I do this for a living, so you'll probably hate me for some of my suggestions....
Number one thing I'd like to get out of the way is that the people who qualify this request as a waste of time are idiots who shouldn't be in an IT department. I've been to too many places where no one can tell me what they're running, where the servers are, what patch levels they are at, which machine is up or down and what they need to keep pace with growing demand (your business IS growing, right?). IT departments like these are the root cause for bloated IT initiatives, downed web servers and crappy customer service.
Number two is the realization that the IT department is in the business of the keeping the rest of the business up and running. This means two things: your responsibility is to keep the rest of the company happy and productive, and you get to charge them (system doesn't matter, as long as you keep track of what it means to service 200 requests a day for lost passwords) when you perform work to keep someones servers up, the mail flowing and the network lit.
Once you understand the place of IT in a business, metrics are easy to come by: - how well you're doing is measured by how available your servers and your apps are. - how efficient you are is measured by how much money you save the rest of the business in avoided downtimes and increased productivity. - Bonus if you keep track of how long it takes to service requests and what their resolution was. - Extra Bonus if you can do performance forecasting and figure out when you need to expand your infrastructure.
The performance of an IT department is NOT measured by any of the following: - budgets of IT departments in other companies - how many new products you've rolled out - how many people you fired (or hired)
Anybody who suggets those needs to be smacked around and told not to speak in public anymore.
With that in mind, there are a million products to track your statistics. My company will be happy to quote you anything from a 4-figure to a 10-figure deal for this. There are open-source tools that will do similar things for free (though in my opinion, you get what you pay for). There are in-house and hosted answers to any of these questions. But the one thing you need to remember is that you need to know the answers to the CEOs questions about what the status of your machines and your people is. If you can tell him that your hardware uptime runs at 99.99% for mission-critical servers (the Oracle RAC that holds your financial information, for example) and your app availability is 99.7% during business hours, that it takes you 4 hours to respond to a priority 1 request and 3 days to a priority 3 request, and that based on current response time trends, you need to double the processing power and database space in 6 months, you're golden.
If you can't tell your CEO these things, you will be replaced by someone who can. Or even worse, your job will be outsourced to my company, and I get to work out these things while you're flipping burgers. Yeah, I'm being a jerk. That's because I'm flabbergasted at some of the comments (and their moderation) and how their authors still have a job. IT metrics are simple, and don't have to start with complex SLA measurements and other crap. You can start with a basic ping monitor of your critical servers, and go from there. But for heaven's sake, do something. You'll be a hero if you play it right.
Oh, and just to repeat - do not benchmark yourself against other companies. You don't have access to valid data, and you won't find an identical business. Instead, find out what your other departments need from you, and benchmark from there.
An overreaction is when you lock up someone for life when they stole a loaf of bread. This doesn't even accomplish their stated goal - to protect their school from an unbalanced and violent individual.
Let's assume for a second that they are right. The guy is violent, mentally unstable and is using his home grown CS map to practice his planned killing spree (which was apparently to be carried out with a hammer). What do they do? They merely transfer him to a different school. In no way, shape or form do any of the school's actions prevent him from entering the school again and carrying out his assumed plans. At best, they've moved the problem to a different place, and put others at risk that hadn't been at risk before. At worst, it really pisses him off, and he escalates his planned violence (pipe bombs really aren't hard to make). Any which way you look at it, the actions of the school and the police were completely irresponsible.
Factor in that the guy had none of these plans to begin with, and you're looking at a massively incompetent school administration, board and police whose only goal is to cover their ass. They don't care whether what they did solved any issues; all they wanted was to have something to point to if the student does go apeshit and the inevitable question of "who's to blame?" rolls around.
The US is going down the shitter, and attitudes like these towards kids and education are the reason why. Way to ruin your future generation.
I'm not quite sure about whether the hex string is copyrighted, though many have pointed out that you can't copyright a random sequence. As far as I know, the hex string is random, and therefore not copyrighteable. It also can't be taken down due to trade secret reasons, because trade secrets have no defense in law. If you find a trade secret through legal means (and the forum crack seemed to be done entirely with legal means), it's yours.
What I can tell though is that the AACS LA group is pretty keen on putting the genie back in the bottle. I'm guessing that as the doom9 forumgoers pointed out, they won't revoke the entire XBox HD-DVD player line. The only alternative they have is to ban the number from the internet - or they're going to have to just live with the fact that a large fraction of the current HD-DVD players are basically DRM-free. Maybe I should invest in one now.:)
My question then is: if the technique is old hat, why are a lot of people suddenly looking at it and updating both first response as well as ER protocols? Is it the combination of brain reperfusion with hypothermic techniques?
The fact that they gank me until the cows come home in STV and Outlands. I couldn't care less about their backstory. Their actions, on the other hand, are pure evil. Well, enough horde is like that to warrant their destruction. So I kill on sight. Wait, what - horde says that's what makes Alliance evil?
I think we have just identified the root cause of the problem. People are, on average, assholes.
Unsuprisingly (because people know that human behavior is complex and rarely traceable to a single cause), the author also says "This is a respected measure, but obviously not the same as seeing whether real people hit or shoot each other." We're talking about trying to figure out whether violent videogames like Postal change people from law-abiding citizens to mass-murderers. Or at least, make them dysfunctional. What is being tracked is whether the violence on-screen translates into similar actions/violence in real life. As a lot of other people pointed out, the increase in aggressiveness is similar to what is seen after a lot of other high-energy activities. That's not nearly the same thing what's being advocated by the Tipper Gores of the world, or what people mean when they say "violent videogames cause violent behavior".
... is a study that can differentiate between videogames increasing the violent tendencies of the player and increasingly violent people playing violent videogames. Anything else is just trying to translate correlation into causation with a lot of handwaving.
Can videogames affect the mindset of people? Sure - I'm sure I'm not the only one who, after a particularly intense multi-player session of burnout ponders the best way to force the slowpoke ahead of you off the road. But I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who has realized that this is not the proper way to deal with a slowpoke ahead of you blocking traffic. What I'd like to see in one of these studies is the establishment of the direction of the link, and whether the increase in violent thought patterns translated into action. If someone can actually show that, I'll be all on-board the "violent videogames are bad for you" band-wagon. Anything short of that, and I'll fight for my right to play the latest Doom-incarnation without censor interference.
Interesting... it sounds like they are saying that code itself - i.e. the stuff you get on a printout, on a t-shirt, anything that isn't part of an executable - is not patentable because it is a set of instructions, rather than a device.
If that's true, all I can say is... Wow. All software patents will basically have to be revisited, because on the face of it, it sounds like software cannot be patented anymore.
Am I missing something here? Or can I start the happy software-patents-are-dead dance?
Great post, with the exception of that armored tank bit.:)
Here's my theory on why people don't care enough: the pervasive idea that opinion is a valid substitute for knowledge, and the equally pervasive idea that the political system is either rigged or that their vote doesn't matter.
We are a nation that is on average fat, lazy, anti-intellectual and too money-oriented for its own good. Who cares who becomes president, as long as bread and circuses are still freely available? I find quite a few parallels between the current US and the latter stages of the Roman Empire.
Funny thing is that the German school I went to was anything but what you described... we were challenged, exposed to new ideas, and learned about linear algebra in 12th grade (there are 13 grades in a German school). We were taught to be anything but good factory workers. Now the social fabric on the other hand... some people consider jay walking a major crime.
True - the seven nines were theoretical, and I hadn't seen any data on one of those machines running for a year. However, I don't count application failure as part of the server going down. Those 7 nines were strictly for the server itself being up... which definitely cuts down on the complexity. I agree that if you start adding actual applications into the mix, you'll be very lucky to even get to three nines.
I think though that if you start with hardware that is only 99.9% reliable, it will be impossible to get to 99.9% app availability, and even anything approaching 99.8% is going to require a lot of creative accounting of what constitutes an outage.
From what I can see when I check the status of my friends on XBox Live, the vast majority of them use the Xbox as a media center as well as a gaming machine. Watching movies, listening to audio (though that requires in-chat confirmation) are all common things.
There is definitely a market for it. Even with my beautiful iMac, I wish I could easily pipe music/video to my stereo/tv setup. Yes, for me, that probably means an Apple TV is somewhere in my future. But for others, it means their XBox is the perfect set up for this. Why buy separate components when you can have one thing do all? Yes, there are concurrency problems, but for the living room, having the XBox do everything is a braindead proposition... especially if they figure out the dead simple. MS already has the easily accessible content (downloads are pretty quick, even for 1gig+ files), and it is fairly cheap for what you get. Once they get the easy access down, I foresee the numbers of XBoxes in living rooms to go up significantly.
Citrix? *snicker* Yeah, I'm not surprised that they have issues. I monitor those babies for a living, and they are the most temperamental systems I've ever seen. Not to mention incapable of properly scaling or working under load. You want scale? Get a new citrix server, and hope to god the load-balancing doesn't barf. I'm not sure Win32 is their culprit, but Citrix is definitely one of their problems.
You know what's sad? I started my IT career with Compaq at it's (nee DEC) non-stop computing department. 99.99999% uptime for these suckers. Redundant everything, hotswapping of HDs, all in 1999. Can't believe people are touting 99.9% hardware availability as a success. Not when 99.8% availability for critical apps is becoming a de-facto minimum....
Other people touched on it already, but I'll repeat it anyway: this is just another attempt by Sony to create the Sony-net, where only Sony systems (playstations) can connect to it, and where Sony has complete control over what is shown and how. Here's the key portion of the story: "We believe there's a need for a clean and safe place where companies can place their advertisements". This is how the business model will work: - Companies will pay Sony to play their latest ads, trailers, clips, show excerpts, etc. - Users will pay Companies (and Sony) to watch ads, trailers, clips, show excerpts, full shows, movies, songs, etc. - There will be cheap pay-per-view stuff, and expensive full downloads-to-own (complete with heavy duty DRM). - There will be some user-generated stuff, but it will come from people with a Sony passport equivalent and who can't be arsed to upload stuff to YouTube.
I'm thinking it will be a cross between XBox Live, iTunes and YouTube. The YouTube connection is there to generate buzz (hah! I'm surprised there was no mentioning of the word 'viral' in the story), the XBox Live model is there because Sony sees how this is a money-press for MS, and iTunes is there because everyone's drooling over its market penetration. Except it will combine the sucky aspects of all its components and make them worse: paying for ads in XBox Live (I'm still amazed that MS pulled off that trick), DRM in iTunes and crap content in YouTube.
Could it work? Sure could. Except that I haven't seen anything that tells me that Sony has moved away from its holy grail: to completely lock its users into an all-Sony all the time world. Which means that the DRM will be unwieldy, the network too small and the content too expensive to generate much inroads against the established powers. At least Sony isn't hailing this again as the next coming of YouTube... maybe it has learned after all.
The difference is that in one case, 1 person mods you a troll. In the other, 51% (you don't even know who that 51% refers to, do you?) of people mod you a troll. Being called a troll is neither a mark of honor nor an indication that you are rugged individualist. It simply means that more people than not think you are a troll. As for whether you are a troll... I don't think you even qualify for that.
He was fired because several large advertisers publically distanced themselves and their money from the show. No advertisers, no money, no show - no matter how many listeners you have. That, ultimately, is why I think he got fired. Doesn't change a lick about the fact that what he said showed him to be racist and sexist, but that's beside the point.
Freedom of expression means that you can say whatever you want, and I can't enlist the government to sop you from saying what you want. However, it doesn't mean that I'm forced to subsidize anybody's attempts to make themselves heard. Don Imus could get into pod-casting (though there's no guarantee he'll be carried by iTunes). Due to the ISPs common carrier clause, they'll take his money and host pretty much whatever he wants. So Don, you wanna talk about nappy-headed hos - go get a server, a T1 (or 10), and set up shop on the internet. But don't complain that your constitutional rights were infringed, because they weren't. Your constitutional right to be an ass does not preclude my constitutional right from calling you on it, and pressuring your advertisers to drop you like a hot potato.
I have to stay, I'm stumped by the amount of people who misinterpret the first amendment as a requirement for others to stay silent when they say anything.
No, you'll be modded troll because you are an idiot. For one, you got basic facts wrong in your initial post. Second, you are insulting about 51% of the world's population. Third, being an ass for the sake of staying true to yourself is.... wait for it.... being an ass.
So any troll mods you get - well deserved. And please, stop with the beaten-down hero crap. No one's buying.
Remember previous transitions? PS/Saturn/N64 to the next generation? Genesis/Super Nintendo to PS/Saturn/N64? NES/Master System to Genesis/Super NES? Same story. Old successful consoles continue to have games that outsell the newcomers for about a year at least occasionally. I didn't think though that God of War 2 was going to be such a blockbuster... I guess that's a testament to how popular the PS2 and God of War are, and how few blockbuster games there are for the new generation.
Are you serious, or just trolling? Here are the key snippets: "or for the detection or prevention of fraudulent activities" and "an affirmative request by the owner or authorized user for an update of, addition to, or technical service for, the software".
The first part means that anyone who sold you hardware or software can snoop around on your machine if they are doing it to detect fraudulent activities - meaning when the activity hasn't happened yet! Yes, yes, you have nothing to hide. Are you sure? Your SSN is probably around somewhere. As is your bank account, or a lot of others things valuable to identity thieves.
The second parts means that anyone who ever wrote any type of software can access your machine in whatever way they please - as long as it's a discrete interaction.
This means that the security features in your OS are there only to prevent you from accessing everything in it. It is expected to remain open so that law enforcement, ISPs, software and hardware owners can check for anything they please.
In short, your computer is yours and secure only in name. Anybody else can trespass pretty much at will. If your computer is broken into and the other party says "I was just checking if anything fraudulent was going on", they're in the clear. Especially if they are a large corporation.
Slashdot Mirror
I do this for a living, so you'll probably hate me for some of my suggestions....
Number one thing I'd like to get out of the way is that the people who qualify this request as a waste of time are idiots who shouldn't be in an IT department. I've been to too many places where no one can tell me what they're running, where the servers are, what patch levels they are at, which machine is up or down and what they need to keep pace with growing demand (your business IS growing, right?). IT departments like these are the root cause for bloated IT initiatives, downed web servers and crappy customer service.
Number two is the realization that the IT department is in the business of the keeping the rest of the business up and running. This means two things: your responsibility is to keep the rest of the company happy and productive, and you get to charge them (system doesn't matter, as long as you keep track of what it means to service 200 requests a day for lost passwords) when you perform work to keep someones servers up, the mail flowing and the network lit.
Once you understand the place of IT in a business, metrics are easy to come by:
- how well you're doing is measured by how available your servers and your apps are.
- how efficient you are is measured by how much money you save the rest of the business in avoided downtimes and increased productivity.
- Bonus if you keep track of how long it takes to service requests and what their resolution was.
- Extra Bonus if you can do performance forecasting and figure out when you need to expand your infrastructure.
The performance of an IT department is NOT measured by any of the following:
- budgets of IT departments in other companies
- how many new products you've rolled out
- how many people you fired (or hired)
Anybody who suggets those needs to be smacked around and told not to speak in public anymore.
With that in mind, there are a million products to track your statistics. My company will be happy to quote you anything from a 4-figure to a 10-figure deal for this. There are open-source tools that will do similar things for free (though in my opinion, you get what you pay for). There are in-house and hosted answers to any of these questions. But the one thing you need to remember is that you need to know the answers to the CEOs questions about what the status of your machines and your people is. If you can tell him that your hardware uptime runs at 99.99% for mission-critical servers (the Oracle RAC that holds your financial information, for example) and your app availability is 99.7% during business hours, that it takes you 4 hours to respond to a priority 1 request and 3 days to a priority 3 request, and that based on current response time trends, you need to double the processing power and database space in 6 months, you're golden.
If you can't tell your CEO these things, you will be replaced by someone who can. Or even worse, your job will be outsourced to my company, and I get to work out these things while you're flipping burgers. Yeah, I'm being a jerk. That's because I'm flabbergasted at some of the comments (and their moderation) and how their authors still have a job. IT metrics are simple, and don't have to start with complex SLA measurements and other crap. You can start with a basic ping monitor of your critical servers, and go from there. But for heaven's sake, do something. You'll be a hero if you play it right.
Oh, and just to repeat - do not benchmark yourself against other companies. You don't have access to valid data, and you won't find an identical business. Instead, find out what your other departments need from you, and benchmark from there.
An overreaction is when you lock up someone for life when they stole a loaf of bread. This doesn't even accomplish their stated goal - to protect their school from an unbalanced and violent individual.
Let's assume for a second that they are right. The guy is violent, mentally unstable and is using his home grown CS map to practice his planned killing spree (which was apparently to be carried out with a hammer). What do they do? They merely transfer him to a different school. In no way, shape or form do any of the school's actions prevent him from entering the school again and carrying out his assumed plans. At best, they've moved the problem to a different place, and put others at risk that hadn't been at risk before. At worst, it really pisses him off, and he escalates his planned violence (pipe bombs really aren't hard to make). Any which way you look at it, the actions of the school and the police were completely irresponsible.
Factor in that the guy had none of these plans to begin with, and you're looking at a massively incompetent school administration, board and police whose only goal is to cover their ass. They don't care whether what they did solved any issues; all they wanted was to have something to point to if the student does go apeshit and the inevitable question of "who's to blame?" rolls around.
The US is going down the shitter, and attitudes like these towards kids and education are the reason why. Way to ruin your future generation.
I'm not quite sure about whether the hex string is copyrighted, though many have pointed out that you can't copyright a random sequence. As far as I know, the hex string is random, and therefore not copyrighteable. It also can't be taken down due to trade secret reasons, because trade secrets have no defense in law. If you find a trade secret through legal means (and the forum crack seemed to be done entirely with legal means), it's yours.
:)
What I can tell though is that the AACS LA group is pretty keen on putting the genie back in the bottle. I'm guessing that as the doom9 forumgoers pointed out, they won't revoke the entire XBox HD-DVD player line. The only alternative they have is to ban the number from the internet - or they're going to have to just live with the fact that a large fraction of the current HD-DVD players are basically DRM-free. Maybe I should invest in one now.
Err, that should probably say combining mechanical brain oxygenation with hypothermic techniques...
My question then is: if the technique is old hat, why are a lot of people suddenly looking at it and updating both first response as well as ER protocols? Is it the combination of brain reperfusion with hypothermic techniques?
The fact that they gank me until the cows come home in STV and Outlands. I couldn't care less about their backstory. Their actions, on the other hand, are pure evil. Well, enough horde is like that to warrant their destruction. So I kill on sight. Wait, what - horde says that's what makes Alliance evil?
I think we have just identified the root cause of the problem. People are, on average, assholes.
Unsuprisingly (because people know that human behavior is complex and rarely traceable to a single cause), the author also says "This is a respected measure, but obviously not the same as seeing whether real people hit or shoot each other." We're talking about trying to figure out whether violent videogames like Postal change people from law-abiding citizens to mass-murderers. Or at least, make them dysfunctional. What is being tracked is whether the violence on-screen translates into similar actions/violence in real life. As a lot of other people pointed out, the increase in aggressiveness is similar to what is seen after a lot of other high-energy activities. That's not nearly the same thing what's being advocated by the Tipper Gores of the world, or what people mean when they say "violent videogames cause violent behavior".
... is a study that can differentiate between videogames increasing the violent tendencies of the player and increasingly violent people playing violent videogames. Anything else is just trying to translate correlation into causation with a lot of handwaving.
Can videogames affect the mindset of people? Sure - I'm sure I'm not the only one who, after a particularly intense multi-player session of burnout ponders the best way to force the slowpoke ahead of you off the road. But I'm also sure that I'm not the only one who has realized that this is not the proper way to deal with a slowpoke ahead of you blocking traffic. What I'd like to see in one of these studies is the establishment of the direction of the link, and whether the increase in violent thought patterns translated into action. If someone can actually show that, I'll be all on-board the "violent videogames are bad for you" band-wagon. Anything short of that, and I'll fight for my right to play the latest Doom-incarnation without censor interference.
Interesting... it sounds like they are saying that code itself - i.e. the stuff you get on a printout, on a t-shirt, anything that isn't part of an executable - is not patentable because it is a set of instructions, rather than a device.
If that's true, all I can say is... Wow. All software patents will basically have to be revisited, because on the face of it, it sounds like software cannot be patented anymore.
Am I missing something here? Or can I start the happy software-patents-are-dead dance?
Great post, with the exception of that armored tank bit. :)
Here's my theory on why people don't care enough: the pervasive idea that opinion is a valid substitute for knowledge, and the equally pervasive idea that the political system is either rigged or that their vote doesn't matter.
We are a nation that is on average fat, lazy, anti-intellectual and too money-oriented for its own good. Who cares who becomes president, as long as bread and circuses are still freely available? I find quite a few parallels between the current US and the latter stages of the Roman Empire.
Funny thing is that the German school I went to was anything but what you described... we were challenged, exposed to new ideas, and learned about linear algebra in 12th grade (there are 13 grades in a German school). We were taught to be anything but good factory workers. Now the social fabric on the other hand... some people consider jay walking a major crime.
True - the seven nines were theoretical, and I hadn't seen any data on one of those machines running for a year. However, I don't count application failure as part of the server going down. Those 7 nines were strictly for the server itself being up... which definitely cuts down on the complexity. I agree that if you start adding actual applications into the mix, you'll be very lucky to even get to three nines.
I think though that if you start with hardware that is only 99.9% reliable, it will be impossible to get to 99.9% app availability, and even anything approaching 99.8% is going to require a lot of creative accounting of what constitutes an outage.
From what I can see when I check the status of my friends on XBox Live, the vast majority of them use the Xbox as a media center as well as a gaming machine. Watching movies, listening to audio (though that requires in-chat confirmation) are all common things.
There is definitely a market for it. Even with my beautiful iMac, I wish I could easily pipe music/video to my stereo/tv setup. Yes, for me, that probably means an Apple TV is somewhere in my future. But for others, it means their XBox is the perfect set up for this. Why buy separate components when you can have one thing do all? Yes, there are concurrency problems, but for the living room, having the XBox do everything is a braindead proposition... especially if they figure out the dead simple. MS already has the easily accessible content (downloads are pretty quick, even for 1gig+ files), and it is fairly cheap for what you get. Once they get the easy access down, I foresee the numbers of XBoxes in living rooms to go up significantly.
Citrix? *snicker* Yeah, I'm not surprised that they have issues. I monitor those babies for a living, and they are the most temperamental systems I've ever seen. Not to mention incapable of properly scaling or working under load. You want scale? Get a new citrix server, and hope to god the load-balancing doesn't barf. I'm not sure Win32 is their culprit, but Citrix is definitely one of their problems.
You know what's sad? I started my IT career with Compaq at it's (nee DEC) non-stop computing department. 99.99999% uptime for these suckers. Redundant everything, hotswapping of HDs, all in 1999. Can't believe people are touting 99.9% hardware availability as a success. Not when 99.8% availability for critical apps is becoming a de-facto minimum....
Citrix? Hah! No wonder they have issues. Citrix servers are an absolut pain to properly maintain.
Other people touched on it already, but I'll repeat it anyway: this is just another attempt by Sony to create the Sony-net, where only Sony systems (playstations) can connect to it, and where Sony has complete control over what is shown and how. Here's the key portion of the story: "We believe there's a need for a clean and safe place where companies can place their advertisements". This is how the business model will work:
- Companies will pay Sony to play their latest ads, trailers, clips, show excerpts, etc.
- Users will pay Companies (and Sony) to watch ads, trailers, clips, show excerpts, full shows, movies, songs, etc.
- There will be cheap pay-per-view stuff, and expensive full downloads-to-own (complete with heavy duty DRM).
- There will be some user-generated stuff, but it will come from people with a Sony passport equivalent and who can't be arsed to upload stuff to YouTube.
I'm thinking it will be a cross between XBox Live, iTunes and YouTube. The YouTube connection is there to generate buzz (hah! I'm surprised there was no mentioning of the word 'viral' in the story), the XBox Live model is there because Sony sees how this is a money-press for MS, and iTunes is there because everyone's drooling over its market penetration. Except it will combine the sucky aspects of all its components and make them worse: paying for ads in XBox Live (I'm still amazed that MS pulled off that trick), DRM in iTunes and crap content in YouTube.
Could it work? Sure could. Except that I haven't seen anything that tells me that Sony has moved away from its holy grail: to completely lock its users into an all-Sony all the time world. Which means that the DRM will be unwieldy, the network too small and the content too expensive to generate much inroads against the established powers. At least Sony isn't hailing this again as the next coming of YouTube... maybe it has learned after all.
Damn - a beautiful flame got lost in the posting process. Oh well. T'was more fun writing it than reading it anyway, I'm sure.
Just for the record though - I think women might be more offended being told that they can't lead rather than being told that girly men can't lead.
Surely you mean "If our leaders manipulate us, democracy fails"?
I'm bored, I'll play.
The difference is that in one case, 1 person mods you a troll. In the other, 51% (you don't even know who that 51% refers to, do you?) of people mod you a troll. Being called a troll is neither a mark of honor nor an indication that you are rugged individualist. It simply means that more people than not think you are a troll. As for whether you are a troll... I don't think you even qualify for that.
He was fired because several large advertisers publically distanced themselves and their money from the show. No advertisers, no money, no show - no matter how many listeners you have. That, ultimately, is why I think he got fired. Doesn't change a lick about the fact that what he said showed him to be racist and sexist, but that's beside the point.
Freedom of expression means that you can say whatever you want, and I can't enlist the government to sop you from saying what you want. However, it doesn't mean that I'm forced to subsidize anybody's attempts to make themselves heard. Don Imus could get into pod-casting (though there's no guarantee he'll be carried by iTunes). Due to the ISPs common carrier clause, they'll take his money and host pretty much whatever he wants. So Don, you wanna talk about nappy-headed hos - go get a server, a T1 (or 10), and set up shop on the internet. But don't complain that your constitutional rights were infringed, because they weren't. Your constitutional right to be an ass does not preclude my constitutional right from calling you on it, and pressuring your advertisers to drop you like a hot potato.
I have to stay, I'm stumped by the amount of people who misinterpret the first amendment as a requirement for others to stay silent when they say anything.
No, you'll be modded troll because you are an idiot. For one, you got basic facts wrong in your initial post. Second, you are insulting about 51% of the world's population. Third, being an ass for the sake of staying true to yourself is.... wait for it.... being an ass.
So any troll mods you get - well deserved. And please, stop with the beaten-down hero crap. No one's buying.
Remember previous transitions? PS/Saturn/N64 to the next generation? Genesis/Super Nintendo to PS/Saturn/N64? NES/Master System to Genesis/Super NES? Same story. Old successful consoles continue to have games that outsell the newcomers for about a year at least occasionally. I didn't think though that God of War 2 was going to be such a blockbuster... I guess that's a testament to how popular the PS2 and God of War are, and how few blockbuster games there are for the new generation.
Are you serious, or just trolling? Here are the key snippets: "or for the detection or prevention of fraudulent activities" and "an affirmative request by the owner or authorized user for an update of, addition to, or technical service for, the software".
The first part means that anyone who sold you hardware or software can snoop around on your machine if they are doing it to detect fraudulent activities - meaning when the activity hasn't happened yet! Yes, yes, you have nothing to hide. Are you sure? Your SSN is probably around somewhere. As is your bank account, or a lot of others things valuable to identity thieves.
The second parts means that anyone who ever wrote any type of software can access your machine in whatever way they please - as long as it's a discrete interaction.
This means that the security features in your OS are there only to prevent you from accessing everything in it. It is expected to remain open so that law enforcement, ISPs, software and hardware owners can check for anything they please.
In short, your computer is yours and secure only in name. Anybody else can trespass pretty much at will. If your computer is broken into and the other party says "I was just checking if anything fraudulent was going on", they're in the clear. Especially if they are a large corporation.
No. Monopoly rents are more profitable than any royalty or customer payments.
And one way to destroy Vonage is to charge licensing fees that are larger than Vonage's profit margin. It's win-win for Verizon, really.