if you make the losing party pay, you can pretty much guarantee that people like you or I will never, ever go up against a big corporation and their hordes of lawyers. If you lost, you'd be bankrupt.
If you implement the system stupidly, then yes, you're right.
But nothing says you have to be stupid about how you implement it. If you stipulate, for instance, that the maximum the losing party will pay is, say, 50% of his total assets, then the average person could still get away with a lawsuit -- it would hurt a lot if he lost, but you want that to be true. At the same time, though, the average person would still be left with half his assets, so he wouldn't be completely screwed.
The old addage that "There's no such thing as bad publicity" really is true, especially when dealing with people who don't know exactly what's going on. The big thing is to get the name out there, anything after that won't be retained by 99% of the population.
Really?
So all the bad publicity that nuclear power has gotten has actually been good for it?
[Looks at the number of new nuclear power plants being built in the U.S.]
Doesn't look that way to me.
Whoever came up with the notion that there's no such thing as bad publicity was a total moron.
If privacy is still attainable by those who work at it, then crime will flourish under the system.
Privacy will always be attainable by some, because there will always be some who have more power than others. Power, especially when we're talking about government, directly translates to the ability to control information -- to be private.
The only way society could ever be what David Brin imagines it could be is if secrets, and the organizations (like the NSA and the CIA) that depend on them, don't exist. I guarantee that such a world will never come about, because the only people with the power to make it come about are the very people who don't want it. There will always be people with more privacy than others. Those people will, not coincidentally, have more power than others.
And so, the only acceptable alternative is a society in which certain privacies were jealously protected by that society. Without that you don't have a free society -- you have a police state. Which, not so coincidentally, is exactly the type of system we're headed towards (in fact, one could probably make a convincing argument that we're already there in everything but name).
Recall that the primary objective of most corporations is only to make money. Everything else is secondary, including you and me. You can take that $120k job but remember that you're signing with a company--and management--whose primary driver is to make money.
Oh, yeah? Then why aren't they offshoring the management jobs, too, huh?
Right. It's not just about making money for the corporation.
In this case India is showing that they have a competitive advantage in programming. They can produce code at the required level and do it for FAR less than the American programmer.
You don't get it, do you? The only reason they can do it for far less than the American programmer is that they live in a different economy. It has nothing to do with the individual programmer and everything to do with differences between the economies of the countries in question.
Don't you people see what's happening here? As soon as India starts to see some of the benefits of the money being pumped into their economy and starts to use that money to improve the standard of living there, the corporations will shift their gaze towards other countries that have a lower standard of living (and thus a lower cost of living). India's economy will thus go into the drink, just like ours (the U.S.) is beginning to. The corporations will play entire countries against each other until they all have rock-bottom standards of living. This is inevitably what must happen as long as the price of shifting the demand for labor remains low -- economics doesn't allow for any other outcome.
Remember: the cheapest source of labor is an individual to whom you're paying a subsistence wage where that wage is barely enough to buy food. Electricity costs money. Running water costs money. Sewage costs money. The more basic services you add to the mix the higher the cost of living and thus the higher the cost of labor. Put pressure on countries to reduce the cost of living and they eventually must reduce or eliminate such services in order to compete against countries that don't have such services. It's that simple.
There is an obvious downside to it: it tends to discourage access to the courts by people who can't afford to lose. Mike Rowe would never have been able to afford Microsoft's court costs, and if he's not 100% convinced he'll win (not just right: win) he'd be in debt forever.
That's because it's not implemented right. The right way to implement it is to limit the amount of money the loser has to pay if he loses. There are a couple of ways you can limit it that would likely be effective:
The loser pays a maximum of some percentage of his net worth.
The loser pays no more than the amount he paid to his lawyer.
The second option is, I think, more likely to be abused, so I tend to favor the first.
Are you saying that every port 25 listener is supposed to check incoming IP addresses against the SPF list for the domain in the envelope-From?
Any MTA that wishes to implement SPF will do precisely that. Note that SPF checking can (if the MTA implements it) be turned on/off based on whether or not the domain in the envelope-From is found in a list.
That means that you're not to relay through anything not in the SPF list?
If you want your email to get past an SPF-ized MTA, then yes, that's correct. Note that you're not to relay through anything not in the sender's SPF list. If you're running your own domain, that means you don't relay through anything not in your SPF list. On the other hand, if the domain you want your envelope sender to be from isn't under your control and you want to relay through a system that isn't in that domain's SPF list, then you're probably a spammer.:-)
If you can relay, the relay can just forge the appropriate Received: headers.
Nope. The sender is retrieved by the MTA from the "MAIL FROM" SMTP command itself, not from any of the headers that appear in the message itself. And the IP address of the sender is picked up by looking at the source IP of the incoming connection. A properly configured MTA acting as a relay will (or should, IMO) remember the argument passed to it via MAIL FROM and should use that same argument when relaying the message outbound. This behavior is, I believe, necessary for SPF to work properly.
SPF is a proposed standard for a domain owner to tell mailers where mail From: that domain may originate.
No, not "From:". That's in the email header. SPF (and other, similar proposals) tells an MTA which systems mail which originates from the domain in the "From " (notice the lack of a trailing colon) envelope entry may be sent from. The address in the "From: " header line is generated by the MUA, while the address in the "From " envelope line (which is transmitted via the SMTP "MAIL FROM" command) is generated by the MTA.
This is a very important difference, and is why people who don't understand the difference incorrectly believe SPF will prevent them from sending email as some other address than the domain their machine is on. There's nothing that says that the sender in the envelope and the sender in the headers must be the same thing.
SPF demands that the sending MTA be configured properly for the receiving MTA to properly verify the inbound message, but I think that's a good thing.
When it comes to copyright we can't fight business, but maybe we can end this legalized bribery and weaken microsoft, walmart, the RIAA and the rest in one fell swoop.
Not gonna happen.
Who do you think your congresspeople work for? You? That's a nice fantasy, but totally wrong. No, they work for those who paid for their election -- the very corporations who like the system the way it is.
"Third-party applications bundled with this download may record your surfing habits, deliver advertising, collect private information, or modify your system settings."
Why would anybody ever download something bundled with the crap referred to here, much less install it? Such "third-party applications" make the main product worse than useless.
I'm surprised there isn't a completely open-source, distributed P2P filesharing application widely available to people. Such a thing, when advertised as been spyware/adware-free, would likely be a huge hit. But I guess the "distributed" problem is a tough one, and it's the only way to avoid having to host some sort of master server (which would be expensive).
BitTorrent is probably the closest thing we have so far, but it doesn't provide an index or anything along those lines...
It should be obvious by now that the government (and, by way of reference, the large corporations that ultimately control how it behaves) is not at all interested in a secure, reliable, trustworthy (to the public) voting system. If it were then the Pentagon would have involved the NSA in the design of its voting system and the end result would be something that is secure, at the very least.
None of the electronic voting systems that have been approved for use by the federal government are secure. Doesn't that tell you anything? Can't you take the hint?
Government doesn't want security, reliability, or verifiability from voting machines. It wants the ability to control the results. Everyone involved wants to control the results, because it's the only way to guarantee that everyone involved gets to keep their job!
A voting machine that the government can (whether directly or indirectly) control is one that will remove from the people what little power they have left over the government. To the government, this is a good thing -- it desires power above all else. Most people in power do. And there's no form of government with more power over the people than fascism.
Make no mistake, a fascist form of government is what the current government wants. With controllable voting machines, the government can achieve this while simultaneously making itself appear to be subject to the will of the people. In fact, I doubt there's really any other good way to achieve that.
I think that their thinking is that if their ad can evade the popup, then it is the only ad you see, so you will pay more attention to it.
Oh, I'll pay more attention to it, all right: I'll remember it well enough to know explicitly not to buy from the bastards who decided to ignore my wishes on the matter of popup ads.
I'm sure that's what they intended...they can't possibly be so stupid as to think that a reasonable person would actually buy something from an ad that annoyed them so much, could they?
[From the initial submission:] It's worth noting that pop-ups and pop-unders are the most effective, lucrative and annoying online advertising form.
Hmm..maybe they can be that stupid... since they're the morons who think that clickthroughs are the same thing as sales of the advertised products.
Re:The answer should be obvious...
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm guessing that you will vote for the democratic nominee in the upcoming elections(if you are in the US). I'm sure all of Clinton's decisions were ethically and morally sound.
Guess you didn't read what I said:
Bush,
like any modern elected federal politican, doesn't listen to the people -- he listens to the media corporations and the corporations that bankrolled his election (that would be most of the big ones, for anyone who cares to ask).
Emphasis added to highlight the relevant part.
Democrats and Republicans are almost to a man roughly the same these days. There are differences, but none that really matter anymore. Both listen to the roughly same sources for direction. There might be some corporations that bankroll the Republicans more than the Democrats and vice-versa, but that will continue to decrease over time as corporations consolidate and merge. In any case, there isn't enough of a difference there to really matter anymore.
There are exceptions, of course. But those exceptions are exceedingly rare and depressingly powerless.
The answer should be obvious...
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Is the re-allocation of funds within NASA really for getting to the Moon and Mars? Or is it just a cover for shifting toward military space applications?
This is a rhetorical question, right?
Of course this is just a cover for shifting towards military space applications. Bush, like any modern elected federal politican, doesn't listen to the people -- he listens to the media corporations and the corporations that bankrolled his election (that would be most of the big ones, for anyone who cares to ask).
Because of this, Bush will do whatever is in the interests of those corporations. One of those interests is to make sure the U.S. remains on top militarily, because the U.S. can't sieze the assets of other countries (e.g., Iraq) or credibly control the actions of other, smaller countries without a strong and influential military.
As difficult to defend against as the U.S. military is right now, it will be completely unstoppable if it manages to gain and retain control of space. Space-borne gun platforms simply can't be touched by anything any third-world country can produce, and producing the required equipment would probably bankrupt many of them. That makes such platforms impossible to defend against.
Now that China and India have shown some initiative in their quest for space, Bush and the corporations that back him want to make sure they can never challenge U.S. military authority. That requires that the U.S. take over and control space in Earth orbit at the very least. Hence the rush.
It goes without saying that a number of the U.S. corporations that back Bush will also benefit from the lucrative contracts that will be given to them for all of this. Contracts paid for by everyone who pays U.S. income tax. Contracts paid for at gunpoint.
If the U.S. develops a manned presence on the moon and elsewhere, it will be a military presence only, at least until corporations figure out how to make it profitable in the short term to be there.
Frankly, I don't think we'll get to Mars prior to a U.S. economic collapse due to the long term consequences of the "jobless recovery" we're currently in. That means we won't get there at all.
No, they have fewer rights. For example, a corporation cannot vote.
Note that I said "protections", not "rights". It's an important distinction.
Perhaps ironically, the right to vote is probably the least important right a corporation can be given, since a corporation's one vote cannot stand against the votes of the individuals that work for it. It's probably the only right a corporation does not have that an individual does, and that is probably only because having it would not make any real difference.
What is overlooked is the fact that a corporation is really made up of individuals. If you take away rights, you are really taking away rights for the individuals in that corporation.
Note that I said "protections", not "rights". It's an important distinction.
In any case, it's most certainly not true that if you take away the rights of a corporation, then you must also be taking away the rights of the individuals within. "Rights" or "protections" or whatever, when applied at the level of a group or corporation, only apply to individuals when those individuals are acting on behalf of the group, and most certainly when they are acting on orders of that group. This is reasonable, since people when acting as a group have much greater power than when acting as individuals.
It is that disparity in power that demands that corporations not be afforded the same protections under the law as individuals. This is especially true since a corporation is answerable only to people who, themselves, are immune to the consequences of any actions taken by that corporation, while the government itself is answerable to the people (or was, until the corporations got control of most of the information outlets).
As agents with great economic power, corporations must be made answerable to the people just as the government is supposed to be. That cannot be accomplished without reducing their standing relative to individuals, and that cannot be accomplished without restricting their rights and protections. Failure to do this results in corporations wielding much greater power and control over everything, including government, than the people do, as is the case today here in the U.S.
Really makes you wonder how many of these Corporations are already in-bed-with-the-feds...
Someday you people are going to figure out that the ties between corporations and government are now quite strong and continue to get stronger. They have been growing slowly, inexorably over time, ever since the 1886 Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same Constitutional protections as individuals.
How many of these corporations are already in bed with the feds? Almost all of them. The ones that aren't are the ones that don't exert any significant influence over the government, and ultimately are the ones that don't matter. But don't make the mistake of believing that the ones that are in bed with the government are somehow subservient to that government -- it's the other way around.
I can't think of anyone I'd trust more...
</sarcasm>
Seriously, it's a wonder anyone trusts them with anything anymore, especially with the way they've abused their position as DNS registrar and TLD maintainer. I certainly don't. They'll have to do a complete 180 for an extended period of time (many years) to ever get my business again.
Not to troll, but I'm curious why somebody using XP strictly for gaming would shell out the extra $$$ for XP Pro vs. XP standard/home?
Someone who is reasonably knowledgeable would want to use Pro because it doesn't require you to go into "single user mode" just to change permissions on files and such.
If you're going to do anything under Windows, you'll want to do it with as few permissions as possible. The best way to accomplish that while playing games is to create a "Gamers" group, create a folder in Program Files that has full control privs for the Gamers group, and install all games underneath that. You might also have to grant full control privs for some registry keys to get some games to work. Then you create restricted users and add them to the Gamers group, and log in as one of them whenever you actually want to play a game (or do anything else non-administrative in nature, actually).
With Pro and 2000, you can do this while the box is running normally. With XP Home you have to reboot into maintenance mode (I suppose you might be able to use the cacls command in XP Home). That difference becomes even more apparent when you have to track down which registry keys the game wants to be able to scribble on.
Honestly, what can the judge compel the other side to produce except for source-code. Even there, what is to stop companies from making alterations to stolen GPL code to obfuscate it 'just enough' so that it can no-longer be assumes to be the same as the original.
That's quite simple. If they alter it in such a way as to generate different executable code, then that becomes clear when you have them build the executable from the source code they submit and compare that with the executable they're actually distributing. If they're different, then they lose.
If they end up being the same, then someone skilled in the art of programming in whatever language is relevant should be able to compare the code submitted with the GPL'ed variant to determine whether or not they're equivalent, and should be able to explain to the judge how they're equivalent.
It seems to me that these people have forgotten that while we live in an Economic system called a Capitalist system, we live in a Political system called a Democracy. They are not the same system and not the same functionally.
They are the same system in the U.S.. This is because the sources of information that people use to make their decisions about who to vote for are owned by a small number of very large corporations that use their influence over what people see and hear to promote candidates that will behave as they (the media corporations) and their pals wish.
So if you're a candidate, you can kiss your candidacy goodbye unless you've made it clear to the media corps that you're willing to do what they want.
Even if the system weren't so rigged behind the scenes, it still blatantly and obviously favors those with money, since at the very least you have to have a lot of money to pay for all the advertising that goes with campaigning. Those candidates who have the most money get it from those entities that have the most money to give: large corporations.
So no matter how you slice it, the U.S. is a democracy in name only. In reality, it's a corporate plutocracy with the appearance of a democracy, and hence very much a "capitalist" political system.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Why, with all the guns in the hands of civilians here in the U.S., the government would never dare pass a law like the DMCA.
Oh, wait...they did.
If you implement the system stupidly, then yes, you're right.
But nothing says you have to be stupid about how you implement it. If you stipulate, for instance, that the maximum the losing party will pay is, say, 50% of his total assets, then the average person could still get away with a lawsuit -- it would hurt a lot if he lost, but you want that to be true. At the same time, though, the average person would still be left with half his assets, so he wouldn't be completely screwed.
Really?
So all the bad publicity that nuclear power has gotten has actually been good for it?
[Looks at the number of new nuclear power plants being built in the U.S.]
Doesn't look that way to me.
Whoever came up with the notion that there's no such thing as bad publicity was a total moron.
[/me dons tinfoil hat]
Other methods? Like, say, Diebold voting machines hooked up to a network?
Privacy will always be attainable by some, because there will always be some who have more power than others. Power, especially when we're talking about government, directly translates to the ability to control information -- to be private.
The only way society could ever be what David Brin imagines it could be is if secrets, and the organizations (like the NSA and the CIA) that depend on them, don't exist. I guarantee that such a world will never come about, because the only people with the power to make it come about are the very people who don't want it. There will always be people with more privacy than others. Those people will, not coincidentally, have more power than others.
And so, the only acceptable alternative is a society in which certain privacies were jealously protected by that society. Without that you don't have a free society -- you have a police state. Which, not so coincidentally, is exactly the type of system we're headed towards (in fact, one could probably make a convincing argument that we're already there in everything but name).
Oh, yeah? Then why aren't they offshoring the management jobs, too, huh?
Right. It's not just about making money for the corporation.
You don't get it, do you? The only reason they can do it for far less than the American programmer is that they live in a different economy. It has nothing to do with the individual programmer and everything to do with differences between the economies of the countries in question.
Don't you people see what's happening here? As soon as India starts to see some of the benefits of the money being pumped into their economy and starts to use that money to improve the standard of living there, the corporations will shift their gaze towards other countries that have a lower standard of living (and thus a lower cost of living). India's economy will thus go into the drink, just like ours (the U.S.) is beginning to. The corporations will play entire countries against each other until they all have rock-bottom standards of living. This is inevitably what must happen as long as the price of shifting the demand for labor remains low -- economics doesn't allow for any other outcome.
Remember: the cheapest source of labor is an individual to whom you're paying a subsistence wage where that wage is barely enough to buy food. Electricity costs money. Running water costs money. Sewage costs money. The more basic services you add to the mix the higher the cost of living and thus the higher the cost of labor. Put pressure on countries to reduce the cost of living and they eventually must reduce or eliminate such services in order to compete against countries that don't have such services. It's that simple.
Yes, and that revolution will fail, because the people who are revolting will not have the weaponry needed to succeed.
Marx didn't envision a world in which it was possible to have a millions to one advantage in firepower at the individual level.
That's because it's not implemented right. The right way to implement it is to limit the amount of money the loser has to pay if he loses. There are a couple of ways you can limit it that would likely be effective:
The second option is, I think, more likely to be abused, so I tend to favor the first.
Any MTA that wishes to implement SPF will do precisely that. Note that SPF checking can (if the MTA implements it) be turned on/off based on whether or not the domain in the envelope-From is found in a list.
If you want your email to get past an SPF-ized MTA, then yes, that's correct. Note that you're not to relay through anything not in the sender's SPF list. If you're running your own domain, that means you don't relay through anything not in your SPF list. On the other hand, if the domain you want your envelope sender to be from isn't under your control and you want to relay through a system that isn't in that domain's SPF list, then you're probably a spammer. :-)
Nope. The sender is retrieved by the MTA from the "MAIL FROM" SMTP command itself, not from any of the headers that appear in the message itself. And the IP address of the sender is picked up by looking at the source IP of the incoming connection. A properly configured MTA acting as a relay will (or should, IMO) remember the argument passed to it via MAIL FROM and should use that same argument when relaying the message outbound. This behavior is, I believe, necessary for SPF to work properly.
No, not "From:". That's in the email header. SPF (and other, similar proposals) tells an MTA which systems mail which originates from the domain in the "From " (notice the lack of a trailing colon) envelope entry may be sent from. The address in the "From: " header line is generated by the MUA, while the address in the "From " envelope line (which is transmitted via the SMTP "MAIL FROM" command) is generated by the MTA.
This is a very important difference, and is why people who don't understand the difference incorrectly believe SPF will prevent them from sending email as some other address than the domain their machine is on. There's nothing that says that the sender in the envelope and the sender in the headers must be the same thing.
SPF demands that the sending MTA be configured properly for the receiving MTA to properly verify the inbound message, but I think that's a good thing.
Not gonna happen.
Who do you think your congresspeople work for? You? That's a nice fantasy, but totally wrong. No, they work for those who paid for their election -- the very corporations who like the system the way it is.
Why would anybody ever download something bundled with the crap referred to here, much less install it? Such "third-party applications" make the main product worse than useless.
I'm surprised there isn't a completely open-source, distributed P2P filesharing application widely available to people. Such a thing, when advertised as been spyware/adware-free, would likely be a huge hit. But I guess the "distributed" problem is a tough one, and it's the only way to avoid having to host some sort of master server (which would be expensive).
BitTorrent is probably the closest thing we have so far, but it doesn't provide an index or anything along those lines...
None of the electronic voting systems that have been approved for use by the federal government are secure. Doesn't that tell you anything? Can't you take the hint?
Government doesn't want security, reliability, or verifiability from voting machines. It wants the ability to control the results. Everyone involved wants to control the results, because it's the only way to guarantee that everyone involved gets to keep their job!
A voting machine that the government can (whether directly or indirectly) control is one that will remove from the people what little power they have left over the government. To the government, this is a good thing -- it desires power above all else. Most people in power do. And there's no form of government with more power over the people than fascism.
Make no mistake, a fascist form of government is what the current government wants. With controllable voting machines, the government can achieve this while simultaneously making itself appear to be subject to the will of the people. In fact, I doubt there's really any other good way to achieve that.
Oh, I'll pay more attention to it, all right: I'll remember it well enough to know explicitly not to buy from the bastards who decided to ignore my wishes on the matter of popup ads.
I'm sure that's what they intended...they can't possibly be so stupid as to think that a reasonable person would actually buy something from an ad that annoyed them so much, could they?
Hmm..maybe they can be that stupid ... since they're the morons who think that clickthroughs are the same thing as sales of the advertised products.
Guess you didn't read what I said:
Emphasis added to highlight the relevant part.
Democrats and Republicans are almost to a man roughly the same these days. There are differences, but none that really matter anymore. Both listen to the roughly same sources for direction. There might be some corporations that bankroll the Republicans more than the Democrats and vice-versa, but that will continue to decrease over time as corporations consolidate and merge. In any case, there isn't enough of a difference there to really matter anymore.
There are exceptions, of course. But those exceptions are exceedingly rare and depressingly powerless.
This is a rhetorical question, right?
Of course this is just a cover for shifting towards military space applications. Bush, like any modern elected federal politican, doesn't listen to the people -- he listens to the media corporations and the corporations that bankrolled his election (that would be most of the big ones, for anyone who cares to ask).
Because of this, Bush will do whatever is in the interests of those corporations. One of those interests is to make sure the U.S. remains on top militarily, because the U.S. can't sieze the assets of other countries (e.g., Iraq) or credibly control the actions of other, smaller countries without a strong and influential military.
As difficult to defend against as the U.S. military is right now, it will be completely unstoppable if it manages to gain and retain control of space. Space-borne gun platforms simply can't be touched by anything any third-world country can produce, and producing the required equipment would probably bankrupt many of them. That makes such platforms impossible to defend against.
Now that China and India have shown some initiative in their quest for space, Bush and the corporations that back him want to make sure they can never challenge U.S. military authority. That requires that the U.S. take over and control space in Earth orbit at the very least. Hence the rush.
It goes without saying that a number of the U.S. corporations that back Bush will also benefit from the lucrative contracts that will be given to them for all of this. Contracts paid for by everyone who pays U.S. income tax. Contracts paid for at gunpoint.
If the U.S. develops a manned presence on the moon and elsewhere, it will be a military presence only, at least until corporations figure out how to make it profitable in the short term to be there.
Frankly, I don't think we'll get to Mars prior to a U.S. economic collapse due to the long term consequences of the "jobless recovery" we're currently in. That means we won't get there at all.
Note that I said "protections", not "rights". It's an important distinction.
Perhaps ironically, the right to vote is probably the least important right a corporation can be given, since a corporation's one vote cannot stand against the votes of the individuals that work for it. It's probably the only right a corporation does not have that an individual does, and that is probably only because having it would not make any real difference.
Note that I said "protections", not "rights". It's an important distinction.
In any case, it's most certainly not true that if you take away the rights of a corporation, then you must also be taking away the rights of the individuals within. "Rights" or "protections" or whatever, when applied at the level of a group or corporation, only apply to individuals when those individuals are acting on behalf of the group, and most certainly when they are acting on orders of that group. This is reasonable, since people when acting as a group have much greater power than when acting as individuals.
It is that disparity in power that demands that corporations not be afforded the same protections under the law as individuals. This is especially true since a corporation is answerable only to people who, themselves, are immune to the consequences of any actions taken by that corporation, while the government itself is answerable to the people (or was, until the corporations got control of most of the information outlets).
As agents with great economic power, corporations must be made answerable to the people just as the government is supposed to be. That cannot be accomplished without reducing their standing relative to individuals, and that cannot be accomplished without restricting their rights and protections. Failure to do this results in corporations wielding much greater power and control over everything, including government, than the people do, as is the case today here in the U.S.
Someday you people are going to figure out that the ties between corporations and government are now quite strong and continue to get stronger. They have been growing slowly, inexorably over time, ever since the 1886 Supreme Court ruling that corporations have the same Constitutional protections as individuals.
How many of these corporations are already in bed with the feds? Almost all of them. The ones that aren't are the ones that don't exert any significant influence over the government, and ultimately are the ones that don't matter. But don't make the mistake of believing that the ones that are in bed with the government are somehow subservient to that government -- it's the other way around.
Um, because most politicians grew up before technology was invented? :-)
With the tech economy the way it is, you'll be basking on the beach in So.Cal for much longer if they do notice ... if you live in So.Cal, that is. :-)
I can't think of anyone I'd trust more...
</sarcasm>
Seriously, it's a wonder anyone trusts them with anything anymore, especially with the way they've abused their position as DNS registrar and TLD maintainer. I certainly don't. They'll have to do a complete 180 for an extended period of time (many years) to ever get my business again.
Someone who is reasonably knowledgeable would want to use Pro because it doesn't require you to go into "single user mode" just to change permissions on files and such. If you're going to do anything under Windows, you'll want to do it with as few permissions as possible. The best way to accomplish that while playing games is to create a "Gamers" group, create a folder in Program Files that has full control privs for the Gamers group, and install all games underneath that. You might also have to grant full control privs for some registry keys to get some games to work. Then you create restricted users and add them to the Gamers group, and log in as one of them whenever you actually want to play a game (or do anything else non-administrative in nature, actually).
With Pro and 2000, you can do this while the box is running normally. With XP Home you have to reboot into maintenance mode (I suppose you might be able to use the cacls command in XP Home). That difference becomes even more apparent when you have to track down which registry keys the game wants to be able to scribble on.
That's quite simple. If they alter it in such a way as to generate different executable code, then that becomes clear when you have them build the executable from the source code they submit and compare that with the executable they're actually distributing. If they're different, then they lose.
If they end up being the same, then someone skilled in the art of programming in whatever language is relevant should be able to compare the code submitted with the GPL'ed variant to determine whether or not they're equivalent, and should be able to explain to the judge how they're equivalent.
They are the same system in the U.S.. This is because the sources of information that people use to make their decisions about who to vote for are owned by a small number of very large corporations that use their influence over what people see and hear to promote candidates that will behave as they (the media corporations) and their pals wish.
So if you're a candidate, you can kiss your candidacy goodbye unless you've made it clear to the media corps that you're willing to do what they want.
Even if the system weren't so rigged behind the scenes, it still blatantly and obviously favors those with money, since at the very least you have to have a lot of money to pay for all the advertising that goes with campaigning. Those candidates who have the most money get it from those entities that have the most money to give: large corporations.
So no matter how you slice it, the U.S. is a democracy in name only. In reality, it's a corporate plutocracy with the appearance of a democracy, and hence very much a "capitalist" political system.