What silme. Anonymous published their smear campaign in full already, including their little charts of who they think Anonymous is. Backing out of conferences will save them the embarrassment of having to answer questions and gives them a chance to smear Anonymous. Given that their primary smear technique was harassment, planting things to discredit and other agent provocateur slime, HGBary's claims of death threats carry no credibility.
We should look to the perspective of the victims to gauge things instead. Try this one on for size:
the revelation of terror tools used so brazenly against political opponents in the private corporate sector is disturbing, to say the least. While the notion of paid political operatives subversively using social media to discredit opponents has long been suspected by many, here we have evidence that these tactics are, in truth, fairly common among those who can afford to deploy them. That commenter who always shows up to hijack a comment thread on a specific topic may very well be working for $250/hour
What a bunch of unAmerican trashbags.
Microsoft will not be re-taking the crown as the most-valuable tech company any time soon, but they’re flirting with being knocked down to the number three — or even number four spot. In the past year, while Microsoft’s stock is down slightly... Google is much closer to Microsoft in terms of market cap than Apple was when I wrote that post last year.
... IBM is a little bit closer at $202 billion. ... They have a shot of passing Microsoft too.
The author points out HP is worth $108 billion and that Apple is now worth an entire company more than Microsoft.
not all the numbers in the 10-Q filed with the SEC and the earnings press release were the same. The revenue and operating income (loss) breakout by division were completely different. And not only were the numbers for last quarter different, but the numbers from the same quarter last year were different.
Techrights suspect the company is again juggle their books to make things look better for investors. Microsoft is hurting after the failure of Vista and Windows 7 is not doing much better. Is Microsoft finally imploding?
BP got the rewards but everyone else is stuck with the cost of their screw up. BP is paying pennies on the dollar to gulf coast residents for loss of business. They will pay nothing in long term health costs.
As a gulf coast resident and free software advocate who's worked for Fortune 100 companies, the role of Microsoft in Deepwater Horizon was not that surprising. I helped write this report about the problems BP had with Microsoft and other non free software and this follow up report when more details were revealed. I'll be looking closely at NOV. Their lack of cooperation is probably concealing more trouble with the system that's largely responsible for the disaster. Industry needs to dump Microsoft to avoid future calamities. BP technicians thought they were doing as much as they can to fix the problems but they were clearly taking risks they should not have been taking and their solution clearly would have lead to more of the same.
No thanks to yet another way to drive up the cost of free software. How else can Microsoft make distribution on shiny disks competitive again? Patent extortions? That's a whole other issue that strangely has help from ATT in Texas.
Thank you, hairyfeet, for pointing out the obvious anti-competitive nature of pay by the minute internet service. You might want to mention that cable companies already have all the bandwith anyone could want but they use 99% for pay per view movies and other rip off services.
Now, let's look at some possible solutions. Municiple networks and Open Spectrum are winners that make entertainment and telcos very nervous.
Municiple wires work well in Tacoma, Washington which only has 250,000 people, so it should work just about anywhere and it should. Almost all US cable networks were built with monopoly protection and have that obligation to the public.
Open Specturm and free software are really the only way to insure free speech in the future. If you haven't figured it out yet, non free software and network control are two sides of the same coin. It's about the power to shove adverts in your face and control public opinion about issues, just like the good old days of broadcast and switched networks. Only free software gives you control of your computer and only free networks let you share news and opinions with your neighbors. The rest resembles the old USSR more than anything else, the publisher's paradise. We already own what we need to stay free, all we lack is the collective knowledge and will to take it.
The authors of this work may believe that an open Internet will succeed on its merits alone. I don't. However we arrive at it, Network Neutrality is simply not negotiable.
Thank you for your partial quote of the document and your insightful commentary. If anything, "specialized services" are the things that might be granted an exception to rule by a liberal government. Neutral networks are what should be mandated but, as pointed out above, only a tiny fraction of available bandwith is given to customers as "open internet" if the likes of Comcast can be described that way. The rest of it is utilized as wasteful push services. Media companies simply won't give up their lucrative and powerful position as information gatekeepers unless forced by real competition in physical media (hint - giving a movie company ownership of a monopoly cable service is the opposite of a free market) or we are finally granted open spectrum. The FCC should keep itself busy busting spammers rather than upholding 110 year old spectrum laws that no longer make sense. Now, would someone be kind enough to paste the actual text of the article, "On Advancing the Open Internet by Distinguishing it from Specialized Services"? Scribd wants me to have a Facebook page to download the document and I can't read it through whatever nasty software they serve it with.
From the article:
To find malware-distribution sites, Google uses a huge number of virtual machines running completely unpatched versions of Windows and Internet Explorer that they point at potentially malicious URLs. The company then ties this in with the data that it gathers from its automated crawlers that are tasked with looking for malicious code on legitimate Web sites.
It would be nice if people would call this stuff Windows malware if it does not do anything to normal computers. Please Call out Windows, people.
These businesses are moving to Linux far faster than they are to Windows or Unix.
... conventional wisdom is that Unix users are the most likely to switch to Linux. ... it turns out that, by a few percentage points, Windows users at 36.6% are more likely to be heading to Linux than Unix, 31.4% ... 36.4% of businesses reported some Linux desktop use in their company. ... while total cost of ownership (TCO) remains a strong number two, the first reason these days for people to switch to Linux is its perceived technical superiority and features. ... 58.6%, said the recession hadn't played a role.
One thing that SJVN missed is that, "and 66% of users surveyed say that their Linux deployments are brand new (“greenfield”) deployments. This greenfield market share grab is a good indicator of a platform’s future performance." Hurry up, already, I want my GNU!
The file is a draft for an expert panel formed by the European Commission. This panel is divided into workgroup (IPR, Open Source, digital life, etc.). ACT and Comptia have been infiltrating every workgroup, even the one on Open Source (WG 7). They are doing the best they can to drown any initiative that would not only promote OSS in Europe but also that could help Europe create a sucessful European software sector.
... [the document has] original and modified text (in glorious colour, so it's really worth downloading it and taking a look), which means that we can see what exactly an organisation sympathetic to Microsoft –and partly funded by them– is worried about
it is important to have the public know how actual policy making is being influenced by lobbies that are precisely under the legal scrutiny of the European Commission. The urgency of the publication of this document is real in the sense that outside pressure would force the Commission to "clean the committees"
This is an issue that Boycott Novell, aka Techrights has been tracking for some time.
Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.