How quickly we forget the screw Google efforts and the fact that because the Republicans no longer control the house or the White House they are trying desperate tactics. The cost in bribes and "taking fat cats to dinner" alone to get into bed with the Democrats must have put Microsoft off the lobbyist angle. So why not try the courts?

Right now my Samsung 5000 series LED tv runs an arm with busybox linux as the firmware. It is only a matter of time before TVs become fully internet capable and use usb 3 for storage. I also have seen demos of touch screen remotes that have qwerty capability for your TV. So the only thing missing is a simple cursor system and presto you have it all. Seeing that arm processors are becoming this powerful the market for all in one home entertainment devices is there. If Microsoft does not see this coming and continues to have mediocre support for arm based devices then embedded Linux will continue to dominate the living room. Three of my home entertainment devices are already based on the Linux kernel!

At least in the world of Windows users.

As long as companies like Sony can hog all the great stuff and squirrel it away or let it out in dribs and drabs. Then classical music distribution is doomed. The simple solution would be to set up kiosks with the ability to burn high bit rate content on demand! That way the distribution costs of inventory would evaporate and a new system of music distribution could make the industry flourish once more. I would gladly pay top dollar for premium recordings of the great artists as I am sure most other classical listeners would.

Trouble is the people who distribute classical music have got their head up their ass and cannot see the forest for the trees.

when a musician makes an unintended noise that is not in the score.

So essentially composition has become the realm of the musically illiterate and the of human performance of live music is dying.

I want to hear the sound of the bow on the string. I want to hear the difference between individual performances. Heck I even forgive clams and wrong notes.

What we now have is not art it is synthetic swill produced for the masses and will not stand the test of time. If we cannot afford real musicians then the art will become cheapened to the point of meaningless twaddle by untalented musically illiterate bean counters.

All the more reason to run Windows within a Linux emulation! This is exactly why 7 Server 2008 and Vista are not catching on as quickly as Microsoft wants them to in the real world. They are too hard to run under emulation whereas server 2003 and XP can be backed up and just run on an IBM, HP or Dell blade within a Linux core. Run a good server raid that has isolation and guess what.. no problem dealing with even the most sophisticated of Window malware. You just make sure that the core OS which is Linux can reset the raid on the fly. Heck you can even log the activities of the malware and back-trace what happened and who got you if you are smart enough!

Considering how much of the Internet and how many servers run Linux it puts the lie to the old saw "if it had the market share there would be just as many viruses and worms for Linux". By far and away the biggest fud indoctrination which is still coming out of Redmond, and is oft times repeated by most Windows salesmen...heck it is even more of a Mantra than the bs statement "the retraining costs of Linux will make it more expensive than paying for software rental per seat from Microsoft!" Or "there is no open source substitute for ...."

Just about every tech shop that I know uses Linux for 1. disk utilities 2. file transfer 3. analysis of "wtf happened to my windows install!"

Yes good computer forensics software is necessary and the cost of using windows software for this purpose is just plain stupid. But thanks to the real software gurus (most of who write for Linux)real good software is available without having to ship more cash to some Windows ware shop. Some of who even hide logic bombs in their ware so that you will need to upgrades or pay for support!

Free Text to Speech

It comes down to if you cannot see the source don't trust it. As long as blackhat crooks are out there making closed binaries there will be problems with trojans. If Google is smart they will insist that all code must be visible to operate on the Android OS. Perhaps Rim will follow suit and make sure that all third party binaries are clean. I know this really irks some developers but if your code is clean, unique and has a copyright why are you afraid that others will see it?

If we were to use the gifts of the Earth with any sense of intelligence then we would never run out of oil or any other natural resource. We need to change our mind set about consumption. I am getting old and do not have long left to make a social difference. We are using up the Earth and our children will pay for our greed and stupidity.

Our cities and infrastructure are designed around the automobile and have no sense of real community or ecological plan. The future must be designed around a society that plans for the ecology of more than the just the needs of cars! Perhaps a crisis like this is necessary to wake up the most industrialized consumptive stupid nation on Earth to the facts of the future.

I grow old and tired of being just a "stupefied-consumer" in the eyes of a corporate crazed system of consumption and waste. Our corporate culture of greed and consumption must change now or we will be considered as a lost generation of essentially greed driven parasitic humans.

We will all just have to get in our SUVs and drive down to the nearest oil company head office and protest! I remember not too long ago when a Republican President poo hooed the heck out of Al Gore about his statement that the "greatest threat to American society is our reliance upon the personal automobile". This statement might have cost him the election, certainly in Florida the result would have been different if not for his political gaff of telling the truth! His statement is still far too true to be funny....

If there is anyway BP is going to actually pay for this disaster then we all are going to lose. BP will not survive this and will just be absorbed by some other multinational. Perhaps even some corporate entity associated with the Bush and Chaney crowd. It was all well and good to bail out the auto industry but we are just delaying the inevitable social collapse caused by our collective stupidity and greed!

The reality of going to an all digital system is not as clear cut as many on /. would believe. Vancouver Island Canada has to a large extent undergone a huge change over to E-film and E-records, and has perhaps the most advanced systems around. The costs of making all this work has not been reflected in reduced numbers of staff needed to handle data instead of paper.

There still are large amounts of paper necessary for day to day operations and getting Doctors and clinics to effectively use secure online services has been nothing short of a nightmare. It costs more to do day to day operations and many say they would find going back to simple reliable terminal based systems more efficient and cost effective! The costs of supporting, securing and system training for PC based software is over the top and is a tremendous burden on any essential service.

OH God I had a Dinosaur/Chicken dinner last night, no wonder... I have been having Jurassic Park like nightmares.

Communication at ftl speeds might be all that is necessary. If it turns out that there are other forms of waves other than emr for example graviton waves then just perhaps we are looking with the wrong equipment. After all Seti is only examining emr that is moving at C.

It is interesting that as more and more satellites are place in far earth orbit the possibility of finding signals longer wave lengths could occur using the communication beams between satellites themselves as a form of antenna.

I suspect that matter will not move faster than light but some form of long wave lengths just might based on the destruction of small quantities of matter and if sub particles reduced to almost strings form waves. The LHC is investigating the possibility of long wave creation, the problem is how do you detect them except at extreme distance.