Damn right he was biased. He has an obligation to be biased against any party who gives false
testimony in his court!
What surprises me the most about this Microsoft
trial, is that the Antitrust act is still the focus. The perjury alone should have been enough
to bring down the empire.
> They had people sign pre-done form letters and
> send them in. Big deal. EVERYONE does this,
> ALL lobby groups do this.
Explain to me how they got dead people to sign.
Now explain how EVERYONE does this. How do
ALL lobby groups do this?
It doesn't matter if they sent out 100,000 legitimate letters. If one of them is a clear case of fraud, it's a clear case of fraud, and
I expect to be reading about a trial soon.
Wait, I think there is something new here.
Using the US Mail to commit fraud! That's a whole
new ballgame, and probably a lot easier to try and
convict than antitrust accusations have been.
They only need one count, and executives get locked up for decades in small rooms with large
men deciding what tv channel to watch.
You really don't want to do the whole mail fraud thing, even if you are a multitrillion dollar company.
Prosecution would probably be along the lines of penalties for the person of the highest authority who knew or should have known about the violation.
At least that's how they do it for environmental laws. That means, if BillG himself should have known about this, and the various cases of perjury that we all know about, then he personally risks doing time.
Call me old fashioned, but I enjoy it when high-level businessmen get locked up for their crimes like perjury and fraud. "Fines" are just
plain irrelevant when you're dealing with billionaires. But a few days in county? That
might just be enough to level the playing field.
>The second option is that they can deny all
>incoming requests to port 80, since the UA
>forbids running servers anyway
You are mistaken, and you have NOT researched
the facts before posting this.
*MY* agreement with Qwest expressly allows
running servers. They are quite up-front and
honest about the whole thing. It's what makes
their relatively expensive, but somewhat slower,
service an attractive choice in markets where
there's cable or other dsl providers.
They even offered to help me setup my LAN, my linux boxes, a static IP netblock, you name it.
I would suggest that when you talk trash, you
stick to subjects that you know something about.
I haven't seen this mentioned in the replies so far, so I'll bring it up:
Later versions of Konqueror run Netscape plugins
pretty damn well, let you choose your own jvm, and a whole host of other nifty features that are lacking in other browsers.
So it's a linux application, so it needs at least the KDE base system to run, so you'd better have a reasonable amount of disk and memory to run it. It's great and wonderful nonetheless. But "nobody" seems to know about
it. And even those that DO know about it don't
seem to realize the huge improvements that have been made just since 2.1, like, in the last 2 weeks.
>Only problem: most web developers write HTML
>with IE in mind
The problem, to be more precise, is that web developers do not write HTML at all. They write
the markup language for some or other particular browser application, but it most certainly is NOT HTML.
If web developers would be professional enough to embrace standards properly, we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
>However, 99.9% of the human population uses the
>x86 architecture, in a desktop-type mode.
You are incorrect. You couldn't even say that
99.9% of the human popluation is familiar with the concept of refrigeration, or has seen a telephone. 99.9% of the human population would
not even be able to parse the meaning of the Roman/Arabic characters "X86".
They might, on the other hand, recognize Mickey Mouse, and might be able to associate the colors
red, white and blue with a particular idiom: Hilfiger.
For a police officer, your attitude is downright unamerican. You really don't believe in presumption of innocence before suspicion, do you?
Re:EMU10K1 fixes, still no ice1712/envy24 :-(
on
Linux 2.4.8 is Out
·
· Score: 2
The cost of the 4Front license for the two soundcards I have in my production box is about $125.00.
> Are you a starving artist who can barely
>scrape together rent and grocery money? Or are
>you an IT or audio professional with a nice
>urban loft, broadband internet, leased
>late-model car, slew of audio gear and other
>nifty toys?
Shit, I'm ALL THAT!:-)
I didn't say I was not going to buy the 4Front driver! I said I WAS going to (and now I have)
but I STILL WANT THE ALSA DRIVER TO WORK, and
I STILL WANT TO SEE A FREE DRIVER.
I don't understand how that escaped you, or why
it creates a problem.
>Another spoilt child on slashdot.
I'll bet you're more than a decade too young to call me "child."
>Sure, the story sounds appaling -- notably the
>way Mama D. exploits her workers. But do you
>really think any other business is different?
>You like having a car, right?
Am I the only one who noticed the right wing slant of the article is more concerned that Mama D employs prostitutes, than with the environmental tragedy of mining in a rainforest?
Or even that mining in the Congolese National Park is illegal, not to mention outrageous?
What I get from the article is that we should be alarmed at the prostituion business going on in the mining town... The parallels between the African mining industry and the early days of the USAn mining industry probably don't stop just with worker exploitation and prostitution...
>Professional Linux users already know that when >you update a kernel, anything that's closely >tied to the kernel (ALSA, VMWare, etc.) gets >recompiled too. It comes with the territory.
If you have a reasonable expectation that those
things will compile, then that's great. If you
can't have that expectation, it's an indication that the QA process consists of "releasing it into the wild and hoping for the best."
I've been a linux user since 1.0.9, and I'm not
trying to imply that I'd put a 2.4.8 kernel into production on monday, or even change a working
2.4.5 system to anything later without a good reason. But if the devteam want
to break things, it's high time to start breaking them in a 2.5.0.
I pointed out vmware because it was what broke for me, and because it is something that is available to anyone testing the i386 kernel.
Probably it's a bad example because we should
expect things to be very breakable at that compatability level, and we should know that
very different results can be obtained from
different versions of the kernel, and even from
slight differences in kernel config. The more
adept ones go as far as to tweak the kernel beyond what's in make config, especially in the
graphics and networking departments. They know
that they have to do their own regression tests for every change and it's hard, expensive work.
I say that vmmon/net and alsa with at least the loopback soundcard should be part of the what's tested before a kernel is packaged for the stable tree. Yes it's not Linus' Alan's, or anyone else's responsibility to test this except the end users'. It would just be a nice, helpful, and professional thing to do.
"You should have known it would be broken" is
not an acceptable response to a compatability
bug report from the field. 2.4.[678] are updates to a stable product, not incremental beta releases.
Well, on a positive note, linux 2.4.8 seems to run okay under VMWare under 2.4.5. Where can
I get my hands on the testing framework Alan uses?
Re:EMU10K1 fixes, still no ice1712/envy24 :-(
on
Linux 2.4.8 is Out
·
· Score: 2
> I am listening to music... via the optical >output of the card.
Does the analog output work?
Does it record from the analog input?
Can you set the patchbay routing params?
Can you toggle SCMS?
What sampling bitrates and frequencies
can you use?
Like I said elsewhere in the thread, the ALSA
driver appears to work, but no output, and the
OSS emulation layer appears to be quite broken.
I do not have marginal hardware, have tried many
versions of the Alsa driver as well as kernel
versions 2.2.19 and 2.4.[567], on both intel and
amd based machines with generally the same results. I think it's documented that the OSS
emulation support isn't ready for any multitrack
cards, so that would rule out ALSA from a certain
application perspective anyway.
I guess I'm stuck with buying the 4Front driver,
which wouldn't bother me that much if Midiman didn't imply that such a driver was included with
the card. At first, I loved them, but now I think they are complete bastards.
I don't imagine there's an OSS/Free module for
envy24 coming anytime soon. It sucks because there are so damned few options for 24bit/96khz
audio recording in linux. Midiman has filled the
niche in the hardware department, the software situation is pretty good, but if the damned driver costs half again as much as the card it's not a good deal. Nothing against 4Front, who will probably get my money anyway, but
why do I seem to be the only person who's upset here? We need an OSS/Free module for Delta cards.
Re:EMU10K1 fixes, still no ice1712/envy24 :-(
on
Linux 2.4.8 is Out
·
· Score: 2
>Have you tried getting the latest ALSA drivers >(9.0 beta6) from www.alsa-project.org? --Leo
Yes. Everything seems to load and work fine,
BUT there is no output, and the OSS emulation
does not work at all. The sad thing is that
the 4Front driver works extremely well; I may
end up buying it. But I had expected an OSS/Free
driver by now. Or maybe a free copy of the 4Front driver provided on the CD in the box with the AP2496 how about? If you advertise linux support for your product, I believe you should
provide exactly that. Putting a link on your
website to 4Front does not cut it. Neither does
putting a link to ALSA. Multitrack card support
in ALSA is NOT completed, and NOT at a production
level, and shouldn't be presented as such.
Granted, it's a lot better situation than with
my Echo Layla, which apparently will NEVER have
any Linux support, experimental or otherwise,
but I'm looking at the box my AP2496 came it, with the penguin logo all over the place, and
distressing over the fact that no Linux driver was included or provided by the manufacturer.
EMU10K1 fixes, still no ice1712/envy24 :-(
on
Linux 2.4.8 is Out
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I have a bone to pick with the M-Audio company.
They go as far as to put a penguin on the box claiming Linux support. But the linux support they claim to have amounts to two choices: an
ALSA driver that does not work, or the 4Front
OSS driver. The price for the 4Front driver
is quite shocking to me, on the order of $65.00.
Where are the OSS/Free drivers for Delta cards
(Audiophile 2496, etc.)? Had I known I'd have to
pay for a closed source driver, I would have kept
shopping for a pro sound card. If the 4Front
driver wasn't closed source, I'd pay their price.
Just can't win.
2.4.6 broke VMware's modules. 2.4.7 broke them
even worse.
I wouldn't mention this, but 2.4 is supposed to
be the STABLE tree. If the interface is changing, that's what the 2.5 series is for.
Something as big as compatability with VMWare
ought to be checked before releasing. If no-one
is doing any QA on the big easy obvious things,
what little things are breaking that nobody knows about? Professional users of Linux are
still hurting for credibility, and this kind of thing just does not help.
The decline of First Saturday is a consequence
of a number of factors.
Consider why it was the obvious site for the swap meet to begin with: It was the parking lot of Heathkit. Heathkit is now a Mercedes Benz repair shop. Downtown Dallas grew east and that area became gentrified, "the Arts District" if you will. Buildings that were slated for demolition in that neighborhood are now $300,000 condos (Adam Hats building, etc.).
It's not a neighborhood that is conducive to any underground-hacker type of activity like it was in the beginning (underground hardware hackers that is, the HAM scene remember?)
Now that everything's digital, even the HAM's
don't have so much homespun hardware; you no longer have to build your own power supplies,
oh the times they are a changin etcetera.
But the big one is that PC's are now highly commoditized. Since that happened, I'm recollecting around 1995, the vendors started being much less of a grass-roots independent variety, and much, much, more commonly people who ran PC shops like IMS or N2, who would bring a booth out to 1st saturday. It went from an open, friendly, monthly barter fair,
to just another commercial marketplace for the same commodity hardware at generally the same prices that the hardware sold for in the vendors' shops.
First Saturday rides on its reputation for being a good place to make good deals. There are still good deals to be made, I suppose. If you get there on Friday night. It started getting silly when people would be setting up
at 6pm friday, and LEAVING around 8am Saturday... for what was supposed to be a day-long SATURDAY swapmeet? plain silly.
Of course, I don't know of a better place to look for original copies of vintage stuff, like Win3.11 disks and so on...
Getting a ticket for being on a nude beach,
where nobody at all is complaining, can make
you a "Sex Offender", no different in certain
eyes than if you raped their 5 year old daughter.
>Of course, they had to go to the station and
>be questioned and prove their identity before
>they were allowed to leave.
What this actually means, is that at some point in the process they waived certain rights. They probably don't realize it but they did. At some point, they were NOT free to
leave the custody of the police. They failed to recognize that juncture and chose not to assert their civil rights. Until you are under arrest, you are free to leave. Period. Once you are not free to leave with no consequences,
it's time to escalate the situation. Force them to arrest you. Not one more word from your mouth, before you speak in private with an attorney.
The fact of the matter is that it is the responsibility of the Police to identify you, not vice versa.
There is really no such thing as "getting hauled in for questioning" in the USA. Either
you voluntarily go to the police station and voluntarily choose to answer questions, or you are under arrest and voluntarily choose to answer questions. Any single word you say to a police officer is voluntary, Miranda or no Miranda.
Sometimes of course it is prudent to choose to speak to the officers, especially if you are the one making a complaint, or if there's really an emergency or something; but if you're being accused of a crime you didn't commit, it's easy to dig yourself a hole that lands you in jail despite your innocence.
People don't seem to understand or believe this, but then, they don't understand that innocent people often do time, or that they
don't need to waive all their rights just because a policeman asked them to.
It gets most people off guard, because they
ask nice, and they also threaten. Let them
know they need to ask nice/threaten your lawyer
when you find one, and that you need to go right now. That will escalate things, and if they have something to arrest you for, it becomes that much simpler to shut up and let them ask AND ANSWER their own questions.
Having things to hide does not necessarily mean you have ILLEGAL things to hide.
My visits to a political party's headquarters,
a planned parenthood center, or my girlfriend's
house should not be monitored by the government, period.
Slashdot Mirror
>he was biased against Microsoft
Damn right he was biased. He has an obligation to be biased against any party who gives false
testimony in his court!
What surprises me the most about this Microsoft
trial, is that the Antitrust act is still the focus. The perjury alone should have been enough
to bring down the empire.
> They had people sign pre-done form letters and
> send them in. Big deal. EVERYONE does this,
> ALL lobby groups do this.
Explain to me how they got dead people to sign.
Now explain how EVERYONE does this. How do
ALL lobby groups do this?
It doesn't matter if they sent out 100,000 legitimate letters. If one of them is a clear case of fraud, it's a clear case of fraud, and
I expect to be reading about a trial soon.
> Nothing new here, par for the MS course.
Wait, I think there is something new here.
Using the US Mail to commit fraud! That's a whole
new ballgame, and probably a lot easier to try and
convict than antitrust accusations have been.
They only need one count, and executives get locked up for decades in small rooms with large
men deciding what tv channel to watch.
You really don't want to do the whole mail fraud thing, even if you are a multitrillion dollar company.
>since the letters went to a law enforcement
> official, there might very well be a charge of
> obstruction of justice here.
I'd start with postal fraud. That can get stiff
fines and long jail terms for anyone held responsible.
If there's anything left of Microsoft after the Postal Inspectors are finished, then we can move to impersonation and obstruction of justice.
Prosecution would probably be along the lines of penalties for the person of the highest authority who knew or should have known about the violation.
At least that's how they do it for environmental laws. That means, if BillG himself should have known about this, and the various cases of perjury that we all know about, then he personally risks doing time.
Call me old fashioned, but I enjoy it when high-level businessmen get locked up for their crimes like perjury and fraud. "Fines" are just
plain irrelevant when you're dealing with billionaires. But a few days in county? That
might just be enough to level the playing field.
>Traffic jams are often not the fault of the
>state, but morons rubbernecking.
You can't really compare public roadways
to privately owned telecommunications.
>The second option is that they can deny all
>incoming requests to port 80, since the UA
>forbids running servers anyway
You are mistaken, and you have NOT researched
the facts before posting this.
*MY* agreement with Qwest expressly allows
running servers. They are quite up-front and
honest about the whole thing. It's what makes
their relatively expensive, but somewhat slower,
service an attractive choice in markets where
there's cable or other dsl providers.
They even offered to help me setup my LAN, my linux boxes, a static IP netblock, you name it.
I would suggest that when you talk trash, you
stick to subjects that you know something about.
I haven't seen this mentioned in the replies so far, so I'll bring it up:
Later versions of Konqueror run Netscape plugins
pretty damn well, let you choose your own jvm, and a whole host of other nifty features that are lacking in other browsers.
So it's a linux application, so it needs at least the KDE base system to run, so you'd better have a reasonable amount of disk and memory to run it. It's great and wonderful nonetheless. But "nobody" seems to know about
it. And even those that DO know about it don't
seem to realize the huge improvements that have been made just since 2.1, like, in the last 2 weeks.
>Only problem: most web developers write HTML
>with IE in mind
The problem, to be more precise, is that web developers do not write HTML at all. They write
the markup language for some or other particular browser application, but it most certainly is NOT HTML.
If web developers would be professional enough to embrace standards properly, we wouldn't need to have this discussion.
>However, 99.9% of the human population uses the
>x86 architecture, in a desktop-type mode.
You are incorrect. You couldn't even say that
99.9% of the human popluation is familiar with the concept of refrigeration, or has seen a telephone. 99.9% of the human population would
not even be able to parse the meaning of the Roman/Arabic characters "X86".
They might, on the other hand, recognize Mickey Mouse, and might be able to associate the colors
red, white and blue with a particular idiom: Hilfiger.
> Don't pick a fight you can't win.
For a police officer, your attitude is downright unamerican. You really don't believe in presumption of innocence before suspicion, do you?
The cost of the 4Front license for the two soundcards I have in my production box is about $125.00.
> Are you a starving artist who can barely
>scrape together rent and grocery money? Or are
>you an IT or audio professional with a nice
>urban loft, broadband internet, leased
>late-model car, slew of audio gear and other
>nifty toys?
Shit, I'm ALL THAT!
I didn't say I was not going to buy the 4Front driver! I said I WAS going to (and now I have)
but I STILL WANT THE ALSA DRIVER TO WORK, and
I STILL WANT TO SEE A FREE DRIVER.
I don't understand how that escaped you, or why
it creates a problem.
>Another spoilt child on slashdot.
I'll bet you're more than a decade too young to call me "child."
>Number of people who benefit from your scenario: 0
Tragically, the number is nonzero. God also made Media Companies and Advertisers.
>Sure, the story sounds appaling -- notably the
>way Mama D. exploits her workers. But do you
>really think any other business is different?
>You like having a car, right?
Am I the only one who noticed the right wing slant of the article is more concerned that Mama D employs prostitutes, than with the environmental tragedy of mining in a rainforest?
Or even that mining in the Congolese National Park is illegal, not to mention outrageous?
What I get from the article is that we should be alarmed at the prostituion business going on in the mining town... The parallels between the African mining industry and the early days of the USAn mining industry probably don't stop just with worker exploitation and prostitution...
If only I could trade old cap's for the "affections" of young women...
A bucket of water will not put out a MG fire.
You've never seen a VW engine burn.
>Professional Linux users already know that when >you update a kernel, anything that's closely >tied to the kernel (ALSA, VMWare, etc.) gets >recompiled too. It comes with the territory.
If you have a reasonable expectation that those
things will compile, then that's great. If you
can't have that expectation, it's an indication that the QA process consists of "releasing it into the wild and hoping for the best."
I've been a linux user since 1.0.9, and I'm not
trying to imply that I'd put a 2.4.8 kernel into production on monday, or even change a working
2.4.5 system to anything later without a good reason. But if the devteam want
to break things, it's high time to start breaking them in a 2.5.0.
I pointed out vmware because it was what broke for me, and because it is something that is available to anyone testing the i386 kernel.
Probably it's a bad example because we should
expect things to be very breakable at that compatability level, and we should know that
very different results can be obtained from
different versions of the kernel, and even from
slight differences in kernel config. The more
adept ones go as far as to tweak the kernel beyond what's in make config, especially in the
graphics and networking departments. They know
that they have to do their own regression tests for every change and it's hard, expensive work.
I say that vmmon/net and alsa with at least the loopback soundcard should be part of the what's tested before a kernel is packaged for the stable tree. Yes it's not Linus' Alan's, or anyone else's responsibility to test this except the end users'. It would just be a nice, helpful, and professional thing to do.
"You should have known it would be broken" is
not an acceptable response to a compatability
bug report from the field. 2.4.[678] are updates to a stable product, not incremental beta releases.
Well, on a positive note, linux 2.4.8 seems to run okay under VMWare under 2.4.5. Where can
I get my hands on the testing framework Alan uses?
> I am listening to music ... via the optical >output of the card.
Does the analog output work?
Does it record from the analog input?
Can you set the patchbay routing params?
Can you toggle SCMS?
What sampling bitrates and frequencies
can you use?
Like I said elsewhere in the thread, the ALSA
driver appears to work, but no output, and the
OSS emulation layer appears to be quite broken.
I do not have marginal hardware, have tried many
versions of the Alsa driver as well as kernel
versions 2.2.19 and 2.4.[567], on both intel and
amd based machines with generally the same results. I think it's documented that the OSS
emulation support isn't ready for any multitrack
cards, so that would rule out ALSA from a certain
application perspective anyway.
I guess I'm stuck with buying the 4Front driver,
which wouldn't bother me that much if Midiman didn't imply that such a driver was included with
the card. At first, I loved them, but now I think they are complete bastards.
I don't imagine there's an OSS/Free module for
envy24 coming anytime soon. It sucks because there are so damned few options for 24bit/96khz
audio recording in linux. Midiman has filled the
niche in the hardware department, the software situation is pretty good, but if the damned driver costs half again as much as the card it's not a good deal. Nothing against 4Front, who will probably get my money anyway, but
why do I seem to be the only person who's upset here? We need an OSS/Free module for Delta cards.
>Have you tried getting the latest ALSA drivers >(9.0 beta6) from www.alsa-project.org? --Leo
Yes. Everything seems to load and work fine,
BUT there is no output, and the OSS emulation
does not work at all. The sad thing is that
the 4Front driver works extremely well; I may
end up buying it. But I had expected an OSS/Free
driver by now. Or maybe a free copy of the 4Front driver provided on the CD in the box with the AP2496 how about? If you advertise linux support for your product, I believe you should
provide exactly that. Putting a link on your
website to 4Front does not cut it. Neither does
putting a link to ALSA. Multitrack card support
in ALSA is NOT completed, and NOT at a production
level, and shouldn't be presented as such.
Granted, it's a lot better situation than with
my Echo Layla, which apparently will NEVER have
any Linux support, experimental or otherwise,
but I'm looking at the box my AP2496 came it, with the penguin logo all over the place, and
distressing over the fact that no Linux driver was included or provided by the manufacturer.
I have a bone to pick with the M-Audio company.
They go as far as to put a penguin on the box claiming Linux support. But the linux support they claim to have amounts to two choices: an
ALSA driver that does not work, or the 4Front
OSS driver. The price for the 4Front driver
is quite shocking to me, on the order of $65.00.
Where are the OSS/Free drivers for Delta cards
(Audiophile 2496, etc.)? Had I known I'd have to
pay for a closed source driver, I would have kept
shopping for a pro sound card. If the 4Front
driver wasn't closed source, I'd pay their price.
Just can't win.
2.4.6 broke VMware's modules. 2.4.7 broke them even worse. I wouldn't mention this, but 2.4 is supposed to be the STABLE tree. If the interface is changing, that's what the 2.5 series is for. Something as big as compatability with VMWare ought to be checked before releasing. If no-one is doing any QA on the big easy obvious things, what little things are breaking that nobody knows about? Professional users of Linux are still hurting for credibility, and this kind of thing just does not help.
The decline of First Saturday is a consequence
of a number of factors.
Consider why it was the obvious site for the swap meet to begin with: It was the parking lot of Heathkit. Heathkit is now a Mercedes Benz repair shop. Downtown Dallas grew east and that area became gentrified, "the Arts District" if you will. Buildings that were slated for demolition in that neighborhood are now $300,000 condos (Adam Hats building, etc.).
It's not a neighborhood that is conducive to any underground-hacker type of activity like it was in the beginning (underground hardware hackers that is, the HAM scene remember?)
Now that everything's digital, even the HAM's
don't have so much homespun hardware; you no longer have to build your own power supplies,
oh the times they are a changin etcetera.
But the big one is that PC's are now highly commoditized. Since that happened, I'm recollecting around 1995, the vendors started being much less of a grass-roots independent variety, and much, much, more commonly people who ran PC shops like IMS or N2, who would bring a booth out to 1st saturday. It went from an open, friendly, monthly barter fair,
to just another commercial marketplace for the same commodity hardware at generally the same prices that the hardware sold for in the vendors' shops.
First Saturday rides on its reputation for being a good place to make good deals. There are still good deals to be made, I suppose. If you get there on Friday night. It started getting silly when people would be setting up
at 6pm friday, and LEAVING around 8am Saturday... for what was supposed to be a day-long SATURDAY swapmeet? plain silly.
Of course, I don't know of a better place to look for original copies of vintage stuff, like Win3.11 disks and so on...
I got one for you:
Getting a ticket for being on a nude beach,
where nobody at all is complaining, can make
you a "Sex Offender", no different in certain
eyes than if you raped their 5 year old daughter.
>Of course, they had to go to the station and
>be questioned and prove their identity before
>they were allowed to leave.
What this actually means, is that at some point in the process they waived certain rights. They probably don't realize it but they did. At some point, they were NOT free to
leave the custody of the police. They failed to recognize that juncture and chose not to assert their civil rights. Until you are under arrest, you are free to leave. Period. Once you are not free to leave with no consequences,
it's time to escalate the situation. Force them to arrest you. Not one more word from your mouth, before you speak in private with an attorney.
The fact of the matter is that it is the responsibility of the Police to identify you, not vice versa.
There is really no such thing as "getting hauled in for questioning" in the USA. Either
you voluntarily go to the police station and voluntarily choose to answer questions, or you are under arrest and voluntarily choose to answer questions. Any single word you say to a police officer is voluntary, Miranda or no Miranda.
Sometimes of course it is prudent to choose to speak to the officers, especially if you are the one making a complaint, or if there's really an emergency or something; but if you're being accused of a crime you didn't commit, it's easy to dig yourself a hole that lands you in jail despite your innocence.
People don't seem to understand or believe this, but then, they don't understand that innocent people often do time, or that they
don't need to waive all their rights just because a policeman asked them to.
It gets most people off guard, because they
ask nice, and they also threaten. Let them
know they need to ask nice/threaten your lawyer
when you find one, and that you need to go right now. That will escalate things, and if they have something to arrest you for, it becomes that much simpler to shut up and let them ask AND ANSWER their own questions.
Having things to hide does not necessarily mean you have ILLEGAL things to hide.
My visits to a political party's headquarters,
a planned parenthood center, or my girlfriend's
house should not be monitored by the government, period.