Unless the actual handset is compatible with both the US and Europe (tri or quad band) just changing the SIM would do no good
Which is why if you ever travel it's always best to get a quad band phone, unlock it, then if traveling you just pick up a local SIM where ever you go, especially as now most countries have them cheap and easy to get. Saves one an absolute fortune in roaming charges
As to the hotel charges, for the wife to use her UK mobile with UK SIM in the US the charges would have probably been even greater than the hotel charges, both for incoming and outgoing and those charges would have been the same even if she was calling the very hotel she standing in
Yes it is possible (both in the US and Europe) but expect to have problems getting loan's, credit, bank accounts, anything that requires a ongoing contract of service for payment (non prepaid mobile, cable/Sat TV, home rental)
Managed to have a blank/no credit records in both the US and the UK (lived in both) until I was in my early 30's, but it made things very difficult as the funny thing is no credit report (which basically means you have never needed a credit line/loan, never mind defaulted) is considered even worse than a credit report full of bad debts and bankruptcies
Eventually caved in and got some "poor credit rating" credit cards (all that one can get with no credit report) to build up my credit rating, within 12 months had a top notch credit rating for very little effort
Aye the Asperger defence is pretty lame but honestly he should not even have to use it, the extradition laws they are using to extradite him should not have been used it this case as not only were they intended only for suspected terrorists but to boot they are completely one sided, requireing no evidence of a crime to presented by the US for someone to be extradited from the UK while the same not being true in reverse
Though wonder why they have not pursued this to the European court level as the extradition treaty is already generally considered illegal at that level, just it has not been tested in their courts yet
Only thing surprising is that 4/10 companies do plan to upgrade next year (at this moment, doubt they will stick to it), I would have expected 1/10 at best.
We are in the middle of world recession, IT budgets have been slashed all over and considering the amount of work a large enterprise has to do to upgrade a desktop OS (all apps, either off the shelf or bespoke have to be tested and upgraded as necessary) I doubt even 1/10 will actually manage to upgrade next year
Windows 7 roll out will not really begin for most major companies until 2011 financial year at the earliest, until then it will mainly be small companies and home users and possibly places that already upgraded to vista if there are not to many incompatibilities or differences and they have the budget for it
" To ensure that we're being absolutely crystal clear, this article isn't focused on the discussion concerning the differences between the pure RPG levelling system versus "player skill-based" games." Yet that's exactly what the article mainly focuses on., even after taking out the most obvious comments by contributors that "cross the line"
It's a pointless debate really, because unless all things are equal (same level, same class, same gear, same skill tree, same amount of skill points or whatever other flavour of advancement/customization the game might have) and there is minimal RNG, "player skill" can always be called into question.
Simple fact is, once you know a game well, you know who is good and who is not, at least in your opinion, because if you ask around you will probably find 20 people in a few minutes who disagree with you
Certain aspects of any MMO will require player skill, majority will not (otherwise they will locking out too many potential paying customers).
Best to just accept it and move on as debating who/what/where requires/has skill or not, especially on such a grand scale, is totally pointless
The problem was Gov originally tried to make ID cards a LOT more than just your name and photo, to just list some of the things they were talking about putting on them
* Home address * Telephone number * National Insurance number (the equivalent of the U.S. Social Security number) * Medical records * Criminal record * Iris scan * Fingerprint record
And to boot they wanted to put in on pretty unsecured RFID chips and build a massive central database that would also contain all this info and that god only knows how many 100's of thousands of public sector employee's could access (oh yeah lets not forget other countries like USA were already rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of getting all that info on foreign nations that crossed their borders)
If they had just tried just to do what most others countries do, just a name and photo there would have been only a tiny fraction of the opposition against the whole thing and it would have been rolled out years ago at a fraction of the cost
Classic case of the major IT outsourcing company's telling IT illiterate officials what is technically possible (and massively understating the costs/risks) and the officials turning around and saying " we will take everything" without once stopping and asking "just because we can do it does it mean we should do it?"
And to be honest, anyone who thinks this is the end of the ID card fiasco is dreaming, they will still push it though the back door, first by targeting "soft targets", like by requiring foreign nationals living in the UK to have them (already under way), then once it is done they will move to other target sectors (most likely next will be those claiming social security, no ID card? Cannot pick up your dole), before we know it those without a ID card will be a minority and then it will be easy for them to change the law
HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash?
Not really, for one simple reason
Flash/Silverlight are controled by their respective plug in's/api's and so forth. Thus no worrys about how something will render if one person is using one browser and another is using something else
On the other hand, HTML is controled by the browser and each will do things a little different, either because they have not fully followed standards (MS) or they have added extras in a attempt to out do each other (all of them)
Thus there will be always a place for things like flash/SL as with them content is delivered exactly as the designer/developer intended not how the browser decides to interpret it
"So, let's let poor Ralph off the hook because the end result here is more power than Dems dared to even dream about 9 years ago."
Which is atually a very bad. Ruling party with not checks or balances that a viable opposition provides quickly becomes democracy's worst nightmare.
I would take the Dem's any day of the week before Republicans but Dem's not afraid of getting kicked out would be just as bad as 8 years of Bush were
"You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks! "
Knowing some mechanics all i can say is, you could not be more wrong
Not heard of the Patriot Act have you?
What's worse is under it you will not even be able to complain because if you tell anyone you got compled via that law, even your lawyer, you will be breaking the law
It will be viable, grab say.shop and then you can create every single.shop you can think of at no extra cost
Price tag will hold block out the little guys
What will also probably start to happen is anyone who buy's a domain from one of these TLD owners and sets up a site under that TLD that becomes popular will find themselves being held to ransom or hijacked as the TLD owners will be able to make their own rules
Whole thing is a really really bad idea, not only in base concept but in proposed implimentation
"It's simple. The company that agreed to pay them that can't afford to pay them that. A new entity (the government) came in which is not bound by those contracts. The people who obviously do not deserve any pay should consider themselves very lucky that they aren't stripped of every asset they own and then tossed out in the streets. That would be fair and just, but not many people are even suggesting it."
You have no idea how the real world works. Yes the Gov is still bound by the contracts, same as any new owner of a established company is bound by any pre existing contracts/debts.
And regardless of what whatever tactics the gov try to do, especially retro the latest one of retroactive taxation, expect them to lose in court. These guys can afford the best lawyers
The main problem with these bonus's is they are not bonus's as the rest of the world (non financial sector) understand them and have not been for years. Like who outside the financial sector gets their "bonus" agreed the year before (if not years before) it is meant to be the bonus for? No one...but in the financial sector they do
These "bonus" are just salary in disguise, paid as lump sums at year end.
Now why have they been disguising them? That's a whole other can of worms
"Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please."
Probably true, but also very clever, they know many many pvpers are VERY UNHAPPY with WoW since WoLK and Bliz don't seem that interested in fixing those issues any time soon, so now is a good time for Warhammer to be doing this
"More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important."
Honestly after you reach much more than the half million mark it is pretty unimportant in terms of MMO gaming experience how many more players you have because in majority of games (wow included) those players are divided by servers/shards/realms
That all said, still will not be playing WAR for one simple reason, EA
As the USA just ignores WTO when it suits them, like in the case of Internet Gambling and Antigua, do they honestly expect a country like China to pay any attention to WTO?
And god help USA if it try's to "punish" China, as China could make the dollar worth less than a Zimbabwean dollar and blast the US economy back to barter system overnight
Many people forget, that guy who's a shark who says "he will make you look good" is making bloody sure the people above you notice what he is doing as well (as long as he has not screwed up, if he has it will be your fault as his manager..at least that's what he will be saying behind your back) and when next round of cuts come along if you are still there, he will be stabbing you in the back for your job
Stuart's and Kellys are just road kill on the corporate ladder to the Doug's of this world and more fool the Kelly's for making it easy on them
I always pay cash to top up my card. Thus there is no way to link it to me
Now if i can figure this out and do it even though i have nothing really to hide, do they honestly think criminals and terrorists will not figure it out
"I seem to recall an arguement implying that if an ISP filters their traffic, they're not being neutral about which data they allow, and this may cause some legal problems" You are refering to the "safe harbour" provisions in USA law which was originally made for telecoms in general not just the internet
Pipex have been some kind of throttling for a while now, but it seems to depend on your location more than how much you personally download and they seem to regularly turn it on and off
Was using them for about 4 years, at my previous address never had any problems with torrents but when i moved it was virtually every 2nd month when my torrent speeds dropped to nothing
After i changed to demon never had a problem again. To be honest Pipex are no longer worth their above average subcription costs. It's even open to debate if Demon are worth it either
"I'm so tired of people making such statements. You get ZERO new content for FREE. You pay a monthly subscription which funds new development, among other things. You PAID for the new content. It is not free!" Very true, you get little (well nothing) for "free"
But where most other MMO's charge just for the service and keep nearly all new contect for the expansion packs (which get more and more frequent) Bliz are contantly adding new content on a regular basis (and sometimes these mini contect updates contain more than expansion packs in other games) outside of the expansion packs with roughly the same monthly subcription fee as other MMO's
Or in more simple terms
In WoW $15 a month gets you access to game and decent content updates about every 3 months
In other MMO's $15 a month gets you access to the game and except once in blue moon little else
So easy to see how many people would consider the new content "free"
"The fact that most of your money disappears into NPC shops with set prices keeps inflation from happening" There is massive inflation in WoW as the NPC vendors only suck up a fraction of the money
Just because a few items have "price controls" does not mean there is no inflation (especially when those items will only be bought once or twice per character or are of low value)
"US of A invests huge amount of money into producing top quality music, videos, and other intellectual property. " No the US mainly invests huge amounts of money in producing low quality products which they then mass market around the world on the cheap, thus largely diminishing much of the home grown production markets because their potencial margins become so slim that it is bearly worthwhile (To ease your understanding a simalar senario in reverse would be Japanese electronics/white goods/cars during the 80's and what they did to the US production market)
Sure USA produces some real quality movies/TV series/music, but i would say even most americans would agree that it is less than 5% of your total output , but the remaining 95% gets sold so cheap abroad that local networks just buy it up for time fillers, leaving only a tiny budget for locally produced material
"Speak for yourself. My TV provider [1] offers BBC 1 and 2 plus several BBC radio channels. They pay the BBC for the privilege. Why shouldn't I be able to access the same programming via the Web?" And there is the reason why, your providers pay for the "privilege" to offer you BBC services, which you turn pay you provider for.
If the bbc start offering the programming to you direct, for free (or even if on a pay basis) they dilite the value of the programming to your providers. Result? Your providers either demand a reduction in the rights costs they pay the BBC or worse, drop the bbc entirely
Same with individual programes, say BBC started offering next season of Dr Who to the USA online, what network would pay a premium to the bbc to show it over there? And thats for new programs, with existing ones the rights have probably already been sold to individual networks in each country. If the BBC started offering direct and for free the programs to those networks customers they would have their ass's dragged to court faster than they could blink
BBC have two main sources of income, first the licence fee paid by the UK residents and secondly the licencing revenue from selling their productions abroad. They don't want wipe one of their revenue streams with this internet offering, which i would say is reasonable
So, put yourself in the shoes of a CIO faced with replacing hundreds, or even thousends of PCs because they need to be upgraded to run Vista, and the difficulty of going to the board once again with a request for huge amounts of cash for very little gain, and then maybe Linux starts to look a little better.
Maybe, until the CIO really starts thinking about it and realises the following
*To switch over to Non MS OS the entire user base would have to go to days worth of retraining (with lost productivity on top of the training costs) as non of them would never have seen a Non MS machine and it's related software before
*To switch over to Non MS OS nearly the entire IT department would have to be retrained/replaced
*To switch over to Non MS OS loads of in house software would have scraped or altered
*To switch over to Non MS OS loads of off the shelf software would have to be sourced
*To switch over to Non MS OS the CIO will spend the next year or two being enemy number of everyone in the organisation and would likely not be there to see the end of the project because he was fired
You will then hear the CIO saying "F*ck that, I want to keep my job, it might suck but we are staying with MS"
Unless you are a relatively new or small organisation changing over from MS to something non MS is not for the faint hearted and any CIO contemplating it better that the FULL backing of the board, skin like steel and a dozen blank checks to cover all the unforeseen's
"I agree with WheelDweller. I totally *want* data mining so that Islamic terrorists are caught." Not you don't if you look down the line. Why? First off because it is illegal extraction of data by the US government on European citizens (or even its own, when done by the CIA and many US citizen data would have been in there) . Do you really want the your own gov. breaking the law?
And if you answer to this is "I don't care", will you say the same when the rest of gov's around the world start doing the same to YOUR records? Will you happy if/when the French, Chinese or Nigerians are data mining your transactions?
Also, this type of data mining is worthless for catching terrorists, most terrorists have known for years to avoid the regular banking system due the drug money laundering regulations that have been in place around the world for years
I would say this whole exercise had little to do with terrorism and a lot more to do with the fading power of the US Fed.
Now that many industries are slowly stopping doing large transactions though the US legal jurisdiction or in US dollars the US Fed is losing its ability to call the shots, something Bush and his people are not happy about, especially as it is his cronies who own the Fed
Slashdot Mirror
Unless the actual handset is compatible with both the US and Europe (tri or quad band) just changing the SIM would do no good
Which is why if you ever travel it's always best to get a quad band phone, unlock it, then if traveling you just pick up a local SIM where ever you go, especially as now most countries have them cheap and easy to get. Saves one an absolute fortune in roaming charges
As to the hotel charges, for the wife to use her UK mobile with UK SIM in the US the charges would have probably been even greater than the hotel charges, both for incoming and outgoing and those charges would have been the same even if she was calling the very hotel she standing in
Yes it is possible (both in the US and Europe) but expect to have problems getting loan's, credit, bank accounts, anything that requires a ongoing contract of service for payment (non prepaid mobile, cable/Sat TV, home rental)
Managed to have a blank/no credit records in both the US and the UK (lived in both) until I was in my early 30's, but it made things very difficult as the funny thing is no credit report (which basically means you have never needed a credit line/loan, never mind defaulted) is considered even worse than a credit report full of bad debts and bankruptcies
Eventually caved in and got some "poor credit rating" credit cards (all that one can get with no credit report) to build up my credit rating, within 12 months had a top notch credit rating for very little effort
Aye the Asperger defence is pretty lame but honestly he should not even have to use it, the extradition laws they are using to extradite him should not have been used it this case as not only were they intended only for suspected terrorists but to boot they are completely one sided, requireing no evidence of a crime to presented by the US for someone to be extradited from the UK while the same not being true in reverse
Though wonder why they have not pursued this to the European court level as the extradition treaty is already generally considered illegal at that level, just it has not been tested in their courts yet
Only thing surprising is that 4/10 companies do plan to upgrade next year (at this moment, doubt they will stick to it), I would have expected 1/10 at best.
We are in the middle of world recession, IT budgets have been slashed all over and considering the amount of work a large enterprise has to do to upgrade a desktop OS (all apps, either off the shelf or bespoke have to be tested and upgraded as necessary) I doubt even 1/10 will actually manage to upgrade next year
Windows 7 roll out will not really begin for most major companies until 2011 financial year at the earliest, until then it will mainly be small companies and home users and possibly places that already upgraded to vista if there are not to many incompatibilities or differences and they have the budget for it
" To ensure that we're being absolutely crystal clear, this article isn't focused on the discussion concerning the differences between the pure RPG levelling system versus "player skill-based" games."
Yet that's exactly what the article mainly focuses on., even after taking out the most obvious comments by contributors that "cross the line"
It's a pointless debate really, because unless all things are equal (same level, same class, same gear, same skill tree, same amount of skill points or whatever other flavour of advancement/customization the game might have) and there is minimal RNG, "player skill" can always be called into question.
Simple fact is, once you know a game well, you know who is good and who is not, at least in your opinion, because if you ask around you will probably find 20 people in a few minutes who disagree with you
Certain aspects of any MMO will require player skill, majority will not (otherwise they will locking out too many potential paying customers).
Best to just accept it and move on as debating who/what/where requires/has skill or not, especially on such a grand scale, is totally pointless
The problem was Gov originally tried to make ID cards a LOT more than just your name and photo, to just list some of the things they were talking about putting on them
* Home address
* Telephone number
* National Insurance number (the equivalent of the U.S. Social Security number)
* Medical records
* Criminal record
* Iris scan
* Fingerprint record
And to boot they wanted to put in on pretty unsecured RFID chips and build a massive central database that would also contain all this info and that god only knows how many 100's of thousands of public sector employee's could access (oh yeah lets not forget other countries like USA were already rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of getting all that info on foreign nations that crossed their borders)
If they had just tried just to do what most others countries do, just a name and photo there would have been only a tiny fraction of the opposition against the whole thing and it would have been rolled out years ago at a fraction of the cost
Classic case of the major IT outsourcing company's telling IT illiterate officials what is technically possible (and massively understating the costs/risks) and the officials turning around and saying " we will take everything" without once stopping and asking "just because we can do it does it mean we should do it?"
And to be honest, anyone who thinks this is the end of the ID card fiasco is dreaming, they will still push it though the back door, first by targeting "soft targets", like by requiring foreign nationals living in the UK to have them (already under way), then once it is done they will move to other target sectors (most likely next will be those claiming social security, no ID card? Cannot pick up your dole), before we know it those without a ID card will be a minority and then it will be easy for them to change the law
HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash? Not really, for one simple reason Flash/Silverlight are controled by their respective plug in's/api's and so forth. Thus no worrys about how something will render if one person is using one browser and another is using something else On the other hand, HTML is controled by the browser and each will do things a little different, either because they have not fully followed standards (MS) or they have added extras in a attempt to out do each other (all of them) Thus there will be always a place for things like flash/SL as with them content is delivered exactly as the designer/developer intended not how the browser decides to interpret it
"So, let's let poor Ralph off the hook because the end result here is more power than Dems dared to even dream about 9 years ago." Which is atually a very bad. Ruling party with not checks or balances that a viable opposition provides quickly becomes democracy's worst nightmare. I would take the Dem's any day of the week before Republicans but Dem's not afraid of getting kicked out would be just as bad as 8 years of Bush were
"You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks! " Knowing some mechanics all i can say is, you could not be more wrong
Not heard of the Patriot Act have you? What's worse is under it you will not even be able to complain because if you tell anyone you got compled via that law, even your lawyer, you will be breaking the law
It will be viable, grab say .shop and then you can create every single .shop you can think of at no extra cost
Price tag will hold block out the little guys
What will also probably start to happen is anyone who buy's a domain from one of these TLD owners and sets up a site under that TLD that becomes popular will find themselves being held to ransom or hijacked as the TLD owners will be able to make their own rules
Whole thing is a really really bad idea, not only in base concept but in proposed implimentation
"It's simple. The company that agreed to pay them that can't afford to pay them that. A new entity (the government) came in which is not bound by those contracts. The people who obviously do not deserve any pay should consider themselves very lucky that they aren't stripped of every asset they own and then tossed out in the streets. That would be fair and just, but not many people are even suggesting it." You have no idea how the real world works. Yes the Gov is still bound by the contracts, same as any new owner of a established company is bound by any pre existing contracts/debts. And regardless of what whatever tactics the gov try to do, especially retro the latest one of retroactive taxation, expect them to lose in court. These guys can afford the best lawyers The main problem with these bonus's is they are not bonus's as the rest of the world (non financial sector) understand them and have not been for years. Like who outside the financial sector gets their "bonus" agreed the year before (if not years before) it is meant to be the bonus for? No one...but in the financial sector they do These "bonus" are just salary in disguise, paid as lump sums at year end. Now why have they been disguising them? That's a whole other can of worms
"Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please." Probably true, but also very clever, they know many many pvpers are VERY UNHAPPY with WoW since WoLK and Bliz don't seem that interested in fixing those issues any time soon, so now is a good time for Warhammer to be doing this "More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important." Honestly after you reach much more than the half million mark it is pretty unimportant in terms of MMO gaming experience how many more players you have because in majority of games (wow included) those players are divided by servers/shards/realms That all said, still will not be playing WAR for one simple reason, EA
As the USA just ignores WTO when it suits them, like in the case of Internet Gambling and Antigua, do they honestly expect a country like China to pay any attention to WTO? And god help USA if it try's to "punish" China, as China could make the dollar worth less than a Zimbabwean dollar and blast the US economy back to barter system overnight
Before the year out Doug will have Kelly's job
Many people forget, that guy who's a shark who says "he will make you look good" is making bloody sure the people above you notice what he is doing as well (as long as he has not screwed up, if he has it will be your fault as his manager..at least that's what he will be saying behind your back) and when next round of cuts come along if you are still there, he will be stabbing you in the back for your job
Stuart's and Kellys are just road kill on the corporate ladder to the Doug's of this world and more fool the Kelly's for making it easy on them
I always pay cash to top up my card. Thus there is no way to link it to me
Now if i can figure this out and do it even though i have nothing really to hide, do they honestly think criminals and terrorists will not figure it out
"I seem to recall an arguement implying that if an ISP filters their traffic, they're not being neutral about which data they allow, and this may cause some legal problems"
You are refering to the "safe harbour" provisions in USA law which was originally made for telecoms in general not just the internet
AFAIK UK has no such provisions
Pipex have been some kind of throttling for a while now, but it seems to depend on your location more than how much you personally download and they seem to regularly turn it on and off
Was using them for about 4 years, at my previous address never had any problems with torrents but when i moved it was virtually every 2nd month when my torrent speeds dropped to nothing
After i changed to demon never had a problem again. To be honest Pipex are no longer worth their above average subcription costs. It's even open to debate if Demon are worth it either
"I'm so tired of people making such statements. You get ZERO new content for FREE. You pay a monthly subscription which funds new development, among other things. You PAID for the new content. It is not free!"
Very true, you get little (well nothing) for "free"
But where most other MMO's charge just for the service and keep nearly all new contect for the expansion packs (which get more and more frequent) Bliz are contantly adding new content on a regular basis (and sometimes these mini contect updates contain more than expansion packs in other games) outside of the expansion packs with roughly the same monthly subcription fee as other MMO's
Or in more simple terms
In WoW $15 a month gets you access to game and decent content updates about every 3 months
In other MMO's $15 a month gets you access to the game and except once in blue moon little else
So easy to see how many people would consider the new content "free"
"The fact that most of your money disappears into NPC shops with set prices keeps inflation from happening"
There is massive inflation in WoW as the NPC vendors only suck up a fraction of the money
Just because a few items have "price controls" does not mean there is no inflation (especially when those items will only be bought once or twice per character or are of low value)
"US of A invests huge amount of money into producing top quality music, videos, and other intellectual property. "
No the US mainly invests huge amounts of money in producing low quality products which they then mass market around the world on the cheap, thus largely diminishing much of the home grown production markets because their potencial margins become so slim that it is bearly worthwhile (To ease your understanding a simalar senario in reverse would be Japanese electronics/white goods/cars during the 80's and what they did to the US production market)
Sure USA produces some real quality movies/TV series/music, but i would say even most americans would agree that it is less than 5% of your total output , but the remaining 95% gets sold so cheap abroad that local networks just buy it up for time fillers, leaving only a tiny budget for locally produced material
"Speak for yourself. My TV provider [1] offers BBC 1 and 2 plus several BBC radio channels. They pay the BBC for the privilege. Why shouldn't I be able to access the same programming via the Web?"
And there is the reason why, your providers pay for the "privilege" to offer you BBC services, which you turn pay you provider for.
If the bbc start offering the programming to you direct, for free (or even if on a pay basis) they dilite the value of the programming to your providers. Result? Your providers either demand a reduction in the rights costs they pay the BBC or worse, drop the bbc entirely
Same with individual programes, say BBC started offering next season of Dr Who to the USA online, what network would pay a premium to the bbc to show it over there? And thats for new programs, with existing ones the rights have probably already been sold to individual networks in each country. If the BBC started offering direct and for free the programs to those networks customers they would have their ass's dragged to court faster than they could blink
BBC have two main sources of income, first the licence fee paid by the UK residents and secondly the licencing revenue from selling their productions abroad. They don't want wipe one of their revenue streams with this internet offering, which i would say is reasonable
You sure about that? http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7461.html
So, put yourself in the shoes of a CIO faced with replacing hundreds, or even thousends of PCs because they need to be upgraded to run Vista, and the difficulty of going to the board once again with a request for huge amounts of cash for very little gain, and then maybe Linux starts to look a little better.
Maybe, until the CIO really starts thinking about it and realises the following
*To switch over to Non MS OS the entire user base would have to go to days worth of retraining (with lost productivity on top of the training costs) as non of them would never have seen a Non MS machine and it's related software before
*To switch over to Non MS OS nearly the entire IT department would have to be retrained/replaced
*To switch over to Non MS OS loads of in house software would have scraped or altered
*To switch over to Non MS OS loads of off the shelf software would have to be sourced
*To switch over to Non MS OS the CIO will spend the next year or two being enemy number of everyone in the organisation and would likely not be there to see the end of the project because he was fired
You will then hear the CIO saying "F*ck that, I want to keep my job, it might suck but we are staying with MS"
Unless you are a relatively new or small organisation changing over from MS to something non MS is not for the faint hearted and any CIO contemplating it better that the FULL backing of the board, skin like steel and a dozen blank checks to cover all the unforeseen's
"I agree with WheelDweller. I totally *want* data mining so that Islamic terrorists are caught."
Not you don't if you look down the line. Why?
First off because it is illegal extraction of data by the US government on European citizens (or even its own, when done by the CIA and many US citizen data would have been in there) . Do you really want the your own gov. breaking the law?
And if you answer to this is "I don't care", will you say the same when the rest of gov's around the world start doing the same to YOUR records? Will you happy if/when the French, Chinese or Nigerians are data mining your transactions?
Also, this type of data mining is worthless for catching terrorists, most terrorists have known for years to avoid the regular banking system due the drug money laundering regulations that have been in place around the world for years
I would say this whole exercise had little to do with terrorism and a lot more to do with the fading power of the US Fed.
Now that many industries are slowly stopping doing large transactions though the US legal jurisdiction or in US dollars the US Fed is losing its ability to call the shots, something Bush and his people are not happy about, especially as it is his cronies who own the Fed