Let me guess - you live in China?

You're not legally bound to follow the terms of the EULA unless you accept it and use the software, and by extension, the license it comes with. You can reject the EULA after reading it and uninstall the software, or just not download it in the first place, and that's that.

Everybody could take the time to read all of the inane rambling bullshit that timothy clutters the front page with. Then we'd really be wasting time.

In other news, if you buy a $1 candy bar every Sunday, that's $52 a year! But wait, there's more. If everybody in Detroit, MI bought a candy bar every Sunday, that would be $36,742,420 a year! And if they bought THREE candy bars, then OMG! That's $110,227,260 per year! And OH EM GEE, IF THEY PAID 7% SALES TAX THAT WOULD BE $7,715,908.20 IN TAXES A YEAR FROM CANDY BARS!

ERMAHGERD, NERMBERS!

All of those companies were doing things that (almost) nobody else was doing at the time of their inception. When 1000 people drop out of college with the exact same "great new idea", 999 people become unemployed and eventually discouraged.

Don't put the idea in someone's head that they should immediately drop out of college if they want to start a "tech company", because nowadays people think "tech company" means "I want to build a website like Flickr but with a red logo instead of a blue one". They also think you can get by by doing what someone else is already doing, only a little differently. This is very, very far from the truth.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to think up a model on your own, and it needs to be very different from established businesses. You can't just copy-paste a business plan and call yourself an "entrepreneur", and nobody's going to pay you to sit there and wallow in your own perceived greatness. You have to do something that people want to pay for!

The last thing society should be doing is encouraging students with no unique or original ideas to drop out and create the next Pets.com. Encourage students to think of creative solutions to existing problems, not blindly follow the "entrepreneur" fad when they have no creative merit. That's a recipe for unemployment and a very rude awakening.

I have an incurable breathing addiction. I keep holding out for a cure of some kind, but all their proposed treatments seem to have a very high mortality rate.

This is terrible. Now Slashdotters will have to find a new disease to self-diagnose and blame for their undeveloped social skills. Might I suggest ASPD?

"Commissioned Study" is politician-speak for "Take my opinion, find some numbers that agree with it, omit ones that don't, and release it as a third party so it looks like other people agree with me."

That's an excellent idea! Implementing those features in Tor would make operating an exit node a lot less nerve-racking for the average nerd. You should suggest an IP Whitelist feature to the Tor team with that exact justification.

ISPs are able to track which client sent which packets and can provide information to law enforcement when illegal activity has taken place over their network. ISPs are also a registered business entity whose purpose is widely recognized as providing internet access to other entities who are responsible for the content they access.

FedEx is able to track who sent a package, who it was addressed to, who took delivery of the package, etc. FedEx can provide information to law enforcement when illegal substances or materials are transported through their shipping system. FedEx is also a registered business entity whose purpose is widely recognized as providing parcel transportation services to other entities who are responsible for the items they ship.

Tor is designed to be completely anonymous and provides no facilities to track who is sending data and who it's destined for. Tor operators cannot provide this information to law enforcement when illegal activity has taken place through a Tor exit node. Tor operators are, in most cases, also not registered business entities. That is why when illegal activity takes place through Tor, the exit node operator is typically the first and only one investigated.

Q: How does the local police department know that Joe Schmoe at 123 Main Street is operating a Tor exit node?
A: They don't. There is no way to tell, aside from computer forensics, whether he was directly involved in illegal activities or not. That's why raids like this happen and will continue to happen. The Tor project warns you about, and you willingly accept the risk of, legal repercussions stemming from operating a Tor exit node.

tl;dr: This isn't news.

It seems you completely missed the fact that I was talking about desktop platforms. Linux is already king of the server space, but as long as Windows maintains its strangle-hold on the desktop market, they will maintain a foothold in the server market. Read my post again with that in mind.

Businesses don't use Windows just to use Windows. Businesses use Windows to use Office, Active Directory, and Exchange. Linux has competitors to all three but they're not even CLOSE, no matter how much the evangelists puff them up.

What do you get when you put a whole office on Linux? You get a bunch of people sitting around using Linux. But they're not doing anything productive. Nobody's paying them to use Linux. No customers are giving your company money to have an office full of people sit around and "use Linux". Linux is not the product, Linux is the platform. Right now, the Linux platform for enterprise is severely lacking in comparison to Windows. The "Why" is dreadfully simple: there are no serious products that give the platform value.

Focus community effort on building solid competitors to Office, Active Directory, and Exchange. Maybe try creating something completely new, or maybe just try to mimic the MS products as best you can. Mimic might be better, because then you can show them how similar your products are so the switching cost is minimal, yet one costs a whole lot less, therefore the TCO is much lower.

In case you haven't noticed, Microsoft likes to throw around TCO as their metric. That's because most businesses don't care about up-front cost, they focus on what you'll pay over the life of the product. Put the most amount of effort possible into minimizing the switching costs. Linux will become a much more viable desktop platform in the enterprise when you can demonstrate meaningful cost savings that take TCO into account. Until then, Microsoft will continue to give enterprise customers concrete and logical reasons for why they should choose their product over all others.

I don't think it's so much that they're looking for acceptance. I think it's moreso that they want businesses to use it for more things. I'd also say it's widely accepted as-is, but apparently they're not happy with already-staggering server and mobile market shares.

If you want to get more people to use something, make it something they want to use.

Or maybe, just maybe, accept that your product has its niche, and other products have other niches. The Linux community will rip itself to shreds trying to make Linux the answer to everything.

Yes, because I'm good at my job and make enough money to afford the comfort that my townhome provides. What's affordable to me isn't affordable to somebody working minimum wage jobs at Burger King,

It's much more affordable than your pulled-from-ass $1500 number, and much nicer than an apartment in the slums. I don't see how you can look at my example compared to your hypothesis and claim that it's not "affordable" by the standard you set.

Based on the fact that you can't say "bumfuck" I'll assume that you're 12 years old. You'll learn when you get older that massive megacities like LA and New York City are not all they're cracked up to be. Any town over 500,000 has all the amenities of the big cities, but with a lower pricetag.

My rent on a townhome in a nice, quiet part of Kansas City is $1000/month. I work at a very high-tech company of 12,000 people. My commute is 10 minutes, with traffic.

Not everyone has to live and work in Silicon Valley or downtown NYC. The people who do are really getting the shit end of the deal. There are other cities out there that are a lot more affordable.

It's well known that product photos are usually a mock-up, but this is completely different. The big idea there is that they start from a finished product and recreate it in a more predictable, yet still visually accurate way.

How many times did you buy a box of Fruit Loops, only to open the box to find a bag full of Raisin Bran?

I'd say this is more akin to a fast food restaurant taking a picture of the actual food, and then when you order one, they serve you a plastic mock-up cheeseburger covered in Armor-All.