Mod parent up!

For all those people wanting their kids to excel and succeed beyond their parents, IT (real IT, not simply tech support) is a great avenue, and introduction early will foster aptitude in their adult life. The lowest rungs will be apt enough for stable tech support and the upper rungs will be developing FAT table hacks in grade 9.

For the nationalists out there, this is how to cultivate technical prowess in a country without costing the school system in overly-burdensome licensing fees, and not insult the intelligence of our children by calling classes on MS Word an "IT" class.

Hmm...This could be just the (mis)opportunity they were looking for. Wasn't there an article sometime back about what the guys who came up with TCP/IP wanted to really do with the net and new protocols, but couldn't because of entrenched culture? Maybe now is the time...and to really look at employing that quantum entanglement effect as a communication medium. Let's see them tap that.

Now THAT would shut them up!

There are ups and downs to many solutions out there. One of my current projects involves XML files and migration into databases (Oracle or MS SQL - both commercial) larger than the application memory limit on 32 bit windows machines let alone the (practical) limit on any editor. Since I'm stuck having to use windows, I needed a solution to split them up, so I had a perl script (free) written that does the job beautifully. The files would be hard to manage if there were too many of them, so the sizes are still large. (70-100M) TextPad (commercial) or saxon-b's XQuery engine (FOSS) to run searches and analysis, but if I am doing anything simple with XML app configuration files, transforming table name lists into SQL create scripts, or non-XML text processing, I use Notepad++ because it's simply better than TextPad AND free, but doesn't handle larger files easily. While our main product is MS SQL-based, our internal project tracking system is MySQL/PHP/Apache with a dash of MS SQL (we have bulk licenses anyways) for convenience.

Anyone who's worked IT (not just tech support) knows that FOSS practically is your trade, or you'd go broke in license fees. Sure, where I work we have some commercial products we work with, but much of the bulk of the business core is custom-built and on platforms we didn't have to pay for. Using the equivalent reasoning of smart business decisions only becomes a problem to the MAFIAA companies when the decisions are in the public eye. (government) Heavy users of IT (including those who work IT) should be using the least costly, most agile solution. Sorry, but that means that a lot of commercial firms will lose out. That's market forces for you. People who whine about that aren't so much capitalists as casting themselves as an obsolete feudal lord in the 21st century. If you're main trade is moved in on, you either adapt and become better, or become obsolete. This is what software is all about.

The only problem I see with mandating (as opposed to recommending) FOSS everywhere might be slow development in the long run but could make software writers more free agents who get contracted at the drop of a hat to interpret and expand a dead project that they built infrastructure on. Much like civil engineers obtain contracts.

On Privacy and Human rights: You don't see that stopping the advocates of the full body scanners, or the people at airport gates who can't fly without exposing themselves, yet did nothing to stop the move in the first place. Web cams in laptops used to play Nanny State on unsuspecting kids, all your packets are belong to the NSA, smile for the nudist-cam, and soon to be laws to randomly pull people over for (effectively) no reason - oh yeah, the US is a MODEL for Human Rights adherence these days.

That list would be the most-sought-after batch of info to the tech community at large if it existed outside the circle of attendants and guards. I tried poking around for officials who were out of country over the last meeting's weekend, but didn't get a peep back. Find that list, and the community will have struck gold.

Perfect example of DRM gone wrong and hurting consumers: A guy I know actually bought the media center edition of WinXP, (yes, I know) and recorded some video on an older-model hand held and then tried to play the resulting AVI file. I was called on to help them debug why it wasn't playing. I don't recall the exact error message now, but it was something related to an unknown author (Media Player was default). So on a wild hunch I downloaded and installed vlc real quick to test my theory and it played perfectly. Way to go Micro$oft, yet another normal user who will never buy your products again.

The problem is if ACTA goes through, there will be no choice. Something must be done to take these players drafting this piece of crap down or out before governments have a chance to sign away our rights to choose.

Yes. I totally agree. I hope there's a massive storming of political email accounts (particularly the two picked up by Obama's cherished Blackberries) to highlight the largest threat to democracy since the cold war.

I'd dub it the Corp War, WE are the resistance - the people. The masters of this 'agreement' dream us their slaves rather than remain relevant by competition.

We must pull together and storm the political strongholds of those who conspire against us lest we grow complacent to wake in a survailence society from hell. Do ANYTHING you can to sway those in your country of Citizenship (and elsewhere if able). We must organize.

Wow...ok, let's take this how legalese might interpret it if you were being prosecuted (or contesting your account being shut off), and make a simple Cartesian Product explanation of things that would cause contracted consumers to breach this.

Unsolicited: The receiver didn't as for it.
Defamatory: Defamatory material, even if it's about you.
Offensive: Good luck not finding a transmitted opinion that is not offensive to someone in the world, unless the scope is merely limited to the ruling body - stuff that pisses us off.
Abusive: This covers a wide variety of things, but is basically a step up from offensive, possibly expands scope.
Obscene: Despite the fact that there are generations alive today who grew up thinking anything Brittany Spears did in front of a camera was obscene, I imagine this scope is once again limited to the firm. They don't express their views on obscenity.
Pornographic: Don't keep porn here. For several reason, probably mostly image, but also for technical reasons like potential hot-linking to a stored file.
Menacing: Your kink, plans for world domination, or the informative chemistry video about the reactive applications of alkali metals
Breach of Copyright: No one on /. should need this explained.
Breach of Confidence: Ok, really? How can they enforce this? Only if your spurned friend, who knew you were on the mailing list for their leaked AND knew about this application of your contract would this be usable.
Breach of Privacy: PIs need not apply.
Breach of Any Other Rights: Conflicting breaches to be resolved in court, either way your service is toast.
--Times--
Store: Don't keep any material dealing with any of the above on our servers. (with no time limit, the first time something hits your inbox could trigger here on any of the above conditions)
Send: Don't forward, compose or otherwise cause any any material dealing with any of the above to be sent from your account.
Knowingly Receive: Getting into intent contracting here, but basically if they find that you've arranged for something that trips the material provisions above to your account, it's toast.
Upload: We don't care if something off the list above did come from your virus-infected computer, don't send it to our servers.
Download: This is the kicker here, and I'll expand after this table.
Distribute: Doesn't send already cover this definition because of its more restricted scope?

Download is the one that will fry everyone who's ever been the recipient of one of those bad forwards, like a goatse attachment. So let's say you get an email one day that is simply titled 'Check this out' with some explanation from a friend that this is funny and you have to see these pics. It's a horrible joke and it is a goatse-type attachment - offensive, obscene, possibly pornographic, and unsolicited - that you just: downloaded (you can't display it without receiving the information), and stored on your email account while you reeled. because each of those lists in the legal statement is effectively concatenated with 'or', you now have a breach of contract sitting in your inbox because you downloaded the horrible joke from their machines to yours.

It will also threaten anyone who's researching any controversy - You're supposed to see and consider points that may be very offensive to some. What trips the offensive clause, what doesn't, and will this be used as a new corporate censorship to the masses to cancel accounts on discovery of researching that corp's old skeletons in the closet? Deals like these are no deals at all, we need fresh blood in the provider industry.

So in addition to the fact that your ISP is handing over private details to non-law-enforcement, private companies to go trolling for copyright violations, they've also put your agreement (and patronage, I might add!) at risk by their own miopic contract design.

Yeah, that's a real good way to keep advertisers interested in you: "Pay me to promote me." Moron.

If the scenario ended up playing out like that, Google should just decline the offer to pay Murdock to promote his ventures by leading users to his sites. Will this hurt Google? Likely. Will it hurt Google more than Murdock's ventures? Most likely not. Both have considerable weight, but Google connects a lot more than news and news readers - they're diversified enough to survive a fight like that. It may not come down to that after discussions we'll never see/hear, but my bet is if Murdock keeps pushing and Google pushes back, News Corp's not going to like the result.