At one point they also lobbied to get a law that would allow them to hack your computer and wipe out the content if they suspected you of having illegal music. Fortunately Congress did not agree.

Yes, better stop having books in school now! [Mod up parent.]

This is one of those stories you can't but help wondering if the story is correct. Well, the DOJ is not looking on life but on law, so that might be the difference.

The idea that we have to cripple the rest of us to even out the field is, certainly messed up.

OK, so the Americans with Disabilities Act, prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability. But the idea that those without disabilities have to suffer is OK? I guess we should all stop driving because the blind certainly have a clear disadvantage! You can't give a drivers license to a blind, how's that for discrimination?

I must conclude that this is just some fool who managed to bend the intent of the Americans with Disabilities Act for no valid reason. All the talk about having "equal opportunity" is in my views highly altered from what is sensible. The fact that a blind person cannot activate the speech module without a seeing person available is not a good reason to not use them. The more they sell the more money will be available for additional R&D. Indeed they are supposed to come out with a version which a blind person can start in some six months.

Which makes little sense when you see that even game developers are using OpenGL. (Something is wrong if your CPU is running 40-50%.)

[Mod parent up.]
Exactly, but we need reasons to overcome peoples natural resistance to being drugged into oblivion. If every urge you have is a "decease" then more people will contribute to the income of the poor drug companies.
If you can be convinced that, for example, anything perfectly normal such as being nervous when meeting your girlfriends parents is a sign of some newly discovered decease that they just happen to have a drug for, then it's harder to argue that it is not a decease because it sure makes you nervous. People who "suffer" from this can swear it is real, in spite of it being completely the wrong why.
They have, for example, labeled jet lag as a mental decease. The fact that you are messing with your body's sleeping rhythm is really not the point - you need to be on drugs now to handle this problem. Of course the easy solution to jet lag, besides not flying over too many time zones, is just good ol' fashion sleep.
The side effects if most of the drugs ARE insane. The drug will help you sleep, or solve something else, but might kill you or some such. Which is indeed the case, as a lot of people have died from these drugs.
Depression is a very real thing to people who are depressed. But what if the natural solution was, let's say, being productive. If the insurance companies then instead of paying for drugs, paid you for doing some worthwhile work. Then you would be productive, something worthwhile was being done and you did not have to be on drugs.
Of course there are people who want to be as close to oblivion as possible, who will take any drug to get there. But for everyone else to follow suit just because someone tells them they should be on drugs might not be the optimum way to go.

I agree with you. Though I really doubt all the different Unix like O/S's would have grown anywhere near what it has if Linux had not created all that interest w Linux. They had been around for decades but never managed to generate anything like the following Linux did. All the different BSD's got a huge boost from the attention Linux generated. I seriously doubt any of them would have grown much by themselves. Linux had, obviously, just the right mix to take off as it did.

Oh, and Happy birthday Linus! :)

Mod parent up. The 'have a stick, will hit anything that moves, before properly investigating' shtick is getting very old.

If I remember correctly, the Church responded to slander and acted to stop dissemination of what they deemed very confidential and sensitive information. It was not an attack on free speech per say as simply trying to stop theft of intellectual property.

Indeed people who are harassing others often claim free speech when harassing, which is not at all what free speech is all about. Of course some people are afraid because they are guilty of something, and they don't want others to find out about it and try to shift attention to others. Scientology appears to be this thing you attack when you feel like attacking someone. Largely because it does things differently and has a cloud of mystery because people simple don't know anything about it. Of course we know about Tom Cruise and how overly excited he was about his, then, new fiancee on Oprah.

The horror claims I read about online, and occasionally in some paper, does not at all match what I have observed about Scientology, and no I don't work for them but I have taken some courses and things. I've observed my daughter become a productive citizen who is no longer shy and stands up for what she believes in, thanks to Scientology. Finished almost top of the whole school. Never mind things like more keys to cities than anyone else, more humanitarian awards than any other. Countries adopting Scientology to rehabilitate criminals, drug users, and it seems to go on and on. The volunteer ministers who fly in to disaster areas from all over helping the victims. It just does not reconcile with these grave injustices that some claim Scientology has committed.

We hear these horror stories from people who are disaffected and may even have worked in Scientology. When I think of what people do and say about ex-employees, how they try to make themselves look good and the employer bad, that's what I think of when I hear their stories. Talk about fear mongering.

But we all make that judgment call deciding how much faith we put in what people claim. I choose to stand up for what I think is right and wrong.

The thing to keep in mind about the above "open and free" is that so far, MS has the intention of erasing OpenSource as we know it. To make the point I use a brutal analogy, just to make the point. Which is how Nazi Germany had many officers that were honorable men, but there could be no doubt what Nazi Germany intended to accomplish. Unfortunate Jews believed they would not be killed by the people who tortured and killed Jews whenever they felt like it. The alternative was too hard to imagine so they held on to an unrealistic hope of surviving by the good intentions of their captors. [I have slept in Auschwitz and have some personal experience with Nazi Germany's intentions.]

Though obviously Microsoft employee's are not Nazi's, and have not killed anyone, nor held any people hostage, they do lock you in to their platform, and their business intentions are equally clear to anyone looking on MS's history. Just because they feed you does not mean they intend to have you around when its all said and done.

Look at one of the old scams from when there was no remote access or control to fuel pumps. The scammer would fill up 3/4 of his tank. Reset it back to zero and fill the last quart which he then paid for. Every now and then he would stop by and give the owner some money because he "forgot to pay the other day". Which of course was only done to create this false sense of being honorable.

No, Microsoft has a long way to go, a very very long way, to even show they intend to coexist with OpenSource. My guess is that we will never see it, at the very least, as long as current management are in place.

The term fear mongering applies when there is nothing to fear, but the fear itself. Hand picking some points that at best appear to be in the good of the public and then use that as the evidence of Microsoft being pro-OpenSource, is called things like ignorance and stupidity. Or an enemy action.

You're dead on.

There is too much crying terrorist which only numbs us to what is real terrorist activities. Much like crying wolf.
Ditto with the government threat levels, in itself it statistically has added more terror than real terrorists has.

By not correctly identify a lot of actions, this thing simply adds more to the general feeling of unknown and unspecific threats. Much like news media who concentrate on creating an unbalanced sense of risk and threat to the viewers. Now there is danger at every corner!
Probably these people are only looking at lining their own pockets. No doubt pursuing the dream of somehow getting in line for government funds.

As some pointed out, there is such a thing as integrity. Some lost theirs so long ago they don't even realize it. Of course it varies from person to person. I knew one woman who felt guilty about cookies she took from her mom as a kid. Her husband on the other hand did everything except touch other women, but he sure worked hard at playing around them. As far as I'm concerned he did violate her trust by his behavior.
Flirting with other women even if you never go beyond that is not exactly what you would call setting a good example. Imagine their kids, other family, friends seeing that! I would be so ashamed I would not want to know myself.
It is best to not violate your own integrity, who's left to like you when you stopped? - Probably not the kind of people you want around...

It's really good that it works well for you!
Really!

However, as the masses can testify, that is not the norm. The complexity in the O/S makes it very susceptible and prone to conflicts. Some people argue that you need to know how to make it work properly, which is true, but should not require that amount of dedication just to have some service up and running.

In the 90's I had a 486 w 8 MB RAM run as my web server, DNS, mail server, SQL server and acted as a router with a firewall on a dialup connection. Later I added another 8MB so that I could also run the GUI.

It's due to the superior simplicity of the UNIX design.

Windows is heavy on complexity, thus less manageable, and more prone to problems. Clearly a lot of people have a working Windows setup, but I'd say many more people have massive stability issues. UNIX was not designed with security in mind, but because of the simple modular design can be modified to work with it in mind.

Now if you don't work with different O/S over time in environments where you can really compare O/S's handling different situations you might not realize how much easier it is to, for example, manage Linux servers compared to Windows. I think the number is something like 12 servers per admin. You could possibly reach 100 servers per admin under a UNIX like O/S. Again, due to simplicity over complexity.

For those of us who have had the pleasure of knowing other O/S's, we can testify to the pleasure level of getting off Windows. For those who love Windows - good for you! It has certainly gotten better over the decades. Is more stable and so on.

That was always part of my successful action. Being a bit proactive goes a long way towards happy users. You call it slacking off to walk around and talk to each user, but it really should be part of the job description. As someone else pointed out technology makes people feel stupid and they tend to attack whomever is related to the problem.

Each month I would talk to the dept heads about their needs and making plans for implementing things that would make their job easier. Of course I switched all the servers from Windows to Linux so I could do a lot of things with much less effort. Some of the things they asked for were for the birds, but giving them the opportunity to tell someone about their ideas did not exactly hurt me.

Some of those collaborations ended up making fundamental changes to how things were done.
People like to know that they matter, that they are appreciated and valuable. Simply listening to someone can easily make that happen.

"Which means it is likely he was in internal waters..."

No, international waters start 24 miles out. It used to be 3 miles, which is out side of how far a cannon ball could fly.

Pres. Reagan extended it to 12 and Pres. Clinton to 24 miles.

Even it it still was 3 miles they were at the dock. Of course we see that the captain had activated the ship's satelite service. Which apparently is stronger than the closest cell tower.