The law would be able to benefit us and punish corporate greed and misbehavior when it comes to data protection but thanks to the corporate interests in the pockets of our lawmakers this law has been made ineffective. The law probably doesn't even specify what punishment would be affected and if it does it's probably so small that most corporations would rather pay it than implementing the technology it requires to satisfy the law. It would probably be even harder to find punishments or personal liability of the corporate officers that make decisions around the compliance with the words. And as it advances through several other levels of lawmakers (house, president, back to congress, rewriting,...) it will probably become even more bland.
If the law were to affect us, simple peasants and benefit corporate interests when breached, you could bet on it that long prison sentences and fines would be involved with it as is the case with the DMCA, ACTA and general 'intellectual property' laws.
I think people are used to big corporation being EVIL! due to the likes of Microsoft, Big Oil, GM etc. and they're looking for these companies to be EVIL! as well.
If Microsoft was Apple they would be doing stuff like that if they think it would improve their business or lock in their consumers. Apple and Google on the other hand are a bit better (not perfectly good I'll say) in treating their customers well and making sure they're customers get what's promised. They also have a lot to lose if they wouldn't do this, they don't have a monopoly position that allows them to bully their customers.
Actually Randi's challenge is an oxymoron in itself. Quite smart if you think about it. Randi wants you to prove pseudo-scientific classes of research using the scientific process. However once you prove a class of research to be valid using the scientific process, it in itself becomes a science and is no longer a pseudo-science.
They want the ISP's (the ones that are giving us the Internet connections) to block the content that we should not be seeing (whether it's for copyright or puritan reasons). Right now the liability lies with the content provider but the problem is that most of the content is hosted outside the jurisdiction of any of the lobbyist companies.
That's why it's such a bad treaty, because it would basically create an international agreement for copyright infringements and censorship with the RIAA, MPAA and it's friends (or whoever is the highest payer to the ruling class on either side of the pond) as the police, judge and jury. It's even worse than the DMCA because it doesn't allow for exemptions, it would allow surveillance, arrest and extradition for whoever goes against any copyright and 'intellectual' property law in any country signed to the treaty. It would also allow them to block you totally from the Internet if you infringe on their perceived property in any locale.
Sure, the Compaq might have been alive but Compaq didn't warranty that it would. It could have died the first time it fell to the ground (as have many Dell and HP laptops I have seen). The Toughbook-series is made so that you COULD drop it and it will still go on and the manufacturer will either replace it or repair it if damage occurs to it. As in a fire truck or police car, the machine is usually protected by the car but it should withstand the door being left open in a winter storm, somebody using it that is dripping wet (due to rain or while extinguishing a fire) or if it stands a long time in the sun or near a burning building or if the car experiences repeated bumps. As for a car analogy: a standard Chevy Impala would withstand most of what cops put it through while being three times cheaper than their remodeled counterparts however, it's those once-in-a-while chases at 100mph and PIT maneuvers that the car has to survive although most cop cars (especially those in the non-urban areas) will never need to do that.
Not necessarily. Amazon's offering as far as the 'cloud' goes is that you pay for a virtual server at a specific data center. Although they do have a level of hardware redundancy at one location, for full redundancy you would have to pay Amazon for 2 instances and tell them to host it at both data centers. That means it's double as expensive. But that would be the same with his setup. He would have to pay for another dedicated server at another hosting company to get redundancy.
But his point stands, if you have legitimate use for a full-blown server it would be much cheaper to host it or buy it from a random hosting company. Amazon only comes in where usage of a single server is on average 1% or less. But if all you care about is serving a webpage, there are shared hosting (even redundant) solutions that are much cheaper than Amazon. I would only recommend Amazon for custom applications where web sessions don't work but that you would want a shared server for and that is something hardly any regular hosting company accepts.
One example where Amazon makes sense would be data crunching - a customer enters some information on a website and behind the curtains, that data has to be crunched. It can't be crunched in real time for whatever reason (it is crunched by a cron job or so) and it would be too expensive to get your own virtual or dedicated server.
The thing is, people like to make things look pretty before they put it on the market. The problem is pretty = costly. It costs in disk space, graphics design, rendering, cpu & gpu cycles, battery,.... All I want is my PDA to be like a Newton or an old Palm - it has everything you need, it does everything you want (even the 'difficult' things like written text recognition) but it's in b&w with crude (in today's standards) boxes. It would probably last for days on today's technology. But these days an alarm clock takes 3 seconds to render - not kidding - and when you leave the application open, the battery dies in less than 8 hours. Sure it's pretty to look at, but I don't need pretty, I need functionality and I would like to take that functionality with me when the flight is delayed and I need to stay overnight in a hotel in Paris.
Well, a lot of people get crap stuff from Wal-Mart or so. Philips actually makes good stuff. I have some Philips LED spotlights and although they are expensive ($30/bulb) they are great (about the same as a halogen) and they last while I have heard many stories about people getting $5-10 bulbs that are blue, don't give off any light and burn out in less than a year.
It's always the crappy companies that give new technology a bad rap. The same goes for smartphones, a lot of people I know don't like smartphones because their capabilities are grossly overstated (Blackberry, Symbian and other locked phones) and slow (Windows Mobile) while they don't have many of the apps that are touted by the carriers (unless you pay $10/app + over-the-top data charges like paying for individual e-mails received). However Android phones and the iPhone has changed a lot of that but people can't try the good ones out because they're locked to a crappy carrier with 2 year contracts.
Yep, many countries levy taxes at the borders (up to 80% of retail value - if they catch you) for stuff (electronics etc.) that you buy outside the country and bring in because it's cheaper elsewhere. I think that only holds for individuals though.
The US government is effectively ran by 2 types of companies: oil & weapon companies (republicans) and drug & insurance companies (democrats) although both company types dabble across the lines. So if republicans are in power, you'll hear a lot about how there is a need to protect the borders and how fuel prices are out of control in order to protect the American lifestyle, if democrats are in power, you'll hear a lot about how to improve the American lifestyle through drugs and doctor visits. At least that has been my experience as an outsider (non-American).
Now, this president has tried to shake up some of this because he is somewhat younger and an intellectual. However on all those main points he had to either admit defeat or it's still somewhere in the middle. The government subsidies of the H1N1 vaccine is just a money-grab by the companies producing it. As any virologist can tell you, a flu vaccine only protects against a single strand of flu and some minor mutations, usually the one that has already been defeated largely by the collective immune system. The upcoming flu strand is a different mutation and therefore the vaccine won't help. That's why loads of people still get sick every season even though they had a vaccine.
If you do some research on this specific strand of flu you'll find quickly that this is a flu virus very similar to the ones we get every year. It might be a bit deadlier than the ones from last year but it's not like the world hasn't gotten flu pandemics before (eg. Hong Kong flu which killed a measly 1 million people). On another note, flu vaccines can trigger auto-immune disorders and temporarily decreases your inherit immunity systems which can cause you to get things like common cold all the way to tuberculosis so it's not without risk either way. When I get a flu vaccine, I get a rash and I'm under the weather for a few days.
Read my sig, that's a (partial) quote from a Supreme Court judge. I couldn't quote it fully because Slashdot doesn't allow long sigs but either way, our lifestyle (whether that is race, religion or sexual preference) is not up for vote, not up for lawmakers to regulate.
I used to be into the Linux kernel a couple of years ago but since then I haven't really followed it anymore. What's the difference between these scheduling algorithms and do they work better than the current scheduling system?
I would outsource our whole military system to China. That would save us loads of money and we know our military will be replaced by China's anyway so why not do it sooner than later, if we don't like it we can always fire them.
The issue is that there need not be any more laws than there already is for this. The example you give us is different, it's called soliciting/offering sex with a minor and there are severe punishments for it. It's not just a 'joke'. The Lori Drew case is of course something that went out of hand. It's similar to the Columbine shootings and a host of other shootings that happen - harassing of somebody that's already depressed and can't cope, they kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves, some people just kill themselves because they don't have the guts to kill a bunch of people.
Quite honestly, if you can't cope with the pressures at school how are you going to cope with the pressures at work in the real world. I have been harassed, bullied and beaten up in school because I was different but that's nothing compared to the stuff you have to go through on a daily basis if you work especially if you work in a support-type or cubicle-oriented organization.
Of course people shouldn't be harassing each other and it's just bad to do, but it's going to happen. People kill themselves everyday because somebody said something wrong or broke up with them. Do you want to put all those people in jail too? It's not because it's online that it makes it any worse. The fact that the mob wants to punish those people is because they identify themselves with the victim and they want to set an example. If the media never picked up on the Lori Drew case, nobody would've cared, nobody would've gone to court or jail - it would just be another teenager not being able to cope with bad/no guidance from the parents committing suicide.
It's fairly simple. Get yourself an IP range, get some connections and do some BGP over it. Sure it's relatively expensive but if you need that type of connectivity on location, then you should be able to pay for it. There are many small data centers out there that have this setup. In open source you can find a solution called Zebra but many ISP's give/lease/sell you the hardware for it from Cisco or Juniper.
For other setups refer to this: http://linux-ip.net/html/adv-multi-internet.html - if you need site-to-site just set up two VPN's over the two connections and route through them. It's all very simple if you break it down.
Vegas-style casinos don't mind you counting cards since you are bringing others to the table that want to try their luck as well. It's the smaller "Native American" casino's in rural America that have a lot more to lose since they have a somewhat fixed set of gamblers that keep coming back to do the same games and get some food, a winning table doesn't necessarily mean many more people will join.
The problem is that even those safeguards are ignored or not always wanted. The vendors actually have a lot to do with it too. They want to sell as much systems as possible for the lowest cost. A lot of the safeguards are thus implemented in software and the same software is shipped to both research sites (where you might want to overdose eg. a mouse) as medical sites (where you don't want to overdose). The only warning you get for most (even dangerous) levels is a pop-up box asking 'are you sure'.
Another problem is that depending on the person, the levels might need to be different. Eg. if you scan a small child you don't want to give it the same levels as an obese adult because it would be dangerous. Therefore safeguards are implemented in software, the front desk puts in the information and the software calculates the levels for you and sends it to the scanner. However if there is an error in weight or size of the person this could easily be overlooked by the tech who needs to churn through 10 other patients in the next hour.
There will always be risks and greed, time and money are a big contributor in these risks. If you want to have better healthcare however, you'll need to invest in it. These scanners are not cheap and are usually overbooked. The biggest problem in the US is that these scanners need to be funded privately by the institution and then later the costs are recovered through private insurance companies that usually give a big fuss about the price of these things, the prices get negotiated to anywhere between 10% and 30% of the actual price and thus you have an underfunded, overbooked imaging department.
I don't know how come. but here I can't select the 2.26GHz but it goes automatically to the 2.66GHz one, same specs as you: $5643, then I go and upgrade the Mac Pro to 2.66GHz: $4699. Actually it seems that the price goes up slightly for Education or Business store (where I should shop). It seems like Dell can't get it's pricing straight.
Isn't it great, a fee that allows you to not buy what you didn't want to buy in the first place. But as far as the specs go: Compare a Mac Pro with the Dell T7400 (both the same exact hardware) and you will see that the Dell comes out somewhere between $1000 to $2000 more expensive. Even the Mac Mini is low priced for what you get. Of course you can do it cheaper when you do it yourself but that doesn't include any support or warranty nor your time that you spent assembling and sending back and forth parts.
What you say is right. I was contracting for a small webdesign & hosting company a while ago and I coded part of a rather large bank. Although the bank had some knowledge about what they needed on their server (software updates, firewall & private network separated from other hosts), they trusted us (me) a lot that we would do the right thing. Nobody ever reviewed the code and although there was a penetration audit done on the website level, nobody ever asked me for the source code or even how they could review the code. Only months after I quit did I get a call from the owner of the company I worked for that I never gave them any login or a root password. For all they know it could have e-mailed me the login & passwords of all their users (a simple line of code to add).
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"
No. The Internet has not done away with paper mills, printers, journalism, Hollywood, Broadway, telephone, schools, office buildings, dedicated computer clusters, data centers etc. etc.
There is a use and reason for the Internet, there is also a use and reason for all the 'traditional' stuff. You can do a lot of 'traditional' stuff on the Internet, doesn't mean you should and doesn't mean everybody will. Even I, born and raised in the Internet age prefer 'traditional' media over the Internet for some things.
The "service and support" model is optional for FOSS. Get a decent sysadmin or lurk around the forums and Google and you don't need to pay for it. You do have to pay for antivirus for the Microsoft platform or you will get infected. It doesn't matter who does it, the fact that it's so easy to subvert the system is the reason there are so many criminals and career crackers.
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The law would be able to benefit us and punish corporate greed and misbehavior when it comes to data protection but thanks to the corporate interests in the pockets of our lawmakers this law has been made ineffective. The law probably doesn't even specify what punishment would be affected and if it does it's probably so small that most corporations would rather pay it than implementing the technology it requires to satisfy the law. It would probably be even harder to find punishments or personal liability of the corporate officers that make decisions around the compliance with the words. And as it advances through several other levels of lawmakers (house, president, back to congress, rewriting, ...) it will probably become even more bland.
If the law were to affect us, simple peasants and benefit corporate interests when breached, you could bet on it that long prison sentences and fines would be involved with it as is the case with the DMCA, ACTA and general 'intellectual property' laws.
I think people are used to big corporation being EVIL! due to the likes of Microsoft, Big Oil, GM etc. and they're looking for these companies to be EVIL! as well.
If Microsoft was Apple they would be doing stuff like that if they think it would improve their business or lock in their consumers. Apple and Google on the other hand are a bit better (not perfectly good I'll say) in treating their customers well and making sure they're customers get what's promised. They also have a lot to lose if they wouldn't do this, they don't have a monopoly position that allows them to bully their customers.
Actually Randi's challenge is an oxymoron in itself. Quite smart if you think about it. Randi wants you to prove pseudo-scientific classes of research using the scientific process. However once you prove a class of research to be valid using the scientific process, it in itself becomes a science and is no longer a pseudo-science.
They want the ISP's (the ones that are giving us the Internet connections) to block the content that we should not be seeing (whether it's for copyright or puritan reasons). Right now the liability lies with the content provider but the problem is that most of the content is hosted outside the jurisdiction of any of the lobbyist companies.
That's why it's such a bad treaty, because it would basically create an international agreement for copyright infringements and censorship with the RIAA, MPAA and it's friends (or whoever is the highest payer to the ruling class on either side of the pond) as the police, judge and jury. It's even worse than the DMCA because it doesn't allow for exemptions, it would allow surveillance, arrest and extradition for whoever goes against any copyright and 'intellectual' property law in any country signed to the treaty. It would also allow them to block you totally from the Internet if you infringe on their perceived property in any locale.
Sure, the Compaq might have been alive but Compaq didn't warranty that it would. It could have died the first time it fell to the ground (as have many Dell and HP laptops I have seen). The Toughbook-series is made so that you COULD drop it and it will still go on and the manufacturer will either replace it or repair it if damage occurs to it. As in a fire truck or police car, the machine is usually protected by the car but it should withstand the door being left open in a winter storm, somebody using it that is dripping wet (due to rain or while extinguishing a fire) or if it stands a long time in the sun or near a burning building or if the car experiences repeated bumps. As for a car analogy: a standard Chevy Impala would withstand most of what cops put it through while being three times cheaper than their remodeled counterparts however, it's those once-in-a-while chases at 100mph and PIT maneuvers that the car has to survive although most cop cars (especially those in the non-urban areas) will never need to do that.
Not necessarily. Amazon's offering as far as the 'cloud' goes is that you pay for a virtual server at a specific data center. Although they do have a level of hardware redundancy at one location, for full redundancy you would have to pay Amazon for 2 instances and tell them to host it at both data centers. That means it's double as expensive. But that would be the same with his setup. He would have to pay for another dedicated server at another hosting company to get redundancy.
But his point stands, if you have legitimate use for a full-blown server it would be much cheaper to host it or buy it from a random hosting company. Amazon only comes in where usage of a single server is on average 1% or less. But if all you care about is serving a webpage, there are shared hosting (even redundant) solutions that are much cheaper than Amazon. I would only recommend Amazon for custom applications where web sessions don't work but that you would want a shared server for and that is something hardly any regular hosting company accepts.
One example where Amazon makes sense would be data crunching - a customer enters some information on a website and behind the curtains, that data has to be crunched. It can't be crunched in real time for whatever reason (it is crunched by a cron job or so) and it would be too expensive to get your own virtual or dedicated server.
The thing is, people like to make things look pretty before they put it on the market. The problem is pretty = costly. It costs in disk space, graphics design, rendering, cpu & gpu cycles, battery, .... All I want is my PDA to be like a Newton or an old Palm - it has everything you need, it does everything you want (even the 'difficult' things like written text recognition) but it's in b&w with crude (in today's standards) boxes. It would probably last for days on today's technology. But these days an alarm clock takes 3 seconds to render - not kidding - and when you leave the application open, the battery dies in less than 8 hours. Sure it's pretty to look at, but I don't need pretty, I need functionality and I would like to take that functionality with me when the flight is delayed and I need to stay overnight in a hotel in Paris.
Well, a lot of people get crap stuff from Wal-Mart or so. Philips actually makes good stuff. I have some Philips LED spotlights and although they are expensive ($30/bulb) they are great (about the same as a halogen) and they last while I have heard many stories about people getting $5-10 bulbs that are blue, don't give off any light and burn out in less than a year.
It's always the crappy companies that give new technology a bad rap. The same goes for smartphones, a lot of people I know don't like smartphones because their capabilities are grossly overstated (Blackberry, Symbian and other locked phones) and slow (Windows Mobile) while they don't have many of the apps that are touted by the carriers (unless you pay $10/app + over-the-top data charges like paying for individual e-mails received). However Android phones and the iPhone has changed a lot of that but people can't try the good ones out because they're locked to a crappy carrier with 2 year contracts.
Yep, many countries levy taxes at the borders (up to 80% of retail value - if they catch you) for stuff (electronics etc.) that you buy outside the country and bring in because it's cheaper elsewhere. I think that only holds for individuals though.
The US government is effectively ran by 2 types of companies: oil & weapon companies (republicans) and drug & insurance companies (democrats) although both company types dabble across the lines. So if republicans are in power, you'll hear a lot about how there is a need to protect the borders and how fuel prices are out of control in order to protect the American lifestyle, if democrats are in power, you'll hear a lot about how to improve the American lifestyle through drugs and doctor visits. At least that has been my experience as an outsider (non-American).
Now, this president has tried to shake up some of this because he is somewhat younger and an intellectual. However on all those main points he had to either admit defeat or it's still somewhere in the middle. The government subsidies of the H1N1 vaccine is just a money-grab by the companies producing it. As any virologist can tell you, a flu vaccine only protects against a single strand of flu and some minor mutations, usually the one that has already been defeated largely by the collective immune system. The upcoming flu strand is a different mutation and therefore the vaccine won't help. That's why loads of people still get sick every season even though they had a vaccine.
If you do some research on this specific strand of flu you'll find quickly that this is a flu virus very similar to the ones we get every year. It might be a bit deadlier than the ones from last year but it's not like the world hasn't gotten flu pandemics before (eg. Hong Kong flu which killed a measly 1 million people). On another note, flu vaccines can trigger auto-immune disorders and temporarily decreases your inherit immunity systems which can cause you to get things like common cold all the way to tuberculosis so it's not without risk either way. When I get a flu vaccine, I get a rash and I'm under the weather for a few days.
Read my sig, that's a (partial) quote from a Supreme Court judge. I couldn't quote it fully because Slashdot doesn't allow long sigs but either way, our lifestyle (whether that is race, religion or sexual preference) is not up for vote, not up for lawmakers to regulate.
I used to be into the Linux kernel a couple of years ago but since then I haven't really followed it anymore. What's the difference between these scheduling algorithms and do they work better than the current scheduling system?
I would outsource our whole military system to China. That would save us loads of money and we know our military will be replaced by China's anyway so why not do it sooner than later, if we don't like it we can always fire them.
The issue is that there need not be any more laws than there already is for this. The example you give us is different, it's called soliciting/offering sex with a minor and there are severe punishments for it. It's not just a 'joke'. The Lori Drew case is of course something that went out of hand. It's similar to the Columbine shootings and a host of other shootings that happen - harassing of somebody that's already depressed and can't cope, they kill a bunch of people and then kill themselves, some people just kill themselves because they don't have the guts to kill a bunch of people.
Quite honestly, if you can't cope with the pressures at school how are you going to cope with the pressures at work in the real world. I have been harassed, bullied and beaten up in school because I was different but that's nothing compared to the stuff you have to go through on a daily basis if you work especially if you work in a support-type or cubicle-oriented organization.
Of course people shouldn't be harassing each other and it's just bad to do, but it's going to happen. People kill themselves everyday because somebody said something wrong or broke up with them. Do you want to put all those people in jail too? It's not because it's online that it makes it any worse. The fact that the mob wants to punish those people is because they identify themselves with the victim and they want to set an example. If the media never picked up on the Lori Drew case, nobody would've cared, nobody would've gone to court or jail - it would just be another teenager not being able to cope with bad/no guidance from the parents committing suicide.
It's fairly simple. Get yourself an IP range, get some connections and do some BGP over it. Sure it's relatively expensive but if you need that type of connectivity on location, then you should be able to pay for it. There are many small data centers out there that have this setup. In open source you can find a solution called Zebra but many ISP's give/lease/sell you the hardware for it from Cisco or Juniper.
For other setups refer to this: http://linux-ip.net/html/adv-multi-internet.html - if you need site-to-site just set up two VPN's over the two connections and route through them. It's all very simple if you break it down.
Vegas-style casinos don't mind you counting cards since you are bringing others to the table that want to try their luck as well. It's the smaller "Native American" casino's in rural America that have a lot more to lose since they have a somewhat fixed set of gamblers that keep coming back to do the same games and get some food, a winning table doesn't necessarily mean many more people will join.
The problem is that even those safeguards are ignored or not always wanted. The vendors actually have a lot to do with it too. They want to sell as much systems as possible for the lowest cost. A lot of the safeguards are thus implemented in software and the same software is shipped to both research sites (where you might want to overdose eg. a mouse) as medical sites (where you don't want to overdose). The only warning you get for most (even dangerous) levels is a pop-up box asking 'are you sure'.
Another problem is that depending on the person, the levels might need to be different. Eg. if you scan a small child you don't want to give it the same levels as an obese adult because it would be dangerous. Therefore safeguards are implemented in software, the front desk puts in the information and the software calculates the levels for you and sends it to the scanner. However if there is an error in weight or size of the person this could easily be overlooked by the tech who needs to churn through 10 other patients in the next hour.
There will always be risks and greed, time and money are a big contributor in these risks. If you want to have better healthcare however, you'll need to invest in it. These scanners are not cheap and are usually overbooked. The biggest problem in the US is that these scanners need to be funded privately by the institution and then later the costs are recovered through private insurance companies that usually give a big fuss about the price of these things, the prices get negotiated to anywhere between 10% and 30% of the actual price and thus you have an underfunded, overbooked imaging department.
What do you mean?
http://www.justnews.com/news/14708354/detail.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/business/worldbusiness/27iht-drone.4.11474996.html
http://gizmodo.com/5167853/the-draganflyer-x6-uav-police-edition
Except for FAA approval, there isn't much stopping our police state to use them.
Except that Frank De Winne is Belgian (If I'm correct he was the first Belgian in space and has been knighted too) and thus speaks Dutch.
I don't know how come. but here I can't select the 2.26GHz but it goes automatically to the 2.66GHz one, same specs as you: $5643, then I go and upgrade the Mac Pro to 2.66GHz: $4699. Actually it seems that the price goes up slightly for Education or Business store (where I should shop). It seems like Dell can't get it's pricing straight.
Isn't it great, a fee that allows you to not buy what you didn't want to buy in the first place. But as far as the specs go: Compare a Mac Pro with the Dell T7400 (both the same exact hardware) and you will see that the Dell comes out somewhere between $1000 to $2000 more expensive. Even the Mac Mini is low priced for what you get. Of course you can do it cheaper when you do it yourself but that doesn't include any support or warranty nor your time that you spent assembling and sending back and forth parts.
What you say is right. I was contracting for a small webdesign & hosting company a while ago and I coded part of a rather large bank. Although the bank had some knowledge about what they needed on their server (software updates, firewall & private network separated from other hosts), they trusted us (me) a lot that we would do the right thing. Nobody ever reviewed the code and although there was a penetration audit done on the website level, nobody ever asked me for the source code or even how they could review the code. Only months after I quit did I get a call from the owner of the company I worked for that I never gave them any login or a root password. For all they know it could have e-mailed me the login & passwords of all their users (a simple line of code to add).
Will a bill such as this endanger publishing companies in the same way Internet journalism endangers traditional journalism?"
No. The Internet has not done away with paper mills, printers, journalism, Hollywood, Broadway, telephone, schools, office buildings, dedicated computer clusters, data centers etc. etc.
There is a use and reason for the Internet, there is also a use and reason for all the 'traditional' stuff. You can do a lot of 'traditional' stuff on the Internet, doesn't mean you should and doesn't mean everybody will. Even I, born and raised in the Internet age prefer 'traditional' media over the Internet for some things.
The "service and support" model is optional for FOSS. Get a decent sysadmin or lurk around the forums and Google and you don't need to pay for it. You do have to pay for antivirus for the Microsoft platform or you will get infected. It doesn't matter who does it, the fact that it's so easy to subvert the system is the reason there are so many criminals and career crackers.
There is a tool for Mac OS X that will do this as well. I forgot the name of it but it works great.