Shifting the cost from the employer to the government helps in fighting anti-dumping lawsuits in GATT. If GM tries to sell its cars for less than the basic cost+health care, it can be sued for dumping.
Secondly without the unbounded liability that is increasing faster than inflation straining its bottom line, its credit rating would go up and its cost of servicing debt will go down.
It would make sense for GM and ALL American companies to shift the burden of health care to the Government. It may have to increase the pay of its employees to retain talent. But most young healthy productive workers with low seniority and lower pay and less burdensome union contracts will accept a small increase, something around 5000$. GM would have been better off ditching its older employees and retirees and passing them on to the taxpayer. Not that it matters now anyway. The tax payer owns GM and all its liabilities now.
Free speech, the right to bear arms, a common trait of all things that are actually rights is that they do not cost money. They are intangible.
You do not have a right to tangible things. They cost money. All you can do is help lower costs so you can afford them.
So I can have guns even if have no money? Hurray? Where do I collect my Beretta? I am going to call it Sweetness. You can't copyright that name, Steven Colbert!
There is already a bureaucrat between you and your doctor. Yes, a nameless, faceless bureaucrat. But this guy works for the private health insurance company. He knows you get your insurance from your employer and you don't have the freedom to dump him and his company and switch your providers, without also ditching your job. You don't know what his pay, compensation and incentive plans are. How much he will make if he denies you coverage for this procedure or that medication.
The reason why the health reform as proposed by the Dems lacks popular is because, it does not go far enough. No chance to escape from whatever your employer dishes out in the name of health care. No recourse if your employer decides suddenly to drop health coverage from the compensation. Have to just bear it if your "contribution" is increased, your copay is increase and your doctor is dropped from the list of preferred providers.
No relief to the employers either. They are competing with Europe and Japan and their competitors do not have to pay for health care. If GM did not have to pay 2000$ per vehicle to provide for health care for its 1 million employees and retirees between 1990 and 2004, it could have competed effectively with the imports.
Already there is public option in so many areas where the private sector refuses to serve. National Flood Insurance Program to insure homes that can not get private insurance. Postal service to serve mail and parcels to places where FedEx and UPS wont go. The examples are endless.
Almost all the netbooks are now shipping with preboot OS, going by names like InstantOS, QuickWeb, InstantWeb etc. They are all based on splashtop linux or its competitor. They boot ultrafast, typically under 10 seconds and offer web, skype, photos, music and video access. The GUI is totally locked down and it is impossible to get behind it to Linux. Often times it does not have much of writable space and the main Windows Hard disk partition is not writable. So it becomes super secure device to access the net from public wifi hotspots like airports and coffee shops. Viruses cant write anything to any place. So many people who are mainly net centric never boot to full Windows. They stay in preboot and quit. Only when they need to download pictures and music into the hard disk they boot to full Windows,
These preboot Linux will act like training wheels to let people kick their dependence on Windows. So pretty soon we might get a real year of the linux.
Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game. What's wrong with that? Did you want Microsoft to go the Linux way and "donate" the software for "free?"
Get a life...Have some faith.
Well, what is wrong in the customers resisting the profit motivated actions of their vendors? Customers have as much right to protect their money as does Microsoft have for making their profits.
Some actions of the vendors, including Microsoft, enhances the productivity and competitiveness of their customers. Rightfully the vendors, including Microsoft, are entitled to a share of the extra profits generated. But some other actions by the vendor, does not enhance the productivity or competitiveness of their clients, and the customer would be better served by switching to a competitor of the current vendor. Actions by the current vendor that prevents this switch by vendor lock would hamper the clients from employing their money, maximizing their profits etc. And we have as much right to highlight to potential long term danger and make everyone aware of it.
Why is Microsoft and its apologists are so against people making informed decisions? Vendor lock is real. Companies are hurting from it.
Well, just yesterday they sparked off a row by saying "privacy concerns are for people with something to hide". This bigger row would kick that off the front pages. BTW g and k are both transliterated to the same glyph in most schemes for Tamil.
Will find citations about this problem. Essentially Geothermal building heating systems bury a large loop of pipe in the ground well below the frost line and circulate water through them. They use a heat pump (air conditioner running in reverse) with the ground as the source and the building as the sink. You need to put in mechanical energy to keep the system going. Figure of merit is the measure of how many units of heat is delivered to the building for each unit of energy used to drive the heat pump. Back when I was doing Thermody I (thank you Dr Bhaskar and Dr Venkatesh) this number was between 6 and 8. Now a days I see high efficiency aircons with efficicency ration in the 12, 13 or 14. Not sure if this is directly figure of merit of the heat pump or some factor involved.
Coming to the "earth heat being used up", essentially as the pump operates the earth in immediate contact with the buried loop starts cooling down and heat from further up would "flow" towards the buried loop. After running this system for decades there will be temperature gradient next to the loop. Most places in USA the frost line is 42 inches. That is no matter how cold the air gets, it can not raise the temp 42 inches below the ground above freezing! Shows how good an insulator earth is.
After two decades of operation the ground next to the loop reaches freezing temp. There is the temperature gradient, even though the temperature beyond three of four feet is much above freezing and places six to eight feet from the loop is practically not affected by heat pump running for decades, the heat pump becomes very very inefficient.
Geothermal energy to heat homes is either renewable or cheap, not both at the same time.
I had a colleague from Europe, where geothermal heating was very popular in 1980s. What they did not realize was that the earth is such a insulator that the available "heat" from the ground slowly gets used up and over some 20 years there is nothing left, the earth surrounding the buried pipe got so cold and the heat from the surrounding does not flow in fast enough.
Not an insurmountable problem. They should pump heat back into the ground in summer by using the same pipes as the radiator for their A/C. But if they cheap out during installation, the geothermal heat wont be renewable.
When I was growing up a movie had this promotion going on in print ads.
A large blank page with just one line segment and this question. "How do you shorten this line without erasing any part of it? See the movie blah[*]".
The solution in the movie was "draw a bigger line next to it". Well, the evil of "why do you care if you have nothing to hide" will be pushed aside by bigger tangible evil of these scammers.
[*] blah= iru kOdukaL, (meaning Two linesegments in Tamil), by K Balachandar.
Everyone seems to be focused on what is found in the emails and what is significant and what is not etc. But just look at what is NOT there. For years the skeptics side has been alleging a conspiracy, funded by communists, socialists, George Soros, Al Gore... Some global anti-American organization slyly orchestrating a campaign to emasculate America!
What do you see in these mails? Remember these scientists think they are talking in private and never anticipated being found out. Are there mentions or references to dark projects? Some references to their agents and their handlers? Strong ideological opinions to destroy Capitalism and install a world Government?
What happened is very simple. These scientists are used to one kind of debate and one kind of rules. Where "the conclusions reached by Kogen, et al [8] is not supported by the evidence presented by them [9],[10],[11]" would be considered a grave insult and might cause loss of reputation. In the question and answer session in a seminar someone saying, "But, Dr Kaplansky, with a sample size of 27, the correlation coefficient you have arrived at is less than experimental error" wouild result in a collective gasp and "ole!" from the assembled people, usually about 20 people who could actually understand the paper being presented.
These scientists are encountering the rough and tumble world of popular journalism, spin meistering. They are clueless about how to handle it. They feel they are being gravely insulted and highly manipulated. They think they are being quote mined, quoted out of context. The journalists are giving totally irrelevant and completely debunked theorists equal time for balance. So they go about in their clueless ways to counter it. They over react, they try to be more guarded, they are trying to write sentences that could not be quote mined.
Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns.
Man! I never knew. Went, there once back in, what 1999?, and got slapped in the face and never went back. Coulda knocked me down with a feather! Fancy that! Salon, no pay wall! Why I never heard about it before?
Say what you want about the quality of his work. But the mother's dead body etc are OTT. Ran into him in some high way rest stop. He was riding with a bunch of motor cyclists. Nicest celebrity one would have met. Very down to earth and posed for pictures for all, despite being without make-up and being out in the sun on a hot day with sweat and grime making him look older. Nice guy. He would not have climbed over his mother's dead body even for the original 1895 Daimler.
Consequent to we being acquired by Comcast, our new CEO Heisa I Diot has directed you to remove all Cable Guy coming late, Cable companies forcing you to stay home all day for a 5 minute service jokes from your repertoire. Please remember the number of stattelite receptions breaking off at the most importunate moment will have a bearing when the annual bonuses are discussed. Have a nice day
As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.
As a small consumer, I don't care if you have the foresight to put a limit on how many gigs of data could be downloaded in your contact up front and charge more for letting people download/upload more data.
But I do have a problem if you sell me a "unlimited bandwidth" or "all-you-can eat" connection and then come bellyaching saying your connection is up 24/7/365 at full load. Just dont sell what you dont have. Just dont mislead customers. It does not work that way. There are still people who believe in truth-in-advertisement laws and full disclosure laws and consumer protection laws. If you called a connection "unlimited", make sure there are no limits on it. Fair is fair.
BTW, don't get steamed up on illegal activity and piracy and all sorts of things. You get legal liability protection as a common carrier. Essentially you are claiming, "I dont know what my users are downloading and uploading. If it is child port catch them, lock 'em up and throw away the key. Hey FBI take this, my IP allocation timestamp data". The moment you start discussing whether or not what your users are downloading is legal/illegal, you open yourself up to liability. If your users download child porn, you will be charged as an accessory, aider and abettor. Suddenly you can't switch to common carrier defense. Get that straight pal.
There is political power to be gained by scaring people all around. But to make money (directly) you have to offer a dubious protection device after scaring them.
The world is going to be destroyed in a super earthquake in Nov 2012. Here buy my EarthQuake Repellent Spray by Acme Chemicals.
These ISPs sold what they ain't got. Sold more bandwidth than they can sustain, and when someone actually takes delivery of what was promised, these telcos bellyache, "we never thought you will ask for all we sold you! whachamagontodoo?". Eventually they will introduce billing by the Gigabytes, and pipesize. Like the electric utilities charge you by the kWh and limit the ampearage of your connection.
Then they will introduce the "friends and family" of ISP, some downloads and some sites will be "unmetered", and the sources will be the friends and family of the ISP. You know? the "partners" who provide "new and exciting" products and content to their "valued customers". Net neutrality will go down the tubes. ha ha.
Google needs the net to be open and neutral for it to freely access and index content. When the dot com bubble burst Google bought tons and tons of bandwidth, the dark fibers, the unlit strands of fiber optic lines. If the net fragments, I expect Google to step in, light up these strands and go head to head with the ISPs providing metro level WiFi. Since it is not a government project, it could not be sabotaged like Verizon and AT&T torpedoed municipal high peed networks.
The parent was not talking about viruses and trojans. He is talking about knowingly installing an application. Some of the functions of the applications are beneficial and actually desired by the user. So much so that he went to the app store and paid money for it. Then once installed, in addition to doing what it should do, it is snooping around and phoning home personal details. That is more recent.
You wake up and smell the coffee. The days when you can trust all application developers to play nice are gone. Even when you install an application yourself on your own computer, you have to assume the application is not trusted and set up privileges explicitly about what it can and can't do. The only question is how to specify these privileges in an easy to use and enforceable manner.
True to some extent, and it can be mitigated to some extent by making all default values to "deny" privilege. Unless you convince Mr Joe Schmoe to grant privilege the app wont get anything. Since Joe Schmoe is unlikely to do it, the apps will be developed without assuming such privilege will be available.
In fact this is one of the fundamental reasons why *nix applications run nicely with user privileges and the Windows applications barf if root privileges are not available. The *nix was originally deployed in large univ environments and corporate environments. Where if a user wants to install an app that needs to be root, he/she has to convince the large IT department why it needs to be root. Since it is difficult to obtain, most apps were developed making sure it would run nicely without being root.
OTOH Windows applications grew in the personal computer environment, and the only user was root. So many applications assumed they will have all the privileges. Of course there were other reasons too, ease-of-use trumping security. The mad scramble marketplace where every application vendor did everything possible to get entrenched. Grabbing all file associations, launching code at start up to give the appearance of fast response time, abuse, overuse and misuse of the registry etc. But without the assumption "all applications will have root privilege" in the early 1990s in the Windows universe, much of the problems would have mitigated.
By the time FCC gets around to rule making and enforcement about POTS, Google would have deployed a coast-to-coast Wi-Fi for free. It would still be called Beta though. All the telephone companies pumping voice through a pair of copper wires would go the way the companies that shipped freight over a pair iron rails. And the cell phone companies would be huddling in a corner, dazed, seeing stars wondering what hit them. They will just be joining others in the same corner newspapers, Rupert Murdoch, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft.
The system described is an active device, not passive. An active device emits radiation and listens to echo. A passive device just listens to naturally occurring radiation emanating from a source. Police and private parties might use a passive device at their own discretion. But an active device, that actually illuminates the target would violate expectations of privacy and should not be deployed without court supervision. It should be treated like wiretapping, no need to inform the targets but the police should not be able to use the technology willy-nilly at their own discretion.
Also we could create devices that look for patterns of radiation and emit jamming or stealth or confusing radiation in response to thwart being seen through the walls. Something like the radar detectors. These devices should be legal. And since the idea has been posted publicly, (i.e. here in slashdot by yours truly) any patent to such devices should specific to that device, not a broad based patent like one-click. Unless patent application for such a device has already been filed.
But in an effort to push Windows7 footprint small enough to be used in netbooks, thus eventually killing WinXP, they have sacrificed this improved version, going back even farther than XP's blue screen of death to black screen. It is truly sad, Microsoft is not even able to improve the Screen of Death experience.
But then I have blacklisted every damn site that loads up a blinking, flashing, animated images. May that has something to do with it. And no script blocks flash on whitelisted sites too!
HP's netbooks are quietly shipping already with what HP calls "QuickWeb". It is essentially a splashtop linux distribution that boots up quickly and launches a browser. I am not sure if it is possible to kill the browser and get to linux or if it is possible to edit the init.rc files and stay in Linux. But a few user comments say that they have used QuickWeb so much they have not booted into full WinXP for quite some time.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly without the unbounded liability that is increasing faster than inflation straining its bottom line, its credit rating would go up and its cost of servicing debt will go down.
It would make sense for GM and ALL American companies to shift the burden of health care to the Government. It may have to increase the pay of its employees to retain talent. But most young healthy productive workers with low seniority and lower pay and less burdensome union contracts will accept a small increase, something around 5000$. GM would have been better off ditching its older employees and retirees and passing them on to the taxpayer. Not that it matters now anyway. The tax payer owns GM and all its liabilities now.
Free speech, the right to bear arms, a common trait of all things that are actually rights is that they do not cost money. They are intangible.
You do not have a right to tangible things. They cost money. All you can do is help lower costs so you can afford them.
So I can have guns even if have no money? Hurray? Where do I collect my Beretta? I am going to call it Sweetness. You can't copyright that name, Steven Colbert!
The reason why the health reform as proposed by the Dems lacks popular is because, it does not go far enough. No chance to escape from whatever your employer dishes out in the name of health care. No recourse if your employer decides suddenly to drop health coverage from the compensation. Have to just bear it if your "contribution" is increased, your copay is increase and your doctor is dropped from the list of preferred providers.
No relief to the employers either. They are competing with Europe and Japan and their competitors do not have to pay for health care. If GM did not have to pay 2000$ per vehicle to provide for health care for its 1 million employees and retirees between 1990 and 2004, it could have competed effectively with the imports.
Already there is public option in so many areas where the private sector refuses to serve. National Flood Insurance Program to insure homes that can not get private insurance. Postal service to serve mail and parcels to places where FedEx and UPS wont go. The examples are endless.
These preboot Linux will act like training wheels to let people kick their dependence on Windows. So pretty soon we might get a real year of the linux.
Microsoft is in the business of making money and licensing of its wares is just part of the game. What's wrong with that? Did you want Microsoft to go the Linux way and "donate" the software for "free?"
Get a life...Have some faith.
Well, what is wrong in the customers resisting the profit motivated actions of their vendors? Customers have as much right to protect their money as does Microsoft have for making their profits.
Some actions of the vendors, including Microsoft, enhances the productivity and competitiveness of their customers. Rightfully the vendors, including Microsoft, are entitled to a share of the extra profits generated. But some other actions by the vendor, does not enhance the productivity or competitiveness of their clients, and the customer would be better served by switching to a competitor of the current vendor. Actions by the current vendor that prevents this switch by vendor lock would hamper the clients from employing their money, maximizing their profits etc. And we have as much right to highlight to potential long term danger and make everyone aware of it.
Why is Microsoft and its apologists are so against people making informed decisions? Vendor lock is real. Companies are hurting from it.
Well, just yesterday they sparked off a row by saying "privacy concerns are for people with something to hide". This bigger row would kick that off the front pages. BTW g and k are both transliterated to the same glyph in most schemes for Tamil.
Coming to the "earth heat being used up", essentially as the pump operates the earth in immediate contact with the buried loop starts cooling down and heat from further up would "flow" towards the buried loop. After running this system for decades there will be temperature gradient next to the loop. Most places in USA the frost line is 42 inches. That is no matter how cold the air gets, it can not raise the temp 42 inches below the ground above freezing! Shows how good an insulator earth is.
After two decades of operation the ground next to the loop reaches freezing temp. There is the temperature gradient, even though the temperature beyond three of four feet is much above freezing and places six to eight feet from the loop is practically not affected by heat pump running for decades, the heat pump becomes very very inefficient.
I had a colleague from Europe, where geothermal heating was very popular in 1980s. What they did not realize was that the earth is such a insulator that the available "heat" from the ground slowly gets used up and over some 20 years there is nothing left, the earth surrounding the buried pipe got so cold and the heat from the surrounding does not flow in fast enough.
Not an insurmountable problem. They should pump heat back into the ground in summer by using the same pipes as the radiator for their A/C. But if they cheap out during installation, the geothermal heat wont be renewable.
The solution in the movie was "draw a bigger line next to it". Well, the evil of "why do you care if you have nothing to hide" will be pushed aside by bigger tangible evil of these scammers.
[*] blah= iru kOdukaL, (meaning Two linesegments in Tamil), by K Balachandar.
What do you see in these mails? Remember these scientists think they are talking in private and never anticipated being found out. Are there mentions or references to dark projects? Some references to their agents and their handlers? Strong ideological opinions to destroy Capitalism and install a world Government?
What happened is very simple. These scientists are used to one kind of debate and one kind of rules. Where "the conclusions reached by Kogen, et al [8] is not supported by the evidence presented by them [9],[10],[11]" would be considered a grave insult and might cause loss of reputation. In the question and answer session in a seminar someone saying, "But, Dr Kaplansky, with a sample size of 27, the correlation coefficient you have arrived at is less than experimental error" wouild result in a collective gasp and "ole!" from the assembled people, usually about 20 people who could actually understand the paper being presented.
These scientists are encountering the rough and tumble world of popular journalism, spin meistering. They are clueless about how to handle it. They feel they are being gravely insulted and highly manipulated. They think they are being quote mined, quoted out of context. The journalists are giving totally irrelevant and completely debunked theorists equal time for balance. So they go about in their clueless ways to counter it. They over react, they try to be more guarded, they are trying to write sentences that could not be quote mined.
Now that people have glimpse of the actual communications between the scientists, compare that to say, the hacked emails of Sarah Palin, See where you find more smoking guns.
Man! I never knew. Went, there once back in, what 1999?, and got slapped in the face and never went back. Coulda knocked me down with a feather! Fancy that! Salon, no pay wall! Why I never heard about it before?
Say what you want about the quality of his work. But the mother's dead body etc are OTT. Ran into him in some high way rest stop. He was riding with a bunch of motor cyclists. Nicest celebrity one would have met. Very down to earth and posed for pictures for all, despite being without make-up and being out in the sun on a hot day with sweat and grime making him look older. Nice guy. He would not have climbed over his mother's dead body even for the original 1895 Daimler.
Consequent to we being acquired by Comcast, our new CEO Heisa I Diot has directed you to remove all Cable Guy coming late, Cable companies forcing you to stay home all day for a 5 minute service jokes from your repertoire. Please remember the number of stattelite receptions breaking off at the most importunate moment will have a bearing when the annual bonuses are discussed. Have a nice day
As a small ISP myself, I don't care if my commercial customer who has the foresight to know they want to use more bandwidth, and buy a higher CIR from me use what they paid for. I have a problem with people paying $30 a month for a residential connection with no/low CIR and expecting me to give them the equivilant of a 100% CIR on the advertised speed.
As a small consumer, I don't care if you have the foresight to put a limit on how many gigs of data could be downloaded in your contact up front and charge more for letting people download/upload more data.
But I do have a problem if you sell me a "unlimited bandwidth" or "all-you-can eat" connection and then come bellyaching saying your connection is up 24/7/365 at full load. Just dont sell what you dont have. Just dont mislead customers. It does not work that way. There are still people who believe in truth-in-advertisement laws and full disclosure laws and consumer protection laws. If you called a connection "unlimited", make sure there are no limits on it. Fair is fair.
BTW, don't get steamed up on illegal activity and piracy and all sorts of things. You get legal liability protection as a common carrier. Essentially you are claiming, "I dont know what my users are downloading and uploading. If it is child port catch them, lock 'em up and throw away the key. Hey FBI take this, my IP allocation timestamp data". The moment you start discussing whether or not what your users are downloading is legal/illegal, you open yourself up to liability. If your users download child porn, you will be charged as an accessory, aider and abettor. Suddenly you can't switch to common carrier defense. Get that straight pal.
because there is money to be made scaring people.
There is political power to be gained by scaring people all around. But to make money (directly) you have to offer a dubious protection device after scaring them.
The world is going to be destroyed in a super earthquake in Nov 2012. Here buy my EarthQuake Repellent Spray by Acme Chemicals.
Then they will introduce the "friends and family" of ISP, some downloads and some sites will be "unmetered", and the sources will be the friends and family of the ISP. You know? the "partners" who provide "new and exciting" products and content to their "valued customers". Net neutrality will go down the tubes. ha ha.
Google needs the net to be open and neutral for it to freely access and index content. When the dot com bubble burst Google bought tons and tons of bandwidth, the dark fibers, the unlit strands of fiber optic lines. If the net fragments, I expect Google to step in, light up these strands and go head to head with the ISPs providing metro level WiFi. Since it is not a government project, it could not be sabotaged like Verizon and AT&T torpedoed municipal high peed networks.
The parent was not talking about viruses and trojans. He is talking about knowingly installing an application. Some of the functions of the applications are beneficial and actually desired by the user. So much so that he went to the app store and paid money for it. Then once installed, in addition to doing what it should do, it is snooping around and phoning home personal details. That is more recent.
So you want to commit all the digital repositories to torrents for archival?
You wake up and smell the coffee. The days when you can trust all application developers to play nice are gone. Even when you install an application yourself on your own computer, you have to assume the application is not trusted and set up privileges explicitly about what it can and can't do. The only question is how to specify these privileges in an easy to use and enforceable manner.
In fact this is one of the fundamental reasons why *nix applications run nicely with user privileges and the Windows applications barf if root privileges are not available. The *nix was originally deployed in large univ environments and corporate environments. Where if a user wants to install an app that needs to be root, he/she has to convince the large IT department why it needs to be root. Since it is difficult to obtain, most apps were developed making sure it would run nicely without being root.
OTOH Windows applications grew in the personal computer environment, and the only user was root. So many applications assumed they will have all the privileges. Of course there were other reasons too, ease-of-use trumping security. The mad scramble marketplace where every application vendor did everything possible to get entrenched. Grabbing all file associations, launching code at start up to give the appearance of fast response time, abuse, overuse and misuse of the registry etc. But without the assumption "all applications will have root privilege" in the early 1990s in the Windows universe, much of the problems would have mitigated.
By the time FCC gets around to rule making and enforcement about POTS, Google would have deployed a coast-to-coast Wi-Fi for free. It would still be called Beta though. All the telephone companies pumping voice through a pair of copper wires would go the way the companies that shipped freight over a pair iron rails. And the cell phone companies would be huddling in a corner, dazed, seeing stars wondering what hit them. They will just be joining others in the same corner newspapers, Rupert Murdoch, Yahoo, eBay and Microsoft.
Also we could create devices that look for patterns of radiation and emit jamming or stealth or confusing radiation in response to thwart being seen through the walls. Something like the radar detectors. These devices should be legal. And since the idea has been posted publicly, (i.e. here in slashdot by yours truly) any patent to such devices should specific to that device, not a broad based patent like one-click. Unless patent application for such a device has already been filed.
But in an effort to push Windows7 footprint small enough to be used in netbooks, thus eventually killing WinXP, they have sacrificed this improved version, going back even farther than XP's blue screen of death to black screen. It is truly sad, Microsoft is not even able to improve the Screen of Death experience.
But then I have blacklisted every damn site that loads up a blinking, flashing, animated images. May that has something to do with it. And no script blocks flash on whitelisted sites too!
HP's netbooks are quietly shipping already with what HP calls "QuickWeb". It is essentially a splashtop linux distribution that boots up quickly and launches a browser. I am not sure if it is possible to kill the browser and get to linux or if it is possible to edit the init.rc files and stay in Linux. But a few user comments say that they have used QuickWeb so much they have not booted into full WinXP for quite some time.