I love it! Everybody else cracking MS jokes gets modded funny or Insightful, but not you... no you're modded troll.

I have Charter and routinely have charges that don't add up. Only those $2 agent fees of course... agents that I never talk to because they don't know anything (although that's every ISP)? And once my Internet went down and after a few phone calls to Charter, they sent over a technician under the understanding that if it was due to a problem on my side of the network (I.e. cables, my LAN, etc.) then I would have a charge, however, if the problem lay on their end, they would not charge me. Turns out they accidentally disabled my connection... and then charged me a $35 dollar technician fee anyway. I was irate to say the least (we didn't have Internet for 3 days and they charged me for it!). I have constant outages, and my bills are routinely in the $75-$85 region, just for Internet. Why can't I go somewhere else? Because they are the only option.

The only solution would be to enable the complete removal of Internet Explorer's GUI. The only reason I don't say to completely remove it is because it is crucial to Windows Update, among other aspects of that OS. However, to force the OS to tell the user, "You must install one of the above to get on the Internet," is ludicrous. The same people claiming that Microsoft's packaging are the ones who have no problem with Firefox being installed by default in Linux distributions. The only difference is that we have the ability to remove Firefox in favor of Opera, Epiphany, or what have you. Therefore the only way to achieve "equality" is for MS to include a way to give the user the option to remove Internet Explorer in favor of a different browser.

This is probably the saddest/nerdiest conversation I have seen on Slashdot that has run this long... now THAT'S saying something...

If someone has Truecrypt on their hard drive and the police raid your house for some server and they take that encrypted drive, there is nothing stopping you from saying, "I forgot my password... oops." But if you trust the hardware, then what stops the police from going after that hard drive manufacturer and putting the legal pressure on them to provide a back entrance and/or technical help? The idea that the government won't put a legal squeeze on the hard drive manufacturer the second they think they've come upon a child pornography/warez/other horrible illegal things seems absurd to me. I understand that manufacturers of things like flash drives and such have had hardware encryption before, but it hasn't been widespread and mainstream. When you throw in the "average citizen" factor, I think we'll see all kinds of challenges and laws spring up.

-- And as always IANAL, but I do read Slashdot!!

Plausible deniabiliity kinda like this? If the RIAA put the lawyers on that case, it could be assumed that a paper thin defense like that wouldn't stand up in court.

They went through the trouble of making fake reviews for their product... and failed because they used their real names... I don't even know what to say to that...

"This post was found to be satisfactory and it was delivered on time in great condition!"
      -Vert^H^H^H^HJohny Luser!

While it may be in an extension, it is not implemented via the main program itself. Therefore IE 8 is the first browser to implement this (as opposed to taking FF's stance and implementing an extension interface).

Fair enough, I just chose a website that does this and is widely used by the general public.

Seriously, this is no big deal. According to the article, "On average, people will hear a 15-second commercial about every two hours, Westergren said, adding that it is a targeted ad campaign and not everyone is hearing the commercials." Other 'free' services have been doing it for ages, most notably Hulu.com. Plus I agree with the above comments... fuck country-specific services on the Internet and fuck those royalty fees. And yes... I'm looking at you the most RIAA...

Nobody cares about your pun.

That's why people invented add-ons for Firefox, such as NoScript and AdBlock. When more people adopt these the ads will stop... the ads will stop.

You would think that. I even went so far at one point as to write my answers down to avoid confusion (how they write the same questions multiple times), however, I still flagged on that test. The employer I had talked to couldn't even pass that "test".

As a teenager, I was always passed up because I couldn't "pass" the personality test on BestBuy.com (for The Geek Squad), despite the fact that I already had my A+ and was on my way to a CCNA at the time. I talked to the employer at that local store and while he recognized that I probably knew my field I 'HAD' to pass that personality test. Needless to say I never got hired by them.

I actually didn't mean private in a "security through obscurity" sense, I meant in the private sector. It just seemed that in modern times, the United States government wouldn't want to give anything to the community in terms of improving security for individuals. (These were just the thoughts at the time, I can see why now... just thought I'd throw it out there)