I was really hit from left field today, I thought that I would spend a little time on my feeling wioth regards to these interesting comments.

Internet Pedophoiles Is there any other subject that bings more emotion? The article surrounds a vigilante sort who planted a trojan in an Internet newgroup frequented by these sick bastards.

Now, there are many people all over the place on this one as the information was originally reported to be received from a person outside of the US, and thus the methods used to extract the information beyond any gray areas is applied to US laws.

The bottom line is this, the types of crimes we are dealing with are as not only hanous by any standards, they are destructive and take advantage the most precious elements of human life, children and our future. It takes malice, forthought and a great deal of individual selfishness to commit such a crime, this I truly beleive is the work of an evil person.

There is no place in society for such animals, the level of destruction they subject our society to is far too costly for us to dance around wondering if we did the right thing by doing what was necessary to bring even one of these things to justice.

As far as law enforcement is concerned, we really need to allow for our laws to be enforced (When I say our, I mean the US). We need to stop putting up road blocks for investigations and allowing for enough room for these criminals to slip through the cracks.

The comment was made in a response to my post that I in some way shape or form subscribe to the pompus and arrogant, closed minded views of one Rush Limbough... Please, while I am not going to say that I never have agreed with something he may have said, I will say that he is an extremest, and I think that any extremest from any nec of the woods or any faction of though should be looked at and listed to with great care prior to making decisions based on their beliefs.

I would also like to point out that the majority of our media rides a very close line between news and entertainment.

In a time when every dollar spent is scrutinized....Why is Government not embracing the concept of OSS?

Each year Federal, State and Local government spend millions on software, at the same time, the politicians are responding to budget shortcomings by recommending reductions in spending, or even spending cuts(of course, this should never apply to them).

Why? I believe that this is something that the public needs to get involved and do something about, while it is true that budgets are reporting shortfalls all over the nation in record numbers, there are ways to control spending without comprimising service....Open Source Software.

Most municipalities require email, this can be a costly application to run depending on which commercial vendor yuo select, however, there are many options in the area of Open Source which are viable, this alone would save potentially tens of thousands of dollars.

Office Applications, This is a no-brainer, there are excellent replacements out there which would save 100's of thousands of dollars...

I think that while Government is becoming more technolgy minded, it needs to embrace more cost effective solutions.

infinite bandwidth

trust me, Bill gates can't wait, I mean, this is the perfect world, you want software, then you run it on demand, paying a usage fee. That sounds really great...

But, look at the positive side of things, you will always have the latest and greatest software and when you are done...poof! The software is gone and all you have now is some malware that was installed due to some hole in the software you were running.

Excellent, I can't wait.

I talked with the local open source freak here today and got the usual:

"You should switch to open, source, you will save so much money and most importantly, it's free"

My answer to this is always the same, there are alot of "Free" things out there, it doesn't make it the best for the present situation that I am in. Then comes the:

"You can modify and take out what you don't want"

I don't know what the deal is here, I am going to let the network administrator re-compile an application and drop it in my production environment? Let's say that there are 450 people involved in this project, and this guy decides he's going to hack this program to suit his needs with really knowing what the ramifications are, in addition, what re you now going to do with this one-off "proprietary" program when it comes time to upgrade?

How about when this linux nut decides to jump ship?

I am not discouraging the use of open source, I strongly beleive in it, it works. It is simply not the answer to everything.

there are far too many people who are far too passionate sbout this subject to think rationally about it, they immediatily take one side or the other, it's ridiculous. They are all tools to be used for a given situation.

Microsoft is always concerned about their image as an innovator of technology, however, it is well known that they simply rob ideas from other software companies and incoporate the ideas into their over-grown packages.

If they do not choose to put it into their package, they will surly buy out the company, or product which is innovative, and add another notch to the belt.

The recent news about Microsofts RSS client is a perfect example of their "innovation". I wonder what proprietary twist they are going to use to make this feature/package non-standard?

I would like to see a sight dedicated to documenting all of the true "innovations", actually, this site would document all of the products and features that were hijacked or bought.