Your arguments are simply undone by the rule that security through obscurity is not security at all. It hasn't worked for Microsoft and it won't work this way either.
Your rationale is that the average user has no need and is in actuality a compromised machine owner waiting to happen for a botnet. Hence the old the users are too stupid so lets remove the ticking timebomb before they set it off argument.
This reduces the OS more and more towards being nothing more than a toy and shackles anyone and everyone using it to that dumbed down standard.
It also astonishingly assumes that the users who were earlier assumed too dumb to stop themselves from being botnet carriers are smart enough to not install those digitall signed (or unsigned) drivers without concrete need later on.
All the nefarious Windows malware people then need do is package up all their stuff, drivers and all, and put a cutsey Flash game on top as the ostensible selling point, give it away for free with automated point-click-infect directions. If you tell people to ignore the unsigned driver warning, they WILL ignore it to get software installed that they want.
Disabling raw sockets does nothing but dumb down the OS pointlessly, hobble knowledgable users needlessly, and turn it into a tchotcke application. ALSO, it gives Microsoft an opening to continue disenfranchising the common users from the path from n00b to power user by creating a cutsey neutered Paris Hilton froo-froo lap dog OS for the idiot masses and a massively more expensive product for everyone that might have more than two brain cells.
This doesn't strike me as a good thing. Instead, Microsoft should be more rigorous in their bughunting and errorchecking before code release, put more gateway steps in the way of getting seriously risky things done, and strongly discourage the users from doing things that are risky without consideration of the ramifications, and try to tie all these risky things together under the watch of a nagging but informative security watch mechanism that keeps tabs on this.
Instead, people are under the impression that AOL is suddenly a paragon of virtue in providing a "safety and security center". If there was such a thing, it should be part and parcel of the OS. Not left to a third party, not left to chance.
Those specie currency lunatics sound like flat-earthers. They just can't get over the fact that "real life" is more complicated than their simple minds allow for.
This is a truism when applied to many many people.
Go to this site and take a look. If you're a nerd for Linux, no problem. You grok this and get it done.
If not, well... imagine having to force Windows XP users who have never been without a GUI to compile XP programs and drivers and patches at the DOS command prompt. Nightmare. If you don't think so, you obviously never worked desktop support in a corporation or for home users. The majority may be whizzes at day trading, welding, cooking, whatever they do for a job, but they largely suck flat out at figuring this stuff out.
I have to reinstall my cam drivers every time I upgrade my kernel. I can do this. Worth it to experiment. But that is all it really is right now. Until the major vendors start porting webcam related features to their Linux releases, it is for nothing as far as adoption by less 7337 people is concerned. Yahoo IM would be a good start.
No, open source projects would not be better. Most of these have next to no adoption among those welders, cooks, day traders, etc. who are likely to be OUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. Do you not want to ever speak with them on webcam? Fine. Use Linux and Open Source while they use Windows and we'll remain two separate camps. The more day to day applications we have in common, the less the difference, the easier to adopt more and more *nix style things and the less tied they will be to Windows.
First, calling the recent resurrection of Doctor Who the first series and noting an option for series two is sacrilege and spits on the work done by thousands of individuals over more than thirty years. THAT was the first series. This is just the latest continuation.
Second, there should have been a deal for the entirety of the series from Hartnell onward.
Third, SCI-FI knows as much about science fiction as USA Network does and it constantly shows with their killing of Farscape, stuntcasting on SG-1, showing The Flinstones, and so forth.
I'll be very resistant to applauding this until SCI-FI shows they can stick with anything longer than it takes for them to be distracted by something shiny like a child with ADD.
Solaris on Mac hardware. Mac interface on Solaris. Proprietary, inaccessible, AND batcave insane fanaticism.
Better would have been Sun, Netscape, and Oracle which would have covered all the bases Microsoft did under one roof but can you imagine Ellison, McNealy, and Andreessen NOT killing each other? I can't even imagine the last two fitting into the same boardroom as Ellison's ego.
In the end it was probably better for everyone everywhere that no such thing happened. Certainly it turned out better for Open Source to have Microsoft remain pre-eminent in the proprietary world over incompetent foes who couldn't shoot straight thus leaving Microsoft as the sole boogeyman to target by the movement making a really clear if not entirely credible on deeper examination comparison between closed source and open.
If every single US citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the state.
If every single Illinois citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the county.
If every single Lake County citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the village.
If every single Gurnee citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the neighborhood.
If every single Brookstone Place citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, sent it to the household.
If every single person in my household agrees with the law, set it into motion.
Just so you know, the state of NY just decided to try this method and could not unanimously agree on laws against murder, rape, and robbery but they did decide unanimously to send all their criminals to your place.
Since that makes it law, does eight o'clock next Tuesday night sound good for you?
Okay, then. Fossil fuel it is. They did mention hybrid power sources there it seems, so that too is coming.
As to pure robots, go Google the Odex-1 "functionoid". By now we should be well on our way to making bots that move and act something like the bugs in the movie rendition of Starship Troopers.
Now combined, that would make a decent force for quickly decimating guerilla forces before they can scatter and get away.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, but - does it surprise anyone that the maker of the #1 target for malware writers is actively campagining against ISPs downthrottling infected users' PCs? I mean, if customers found out that Microsoft Windows = your ISP cuts down your rate, are people more or less likely to buy Windows? Their actions seems like obvious good buisness practice to me.
What percentage of all Internet users are on Windows versus everything else?
Okay, so this is NOT a good business practice. Disenfranchising 90%+ of all Internet users is just plain stupid. Right up their with a multitiered Internet where big carriers can throttle your traffic if it comes from IP addys other than in their blocks or is aimed at ports they believe signify what is in their opinion unimportant traffic.
the polar ice caps will melt and coastal areas will vanish undersea
Er, no. Evidence is that Antarctica began its slide towards its current iceberg status when Antractica finally broke from the last of the other continents still connected and the circumpolar current locked it away from the currents carrying warm water from the north at the equator. It has been in deep freeze ever since.
There's no hard science of any sort that says all the ice, even all the ice in the arctic will melt. Instead, evidence is that in the entire history of human civilization we've been inside an ice age, between deep cold cycles. If ice ages do actually ever end on this planet, it will be much much warmer than now, water will rise a lot higher, and that is because that is the natural state of Earth outside of an ice age. No one told humanity to build their houses upon the sand.
Why do people have this insane idea that we should live our lives based on the foolish attempt to control long term planetary climate changes that were going on long before us and will still be doing long after? We just live here. Earth does what it is going to do. It's the height of hubris to think a minor change in your car's fuel source is going to keep NYC perpetually at its current level above seawater. It won't. Either it will rise and drown the city or we freeze and it will lower the level. Either way, humanity ain't making that choice.
Now you can let the screensave run and go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS...
ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!!
Why do we have to measure the gender representation in every frigging thing? When was the last time you saw any industry association actively discourage women from being techs? When was the last time you saw politicians in government actively discourage women from being techs? Never. For crissakes, we blew up a couple on a space shuttle to get techie women out there in the news. Women are constantly hounded to think with their brains and not emotions, to be more technical and mechanical, to be more like men.
Maybe they DON'T WANT to be more like men. Maybe some things just happen not to interest them. If they want the job and can do it, fine. If they don't and don't give a rats butt and want to be competitive figure skaters or race car drivers or the next big Food Network star, whatever. Their choise. AS INDIVIDUALS.
In the name of women's lib and equality and all that, we treat women equally alright... EQUALLY IDENTICAL. We judge them as a group because they have a uterus as the feminists say who in keeping with their station as a key portion of modern society's Irony Deparment do much to keep up this nonsense (okay, split hairs between the gender feminists and equity feminists if you want). This is part of the problem of focusing on an idea of diversity which seems to be no less group judgemental and defining than the old sexist or racist ideas of the past and is even more stiflingly Borg-like because it is place beyond question in an embrace of holy effrontery (I don't recall racists and sexists of old being afraid to argue their stupid ideas with differently minded peers but the political correctness brigade has managed to embrace more racist and sexist and more repugnant results than was ever possible before because they put their idiocy beyond question on the level of faith where their quintuple standards are only challenged by the truly foolhardy looking to be tarred and feathered as racist or sexist even if the one questioning is non-white or female).
Howabout we treat women like INDIVIDUALS and let them make their own damn decisions as individuals as to what they want to work in and at? Is that so hard?
Of course, I know what the point of the post was. I'm not dense. It's worry about not enough geek chicks around to finally get laid with someone who relates and doesn't think you're strange for reading old issues of Byte with the reverence once reserved for holy writings and getting orgasmic over thinkgeek's latest product line. Get a clue guys. You're being incredibly sexist by thinking the girls have to come over to your field and relate to you. You need to pull your heads out of the system and learn to relate to those women. Whatever it is that they do. Treat the women like specific people for crying out loud. Not a set of boobs in a geek slogan t-shirt.
Three weeks ago, every American pinhead was in here screaming
"Why would the rest of the world not want the US to be the sole master of the Internet, we are the bastion of freedom, and would never restrict Internet freedom, unlike those lefties in Canada and Europe"
This is exactly why. The US WAS the bastion of freedom. You have become nothing more than a new facist state. Your policies, and beliefs are way out of line with the rest of the world, and no one looks to the US system as a model of anything, except rampant corruption.
The difference is that in Europe some group of fascist idiots who think their politics (left of center usually) are more important than any of the traditions, beliefs, politics, freedoms, etc. of the people they have power over and they'd simply do this and not reverse themselves until half-naked anarchists went rampaging through the streets of Berlin and Paris burning cars, if then.
Here, we get to see it coming, and bitch and moan, write our politicians, bitch and moan without some sort of government censorship notice to stop us, write some more, and ultimately cause enough trouble that they either don't do it or as soon as they do, get it suspended in court as unconstitutional.
I prefer that to Europe's system of running roughshod over what the people think, doing things without any care to what they think, and maybe addressing the public's discontent years after the folly was proven beyond moronic. The only difference between the EU of today and the Europe of the fifteenth century is that they don't round up the naysayers, malcontents, and opposition noisemakers beforehand and behead them. However, if I were you, I wouldn't mention that to the EU policymakers. They might get it into their heads that removing yours is simply good for the people no matter what you think.
a 3d desktop and a trackball mounted on a mouse in the place of the scroll wheel. Rotate targets with the ball, move with the mouse, click with the buttons. Maneuver in three dimensions through your desktop icons. Dodge flying "Click here to install AOL" icons. Fight with XOrg. Curse ATI. Keep an airsickness bag nearby for motion sickness.
AOL failing to simply get a small bootable Linux distro together with an AOLified interface and giving it away on all those CDs which were headed like stealth infectious agents towards Windows machines...
Simplest solution: Google buys ASCAP, BMI, etc. Google hires OJ's Dream Team for their legal team. Google hires Chuck Norris as their security and enforcement. RIAA is eliminated in a flurry of muscian withdrawls, legal motions, and roundhouse kicks.
"What do you mean go to the shell and enter sudo usermount what?"
"Er..."
They can eye candy up Linux all they want on the desktop. The OS itself still has structural problems that boil down to bass ackwards techie goonery in thinking. Desktop end users DO NOT and SHOULD NOT have to understand abstractions and specifics about mounting drives, runlevels, reinstalling video drivers every single time they update the kernel by clicking a desktop icon telling them to...
...in Minority Report. You can still smack them off your desk, across the room, spilling cereal and they keep on going on advertising. All we need is a tiny sound system to complete this.
For those who think that China is a big teddy bear full of love for the world, freedom, and independence of the people we have two words to remember: Tiananmen Square.
I will never forget the images of those young people being shot at, arrested, stampeded out of the square by the Chinese military.
Their government is not warm and fuzzy and has nothing to do with basic human rights. They are fellow humans, the people of China. They deserve better than that gang of thugs in power. I wish them luck in outlasting their predecessors' mistake in choosing to empower those creeps.
Wow dude, that is pretty messed up. It is hard to see if you are joking or not, (this being slashdot and all) but even if you were joking, you sound pretty angry about something. I strongly recommend marraige counseling, especially if you have kids. Comitted human relationships are much more important than computers, jobs, video games, school, anything.
fricken' jesus people. Tell you what - you put God where you want him in your life, and let everybody else do the same. Save the preaching for Church, not slashdot.
Knee-jerk touchy are we? NOWHERE did that poster mention G-d. NOWHERE. It sounded to me like something any secular humanist might say, never mind your local pastor.
AND... The poster is 100% correct. I can't see where I could ever come up with any rationale that made any coherent sense whatsoever that could argue in favor of "computers, jobs, video games, school" being more important the good solid human relationships.
The whole reason for technology on which we live and thrive is to support us humans. If we lose sight of the importance of US, we then have no reason to do any of the technical things we do.
First, that they are going to make more money even with this fine than otherwise having followed the list and...
Second, every other company is doing this as well. Know the bit about collection agents not being able to call you at work? Surprise, Indian call centers for collection companies in the US call with total abandon, harassing all day long. Everyone in my family has gotten such calls. And since India is on the far side of the planet, they will call at two in the morning as if it was nothing; round the clock calls.
Companies largely do figure they aren't responsible for the acts of their contractors. DirecTV certainly does, both with this and with installations. Comcast sure DOESN'T and will fire contractors in an instant for screwing up in any way the breaks regulations or laws. If I was looking for TV service and Comcast didn't violate the no-call and DirecTV did, I'd not be going with DirecTV but arse-end-up world this is, you can bet thousands of those called did go with DirecTV to spite the cable operator that didn't violate the do not call list.
Well I do know about KDE and it blows on Fedora Core 3 both with their build and with the KDE official repos and building from source. Tends to spectacularly fail with segfaults and have segfault failure of various apps at various points. Using the default install from the DVD without updating is the most stable configuration I've found.
Gnome on the other hand rocks. Shows CDs and DVDs on insertion to the drive as well as flash memory. Doesn't make me go and force it. Interface is simple and elegant. Most things have to be done from the CLI anyhow as this IS Linux.
It's not a macho status symbol and I don't like punishing myself. If I did, I'd use Vi instead of Joe.
Slashdot Mirror
Your arguments are simply undone by the rule that security through obscurity is not security at all. It hasn't worked for Microsoft and it won't work this way either.
Your rationale is that the average user has no need and is in actuality a compromised machine owner waiting to happen for a botnet. Hence the old the users are too stupid so lets remove the ticking timebomb before they set it off argument.
This reduces the OS more and more towards being nothing more than a toy and shackles anyone and everyone using it to that dumbed down standard.
It also astonishingly assumes that the users who were earlier assumed too dumb to stop themselves from being botnet carriers are smart enough to not install those digitall signed (or unsigned) drivers without concrete need later on.
All the nefarious Windows malware people then need do is package up all their stuff, drivers and all, and put a cutsey Flash game on top as the ostensible selling point, give it away for free with automated point-click-infect directions. If you tell people to ignore the unsigned driver warning, they WILL ignore it to get software installed that they want.
Disabling raw sockets does nothing but dumb down the OS pointlessly, hobble knowledgable users needlessly, and turn it into a tchotcke application. ALSO, it gives Microsoft an opening to continue disenfranchising the common users from the path from n00b to power user by creating a cutsey neutered Paris Hilton froo-froo lap dog OS for the idiot masses and a massively more expensive product for everyone that might have more than two brain cells.
This doesn't strike me as a good thing. Instead, Microsoft should be more rigorous in their bughunting and errorchecking before code release, put more gateway steps in the way of getting seriously risky things done, and strongly discourage the users from doing things that are risky without consideration of the ramifications, and try to tie all these risky things together under the watch of a nagging but informative security watch mechanism that keeps tabs on this.
Instead, people are under the impression that AOL is suddenly a paragon of virtue in providing a "safety and security center". If there was such a thing, it should be part and parcel of the OS. Not left to a third party, not left to chance.
Those specie currency lunatics sound like flat-earthers. They just can't get over the fact that "real life" is more complicated than their simple minds allow for.
This is a truism when applied to many many people.
Go to this site and take a look. If you're a nerd for Linux, no problem. You grok this and get it done.
If not, well... imagine having to force Windows XP users who have never been without a GUI to compile XP programs and drivers and patches at the DOS command prompt. Nightmare. If you don't think so, you obviously never worked desktop support in a corporation or for home users. The majority may be whizzes at day trading, welding, cooking, whatever they do for a job, but they largely suck flat out at figuring this stuff out.
I have to reinstall my cam drivers every time I upgrade my kernel. I can do this. Worth it to experiment. But that is all it really is right now. Until the major vendors start porting webcam related features to their Linux releases, it is for nothing as far as adoption by less 7337 people is concerned. Yahoo IM would be a good start.
No, open source projects would not be better. Most of these have next to no adoption among those welders, cooks, day traders, etc. who are likely to be OUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. Do you not want to ever speak with them on webcam? Fine. Use Linux and Open Source while they use Windows and we'll remain two separate camps. The more day to day applications we have in common, the less the difference, the easier to adopt more and more *nix style things and the less tied they will be to Windows.
as you might be able to know where the computer is but not what it is doing or what it is doing but not where it is at the same time...
There's a movie called "Rave Pigs" in this somehow.
First, calling the recent resurrection of Doctor Who the first series and noting an option for series two is sacrilege and spits on the work done by thousands of individuals over more than thirty years. THAT was the first series. This is just the latest continuation.
Second, there should have been a deal for the entirety of the series from Hartnell onward.
Third, SCI-FI knows as much about science fiction as USA Network does and it constantly shows with their killing of Farscape, stuntcasting on SG-1, showing The Flinstones, and so forth.
I'll be very resistant to applauding this until SCI-FI shows they can stick with anything longer than it takes for them to be distracted by something shiny like a child with ADD.
Solaris on Mac hardware. Mac interface on Solaris. Proprietary, inaccessible, AND batcave insane fanaticism.
Better would have been Sun, Netscape, and Oracle which would have covered all the bases Microsoft did under one roof but can you imagine Ellison, McNealy, and Andreessen NOT killing each other? I can't even imagine the last two fitting into the same boardroom as Ellison's ego.
In the end it was probably better for everyone everywhere that no such thing happened. Certainly it turned out better for Open Source to have Microsoft remain pre-eminent in the proprietary world over incompetent foes who couldn't shoot straight thus leaving Microsoft as the sole boogeyman to target by the movement making a really clear if not entirely credible on deeper examination comparison between closed source and open.
If every single US citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the state.
If every single Illinois citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the county.
If every single Lake County citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the village.
If every single Gurnee citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, send it to the neighborhood.
If every single Brookstone Place citizen doesn't agree unanimously with a law, sent it to the household.
If every single person in my household agrees with the law, set it into motion.
Just so you know, the state of NY just decided to try this method and could not unanimously agree on laws against murder, rape, and robbery but they did decide unanimously to send all their criminals to your place.
Since that makes it law, does eight o'clock next Tuesday night sound good for you?
(insert rolling eyes emoticon here)
Would anyone prefer nuclear?
Okay, then. Fossil fuel it is. They did mention hybrid power sources there it seems, so that too is coming.
As to pure robots, go Google the Odex-1 "functionoid". By now we should be well on our way to making bots that move and act something like the bugs in the movie rendition of Starship Troopers.
Now combined, that would make a decent force for quickly decimating guerilla forces before they can scatter and get away.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, but - does it surprise anyone that the maker of the #1 target for malware writers is actively campagining against ISPs downthrottling infected users' PCs? I mean, if customers found out that Microsoft Windows = your ISP cuts down your rate, are people more or less likely to buy Windows? Their actions seems like obvious good buisness practice to me.
What percentage of all Internet users are on Windows versus everything else?
Okay, so this is NOT a good business practice. Disenfranchising 90%+ of all Internet users is just plain stupid. Right up their with a multitiered Internet where big carriers can throttle your traffic if it comes from IP addys other than in their blocks or is aimed at ports they believe signify what is in their opinion unimportant traffic.
This is plainly a stupid idea on multiple levels.
the polar ice caps will melt and coastal areas will vanish undersea
Er, no. Evidence is that Antarctica began its slide towards its current iceberg status when Antractica finally broke from the last of the other continents still connected and the circumpolar current locked it away from the currents carrying warm water from the north at the equator. It has been in deep freeze ever since.
There's no hard science of any sort that says all the ice, even all the ice in the arctic will melt. Instead, evidence is that in the entire history of human civilization we've been inside an ice age, between deep cold cycles. If ice ages do actually ever end on this planet, it will be much much warmer than now, water will rise a lot higher, and that is because that is the natural state of Earth outside of an ice age. No one told humanity to build their houses upon the sand.
Why do people have this insane idea that we should live our lives based on the foolish attempt to control long term planetary climate changes that were going on long before us and will still be doing long after? We just live here. Earth does what it is going to do. It's the height of hubris to think a minor change in your car's fuel source is going to keep NYC perpetually at its current level above seawater. It won't. Either it will rise and drown the city or we freeze and it will lower the level. Either way, humanity ain't making that choice.
...the bodies of the recently deceased returning to life and attacking and devouring the living, at least you know why.
Now you can let the screensave run and go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS and then the screensaver on that runs and you go into another OS... ARRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!! MAKE IT STOP!!!!!!!!
Why do we have to measure the gender representation in every frigging thing? When was the last time you saw any industry association actively discourage women from being techs? When was the last time you saw politicians in government actively discourage women from being techs? Never. For crissakes, we blew up a couple on a space shuttle to get techie women out there in the news. Women are constantly hounded to think with their brains and not emotions, to be more technical and mechanical, to be more like men.
Maybe they DON'T WANT to be more like men. Maybe some things just happen not to interest them. If they want the job and can do it, fine. If they don't and don't give a rats butt and want to be competitive figure skaters or race car drivers or the next big Food Network star, whatever. Their choise. AS INDIVIDUALS.
In the name of women's lib and equality and all that, we treat women equally alright... EQUALLY IDENTICAL. We judge them as a group because they have a uterus as the feminists say who in keeping with their station as a key portion of modern society's Irony Deparment do much to keep up this nonsense (okay, split hairs between the gender feminists and equity feminists if you want). This is part of the problem of focusing on an idea of diversity which seems to be no less group judgemental and defining than the old sexist or racist ideas of the past and is even more stiflingly Borg-like because it is place beyond question in an embrace of holy effrontery (I don't recall racists and sexists of old being afraid to argue their stupid ideas with differently minded peers but the political correctness brigade has managed to embrace more racist and sexist and more repugnant results than was ever possible before because they put their idiocy beyond question on the level of faith where their quintuple standards are only challenged by the truly foolhardy looking to be tarred and feathered as racist or sexist even if the one questioning is non-white or female).
Howabout we treat women like INDIVIDUALS and let them make their own damn decisions as individuals as to what they want to work in and at? Is that so hard?
Of course, I know what the point of the post was. I'm not dense. It's worry about not enough geek chicks around to finally get laid with someone who relates and doesn't think you're strange for reading old issues of Byte with the reverence once reserved for holy writings and getting orgasmic over thinkgeek's latest product line. Get a clue guys. You're being incredibly sexist by thinking the girls have to come over to your field and relate to you. You need to pull your heads out of the system and learn to relate to those women. Whatever it is that they do. Treat the women like specific people for crying out loud. Not a set of boobs in a geek slogan t-shirt.
I love this.
Three weeks ago, every American pinhead was in here screaming
"Why would the rest of the world not want the US to be the sole master of the Internet, we are the bastion of freedom, and would never restrict Internet freedom, unlike those lefties in Canada and Europe"
This is exactly why. The US WAS the bastion of freedom. You have become nothing more than a new facist state. Your policies, and beliefs are way out of line with the rest of the world, and no one looks to the US system as a model of anything, except rampant corruption.
The difference is that in Europe some group of fascist idiots who think their politics (left of center usually) are more important than any of the traditions, beliefs, politics, freedoms, etc. of the people they have power over and they'd simply do this and not reverse themselves until half-naked anarchists went rampaging through the streets of Berlin and Paris burning cars, if then.
Here, we get to see it coming, and bitch and moan, write our politicians, bitch and moan without some sort of government censorship notice to stop us, write some more, and ultimately cause enough trouble that they either don't do it or as soon as they do, get it suspended in court as unconstitutional.
I prefer that to Europe's system of running roughshod over what the people think, doing things without any care to what they think, and maybe addressing the public's discontent years after the folly was proven beyond moronic. The only difference between the EU of today and the Europe of the fifteenth century is that they don't round up the naysayers, malcontents, and opposition noisemakers beforehand and behead them. However, if I were you, I wouldn't mention that to the EU policymakers. They might get it into their heads that removing yours is simply good for the people no matter what you think.
a 3d desktop and a trackball mounted on a mouse in the place of the scroll wheel. Rotate targets with the ball, move with the mouse, click with the buttons. Maneuver in three dimensions through your desktop icons. Dodge flying "Click here to install AOL" icons. Fight with XOrg. Curse ATI. Keep an airsickness bag nearby for motion sickness.
AOL failing to simply get a small bootable Linux distro together with an AOLified interface and giving it away on all those CDs which were headed like stealth infectious agents towards Windows machines...
Simplest solution: Google buys ASCAP, BMI, etc. Google hires OJ's Dream Team for their legal team. Google hires Chuck Norris as their security and enforcement. RIAA is eliminated in a flurry of muscian withdrawls, legal motions, and roundhouse kicks.
Problem solved.
Linux loses hands down. Period.
"What do you mean go to the shell and enter sudo usermount what?"
"Er..."
They can eye candy up Linux all they want on the desktop. The OS itself still has structural problems that boil down to bass ackwards techie goonery in thinking. Desktop end users DO NOT and SHOULD NOT have to understand abstractions and specifics about mounting drives, runlevels, reinstalling video drivers every single time they update the kernel by clicking a desktop icon telling them to...
...in Minority Report. You can still smack them off your desk, across the room, spilling cereal and they keep on going on advertising. All we need is a tiny sound system to complete this.
Why don't we have done with it and implement the final solution. Turn the whole planet into a jail.
(tinfoil hat on, whispers...)
And what makes you think it already isn't?
(tinfoil hat off)
I mean, it's not as though we can presently escape this system.
For those who think that China is a big teddy bear full of love for the world, freedom, and independence of the people we have two words to remember: Tiananmen Square.
I will never forget the images of those young people being shot at, arrested, stampeded out of the square by the Chinese military.
Their government is not warm and fuzzy and has nothing to do with basic human rights. They are fellow humans, the people of China. They deserve better than that gang of thugs in power. I wish them luck in outlasting their predecessors' mistake in choosing to empower those creeps.
Wow dude, that is pretty messed up. It is hard to see if you are joking or not, (this being slashdot and all) but even if you were joking, you sound pretty angry about something. I strongly recommend marraige counseling, especially if you have kids. Comitted human relationships are much more important than computers, jobs, video games, school, anything.
fricken' jesus people. Tell you what - you put God where you want him in your life, and let everybody else do the same. Save the preaching for Church, not slashdot.
Knee-jerk touchy are we? NOWHERE did that poster mention G-d. NOWHERE. It sounded to me like something any secular humanist might say, never mind your local pastor.
AND... The poster is 100% correct. I can't see where I could ever come up with any rationale that made any coherent sense whatsoever that could argue in favor of "computers, jobs, video games, school" being more important the good solid human relationships.
The whole reason for technology on which we live and thrive is to support us humans. If we lose sight of the importance of US, we then have no reason to do any of the technical things we do.
First, that they are going to make more money even with this fine than otherwise having followed the list and...
Second, every other company is doing this as well. Know the bit about collection agents not being able to call you at work? Surprise, Indian call centers for collection companies in the US call with total abandon, harassing all day long. Everyone in my family has gotten such calls. And since India is on the far side of the planet, they will call at two in the morning as if it was nothing; round the clock calls.
Companies largely do figure they aren't responsible for the acts of their contractors. DirecTV certainly does, both with this and with installations. Comcast sure DOESN'T and will fire contractors in an instant for screwing up in any way the breaks regulations or laws. If I was looking for TV service and Comcast didn't violate the no-call and DirecTV did, I'd not be going with DirecTV but arse-end-up world this is, you can bet thousands of those called did go with DirecTV to spite the cable operator that didn't violate the do not call list.
Well I do know about KDE and it blows on Fedora Core 3 both with their build and with the KDE official repos and building from source. Tends to spectacularly fail with segfaults and have segfault failure of various apps at various points. Using the default install from the DVD without updating is the most stable configuration I've found.
Gnome on the other hand rocks. Shows CDs and DVDs on insertion to the drive as well as flash memory. Doesn't make me go and force it. Interface is simple and elegant. Most things have to be done from the CLI anyhow as this IS Linux.
It's not a macho status symbol and I don't like punishing myself. If I did, I'd use Vi instead of Joe.