"Negative attack ads" are considered poisonous to democracy, but using spammer SEO tactics which are sleezy and destructive to Google's usefulness are not considered even worse. This is nothing less than an attempt to create a propagandistic effect with Google, whereas "negative attack ads" have to operate in the clear and open and are already covered by libel and slander laws. There are no laws against using a Google bomb to create a potentially false impression by the order in which things come up. You could have a guy who's say... obsessed with ending the War on Drugs, but a Google bomb could make him out to be some racist ass by bombing up all of the links that point to the one time he said "blacks are the most common drug dealer suspects, so profiling them before anyone else is the most effective strategy for DEA to use." Even if it's out of context, who will know now?
This is why I'm against all of the restrictions on campaigning. Instead I support 100% transparency on money. If you want to publish an ad, all you should have to do is say "I'm __INSERT__NAME__ and have the following (non-)affiliation with Candidate X." Just transparency so the public can decide.
Ironically, all the "campaign reform" advocates in the public have done is to support the things that incumbents enthusiastically support, like negative, privately-funded campaign ads that highligh what Group X doesn't like about a candidate, thus informing the public. And... if it's false, the candidate can always sue for libel.
Cartman: Try this on for size. Blood-drenched, frozen tampon popsicle! Sadaam Hussein: Hey buddy, I know I was mean before, but don't worry, I can change! Cartman: Okay. Not. Fuck, shit, cock, ass, dildo, boner, bitch, pussy, butthole, Barbara Streisand!
Because we all know that artistic and technical talent are democratically distributed throughout the teeming masses! This is taking democracy way too far. Didn't anyone learn from Snakes on a Plane? You need to find good, talented writers, not give every schmuck his or her chance to take a crack at it. How about using the wiki as a way to submit your work for review to see if you can make it as a contributor instead?
But... but... that would destroy the democratic idealism!
The vast majority of experiences that I and every other person I have met with Fedora have been profoundly negative on some level. Version 1.0 was nice on my machine, and 2.0 didn't slip far, but 3.0 and especially 4.0 were just total piles of dog shit for everyone I have known. I watched as an entire CS class composed of people who ranged from total newbies to gentoo and debian rabid partisans couldn't get it installed on hardware that RHEL and SuSE 10 had not 1 iota of a problem working with. My girlfriend, who actually has a little bit of experience writing kernel modules, spent two days trying to get Fedora 5 to install on her work machine. Rinse, repeat for every other person I have met who has used Fedora post v 2.0.
When is the Fedora project going to start fixing its bugs instead of just pushing out bleeding edge packages? OpenSuSE has its problems, but it is significantly better than Fedora and Ubuntu makes Fedora look like useless because those teams work hard on bug fixes. Fedora doesn't even do Core 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 then 6.0. It's like very release they just cross their fingers and pray that the bugs will go away.
Hey, I'm just saying that it blows my mind how bad Fedora has been for everyone I know, how much griping I have seen about it online, and yet... things never change. I for one have given up hope for it since being severely burned on version 3.0 (had it kernel panic in the middle of a demo, trying to run Tomcat of all things!) and then having 4.0 refuse to even install on the same hardware that 3.0 worked on.
God forbid that we hold people accountable for their actions while intoxicated. We simply cannot be so rough and judgemental as to do that! Why they're just a good person who did something stupid while drunk!
Yes, just keep giving people excuses to be dumb. This is perhaps the single greatest reason why the Libertarian Party won't gain traction in America besides welfare-related issues. The LP stands for freedom with accountability. Most libertarians I know are sympathetic to the idea that you can punish someone 100% to the letter of the law while engaging in vice. Most conservatives and liberals aren't, and this is the problem on both sides of the pond.
There is no good reason to let people off the hook in these cases, except perhaps in the most extreme cases like someone got caught drunk driving because they got a call that their kid was bleeding all over the place.
They want to sell more software and improve relations with foreign governments that despise them. I thought that we all hated Microsoft this week because they have problems with obeying the EU and other governments. Now we hate them because they're trying to make concessions to them, even if they're not concessions that may have been asked for? Oh well, can't please everyone.
You know, I find it very ironic that they force them to unbundle Windows Media Player, but the EU doesn't promote its own home-grown apps like the VideoLAN client. In fact, it makes it legally dangerous to develop it. I for one don't trust even my own government to look after anything economics related on its own turf.
I would advise others to take a good, hard look at the double standards, inconsistencies, etc. shown in these cases before trusting the EU or other governments. Big business often exists BECAUSE of big government, so don't assume that just because a big business is at odds with the government right now that either of them are right. In the real world, two sides can be equally 100% wrong.
"Psycho attacks man over perceived slight" is the dog bites man story no matter how you wrap it up for media consumption. The man bites dog story would be "Psycho drives 70 miles to clean man's snowed-in driveway with a shovel after an online exchange."
He's psychotic, what did you expect? Him to drive up with a bouquet of fresh flowers for the women of the family and a bottle of Dom Perignon for the gentlemen to savor over fine Cuban cigars?
This is one reason why I plan to live in the South as long as I live in America. Most of the South is still relatively sane. Someone comes at you with any sort of axe, ice pick, knife, etc. you're going to be hard-pressed to find a jury that will convict you for blowing their head off.
I read stories online all the time about youths beating up or murdering people in Britain and the police harassing the 50 year old Brit who asked them to just be quiet. Who are the psychos? The punk youths, the British cop and the institution he represents. I thought the definition of psychosis is a pathological inability to tell right from wrong, and last time I checked, state power harassing law-abiding British subjects set upon by violent punks is the definition of injustice--right and wrong!--making the British legal system technically psychotic.
And unfortunately right about YouTube
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
YouTube is trying to provide a legitimate platform, but it has A LOT of IP that doesn't belong to those posting it. For better or for worse, this is illegal and somewhat unethical. Google stepped into a minefield by buying them if they don't have a comprehensive way to filter out that stuff. If I were a shareholder, I'd be deeply worried that Google has opened themselves up to a potentially fatal IP battle. Between this and the Google book search IP lawsuits, Google is gambling big time and geek opinions on the legitimacy of IP law and how it should apply won't mean crap in a court of law WRT Google.
This is just my experience from the little time I've had out of college to see both sides. When you go to a big, known enterprise company like Oracle for support, they send out a person to help you and that person works like a slave for you until your needs have been met to the specifications of the contract. Yes, I'm exaggerating, and spare me the details of your case where it didn't work like this. I'm not trying to make a universal rule here.
The "community response?" RTFM you n00b. That's ok, that's where Red Hat and others come in.
Oh wait, they can't make a killing off of the sales of their products, so the majority of the company is taken care of by the support people. Ok... so they have less incentive to invest in R&D than say, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, etc. because they can't make a large amount of cash off the product itself since it has to go out to the public, and support is something that others can come in and provide. There really is no reason why IBM consulting cannot provide Red Hat support, and that's true of many other companies.
The bottom line is that the freedom to write OSS is one thing. An expectation that you'll get rich off it is quite another.
Brazil has shown little respect for foreign IP in the past. It was an AIDS drug, which allows all of the lefties to argue that "the people" have a "right" to the research of others. Funny how these are often the same people who complain when their employer generously hires 5 Indians in India to work on their work for the cost of their salary... but don't get me started on the standard hypocrisy here.
Yeah, if I were a Microsoft executive, I might be worried that some left-wing nutjob in Brazil would nationalize that source code and fork in a "fuck the yankee imperialist capitalist" move that Latin America loves so much. OSS fans should be leery as well, since these governments have not historically demonstrated an appreciation for the requirement to give code back either. Remember Red Flag Linux?
Subsidies are frequently abused and allocated for all of the wrong reasons. They skew the market, create a new base of lobbyists and generally increase the scope of government intrusion. We wouldn't have people like Ted Stevens be the norm in Congress if the American people could bring themselves to follow what's in the Constitution, and subsidizing business isn't one of the enumerated powers of Congress. If it were a dry, boring job that made them more like "law book janitors" than power brokers, most problems would go away within an election cycle.
But no, we just need to change where and how the government gives away money, not whether or not the government should be involved at all.
Did Hurd not get the memo that the courts rediscovered the old management accountability rule, "the buck stops here?" Hell, in his case, it was a big loop back since the buck left his desk and returned to it!
What's amazing is how obvious it was that these guys knew that they were committing a slew of felonies, but did it anyway on something that would really creep out a lot of ordinary people. Fat chance of getting a sympathetic jury, Hurd. I hope for your sake you don't get any women on it because if the universe has any cosmic irony reserves left, it'll put a few women who have been victims of stalkers on your jury.
TIA's biggest hurdle was a lack of data due to public outcry
Anyone think that these "losses" might be a cover for covertly putting untold millions of records into the hands of the groups working on these spying projects?
They don't just care about what you have to hide, but what sort of judgement you show. They have never pretended that they are concerned just with what you have to hide, but what sort of character you show and how good your judgement is. A lot of leaks happen due to bad judgement calls, not malice.
I know it's cliche to say that you shouldn't post very embrassing things about yourself online (employers don't like to read "hey, I get like... totally wasted and have drug-addled gay sex with my best friend every friday!"), but it is a problem. If you go for a sensitive position, they will do a background check and you can kiss getting a security clearance goodbye with half of what often gets put on these sites. Yes, just write off your ability to possibly get anything above a confidential clearance.
On the bright side, maybe we will end up either weeding out a whole lot of future potential politicians, or make things so open that "colorful people" can get into office. Works for me either way!
The Social Democrats just got ousted from power by a moderate coallition that is seeking to introduce some market reforms into Sweden. Gee, you think that might have something to do with a fledgling party whose property rights philosophy is probably left of the Social Democrats not getting any attention?
It is suicidal for America to not tie very strong IP enforcement to its trade agreements with countries like China. Most of what we produce domestically is IP from music to code to drug designs. We are at an inherent disadvantage then, if we allow them to dump tens of billions of dollars of cheap crap in our stores, but allow their locals to run wild with our IP.
I don't like it, but that's just the way it is.
If you want to reduce our dependency on IP and strong foreign IP laws, go start a manufacturing business that produces in America at rates that can replace China and Taiwan.
Until then, I am glad to see China stepping things up, as it means we aren't getting shafted so badly anymore.
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and in the end lose his very soul?
If you need an argument against secularization of the culture (as opposed to the government), then look no further than capitalism completely unrestrained by any influence from the Protestant Christian tradition that gave birth to it.
Or, as the Communists used to say, "the Capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them."
If you have 50 cases where a law can be circumvented, it has no practical force anymore. That's what has happened to virtually every area that restrains law enforcement and the intelligence agencies in the past several decades. What we have now are just general behavior guidelines, not anything that could be construed as law and order. The irony, as I have said before, is that we continue to play Russian Roulette by allowing immigration in a "time of war" from the very countries whose people largely hate us. Despite the Neocons' penchant for WWII analogies, they can't seem to grasp the fact that we didn't allow immigration from Italy, Germany or Japan during the hostilities.
The short answer is that if you want to be reasonably safe from terrorism, deport all Saudi and Egyptian nationals from the United States and bar them from getting visas. If you think this is extremist, just imagine what would happen to these people if they got caught by a mob after a terrorist sets of a nuclear bomb. We can't know what's in their heart for America, but we do know one thing: these countries have a disturbing tendency to create people who are violently opposed to the core values of America and we don't owe them shit in terms of immigration privileges if they want to come here and change those values.
Both major parties are anti-video gamer. The Democrats are actually even worse here on "morality" than the Republicans, but the bottom line is that neither party is a good vote on this issue.
If you want them to make a difference, have them en masse vote Libertarian at the local level. That's where most of the "decency" legislation is really passed and enforced.
They pulled that crap with a Usnet provider, but our legal system actually provided the provider with some recourse against the police that moderated their seizure of equipment. The root problem in these sorts of cases is that the police can't seem to get competent forensic techs for this sort of thing. I don't know how it is in Germany, but in the US it's not for lack of money in many jurisdictions. I'd blame it in general on the police culture.
It has come to my attention that you may be in need of the financial services of an American who is sympathetic to your position. I know that we have never met, but I would consider it my honor and privilege to assist you in keeping what is rightfully yours. Respectfully, transfer your money to my bank account (attached at bottom) and I will transfer the money into a new bank account for you upon your arrival.
Sincerely,
An American who wants to help you spend^H^H^H^Have your royal family money.
I've noticed a lot of the nay sayers don't seem to have really used Vista on decent hardware. My 1 year old laptop works just fine with RC1, and in fact the GUI is significantly slicker and more responsive than any XP installation I've used. I like Vista and think it's going in a kick ass direction. Vista is not appropriate for older PCs that are underpowered, but neither was XP when it came out.
If you buy a crappy PC, it's going to become outdated sooner rather than later. It's just that simple. As a general rule, I don't pay anything less than $1200-$1300 for a new PC. My laptop was going for $2000 a year ago before I got a $750 off deal. You can't buy a cheap POS for $500 and expect it to work like a $1500-$2000 (or especially $3000+) PC. How many of these mental giants would expect ferrari performance from a stock Civic?
Slashdot Mirror
"Negative attack ads" are considered poisonous to democracy, but using spammer SEO tactics which are sleezy and destructive to Google's usefulness are not considered even worse. This is nothing less than an attempt to create a propagandistic effect with Google, whereas "negative attack ads" have to operate in the clear and open and are already covered by libel and slander laws. There are no laws against using a Google bomb to create a potentially false impression by the order in which things come up. You could have a guy who's say... obsessed with ending the War on Drugs, but a Google bomb could make him out to be some racist ass by bombing up all of the links that point to the one time he said "blacks are the most common drug dealer suspects, so profiling them before anyone else is the most effective strategy for DEA to use." Even if it's out of context, who will know now?
This is why I'm against all of the restrictions on campaigning. Instead I support 100% transparency on money. If you want to publish an ad, all you should have to do is say "I'm __INSERT__NAME__ and have the following (non-)affiliation with Candidate X." Just transparency so the public can decide.
Ironically, all the "campaign reform" advocates in the public have done is to support the things that incumbents enthusiastically support, like negative, privately-funded campaign ads that highligh what Group X doesn't like about a candidate, thus informing the public. And... if it's false, the candidate can always sue for libel.
Cartman: Try this on for size. Blood-drenched, frozen tampon popsicle!
Sadaam Hussein: Hey buddy, I know I was mean before, but don't worry, I can change!
Cartman: Okay.
Not. Fuck, shit, cock, ass, dildo, boner, bitch, pussy, butthole, Barbara Streisand!
Because we all know that artistic and technical talent are democratically distributed throughout the teeming masses! This is taking democracy way too far. Didn't anyone learn from Snakes on a Plane? You need to find good, talented writers, not give every schmuck his or her chance to take a crack at it. How about using the wiki as a way to submit your work for review to see if you can make it as a contributor instead?
But... but... that would destroy the democratic idealism!
The vast majority of experiences that I and every other person I have met with Fedora have been profoundly negative on some level. Version 1.0 was nice on my machine, and 2.0 didn't slip far, but 3.0 and especially 4.0 were just total piles of dog shit for everyone I have known. I watched as an entire CS class composed of people who ranged from total newbies to gentoo and debian rabid partisans couldn't get it installed on hardware that RHEL and SuSE 10 had not 1 iota of a problem working with. My girlfriend, who actually has a little bit of experience writing kernel modules, spent two days trying to get Fedora 5 to install on her work machine. Rinse, repeat for every other person I have met who has used Fedora post v 2.0.
When is the Fedora project going to start fixing its bugs instead of just pushing out bleeding edge packages? OpenSuSE has its problems, but it is significantly better than Fedora and Ubuntu makes Fedora look like useless because those teams work hard on bug fixes. Fedora doesn't even do Core 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 then 6.0. It's like very release they just cross their fingers and pray that the bugs will go away.
Hey, I'm just saying that it blows my mind how bad Fedora has been for everyone I know, how much griping I have seen about it online, and yet... things never change. I for one have given up hope for it since being severely burned on version 3.0 (had it kernel panic in the middle of a demo, trying to run Tomcat of all things!) and then having 4.0 refuse to even install on the same hardware that 3.0 worked on.
God forbid that we hold people accountable for their actions while intoxicated. We simply cannot be so rough and judgemental as to do that! Why they're just a good person who did something stupid while drunk!
Yes, just keep giving people excuses to be dumb. This is perhaps the single greatest reason why the Libertarian Party won't gain traction in America besides welfare-related issues. The LP stands for freedom with accountability. Most libertarians I know are sympathetic to the idea that you can punish someone 100% to the letter of the law while engaging in vice. Most conservatives and liberals aren't, and this is the problem on both sides of the pond.
There is no good reason to let people off the hook in these cases, except perhaps in the most extreme cases like someone got caught drunk driving because they got a call that their kid was bleeding all over the place.
They want to sell more software and improve relations with foreign governments that despise them. I thought that we all hated Microsoft this week because they have problems with obeying the EU and other governments. Now we hate them because they're trying to make concessions to them, even if they're not concessions that may have been asked for? Oh well, can't please everyone.
You know, I find it very ironic that they force them to unbundle Windows Media Player, but the EU doesn't promote its own home-grown apps like the VideoLAN client. In fact, it makes it legally dangerous to develop it. I for one don't trust even my own government to look after anything economics related on its own turf.
I would advise others to take a good, hard look at the double standards, inconsistencies, etc. shown in these cases before trusting the EU or other governments. Big business often exists BECAUSE of big government, so don't assume that just because a big business is at odds with the government right now that either of them are right. In the real world, two sides can be equally 100% wrong.
"Psycho attacks man over perceived slight" is the dog bites man story no matter how you wrap it up for media consumption. The man bites dog story would be "Psycho drives 70 miles to clean man's snowed-in driveway with a shovel after an online exchange."
He's psychotic, what did you expect? Him to drive up with a bouquet of fresh flowers for the women of the family and a bottle of Dom Perignon for the gentlemen to savor over fine Cuban cigars?
This is one reason why I plan to live in the South as long as I live in America. Most of the South is still relatively sane. Someone comes at you with any sort of axe, ice pick, knife, etc. you're going to be hard-pressed to find a jury that will convict you for blowing their head off.
I read stories online all the time about youths beating up or murdering people in Britain and the police harassing the 50 year old Brit who asked them to just be quiet. Who are the psychos? The punk youths, the British cop and the institution he represents. I thought the definition of psychosis is a pathological inability to tell right from wrong, and last time I checked, state power harassing law-abiding British subjects set upon by violent punks is the definition of injustice--right and wrong!--making the British legal system technically psychotic.
YouTube is trying to provide a legitimate platform, but it has A LOT of IP that doesn't belong to those posting it. For better or for worse, this is illegal and somewhat unethical. Google stepped into a minefield by buying them if they don't have a comprehensive way to filter out that stuff. If I were a shareholder, I'd be deeply worried that Google has opened themselves up to a potentially fatal IP battle. Between this and the Google book search IP lawsuits, Google is gambling big time and geek opinions on the legitimacy of IP law and how it should apply won't mean crap in a court of law WRT Google.
This is just my experience from the little time I've had out of college to see both sides. When you go to a big, known enterprise company like Oracle for support, they send out a person to help you and that person works like a slave for you until your needs have been met to the specifications of the contract. Yes, I'm exaggerating, and spare me the details of your case where it didn't work like this. I'm not trying to make a universal rule here.
The "community response?" RTFM you n00b. That's ok, that's where Red Hat and others come in.
Oh wait, they can't make a killing off of the sales of their products, so the majority of the company is taken care of by the support people. Ok... so they have less incentive to invest in R&D than say, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Oracle, etc. because they can't make a large amount of cash off the product itself since it has to go out to the public, and support is something that others can come in and provide. There really is no reason why IBM consulting cannot provide Red Hat support, and that's true of many other companies.
The bottom line is that the freedom to write OSS is one thing. An expectation that you'll get rich off it is quite another.
Brazil has shown little respect for foreign IP in the past. It was an AIDS drug, which allows all of the lefties to argue that "the people" have a "right" to the research of others. Funny how these are often the same people who complain when their employer generously hires 5 Indians in India to work on their work for the cost of their salary... but don't get me started on the standard hypocrisy here.
Yeah, if I were a Microsoft executive, I might be worried that some left-wing nutjob in Brazil would nationalize that source code and fork in a "fuck the yankee imperialist capitalist" move that Latin America loves so much. OSS fans should be leery as well, since these governments have not historically demonstrated an appreciation for the requirement to give code back either. Remember Red Flag Linux?
Subsidies are frequently abused and allocated for all of the wrong reasons. They skew the market, create a new base of lobbyists and generally increase the scope of government intrusion. We wouldn't have people like Ted Stevens be the norm in Congress if the American people could bring themselves to follow what's in the Constitution, and subsidizing business isn't one of the enumerated powers of Congress. If it were a dry, boring job that made them more like "law book janitors" than power brokers, most problems would go away within an election cycle.
But no, we just need to change where and how the government gives away money, not whether or not the government should be involved at all.
and be done with it!!!
Did Hurd not get the memo that the courts rediscovered the old management accountability rule, "the buck stops here?" Hell, in his case, it was a big loop back since the buck left his desk and returned to it!
What's amazing is how obvious it was that these guys knew that they were committing a slew of felonies, but did it anyway on something that would really creep out a lot of ordinary people. Fat chance of getting a sympathetic jury, Hurd. I hope for your sake you don't get any women on it because if the universe has any cosmic irony reserves left, it'll put a few women who have been victims of stalkers on your jury.
TIA was "abolished"
TIA's biggest hurdle was a lack of data due to public outcry
Anyone think that these "losses" might be a cover for covertly putting untold millions of records into the hands of the groups working on these spying projects?
They don't just care about what you have to hide, but what sort of judgement you show. They have never pretended that they are concerned just with what you have to hide, but what sort of character you show and how good your judgement is. A lot of leaks happen due to bad judgement calls, not malice.
You just equated a moderate party with conservatism. That's not possible in any country. That's like saying "Socialist Party" (capitalist).
I know it's cliche to say that you shouldn't post very embrassing things about yourself online (employers don't like to read "hey, I get like... totally wasted and have drug-addled gay sex with my best friend every friday!"), but it is a problem. If you go for a sensitive position, they will do a background check and you can kiss getting a security clearance goodbye with half of what often gets put on these sites. Yes, just write off your ability to possibly get anything above a confidential clearance.
On the bright side, maybe we will end up either weeding out a whole lot of future potential politicians, or make things so open that "colorful people" can get into office. Works for me either way!
The Social Democrats just got ousted from power by a moderate coallition that is seeking to introduce some market reforms into Sweden. Gee, you think that might have something to do with a fledgling party whose property rights philosophy is probably left of the Social Democrats not getting any attention?
Nah, couldn't be that...
It is suicidal for America to not tie very strong IP enforcement to its trade agreements with countries like China. Most of what we produce domestically is IP from music to code to drug designs. We are at an inherent disadvantage then, if we allow them to dump tens of billions of dollars of cheap crap in our stores, but allow their locals to run wild with our IP.
I don't like it, but that's just the way it is.
If you want to reduce our dependency on IP and strong foreign IP laws, go start a manufacturing business that produces in America at rates that can replace China and Taiwan.
Until then, I am glad to see China stepping things up, as it means we aren't getting shafted so badly anymore.
what sharecropping is to realestate ownership. It's just that simple.
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and in the end lose his very soul?
If you need an argument against secularization of the culture (as opposed to the government), then look no further than capitalism completely unrestrained by any influence from the Protestant Christian tradition that gave birth to it.
Or, as the Communists used to say, "the Capitalists will sell us the rope we will use to hang them."
If you have 50 cases where a law can be circumvented, it has no practical force anymore. That's what has happened to virtually every area that restrains law enforcement and the intelligence agencies in the past several decades. What we have now are just general behavior guidelines, not anything that could be construed as law and order. The irony, as I have said before, is that we continue to play Russian Roulette by allowing immigration in a "time of war" from the very countries whose people largely hate us. Despite the Neocons' penchant for WWII analogies, they can't seem to grasp the fact that we didn't allow immigration from Italy, Germany or Japan during the hostilities.
The short answer is that if you want to be reasonably safe from terrorism, deport all Saudi and Egyptian nationals from the United States and bar them from getting visas. If you think this is extremist, just imagine what would happen to these people if they got caught by a mob after a terrorist sets of a nuclear bomb. We can't know what's in their heart for America, but we do know one thing: these countries have a disturbing tendency to create people who are violently opposed to the core values of America and we don't owe them shit in terms of immigration privileges if they want to come here and change those values.
Both major parties are anti-video gamer. The Democrats are actually even worse here on "morality" than the Republicans, but the bottom line is that neither party is a good vote on this issue.
If you want them to make a difference, have them en masse vote Libertarian at the local level. That's where most of the "decency" legislation is really passed and enforced.
They pulled that crap with a Usnet provider, but our legal system actually provided the provider with some recourse against the police that moderated their seizure of equipment. The root problem in these sorts of cases is that the police can't seem to get competent forensic techs for this sort of thing. I don't know how it is in Germany, but in the US it's not for lack of money in many jurisdictions. I'd blame it in general on the police culture.
Dear Madam,
It has come to my attention that you may be in need of the financial services of an American who is sympathetic to your position. I know that we have never met, but I would consider it my honor and privilege to assist you in keeping what is rightfully yours. Respectfully, transfer your money to my bank account (attached at bottom) and I will transfer the money into a new bank account for you upon your arrival.
Sincerely,
An American who wants to help you spend^H^H^H^Have your royal family money.
I've noticed a lot of the nay sayers don't seem to have really used Vista on decent hardware. My 1 year old laptop works just fine with RC1, and in fact the GUI is significantly slicker and more responsive than any XP installation I've used. I like Vista and think it's going in a kick ass direction. Vista is not appropriate for older PCs that are underpowered, but neither was XP when it came out.
If you buy a crappy PC, it's going to become outdated sooner rather than later. It's just that simple. As a general rule, I don't pay anything less than $1200-$1300 for a new PC. My laptop was going for $2000 a year ago before I got a $750 off deal. You can't buy a cheap POS for $500 and expect it to work like a $1500-$2000 (or especially $3000+) PC. How many of these mental giants would expect ferrari performance from a stock Civic?