Do you know who owns it? Do you know what kind of logs they keep? Do you know who else reads their logs? Seems to me like a terribly good way to fish for undesireables would be to setup an "anonymous" proxy and wait for people to start using it. I mean, its not like police go out and pretend to be hookers to catch 'johns', or pretend to be dealers to catch users, or even pretend to be young children to catch pedophiles. If you don't own it, you can't trust it, and if you do own it then its not terribly anonymous. Even the whole onion router business has come into question as of late.
Not a whole lot of anonymous anything left on the internet these days with all the data mining that goes on. The best you can do is leech wireless and pretend to be someone else.
2008 is around the corner. Their ex-CEO is about out the door (barring some executive emergency where they attempt to claim that an election in this dangerous time would be a bad thing...its been done before). Their protection is leaving the oval office. War crimes and fraud go well outside the bounds of "they had a contract". Currently under investigation for $2.7B in fraud....
This move does not make business sense, don't fool yourself. Look at the news. Look at the huge backlash. Look at everyone rattling cages. Look at everyone revisiting the Cheney stock stuff. Look at everyone revisiting their fingers in US policy. Look at everyone revisiting the no bid contracts. Look at Congress getting ruffled up. Look at the federal investigations claiming that Halliburton is responsible for $2.7 BILLION of the $10B in fraud waste and abuse. Look at all the questions coming back up about why Bush tried to let Dubai take over so many US ports. The questioning of Iraqi oil fields being opened to US interests...
So...not a smart move unless they are positioning themselves for something. They have brought a rather large ammount of hate and discontent down on themselves as part of this little move. They wouldn't do that without a damned good reason, and being closer to their clients in a world of global communication and travel is not that good of a reason.
Now, I'm really not that much on the paranoid terrorist fear shit that goes around, but I am going to be god damned pissed if my federal tax dollars are being siphoned off by Halliburton into foreign tax coffers in a part of the world that is less than friendly towards westerners.
Read the last few days worth of XP phone home and other such stories. My wifes legitimate install got hit with that WGA shit and determined she was pirated, when I called their only solution was buy a new copy. I REALLY REALLY don't want to put XP Media Edition back on my laptop and dual boot for a single game. But it mostly involves going on business trips living out of a hotel for 2 weeks with nothing better to do than play video games unmolested by children and day to day household chores:).
From what I have seen and experienced the VM video card is the issue. The virtual machine uses the virtual hardware drivers so the actual hardware is largely irrelevant so long as the host OS can handle it. In a desparate attempt to get FFXI installed on my linux machine I resorted to attempting to use VMware only to find out that VMware does not support any kind of 3d accel stuff (again, virtual hardware vs real hardware).
You are right. I'm actually a little ashamed since I have read Yeagers biography and have seen both the X-1 and X-15 at the smithsonian. However, thankfully I'm not completely off my rocker. X-2 was part of the Mach 2-3 stuff not Mach 1. All in all I think it is amazing that these jets could reach the speeds that they did with the pilots having such massive steel balls. Yaeger even did it with a broken rib! Titanium balls on that guy. Having grown up around this stuff its strange to see how the words "test pilot" cause a fighter pilots eyes to light up and his wife's to glaze in horror.
The hard to use bit is a hard one to fight really. Desktops and laptops are two entirely different worlds for one, but if you have fairly normal behaving hardware (no bizarro nonstandard architecture crap like winmodems or strange motherboards) linux is terribly good these days about getting everything up and running. Some distros are better than others and it seems fairly random at times. Ubuntu on my laptop got one set of hardware right out of the gate working, but missed some critical ones, Gentoo got different ones right out of the gate and also missed ones that Ubuntu nailed.
In the end it is irritating as hell to hear people still talk about how hardware XYZ is hard to make work. I remember when making printing work was pulling teeth, I remember getting "the printer is on fire" error messages, but these days its terribly simple. Granted you sometimes run into strange crap, but all in all its not bad. I don't know that I want double click to install, I am quite fond of using apt or portage or their GUI frontends to basically browse an entire library of software, select all the packages I want, and have them install with all dependancies. It may take more work, but I think it results in an infinetly more stable system and no questions about what.dll got overwritten by what program and now multiple programs using it stop working because of wrong versions. I ran into some stupid windows tricks when the wireless encryption stuff for the onboard wireless and smart card reader stuff used the same.dll but due to versioning you could only use one or the other but not both, which is a problem because you need your smart card to authenticate to use the wireless.
WRONG! Every American citizen is guilty of something, whether they know it or not. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and such. There are an unbelievable number of unenforced laws, and this is ultimately the consequance (if not outright goal) of having such an overlegistlated populace. People just never see these laws unless someone is out to get them for something. Its terribly prevalent in the military too. Males are not allowed to wear earrings on base, on or off duty. It is usually marginally enforced, sometimes people catch it, sometimes people don't, and the enforcement is typically an NCO telling that person to just take them out. Now, the technicality of it is that you CAN be charged with disobeying a direct order because the regulation regarding that is an order even for a single offense.
I typically hear them refered to as black projects, and skunkworks type stuff, and the only place I have seen X anything is in regards to eXpierimental aircraft. The X-2 for example was the 1st plane to break the sound barrier, X-15 is in that realm of sound barrier breaking research as well, the X-35 is just the Joint Strike Fighter thats all the rage in the news.
Aside from that, I have often wondered if the 'conspiracy' is government supplied. Think about this, you are doing top secret research during the cold war era, spies everywhere. Something bad happens, there is a mishap, and now there are a bunch of people that saw it, and even more people (important ones, not just your average paranoid schmuck) that are terribly terribly interested in what you were doing. So you tell a weak story and then sow the seeds of alien/UFO conspiracy. Almost any form of HUMINT is going to be completely and utterly worthless as every man, woman, and child is talking about the alien spacecraft and not a top secret research project mishap.
You are absoultely correct! With so many programs not working on Vista it will be impossible for employees to waste time with them! Coincidentally Ubuntu doesn't have specially tailored hooks to make OO.o run better than the competition.
So, I notice you didn't weigh in on when the other side does the same thing? I don't disagree that there have been numerous problems with this type of thing, but you seem to leave out the pro-war side's shenanagins. I think you are quick to jump on the right wing bandwagon of calling some of these outlets terrorist organizations, it has FAR more to do with money and ratings than it does any kind of support on either side. When your readers/viewers are primarily left wingers, you play anti-war up bigtime for them, when your readers/viewers are primarily right wingers you play pro-war up big time for them. Contrary to popular *winger belief, it really is possible for both sides to be wrong, and for the media to take full advantage of it to get their dollars.
Now the next logical step is to write a cute little program that generates that information and sends it to the server that WGA talks to. I would be fairly interested to see the legal ramificaions of that play out.
MS: "Your honor, they 'hacked' our system and sent false identification and statistics to our server"
Defendant: "Your honor, they just admitted that they are collecting indentifying information about everyone's computer against their wishes."
Carbonite would make it a tad difficult to see said $100,000 cloak
Ol Ben was never in the carbonite
Since I am a tad lazy, and not quite nerdy enough, just consider yourself mocked for a Solo vs Jedi comparison
Other than that, I think the frozen in carbonite thing would be pretty cool, but not so much for the halloween thing (although it would be), but can you imagine the joys of sending misbehaving children to go open the closet you store it in?
This is just the precursor to buying the corpse and building a display out of it. The cloak...pft...having a Jedi under glass...now that is impressive.
Not to make you go kill yourself or anything, but even if they do drop it...what is to stop them from still owning it? Just a nice name change, a 'purchase' and so on. Go look at the stuff in the grocery store even, most things are owned by a handful of companies. Look for the fine print and you find that many of those name brands are all just one big conglomerate. So they wash their hands, and get to profit from broken e-voting machines sold under a less notorious name.
Again...don't want to encourage suicidal tendencies...but go to DC. Go to the National Archives and read the quotes and documents there (not just the big ones in the center of the room). Go read the inscriptions on every building in DC. Go look at the inscriptions on the monuments. Then realize just how far we have fallen. The men that formed our government were felons and revolutionaries, and they knew what they were doing would land them in terribly bad places if they were to fail. These were men who were willing to risk everything on some very simple and core ideals that have largely been ignored. So much legal wrangling over the constitution disgusts me, it ultimately was very simple, and still is if you look at the spirit of the law instead of the letter, but these days we have a government full of corrupted freaks trying to find loopholes in the document that was to secure our future. Precious few politicians understand it, or care. Politics was never meant to be a career, it was meant to be a service to your country. If you really are patriotic those inscriptions will bring at least a tear to your eye. Forget the wingers of both sides...Liberal and Conservative alike are so far gone from what was supposed to be, its sad.
I would argue that they are incredibly self destructive. Now, I don't think they would be THAT stupid to shakedown their customers quite like that, I just wouldn't be terribly surprised given their pitchfork n torch attitude towards piracy. Read up on the Ernie Ball linux switch, or their raids in japan, they are ruthless bastards when it comes to the licensing stuff...to me it is only a matter of time before they start turning on their customers more. The license says you only get 2 activations before you gotta buy new right? Not too far from that.
I hate when they use stupid fonts for that crap, but that is hardly limited to CD printings. You think you have seen bad with that...go activate a Sidewinder Firewall by manually entering the key. The key is 3 freaking lines long! Try to find the typo in that! I have suffered from problem 2, now I knew the key was on the disc, but didn't have the forsight to write it down before inserting the disk. Its still better than trying to find a 3x4 card, a 2 page manual, or a.5x1 sticker to read the stupid key off of. I have actually been very happy with most laptop mfgs these days for putting the windows key on the bottom of the laptop on that nice sticker. Not that I ever use it, but its nice to know if I really had to fire up VMware or something I have the key with me.
1. I have called them for problems with keys. Sometimes they hand a new key over the phone like its nothing, sometimes its flaming hoops of death and hours on hold. Hit or miss with that, but as to be expected from any large corporation that has gone through so many hoops to assume their customers are all criminals.
2. I'm not saying its some supervillian plan, I am saying this is the kind of horse shit that comes out of large money hungry beurocratic organizations. It's not really MS specific.
3. I think their product is a tolerable product for some things (right tool for the job stuff). I despise their business practices because the only reason their product IS a tolerable product for some things is because they successfully violated so many laws to make it the defacto standard. They are not innovative, the people who typically think they are have only ever been exposed to MS products and don't realize that the vast majority of the shit they do are poor 'embrace and extend' bastardizations of good ideas that came from other places.
Ultimately, they are a very large beurocratic money hungry organization with a piss poor track record of behaving ethically. They aren't the only organization like this, but they certainly are one of the biggest. In the meantime I am going to laugh at their horrible mistakes, their losing lawsuits, and the other nonsense monkey boy puts out. Their products are getting worse and they are less of a software giant and more of a comedy club these days anyways. "developers developers developers developers" "fuckign kill google!". I hope chair tossing becomes an olympic sport soon too.
Seems to me like a great opporunity for a shakedown. "We are sorry, but we cannot help you until we finish an investigation into your software licensing. If you need access you will have to purchase a new copy". They get to play like they are helping by paying a few MS shills to talk about how their cracked license recovery process was quick and painless and they don't understand anyones complaints. Then they get to scare people into walking away and buying new copies!
I don't have problems with any number of copy protection schemes. Granted they can eventually be defeated almost without fail, but it does rais the bar for the effort. PS disc error thing I think was a fairly clever method for example. I don't even really mind CD keys too much, although its irritating as hell to lose whatever they happened to write the code on (Is it too much to ask to print it on the damned disc?). But I absolutely refuse to touch any piece of software that requires some online activation type crap.
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Do you know who owns it? Do you know what kind of logs they keep? Do you know who else reads their logs? Seems to me like a terribly good way to fish for undesireables would be to setup an "anonymous" proxy and wait for people to start using it. I mean, its not like police go out and pretend to be hookers to catch 'johns', or pretend to be dealers to catch users, or even pretend to be young children to catch pedophiles. If you don't own it, you can't trust it, and if you do own it then its not terribly anonymous. Even the whole onion router business has come into question as of late.
Not a whole lot of anonymous anything left on the internet these days with all the data mining that goes on. The best you can do is leech wireless and pretend to be someone else.
2008 is around the corner. Their ex-CEO is about out the door (barring some executive emergency where they attempt to claim that an election in this dangerous time would be a bad thing...its been done before). Their protection is leaving the oval office. War crimes and fraud go well outside the bounds of "they had a contract". Currently under investigation for $2.7B in fraud....
This move does not make business sense, don't fool yourself. Look at the news. Look at the huge backlash. Look at everyone rattling cages. Look at everyone revisiting the Cheney stock stuff. Look at everyone revisiting their fingers in US policy. Look at everyone revisiting the no bid contracts. Look at Congress getting ruffled up. Look at the federal investigations claiming that Halliburton is responsible for $2.7 BILLION of the $10B in fraud waste and abuse. Look at all the questions coming back up about why Bush tried to let Dubai take over so many US ports. The questioning of Iraqi oil fields being opened to US interests...
So...not a smart move unless they are positioning themselves for something. They have brought a rather large ammount of hate and discontent down on themselves as part of this little move. They wouldn't do that without a damned good reason, and being closer to their clients in a world of global communication and travel is not that good of a reason.
Now, I'm really not that much on the paranoid terrorist fear shit that goes around, but I am going to be god damned pissed if my federal tax dollars are being siphoned off by Halliburton into foreign tax coffers in a part of the world that is less than friendly towards westerners.
Who do you think paid for the research?
Keep beating it everyone! Candy will eventually come out!
It would seem you missed the recent story about the new electronic info gathering the feds are doing. Prepare to be contacted soon.
Read the last few days worth of XP phone home and other such stories. My wifes legitimate install got hit with that WGA shit and determined she was pirated, when I called their only solution was buy a new copy. I REALLY REALLY don't want to put XP Media Edition back on my laptop and dual boot for a single game. But it mostly involves going on business trips living out of a hotel for 2 weeks with nothing better to do than play video games unmolested by children and day to day household chores :).
From what I have seen and experienced the VM video card is the issue. The virtual machine uses the virtual hardware drivers so the actual hardware is largely irrelevant so long as the host OS can handle it. In a desparate attempt to get FFXI installed on my linux machine I resorted to attempting to use VMware only to find out that VMware does not support any kind of 3d accel stuff (again, virtual hardware vs real hardware).
You too can have a PhD in Metaphysics all for the low low price of $29.95.
I'm also an expert in *snap* nameology!
You are right. I'm actually a little ashamed since I have read Yeagers biography and have seen both the X-1 and X-15 at the smithsonian. However, thankfully I'm not completely off my rocker. X-2 was part of the Mach 2-3 stuff not Mach 1. All in all I think it is amazing that these jets could reach the speeds that they did with the pilots having such massive steel balls. Yaeger even did it with a broken rib! Titanium balls on that guy. Having grown up around this stuff its strange to see how the words "test pilot" cause a fighter pilots eyes to light up and his wife's to glaze in horror.
The hard to use bit is a hard one to fight really. Desktops and laptops are two entirely different worlds for one, but if you have fairly normal behaving hardware (no bizarro nonstandard architecture crap like winmodems or strange motherboards) linux is terribly good these days about getting everything up and running. Some distros are better than others and it seems fairly random at times. Ubuntu on my laptop got one set of hardware right out of the gate working, but missed some critical ones, Gentoo got different ones right out of the gate and also missed ones that Ubuntu nailed.
.dll got overwritten by what program and now multiple programs using it stop working because of wrong versions. I ran into some stupid windows tricks when the wireless encryption stuff for the onboard wireless and smart card reader stuff used the same .dll but due to versioning you could only use one or the other but not both, which is a problem because you need your smart card to authenticate to use the wireless.
In the end it is irritating as hell to hear people still talk about how hardware XYZ is hard to make work. I remember when making printing work was pulling teeth, I remember getting "the printer is on fire" error messages, but these days its terribly simple. Granted you sometimes run into strange crap, but all in all its not bad. I don't know that I want double click to install, I am quite fond of using apt or portage or their GUI frontends to basically browse an entire library of software, select all the packages I want, and have them install with all dependancies. It may take more work, but I think it results in an infinetly more stable system and no questions about what
WRONG! Every American citizen is guilty of something, whether they know it or not. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" and such. There are an unbelievable number of unenforced laws, and this is ultimately the consequance (if not outright goal) of having such an overlegistlated populace. People just never see these laws unless someone is out to get them for something. Its terribly prevalent in the military too. Males are not allowed to wear earrings on base, on or off duty. It is usually marginally enforced, sometimes people catch it, sometimes people don't, and the enforcement is typically an NCO telling that person to just take them out. Now, the technicality of it is that you CAN be charged with disobeying a direct order because the regulation regarding that is an order even for a single offense.
I typically hear them refered to as black projects, and skunkworks type stuff, and the only place I have seen X anything is in regards to eXpierimental aircraft. The X-2 for example was the 1st plane to break the sound barrier, X-15 is in that realm of sound barrier breaking research as well, the X-35 is just the Joint Strike Fighter thats all the rage in the news.
Aside from that, I have often wondered if the 'conspiracy' is government supplied. Think about this, you are doing top secret research during the cold war era, spies everywhere. Something bad happens, there is a mishap, and now there are a bunch of people that saw it, and even more people (important ones, not just your average paranoid schmuck) that are terribly terribly interested in what you were doing. So you tell a weak story and then sow the seeds of alien/UFO conspiracy. Almost any form of HUMINT is going to be completely and utterly worthless as every man, woman, and child is talking about the alien spacecraft and not a top secret research project mishap.
You are absoultely correct! With so many programs not working on Vista it will be impossible for employees to waste time with them! Coincidentally Ubuntu doesn't have specially tailored hooks to make OO.o run better than the competition.
So, I notice you didn't weigh in on when the other side does the same thing? I don't disagree that there have been numerous problems with this type of thing, but you seem to leave out the pro-war side's shenanagins. I think you are quick to jump on the right wing bandwagon of calling some of these outlets terrorist organizations, it has FAR more to do with money and ratings than it does any kind of support on either side. When your readers/viewers are primarily left wingers, you play anti-war up bigtime for them, when your readers/viewers are primarily right wingers you play pro-war up big time for them. Contrary to popular *winger belief, it really is possible for both sides to be wrong, and for the media to take full advantage of it to get their dollars.
Temporal hammer? You would have to smash it before you get it.
Maybe he should get the lightsaber too and just toss them in a pile to be accurate.
Now the next logical step is to write a cute little program that generates that information and sends it to the server that WGA talks to. I would be fairly interested to see the legal ramificaions of that play out.
MS: "Your honor, they 'hacked' our system and sent false identification and statistics to our server" Defendant: "Your honor, they just admitted that they are collecting indentifying information about everyone's computer against their wishes."
Carbonite would make it a tad difficult to see said $100,000 cloak
Ol Ben was never in the carbonite
Since I am a tad lazy, and not quite nerdy enough, just consider yourself mocked for a Solo vs Jedi comparison
Other than that, I think the frozen in carbonite thing would be pretty cool, but not so much for the halloween thing (although it would be), but can you imagine the joys of sending misbehaving children to go open the closet you store it in?
This is just the precursor to buying the corpse and building a display out of it. The cloak...pft...having a Jedi under glass...now that is impressive.
Not to make you go kill yourself or anything, but even if they do drop it...what is to stop them from still owning it? Just a nice name change, a 'purchase' and so on. Go look at the stuff in the grocery store even, most things are owned by a handful of companies. Look for the fine print and you find that many of those name brands are all just one big conglomerate. So they wash their hands, and get to profit from broken e-voting machines sold under a less notorious name.
Again...don't want to encourage suicidal tendencies...but go to DC. Go to the National Archives and read the quotes and documents there (not just the big ones in the center of the room). Go read the inscriptions on every building in DC. Go look at the inscriptions on the monuments. Then realize just how far we have fallen. The men that formed our government were felons and revolutionaries, and they knew what they were doing would land them in terribly bad places if they were to fail. These were men who were willing to risk everything on some very simple and core ideals that have largely been ignored. So much legal wrangling over the constitution disgusts me, it ultimately was very simple, and still is if you look at the spirit of the law instead of the letter, but these days we have a government full of corrupted freaks trying to find loopholes in the document that was to secure our future. Precious few politicians understand it, or care. Politics was never meant to be a career, it was meant to be a service to your country. If you really are patriotic those inscriptions will bring at least a tear to your eye. Forget the wingers of both sides...Liberal and Conservative alike are so far gone from what was supposed to be, its sad.
I would argue that they are incredibly self destructive. Now, I don't think they would be THAT stupid to shakedown their customers quite like that, I just wouldn't be terribly surprised given their pitchfork n torch attitude towards piracy. Read up on the Ernie Ball linux switch, or their raids in japan, they are ruthless bastards when it comes to the licensing stuff...to me it is only a matter of time before they start turning on their customers more. The license says you only get 2 activations before you gotta buy new right? Not too far from that.
I hate when they use stupid fonts for that crap, but that is hardly limited to CD printings. You think you have seen bad with that...go activate a Sidewinder Firewall by manually entering the key. The key is 3 freaking lines long! Try to find the typo in that! I have suffered from problem 2, now I knew the key was on the disc, but didn't have the forsight to write it down before inserting the disk. Its still better than trying to find a 3x4 card, a 2 page manual, or a .5x1 sticker to read the stupid key off of. I have actually been very happy with most laptop mfgs these days for putting the windows key on the bottom of the laptop on that nice sticker. Not that I ever use it, but its nice to know if I really had to fire up VMware or something I have the key with me.
1. I have called them for problems with keys. Sometimes they hand a new key over the phone like its nothing, sometimes its flaming hoops of death and hours on hold. Hit or miss with that, but as to be expected from any large corporation that has gone through so many hoops to assume their customers are all criminals.
2. I'm not saying its some supervillian plan, I am saying this is the kind of horse shit that comes out of large money hungry beurocratic organizations. It's not really MS specific.
3. I think their product is a tolerable product for some things (right tool for the job stuff). I despise their business practices because the only reason their product IS a tolerable product for some things is because they successfully violated so many laws to make it the defacto standard. They are not innovative, the people who typically think they are have only ever been exposed to MS products and don't realize that the vast majority of the shit they do are poor 'embrace and extend' bastardizations of good ideas that came from other places.
Ultimately, they are a very large beurocratic money hungry organization with a piss poor track record of behaving ethically. They aren't the only organization like this, but they certainly are one of the biggest. In the meantime I am going to laugh at their horrible mistakes, their losing lawsuits, and the other nonsense monkey boy puts out. Their products are getting worse and they are less of a software giant and more of a comedy club these days anyways. "developers developers developers developers" "fuckign kill google!". I hope chair tossing becomes an olympic sport soon too.
Seems to me like a great opporunity for a shakedown. "We are sorry, but we cannot help you until we finish an investigation into your software licensing. If you need access you will have to purchase a new copy". They get to play like they are helping by paying a few MS shills to talk about how their cracked license recovery process was quick and painless and they don't understand anyones complaints. Then they get to scare people into walking away and buying new copies!
I don't have problems with any number of copy protection schemes. Granted they can eventually be defeated almost without fail, but it does rais the bar for the effort. PS disc error thing I think was a fairly clever method for example. I don't even really mind CD keys too much, although its irritating as hell to lose whatever they happened to write the code on (Is it too much to ask to print it on the damned disc?). But I absolutely refuse to touch any piece of software that requires some online activation type crap.