Easy, time is a measurement of change. You can NOT define change without time. Time just gives us a way to "tag" a specific state of the universe as for example at 15:30:34, you could open your mouth and next at 15:30:36 you could close it again, the only way to describe that change is by giving a tag to the "change unit" we have.
But no state can be repeated, that will be traveling back in time as you will be able to be again in a specific state of the universe.
Haven't you had any memory, you will not have the perception of what we call time. It is all on your head. Take as an example, when you sleep or get unconsious (without dreaming). For you, it may seem like a minute after you got sleep and your alarm clock waked you up but after you see your guides for time then you *imply* that some time has passed. In the event of not having memory your life would pass in the same blink of an eye.
Time travel does exist, in one direction and at one velocity.
The funny thing about the time travel theories is that, they are all based on a specific "definition" of time, when time by itself does not exist, it is just another metric that we mere mortals created (no I do not believe in god:) ). We continue to crash our heads trying to decipher *how* to travel across some theoretic "travelable" metric we created. Say can we travel across "Watts"? can we go "3 watts ahead" or "3 watts below"? or "r watts to the right or to the left".
[Un]fortunately, the only thing that gives us a sense of the past is the memory, that way, if yesterday someone implanted in my memory that I was going to be reading this story on slashdot, I may believe that I've traveled to the past (no dupe jokes please).
from TFA: "only responded with what we were legally compelled to provide, and nothing more".
So, unlike you, I would have do what the LAWS of said COUNTRY told me.
Look, I got tired of this meaningless conversations, *you* are the one that do not get it. It is like the Microsoft VS E.U. problem. Microsoft MUST comply with current regulations, it does not matter if in its home country they didn't need to make the sourcecode available or to comply to some terms to enable fair competition.
If they decide *not* to comply with law, then they might have to fave the legal consequences from THAT country. And you do not know, maybe the consequences mean death penaly for "tration" to the country.
You are free to dislike American Government and I'm free to dislike China's government. Perhaps this makes more sense. Thats the way it works here. America was founded on ideals that didn't just government accept authority as the ulitmate truth. There is a higher power, and Government shouldn't outstep its bounds to try to strip mankinds born rights.
Aleluya!
Yep, as you could see from me comments, I dislike American government. I do not dislike the people (I have really good North American friends!). What I dislike is that the government is getting its noses everywhere it wants. It is not your fault, as a lot of times one can't do nothing to change their government. As a side note, I am from Mexico.
It is however interesting to notice that almost all the friends from USA I have is people that live outside USA, and they all dislike current USA administration. They are independent people as they do not know each other. One of them (the most notable one) was a English teacher of mine at the time Bush Jr. won the first election. He was very outraged by the way he stole the election, she showed us videos about what was happening on the USA and told us more or less how the "votes" where counted back there (the weight on states that have more "points" like california winning and the fact that the "total" citizens amount of votes does not count at the end).
Again, please do not consider my comments as a rant against you (if you happen to be from USA as you seem to be). This friend also told me that, the majority of people in USA do not really care about what the government is doing and that a lot of people do not vote.
Now, let me tell you that is not a USA-only problem. Down in Mexico we have a *hell* of corruption and problems with drugs, I do not like it (casually, I do not live in Mexico myself:-/). We have our problems and we have the same problem you have, that people really do not care on the governments decissios, the most like to do is get into forums and say what they are doing wrong but nobody wants to act. Besides, in Mexico we have a bigger problem, people is *very busy* looking for ways to survive each day to be interested in politics. Just as a side note a trivia quote, "8 of each 10 Mexicans living in rural areas are poor, 6 of them live in misery".
To conclude, I state again, what I dislike of USA is their "international relations" pollitics, trying to force their law into other countries.
Sean McCormack, from the USA Department of State said that the laws of USA are applied in all the world, but that is not true, that is true ONLY when the extraterritoriality laws have been accepted by the country.
I will just ask you, hate China all the way, boycot chineese products, do the same as to Cuba (the Helms-Burton law ) to china, irak, iran, vietnam, Bolivia or any other country you dislike (because of their politics or whatever else) but do not try to bomb their asses until they comply.
You: Google has rebealed against CHINA, so YAHOO, you're either with us, or your against us. Some *other* guy: Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
So that is the mentality of you USA people uh?, I guess I understand why did GWB got reelcted.
Again I try to tell you, the peace of the world *could* be achieved if USA and other countries stoped trying to get into other countries buisnesses.
Have you ever thought that, the terrorist attacks would cease, if USA just stopped tyring to dominate the world?
The only thing you (USA) are going to achieve is to get a Pax Romana, and in the end your empire will collapse.
What's your personal belief in this regard, xtracto? Is the action of the Chinese government morally just in this instance? What do you personally believe?
Ok, here I go. just because you asked.
My belief is that, the United States of America should, no, must get its hands off all the other country politics and economics. They must stick into solving they not-so-tiny own internal problems. They must stop "liberating" other countries from their "tiranys" (that what revolutions where made for), they should stop caring what other countries legislation and economic practices are.
I am not a Chinnesse, but I really do not care of what the current laws are there, if they are or not a democracy. I live far from there, and if Chinesse do not get with me, I do not have to get with them.
That is why I wrote the example of the Mexican hotel, What the fuck has USA to do giving orders to a Mexican Hotel to apply a USA law?. If they do not like their people to talk with Cubans then, they should put them a chip in the brain that detects when they are talking with them and make it explode or whatever.
In my country, people is FREE to assossiate with anyone, as long as it is not again MY COUNTRY'S constitution, the USA, Canada, Iran, Spain or any other prohibit. Likewise, in my country smoking pod is not permitted, I do not care if a Dutch guy comes to my country and he is allowed to do it at home.
I repeat, that is why revolutions are made, when people INSIDE their country do not want the way it is being managed they make a revolution, it is a matter of internal national politics so USA (and any other country) should fuck off.
Anyway, that is what I thought, speciffically, I think Yahoo did a good thing, as they complied with the legislation of the country. I am sorry if my comments appears a bit upset but that is my opinion, not a troll, not a flamebait, just an opinion.
This is a deeper problem than it seems at first sight. From my point of view, Yahoo is not doing wrong as it surely is complying with petitions that the Chinese government asks.
A lot of people in slashdot think that just because they *believe* the type of Government China has is unfair then it is wrong and unfair. But companies working over there MUST comply with current legislation.
Just some days ago USA government gave an order to the Sheraton hotel to make the Maria Isabel Sheraton hotel in Mexico City remove some Cuban citizens from the installations and avoid a meeting with some USA company representatives (Caterpillar is one of them).
The problem was not the order that USA give, but that the Sheraton hotel *in Mexico* actually asked the people to leave AND did not returned their 3 night deposit.
Just today, the Sheraton hotel has been shut down as they tried to apply the Helms-Burton law in Mexican ground. This is bad, but is the opposite of what happened to Yahoo.
Yahoo MUST comply with local laws if they want to make buisness there, there is no other choice, comply or go, and while China keeps giving good revenue, they will continue.
Yeah... you and me sure have very different tastes... . I prefer to squeeze every CPU cycle for the work I am doing:)
Re:Nintendo is in trouble with the Revolution
on
Nintendo's New Look
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Nice, another comment moded as troll because you expressed your POV and it was different than the general/. crowd.
I just want to note something, Nintendo is going to fail with the revolution and will end the same way Sega ended, we will see the Mario Brothers on the PlayStation 4. Mark my words, it will happen.
It will be nice, whoever (Microsoft vs Sony) gets the Mario/Zelda franchise is going to win the console game wars. I preffer Sony (not because I am pro Sony, I HATE sony for they DRM and Rootkit) but in some way, if Sony wins it will be a force against Microsoft Monopoly. If MS wins, we will have to stand the big MS Monopoly for another 10 years.
Man... after looking at the keyboard and reading your . I plan on resting my head right there in the middle between the flaps. post, I could not help but thing about breasts =op I need a break =-S
Puta madre guey disculpame, la verdad se me fue la pinche palabra "trademark" en lugar de "trade" puta neta cabron disculpa, yo se que no soy digno de que tu leas mi comentario.
Por otro lado, me siento alagado de que hayas corregido mi error, oh gran señor conocedor de las lenguas y la gramática!.
En resumen, espero que te vayas a chingar a tu madre.
I agree with you in this sense, I have never understood what is the functionallity of the "transparency", I mean, what is the big deal, I can blend the content of all the stacked windows on the screen. Aside of the "coolness" factor It is confusing.
Why would you like to make lets say, your Firefox window transparent and having under that OpenOffice Word and under that your desktop image showing the moving world clock, what you will see at the end is, Nothing, just a mess of blended images.
Really, someone please tell me a way to use is productevly as I do not mean to be a troll but, I cant find any use for that.
Just to extend your point a bit. I hope someone can get this quote source as I do not have it but, I remember Bill Gates said something which I found really important in an interview related to his malaria fight fund donations.
The quote was something like "Unfortunately, it is not possible, with human viruses, to give money to a group of people and tell them, go ahead, make a cure for Malaria. It just does not works like that".
With this what I want to show is that, this pharmaceutical companies cant do the same as say, Intel, that just throw some money to the PentiumV chip and say to the team "go ahead, make a 8 GHZ chip".
The process of finding medicine *really* useful against viruses is ten (if nota hundred) times more difficult. And besides that, after they've got the medicine they *must* pass the FDA regulations. To what does Intel needs to comply? some quite trivial FCC regulations.
So, yes, I defend the pharmaceutical companies. I agree that they seem to do something really antiethic, to profit by selling things that save lifes. But, in our current economy there is no other way it can be done. What some governments do (I can ONLY speak for the Mexico government) is subsidise (spell?) the medicines with the Social Security System. You have to see how cheap are the medicines in Mexico when you have IMSS, not even that, the service you can get for free (I was in the hospital for 3 months when I was a kid).
I think that is the best way to do it, but of course, we can blame our governments for removing our Social Security services:)
just as a sidenote, I just downloaded Opera 9 preview today with uTorrent and while it was downlading a message poped up telling me that uTorrent is free and that if I have paid for it I should somewhere with the URL of the page where I downloaded/purchased it.
Now, I agree with them, as uTorrent is not GPL (to my best knowledge) but, if it was a GPL (like azureus), I *believe* the GPL does not prohibits the ability to sell it does it?, as long as you give the code and the changes (if you modify it) when someone asks...
Yes, it is like all kind of communication things, if you want privacy you should not use those kind of third party service (Gmail. Yahoo mail etc) or IM> like (Gmsngr MSmsngr, Ymsngr, etc) or, if you still want to use them and *really* want privacy use PGP.
I have used PGP over Gmail for some conversation (with trademark secrets etc) with other people. I use winPGP. it is so easy to use that you can even use it for IM encrypted conversations.
I think he must stay at his actual job. Why?, financial stability. Look, if he is doing okey and the payment is right, what else does he wants?.
He says that he only works on Office things and that his potential is being wasted?, well, maybe he could get half day of his saturday to do something interesting for him, or even just enter as a consultant to the other company, speding a minimum time.
The problem will be when he moves to the other "startup company" and it does not work... then he will be without job and money. My father has always said "do not rise the left foot until the right is firmly at the next step".
What I would do is just stay with my current job and get some time to do something interesting (note: this is what can really improve your resumé).
I will answer just to some of your comments, as one answer covers all of them.
. I had to write my own sleep command in VB script just to accomplish a simple "sleep 5s". And since VB script is such a fucking mess, my script would only run on some machines unless I wanted to do version checking.
So, you can program a bash script and manage to install a tarball but you whine for a pretty basic "idiot-based-language" VB script?. Cool that you only have this *some machines* problems with a sleep thing that can be done in other ways (or at the end, you achieved in your own way); there are things that can NOT be done on any Linux flavor, like for example using some hardware. Darn...
using Linux and all I needed to do was compile one external driver for the PVR-250 card and write a bunch of Bash scripts utilizing Zenity for GUI interaction.
Whoopewho, Compile? wow 1337. On windows you only have to double click on a program and it will be there!
Everything I needed was in my base Fedora Core 3 installation. I didn't need to buy anything other than the PVR-250... I challenge you to do the same with Windows. I do not care how much did it costed, as a lot of companies. Remember, the advantage of OSS is not in the price. If I wanted a PVR I would just bought a softare (you could do it too!.
Now, I will conclude saying again, I am not against any OSS, but it is not true that Windows is too limiting compared to Linux. All the new applications available for Linux are "replacements" of Windows applications. That is not bad, they make some functionality available.
The difference is that with Windows you pay for the software so it just work while on Linux you have to make it work. Some people do not want to waste their time on that. The same way as I do not want to waste my time looking at the motor in my car, I just want it to take me from my office to my home.
Then I would recommend you setting up an NON ADMINISTRATION privileged account on any system she uses.
The only real difference between Windows and all Unix flavors now is that the first gives administrator privileges to its users by DEFAULT, and *promotes* the use of the computer with them, while the last (all unix flavors including Linux and BSDs) promotes the contrary.
I think Windows is less secure than say, Mandriva on the same way that Mandriva is less secure than OpenBSD, they just leave the more "dangerous" services/tools disabled by default.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy, time is a measurement of change. You can NOT define change without time. Time just gives us a way to "tag" a specific state of the universe as for example at 15:30:34, you could open your mouth and next at 15:30:36 you could close it again, the only way to describe that change is by giving a tag to the "change unit" we have.
But no state can be repeated, that will be traveling back in time as you will be able to be again in a specific state of the universe.
Haven't you had any memory, you will not have the perception of what we call time. It is all on your head. Take as an example, when you sleep or get unconsious (without dreaming). For you, it may seem like a minute after you got sleep and your alarm clock waked you up but after you see your guides for time then you *imply* that some time has passed. In the event of not having memory your life would pass in the same blink of an eye.
Time travel does exist, in one direction and at one velocity.
:) ). We continue to crash our heads trying to decipher *how* to travel across some theoretic "travelable" metric we created. Say can we travel across "Watts"? can we go "3 watts ahead" or "3 watts below"? or "r watts to the right or to the left".
The funny thing about the time travel theories is that, they are all based on a specific "definition" of time, when time by itself does not exist, it is just another metric that we mere mortals created (no I do not believe in god
[Un]fortunately, the only thing that gives us a sense of the past is the memory, that way, if yesterday someone implanted in my memory that I was going to be reading this story on slashdot, I may believe that I've traveled to the past (no dupe jokes please).
from TFA:
"only responded with what we were legally compelled to provide, and nothing more".
So, unlike you, I would have do what the LAWS of said COUNTRY told me.
Look, I got tired of this meaningless conversations, *you* are the one that do not get it. It is like the Microsoft VS E.U. problem. Microsoft MUST comply with current regulations, it does not matter if in its home country they didn't need to make the sourcecode available or to comply to some terms to enable fair competition.
If they decide *not* to comply with law, then they might have to fave the legal consequences from THAT country. And you do not know, maybe the consequences mean death penaly for "tration" to the country.
Chinese government, of imprisoning someone who joins a political party morally just in this case?
No, that is not morally right, or, in my opinion that is wrong.
"every coutntry has the government it deserves"
You are free to dislike American Government and I'm free to dislike China's government. Perhaps this makes more sense. Thats the way it works here. America was founded on ideals that didn't just government accept authority as the ulitmate truth. There is a higher power, and Government shouldn't outstep its bounds to try to strip mankinds born rights.
:-/). We have our problems and we have the same problem you have, that people really do not care on the governments decissios, the most like to do is get into forums and say what they are doing wrong but nobody wants to act. Besides, in Mexico we have a bigger problem, people is *very busy* looking for ways to survive each day to be interested in politics. Just as a side note a trivia quote, "8 of each 10 Mexicans living in rural areas are poor, 6 of them live in misery".
Aleluya!
Yep, as you could see from me comments, I dislike American government. I do not dislike the people (I have really good North American friends!). What I dislike is that the government is getting its noses everywhere it wants. It is not your fault, as a lot of times one can't do nothing to change their government. As a side note, I am from Mexico.
It is however interesting to notice that almost all the friends from USA I have is people that live outside USA, and they all dislike current USA administration. They are independent people as they do not know each other. One of them (the most notable one) was a English teacher of mine at the time Bush Jr. won the first election. He was very outraged by the way he stole the election, she showed us videos about what was happening on the USA and told us more or less how the "votes" where counted back there (the weight on states that have more "points" like california winning and the fact that the "total" citizens amount of votes does not count at the end).
Again, please do not consider my comments as a rant against you (if you happen to be from USA as you seem to be). This friend also told me that, the majority of people in USA do not really care about what the government is doing and that a lot of people do not vote.
Now, let me tell you that is not a USA-only problem. Down in Mexico we have a *hell* of corruption and problems with drugs, I do not like it (casually, I do not live in Mexico myself
To conclude, I state again, what I dislike of USA is their "international relations" pollitics, trying to force their law into other countries.
Sean McCormack, from the USA Department of State said that the laws of USA are applied in all the world, but that is not true, that is true ONLY when the extraterritoriality laws have been accepted by the country.
I will just ask you, hate China all the way, boycot chineese products, do the same as to Cuba (the Helms-Burton law ) to china, irak, iran, vietnam, Bolivia or any other country you dislike (because of their politics or whatever else) but do not try to bomb their asses until they comply.
OMG greaht LOL now 1etz b0mb those bastard unliberal chinnese!!!!!11!!1!
-- Bush
You:
Google has rebealed against CHINA, so YAHOO, you're either with us, or your against us.
Some *other* guy:
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.
So that is the mentality of you USA people uh?, I guess I understand why did GWB got reelcted.
Again I try to tell you, the peace of the world *could* be achieved if USA and other countries stoped trying to get into other countries buisnesses.
Have you ever thought that, the terrorist attacks would cease, if USA just stopped tyring to dominate the world?
The only thing you (USA) are going to achieve is to get a Pax Romana, and in the end your empire will collapse.
What's your personal belief in this regard, xtracto? Is the action of the Chinese government morally just in this instance? What do you personally believe?
Ok, here I go. just because you asked.
My belief is that, the United States of America should, no, must get its hands off all the other country politics and economics. They must stick into solving they not-so-tiny own internal problems. They must stop "liberating" other countries from their "tiranys" (that what revolutions where made for), they should stop caring what other countries legislation and economic practices are.
I am not a Chinnesse, but I really do not care of what the current laws are there, if they are or not a democracy. I live far from there, and if Chinesse do not get with me, I do not have to get with them.
That is why I wrote the example of the Mexican hotel, What the fuck has USA to do giving orders to a Mexican Hotel to apply a USA law?. If they do not like their people to talk with Cubans then, they should put them a chip in the brain that detects when they are talking with them and make it explode or whatever.
In my country, people is FREE to assossiate with anyone, as long as it is not again MY COUNTRY'S constitution, the USA, Canada, Iran, Spain or any other prohibit. Likewise, in my country smoking pod is not permitted, I do not care if a Dutch guy comes to my country and he is allowed to do it at home.
But the main thing here is that you (as a country/government/people from there) should not involve with other countries buissensses, if it is right or wrong with you, then you'd better care that it does not happens in you country and you should stop bombing whatever country you believe does not follow your consitution rules.
I repeat, that is why revolutions are made, when people INSIDE their country do not want the way it is being managed they make a revolution, it is a matter of internal national politics so USA (and any other country) should fuck off.
Anyway, that is what I thought, speciffically, I think Yahoo did a good thing, as they complied with the legislation of the country. I am sorry if my comments appears a bit upset but that is my opinion, not a troll, not a flamebait, just an opinion.
This is a deeper problem than it seems at first sight. From my point of view, Yahoo is not doing wrong as it surely is complying with petitions that the Chinese government asks.
A lot of people in slashdot think that just because they *believe* the type of Government China has is unfair then it is wrong and unfair. But companies working over there MUST comply with current legislation.
Just some days ago USA government gave an order to the Sheraton hotel to make the Maria Isabel Sheraton hotel in Mexico City remove some Cuban citizens from the installations and avoid a meeting with some USA company representatives (Caterpillar is one of them).
The problem was not the order that USA give, but that the Sheraton hotel *in Mexico* actually asked the people to leave AND did not returned their 3 night deposit.
Just today, the Sheraton hotel has been shut down as they tried to apply the Helms-Burton law in Mexican ground. This is bad, but is the opposite of what happened to Yahoo.
Yahoo MUST comply with local laws if they want to make buisness there, there is no other choice, comply or go, and while China keeps giving good revenue, they will continue.
Everything in the WORLD should be anti-Bush.
That's not terribly difficult, given that Bush is standing against all the world.
.
.
.
.
-1, TruthHurts
Yeah... you and me sure have very different tastes... . I prefer to squeeze every CPU cycle for the work I am doing :)
Nice, another comment moded as troll because you expressed your POV and it was different than the general /. crowd.
I just want to note something, Nintendo is going to fail with the revolution and will end the same way Sega ended, we will see the Mario Brothers on the PlayStation 4. Mark my words, it will happen.
It will be nice, whoever (Microsoft vs Sony) gets the Mario/Zelda franchise is going to win the console game wars. I preffer Sony (not because I am pro Sony, I HATE sony for they DRM and Rootkit) but in some way, if Sony wins it will be a force against Microsoft Monopoly. If MS wins, we will have to stand the big MS Monopoly for another 10 years.
Nah... he surely uses his left hand to spank the monkey
Agree, I see this things similar to trackballs, you know, they are nice, they are kind of better but they are just not going to replace mice
Man... after looking at the keyboard and reading your . I plan on resting my head right there in the middle between the flaps. post, I could not help but thing about breasts =op I need a break =-S
Just a comment, you should add that to Wikipedia, I found that interesting, but could not find any reference over there :-)
Puta madre guey disculpame, la verdad se me fue la pinche palabra "trademark" en lugar de "trade" puta neta cabron disculpa, yo se que no soy digno de que tu leas mi comentario.
Por otro lado, me siento alagado de que hayas corregido mi error, oh gran señor conocedor de las lenguas y la gramática!.
En resumen, espero que te vayas a chingar a tu madre.
You, have a good day Sir.
I agree with you in this sense, I have never understood what is the functionallity of the "transparency", I mean, what is the big deal, I can blend the content of all the stacked windows on the screen. Aside of the "coolness" factor It is confusing.
Why would you like to make lets say, your Firefox window transparent and having under that OpenOffice Word and under that your desktop image showing the moving world clock, what you will see at the end is, Nothing, just a mess of blended images.
Really, someone please tell me a way to use is productevly as I do not mean to be a troll but, I cant find any use for that.
Just to extend your point a bit. I hope someone can get this quote source as I do not have it but, I remember Bill Gates said something which I found really important in an interview related to his malaria fight fund donations.
:)
The quote was something like "Unfortunately, it is not possible, with human viruses, to give money to a group of people and tell them, go ahead, make a cure for Malaria. It just does not works like that".
With this what I want to show is that, this pharmaceutical companies cant do the same as say, Intel, that just throw some money to the PentiumV chip and say to the team "go ahead, make a 8 GHZ chip".
The process of finding medicine *really* useful against viruses is ten (if nota hundred) times more difficult. And besides that, after they've got the medicine they *must* pass the FDA regulations. To what does Intel needs to comply? some quite trivial FCC regulations.
So, yes, I defend the pharmaceutical companies. I agree that they seem to do something really antiethic, to profit by selling things that save lifes. But, in our current economy there is no other way it can be done. What some governments do (I can ONLY speak for the Mexico government) is subsidise (spell?) the medicines with the Social Security System. You have to see how cheap are the medicines in Mexico when you have IMSS, not even that, the service you can get for free (I was in the hospital for 3 months when I was a kid).
I think that is the best way to do it, but of course, we can blame our governments for removing our Social Security services
. And the applications...
Or the lack of them...
just as a sidenote, I just downloaded Opera 9 preview today with uTorrent and while it was downlading a message poped up telling me that uTorrent is free and that if I have paid for it I should somewhere with the URL of the page where I downloaded/purchased it.
Now, I agree with them, as uTorrent is not GPL (to my best knowledge) but, if it was a GPL (like azureus), I *believe* the GPL does not prohibits the ability to sell it does it?, as long as you give the code and the changes (if you modify it) when someone asks...
Yes, it is like all kind of communication things, if you want privacy you should not use those kind of third party service (Gmail. Yahoo mail etc) or IM> like (Gmsngr MSmsngr, Ymsngr, etc) or, if you still want to use them and *really* want privacy use PGP.
I have used PGP over Gmail for some conversation (with trademark secrets etc) with other people. I use winPGP. it is so easy to use that you can even use it for IM encrypted conversations.
I think he must stay at his actual job. Why?, financial stability. Look, if he is doing okey and the payment is right, what else does he wants?.
He says that he only works on Office things and that his potential is being wasted?, well, maybe he could get half day of his saturday to do something interesting for him, or even just enter as a consultant to the other company, speding a minimum time.
The problem will be when he moves to the other "startup company" and it does not work... then he will be without job and money. My father has always said "do not rise the left foot until the right is firmly at the next step".
What I would do is just stay with my current job and get some time to do something interesting (note: this is what can really improve your resumé).
I will answer just to some of your comments, as one answer covers all of them.
. I had to write my own sleep command in VB script just to accomplish a simple "sleep 5s". And since VB script is such a fucking mess, my script would only run on some machines unless I wanted to do version checking.
So, you can program a bash script and manage to install a tarball but you whine for a pretty basic "idiot-based-language" VB script?. Cool that you only have this *some machines* problems with a sleep thing that can be done in other ways (or at the end, you achieved in your own way); there are things that can NOT be done on any Linux flavor, like for example using some hardware. Darn...
using Linux and all I needed to do was compile one external driver for the PVR-250 card and write a bunch of Bash scripts utilizing Zenity for GUI interaction.
Whoopewho, Compile? wow 1337. On windows you only have to double click on a program and it will be there!
Everything I needed was in my base Fedora Core 3 installation. I didn't need to buy anything other than the PVR-250... I challenge you to do the same with Windows.
I do not care how much did it costed, as a lot of companies. Remember, the advantage of OSS is not in the price. If I wanted a PVR I would just bought a softare (you could do it too!.
Now, I will conclude saying again, I am not against any OSS, but it is not true that Windows
is too limiting compared to Linux. All the new applications available for Linux are "replacements" of Windows applications. That is not bad, they make some functionality available.
The difference is that with Windows you pay for the software so it just work while on Linux you have to make it work. Some people do not want to waste their time on that. The same way as I do not want to waste my time looking at the motor in my car, I just want it to take me from my office to my home.
Then I would recommend you setting up an NON ADMINISTRATION privileged account on any system she uses.
The only real difference between Windows and all Unix flavors now is that the first gives administrator privileges to its users by DEFAULT, and *promotes* the use of the computer with them, while the last (all unix flavors including Linux and BSDs) promotes the contrary.
I think Windows is less secure than say, Mandriva on the same way that Mandriva is less secure than OpenBSD, they just leave the more "dangerous" services/tools disabled by default.