The advantage or Active Directory is that Microsoft holds a monopoly on operating system software where they can require all customers bend over and install COA stickers on computers (which they don't require in software they hold no monopoly position in), and the customer has no option but put up with it if they want to use this marvel of technology called computers at all. But unless the Swedes can make their own chips and CPU's, little do they realize that computers bought next year will be required to install in the UEFI BIOS replacement a check for Windows, required by Microsoft or their manufacturers don't get the discounts their competitors get, and then there goes the aspirations of the Swedes to break away from the chains installed onto them by the monopolies, and use an alternative to the monopoly instead, like Linux, if they wish to use computers at all. So all hail to Active Directory or whatever piece of shit software they cook out and release into the public at Microsoft these days, because that is gonna be your only option if you want to use computers at all, they make sure of that, that's what they are best at, not creating things, but embrance, extend, extinguish alternatives, which is how they got to the point where they are, sporting the richest people that ever walked on the surface of this planet.

backed? as in backed into it? vibrator?

I beg to differ in opinion, which are like assholes. I bet they select audits based on:
- political motivation
- somebody accumulating money in their bank account, or paying off a mortgage too fast, either of which is illegal

so if you want to stay under the radar, make sure you're not keeping your belt too tight and getting ahead, instead you buy that overpriced ipod or cable subscription.. just to hang with the crowd, like ocean fish defend by swimming in schools of large numbers together, and if they hang out too much, it's easier for a predator to single them out and focus on them

You know what I call a smart sewer? An outhouse. Your shit stays put. Got a deadly genetically modified cooked up at Monsanto Labs biological warfare infection? It stays with you, instead of going to the treatment plant where it might survive and be released into the wild, contaminating natural rivers, lakes, oceans.

The IRS is a money making machine. They select audits based on income levels where the belt is kept too tight and things are out of average on statistics, unless they are playing politics with someone who misbehaves, as agents of Da Man himself.
So they are not gonna spend $2000 in agent salaries where there is a suspicion of $5 tax revenue missing. Nor are they gonna really harass people with a total income at the federal poverty level, unless there is a suspicion of a lot of under the table income. Who they go after is the big fish, big bucks, to them it's a lot better investment to spend $2000 bothering someone cheating them out of $200,000 in taxes, than spending the same on someone cheating them out of $20. It's just the way things work in the real world, and if they don't, something smells really fishy there. Like they can go after someone earning near the poverty level, for political reasons, such as being a Linux programmer, or the like. Oh btw linux programmers tend to die in mysterious accidents instead of IRS audits, that's a less conspicuous way to deal with them instead of giving them IRS audits when their income is low. Or they get framed for stuff, like Reiser. How do you trust who you marry? Especially mail order brides? They'll have children with you, then pretend being killed and go back to their home country with 2 million dollars, paid for by Da Man, and they leave their kids with you behind, as per initial agreement when they signed up for the deal. $2 million can go a long way in a lot of places in the world, including bringing whole villages and towns out of desolation, and people are willing to make kids over it and leave them behind, after all the kids won't die, they'll probably live a better life than most kids around the world. Yeah, my imagination is soooper! So back to the real world, IRS algorithms and stuff, they deal with the real world, and if you don't have a lot of money, nor make a lot of money, you're safe from them. What are they gonna find where there is no money? A lot of wasted time of their own.

I like a woman with good looks who cooks and cleans.

And btw the US is not going bankrupt from military waste, but from the cost of living waste where the government has to finance the insane costs of property, i.e. housing which is by far the most massive bill in everyone's budget, at least this stupid Obamacare King Kong arrived into everyone's budget to dwarf housing cost - insanity! Yeah I'm paying taxes to buy me some military protection against another Ghenghis Khan, not to have other people breed out of control on welfare on it, nor landlord cocksuckers pocket it all and buy golf courses and yachts on it, racking up government debt. In face of international competition of $5/day in places like Mexico, trying to sustain a 1500/mo rent in places like New York is only possible by racking up government debt. That's what's fucking wrong with the country, cost of living, and in that, cost of property. Landlords be like "but i, as an entrepreneus, invested 3 million dollars into this house so I can recoup it at 1500/mo, I can't make the mortgage payments on renting it to somebody who makes $5/day. Solution? It's simple - go on unemployment, then on welfare, and let the government pay the $1500/mo directly into the landlord's pockets, and wait while hyperinflation makes that 1500/mo equivalent to $4/day, so if you make $5/day, like in Mexico, you have $1 left over after you spend your $4/day housing cost, competing against places like China where $1/day pays for the whole show, because their housing cost and cost of living is not as insane as ours. Hyperinflation should annul the government debt too, but it would wreak havoc on the global financial market all pitted on the US dollar, at least until the China-Russia-EU bank conglomerate replaces it with something else, just to help us out and allow us to hyperinflate our currency to get rid of debt and make housing cost more sane, without dragging down the whole world with us, it's what you call smooth landing and the replacing of the US dollar with say US florins or US denars, or whatever. That's what happens when a financial system gets totally fucked, erase, replace, start over, bankruptcy, or, if you think we're gonna pick up our asses, fix everything that's wrong, and pay off the government debt by competing in the world market against people making $1 or $5 a day while we pay 1500/mo rent or mortgage in some places, commute for hours in 20K+ cars, then I ask you what are you smoking because I want some of that too. How you gonna get people off welfare and give them a job? Cuz right now, with free money falling from the sky called welfare the best interest of any ethnic group is to breed as fast as they can, starting at age 13, just to get voting majority and their way in politics, leading to even more welfare money and even more breeding out of control, without a way to earn an income fully dependent on government aid. And all Obamacare does is put even more people on government aid, working people who used to manage and try to stay within budget, now they surpass that mental roadblock saying everyone's doing it. Where is Obama gonna get the funds to pay for all that money going into his filthy rich insurance buddies' pockets? I know, more government debt! It's like even the powers that be, like insurance companies, or places like Microsoft about to charge rental fees starting with Windows 10, have given up on the idea of saving the system, they are like bees when they get smoked, start gobbling up all the honey they can before it's time to abandon the nest because a forest fire is about to destroy it. Getting the last bits out right before the whole friggin circus collapses, and starvation of the welfare dependents begins, when the welfare checks stop, and nobody is gonna dedicate their own personal time to put food on your table if they are not getting paid, everyone will worry about their own personal problems, of putting food on their own table.

Y'all forgetting that this is nothing more than some advanced cruise control. It may do object recognition, such as an accident pile up in the distance, or even a deer or bear walking across the street, however it will never be able to differentiate between a lawn ornament deer, or a live deer standing next to the road, about to enter the road, where even humans have problem. So falling asleep for the driver is out of the question. With trains it would be different, but even there often a decision has to be made in object recognition, and intents. Artificial intelligence equivalent to human intelligence is dangerous, and these visual object recognition and behavior predicting computing exercises are the critical first steps toward machine intelligence, and it's hard to see where the limiting point to machine intellect power would be set, it'd be always lets go another inch, another feature, another ability, then we limit ourselves to make sure we don't create something that takes over the world kills us all. Machine intellect and machine "life" has the power to exist in the vacuum of outer space, devour any matter, including all planets, moons and asteroids to build itself bigger or more numerous, and in that you and I have some carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium phosphate, etc. in us that it might go after as food or structural material for itself or its own kind. Ethics this ethics that, it's sad how even the smartest people that ever lived participated in wars of self interest, in fact the two World Wars have been between pretty damn smart people. So just that simple fact is no guarantee that artificial intelligence or machine intelligence will sustain genetic variety of lifeforms, you'd hope it would but it's not guaranteed, and because of that it's the greatest threat facing humanity, greater than genetic modification bioterrorism, and these two far outdo the threat of a nuclear apocalypse, which would probably be pretty easy to live through, because it would be dumb, not actively seeking your destruction in smart ways like a specifically created biological weapon whose antidote no longer functions due to a mutation and devastates all lifeforms including plants, animals, bacteria, or a machine whose reflexes, memory and computing power far outdoes reflexes of any carbon based nerves and nervous system. By far the military is the strongest driver for this kind of visual recognition projects, where an edge in capability over the competing nations could mean the difference between life and death, i.e. between winning or losing a war. Unfortunately that's the way things are. I'm not as excited about this new tech as these truck drivers wanting to catch some badly needed sleep. As long as it's advanced cruise control that lessens the load on the brain and muscles so they don't get as tired, I guess, but I would never agree to a situation where truck drivers are okay to fall asleep while the truck is moving, however with trains on a track, with a built in alarm to wake them up in case there is something in the distance 3-5 minutes from now, that would be okay, as it takes about that long for a train to stop anyway, and if there in another issue that requires a 10 second reaction time, well, with a train moving at speed it's irrelevant anyway, because trains don't stop on a dime anyway.

35 years ago they hit the jackpot with MS DOS as a near complete ripoff of Gary Kildall's CP/M who btw died from a blunt force trauma to his head in a biker bar early 90s. The also did great copying the look and feel of Apple, and he courts excused them on it, just like pretty much everything else they've come up with other people came up with it and got "embrace, extend, extinguish"ed by Microsoft on everything, operating systems, office software, gaming, everything. And they bitch and moan about intellectual property violations the most of anybody in the world. Megabillions of dollars lost, boo hoo hoo. Piracy rampant here, piracy rampant there. Crock of shit! Their biggest issue is the lack of anything good to embrace extend extinguish anymore, except GPL stuff, which is like a poisoned pill they hate and want outlawed. Lowest fucking scum crawling on the surface of this planet, together with Monsanto "seed intellectual property" biotech, insurance forced gambling law pimpers like Obamacare, and corrupt politicians all chickens without a backbone, fucking cocksuckers all over the place. Intellectual property this, intellectual property that, human decency my ass. Hail the Microsoft cunts for subverting almost completely a modern technology we call computer science! Fucking cocksuckers.

I'd even go as far as say because chips cannot be trusted in life and death situations, instead of gimme liberty or gimme death, please gimme a car without any fucking chips in it, let alone software.

Which shows that even the greatest minds that ever lived struggle with the unknown, and have only been momentarily blessed with discoveries only disclosed to them through divine revelation, like a message or mental imprint from God. Some are lucky with more blessings, some get less. You can even showcase a family tree of pure Nobel laureates that you're descended from, and bend over backward and piss yourself overexerting yourself trying to be smarter, and steadfast hammering with an inquisitive mind helps, like Euler's persistence and relentless perseverance in computing, (almost all great mathematicians back in his day they had fun and joy computing log tables without exception, mind numbing rote like that was entertainment to them), but acquiring ultimate knowledge does not happen by brute force alone, or even genetics, but instead, you have to be a bit more fluid and just go with the flow (a teaching very important in Eastern religions and philosophy, and even places like Karate Kid, or Feel the Force, Luke), and just be thankful and gracious for the bits of knowledge that are disclosed to you by Nature, like after a dream when you wake up, while always being aware of your own limitations when it comes to the power to know things as they are Just be happy with the mere inklings that you can attain.

I'm both happy and unhappy about this. Yay they are shooting asteroids, interplanetary ping pong that may lead to Venus being habitable, colonized with cheap farming acreage on it. I'd volunteer to go. But nay, why they had to pick a binary system that's relatively rare? That's like something special, and might need to be studied later, such as trying to get better measurements of the Newton-Cavendish-Eotvos gravitational constant, hunting for gravitational waves, etc, and it might be the closest such heavy weight object with easily movable masses to us. Why not shoot a solitary asteroid, there's gotta be tons of those, as each August is shooting star month on Earth, and you can get your practice on with would be shooting stars, at much closer range to Earth, which, if they go on the wrong trajectory, they still burn up as shooting stars anyway. Then scale up on size later. When Nasa can achieve a year with August free of any shooting stars, that would be proof they are getting somewhere, and it's only a matter of scaling up. Why travel so far for such a thing to get practice with, and most importantly why destroy a unique and exquisite thing in the world, that could come in handy later. Hindsight is 20/20 300 years from now when they need to run a gravitational wave measuring experiment, thinking we could have done in in 2020 with this binary asteroid system by jerking one very fast and measuring the reaction time of the other, but we destroyed it, and now it's expensive to make another one like it from stuff like Saturn's rings. Could have would have but didn't (protect, preserve for a possible future need) is hindsight.

The obvious solution is to upgrade upgrade upgrade constantly to better hardware and software that promises more security, performance etc, but never delivers, because security is a vague concept. That's the only way computing business makes money nowadays, but it drives progress, or sometimes regress.

The other solution would be to provide the customer with something sleek, simple, efficient and secure, by charging monthly rental fees. The downside of that is that you're forever stuck at a certain level of technology, and there is no incentive to improve on it, which though, might be a blessing in cases like XP vs. Vista where the progress was starkly a regress.

But the money got to be made by computing professionals, else the money does not get made. Or at least not as much. But right now having perpetual security and hacker issues are vital to profitability, and it does not look like it will stop anytime soon, because it dives sales of newer and better, which may no mean is worse than old one though

also technology is neutral and amoral
yeah, but a tiger in a jungle is high tech and makes me uncomfortable, unless i have technology, such as motion detect and a gun.. but not too much technology, such as AI that's better than both me and the tiger, which is amoral and neutral but if it decides I'm lunch i have no good ways to argue with it.. such as a good defensive weapon.. herein lies the eternal dilemma in pushing technology relentlessly forward, in hopes of a better world, but in fear of being hurt by it..
i still love and admire tigers and want to share the world with them.. just because one can sneak up on me in a jungle, and has faster reflexes than me when it attacks me, trying to turn me into his lunch.. that does not mean i want all tigers gone from the word, and similar things go for snakes, sharks, wolves, or pretty much any life form that depends on feeding on other life forms.. i like the multitude of life, the genetic diversity and richness as opposed to one species of say predators, and one species of photosynthetic benign life form used as food... yeah that's safe but who wants to live like that.. without the richness of beauty and love of nature? whoever does, they are welcome to go live on space stations, but please don't destroy the variety down here by ruthless extermination campaigns with things like pesticides and lawnmowers.. please leave the kitchen if you can't take the heat, i told you much of last year how to make it out there, in the nothingness of space, on a space station where you can finally be "safe", at least safe from diseases and other nontechnological life forms, not from other humans that can shoot you because you're a sitting duck, so you might wanna think about hiding on the other side of the Moon, at least.. ultimately nowhere is safe.. but you can be safe from the things that you're trying to relentlessly exterminate with pesticides and lawnmowers.. and leave my fucking grass alone

there is something great and awesome, in the sense of liberty, about anonimity on the internet..
but like with the money supply, there is a way to track originators and recipients..
on the internet it's called an ip address, and technically everyone is responsible for packets originating from them, in some abstract way
to find somebody, you need an ip address and a date time, and you can track who did what through isp logs.. if they are kept

however, it is possible to forge a packet, and pretend it came from Terroristan or Ungabungaville, pretending you are forwarding it from origin to destination. As the internet is based on multi path forwarding of packets, and they sometimes go round a couple times before reaching destination (which is silly, but the CIA or NSA loves tricks like that to make it confusing or hide their eavesdropping) it's hard to tell why someone from Antarctica or Greenland would be forwarding a packet coming from Terroristan, when there should be a more direct path between the different continents. Sometimes though cost of bandwidth fluctuates in various directions, and is purchased through off the beaten tracks like your internet protocol packet might end up in Antarctica before it goes to Asia from America, because the main pipes via the direct path are saturated. Kinda like off roads during a highway congestion, people take the route of least resistance. So the internet is very open and free environment, and you often wonder who's got your packet. If you worry about that, you can probably get a private dedicated telco line for an assraping fee, off and away from the internet. But the internet is the internet, aint nothing else like it, and anybody might have your packets, you hope not, but that's the way we live life.

in the end this is the pivotal point where the buck stops: it is not in the interests of powers that be that we have a safe and reliable internet, to where they can no longer make money by telling people they've got something better, more secure.. on the other hand it's also not in their interest to create such a devastating world where people stop using the internet altogether.. and just give up on technology for good, cutting their profit off hard.. so their profit scenario graph looks like a seesaw, a 45degree ramp with a sudden vertical precipice fall, where going that extra cent up the increased profit graph runs the severe risk of losing everything you're already making.. such as pimping minimum charges by utilities.. or DRM in the intellectual property world.. my attitude is that when you become abusive toward your customer like that, the customer is ultimately in charge, and he can bend over backward living his life down without having to put up with your bullshit, and cuts you off hard.. for instance i intend to never watch a DVD movie, because it has DRM.. yeah i know, they used to deal with piracy, and DRM helps them while it makes my life stink.. but ultimately I'm the fucking customer, and I decide how i live my life.. until Obama passes a law that makes me purchase a certain quota of Hollywood DVD's even if I don't feel like it.. like he does with his stupid fucking retarded insurance bullshit.. hey, all i know I don't owe anybody an existence fee, for being alive... nor do i owe anyone a dime for the breath of air I take, or the sunlight that I use to see.. these folks pent up on pushing the boundaries of what constitutes property just to they can sit back and collect, by claiming they own math, or air, or sunlight can all go fuck themselves with a huge cuke.. no it is not your air i'm breathing, you don't own the atmosphere, and if you say you invested a billion dollars into purchasing that atmosphere so you can own it, take care of and license it to me i call you a fucking retard.. same goes for the Sun, the Sun cannot be owned by a cartel making everyone pay for sunlight.. same goes for math, basic human knowledge is everybody's.. or organic chemistry.. yeah we had these intellectual property laws installed when the US was created, copyright of 14 years renewable to 28, and patents used to be 17 creeping up to 20, with excuses excuses excuses, and copyright just went from 70 to 90 years during the Clinton Mickey Mouse Act, but why stop there, why not have a 2000 year intellectual property protection?? huh? what about organic chemistry that all got developed after 1923, the last year of public domain writings.. do you deny me the right to know basic science and human culture, because you own it? that's fucking bullshit.. the goal of intellectual property is to spur creation of new material, not to hog and blackmail other people for access to basic needs in life, like math.. or computing.. as far as I'm concerned, extending copyright on Mickey Mouse from 70 to 90 years has very near zero effect of Walt Disney creating it for the world in the first place, and the corrupt law makers fucked up royally on passing that extension law, like they are fucking up royally on Obamacare..
but to return to the main topic, i'm never gonna get a smart phone, simply because that's an internet killer, or internet replacement per packet text message charging device, and i can live my life with paper books, without electronics, like in the old days, rather than putting up with the ass raping charges some people put up with.. like $1200/yr telecommunications charges.. that's too much money under the prevailing minimum wage/inflation and other price scenario.. they assume simply because i spent so much of my sick time on electronics and internet, that it's worth a whole lot to me.. au contraire.. i could be doing a whole lot of other things with my time.. just because i spend so much of my time on something, it does not mean that that activity worth insane amounts in my judgment.. right now I do spend 36/mo cable internet, which comes to $35.99x12=$431.88/yr, then I have a main prepaid cellphone, with a T-mobile sim card, usually able to drag $108 for 12 mos, and another with Verizon, that wants like $6/mo, so that's $72. I wish Verizon used sim cards where I could switch phones when one becomes defective, but only AT&T has sims besides T-mobile, and I have issues with AT&T such as sending me minimum charges back in the day as the long distance carrier even if I made no calls at all, I drop their fuckin ass and went with 10-10-811 and such without minimum charges, that was sold by them or similar anyway..
over monopoly abuse over taking the landlines, when they were told by We The People to split up into Baby Bells and compete, and my last day of having a landline was the day they bought SBC, after SBC bought Ameritech, landline that I used let me get dialup on for $5/mo, and it was great for playing games on igs, internet go server, or getting popmail, and I would even use it today simply for security reasons. My cable modem is getting hammered right now, and I have not used one of these hardware packet forwarding firewalls yet because they all seem to be hackable except some obscure ones might be less so, and even so the browser itself is a trojan horse backdoor into my computer, acting like i initiate a connection, and it's so huge on codesize and so complicated in what it does, that i cannot guarantee that it's safe and secure.. if anything there is a lack of enough genetic diversity in browsers, to try to get more obscure ones for security.. a monoculture in browsers sux.. one flaw takes the whole internet down at once, but if you had a genetic diversity of, say 200 different species of browsers, instead of 4 or 5 (gecko, ie8/9/10, safari/konqueror, opera) that each have different versions and vulnerabilities, but often backwards compatible with settings and configs from prior versions.. so increased genetic variability could ensure more safety, when one goes under the other 199 are still live and kicking, and only takes out 0.5% of the internet with its flaw. So a landline with 56K dialup would come in handy for me right now, because it would get popmail email, or let me play on IGS, and lessen the packet burden of the internet, and in case I get hacked, lessen the packet outflux. I wish cable isp's had a way of throttling bandwidth all the way to 300 bps (bit per second) from the 15,000,000 bps I'm sitting on right now typing this. I could get popmail and play go on IGS just fine on 300 bps, maybe even do off phone texting, true chaturbate and the like would not be possible, but then I could crank up bandwidth by manually setting a domain specifically for that. such as youtube, some specific porn sites, but not general news sites, like yahoo even. Like, wtf is wrong with yahoo, twitter, facebook and google+ running javascript garbage making my 10W HP Mini 210 crawl on its knees. I've looked at newer computers, none come at a say 3x speed and 1W total power consumption with an at least 10" screen. No smartphones with a per click charge are not the answer for me, neither are DVD's, and because of AT&T hogging landlines, I cannot get dialup either, because they are a monopoly, and my standard treatment of abusive monopolies is to tell them to go live your life, be happy, but you gotta do it without me.

the internet is expected to be
--either fully killed off if the bulk of the population signs up for smart phones and pay per click every packet has a phone number or sim id tagged at it.. fully trackable, no anonimity, including less dissent like this Slashdot posting at -1 terrible karma..
--or stay the way it is, with enough bullshit like news coming about banks or companies like home depot getting hacked and customer data stolen, to keep everyone in fear and constantly upgrading hardware and software, but not enough fear to where they completely abandon any further hardware and software purchases

those two above scenarios are in the best interest of big money, which controls and decides what happens in the world, other than being able to control individual customer choices, such as complete abandonment of a technology, unless they can pass laws to force people to buy smartphones, like they are trying to force people to buy insurance, at arbitrary prices they pull out of their asshole, and if anyone does not follow the law gets singled out, goes to jail and punished hard as a lesson for the rest of the herd for the consequences of not "following the stupid corrupt laws" they are trying to shove down everyone's throat

It changes my behavior. I speed on cameras while carrying a cellphone, so they know it's not a fluke, just because I know they can monitor it and want to send a message, like, look, you wanna see me go crazy? Trying all day desperately to piss me off at work. Here, I can do it, it's not that hard, I can act like a total idiot, do not assume you can keep pushing somebody to extreme limits because they are pussies and never stick up for themselves. If that subliminal monitoring were not in place though, there'd be no useful purpose to going nuts under camera and cellphone monitoring, while endangering anyone who running a red light right into your face when you're speeding through a green. I also sometimes leave my cellphone home while going shopping, or to work, sometimes on purpose, sometimes I simply forget. I have been sent home from work before simply over forgetting the phone at home, at least that's what my best guess was why I was sent home. Nowadays I even pull the battery from the cellphone sometimes, cuz I know them bitches eavesdrop even when powered off. I know some people who still don't have a cellphone, and there are pluses and minuses to that too.