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Mandriva isn't perfect, but I'm not in the mood to learn another package system after learning RPM (and Mandriva's urpmi-tool) so Ubuntu isn't really interesting until I really have to.

I'm really not happy about that they aren't shipping Firefox 3 though. Right now I think I have a badly (halfly) updated Mandriva 2008-2008.1 system that can't run Firefox 3 properly. I have no spelling-control (I hope that isn't seen in this posting...) and GIF-images bigger than 420px*152px will not show (Firefox 3 in Wine 1.0 works just fine though, and it works fine on my mother's Mandriva 2008.0). So an upgrade with RPM-dependency Firefox 3 would be nice. Although I have to say that the installation programming and instruction documentation for Firefox 3 on Linux are way beyond shit. No instructions available in the dist, only a link to a non-working URL, no checking if you have the libs needed, no bloody nothing! Even Sun's Java was easier to install correctly... (And that demanded looking at a web-page, doing some very specific copying to the right dirs and an ldconfig-command, if I remember correctly.).

Well, it depends on the site really. The crap-sites like Match and Yahoo Personals, and even the pretty nice site Penty of Fish have the problem that they encourage a very bad way of dating. It's all about sending messages to as many people as possible, and even if that sort of make people stay at the site, it's horribly bad for hooking "normal" people up.

On my site Elfpack there are about 20% more female than males (At least before I wrote this posting on Slashdot...) and it's quite typical for a site where people can actually talk freely to each other and do other stuff than just dating. Some people still get a little flooded with messages, but it's generally not a problem and the problem with people who just want a load of messages without doing anything is very small.

As for Shrek: I don't mind that selling things with copyrighted material is illegal, and saying that you're a sponsor, when you aren't, is of course illegal for other reasons. It's sharing information that mustn't be illegal.

As for commercials: When there was no commercials on TV here in Sweden, people made sure to come in time to movies just to see the commercials there. And movie-audiences don't seem to mind watching good and relevant commercials like trailers. So if the one producing the movie doesn't have to pay for distribution, I think they can make some money out of commercials that generally aren't cut away when people copy the movie. I've seen some documentaries made to be bittorrent distributed with ads for the sponsors in the beginning. An Australian producer (I think) made a great speech about how content producers should make money in the future: www.elfpack.com/stuff/FutureOfBitTorrent.avi.torrent

But as I said: I realize that Hollywood will not get as much money as now. But I prefer Hollywood being wiped out over that my communication with others being strangled. And strangling our communication is the only way to uphold any respect for the current laws.

I've thought a lot about adding applications to my social networking sites Elfpack and Elftown, but so far it only seems to make the user experience worse.

Your Alexa-rating is bullshit. Elfpack has Alexa's bullshit traffic rating 124,533 while it has over 40 000 page views per day. And while more than 90% of the users are from the English speaking world, Alexa says most of the viewers comes from a few Arabic countries.

The reason why USA is behind is that you have a regulated communist system. First of all it's the free local calls that have destroyed the reason to have anything else than dailup. For example: On Elfpack 15.92% of the US-users have dailup. 0.97% of the Swedes 1.92% of the Dutch have dialup. Secondly it seems it's not that easy to build the needed infrastructure for reasons I don't know about. Here the Internet-companies ask the real estate companies if they build Internet in their houses, and they get a yes. Private homes often have to stay with ADSL, but it's changing.

I pay 320 SEK (45 USD) per month for 100 Mbit (minus about 20% used for other services) and 5 IP-numbers. Most people can't get that, but you can always get 8Mbit up/1 Mbit down ADSL from a great number of companies and most people have access to some cable company too.

Do I have to explain that net neutrality is a non-issue here? That's something for people who think the politicians can run Internet better than the Internet companies and their customers. So it's something for USA and Venezuela (As I think North Korea will be smarter than that)...

There are a lot of people who do bad stuff just because they can. They need to be stopped. If someone is going around and are just trying to insult people, they will very soon get a very hard time to enter Elfpack anymore.

But it's also very common that people keep arguing with each other in the style "Stop messaging me!" "No, YOU stop messaging me!" "If you don't stop, I'll report you!" "I've already reported you, you idiot!". I respond to those reports with pointing out the fact that they both seem to like to fight as they continue to talk to each other instead of just stop messaging.

Another part of the bully-culture is naive persons who start to speak to someone with "You (some bad word) stop harassing my friend, or bla bla!!!". And in 66% of the cases the original case was built on some sort of misunderstanding and is about to be solved by the friend and "his foe". Their arguments for their right to start to harass someone is of course "But I'm just standing up for my friend!". So then they have to either explain exactly how their bullshit will help the situation in a good way, or face a ban next time they do it. (Guess what happens...)

A much harder problem is people who crack each others' account. No matter how secure you make a website, you aren't safe from people who "borrow" each others' logins when at school. There has been sad events where I had to ban people because they couldn't keep idiots out of their account.

But my general advice is to use a site where people are nice. Why go to MySpace just to read chain messages and insults?