t Linux Security is somewhat atrocious these days with the whole security via obscurity approach

Your ideas are intriguing to me. I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

News that matters.

Next up, Microsoft/Symantec/Cisco security product and costs 10's of thousands more! Can't leave the point-and-click jui jitsu black belts out.

Either we have a Constitution, and it applies, or it does not.

Why is this insightful? Human language, the U.S. Constitution in particular, is not a finite state machine.

And then you follow with an artful interpretation of the situation. Good work making us all poorer!

Every time I see Visa/Mastercard news I and dumbfounded at the ignorance some smart people have regarding payment networks.

1. visa and Mastercard are bank associations.
That means a bank can join either one. Banks can and do belong to both associations. Banks get revenue a variety of ways when they issue Visa/Mastercard products. That's why they join!

2. Payment services inflate the cost of all goods at a retailer who accepts cards and cash.
The consequence is the cost of all goods is inflated. Anyone familiar with the merchant end of accepting these payment types can fill you in.

3. The associations have a duopoly on payment services in the U.S.
Resulting economic activity is constrained by the duopoly and wealth is destroyed. Look up the Visa and Mastercard anti-trust rulings won by Discover and Amex.

4. Paypal is not a bank and does not have a bank charter. Not even a 'commercial' bank charter. Paypal is its own 'closed' payment system.

You too can start a payment system. So long as you do not cut into Visa/Mastercard's business, you will not be bothered.

Really. It's essentially a marketing front end. By itself, it does not generate revenue for Mastercard.

Prosecution in this case is an opportunity to fabricate 'damages' and 'lost revenue' from losing access to an electronic version of a brochure.

in reading the article, not compensating the owners struck me as just being mean.

Really? Run an equity into the ground in clear violation of untold number of regulations and reward the owner. That's going to end badly for everyone.

Think about it and apply this thinking to other things like, oh, banks for instance. How about extending it to any corporation in the industry you choose to dislike the most?

Sure, I had $30,000 worth of pirate software when I was in college, and I went legit after my student discount was up

And there you have it boys and girl. The exact reason why the vast majority of commercial software approve of violating the terms and conditions of using their software. You will in all likelihood become their customer.

And what about the other users who don't go legit? Well, you certainly don't want them to use your competitor's software, right?

Now, how does the evil BSA figure into this? Like the RIAA, they make an example out of an individual/organization to instill fear. Again, the idea is to discourage the violations, not actually prevent them from happening.

What Canon can do?

-With current available models nothing
-With future models blah... blah... blah...
-Hire people who really understands security

Having been on that side of the industry, there's no way Canon's putting a smart card chip in camera. Why? Cost mostly. And then there's the significant problem of communicating from the camera OS to the smart card chip. And then there's the significant increase in the cost of manufacturing.

They aren't going to hire anyone either. This decision was made long ago and the constraints are still cost and calendar. Both extraordinarily tight.

Canon will generally defame Skylarov to any agency that feigns interest and be generally dishonest about the whole thing.

So not only are you battening down the hatches for the present when you lay them off, you're mortgaging your future by destroying the core intellectual base for the stuff you have.

The buyers in this case and most others are not planning for a future. They are extracting as much wealth as possible as quickly as possible with no regard for a future that will never be. If it blows up in 2, 3, or five years is only a matter of finding more suckers to take money from while Novell's business prospects end.

People with a mindset like yours are not valued because you are not looking to extract maximum value today with only a pretty presentation and pro-forma statements. You might add a little value to a pillager's target that is with certainty headed to bankruptcy and dissolution, but that's about it.

Hot news for you: Linux is many more places than Microsoft's products. You just don't know it. Millions of electronic devices use it. Yes, millions. Mostly invisible to you because it just works. When it **has** to work, there's some kind of Unix used.

Windows has a niche and does a good job defending it. It's an "okay" desktop. Mostly they use the desktop like a cancer that bores into an office environment. Straight server applications? Expensive in most ways and comparably weak. It's below average-ness doesn't stop it from being sold because Microsoft knows the customer is not the geek, but the boss of the geek's boss who doesn't know anything about the geek's job.

It looks like this deal keeps NetWare customers going for sure and forces the SuSe business to pay for itself. That will likely chop the head count of the group working on SuSe.

Flame on!

I think sometimes the geeks forget the Marketing adage that most enduring products are functionally "just okay." Typically a successful product uses lots of cash to drown their competitors. Might makes right.

Someone somewhere said "Early to bed. Early to rise. Advertise Advertise Advertise"

I've admined SuperMicro, Dell, and HP at this point and would strongly recommend a second hand HP. Lots of parts availability, *excellent* management software, while the servers themselves are practically ready to run with all kinds of redundancy. Cheap supermicro doesn't work out to be low-cost.

Serversupply.com has tons of second-hand Proliants. You'll pay more than Craigslist, but less than new. Unless you *really* need tons of cpu horsepower, make sure the server has gigabit ethernet and Bob's yer Uncle. Get an old HP ultra320 SCSI storage array and load it up with 75+ GB drives for your storage. Yer bottleneck is always the network. Dead simple, cheap and reliable.

On the coast of California is a whole lotta military real estate some of it pretty secret judging by the number of ways to be discouraged from getting too close to the boundaries.

Of course the military will deny it. 50 years from now a FOIA request might be interesting, but doubtful.

A rocket launched off the California coast isn't special. Neither is something secret happening at one of the bases. Put the two together and it's a non-event.

And if you ask them to wade that sea of ridiculousness they'll swiftly be lured back to the comort of the tried and true.

Which is the precise reason why they are not good candidates for switching to Linux. There is no urgent need to switch. Leave them alone.

Oracle and Microsoft to name *just* two companies piss off enough customers you'll have enough people desperately wanting to be rid of both to pay you well for an entire career.

No. A thousand times no.

Most of your rant is incoherent middle Marketing management hyperbole.

- Interface design that specifically and completely bars programmers from participating
So, how would GUI's get done? Really. Because IDE's have tried over the decades and none has succeeded. Zero. There's another toolkit that inevitably follows the last big thing in GUI's.

If you say something along the lines of "a gui should be as simple as scripting" I agree, and KDE4, XFCE4 have it. Your bash script magically appears as a nice gui in some cases. winetricks.sh comes to mind.

Acceptance of proprietary drivers when offered
Done. ATI, Nvidia, Epson and HP(networking driver) are three examples that have binary drivers and the distros have done a good job at integrating them. The companies behind them have been pretty good to the Free software community too. (Epson exception. Epson printers work, only sort-of compared to HP's full featureset)
Provision of real, available, phone-based technical support
I know this industry and I don't see any of this for software. Apple? Briefly. Adobe? cha-ching! Oracle? Microsoft? More money for support. If you need it, just look around and you'll find it. The AOL of Linux, Ubuntu will hold your hand for a reasonable fee. Red Hat will hold your hand for an Enterprise contract. HP? IBM? They all got it.

- Real, complete documentation
I don't accept this. Most apps have great man pages. Certainly as good as what passes for documentation included in a Microsoft OS release. Not as good as some of the commercial UNIXes, but great in most cases. Man pages are certainly enough in most cases. Please, do not take this as an opportunity to tell me about the ONE app you downloaded from who knows where having nothing to do with the distro you used. It's not a legitimate complaint.

If you want to wail and moan about how it shouldn't be necessary to dig through man pages, then you are applying a completely wrong standard to general purpose desktop operating systems.