He's not advocating changing the 200yr old doc over software either - he's advocating changing it over protecting literature...

Hypothetically, if a decade from now - the media stronghold(s) decided that some event 'X' in US history should NOT have occurred, so they decide to release a shit load of media against the idea - and with our lives 100% controlled at the digital level by DRM, after a generation or two - that 'X' part history no longer happened... That's acceptable?

You give someone an inch, they will next go for the mile - until they get that, and then they go for the next mile. Accepting this and not fighting back with a something 'bigger' than them will only give them that inch, and later the mile.

Kind of going back in time there aren't you? Technology is suppose to advance, not retreat...

Win 3.1 is what I was thinking... If your only allowing 3 apps to run, why not just go back to the simplified OS that uses time slicing instead of true multitasking and likewise you less intelligent hardware and consequently saving money?

Recently while talking to the hundreds of head hunters (like so many are these days), one of them explained to me that the over whelming majority of companies that do a credit check are those in the financial industry. We got to joking about it, but the point was that it was very hard to find someone with that good of credit - they were just far and few between. I'd be curious to know if the H1-B workers get preference simply because they are not on our credit system and consequently not having any credit is better than not having bad credit?

If that is the case, talk about a catch-22 - the 'system' got us here, and that same system doesn't want us... One of the halves of my brain are working overtime in that some jack-ass exec came up with the ingenious idea of giving every one easy credit, knowing eventually we would not be able to support it - and now they have the 'reasoning' not to employee their fellow neighbours...

I seriously doubt DELL was approaching Microsoft with - "Come on man, I know your OS can't run on our hardware but can't you give us these stickers anyway?", I would presume to guess that is was more along the lines of DELL telling them that their stuff would not run right, and that they needed to fix it - Microsoft just opted to just give them the sticker instead.

And? They have been pushing their customers around for decades, and just because they are BEING forced, both legally and finally by their customers to get their act together (possibly to late) - you really want to say, "that's okay - there, there..."

2 wrongs don't equal a right, it never has...

Your friends were still selling what they claimed to be selling - a P4 with 512mb of RAM, if they were able to convince **YOU** to say that your stuff would run on it, and you knew it wouldn't, well that's your problem - not theirs...

You going to walk off a cliff if one of them thought it was safe, when you knew full and well it wasn't?

FTA...

It also notes that it is policing the newsgroups, my question is on the "downloading" and copyright violation - With P2P when you download, your uploading also although this is not the case for the newsgroups, when you download that is all your doing - this would be more in lines of "stealing" than the copyright violation isn't it? I was under the impression that to violate a given copyright, you need to re-distribute the said material, IE: why the mafiaa goes after P2P and the insane "settlements"... If this is correct, how could they go could after you for a copyright violation if you didn't violate it? This isn't for uploading the material mind you, just leeching it...

All it takes is two clicks - "choose" and "add to cart"...

Dell Inspiron mini 12 Laptop

The cheapest of the 3 versions, comes with Ubuntu preinstalled.

I could buy Verizon finding some Linux geek in their midst to go and help this girl out for PR reasons - although still a stretch I think, they don't support it is all they would need to say and would be legit. Although, I do have a hard time swallowing this quote - colleges and universities of course have specific classes and such that would deal with Linux or have knowledge of it, although the *rest* of them would have instructors that would not have a clue of what Linux/OpenOffice is, let alone care - Office 101, English, etc.. I'm sure they could find someone, even on staff, although I'm relatively certain that they aren't going to go and install OpenOffice for this girls instructors, and have all this "special" software just for her. Then again, I wouldn't be surprised if they assume that ALL software would create *.doc documents - it is the norm after all isn't it?

I've seen this pop up numerous times on this, and that isn't an obvious as it may seem. Geeks are geeks, and likewise we hang out with geeks - I believe any sane shrink will tell you that we tend to hang out with people of like minded personalities. I'm up here in a small community and from what I can tell I'm the only "geek" with in an hours drive from here, and I'm 2hrs from Dallas. I've known many people who may use a system at the office but is clueless on doing something as simple as installing an OS, they just rely on that magic button to do everything.

Just because your not technical, does NOT mean you know someone who is - after all, normally a geek keeps to them selves and is not a social butterfly.

The Inspiron mini 9 and mini 12 - both of the "cheap" versions come with Ubuntu, the more expensive ones to the right come with XP...

If you don't know what your looking at when it comes to the "specs", I could see this happening relatively easily...

Not necessarily, Linux isn't anywhere near Windoze, let alone Mac - but it has come leaps and bounds in the last decade. I've just finished installing Kubuntu and KDE4.1 for friends of my parents - they are in their 60's ~ 70's and know ZERO about technology.

The whole thing started out with him asking me to take a look at his desktop because he couldn't enable the automatic updates - looked/acted as if TrendMicro disabled that option for security or something for some reason. After a few beers, and BS'ing about things - we got to talking about Firefox, Thunderbird and Linux (FOSS). He started getting all gitty about things when I explained that Linux is mostly immune to viruses - I've been using it solely for a couple of decades now and have never had a virus problem, and routinely hit up sites that are known for malware and just chuckle when they try to run. I explained to him that if by some chance I did come across one made for Linux, all I would have to do is create a new user simply because of the basic security on a *NIX system - the core system will never get infected like it does under Windows with the typical user having administrator rights.

He asked if we could get together after the 1st, and I said of course. I pretty much blew it off, thinking it was the beer talking - but earlier this week he called asking if I could come over and look at his system. It had become infected with some kind of virus that Trend could do nothing about, it would just pull up a window saying it can't do anything about it, you close it and it comes back up with in a few minutes. I had brought over the Kubuntu install disk with me and showed him KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and Adept where he can search for practically any kind of software and simply hit install - it's all free...

I ended up resizing the partitions and installing Kubuntu on both his desktop and laptops, both had infections that Trend either missed or couldn't do anything about. The desktop was twice as fast as the laptop but with half the RAM (512mb), it was dog slow under windows (6+ hrs to zip 200 1mb images that took Linux less than a minute - he just laughed when he saw that). Linux ran the desktop just fine, even with only 512MB, the CD burner even started working again (the burning part). And when I got the laptop to see the desktop through CIFS and over wireless (which wasn't working either under Windows), he was 100% sold on Linux and told his wife they are going to get another 1G of RAM for the desktop and a new printer since the DELL was a "paperweight" according to linuxprinting.org, which he got a kick out of - the communities since of humor, like the kernel reporting "OOPS" when it hits a bug.

I was surprised to see that WINE had installed and ran his PokerStars application with out any issues what so ever (www.pokerstars.com). I kept telling them that they could boot back into windows at anytime they got tired or frustrated with Linux - and he just nodded and said that Windows was a pile of crap and never wanted to use it again. All he cared about was his PokerStars (WINE), WORD docs (OpenOffice), surfing the web (FireFox) and Email (Thunderbird) - after walking him and his wife through everything, they were 100% sold. His wife made the comment that it looks exactly the same, just a little different in how to do things...

Point being, that Linux has come 1000 miles in a short time - and as long as the given person *knows* what is up and what to expect, they will fall in love too with the hansom penguin:-)

It would be a great defence by far - all though, the problem being is that to give that said defence, you will have to still spend thousands of $$$ to do so in front of a given judge. From what I recall, the RIAA isn't to prone to dropping cases solely because of an air tight defence...

Whether your innocent or not, I really don't think is any of their concern.

You normally will report the given vehicle stolen or what not, and that likewise will give you the out. The local PD will give a rats ass if you lost your $100 IPod, I'm sure they will either hangup on you out right, or follow up with "What do you want us to about it?" - I wouldn't be surprised if they would feel the same about the $100 toy being supposedly stolen either.

Now that the RIAA/Apple has allowed this to happen, they need to also setup some kind of system where you can report a loss and or theft of the golden nugget(s). My concern is that now the RIAA lawyers don't have to contend with the IP address mysteries and all - they have your email address buried in the illegal song file, proving with out a doubt that it was yours and it has now been distributed in the wild. If you have a brain at all, your first defence will be that you lost it, or it was stolen whether legit or not...

Well, if you think about it - that would only be prudent planning on their part. From what has been said around here, TWC is actually telling their customers to use the internet to get their favourite shows - this means, as you pointed out, that VIACOMS cost will go up to support it. Since they are out for $$$ in the first place, it would only make since to prevent this.

On the note of $$$, this is making me wonder if the wall street melt down in the last few months is only the tip of the ice berg. That melt down was the result of mismanagement and greed, flat out - since they are the begining of everything (financially) it would mean a domino effect to the rest of the monopolies - the effects wouldn't be immediate although they will be there, and I'm curious if this is another start of things to come.

I'm basically getting at a communications meltdown (and any other monopolies) at the hands of the high end fat cats controlling it all - just as it happened on wall street, and for the same reason - greed and easy money.