Due to security reasons we do not allow nor do we have a feature to delete Microsoft Windows from your system. Rest assured that if you do not access your computer within 12 months your hard drive will automatically be reformatted.
It's been my experience that the likelihood of your hard drive being reformatted without warning increased with sustained use of Microsoft products.
Microsoft haven't actually explained how they intend to implement remote software disabling.
So maybe this would be a good reason to get M$ back in court
It seems that Bill or his lawyers read history. If time were in a position to honour anything, we would be considering a time-honoured practice here.
The exact same method was used to acquire enormous power by the Medievel Church. They worked very hard to become confessors to important people, then used or sold the information confessed for even further political entrenchment. Of course, if someone became too much of an obstacle, they could always be bumped off their perch.
So... Microsoft are taken to court, and then one day a judge finds an email in his inbox with copies of emails to and from his son's Hotmail account - concerning specific indiscretions - attached; or copies of an email conversation between him and a particular woman; or whatever. I'm sure you get the idea.
Suddenly, having Microsoft lose a case seems an exceptionally bad idea to the judge. Meanwhile, the other judges are seeing rising pressure from friends and relatives (many of whom, it seems, also have Hotmail/Passport accounts), which combined with another astroturf movement might be enough to throw the case.
If people get access to my PC, why should I worry?
...borrow your credit card details, passwords to any/all accounts you access through the machine, use your machine to break others (thus dropping you in the pooh en passant), post emails and the like in your name, yadda yadda yadda.
The Moon is receding from Earth, and doing so rapidly enough that that their surfaces would have been touching about a billion years ago. The infinitesimal amount of wave and tide energy that we can extract, even if we work on every section of coastline, woun't even slow this recession down noticeably. Plain, ordinary vannilla-flavoured physics is slowing the recession several orders of magnitude faster than we eevr could.
BTW, lightning damage (like Schroter's Valley) and other more or less Transient Lunar Phenomena hint that dear old Luna isn't as inactive as has previously been thought.
...on Google, at least: link early, link often. Link to your favourite sites on every page you make, which boosts them in the ratings.
BTW, AFAIK Google doesn't change rankings for money, it adds those little side-links for money. I do hope they stop adding gingerbread now lest the site end up as cluttered and useless and Deja did.
However, I would contest that even with every post visible, you would choose not to read most of the things abhorrent to you - except if you are a zealot looking for a jihad, in which case reading them isn't likely to help you much because it just bounces off.
You can get mod_ssl to send the user to a page that quietly uploads your self-signed cert into their browser anyway.
I think I should make up a CA called `Microsott Corporation' to self-sign these things with... (-:
The idea of an Open CA is a good one, but... how do we get M$ to include them in the list of trusted authorities within IE? A website with an audit trail of the emails/letters/transcripts from such an attempt would be interesting. (-:
Guys, Microsoft is not nearly as evil as you think it is. Yes, they had a track history, and yes clearly Bill Gates is a dick, but there are a lot of cool OS and game programmers, and hardware specialists that put out some wicked shit. You have to separate the company from the nerds like you and me.
So... why don't you? You're essentially saying that ``the compnay is nerds like you and me'' but really, how much of the company's personality comes from said nerds, and how much from obsessively competitive people like William Henry Gates III?
Time and time again, reading the testimony of ex-Microserfs, you see statements like ``we adopted the Microsoft culture'' which was...? Nerdism? Gentle altruism? Quiet pride? No, it was always obsession, competition, fear, elitism (FY-IFV badges), a cog-in-the-machine mentality.
You may fervently hope otherwise, but Microsoft is at heart an extension of Trey Gates, not a collective manifestation of geek culture with a few management problems. It has a track record, not ``had'' one. The mentality which gave it that criminal record is what drives Microsoft along. Separating Microsoft from their history is like unto separating the eggs from a well-cooked omelette. Remember the parable of the frog and the scorpion.
Much better to separate the nerds from the company, than the company from the nerds. That way, the nerds won't be so badly hurt when Microsoft bluescreens, which I suspect will happen with shocking speed.
If Linux were a beer, it would be shipped in open barrels so that anybody could piss in it before delivery.
And what makes you think that nobody does this with ``sealed'' beer? (-:
Did you know that your sealed package of chocolate can legally contain up to 4% cockroach parts?
BTW, exactly who is it pisses in my kernel between ftp.kernel.org and here? With Microsoft you know what the product is full of... at least I have a chance of getting something edible. And it comes with the full recipe. (-:
My faith in the American judicial system as a counterbalance to overenthusiastic, vote-scrounging lawmakers has just dropped another notch.
Into the sub-basement?
The US Constitution must be a really, really good idea if so many people are united against it. Not only the judiciary in general but practically every person with political or religious authority seems to have something against it - and Dublya is both - which is probably the single best reason around for protesting its erosion and demanding legal reform.
The reason for having these expensive certs from these companies is that you are paying for that level of trust.
Why not become your own CA? If the user can't trust you, why are they visiting your site? (*) Complete instructions are here.
Sure, the browser asks the users to confirm (once only per browser per cert), but if you link from an unsecured splash page that tells them what to expect and how to react to it, they get over the shock just fine.
Expensive trust? Think of the RIAA: to artists, ``trust us because we can get you royalties''; to buyers, ``trust us because our stuff is legal [implication: and other people's stuff is at best second-rate]''. But it's similar to the one liner about big government: any organisation big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.
(*) Note: IE ``the browser that reaches the places the other browsers miss'' has all manner of exciting ways to obliterate or export your precious data without warning you, and in some cases without you being aware that it happened. Oh, and it matters not whether this happens over an open link or through an SSL link sprinkled with with Thawte holy water. Where do you want your data to go today?
Notice that while this was filed in 2000, it wants rates set as from 1998? Suddenly, what was a free, legal act may have become a pay-for illegal act. Nice...
I think that the gender issue has to do with the fact that women are generally not encouraged as much to excel in fields of math and science.
More than that, the aspects of maths and science taught in school (``all your mind are belong to us'') are generally taught in a way incompatible with feminine strengths. Women pick up better on things with a wider range of information and perceptual channels available (relatively speaking, men just become more confused as more data channels open). School is in the business of narrowing channels of perception, blandifying information (lopping off sidebands), and chopping data down into such small pieces that the big picture, if any, is at best elusive. School (realschule) was designed to do this specifically to stop people from learning to think.
Femmes actually make better CS experts in many cases because of their built-in greater ability to sift through masses of information for specific items. This is why many wives are able to find their husbands' keys when the husband (who actually put the keys wherever they are) cannot. They pay a price in things like spatial perception (think of reverse-parallel parking).
There are some interesting biases: femmes are often better at low-level OO because they are landmark-oriented, their opposite numbers are often better at structure because they are map-oriented.
The third major problem with our CS department is the teachers. The teachers we have are quite intelligent, and a few of them are really good computer scientists. However some of them are just not qualified. We ask them all kinds of advanced questions and they don't have answers. There are only two teachers we can take our complex problems to because the rest don't know.
Worse than that, the others don't know how to find those answers, and if they did know, wouldn't have the attitude that they should go looking for them. This is a basic problem involving schools and schooling, and the damage which the school system does to people's psyche. The only answer to this is to replace schools with something less rigid, something that works. They are beyond reform.
Also, the CrutchOf$cientology stuff is (obviously) available in many places, and the Microsoft stuff wasn't obviously copyrighted material like the stuff about playing thought-Ricochet in your local park.
How did that go again? ``Visit your local park and beam thoughts at trees and animals until either a `jogger' rapist or the men with the padded van get you?''
PS, if they ever invite you up for a personality test, phrase your replies as if you were a totally selfish, mercenary bastard and you'll do as well in the test as I did. This is worthwhile just to see the expressions on various faces... (-:
OTOH if you go crazy before you die, running around your yacht screaming at your ``body thetans,'' then I'm unlikely to adopt your business religion at any price.
If they were seriously after patent infringers, what about Microsoft and their gang of WinCE/PocketPC manufacturers?
Yo! And sue those scumbags Osborne and KayPro who each put out a ``portable personal terminal for use in a system for handling transactions'' in 1980! I know they did it because I personally wrote an MBASIC data-acquisition program that ran on these impertinant clones of fabulous ideas! And those Husky Hunters! ``Portable personal terminals'' that you could park a car on without damage... oh, the cheek of it!
And, oh, uhhh... you say that the patent was granted in 1987... Ooh, um, err...
I think I'd better hurry off and write an xterm that has a beep in the prompt to tell you it's ready for input, before NCR patent the idea. Anyone remember those? Nothing like a roomfull of students using an NCR machine that's so slow it has to wake you up when it wants input...
Installing systems that people can actually do stuff with will only impact a few percent of the users at first, but as more discover the power now at their fingertips - and more importantly, the documentation inherent in the source code, and the ability to make incremental changes (``experiments'') - the effect will snowball.
Whether it snowballs enough for Mexico to survive when Microsoft's massive financial fraud kills Microsoft and possibly also the US economy, is a different question. But certainly they will be better off.
Either way, it is entirely possible that ``destroying the economy they live in'' is the best possible large-scale move, since it will be replaced by something else.
The best training by far is actually doing stuff, not meta-doing stuff in a classroom.
The best business incentive is wanting to do it, and knowing that you can, and knowing that there is some point in starting and running a business. Linux will help to provide tools helpful for many small businesses, and so increase the incentive to start one.
BTW, I think the ``5 MS developers'' quip is a pretty staggering bit of imperialist ignorance. Are there any Mexicans reading this who would care to comment?
1. Reading, writing and arithmetic can be taught in 50-100 contact hours (2-4 weeks at 5 hours a day) when the child is ready. Why do schools take years to complete the job?
2. Where else do you wear the same clothes, sit in formation, line up and wait, all do the same things, all sit and listen to one instructor, obey without thinking, lose some basic human rights, and have the whole place assemble more or less regularly?
3. Maryland had 98% literacy (2% illiteracy) before the introduction of compulsory schooling (at gunpoint!), and has never exceeded 91% (9% illiteracy, over 4x worse) since. And the standards for deciding ``literacy'' have gone down. Why do we persist with schools as they are?
4. Tripling the amount of money spent on schools made the results slightly worse, from academic and social viewpoints. Why are we spending even more money (``good money after bad'') on schools?
5. Places such as Korea (with shorter school days/years) and Switzerland (with a later starting age for schools) produce better academic results. In the case of Korea, world-beating results. Why haven't we even tried shortening school hours and starting later?
6. School is the second largest national budget item in most Western Countries, yet educational standards and social outcomes are getting steadily worse. Why don't we stop doing this, and do something else, even nothing, instead?
7. 1.5 million American children are home schooled each year, usually by unqualified, uneducated parents. These children better their public school counterparts by an average of 30 percentile points, and are socially equal or better depending on who does the measuring. Why isn't home education encouraged by the government?
In space, where solar panels don't deface the landscape, and don't require precious earthbound resources to make, and beam it down with microwaves (whose receiving antennae can be blended in to any of a number of other structures).
A pity that NASA's recent budget cuts just canned testing of the vehicles necessary to do this. Complain to your poltician if you care.
Oddly enough, some fossil fuel reserves (to the confusion of the geologists involved) do actually self-replenish, existing reserves useable for plastics (coal/oil shale etc) are truly staggering anyway, and finally, you can make coal in the lab in less than half an hour from agricultural byproducts, so doing it industrially at reasonable cost can soon be made viable if need be.
Plastic solar cells already wrap around yacht booms (I know, I know, critical application, yadda yadda yadda, but if selling luxury items drives down the cost of useful stuff, so be it).
Flexible electronics might mean a hat-brim display that survives being sat on, programmable jersey numbers for sportsmen, a TV that you unroll and hang on the wall/projector-screen-stand, and finally to useful stuff like truly wearable computers, rolled-up satellite in-a-can, stick-on intelligent medical monitors, electronics that survive vibration and impacts better (process control, remote sensing, satellites, even mobile 'phones that you can, enraged, safely hurl at the pavement...), ``sensi-peril'' windscreens (ie automatically darken just the spot around the oncoming headlights), and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been my experience that the likelihood of your hard drive being reformatted without warning increased with sustained use of Microsoft products.
Microsoft haven't actually explained how they intend to implement remote software disabling.
It seems that Bill or his lawyers read history. If time were in a position to honour anything, we would be considering a time-honoured practice here.
The exact same method was used to acquire enormous power by the Medievel Church. They worked very hard to become confessors to important people, then used or sold the information confessed for even further political entrenchment. Of course, if someone became too much of an obstacle, they could always be bumped off their perch.
So... Microsoft are taken to court, and then one day a judge finds an email in his inbox with copies of emails to and from his son's Hotmail account - concerning specific indiscretions - attached; or copies of an email conversation between him and a particular woman; or whatever. I'm sure you get the idea.
Suddenly, having Microsoft lose a case seems an exceptionally bad idea to the judge. Meanwhile, the other judges are seeing rising pressure from friends and relatives (many of whom, it seems, also have Hotmail/Passport accounts), which combined with another astroturf movement might be enough to throw the case.
...borrow your credit card details, passwords to any/all accounts you access through the machine, use your machine to break others (thus dropping you in the pooh en passant), post emails and the like in your name, yadda yadda yadda.
Trust me, it's not a good idea.
This question belongs in April 1, methinks.
The Moon is receding from Earth, and doing so rapidly enough that that their surfaces would have been touching about a billion years ago. The infinitesimal amount of wave and tide energy that we can extract, even if we work on every section of coastline, woun't even slow this recession down noticeably. Plain, ordinary vannilla-flavoured physics is slowing the recession several orders of magnitude faster than we eevr could.
BTW, lightning damage (like Schroter's Valley) and other more or less Transient Lunar Phenomena hint that dear old Luna isn't as inactive as has previously been thought.
BTW, AFAIK Google doesn't change rankings for money, it adds those little side-links for money. I do hope they stop adding gingerbread now lest the site end up as cluttered and useless and Deja did.
However, I would contest that even with every post visible, you would choose not to read most of the things abhorrent to you - except if you are a zealot looking for a jihad, in which case reading them isn't likely to help you much because it just bounces off.
It really does. Try it and see!
``Leon the pig farmer'' boards the shuttle? (-:
You can get mod_ssl to send the user to a page that quietly uploads your self-signed cert into their browser anyway.
I think I should make up a CA called `Microsott Corporation' to self-sign these things with... (-:
The idea of an Open CA is a good one, but... how do we get M$ to include them in the list of trusted authorities within IE? A website with an audit trail of the emails/letters/transcripts from such an attempt would be interesting. (-:
So... why don't you? You're essentially saying that ``the compnay is nerds like you and me'' but really, how much of the company's personality comes from said nerds, and how much from obsessively competitive people like William Henry Gates III?
Time and time again, reading the testimony of ex-Microserfs, you see statements like ``we adopted the Microsoft culture'' which was...? Nerdism? Gentle altruism? Quiet pride? No, it was always obsession, competition, fear, elitism (FY-IFV badges), a cog-in-the-machine mentality.
You may fervently hope otherwise, but Microsoft is at heart an extension of Trey Gates, not a collective manifestation of geek culture with a few management problems. It has a track record, not ``had'' one. The mentality which gave it that criminal record is what drives Microsoft along. Separating Microsoft from their history is like unto separating the eggs from a well-cooked omelette. Remember the parable of the frog and the scorpion.
Much better to separate the nerds from the company, than the company from the nerds. That way, the nerds won't be so badly hurt when Microsoft bluescreens, which I suspect will happen with shocking speed.
And what makes you think that nobody does this with ``sealed'' beer? (-:
Did you know that your sealed package of chocolate can legally contain up to 4% cockroach parts?
BTW, exactly who is it pisses in my kernel between ftp.kernel.org and here? With Microsoft you know what the product is full of... at least I have a chance of getting something edible. And it comes with the full recipe. (-:
Into the sub-basement?
The US Constitution must be a really, really good idea if so many people are united against it. Not only the judiciary in general but practically every person with political or religious authority seems to have something against it - and Dublya is both - which is probably the single best reason around for protesting its erosion and demanding legal reform.
Why not become your own CA? If the user can't trust you, why are they visiting your site? (*) Complete instructions are here.
Sure, the browser asks the users to confirm (once only per browser per cert), but if you link from an unsecured splash page that tells them what to expect and how to react to it, they get over the shock just fine.
Expensive trust? Think of the RIAA: to artists, ``trust us because we can get you royalties''; to buyers, ``trust us because our stuff is legal [implication: and other people's stuff is at best second-rate]''. But it's similar to the one liner about big government: any organisation big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take everything you have.
(*) Note: IE ``the browser that reaches the places the other browsers miss'' has all manner of exciting ways to obliterate or export your precious data without warning you, and in some cases without you being aware that it happened. Oh, and it matters not whether this happens over an open link or through an SSL link sprinkled with with Thawte holy water. Where do you want your data to go today?
Notice that while this was filed in 2000, it wants rates set as from 1998? Suddenly, what was a free, legal act may have become a pay-for illegal act. Nice...
More than that, the aspects of maths and science taught in school (``all your mind are belong to us'') are generally taught in a way incompatible with feminine strengths. Women pick up better on things with a wider range of information and perceptual channels available (relatively speaking, men just become more confused as more data channels open). School is in the business of narrowing channels of perception, blandifying information (lopping off sidebands), and chopping data down into such small pieces that the big picture, if any, is at best elusive. School (realschule) was designed to do this specifically to stop people from learning to think.
Femmes actually make better CS experts in many cases because of their built-in greater ability to sift through masses of information for specific items. This is why many wives are able to find their husbands' keys when the husband (who actually put the keys wherever they are) cannot. They pay a price in things like spatial perception (think of reverse-parallel parking).
There are some interesting biases: femmes are often better at low-level OO because they are landmark-oriented, their opposite numbers are often better at structure because they are map-oriented.
``Amen, brother, amen!'' (-:
Worse than that, the others don't know how to find those answers, and if they did know, wouldn't have the attitude that they should go looking for them. This is a basic problem involving schools and schooling, and the damage which the school system does to people's psyche. The only answer to this is to replace schools with something less rigid, something that works. They are beyond reform.
...they just cook your frog.
Also, the CrutchOf$cientology stuff is (obviously) available in many places, and the Microsoft stuff wasn't obviously copyrighted material like the stuff about playing thought-Ricochet in your local park.
How did that go again? ``Visit your local park and beam thoughts at trees and animals until either a `jogger' rapist or the men with the padded van get you?''
PS, if they ever invite you up for a personality test, phrase your replies as if you were a totally selfish, mercenary bastard and you'll do as well in the test as I did. This is worthwhile just to see the expressions on various faces... (-:
...you're part of the precipitate.
Elementary chemistry. (-:
OTOH if you go crazy before you die, running around your yacht screaming at your ``body thetans,'' then I'm unlikely to adopt your business religion at any price.
Yo! And sue those scumbags Osborne and KayPro who each put out a ``portable personal terminal for use in a system for handling transactions'' in 1980! I know they did it because I personally wrote an MBASIC data-acquisition program that ran on these impertinant clones of fabulous ideas! And those Husky Hunters! ``Portable personal terminals'' that you could park a car on without damage... oh, the cheek of it!
And, oh, uhhh... you say that the patent was granted in 1987... Ooh, um, err...
I think I'd better hurry off and write an xterm that has a beep in the prompt to tell you it's ready for input, before NCR patent the idea. Anyone remember those? Nothing like a roomfull of students using an NCR machine that's so slow it has to wake you up when it wants input...
...even though the officials say that it is the main reason for the decision.
The big win for Mexico will be in accessible systems. Education doesn't happen in schools, education happens where people have uninhibited access to things. You can spend as much money as you like on schools and only make the educational situation worse (the USA has thoroughly proven this).
Poverty programs also have a very patchy history.
Installing systems that people can actually do stuff with will only impact a few percent of the users at first, but as more discover the power now at their fingertips - and more importantly, the documentation inherent in the source code, and the ability to make incremental changes (``experiments'') - the effect will snowball.
Whether it snowballs enough for Mexico to survive when Microsoft's massive financial fraud kills Microsoft and possibly also the US economy, is a different question. But certainly they will be better off.
Either way, it is entirely possible that ``destroying the economy they live in'' is the best possible large-scale move, since it will be replaced by something else.
The best training by far is actually doing stuff, not meta-doing stuff in a classroom.
The best business incentive is wanting to do it, and knowing that you can, and knowing that there is some point in starting and running a business. Linux will help to provide tools helpful for many small businesses, and so increase the incentive to start one.
BTW, I think the ``5 MS developers'' quip is a pretty staggering bit of imperialist ignorance. Are there any Mexicans reading this who would care to comment?
Too disturbing? Consider this:
1. Reading, writing and arithmetic can be taught in 50-100 contact hours (2-4 weeks at 5 hours a day) when the child is ready. Why do schools take years to complete the job?
2. Where else do you wear the same clothes, sit in formation, line up and wait, all do the same things, all sit and listen to one instructor, obey without thinking, lose some basic human rights, and have the whole place assemble more or less regularly?
3. Maryland had 98% literacy (2% illiteracy) before the introduction of compulsory schooling (at gunpoint!), and has never exceeded 91% (9% illiteracy, over 4x worse) since. And the standards for deciding ``literacy'' have gone down. Why do we persist with schools as they are?
4. Tripling the amount of money spent on schools made the results slightly worse, from academic and social viewpoints. Why are we spending even more money (``good money after bad'') on schools?
5. Places such as Korea (with shorter school days/years) and Switzerland (with a later starting age for schools) produce better academic results. In the case of Korea, world-beating results. Why haven't we even tried shortening school hours and starting later?
6. School is the second largest national budget item in most Western Countries, yet educational standards and social outcomes are getting steadily worse. Why don't we stop doing this, and do something else, even nothing, instead?
7. 1.5 million American children are home schooled each year, usually by unqualified, uneducated parents. These children better their public school counterparts by an average of 30 percentile points, and are socially equal or better depending on who does the measuring. Why isn't home education encouraged by the government?
Further reading
In space, where solar panels don't deface the landscape, and don't require precious earthbound resources to make, and beam it down with microwaves (whose receiving antennae can be blended in to any of a number of other structures).
A pity that NASA's recent budget cuts just canned testing of the vehicles necessary to do this. Complain to your poltician if you care.
Oddly enough, some fossil fuel reserves (to the confusion of the geologists involved) do actually self-replenish, existing reserves useable for plastics (coal/oil shale etc) are truly staggering anyway, and finally, you can make coal in the lab in less than half an hour from agricultural byproducts, so doing it industrially at reasonable cost can soon be made viable if need be.
Plastic solar cells already wrap around yacht booms (I know, I know, critical application, yadda yadda yadda, but if selling luxury items drives down the cost of useful stuff, so be it). Flexible electronics might mean a hat-brim display that survives being sat on, programmable jersey numbers for sportsmen, a TV that you unroll and hang on the wall/projector-screen-stand, and finally to useful stuff like truly wearable computers, rolled-up satellite in-a-can, stick-on intelligent medical monitors, electronics that survive vibration and impacts better (process control, remote sensing, satellites, even mobile 'phones that you can, enraged, safely hurl at the pavement...), ``sensi-peril'' windscreens (ie automatically darken just the spot around the oncoming headlights), and so on.