I hope you hold Microsoft stock - and lots of it. This kind of astroturfing is hard to do on just a paycheck - it's soul-draining work.
after said company complied with order after absurd order to change its practices. Untrue. Fines were demanded as a result of non-compliance. More fines were demanded as a result of MS not paying the initial fines and generally ignoring the proceedings. I should stop here, but I like to stop and feed the trolls once in a while.
Gee, no one seems to have bought XP-N Is that so? Do you have numbers? How many XP box licenses were sold in the EU in the relevant timeframe? Not many at all, I'd say. Was XP-N cheaper in any way? Shouldn't it have been, given that Media Player is valuable Microsoft IP?
Open the file formats? Here, have some source code. Not good enough? How about we just use XML? Still not good enough? I hope you don't mean Microsoft Office Open XML. If you do, I challenge you to create a feature-complete implementation of the standard - including the nice bits about "doing like word95 does it". Also, it wasn't about just files, but also about moving them around (read: providing documentation so that Samba can stop sucking needlessly). No progress there.
But people still had the choice to install a number of alternatives Choice, you say. Have you ever uninstalled IE? Don't bother answering that one, it's called a rhetorical question.
And most chose not to. Do you have figures to back that up? Don't bother trotting out browser stats - though even those will show Firefox at a healthy 20% or thereabouts. Many of those running IE now have no choice in the matter - their corp is standardized on Windows.
Egads... That'd be a sight to behold. Who wants to bet it will be not war, but "removing an evil dictator and restoring the right to self-determination of an opressed people"? Free French Canada, anyone?
If I walk into Starbucks and ask for a cup of coffee then I have agreed to pay for it, even if I have never signed anything. . I'm sorry, what? No, you haven't.
Radiators (they had sufficient tech to make high-surface-area "textiles", they all wore capes (sadly absent from the movie - idiot director) and Arrakis is windy).
The entertainment industry wields a vast amount of power considering how tiny they actually are. Astute observation. Two things are at the root of this:
1. the Holywood complex is made up of people who influence _other people_ for a living. That tends to keep the necessary skills sharp. On the contrary, the software industry makes money convincing _bits of silicon_ to do their bidding, which reflects in their (sorely lacking) marketing/PR/lobbying skills. Even among the successful software players a ham-handed, resource-intensive (read SPAM-ish) approach to public relations is all too common. 2. The Mafia. It wields a vast amount of power and is, for historical and practical reasons, wedded inextricably to Hollywood.
Look at the size of the computer industry, or just the home electronics industry, both orders of magnitude larger, yet they allow themselves to be pushed around by the "content providers". The meme "content producers are pushing around the software industry" is naught but unmitigated bull, pandered by Microsoft in an attempt to veil their attempts at becoming gatekeepers for all media (DRM, TPM, whatever). Apple is trying the same, and failing, but at least they do not misrepresent their intentions.
Media-player hardware producers (Sony and their ilk), otoh, _are_ gatekeepers to media already. The push for DRM is largely theirs, as they do not want to lose that position.
Spoken like a true crypto theorist. In the mean time, i'm visualizing TLA's all over the world sitting on mountains of old cyphertext (recorded but never decrypted) like fat dragons and slobbering in anticipation of the day (so near now!) when all that treasure will finally be truly theirs.
I have found compiz to be good for one thing: reducing cpu load on my craptop - one of those exploding-battery Dell jobs. Apparently the integrated i915 actually has some processing power of its own which now (thanks to Compiz) is being put to good use moving windows around. None of them fancy 3d effects for me - the spinning cube gives me nausea -, although I do use the transparency and the window tiler/picker thingy from time to time. Just my 2 cents.
Neither Stalin, nor Mao ever did anything to destroy the balance of power on purpose, as destroying it would have brought chaos to everyone, including themselves. In fact, their greatest recorded atrocities (the manufactured famine in Ukraine and the cultural revolution, respectively) were meant to help them preserve political power - i.e. simply to maintain the status quo. That being said, the whole argument is moot - there cannot be a balance of power between humans and a superior machine intelligence any more than there can be a balance of power between rats, or daffodils, and humans. Our only hope is that the AI will not need any of the resources that we ourselves make use of and that it will go to pursue its interests elsewhere, without damaging Earth or us in any major way while it organizes its departure... but I doubt that will happen.
Ac'lly, they shoyld call it wiki-staleness. Pages/sections which are not edited for AGES should be marked in a sickly green and flagged for editing, as the information is likely to have been obsoleted in some way (yes, even historical information).
Sounds like fun. At the end of the hugely-publicized trial, you'd have the only bona-fide Pepsi(tm) clone in the market, obtained at expense and risk so great that your competitors are highly unlikely to follow suit. I'm off to find a good lab and a couple angel investors. Cheers all... I think I'll call it Duck Cola. Is the name taken? If not, I claim copyright.
It's a story about how to take on the government and win - from irish mobster/drug dealer to father of a US president and head of a political dinasty in a couple easy steps.
Look real hard into the history of the mafia, then come to speak to me about centres of power. You do know what JFK's daddy did for a living, no? The army is damn-nigh inconsequential in such cases. Only the secret police and their goon squads matter somewhat - until/unless they are infiltrated, of course, at which point you get Northern Mexico or the Guatemalan highlands, with (ex)-goons basically running the insurgency. Such are the woes of empire.
Yea, those F-16 sure work like magic against IED's and snipers in gutters. A citizen militia on its home turf is damn nigh unbeatable - even Mussolini's early successes against the the Camorra and the 'ndrangheta only served to push them further underground. Such organisations can only be defeated by being wiped out entirely, all at once, along with the population that supports them. The other alternative is to deprive them of a reason to exist as paramilitary orgs by involving them (for real) in the above-board political game, like the Brits did with the IRA, i.e. to grant them at least a partial victory.
there you go, making me lump you into one of three (nasty) categories - the delusional (something like this wouldn't happen in the USA - the flamebaiter - the spook astroturfer these are declassified gov't docs TFA is talking about. what's not to be believed?
Feh. Go read last month's news. You might learn something. Audio drivers in Vista can't do DMA, because of the stupid restrictions M$ puts on them. All audio in Vista is strictly software and usermode. That is why, for instance, Creative is moving from DirectSound to OpenAL - so users can actually, y'know, use all that soundcard goodness they bought.
Hence a theory that says we're part of a galaxy-colonization process started by some other race in the distant past - a little variation on the panspermia theory, if you will. How do you like the thought of being someone else's planetforming machine?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, it wasn't about just files, but also about moving them around (read: providing documentation so that Samba can stop sucking needlessly). No progress there. But people still had the choice to install a number of alternatives Choice, you say. Have you ever uninstalled IE? Don't bother answering that one, it's called a rhetorical question. And most chose not to. Do you have figures to back that up? Don't bother trotting out browser stats - though even those will show Firefox at a healthy 20% or thereabouts. Many of those running IE now have no choice in the matter - their corp is standardized on Windows.
Egads... That'd be a sight to behold. Who wants to bet it will be not war, but "removing an evil dictator and restoring the right to self-determination of an opressed people"? Free French Canada, anyone?
Wet sand, please. Useful for putting out fires of any kind - heck, some was poured into Chernobyl, even.
I'm sorry, what? No, you haven't.
Radiators (they had sufficient tech to make high-surface-area "textiles", they all wore capes (sadly absent from the movie - idiot director) and Arrakis is windy).
Using some sort of cloth bag to hold it and protect it (somewhat) from slashes and punctures after filling it up with water is always a good idea.
1. the Holywood complex is made up of people who influence _other people_ for a living. That tends to keep the necessary skills sharp. On the contrary, the software industry makes money convincing _bits of silicon_ to do their bidding, which reflects in their (sorely lacking) marketing/PR/lobbying skills. Even among the successful software players a ham-handed, resource-intensive (read SPAM-ish) approach to public relations is all too common.
2. The Mafia. It wields a vast amount of power and is, for historical and practical reasons, wedded inextricably to Hollywood. Look at the size of the computer industry, or just the home electronics industry, both orders of magnitude larger, yet they allow themselves to be pushed around by the "content providers". The meme "content producers are pushing around the software industry" is naught but unmitigated bull, pandered by Microsoft in an attempt to veil their attempts at becoming gatekeepers for all media (DRM, TPM, whatever). Apple is trying the same, and failing, but at least they do not misrepresent their intentions.
Media-player hardware producers (Sony and their ilk), otoh, _are_ gatekeepers to media already. The push for DRM is largely theirs, as they do not want to lose that position.
Spoken like a true crypto theorist. In the mean time, i'm visualizing TLA's all over the world sitting on mountains of old cyphertext (recorded but never decrypted) like fat dragons and slobbering in anticipation of the day (so near now!) when all that treasure will finally be truly theirs.
I have found compiz to be good for one thing: reducing cpu load on my craptop - one of those exploding-battery Dell jobs. Apparently the integrated i915 actually has some processing power of its own which now (thanks to Compiz) is being put to good use moving windows around. None of them fancy 3d effects for me - the spinning cube gives me nausea -, although I do use the transparency and the window tiler/picker thingy from time to time.
Just my 2 cents.
Neither Stalin, nor Mao ever did anything to destroy the balance of power on purpose, as destroying it would have brought chaos to everyone, including themselves. In fact, their greatest recorded atrocities (the manufactured famine in Ukraine and the cultural revolution, respectively) were meant to help them preserve political power - i.e. simply to maintain the status quo.
That being said, the whole argument is moot - there cannot be a balance of power between humans and a superior machine intelligence any more than there can be a balance of power between rats, or daffodils, and humans. Our only hope is that the AI will not need any of the resources that we ourselves make use of and that it will go to pursue its interests elsewhere, without damaging Earth or us in any major way while it organizes its departure... but I doubt that will happen.
Ac'lly, they shoyld call it wiki-staleness. Pages/sections which are not edited for AGES should be marked in a sickly green and flagged for editing, as the information is likely to have been obsoleted in some way (yes, even historical information).
Noob? Heh. I was there when he said it.
Sounds like fun. At the end of the hugely-publicized trial, you'd have the only bona-fide Pepsi(tm) clone in the market, obtained at expense and risk so great that your competitors are highly unlikely to follow suit. I'm off to find a good lab and a couple angel investors. Cheers all...
I think I'll call it Duck Cola. Is the name taken? If not, I claim copyright.
It is not dead which can forever lie.
The Provos won. That's all there is to it. The Sinn Fein no longer needs to resort to violence to make itself heard.
It's a story about how to take on the government and win - from irish mobster/drug dealer to father of a US president and head of a political dinasty in a couple easy steps.
Hence my comment about "wiping out".
I said his daddy.
Look real hard into the history of the mafia, then come to speak to me about centres of power. You do know what JFK's daddy did for a living, no? The army is damn-nigh inconsequential in such cases. Only the secret police and their goon squads matter somewhat - until/unless they are infiltrated, of course, at which point you get Northern Mexico or the Guatemalan highlands, with (ex)-goons basically running the insurgency. Such are the woes of empire.
Yea, those F-16 sure work like magic against IED's and snipers in gutters. A citizen militia on its home turf is damn nigh unbeatable - even Mussolini's early successes against the the Camorra and the 'ndrangheta only served to push them further underground. Such organisations can only be defeated by being wiped out entirely, all at once, along with the population that supports them. The other alternative is to deprive them of a reason to exist as paramilitary orgs by involving them (for real) in the above-board political game, like the Brits did with the IRA, i.e. to grant them at least a partial victory.
there you go, making me lump you into one of three (nasty) categories
- the delusional (something like this wouldn't happen in the USA
- the flamebaiter
- the spook astroturfer
these are declassified gov't docs TFA is talking about. what's not to be believed?
Silos? What silos?
Feh. Go read last month's news. You might learn something. Audio drivers in Vista can't do DMA, because of the stupid restrictions M$ puts on them. All audio in Vista is strictly software and usermode. That is why, for instance, Creative is moving from DirectSound to OpenAL - so users can actually, y'know, use all that soundcard goodness they bought.
Are you suggesting that the US could not feed their population? Preposterous.
Hence a theory that says we're part of a galaxy-colonization process started by some other race in the distant past - a little variation on the panspermia theory, if you will. How do you like the thought of being someone else's planetforming machine?