Heh, I don't know that I am impressed by that. It seems like a pretty bad idea and not much of a feature. But hey ActiveX and other such nonsense being able to do whatever it wants to the OS through the web browser is a feature too...
Well unfortunately you are living on the wrong planet. Once upon a time claiming one thing and doing another was fraud...these days its marketing. Again I doubt they are really lying, there is a stupidity in that action that I just don't think they would do. However, making claims that are sketchy and skirt around the issue a bit...oh absolutely, and I bet someone got a nice bonus for coming up with a very unthreatening way to say it.
Shrug could be. Certainly doesn't bother me any, its their search engine to use as they see fit really. I hardly think its unfair for them to do that. They could be lying, or maybe they could just not be giving everyone the full story. I am more inclined to believe they just aren't giving everyone the full story. Hell given that its their secret wizbang search engine...well...they kinda know all the ins and outs of it, it stands to reason the could also design their pages to work their way to the top reliably.
ISA server really has no benefit beyond it is cheaper than the dedicated devices. A BlueCoat is WAY more impressive caching/proxy/filtering proxy and has far more capabilities (BlueCoat is not software you install on a Win/Lin/Etc server, it is a device). I'm not sure what exactly you mean by HTTPS stream inspection since the whole point is that it is encrypted and can't be looked into. ANY application level proxy should be inspecting all HTTPS/HTTP/SMTP/FTP/etc protocol stuff for well formed commands (IE most MTAs send commands in a particular order, so if they don't happen in that order you can reasonably assume that there is a high probability it is a script kiddie/spam zombie) but unless you are the victim of a MitM type attack they shouldn't be able to look into HTTPS data. Really the features you mention should be a bare minimum for something on the boundary.
Given that they are pretty tight lipped about their criteria who knows. I mean if one of their criteria is response time and the servers are near each other that could do it. There are still a multitude of ways it could come up first without them changing the rules to favor themselves over others.
So...if I run a search engine company, and I make spreadsheet software and you make spreadsheet software and pay me to advertise I shouldn't be allowed to advertise above you for my own product? I should give you an unfair advantage just because? Lets face it, YOU didn't make a giant search engine that basically became the top dog in internet searches, so me giving you preferental treatment over my own products is just stupid. If you are really that upset about me advertising my product on my search engine above where I am advertising your product on my search engine why don't you just go call up Yahoo and advertise with them instead? Oh...you mean being #2 on the results of the most used search engine is still a valuable thing you are willing to pay for?
I mean that is almost as goofy as being upset that AOL and others get charged to advertise their crap on the default Windows desktop, but MS doesn't get charged for the MSN link on there too. I mean while we are at it, we should force Ford to stop putting Ford emblems on their products! We must allow Chevy to pay a fair price to replace every Mustang's Ford emblem with a Chevy emblem too! (I love the slashdot computers = car analogies).
Well the hosting MS.com thing is what I was refering to, however, I deliberately avoided saying that exactly because I know that to not be the case. It is exactly as you described, the akamai thing, I just couldn't remember any of the names involved. I made no "MS uses linux!!!!@#$!@#$ OMGZORZ!!!" claim. I just mentioned the MS/linux related stories and how MS did quite a song and dance avoiding saying anything clearly about either situation.
Beyond that I don't know how WPA has anything to do with this at all. That is a bit like saying our network was Ethernet and we deployed it while most of the world was still using coax. Completely unrelated.
Again, I have a VERY hard time believing they are using ISA server for boundary protection for their enterprise network. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they used it in some fashion internally for some mystery bloat reason, but it would be dumb. Further it would largely be equally stupid to field some linux box with squid running for a very large enterprise. I imagine they would be smart enough to invest in something like BlueCoat stuff or Sidewinder stuff or any number of enterprise level products rather than relying on some small business level product like ISA server.
Do you honestly believe they would admit to using anything other than MS? Do you remember the noise that was made about their website being protected by a company using linux servers to protect it from denial of service stuff? Do you remember the noise that was made when that linux based company signed up with their silly streaming media shit and was able to stream windows media more efficiently from linux boxes than what equivilent Windows boxes could do? (The worst part about this was that it could only stream windows media content to windows computers, and linux clients could't do anything with the streaming media from the linux server).
Give MS some credit...their Marketing/PR departments aren't stupid enough to talk about everyone else products used to secure their network, but I have a hard time believing that their technical folks are stupid enough to restrict themselves to MS products. I mean I have heard people explain to me how MS Proxy is the best proxy ever, or how that other stupid MS firewall/proxy/server thing is the best for boundary protection...but I assume those people will never work in security at a decent sized company for long if at all. MS products have their uses as much as I dislike many of them...but if I ever had anyone working for me try to use an MS product for something like boundary protection I would slap them, repeatedly, in front of the whole IT department.
Well I think you took it a bit more seriously than intended since I think all of the lets relate it to cars things are patently insane to begin with. But just for shits n grins, most states have speed limits well in excess of 55, and it isn't exactly unheard of for cars to be sold with governors that do exactly that, keep it from going faster than what it would need to do in any sane situation.
My point with the hidden shotgun really was only to illustrate how insane the car analogies tend to be, and that there is a slashdot assumtion that people have ANY idea what most of those "warnings" mean. I mean I could warn plenty of people using standard chemistry formulas why mixing various things is bad news, but unless they understand the terms and language its roughly meaningless. I don't know about you, but I have NEVER seen a EULA/Agreement/Whatever that resembled clear english beyond using the same alphabet and words that I presume lawyers actually do use rather than software people make up:).
As far as the law goes, you are right ignorance is no excuse, however, in the past the whole copy thing wasn't exactly a big deal. It was trivial to tape things off the radio, to make mix tapes, there were even DJs that would TELL you when to start recording to get a nice "clean" copy off the radio. So now suddenly the world goes digital and the lawsuits are flying, fair use is out the door, and a whole realm of insanity opens up where its normal to sue grandmothers and 4yr olds for being evil music pirates, yet even by his own admission Warner CEO's kid was doing the same and just got a stern talking to.
Sharman networks or whatever are a bunch of scumware peddling assmites. Their attack on the Morpheus network, their fraud involving Tsunami relief, quite frankly I would cheer someone on who beat their decision makers to bloody piles of goo with baseball bats regardless of how illegal that act is. So while I think the whole need for the lawsuit is insane in the first place because the RIAA n company shouldn't be allowed to do what they are doing to trigger this lawsuit in the first place, I really don't give a rats ass if it means the Kazaa folks get a good swift kick in the balls at the end of the day. Hell, if it works then it opens yet another door (beyond Hey the CEOs kid did it and didn't get sued!) for all of this RIAA sponsored insanity to be deflected from the general populace at large.
Well I am going to go ahead and use your slashdot favorite of the car. Kazaa knows full well that sharing those files is illegal. Now it certainly isn't their responsibility to stop you from downloading them, however, they certainly have some responsibility in the fact that their stuff is deceptive as hell and defaults to sharing all files, and IIRC searches your computer for things to share beyond what you download. So...now to my point of your silly car analogy. Its like if Ford and Toyota connected a shotgun to the horn on your car. Sure its not their fault that you broke the law shooting someone, you should have known enough to disconnect the hidden gun from the horn. I mean they only advertised it as new Superhorn used to increase your safety, you should have been up on the nuances of the technology and all applicable laws to know what it did and that you would get in trouble. (Again, let us please not forget that alot of these stupid copyright laws are relatively new, and incredibly vague, so the "obvious illegal" part of it isn't exactly obvious...unless of coarse you are an RIAA lawyer)
OOOOOh...they incubate future minds, they hire lots of PhDs...lots of fancy buzztastic crap. First, lets look at the history...MS has a tendancy to buzzword up anything they can get their hands on and redefine simple words like "innovate". Media Player for all its "innovation" is NOT...it has been playing catchup copying features from anything that had an ounce of success. Active Directory...well given that Novell was doing basically the same thing years ago...MS took LDAP + Novell + Cruft = Innovation! The list goes on and on and on of their products just constantly playing catchup on the features that matter and the "innovative" stuff are features that generally don't make alot of sense and aren't of much use (except for the scumware writers to help get footholds). I mean the most innovative thing they did was create amazing ways to sidestep and ignore the DoJ, and I hardly think Microsoft Research had anything to do with that.
Now on this PhD nonsense they are flagwaving about. Problem 1. When the number of PHB is greater than the PHD by such a large margin the PHD doesn't really mean much. If anything MS should be chastised by depriving the US of so many PHD types by gathering them into one place to be negated by a large group of PHBs. Problem 2. Remind me again why a PHD is inherently more valuable... Not to discount the degree holders, their hard work, or even abilities/talents, but a great number of the critical moments in computer history were not achieved by people holding PhDs.
That 20% isn't exactly the brightest or richest either. You don't want to be mortgage free for a number of reasons. If I have a $500,000 house and its paid of what do I have...a $500,000 house that I live in with $500,000 in equity tied up, removed from the economy, doing absolutely nothing. If I take out $400,000 from said house in home equity loan stuff then I can go purchase a few rental properties and make that $400,000 earn me money instead of just sitting around. If I invest it in anything and get really even a small return my wealth is growing instead of not doing anything. Really you just have to get a higher return than inflation+loan interest rate.
The world is a very large place, an OLPC laptop isn't.:)
I still remember a story about one of those nice folks in Africa trying to spread the wealth of computing to the poor asking MS if they would support. They would...if he agreed to allow them to slap their name all over the thing and parade it around as a huge PR thing, and for doing this they would "donate" a bunch of MS Office stuff. Unfortunately by the time all was said and done it would cost him an order of magnitude more in funding to make use of their "donation" due to the increased hardware costs associated with running copies of Windows that he would have been forced to purchase.
Even if they do get it stripped down enough to work, ignoring all of the associated applications and updates that you need on a Windows system, I think the killing point will be the fact that the OS will cost something like 2-3x the laptop itself.
Thank you! Wish I had a mod point right now. That is one of the most irritating and clueless arguments I have ever heard, and I hear it frequently. "Look your linux install takes up WAY more space than my XP install" or "Your linux comes on a huge DVD or CD set". Well thats great son, but I also have every application I need installed, quite a few bells and whistles to tinker with when I'm bored, and a compiler (shock, gasp, you can actually compile real programs on a PC without magic software company magic machines) among other things. Oh yes the pain, oh dear lord a single huge DVD that carries my OS and all relevant apps that I may need in one place instead of a giant software folder of some couple dozen disks and serial numbers and registration cards and activation codes.
My other favorite is the "see distro XYZ costs this much, you can buy an OEM windows for $X or an upgrade disk for $Y less dollars". After reading what is either a troll or MS fanboy response I'm surprised that one didn't get tossed out there too.
My point is he shouldn't view it as a special "card" that helped him out because a clever insurance company convinced a judge to help him. Its a hefty sledgehammer to be dropped on people trying to jerk service members around, and his insurance company was good enough to break out the hammer and say "Don't make me use this". Every service member should know about it, unfortunately many are never told about it and believe things like this to be fortunate circumstance and never realize they have this tool to protect themselves.
FYI your insurance company didn't play a "card" and the judge had no choice in the matter (except to agree to delay without forcing you to actually go through the simple steps of forcing the judge to agree to delay). Servicemembers Civil Relief Act of 2003 aka The Act formally known as Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act of 1940. Check it out. Some very valuable information in there in regards to many things even beyond civil court proceedings.
See...everyone now n then those worthless congress critters do something good for us...granted it was mostly done in 1940 and only updated in 2003. And now they are back to stripping our benefits, taking our pay, cutting back the force while increasing the force commitments abroad... I find it entertaining that they pander to so many lobbyists and special interests to get voted in while totally forgetting the fact that the job only exists so long as the military is there to protect it.
He makes one of my favorite moronic claim about crime. Saying a prison is full of low IQ scores says NOTHING about the distribution of criminals on the pretty little IQ charts for a number of reasons.
First and foremost the only thing it could reasonably be used to "show" is that people with low IQs are more likely to be found guilty either by getting caught, by winding up a victim of circumstance (wrong place/wrong time), or being outright framed. If I can only catch blind and deaf mice, it doesn't mean all mice are blind and deaf, or even that most mice are blind and deaf, it means that I am better at catching blind mice than I am at catching mice with vision and hearing intact. To me it seems a matter of common sense that the smarter the criminal the less likely they are to be caught committing crimes.
The second and probably equally important is that you can't force someone to perform at their maximum or even take it seriously while taking such tests. I mean unless you put a gun to their head and say "score this high or else" you aren't likely to get them to take it seriously, and even then are likely to make them nervous enough to screw some things up even if they ARE trying their hardest. I got wrangled into taking a IQ/Personality test as part of a job interview/screening process once...I made it through the IQ test part fine because I tend to actually enjoy the little puzzle type questions that are typically part of IQ tests, and the spacial/pattern ones where you actually get handed a box of things to 'play' with during the test are the best. However, a few questions into the personality test I decided the whole thing was dumb and probably not a place I wanted to work for so I proceeded to be as deranged as possible for that section...they never contacted me.:) I recently was going to apply for a sysadmin position and they wanted me to fill out an even more nutty personality test (not professionally administered, but a nice "do you feel more like a cloud or a bunny" thing) and I just walked away shaking my head.
Finally, you would have to compare everyones scores, not just look at criminal scores. If the average criminal scores an 85, but the average citizen scores a 75, or 85, or 95, or 150 it all tells a completely different story. But then you also have to throw in their ages, their schooling, their background, and basically everything that could possibly affect an IQ score. Its the same as one of my favorite points about racism. When a relatively small percentage of the population is a given race it only takes a few to make everyone of that race look bad. If there are 10 black guys in your neighborhood and 7 of them are thugs thats a whopping 70% of black guys are thugs! Proof that being black makes you more likely to be a thug! But in that same neighborhood if there are 90 white guys, and 10 of them are thugs its no big deal its only like 11%. You can bet that someone from that neighborhood would be suspect of almost everyone in a black neighborhood of 100 people with 17 total thugs even though at that point its the same as their neighborhood crime rate and only 17% of the black people there are thugs.
Where have you been? New Orleans happened because Bush doesn't like black people, duh.
Didn't you hear that lady talk about how she saw them bomb the levies? Who can doubt that?! I mean forget the reports that the city decided to ignore the engineers and build them with foundations some 10ft deeper and used the savings on the project to further invest in the gambling and tourism sectors. Why would the city do something like that? The truth is obvious. Bush asked Pat Robertson to pray to redirect the hurricane away from a white Texas to hit a black New Orleans...
The beauty of being a large customer really. You don't send the part back first, they send you the new part and you return the old part in the new parts packaging:). Even if they do complain you simply site policy for destruction of the drive to prevent data recovery. From what I understand most places don't generally do anything with the returned hardware except scrap it anyways. I have heard stories of employees at PC repair shops (Best Buy, CompUSA, etc) that will remove "broken" hard drives and have them replaced under warranty at no cost to the customer, keep the "broken" drive and ship back other random old drives or (I don't know that I really believe this one) bricks just to make the box feel right.
Right but it basically makes it impossible to shut out the other distros anyways. Realistically not many businesses use the other distros unless they hire the geekpower to manage them anyways. That was my only point, that they can't only have the major distros "in on it". If they set it up so that you can run MS SQL on linux, then by the end of the month someone will have installed MS SQL on a linux powered toaster. Just the nature of linux.
Explain something to me please. Why do you believe that proprietary software will only work on the major distros just because MS only deals with them? With linux you have pretty much total control of your operating system. So what if the proprietary software looks for things in a particular place, you can move them there, or symlink them and the software chugs right along. You can manipulate the OS more than enough to run anything you want so long as it runs in linux. The distro XYZ kernel is still a linux kernel and if the software runs in linux, odds are you will be able to make it work under any distro you choose. In fact, I imagine it would be terribly trivial for the other distros to write package wrappers to do the install for you. There are more than enough tools to install RPMs in non RPM distos, and many distros use package wrappers to install binary proprietary things. The only exception I see is if the linux distros find a way to 'sign' their kernel with the trusted computing nonsense so that it will allow proprietary vendors to verify that it was a distro XYZ kernel. Which would destroy your ability to customize your kernel, and would likely not hold up well in the licensing of the kernel.
We frequently use a heavy duty degausser for real wiping, but it also destroys the drive. But sometimes we get creative.
We had 40 gateways that just as the warranty expired started failing like clockwork. 6 out of 40 in the first month or two after it expired so we fought with them and got a free warranty extension on them. One of the hard drives that failed on us had to be sent back for replacement...so our boss told us to make sure that the data was gone and do it "however you want". So after running a data wiping tool writing a pattern to the drive X times, we took it out and proceded to use a jackhammer on it. We tried to pick up as many pieces as we could...some were quite small since it was a laptop drive...and we packed it up nice and neat in its little antistatic bag and sent it back to the company in bits.
There is a three word reason I believe. "Fix My Computer". I never get asked about any of the rest, and while I totally agree they the things you pointed out are just as much of a monopoly in many cases, but the tactics that MS uses has more of a direct impact on more people. You may not like your alternatives, but noone forced you to pay for cable, or DSL, or FIOS against your agreement. The fact is you do have other options in connectivity, be it dialup, DSL, Cable, Dish systems, or even free local things like the library or some businesses with free wireless. There are plenty of easily available options and there have been some places to sell better DSL well below the main provider prices, and in the past 4 years or so of owning DSL I have always gone with the small local provider who gave me better speeds, lower costs, and static IPs over the massive ones.
But with MS you have people having to pay the MS tax on every new computer purchase. You also have tons of IT geeks constantly being told by their friends, familiy, neighbors, coworkers, and generally anyone that finds out they can click a mouse and read on screen directions "Fix My Computer".
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I don't know that I am impressed by that. It seems like a pretty bad idea and not much of a feature. But hey ActiveX and other such nonsense being able to do whatever it wants to the OS through the web browser is a feature too...
Well unfortunately you are living on the wrong planet. Once upon a time claiming one thing and doing another was fraud...these days its marketing. Again I doubt they are really lying, there is a stupidity in that action that I just don't think they would do. However, making claims that are sketchy and skirt around the issue a bit...oh absolutely, and I bet someone got a nice bonus for coming up with a very unthreatening way to say it.
Shrug could be. Certainly doesn't bother me any, its their search engine to use as they see fit really. I hardly think its unfair for them to do that. They could be lying, or maybe they could just not be giving everyone the full story. I am more inclined to believe they just aren't giving everyone the full story. Hell given that its their secret wizbang search engine...well...they kinda know all the ins and outs of it, it stands to reason the could also design their pages to work their way to the top reliably.
ISA server really has no benefit beyond it is cheaper than the dedicated devices. A BlueCoat is WAY more impressive caching/proxy/filtering proxy and has far more capabilities (BlueCoat is not software you install on a Win/Lin/Etc server, it is a device). I'm not sure what exactly you mean by HTTPS stream inspection since the whole point is that it is encrypted and can't be looked into. ANY application level proxy should be inspecting all HTTPS/HTTP/SMTP/FTP/etc protocol stuff for well formed commands (IE most MTAs send commands in a particular order, so if they don't happen in that order you can reasonably assume that there is a high probability it is a script kiddie/spam zombie) but unless you are the victim of a MitM type attack they shouldn't be able to look into HTTPS data. Really the features you mention should be a bare minimum for something on the boundary.
Given that they are pretty tight lipped about their criteria who knows. I mean if one of their criteria is response time and the servers are near each other that could do it. There are still a multitude of ways it could come up first without them changing the rules to favor themselves over others.
So...if I run a search engine company, and I make spreadsheet software and you make spreadsheet software and pay me to advertise I shouldn't be allowed to advertise above you for my own product? I should give you an unfair advantage just because? Lets face it, YOU didn't make a giant search engine that basically became the top dog in internet searches, so me giving you preferental treatment over my own products is just stupid. If you are really that upset about me advertising my product on my search engine above where I am advertising your product on my search engine why don't you just go call up Yahoo and advertise with them instead? Oh...you mean being #2 on the results of the most used search engine is still a valuable thing you are willing to pay for?
I mean that is almost as goofy as being upset that AOL and others get charged to advertise their crap on the default Windows desktop, but MS doesn't get charged for the MSN link on there too. I mean while we are at it, we should force Ford to stop putting Ford emblems on their products! We must allow Chevy to pay a fair price to replace every Mustang's Ford emblem with a Chevy emblem too! (I love the slashdot computers = car analogies).
Well the hosting MS.com thing is what I was refering to, however, I deliberately avoided saying that exactly because I know that to not be the case. It is exactly as you described, the akamai thing, I just couldn't remember any of the names involved. I made no "MS uses linux!!!!@#$!@#$ OMGZORZ!!!" claim. I just mentioned the MS/linux related stories and how MS did quite a song and dance avoiding saying anything clearly about either situation.
Beyond that I don't know how WPA has anything to do with this at all. That is a bit like saying our network was Ethernet and we deployed it while most of the world was still using coax. Completely unrelated.
Again, I have a VERY hard time believing they are using ISA server for boundary protection for their enterprise network. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they used it in some fashion internally for some mystery bloat reason, but it would be dumb. Further it would largely be equally stupid to field some linux box with squid running for a very large enterprise. I imagine they would be smart enough to invest in something like BlueCoat stuff or Sidewinder stuff or any number of enterprise level products rather than relying on some small business level product like ISA server.
Do you honestly believe they would admit to using anything other than MS? Do you remember the noise that was made about their website being protected by a company using linux servers to protect it from denial of service stuff? Do you remember the noise that was made when that linux based company signed up with their silly streaming media shit and was able to stream windows media more efficiently from linux boxes than what equivilent Windows boxes could do? (The worst part about this was that it could only stream windows media content to windows computers, and linux clients could't do anything with the streaming media from the linux server).
Give MS some credit...their Marketing/PR departments aren't stupid enough to talk about everyone else products used to secure their network, but I have a hard time believing that their technical folks are stupid enough to restrict themselves to MS products. I mean I have heard people explain to me how MS Proxy is the best proxy ever, or how that other stupid MS firewall/proxy/server thing is the best for boundary protection...but I assume those people will never work in security at a decent sized company for long if at all. MS products have their uses as much as I dislike many of them...but if I ever had anyone working for me try to use an MS product for something like boundary protection I would slap them, repeatedly, in front of the whole IT department.
Typo Notifaction Post
Typed: ", the world isn't perfect."
Corrected ", Word isn't perfect."
Well I think you took it a bit more seriously than intended since I think all of the lets relate it to cars things are patently insane to begin with. But just for shits n grins, most states have speed limits well in excess of 55, and it isn't exactly unheard of for cars to be sold with governors that do exactly that, keep it from going faster than what it would need to do in any sane situation.
:).
My point with the hidden shotgun really was only to illustrate how insane the car analogies tend to be, and that there is a slashdot assumtion that people have ANY idea what most of those "warnings" mean. I mean I could warn plenty of people using standard chemistry formulas why mixing various things is bad news, but unless they understand the terms and language its roughly meaningless. I don't know about you, but I have NEVER seen a EULA/Agreement/Whatever that resembled clear english beyond using the same alphabet and words that I presume lawyers actually do use rather than software people make up
As far as the law goes, you are right ignorance is no excuse, however, in the past the whole copy thing wasn't exactly a big deal. It was trivial to tape things off the radio, to make mix tapes, there were even DJs that would TELL you when to start recording to get a nice "clean" copy off the radio. So now suddenly the world goes digital and the lawsuits are flying, fair use is out the door, and a whole realm of insanity opens up where its normal to sue grandmothers and 4yr olds for being evil music pirates, yet even by his own admission Warner CEO's kid was doing the same and just got a stern talking to.
Sharman networks or whatever are a bunch of scumware peddling assmites. Their attack on the Morpheus network, their fraud involving Tsunami relief, quite frankly I would cheer someone on who beat their decision makers to bloody piles of goo with baseball bats regardless of how illegal that act is. So while I think the whole need for the lawsuit is insane in the first place because the RIAA n company shouldn't be allowed to do what they are doing to trigger this lawsuit in the first place, I really don't give a rats ass if it means the Kazaa folks get a good swift kick in the balls at the end of the day. Hell, if it works then it opens yet another door (beyond Hey the CEOs kid did it and didn't get sued!) for all of this RIAA sponsored insanity to be deflected from the general populace at large.
Well I am going to go ahead and use your slashdot favorite of the car. Kazaa knows full well that sharing those files is illegal. Now it certainly isn't their responsibility to stop you from downloading them, however, they certainly have some responsibility in the fact that their stuff is deceptive as hell and defaults to sharing all files, and IIRC searches your computer for things to share beyond what you download. So...now to my point of your silly car analogy. Its like if Ford and Toyota connected a shotgun to the horn on your car. Sure its not their fault that you broke the law shooting someone, you should have known enough to disconnect the hidden gun from the horn. I mean they only advertised it as new Superhorn used to increase your safety, you should have been up on the nuances of the technology and all applicable laws to know what it did and that you would get in trouble. (Again, let us please not forget that alot of these stupid copyright laws are relatively new, and incredibly vague, so the "obvious illegal" part of it isn't exactly obvious...unless of coarse you are an RIAA lawyer)
OOOOOh...they incubate future minds, they hire lots of PhDs...lots of fancy buzztastic crap. First, lets look at the history...MS has a tendancy to buzzword up anything they can get their hands on and redefine simple words like "innovate". Media Player for all its "innovation" is NOT...it has been playing catchup copying features from anything that had an ounce of success. Active Directory...well given that Novell was doing basically the same thing years ago...MS took LDAP + Novell + Cruft = Innovation! The list goes on and on and on of their products just constantly playing catchup on the features that matter and the "innovative" stuff are features that generally don't make alot of sense and aren't of much use (except for the scumware writers to help get footholds). I mean the most innovative thing they did was create amazing ways to sidestep and ignore the DoJ, and I hardly think Microsoft Research had anything to do with that.
Now on this PhD nonsense they are flagwaving about. Problem 1. When the number of PHB is greater than the PHD by such a large margin the PHD doesn't really mean much. If anything MS should be chastised by depriving the US of so many PHD types by gathering them into one place to be negated by a large group of PHBs. Problem 2. Remind me again why a PHD is inherently more valuable... Not to discount the degree holders, their hard work, or even abilities/talents, but a great number of the critical moments in computer history were not achieved by people holding PhDs.
That 20% isn't exactly the brightest or richest either. You don't want to be mortgage free for a number of reasons. If I have a $500,000 house and its paid of what do I have...a $500,000 house that I live in with $500,000 in equity tied up, removed from the economy, doing absolutely nothing. If I take out $400,000 from said house in home equity loan stuff then I can go purchase a few rental properties and make that $400,000 earn me money instead of just sitting around. If I invest it in anything and get really even a small return my wealth is growing instead of not doing anything. Really you just have to get a higher return than inflation+loan interest rate.
And have them come out chasing nurses?
The world is a very large place, an OLPC laptop isn't. :)
I still remember a story about one of those nice folks in Africa trying to spread the wealth of computing to the poor asking MS if they would support. They would...if he agreed to allow them to slap their name all over the thing and parade it around as a huge PR thing, and for doing this they would "donate" a bunch of MS Office stuff. Unfortunately by the time all was said and done it would cost him an order of magnitude more in funding to make use of their "donation" due to the increased hardware costs associated with running copies of Windows that he would have been forced to purchase.
Even if they do get it stripped down enough to work, ignoring all of the associated applications and updates that you need on a Windows system, I think the killing point will be the fact that the OS will cost something like 2-3x the laptop itself.
Thank you! Wish I had a mod point right now. That is one of the most irritating and clueless arguments I have ever heard, and I hear it frequently. "Look your linux install takes up WAY more space than my XP install" or "Your linux comes on a huge DVD or CD set". Well thats great son, but I also have every application I need installed, quite a few bells and whistles to tinker with when I'm bored, and a compiler (shock, gasp, you can actually compile real programs on a PC without magic software company magic machines) among other things. Oh yes the pain, oh dear lord a single huge DVD that carries my OS and all relevant apps that I may need in one place instead of a giant software folder of some couple dozen disks and serial numbers and registration cards and activation codes.
My other favorite is the "see distro XYZ costs this much, you can buy an OEM windows for $X or an upgrade disk for $Y less dollars". After reading what is either a troll or MS fanboy response I'm surprised that one didn't get tossed out there too.
My point is he shouldn't view it as a special "card" that helped him out because a clever insurance company convinced a judge to help him. Its a hefty sledgehammer to be dropped on people trying to jerk service members around, and his insurance company was good enough to break out the hammer and say "Don't make me use this". Every service member should know about it, unfortunately many are never told about it and believe things like this to be fortunate circumstance and never realize they have this tool to protect themselves.
FYI your insurance company didn't play a "card" and the judge had no choice in the matter (except to agree to delay without forcing you to actually go through the simple steps of forcing the judge to agree to delay). Servicemembers Civil Relief Act of 2003 aka The Act formally known as Soldiers' and Sailors' Civil Relief Act of 1940. Check it out. Some very valuable information in there in regards to many things even beyond civil court proceedings.
See...everyone now n then those worthless congress critters do something good for us...granted it was mostly done in 1940 and only updated in 2003. And now they are back to stripping our benefits, taking our pay, cutting back the force while increasing the force commitments abroad... I find it entertaining that they pander to so many lobbyists and special interests to get voted in while totally forgetting the fact that the job only exists so long as the military is there to protect it.
He makes one of my favorite moronic claim about crime. Saying a prison is full of low IQ scores says NOTHING about the distribution of criminals on the pretty little IQ charts for a number of reasons.
:) I recently was going to apply for a sysadmin position and they wanted me to fill out an even more nutty personality test (not professionally administered, but a nice "do you feel more like a cloud or a bunny" thing) and I just walked away shaking my head.
First and foremost the only thing it could reasonably be used to "show" is that people with low IQs are more likely to be found guilty either by getting caught, by winding up a victim of circumstance (wrong place/wrong time), or being outright framed. If I can only catch blind and deaf mice, it doesn't mean all mice are blind and deaf, or even that most mice are blind and deaf, it means that I am better at catching blind mice than I am at catching mice with vision and hearing intact. To me it seems a matter of common sense that the smarter the criminal the less likely they are to be caught committing crimes.
The second and probably equally important is that you can't force someone to perform at their maximum or even take it seriously while taking such tests. I mean unless you put a gun to their head and say "score this high or else" you aren't likely to get them to take it seriously, and even then are likely to make them nervous enough to screw some things up even if they ARE trying their hardest. I got wrangled into taking a IQ/Personality test as part of a job interview/screening process once...I made it through the IQ test part fine because I tend to actually enjoy the little puzzle type questions that are typically part of IQ tests, and the spacial/pattern ones where you actually get handed a box of things to 'play' with during the test are the best. However, a few questions into the personality test I decided the whole thing was dumb and probably not a place I wanted to work for so I proceeded to be as deranged as possible for that section...they never contacted me.
Finally, you would have to compare everyones scores, not just look at criminal scores. If the average criminal scores an 85, but the average citizen scores a 75, or 85, or 95, or 150 it all tells a completely different story. But then you also have to throw in their ages, their schooling, their background, and basically everything that could possibly affect an IQ score. Its the same as one of my favorite points about racism. When a relatively small percentage of the population is a given race it only takes a few to make everyone of that race look bad. If there are 10 black guys in your neighborhood and 7 of them are thugs thats a whopping 70% of black guys are thugs! Proof that being black makes you more likely to be a thug! But in that same neighborhood if there are 90 white guys, and 10 of them are thugs its no big deal its only like 11%. You can bet that someone from that neighborhood would be suspect of almost everyone in a black neighborhood of 100 people with 17 total thugs even though at that point its the same as their neighborhood crime rate and only 17% of the black people there are thugs.
Where have you been? New Orleans happened because Bush doesn't like black people, duh.
Didn't you hear that lady talk about how she saw them bomb the levies? Who can doubt that?! I mean forget the reports that the city decided to ignore the engineers and build them with foundations some 10ft deeper and used the savings on the project to further invest in the gambling and tourism sectors. Why would the city do something like that? The truth is obvious. Bush asked Pat Robertson to pray to redirect the hurricane away from a white Texas to hit a black New Orleans...
The beauty of being a large customer really. You don't send the part back first, they send you the new part and you return the old part in the new parts packaging :). Even if they do complain you simply site policy for destruction of the drive to prevent data recovery. From what I understand most places don't generally do anything with the returned hardware except scrap it anyways. I have heard stories of employees at PC repair shops (Best Buy, CompUSA, etc) that will remove "broken" hard drives and have them replaced under warranty at no cost to the customer, keep the "broken" drive and ship back other random old drives or (I don't know that I really believe this one) bricks just to make the box feel right.
Right but it basically makes it impossible to shut out the other distros anyways. Realistically not many businesses use the other distros unless they hire the geekpower to manage them anyways. That was my only point, that they can't only have the major distros "in on it". If they set it up so that you can run MS SQL on linux, then by the end of the month someone will have installed MS SQL on a linux powered toaster. Just the nature of linux.
Explain something to me please. Why do you believe that proprietary software will only work on the major distros just because MS only deals with them? With linux you have pretty much total control of your operating system. So what if the proprietary software looks for things in a particular place, you can move them there, or symlink them and the software chugs right along. You can manipulate the OS more than enough to run anything you want so long as it runs in linux. The distro XYZ kernel is still a linux kernel and if the software runs in linux, odds are you will be able to make it work under any distro you choose. In fact, I imagine it would be terribly trivial for the other distros to write package wrappers to do the install for you. There are more than enough tools to install RPMs in non RPM distos, and many distros use package wrappers to install binary proprietary things. The only exception I see is if the linux distros find a way to 'sign' their kernel with the trusted computing nonsense so that it will allow proprietary vendors to verify that it was a distro XYZ kernel. Which would destroy your ability to customize your kernel, and would likely not hold up well in the licensing of the kernel.
We frequently use a heavy duty degausser for real wiping, but it also destroys the drive. But sometimes we get creative.
We had 40 gateways that just as the warranty expired started failing like clockwork. 6 out of 40 in the first month or two after it expired so we fought with them and got a free warranty extension on them. One of the hard drives that failed on us had to be sent back for replacement...so our boss told us to make sure that the data was gone and do it "however you want". So after running a data wiping tool writing a pattern to the drive X times, we took it out and proceded to use a jackhammer on it. We tried to pick up as many pieces as we could...some were quite small since it was a laptop drive...and we packed it up nice and neat in its little antistatic bag and sent it back to the company in bits.
There is a three word reason I believe. "Fix My Computer". I never get asked about any of the rest, and while I totally agree they the things you pointed out are just as much of a monopoly in many cases, but the tactics that MS uses has more of a direct impact on more people. You may not like your alternatives, but noone forced you to pay for cable, or DSL, or FIOS against your agreement. The fact is you do have other options in connectivity, be it dialup, DSL, Cable, Dish systems, or even free local things like the library or some businesses with free wireless. There are plenty of easily available options and there have been some places to sell better DSL well below the main provider prices, and in the past 4 years or so of owning DSL I have always gone with the small local provider who gave me better speeds, lower costs, and static IPs over the massive ones.
But with MS you have people having to pay the MS tax on every new computer purchase. You also have tons of IT geeks constantly being told by their friends, familiy, neighbors, coworkers, and generally anyone that finds out they can click a mouse and read on screen directions "Fix My Computer".