Hey now... If politicians can do it, why can't everyone else?

They didn't open source all of .NET. The only open sourced the bits that are critical for .NET being viable for cloud computing, which is an utterly self-serving decision that smacks of desperation.

If Microsoft really wants to raise eyebrows, they should open source the ENTIRE stack, including all the APIs necessary to write desktop applications.

So far all they've been doing is playing a game of "Gee, maybe if we open up this one particular little tidbit, that'd be enough for people to bite and give our stuff a try." and hope that nobody is paying attention to the man behind the curtain.

When your abusive SO repeatedly offers you their hand, only to punch you in the nose when you take it, how long does it take before you stop putting any faith into their protestations about "having changed", etc?

Bullshit.

You don't just wipe away a conniving corporate culture by replacing the CEO and adding a little more lipstick.

Microsoft has spent the last several *decades* screwing people, companies, and industries over, and they have yet to show they have changed. Just look at what happened to Nokia.

They have a well established history of offering people a carrot, and then sticking them in the back when they turn around.

Microsoft lost everyone's trust a long time ago, and it is THEIR responsibility to show that they've changed, and everyone else is under ZERO obligation to give them any benefit of the doubt whatsoever. They want to show they've changed? They have to demonstrate it, not just once, but repeatedly and consistently. If they do that for, oh, a few years, without falling back to their old ways, then maybe we can BEGIN to trust them again. Maybe.

That's because Windows and Office are still their big cash cows.

Want to use a PC? You use Windows. Want to write documents and spreadsheets? You use Office. They have a massive monopoly on those two things, and right now they are coasting on inertia. If people don't like Windows 8, what do they do? A few switch to Apple. Fewer still switch to Linux. The vast majority just stick to Windows 7. In other words, Microsoft still makes money even if they fuck up royally.

But as soon as you step outside that core, look what happens. Practically every single venture they have attempted, has flopped on it's face. XBox had a good run, but Microsoft did an excellent job of torpedoing that with the XBox One. Remember Zune? How many BILLIONS have they lost on surface now?

The *only* thing that is keeping Microsoft afloat right now is that core Windows/Office property, because it's not worth the effort to switch away from it. But for anything new, people are generally avoiding Microsoft like Typhoid Mary. As they should, given the number of entities (and I'm talking Partners, OEMs, and even international standards bodies) that Microsoft has screwed over, only a fool would trust Microsoft to so much as squeeze their raging blackheads.

They should have gotten help from Disney. Then they would have been able to extend copyright until our sun goes supernova.

I'm sorry, but there's no room for rational and well stated arguments in this debate. Now go home and come back when you have more froth coming out of your mouth.

I'll be very interested to see how the data plays out, comparing the old dummies with the new ones.

For example: Does the extra fat provide a sufficient additional layer of protection, resulting in less severe injuries?

Thank you for having the guts to try something new and different.

It's so tiresome to always have Apple be the one that experiments with design, followed by everyone else copying whatever Apple did whether or not it was a good idea. When Apple introduced their gumdrop iMacs, everything else went translucent. Microwaves. Clothes irons. It was absurd.

eg: We recently got a bunch of PCs, and they included mice copied from Apple's absurdly-flat mighty mouse or whatever they call it. Had to throw the damn things out cause they were unusable. Apple should be barred from designing mice.

There's only one feature that Android desperately needs, and it's one I doubt that will ever happen.

Google needs to copy iOS's control over app behaviour. The unfortunate fact is, most developers are no where near as good as they think they are (regardless of platform), and there are way too many apps that will obliterate your battery even when they're only running in the background.

This is inexcusable for a mobile operating system that, by definition, runs on devices with limited battery life. It's even worse when you have a phone that doesn't have an easily replaceable battery.

Too bad this will never happen. That's why I gave up on Android and switch to iOS, despite Apple's obsessive control freakery. When all's said and done, I need a device that I can trust to work reliably. If I wanted a device where I *needed* to screw around and poke at it right down to the OS level just to make it work properly, I'd be using Gentoo.

http://www.shsmedia.com/pentiu...

Remember... "Don't Divide, Intel Inside"

Assuming you were even correct, you will be very hard pressed to find a single public network owner be upset that someone took it upon themselves to clean up their network for them.

Businesses provide wifi as a service to help bring in paying customers. The likelyhood that a paying customer is going to come in and suddenly start torrenting a boatload of crap is exceedingly low.

Case in point... I've been to places where the network was hosed, but I was the only person there with a computer. The bandwidth was all being consumed by people who weren't even customers of the establishment. What are the possible options? You can't canvas an entire neighbourhood looking for people abusing the wifi connection. Call the police? Yeah right.

So along comes someone who is fed up and finally does something about it. Assuming that he got the owners permission, he just performed a public service for free, to the benefit of everyone else that wanted to use that network. That makes him a hero, not a criminal.

What I find particularly sad is people like you who would rather defend abusers and vilify good samaritans, instead of the other way around. This is why trolls will always win, because it's easier for people like you to target and pull down the few who actually contribute something useful to society, instead of railing against the people who are instigating genuine harm.

I'm not advocating for vigilante justice in general. I'm saying that this is an inevitable consequence when other recourses are not available. Especially so when people like you are essentially blaming the victim for standing up for themselves and giving the actual aggressor (in this case, the torrenters) a free pass.

And don't get me started on supposed Libertarian ideals. It is so completely out of touch with how the real world works, that I'm embarrassed for people who actually admit to being Libertarian.

You seem to be confused regarding who is engaging in the DoS attack.

The script poisons bittorrent traffic in order to *stop* the DoS attack that is *already* in progress, caused by the *torrenter*.

This is not the equivalent of yelling at kids riding their bikes. It's the equivalent of having a bunch of kids forcefully and willfully blocking the driveway of you and every other person's house on your street because they want to play road hockey.

In real life, you'd be calling the police and possibly pressing charges. But that's a lot harder to do with network traffic, hence people going vigilante like this. This is an inevitable consequence when more reasonable measures are not available.

Your strawman arguments are ridiculous. Why the hell would the owner of a coffee shop be in the back room downloading CentOS ISOs? That's horse shit and you know it.

The whole point of a business providing public wifi, is to entice people to come in and use their other services. If I go in there with the expectation that I can peruse slashdot while enjoying a cappuccino, and I can't, then that will directly impact my decision to go there again.

I challenge you to find one single shop owner that wouldn't happily invite measures such as these, so that they are able to provide service to their customers.

Ilsa

I guess then that it's a good thing there are *other* download methods other than torrenting if you need to grab an ISO that badly. And of course, we're ignoring the fact that your scenario is incredibly unlikely.

Having sane network policies require network admins to set them up and possibly police them. The likelyhood that a mom 'n pop shop is going to hire one borders on zero. They'd sooner get rid of the wifi altogether.

The issue here is simple: If you want to be an asshole, someone else is going to be an asshole back. This is a basic concept common to almost all human interactions, and it's not going to change no matter how libertarian you want to be about it.

Bittorrent users are effectively performing a denial of service attack on an entire network that doesn't belong to them.

Please explain how running a script like this, with the owners permission, makes the script-writer worse than the torrenters?

The torrenters do not have a god given right to abuse someone else's network. I've been in places where the wifi is basically useless, but the shop is almost empty, which means there are people consuming wifi bandwith and not even having the courtesy of being a patron of said shop.

I'm sorry, but people like that can go fuck themselves. If you can't express even the simplest forms of common courtesy, you don't deserve any in return.