I tried to process an eOpen license last week. When the VLSC site finally was up, I went to add the license to our account, only to be completely unable to find an option to do so. Finally I gave up in frustration, and called their tech support line. I was on hold for 2.5 hours, and when they finally answered, was told they "forgot" that functionality when they did the "upgrade" to the VLSC from the old eOpen site. Luckily I already have the media and such, and can go ahead and build the server and put the product key in later, but it is a pain in the ass.

The old eOpen site was pretty terrible, I have to give MS credit for making something worse.

The presumption of innocence IS THE CORRECT ATTITUDE. Humans have an illogical tendency to jump to conclusions, presume guilt, and go on witch hunts. Presuming innocence until proven guilty by facts is the best way to stop that irrational behavior and protect the innocent. Someone who like child porn and intentionally seeks it out (and is therefore believed to be directly or indirectly a danger to children, the whole reasoning behind child porn being illegal in the first place) is not going to download one video, delete it, and never download it again. Everything about the circumstances points to his story being correct, Limewire is famous for misnamed files, and its not the first time I've heard of there being kiddie porn on it. He did not have a collection, nor did he have it even saved, it was clearly deleted. There is no evidence he distributed it, sought it, or wanted it. If there is more to this case the FBI needs to reveal it, of course they won't have to because they have used the fact the legal system is rigged in their favor in this kind of case to scare him into a plea bargain.

I know someone who is happily married, with 2 children. Their family has a very difficult time finding a place to live. The reason? When the Father was 18, he had consensual sex with his future wife, who was 16. Her family found out and pressed statutory rape charges. As a result, he is on the sex offender list, which is especially ironic because the "punishment" now hurts the supposed victim, and her children. The state has done far more harm to her then he ever did.

The police have no interest in justice. Every time you see a policemen, do not think he is there to protect you, or seek justice. His sole purpose is to be a crony to a politician, whether that politician is the DA, or the Mayor, or the governor, or the President. His job is to implicate as many people as possible in as many violations of the law as possible, to be used against them at his masters discretion. Every politician wants to look tough on crime, especially on pedophiles, and keep the population certain that HE is the one standing between their children and the groping hands of molesters. So the police are encouraged to round up as many people who can be labeled pedophiles as possible, and make sure the public is constantly reminded they are walking amongst them.

Just look at this article. The FBI tells people if you download child porn accidentally, call the authorities immediately. Presumably so they can offer you a plea "bargain" like this guy for turning yourself in, and only give you 3.5 years, plus 10 years parole, and a lifetime of discrimination on the sex offenders list. It is the exact opposite of what any competent lawyer would tell you to do, which is never admit to anything, never talk to the police, never allow them in your house, car, or computer without a warrant.

If you wanted to block outside dns, why would you blacklist instead of whitelist? Any decent firewall should be able to block DNS requests leaving the network except from the local dns server.

NASA can not afford accidents, not because of the sanctity of human life or any nonsense like that, but because it will kill NASA and probably manned spaceflight in this country in general. Colombia very nearly killed the shuttle program entirely, before a successor was even on the drawing board. People are willing to accept that being an astronaut is dangerous, but a lot of people look up to them, and when a bunch of them explode in a ball of fire over Texas in an entirely preventable accident, the PR impact is catastrophic. Even privately funded spaceflight will get shut down (in this country at least) if it has too many high profile accidents. Even if in reality the cost in lives is minuscule compared to what we lose daily in car accidents or lung cancer from smoking, a few big accidents in a row and the politicians will see "stopping the reckles endangerment of human lives" as a way to score some cheap votes. If human beings were rational and logical, you'd have a point, but we aren't, and too many astronaut funerals on TV will inevitably cause a kneejerk reaction.

I deal with malware quite a bit. The most common infection source I have seen lately has been unpatched adobe reader, java, or flash plugins. That and people who click those "Your computer has registry error" banners and install whatever it asks them too. WSUS makes keeping all the systems on a network updated with Windows updates very simple, but unless you have a tightly controlled environment keeping all the plug-ins and such updated automatically is much more difficult. Home users can use the excellent Secunia PSI for free to make sure they are keeping on top of updates, as it scans all the programs and warns you if any are out of date.

Miami was hit by Hurricane Andrew(a Cat 5), it caused a lot of damage in Homestead and some other areas but nothing really on the scale of Katrina. We are pretty used to hurricanes in Florida, and most Floridians know to take precautions, including getting the fuck out of dodge when they call your area an evacuation area. South Florida is general at sea level, not below it, and we have extensive drainage systems. Florida has extremely strict building codes to make buildings that are much more likely to survive a hurricane. The last hurricane to hit South Florida did relatively minor damage, although power was out for about a week in most places (this was due to Florida Power and Lighting's horrendous maintenance policies they had enacted since they realized the state would bail them out of any hurricane damage losses, so they stopped doing the maintenance that would prevent most of the damage). We also don't have as big a poverty problem as New Orleans does, so FEMA will actually come help us. For those of us used to living through hurricanes, Katrina was something on a whole different level. In South Florida, if you make it through the night and the storm passes, you know you are going to be ok. Katrina dragged on for weeks.

I think the city of New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana need to share in the responsibility. If your city is one broken levee away from disaster, you would think you would perform independent audits of your levee infrastructure. If the army core of engineers wont fix it, the feds wont fix it, the state won't fix it, then it is up to the people of that city on whose lives depend on it, to cough up the money however they can to fix it. They managed to build a football stadium, they can get a hold of funds to audit and repair levees. They also lacked adequate planning and preparation for shelters, evacuation transportation, and relief supplies. These are all simple things that we do here in South Florida that the government should have been doing in New Orleans, and the people need to take them to task for that. A hurricane in the gulf is not an extraordinary event, that can't be planned for. It is not an alien invasion or godzilla attack. If you are on the east coast, especially the gulf region, it is never a question of if a hurricane is going to hit you, but when. On the local news media here (where a lot of attention is paid to hurricanes for obvious reasons) I remember it generally came up about once a season when a hurricane was predicted to enter the gulf how bad it could be if it hit Lousiana. Apparently the local weather guy here has more sense then the entire New Orleans government?

I have firefox 3.5.5 on Win7, 10+ add-ons, and have left firefox open with 4-5 different windows, with 10+ tabs each, open for 4 days now. My memory usage is 80 megs. It sounds like either 1 particular add-on you use has nasty memory leaks, or the problem is more likely with flash or some other plug-in.

Just for kicks, if you don't need any of the fancy features, you can still use the old laserjet 4 drivers for brand new HP laserjet printers. Every large enterprise I've been in has standardized on them, they must be doing something right. Their consumer grade hardware is total shit though, a customer of ours decided to "save" some money by buying some printers from Best buy instead of the printers we recommended. They bought 2 HP printers, the drivers took 45 minutes to install out of the box.

After the first one, I tosssed the cds in the trash and downloaded the "plug in play" drivers from the hp site, they only took 15-20 minutes to install.

You can probably summarize this to: Don't buy anything Cisco thats not a Router, Switch, or Firewall (honestly the firewall is pretty iffy as well). Their other products seem designed to trade in on the name recognition their core business has created, but are generally sub par. I say this as someone who loves and defends Cisco's core networking gear. Would you buy a router from Microsoft, based on Windows? Of course not. Don't buy a server from Cisco (even if they call it a network appliance). Vendor lock-in is always a bad idea, Cisco lock-in is a world of pain. They will bleed you for money every chance they get, and not even realize they are doing it. Want to update to fix a crippling bug? Better have renewed your Smartnet. Want to enable a feature supported by your device? Better check to make sure your device is licensed for that. Oh, and you will need to buy client licenses for every piece of equipment that interacts with it, and a support agreement for those too.

The one positive side effect of the Cisco way is there is a ton of cheap older hardware out there to train on, Cisco makes reselling the equipment with support intact almost impossible so businesses don't want to touch it.

Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?

Actually, I think the article is complete bullshit for precisely this reason. The "lost decade" wasn't MS twiddling their thumbs. That big gap between XP and Vista? 90% of that was MS working on security. When worms began running rampant MS realized it had a major problem. It takes a long time to go from a codebase completely unconcerned with security to reasonably secure. A lot of the growing pains with Vista can be attributed to MS trying to wean application developers off assuming they were a local admin all the time, even if there was no need. After xp was released, they spent a lot of time on tracking down and fixing holes, along with implementing new tech to mitigate existing holes. Hell when XP came out they didn't even have a way to update automatically. Prior to XP Sp1, security in Windows was practially non-existent, and taking remote control of a Windows machine was trivial. Now Windows is a hell of a lot more secure out of the box, and the tools exist to make it pretty damn secure overall. In my opinion this "lost decade" nonsense is simply MS paying the price for a previous decade of laziness. They didn't bother to learn the lessons of Unix and other OS's before them and build with security in mind from the beginning, and paid the price.

To me the transition from Gates to Balmer can be seen as a maturing of MS. Under Gates MS acted like a schoolyard bully. Petulant, overly aggressive, petty, and ultimately self defeating. That MS could not have survived in the enterprise world (aka the people who actually buy Windows licenses) in the long term. A constant upgrade treadmill with little attention paid to management or backwards compatibility. Deliberately sabotaging the competition, with no regard to how it will affect their customers or their long term health. Look at the Java debacle, MS acted like assholes and as a result, I still have to go install the JRE every time I install Windows, hosting java based apps on Windows is practically nonexistent (giving market share to Linux), and IE is the retarded step child of internet browsers due mainly to it's terrible javascript engine. how much money do you think MS pissed away defending antitrust suits here and in the EU? How much did they have to spend on bribing politicians (excuse me, "campaign donations") to get off as lightly as they did?

In my opinion, from a technical point of view, MS's products are better now then they have ever been. Which they desperately need because Linux is closing fast and it is increasingly difficult to justify their licensing costs.

I'm sure all the small business owners in Washington feel super happy about it every time they pay the taxes MS get's a free pass on.

Pretty sure noone in the world wants a website that looks like Cisco's. It's the worst site by a major technology company I've ever used. To get to anything I normally have to login 3-4 times because it randomly forgets your logged in, only to find out that what I was trying to get to was just a link back to where I started. And forget trying to download the software my account privileges say I should be entitled to, I always wind up using someone else's account because despite several attempts on Cisco's part to fix it it STILL won't let me. Honestly for the company that practically runs the internet, their website is just shameful.

If I signed a petition of my own free will, in clear understanding of what it was for, in good conscience, then I would not care if they ran tv ads 24/7 on Fox news about it. I don't sign every petition some college kid trying to make a quick buck tosses in my face, so I don't have anything to worry about. I suppose if I signed something I was ashamed of, because it revealed that despite the tolerant face I show in public, I am a close minded bigot that likes to oppress people different from me, I might have a problem with it.

I don't know about their official policy, but reinstalling machines with oem versions of Windows with the key on the sticker is something I do all the time, in fact I did it twice on Friday. 99% of the time you have no activation problems, when you do you call the number and the automated computer voice helps you activate with no issues, including with WGA. What may be your problem is the media used, you need OEM media for OEM keys. I would really like to see a concrete, reproducible example of the problem your talking about.