
Now will the v3 be important, I do not know, after all there is still quite a lot of MIT/BSDish licences floating around. What is interesting is that even if Gnu/Linux would stay under v2 it gives an option, and if for instance patents or DRM would threaten Gnu/linux it would be possible to just find half a dozen key package maintainer, and get them to agree to release their package under v3, and then the "linux businesses" whould have to evaluate their options between "doing the right thing" or forking out large amount of money to go back to v2 alternative of what escaped.
Discriminating against people on one criteria is obviously wrong.
On the other hand he was not implying that 30% of US Citizen had no self discipline, but saying that out of all self discipline challenged people in the US the overweight ones where the easiest to spot.
Personally I guess that about 85 to 95% of humanity is lacking self discipline.
In the US if people would have some self discipline they would oust the current crop of politicians, and vote for somebody that would address: Bad food, too much comute time, bad health care, too many people in prison,...
But it's more comfy not to think too much (on the other side, it's unfortunatelly not that different elsewhere).
actually there should be a wrink wrap licence and two buttons Button one: GO TO PAYMENT (5) Button two: Read the Fine Licence
This would enable people that enjoy being ignorant to be parted with a small amount of money and people that are either allready knowledgable or just willing to learn to use the "Free (as in speach)" freely (as in beer)
It's certainly a bad idea, but I'm still happy I had it:-)
If you are so uneducated, and have such low outlook on your own life that you need "help" to choose between Microsoft and Google, you should not be allowed near a computer.
Working for microsoft can not be excused (unless you are an illiterate cleaning person that does not even know s/he is working there).
Working for Google is suspect but might be compatible with a modicum of personal morality.
Working for anybody else is probably safer.
To be precise the job of Microsoft is to make our field totally uninteresting while providing the tools necessary to destroy what is left of democracy.
Mozilla corp will release a Mozilla branded Debian (name to be selected either by public competition or the brand management team not sure yet, but it has to be slightly offending but not overly we still know who the real enemy is!).
(disclaimer, this is supposed to be a joke, if moz corp is doing this it's not my fault, and I'll might actually call back the nice nigerian gentlemen that requested my banking infos).
---- Some times late at night my computer speak with itself, or maybe with an elbonian computer over the internet.
What if SpamHaus, in order to avoid being in "comptent" would decide "unilaterally" to stop providing their services to US customers. Maybe it would have an sufficient effect to make "someone" notice.
And after dusting off some old fax machine or uucp modem/software the power that be would make a "friendly visit" to e360.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that 4* more spam would actually be such a drag on the Internet, I do every morning my "religious duties" (show unread message, alphabetically sorted, erase bunch of similar junks) and having 4* more would probably not significantly slow me down. As for the overal bandwith, I suspect that with the popularity of video blogs, and community sites, the percentage dedicated to mail went significantly down.
Therefore I believe it is fundamentally not an issue of efficiency, or method, but only an issue of what rights are the US claiming over foreign content providers on the Internet.
Either the US claim that: I do not like that site that is visible on the Internet it has to either GO or be Invisible. In that case there is no moral difference between the US and Chine/Saudi/Iran (choose your favorite "contry wide firewall manager"), at least on the "right to information".
Or they have to go sue a site that they do not like IN THE COUNTRY WHERE IT IS "really" OPERATING (ther really part can be quite tricky if it is a money gaming site incorporated in eastern molnavia, with a gaming server in denmark, a payment platform in Turkish Cyprus and a virtual cash server in the bahamas.)
And accept that some country just might have laws that differ from the US laws.
What the article really tell is that although the quality of OS application is on the average higher than Closed Sources applications, there exist a class of OS application that has higher quality, notably airplane software. Well since there is a very limited number of airplane manufacturer (for a large number of very bad reasons), and since it is quite difficult to have a handy Aibus 380 or Boing Skyliner around for testing, it is clearly not a very "OS Friendly" field of development.
Actually what is really compared is:
Open Source applications
Closed Source applications
and a class of very specific Bespocken applications.
Now the methodology is not very scientific, and therefore the results quite disputable.
But what it might show if anything, is that if there would be more openess in the airplane industry and more cooperation and information sharing, planes would probably be cheaper and safer.
So to make a slightly too fast shortcut: patents are bad not only in the software industry but in practice, everywhere.
You mean before the next elections, or more accuratelly before the next time their party administration designate them for reellection. (The risk of an US Representant or Senator to fail to be reellected is LOWER than it was for a Soviet representent to be thrown out.
actually there is a way to use reliably electronic voting machines. (even paperless ones)
You give each voter a couple of non erasable markers (numbers depending of the number of voting options). Each voter can then behind a curtain mark the electronic voting with the right maker. and then throw the voting machine in a specially constructed (hopefully large enough) "voting urn".
Of course this has several draw backs:
Weak and elderly voters could be disfranshised.
Vote counting might be a tad longer than usual, and it might be necessary to hire some weight lifer, wrestler and meatpackers as assistant, this might make some additional
costs. On the other hand even a democrat might get some campain money from diebold if s/he pushed such a proposal.
Alternativelly voter coult throw the voting machines on the candidates, but this might need some additional analysis, I'm not sure it is completely compatible with representative democracy.
In an old Whole Earth catalog (Neither the first nor the last, I think it was the on called "Next") there was a republication of a social experiment, where teen agers where given "as a play" various "rules", "signs", elements of uniforms, and a "neo reglious philosophy", they where supposed to know that is was a sham.
But after a couple of month the organizer found out that the teen agers where really "buying" it and where starting to wear their "symbols" outside of the school, and seemed to believe in the "creed".
So the school stopped the experiment at once.
It seems that now the experiment has been somewhat perfected, expanded nation wide, and is not being stoped.
There is nothing that can be done to stop electronic voting fraud in the US, in time for the next elections. The only way to stop the fraud is to make it blatant when you compare it with exit polls. And the difference cannot be just 5%, this can allways be explained away.
You need to have less than 20% of voters for Republican.
And yes it is possible, for instance in germany the Nationalistic Party that though that being german was equivalent to being right got 33% in 1930, 43% in 1943 and 1.6% in 2005.
US citizens have to understand that being member of the Republican party is not an acceptable option. If you DO want to vote conservative vote Democrat they are reactionnary enough.
The issue is not the quality bit rate or any stuff like that, the issue is WHO owns the pipe between the content and the consumer.
And forget about the torrent, bbc content will be shipped with DRM'd WMV and yes some people will be able to copy it but most people will sooner or latter be left behind.
And then it will be Microsoft and/or the FCC that will decide for the BBC.
Not so sure, just look at the result of the past couple of elections in the US. Althought he did have to fiddle the numbers, so QI is not totally flatlined.
Ok I confess I decided to invest all my karma points in a big hairy troll:-)
Well it was around 10 M and not 100M and yes it did, of course the real trick was to convince all the operators to work for free, but it worked and each telephone owning new yorker is his or her own telephone operator.
That is the role of the "automatic" part in the modern phones:-)
Well 9 and AOL have actually not that much in common. 9 bough the french/european client base from AOL and plan to transfer them to their own infrastructure as fast as possible.
So the service of 9 can be good or bad, but it is neither the quality or the fault of AOL that are at stake.
The reasonning of 9 was just that if a couple of 100 000s of people where dim enough to use AOL (today) well they HAD to be good patient sheepish clients ready to be fleeced.
The EasyGate on the other hand is for the 'really hard to fleece traditionalists', who are thinking, ok what it the easiest, cheapest, least irritating way to read and send mail and replace my Minitel (for yellow page, train schedule and tax returns). And NO I do not want to really learn it.
So it is certainly not the solution for a "linux fan", but it might be the right suggestion for all the "linux fan grand(mothers|fathers)"
proof, that "pirates" are actually good for business.
They should have made a "world premiere" so they could have pretended it's their "marketing work" that generated money for WA, so he might just leak all his video to youtube and completely forget about the major.
On an aside note, it is nice to see for once, even if it is on a humorous way that the "nerd" is the hero. And that hawkins, etc... are presented as "cool stuff to do" (well collecting action figures also, but you cant win them all).
The difference between patents and copyright is that you can build a "copyright related" licence that protect your creation and the way it is made, because it protects exactly what YOU did (wrote). If somebody else writes a similar code that does the same thing s/he can licence it differently it has no impact on your code. This doesn't work for patents.
The FSF could create a GnuPatents, but since patents are protecting "what it does" (actually in theory the way it does what it does, but for software it actually boils down to "what it does") if you want to "GnuPatents your way to "whatsadoingnow" that you invented all on your own you might very well not be able because somebody else has a "prior patent".
And since any significant software is composed of 1000s of piece (if not million) the question is not "is part of my code allready patented by somebody evil", but will the evil guy that has a patent on some of my code find out and will I make enough money to make it worth for him/her to sue me but not that much that I will survive ?
Ugly question no ?
So repeat after me: There is no excuse for software patents, the only people that have to gain from them are people that are not involved in the software development (lawyers and general managers of very large companies), so if you feel that the IT community has a moral duty to slow down itself and give large amount of money to other people why not just add a mandatory one month hollyday without computers and a 20% income taxe to be paid out randomly to citizen world wide. (actually if the casinos are allowed to manage the random generator and get a 10% cut we might get this, and of course the average revenue of programmers and IT specialists would certainly grow, while to cost to the general public would decline).
First to file rather than first to invent means that all pesky open source programmers will have to worry about patenting random parts of what they do or risk that some large corporation or patent troll patents them out of their invention.
Even people that uterly despise software patents will have no choice in the US.
On the other hand all countries that heavelly invest in public education under the idea that education should not be only for rich kids and insannely smart, but also for smart creative poor or just not so rich kids, should be happy to see anything happen that makes the US less interesting for creative minds. And helps the ROI stay in the country that made the investment.
No what really happens is that the average Luser receives a PC with Norton bundled in. The let the 3 month period expire, get zombified, the machine slows down, doesn't work anymore, and then they find an idiot (me for instance) that fixe their computer when it dies. Then somebody else downloads some free version, that expires, and then the "friendly helper (idiot)" gets tired and tells them they have to fork over a couple of bucks to get their manchine running.
Not only is the use of CNR not mandatory with either Lin or Freespire, but since in practice you have to pay for a virus scanner and an antispyware for your windows box, and if you do not want to change each year and try a new "free" (as in beer and not speech, or more accuratelly as in "toke" as its free to start, but then you really HAVE to pay) version it will cost you at least 50$/year to have a half way secure Windows PC. So 20$ is actually cheap.
Well since the slave loves his/her collar. 1) Check out all the software that are installed "on top of windows". 2) Backup all data 3) check the licences of all your "non Windows" sofware 4) Make sure you have a licence for a virus scanner and a spyware scanner 4a) if now buy 4b) buy all non windows software you need and do not have a legal licence for. 5) contact your hardware makers and try to get or buy a legal version of Windows made for your hardware
if you have an invoice and the original key (sticker on your pc) you should be able to get this 6) pay the upgrade for what ever version you want 7) install the original windows and all the drivers 8) go to each of your periferal HW vendor site and check if there is an upgrade for your driver 9) install your recent windows version 10) install the virus scanner and run it 11) connect to the internet 12) upgrade the virus scanne and run it again 13) install the spyware scanner 14) upgrade the spyware scanner 15) run it 16) upgrade windows online 17) re run the viruse scanner and the spyware scanner 18) re install all your junk windows compatible software 19) reload your data (you did check that the bakcup worked right ?) 20) install a bakcup manager and train your parents 21) remember they are your parents you cannot charge them 500$ for the day you lost 22) remember they are your parents you cannot take a cut on the 400$+ of software licence they had to buy 23) try to invoice the stupid moron that gave them the pack of crufty junk in the first place 24) you can mutter sotto voce against the people that have the intellectual laziness to prefer this aggravation to running a free platform (that of course also has its own hasles but at least you are free so the hasles is to stay that way not to lineup bill and steve's pockets and flush democracy down the drain. 25) good luck
Slashdot Mirror
Well reading Forbes is very similar to ready the Pradva in the 70s/80s.
It says what the "power that are" want.
So you can translate the article into: "We who get into Forbes what we want do not like the GPLv3.
GPLv2 was bad enough we could not steal those wacko artists work, but v3 is even worse we cannot force them to play with our rules.
No Patents, No DRMs comme on, how do we create cushy monopols then ?"
Now will the v3 be important, I do not know, after all there is still quite a lot of MIT/BSDish licences floating around.
What is interesting is that even if Gnu/Linux would stay under v2 it gives an option, and if for instance patents or DRM would threaten Gnu/linux it would be possible to just find half a dozen key package maintainer, and get them to agree to release their package under v3, and then the "linux businesses" whould have to evaluate their options between "doing the right thing" or forking out large amount of money to go back to v2 alternative of what escaped.
So I doubt that RMS will become "irrelevant" RNS.
Discriminating against people on one criteria is obviously wrong.
...
On the other hand he was not implying that 30% of US Citizen had no self discipline, but saying that out of all self discipline challenged people in the US the overweight ones where the easiest to spot.
Personally I guess that about 85 to 95% of humanity is lacking self discipline.
In the US if people would have some self discipline they would oust the current crop of politicians, and vote for somebody that would address:
Bad food, too much comute time, bad health care, too many people in prison,
But it's more comfy not to think too much (on the other side, it's unfortunatelly not that different elsewhere).
actually there should be a wrink wrap licence and two buttons
:-)
Button one: GO TO PAYMENT (5)
Button two: Read the Fine Licence
This would enable people that enjoy being ignorant to be parted with a small amount of money
and people that are either allready knowledgable or just willing to learn to use the "Free (as in speach)" freely (as in beer)
It's certainly a bad idea, but I'm still happy I had it
If you are so uneducated, and have such low outlook on your own life that you need "help" to choose between Microsoft and Google, you should not be allowed near a computer.
Working for microsoft can not be excused (unless you are an illiterate cleaning person that does not even know s/he is working there).
Working for Google is suspect but might be compatible with a modicum of personal morality.
Working for anybody else is probably safer.
To be precise the job of Microsoft is to make our field totally uninteresting while providing the tools necessary to destroy what is left of democracy.
Mozilla corp will release a Mozilla branded Debian (name to be selected either by public competition or the brand management team not sure yet, but it has to be slightly offending but not overly we still know who the real enemy is!).
(disclaimer, this is supposed to be a joke, if moz corp is doing this it's not my fault, and I'll might actually call back the nice nigerian gentlemen that requested my banking infos).
----
Some times late at night my computer speak with itself, or maybe with an elbonian computer over the internet.
What if SpamHaus, in order to avoid being in "comptent" would decide "unilaterally" to stop providing their services to US customers.
Maybe it would have an sufficient effect to make "someone" notice.
And after dusting off some old fax machine or uucp modem/software the power that be would make a "friendly visit" to e360.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that 4* more spam would actually be such a drag on the Internet, I do every morning my "religious duties" (show unread message, alphabetically sorted, erase bunch of similar junks) and having 4* more would probably not significantly slow me down.
As for the overal bandwith, I suspect that with the popularity of video blogs, and community sites, the percentage dedicated to mail went significantly down.
Therefore I believe it is fundamentally not an issue of efficiency, or method, but only an issue of what rights are the US claiming over foreign content providers on the Internet.
Either the US claim that: I do not like that site that is visible on the Internet it has to either GO or be Invisible.
In that case there is no moral difference between the US and Chine/Saudi/Iran (choose your favorite "contry wide firewall manager"), at least on the "right to information".
Or they have to go sue a site that they do not like IN THE COUNTRY WHERE IT IS "really" OPERATING (ther really part can be quite tricky if it is a money gaming site incorporated in eastern molnavia, with a gaming server in denmark, a payment platform in Turkish Cyprus and a virtual cash server in the bahamas.)
And accept that some country just might have laws that differ from the US laws.
What the article really tell is that although the quality of OS application is on the average higher than Closed Sources applications, there exist a class of OS application that has higher quality, notably airplane software.
Well since there is a very limited number of airplane manufacturer (for a large number of very bad reasons), and since it is quite difficult to have a handy Aibus 380 or Boing Skyliner around for testing, it is clearly not a very "OS Friendly" field of development.
Actually what is really compared is:
Open Source applications
Closed Source applications
and a class of very specific Bespocken applications.
Now the methodology is not very scientific, and therefore the results quite disputable.
But what it might show if anything, is that if there would be more openess in the airplane industry and more cooperation and information sharing, planes would probably be cheaper and safer.
So to make a slightly too fast shortcut: patents are bad not only in the software industry but in practice, everywhere.
You mean before the next elections, or more accuratelly before the next time their party administration designate them for reellection.
(The risk of an US Representant or Senator to fail to be reellected is LOWER than it was for a Soviet representent to be thrown out.
actually there is a way to use reliably electronic voting machines. (even paperless ones)
You give each voter a couple of non erasable markers (numbers depending of the number of voting options).
Each voter can then behind a curtain mark the electronic voting with the right maker.
and then throw the voting machine in a specially constructed (hopefully large enough) "voting urn".
Of course this has several draw backs:
Weak and elderly voters could be disfranshised.
Vote counting might be a tad longer than usual, and it might be necessary to hire some weight lifer, wrestler and meatpackers as assistant, this might make some additional
costs.
On the other hand even a democrat might get some campain money from diebold if s/he pushed such a proposal.
Alternativelly voter coult throw the voting machines on the candidates, but this might need some additional analysis, I'm not sure it is completely compatible with representative democracy.
In an old Whole Earth catalog (Neither the first nor the last, I think it was the on called "Next") there was a republication of a social experiment, where teen agers where given "as a play" various "rules", "signs", elements of uniforms, and a "neo reglious philosophy", they where supposed to know that is was a sham.
But after a couple of month the organizer found out that the teen agers where really "buying" it and where starting to wear their "symbols" outside of the school, and seemed to believe in the "creed".
So the school stopped the experiment at once.
It seems that now the experiment has been somewhat perfected, expanded nation wide, and is not being stoped.
There is nothing that can be done to stop electronic voting fraud in the US, in time for the next elections.
The only way to stop the fraud is to make it blatant when you compare it with exit polls.
And the difference cannot be just 5%, this can allways be explained away.
You need to have less than 20% of voters for Republican.
And yes it is possible, for instance in germany the Nationalistic Party that though that being german was equivalent to being right got 33% in 1930, 43% in 1943 and 1.6% in 2005.
US citizens have to understand that being member of the Republican party is not an acceptable option.
If you DO want to vote conservative vote Democrat they are reactionnary enough.
Microsoft makes it purposedly hard to work with them.
Their security is bad, and anything that encourage people to use their software is wrong.
It encourage Microsoft to continue to work as they are.
And therefore it actually lowers the global security of the Internet
The issue is not the quality bit rate or any stuff like that, the issue is WHO owns the pipe between the content and the consumer.
And forget about the torrent, bbc content will be shipped with DRM'd WMV and yes some people will be able to copy it but most people will sooner or latter be left behind.
And then it will be Microsoft and/or the FCC that will decide for the BBC.
Not so sure, just look at the result of the past couple of elections in the US.
:-)
Althought he did have to fiddle the numbers, so QI is not totally flatlined.
Ok I confess I decided to invest all my karma points in a big hairy troll
Well it was around 10 M and not 100M and yes it did, of course the real trick was to convince all the operators to work for free, but it worked and each telephone owning new yorker is his or her own telephone operator.
:-)
That is the role of the "automatic" part in the modern phones
Well 9 and AOL have actually not that much in common.
9 bough the french/european client base from AOL and plan to transfer them to their own infrastructure as fast as possible.
So the service of 9 can be good or bad, but it is neither the quality or the fault of AOL that are at stake.
The reasonning of 9 was just that if a couple of 100 000s of people where dim enough to use AOL (today) well they HAD to be good patient sheepish clients ready to be fleeced.
The EasyGate on the other hand is for the 'really hard to fleece traditionalists', who are thinking, ok what it the easiest, cheapest, least irritating way to read and send mail and replace my Minitel (for yellow page, train schedule and tax returns).
And NO I do not want to really learn it.
So it is certainly not the solution for a "linux fan", but it might be the right suggestion for all the "linux fan grand(mothers|fathers)"
It worked, weid al's site is /.ed it doesn' respond anymore :-)
:-)
I doubt very much an AOL launch would have had the same effect.
Cheers to AL(L)
(of course making a nerdy guy a friend of Gates is pure slander, but well we should let it pass for this time
proof, that "pirates" are actually good for business.
... are presented as "cool stuff to do" (well collecting action figures also, but you cant win them all).
They should have made a "world premiere" so they could have pretended it's their "marketing work" that generated money for WA, so he might just leak all his video to youtube and completely forget about the major.
On an aside note, it is nice to see for once, even if it is on a humorous way that the "nerd" is the hero.
And that hawkins, etc
Cheers
The difference between patents and copyright is that you can build a "copyright related" licence that protect your creation and the way it is made, because it protects exactly what YOU did (wrote). If somebody else writes a similar code that does the same thing s/he can licence it differently it has no impact on your code.
This doesn't work for patents.
The FSF could create a GnuPatents, but since patents are protecting "what it does" (actually in theory the way it does what it does, but for software it actually boils down to "what it does") if you want to "GnuPatents your way to "whatsadoingnow" that you invented all on your own you might very well not be able because somebody else has a "prior patent".
And since any significant software is composed of 1000s of piece (if not million) the question is not "is part of my code allready patented by somebody evil", but will the evil guy that has a patent on some of my code find out and will I make enough money to make it worth for him/her to sue me but not that much that I will survive ?
Ugly question no ?
So repeat after me: There is no excuse for software patents, the only people that have to gain from them are people that are not involved in the software development (lawyers and general managers of very large companies), so if you feel that the IT community has a moral duty to slow down itself and give large amount of money to other people why not just add a mandatory one month hollyday without computers and a 20% income taxe to be paid out randomly to citizen world wide.
(actually if the casinos are allowed to manage the random generator and get a 10% cut we might get this, and of course the average revenue of programmers and IT specialists would certainly grow, while to cost to the general public would decline).
Actually in France (EU) we fought very hard in order NOT to have SWPATs.
:-))
So you should write: Lawsuit is "English (US)" for Bancrupcy.
And do not worry about infringing, you are, the solution is to stay small enough so that it is not worth it to take you to the cleaner.
Do not forget to create multiple corporate entities, so that you can drop any part that gets sued.
Or sell to a company with at least 1 Billion of yearly revenues
Or migrate to a business friendly country (ok that's a troll
And then the voter shows his/her paper slip to the friendly guy and gets the 50$ he was promised for his/her vote.
Nope, ain't so simple
First to file rather than first to invent means that all pesky open source programmers will have to worry about patenting random parts of what they do or risk that some large corporation or patent troll patents them out of their invention.
Even people that uterly despise software patents will have no choice in the US.
On the other hand all countries that heavelly invest in public education under the idea that education should not be only for rich kids and insannely smart, but also for smart creative poor or just not so rich kids, should be happy to see anything happen that makes the US less interesting for creative minds.
And helps the ROI stay in the country that made the investment.
No what really happens is that the average Luser receives a PC with Norton bundled in.
The let the 3 month period expire, get zombified, the machine slows down, doesn't work anymore, and then they find an idiot (me for instance) that fixe their computer when it dies.
Then somebody else downloads some free version, that expires, and then the "friendly helper (idiot)" gets tired and tells them they have to fork over a couple of bucks to get their manchine running.
so it does cost!
Not only is the use of CNR not mandatory with either Lin or Freespire, but since in practice you have to pay for a virus scanner and an antispyware for your windows box, and if you do not want to change each year and try a new "free" (as in beer and not speech, or more accuratelly as in "toke" as its free to start, but then you really HAVE to pay) version it will cost you at least 50$/year to have a half way secure Windows PC.
So 20$ is actually cheap.
Well since the slave loves his/her collar.
1) Check out all the software that are installed "on top of windows".
2) Backup all data
3) check the licences of all your "non Windows" sofware
4) Make sure you have a licence for a virus scanner and a spyware scanner
4a) if now buy
4b) buy all non windows software you need and do not have a legal licence for.
5) contact your hardware makers and try to get or buy a legal version of Windows made for your hardware
if you have an invoice and the original key (sticker on your pc) you should be able to get this
6) pay the upgrade for what ever version you want
7) install the original windows and all the drivers
8) go to each of your periferal HW vendor site and check if there is an upgrade for your driver
9) install your recent windows version
10) install the virus scanner and run it
11) connect to the internet
12) upgrade the virus scanne and run it again
13) install the spyware scanner
14) upgrade the spyware scanner
15) run it
16) upgrade windows online
17) re run the viruse scanner and the spyware scanner
18) re install all your junk windows compatible software
19) reload your data (you did check that the bakcup worked right ?)
20) install a bakcup manager and train your parents
21) remember they are your parents you cannot charge them 500$ for the day you lost
22) remember they are your parents you cannot take a cut on the 400$+ of software licence they had to buy
23) try to invoice the stupid moron that gave them the pack of crufty junk in the first place
24) you can mutter sotto voce against the people that have the intellectual laziness to prefer this aggravation to running a free platform (that of course also has its own hasles but at least you are free so the hasles is to stay that way not to lineup bill and steve's pockets and flush democracy down the drain.
25) good luck
11) install the