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Government

Submission + - New York Daily News Steals Empire State Building. (nydailynews.com)

westbake writes: A few forms, a stamp and 90 minutes were all it took to transfer ownership of the Empire State building to Nelots (stolen spelled backward) Properties.

Some of the information was laughable: Original "King Kong" star Fay Wray is listed as a witness and the notary shared a name with bank robber Willie Sutton. The massive [$2 billion] ripoff illustrates a gaping loophole in the city's system for recording deeds, mortgages and other transactions. The loophole: The system — run by the office of the city register — doesn't require clerks to verify the information.

Ouch.

Comment The point of Minority Report. (Score -1) 133

Minority Report featured billboards that uniquely identified people and "personalized" their contents and occasionally calling the police. A billboard in Japan that monitors people's faces for feedback is a crude prototype of this concept. The people with ESP powers who predicted crime were a plot device used to explore the real issues of experimental ethics, privacy and criminal justice.

Comment get real (Score -1) 234

Thanks for another example of dumping. You can point to them as often as you like, that won't change the real cost difference between Windows and free software nor will it make Windows itself competitive. We've seen how this practice is hurting M$'s bottom line, they can't keep it up forever but free software won't go away.

Walmart also has cheap drugs, but healthcare in the US ruins more people than outlawed drugs do now.

Comment Dead XP, Leave Windows Now. (Score -1) 534

Don't worry, by the time they finish "upgrading" XP, Vista 7 will be teh fastest. Do you really think upgrades are going to be kind to the OS they have tried to kill for the last two years? Move to free software before your systems all crap out and you will be happier.

This has been going on forever, but Vista's failure ends it. You're talking to a guy who fell for the Win98 trick but not the XP trick. Every OS upgrade from M$ since 95 has been a bigger joke than the last. They beat better stuff from IBM and Apple with OEM and retail strong arming, but Vista is putting them all out of business.

Censorship

Submission + - Why Does M$ Get a Free Pass on Malware? (earthweb.com)

twitter writes: "Carla Schroder of IT Management asks an obvious question, "Why Does Microsoft Get a Free Pass on Malware?"

It's a funny thing how Microsoft succeeds in getting their logo and the Windows logo plastered on everything — computers, advertising, and even other companies' ads. That "We recommend Windows Vista!" blurb is on every darned ad and product catalog that exists, it seems. Every word that falls from the mouths of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer is dutifully recorded and reported. And yet the news media go all forgetful when they're reporting on yet another malware outbreak. The most recent example of this is the mass worm outbreak at our largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

When you dig into any W32 virus story you find the same thing Boycott Novell has answers about advertising. Boycott Novell is also doing a good job of tracking press manipulation [2], [3], [4], wikipedia editing and abuse of those who refuse to be manipulated. Carla, should also read this to know how personally M$ takes reporter manipulation. The net result of these efforts is massive censorship and a public that no longer trusts it's media."

Comment Linux Gaming. (Score -1) 314

if anyone's taking a bite out of Windows gaming, it's the Mac -- much as I don't want to admit it, Linux isn't going to make much of a dent.

You seem blisfully unaware that the number one selling game console of all time and it's healthy decendent both ran GNU/Linux. Ever heard of Play Station? There's going to be plenty more where that came from because GNU/Linux is about as close a ubiquitous platform as you can get. A freaking ARM based Beagle board has accelerated graphics good enough for gaming these days. From cell phone to supercomputer, GNU/Linux runs it all. Windows has got .... Zune .... Xbox .... Windows all of it is the same broken suck because Ballmer's got his greedy palms on it.

Comment More is on the way. (Score 0) 314

This is not a tech industry lawsuit, it's a customer lawsuit. It's true that Intel, HP and Dell were pissed off, but they did not launch this thing. See the fine PDF for more. Industry lawsuits will come later as shareholders for CompUSA, Circuit City, Best Buy and many others sue M$ for the Vista Failure channel stuffing that put them out of business.

Comment Other article? (Score -1) 369

Who reads articles? Looks. Oh yeah, these are independent studdies by different people who reach the same conclusions by different means. That's a good indicator of truth. If there was a fix for Visat, it would have come out in it's six years of development. If you want to be charitable and blame hardware vendors, it should work by now but it does not. Vista still requires extraordiary hardware for ordinary tasks. This is not going to be fixed because the idiots at M$ believe in DRM and owning your computer for data rape.

Comment I see a lot of this. (Score -1, Troll) 369

but only on slashdot. It's like goats.ex or something but funnier because of what it says about M$.

It's funny to see the current M$ party line as, "incompetent IT people are going to install Vista so get used to it." Is that the best lie they can come up with? Wow! Shovel another $300 million into the PR pit.

Linux Business

German Foreign Ministry Migrates Desktops To OSS 147

ruphus13 writes "Here's another example of 'German Engineering' — The Foreign Ministry in Germany is migrating all of its 11,000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other open source applications. According to the article, 'this has drastically reduced maintenance costs in comparison with other ministries. "The Foreign Ministry is running desktops in many far away and some very difficult locations. Yet we spend only one thousand euro per desktop per year. That is far lower than other ministries, that on average spend more than 3000 euro per desktop per year ... Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations," says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry ... "The embassies in Japan and Korea have completely switched over, the embassy in Madrid has been exclusively using GNU/Linux since October last year", Schuster added, calling the migration a success.' The Guardian has additional coverage of the move."

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