I disagree that that is the only viable answer. While being able to "turn the camera around" is great.
The fact is that there is a huge unbalance in the resources governments have to invade our privacy, and the resources that scattered groups of citizens would have.
There is no real way to compete with their resources.
The only real solution, IMHO, is to make the majority of the population conscious of these problems and simply kick these facists-wannabes out of their offices.
AFAICT the point that the parent poster was making is that unlike other security measures (say ID card, social security number etc) you just can't get a new biometric reading for your fingers (without at least some serious medical intervention), you can't get a new iris scan for your eyes, you can't get a new DNA code etc.
Biometric data may put some entry barriers higher, so what? The problem is that you just can't get a new iris scan, like you get a new passport once your gets stolen.
The worst of the situation is that we have all these politicians deciding --without the least form public debate about the real privacy implications-- that biometric data is now to be collected, and used, and kept by the government.
I thought that's what www.southparkzone.com was for?
My thoughts exactly. I have been (legally) downloading South Park from the web for some months now.
I've seen slashdot publishing old news many times, but this is the first time (I can recall) that I see it posting old news that I had read about in a "normal" newspaper.
The movie is most likely just a rant about the danger of trying to use ancient religious texts to rule peoples lives today. Regardless of that, I'm sure Muslims will take offence, since any criticism will cause them to take offence. These people just have a hard time dealing with free and open societies, and like to purport that their religious feelings deserve extra constitutional protection.
In a free marketplace of ideas like western Europe, asking for this kind of protection under the law for your ideas gives a rather obvious indication of the lack of confidence in those ideas in my opinion. But then, i don't claim to understand religious people.
Open society? The muslims are against that? Really? I thought that it was the dutch ***christian*** prime minister, and the other ***christian*** party (sorry don't remember the name) who were just some weeks ago trying to maintain legal restrictions to "blasphemy".
But we shouldn't let facts get in the front of our generalized prejudices, should we?
Linux kernel 2.6.24 - The new & neat things here are dynticks for amd64 (power savings), the new CFS scheduler (you should experience less lags when your system is loaded). I'm mostly interested in the dynticks part. Sorry to inform you but scheduling still sucks on Hardy just like it sucked on Gutsy.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/131094
My advice is to wait for the final release of hardy, which should be rock solid stable. It is still decently buggy at this point. I second that. There are loads of broken things in Hardy right now.
I have been upgrading to the Ubuntu "beta" release some 2 months before the official release for some 2 years now. Hardy is the one that gave me the most trouble so far. Never had to fill so many bug reports.
They made a truly royal mess with scim (sorry you can't uninstall).
My bluetooth headset doesn't work anymore.
They are using a new wireless driver (for intel) that is giving me loads of trouble.
The time it takes for desktop logout on KDE has increased.
Amarok sometimes fails to start.
Sometimes I simply lose the keyboard (must then logout with the mouse).
I'm a long time Linux user mostly Red Hat and SuSE.
What I don't understand is the concept that Ubuntu is a Linux that is supposed to just work and be non- computer geek friendly.
[...]
I'm sure/I hope if I'm missing something it will be pointed out, but personally I did not find Ubuntu that easy to use.
I worked as a Debian sysadmin back in the day, and I generally can find my way on a Debian system.
Some years ago, I had to admin some Suse machines, and I found that much more difficult than Debian. It took me some time get used to it, and see//any// advantage of it over Debian. The point here is that systems that you already familiar with will always be easier to handle, since you already know your way around.
Other than that, Ubuntu **tries** to change a very basic assumption of most Linux dists: a Linux system that doesn't make the premise that there is a (fully trained) sysadmin available to set up/run the machine.
Because it is ours (Free), and also because it is good for all my OS needs which for me means:
having bazillion high quality programs available from a single distributor,
secure,
efficient
configurable
stable
supported by a large friendly community
runs on cheap hardware
I can install it on a USB stick
No MS/Apple telling me what I can or cannot do with MY computer
I actually enjoyed this story why do we use Linux?, (even better without a retarded link to some blog post). I have been using Linux for so long, and I actually enjoyed having to think about the actual reasons I wouldn't leave it.
Religion is a way of passing down millennia of hard-learned lessons in a way that leaves no room for argument.
I would go into the lessons besides 'don't lie, cheat, murder or steal', except you might argue with me about those topics, proving my point while convincing yourself I'm anachronistic.
You assume that these rules are compiled with the purpose of benefiting most of us. That is not necessarily true. Many religious rules (or civil laws) we have were written to, for instance, maintain status quo, which in many cases is nothing short of "Cleptocracy" (e.g. "I, the king/high priest, and my buddies will take as much as we can from you the peasants").
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond is filled with data about systems of belief being drafted with lots of different purposes.
Funny; we have similar laws here in the Australian state of Victoria. Christians generally oppose them, largely because it has made it harder for them to state their reasonably-held opinions of Muslims. Do you know if anyone has had success prosecuting people in your state using this law? In the Netherlands people had failed to use it in the last 10 or 20 years (AFAIK).
This experience has cemented the view in my mind that there's no such thing as "god-given" or "constitutional" rights; the only rights we have are the ones we make sure we keep. I couldn't agree more with this.
Whenever I complain about lack of privacy in modern Europe, people have often said abuses like you describe would never happen, but if it did, OOOOHHH, there would be so much trouble, OOOOHHH, governments would fall OOOOHHH.
Well, when it became public that all European financial transactions logs were being leaked to the US. There was not that much of a big deal, there was a judicial order for it to stop (from Belgium's supreme court), they didn't stop, a point from which the issue was said to move to a "legal grey area".
what you need is to sue some bible publishers over the mockery of other religions in the bible.
It would not work. To be fair, people have failed to enforce this law for quite a while. The law itself is from the 1930s. In the 60s somebody had described God as a donkey or something, and how he had had sex with the donkey/God.
They tried to prosecute this guy, and failed. My point is that the very same people that so strongly defended people's right to mock Islamic faith, on the grounds that freedom of speech comes first, are right now trying to keep this law as valid.
Actually, it is quite OK to mock the scientology "religion". It's even allowed to ridicule Christianity and Jesus.
There is nothing magical about religion that makes it exempt from attack and ridicule.
It is NOT good that you can't attack something because it is a "religion" and would ONLY for that reason deserve respect. People's deeply held beliefs are not OK just because they are deeply held beliefs, they can just as well be ridiculous, and wrong. The fact that you ridicule them isn't even necessarily respectless, not challenging people's delusions, and leaving them with these ridiculous beliefs can be much more respectless.
I agree with your post. I assume you live in the US. Since the majority of the Slashdot seems to be there.
I found it interesting because it touched an issue that is hot right now in The Netherlands. Where there is a law that makes an offense to mock religious belief. People are right now, trying to strike it down, but the "Christian parties" are against.
Since the prime minister of the country belongs to one of these Christian parties, it is still uncertain whether this will work out.
I found it quite funny to discover that, since it makes ridiculously hypocritical all the talk about having Mohammed in comic cartoons that took place in Europe. I mean, everybody was "pro" support for freedom of speech, but now two major political dutch parties (including the prime minister) seem to see this law as an entirely different story.
Not trying to flame here, but Pidgin/GAIM is not a Gnome app, so the question you asked can't really be answered. In fact, Empathy (based on the Telepathy framework) was set to be the default chat client for 2.22, but it didn't make the final cut. It's still slated for 2.24. When that happens, we'll have well-integrated text, voice, and video chat. Yipee!!
And my question probably got marked "off-topic" by some Gnome zealot because of that.
I understand your point that Gaim/Pidgin is not a official Gnome app, but you should reckon that for years, what everyone (using Gnome) had for IM was Gaim/Pidgin. As you mention yourself, Empathy still doesn't exist (from the perspective of a user). I mean which IM client do I get if I install the most popular Gnome distribution (Ubuntu), I get Pidgin.
Is there any major distribution, installing a IM client with Gnome, which is not installing Pidgin?
So honestly, I think that asking about the state of what in practice is what people get for IM client when using Gnome, to be pretty "on-topic". Otherwise the honest answer would be along the lines of "We expect to have a great IM client on Gnome 2.24 but, for various reasons, Gnome 2.22 doesn't even have a IM client" (Or there is a default IM client set on 2.22, and nobody is telling me?)
does it run Linux? Oh, wait, ummmm, shit! I really suck at karma whoring.... I have to agree. You do suck at karma whoring.
Evolution actually working?
on
Gnome 2.22 Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?
Like switching the spell checker of a chat session during the chat session? Or the assumption is still that everybody only ever uses one language at a time.
Seriously. I'm not flaming, I mean to ask the question. One of the reasons I stopped using Gnome, after many years using it, was that in order to use a Dutch spell checker in Gaim, I had to restart Gaim using a dutch locale environment (and be stuck with a Dutch spell checker for the rest of that Gaim instance).
What do you mean by the "Nokia N810 can do it"? I'm pretty sure I could create a Flash animation that would make it choke. Sure, it might be able to play a limited subset of flash files, but the key word there is "limited". And how long do your batteries last playing those files? The subset of Flash videos that count is the YouTube videos subset. The Nokia N810 can handle that. End of story.
I would make the distinction that the device is less durable. The digital files, and specially any annotations made on it will be as durable as your capacity to back them up.
I couldn't agree more.
There is very little privacy being respected by that crap, after all I do have the expectation of not being searched without any tangible reason. The problem is that with this fearmongering, most people don't see a problem whatsoever with it. I find it actually rather amazing the amount of people in Europe who don't give a rats ass for their privacy, and absolutely trust their governments never to screw them (personally) in any way. AFAICT they know abuses will happen, but they just expect it to happen to some weird looking person.
Yes, I meant that: who cares?
Nobody living outside their parents' basement is going switch from Linux to BSD for a 15% performance increase. Somebody already using BSD might upgrade if the latest BSD kernels and environment are significantly better than past environments, but 15% is so slight as to be basically undetectable in a real-world environment!
I only use Linux as a desktop OS. I don't know much about the implications of this particular benchmark, but I care a lot about the current schedule work, for the simple fact that they have been causing me problems for my desktop use.
I can't speak for Spain. But in Brazil the strongest opposition to the dictatorship torture campaign came from the Catholic Church
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulo_Evaristo_Arns/. What do you say of that?
AFAIK much of the same happened in many other places at the same period in the rest of the Latin America.
The Catholic Church gets (with due justice) a lot of heat for sexual abuse cases. But there is also a huge work made by many many people inside it to help the poor.
The point being that the C.Church is a gigantic institution with hundreds of different groups pursuing different goals inside of it. So it would be more balanced to take more into account that just, the usual church bashing stuff that hits the main stream news.
Also worth noting is that many OEMs were shipping systems with "Vista Ready" stickers long before Vista was finalized. They had no way of knowing how well Vista would ultimately run on the machines, other than what Microsoft was telling them. Still, the OEMs share the blame to the extent that it was irresponsible of them to trust Microsoft and put stickers on systems without being sure that their claims were correct. This talk about OEMs not knowing how Vista would run is wrong. Vista Beta's were already available a couple of *years* in advance for the OEM, and big corporations using Windows. I know that because the university I used to work at, had copies of Vista to test in advance.
I bet a lot was still changing, and that perhaps those copies were lacking Aero and what not. But still, if a university had copies of Vista Betas in advance, I can only suppose that OEMs like Dell, HP, Intel, could test the whole of Vista with Aero and everything. They could not know for sure how well it would run, but they had a very good idea.
But what is an OEM supposed to do? Ship without the stickers? When everybody else was going to ship with them? 3 laptops on sale next to each other with similar price and specs, 2 have a "Vista Ready(tm)" sticker, 1 doesn't. Which computer do you think would/not/ get chosen?
TFA shows that they kept changing things until the last moment, b
You double-click the icon, you get music or you don't; If you didn't, it failed. You can research why it failed, it might even be easy to research, but it already failed. I also expected to get a hippopotamus for my birthday. But I didn't. I call that an unrealistic expectation.
Linux is not sold pre-installed (due to market pressure from MS). Real attempts to sell Linux pre-installed like the EEE (and not the Dell laptops) will play your mp3s just fine. Please compare oranges to oranges. **Buy** a linux dist for the desktop (say Linspire), install it, it will play the mp3s.
The problem is that the Free as in Pizza && as in Freedom linux dists do such a good job putting on a OS, that people assume that they should also be able to provide for free (as in Pizza) stuff which they legally (in the US) have to pay for. That is unrealistic.
IMHO the problem is the lack of pre-installed desktop systems, where the costs for these codecs would be paid by the user in the same way they are with Windows and Mac machines. Linux failure (now changing with the EEE) is the lack of main stream pre installed offerings.
Good call.. Tell them it's worth $150 and they can send the cheque to the EFF, OLPC or any other Opensource project/charity needing the money. In this case, a good place to send donations to would be http://www.ubuntu.com/community/donations
I use linux over 10 years and still think it is the best operating system for me.
Same here;-)
The ugly:
multimedia in linux: enter a DVD and the movie has to play. DeCSS as stumbling block
video editing. Editing movie as in quicktime pro and allow to export it in any format.
hardware: scanner, camera, printer, bluetooth for phone, handheld and keyboards, midi
FWIW:
I live in Europe. Ubuntu will install DeCSS for me and run DVDs.
I have used bluetooth keyboards, and phones. They simply worked. (Kubuntu)
My girlfriend bought a camera. When it got plugged, KDE offered the right program (digikam - which incidentally had a big camera icon), she selected the camera model, we got a nice window with photos and a "download" button.
the tax program the Dutch government tells me to use is written in Java, and runs perfectly
This is leaps and bounds better than what happened 3 to 4 years ago.
Most non-tech savy people I know can't tell the difference between OOffice, and MS Office. Video edition sucks but that isn't a true deal breaker. IMHO the real deal breaker is the lack of marketing that reaches non-IT people, and the fact that until the EEE people just wouldn't walk into a hardware shop and find a linux laptop in the shelves.
I have hope that the EEE (and perhaps the Android) will change change the landscape a lot.
My guess is that that is a result of fearmongering, and the fact that all these populations are getting, on average, older. Thus grumpier, much more susceptible to fearmongering, and missing the nostalgic "gold old days" when life was shinier, and they could have as much salt as they wanted in every meal.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that there is a huge unbalance in the resources governments have to invade our privacy, and the resources that scattered groups of citizens would have.
There is no real way to compete with their resources.
The only real solution, IMHO, is to make the majority of the population conscious of these problems and simply kick these facists-wannabes out of their offices.
Biometric data may put some entry barriers higher, so what? The problem is that you just can't get a new iris scan, like you get a new passport once your gets stolen.
The worst of the situation is that we have all these politicians deciding --without the least form public debate about the real privacy implications-- that biometric data is now to be collected, and used, and kept by the government.
My thoughts exactly. I have been (legally) downloading South Park from the web for some months now.
I've seen slashdot publishing old news many times, but this is the first time (I can recall) that I see it posting old news that I had read about in a "normal" newspaper.
In a free marketplace of ideas like western Europe, asking for this kind of protection under the law for your ideas gives a rather obvious indication of the lack of confidence in those ideas in my opinion. But then, i don't claim to understand religious people.
Open society? The muslims are against that? Really? I thought that it was the dutch ***christian*** prime minister, and the other ***christian*** party (sorry don't remember the name) who were just some weeks ago trying to maintain legal restrictions to "blasphemy".
But we shouldn't let facts get in the front of our generalized prejudices, should we?
I have been upgrading to the Ubuntu "beta" release some 2 months before the official release for some 2 years now. Hardy is the one that gave me the most trouble so far. Never had to fill so many bug reports.
What I don't understand is the concept that Ubuntu is a Linux that is supposed to just work and be non- computer geek friendly.
[...]
I'm sure/I hope if I'm missing something it will be pointed out, but personally I did not find Ubuntu that easy to use.
I worked as a Debian sysadmin back in the day, and I generally can find my way on a Debian system.
Some years ago, I had to admin some Suse machines, and I found that much more difficult than Debian. It took me some time get used to it, and see //any// advantage of it over Debian. The point here is that systems that you already familiar with will always be easier to handle, since you already know your way around.
Other than that, Ubuntu **tries** to change a very basic assumption of most Linux dists: a Linux system that doesn't make the premise that there is a (fully trained) sysadmin available to set up/run the machine.
Because it is ours (Free), and also because it is good for all my OS needs which for me means:
I actually enjoyed this story why do we use Linux?, (even better without a retarded link to some blog post). I have been using Linux for so long, and I actually enjoyed having to think about the actual reasons I wouldn't leave it.
You assume that these rules are compiled with the purpose of benefiting most of us. That is not necessarily true. Many religious rules (or civil laws) we have were written to, for instance, maintain status quo, which in many cases is nothing short of "Cleptocracy" (e.g. "I, the king/high priest, and my buddies will take as much as we can from you the peasants").
The book Collapse by Jared Diamond is filled with data about systems of belief being drafted with lots of different purposes.
Whenever I complain about lack of privacy in modern Europe, people have often said abuses like you describe would never happen, but if it did, OOOOHHH, there would be so much trouble, OOOOHHH, governments would fall OOOOHHH.
Well, when it became public that all European financial transactions logs were being leaked to the US. There was not that much of a big deal, there was a judicial order for it to stop (from Belgium's supreme court), they didn't stop, a point from which the issue was said to move to a "legal grey area".
It would not work. To be fair, people have failed to enforce this law for quite a while. The law itself is from the 1930s. In the 60s somebody had described God as a donkey or something, and how he had had sex with the donkey/God.
They tried to prosecute this guy, and failed. My point is that the very same people that so strongly defended people's right to mock Islamic faith, on the grounds that freedom of speech comes first, are right now trying to keep this law as valid.
The wikipedia has a good resume of the story but in dutch http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godslastering#Wet_inzake_smalende_godslastering_.281932.29/ and this is the google translation of it http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnl.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGodslastering%23Wet_inzake_smalende_godslastering_.281932.29&langpair=nl%7Cen&hl=en&ie=UTF8
There is nothing magical about religion that makes it exempt from attack and ridicule.
It is NOT good that you can't attack something because it is a "religion" and would ONLY for that reason deserve respect. People's deeply held beliefs are not OK just because they are deeply held beliefs, they can just as well be ridiculous, and wrong. The fact that you ridicule them isn't even necessarily respectless, not challenging people's delusions, and leaving them with these ridiculous beliefs can be much more respectless.
I agree with your post. I assume you live in the US. Since the majority of the Slashdot seems to be there. I found it interesting because it touched an issue that is hot right now in The Netherlands. Where there is a law that makes an offense to mock religious belief. People are right now, trying to strike it down, but the "Christian parties" are against.
Since the prime minister of the country belongs to one of these Christian parties, it is still uncertain whether this will work out.
I found it quite funny to discover that, since it makes ridiculously hypocritical all the talk about having Mohammed in comic cartoons that took place in Europe. I mean, everybody was "pro" support for freedom of speech, but now two major political dutch parties (including the prime minister) seem to see this law as an entirely different story.
Funny, eh?
And my question probably got marked "off-topic" by some Gnome zealot because of that.
I understand your point that Gaim/Pidgin is not a official Gnome app, but you should reckon that for years, what everyone (using Gnome) had for IM was Gaim/Pidgin. As you mention yourself, Empathy still doesn't exist (from the perspective of a user). I mean which IM client do I get if I install the most popular Gnome distribution (Ubuntu), I get Pidgin. Is there any major distribution, installing a IM client with Gnome, which is not installing Pidgin?
So honestly, I think that asking about the state of what in practice is what people get for IM client when using Gnome, to be pretty "on-topic". Otherwise the honest answer would be along the lines of "We expect to have a great IM client on Gnome 2.24 but, for various reasons, Gnome 2.22 doesn't even have a IM client" (Or there is a default IM client set on 2.22, and nobody is telling me?)
BTW, does Gnome now allows switching the spelling language of an application during the use of it?
Like switching the spell checker of a chat session during the chat session? Or the assumption is still that everybody only ever uses one language at a time.
Seriously. I'm not flaming, I mean to ask the question. One of the reasons I stopped using Gnome, after many years using it, was that in order to use a Dutch spell checker in Gaim, I had to restart Gaim using a dutch locale environment (and be stuck with a Dutch spell checker for the rest of that Gaim instance).
* Less durable
I would make the distinction that the device is less durable. The digital files, and specially any annotations made on it will be as durable as your capacity to back them up.
I couldn't agree more.
There is very little privacy being respected by that crap, after all I do have the expectation of not being searched without any tangible reason.
The problem is that with this fearmongering, most people don't see a problem whatsoever with it. I find it actually rather amazing the amount of people in Europe who don't give a rats ass for their privacy, and absolutely trust their governments never to screw them (personally) in any way.
AFAICT they know abuses will happen, but they just expect it to happen to some weird looking person.
I only use Linux as a desktop OS. I don't know much about the implications of this particular benchmark, but I care a lot about the current schedule work, for the simple fact that they have been causing me problems for my desktop use.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/131094/AFAIK much of the same happened in many other places at the same period in the rest of the Latin America.
The Catholic Church gets (with due justice) a lot of heat for sexual abuse cases. But there is also a huge work made by many many people inside it to help the poor.
The point being that the C.Church is a gigantic institution with hundreds of different groups pursuing different goals inside of it. So it would be more balanced to take more into account that just, the usual church bashing stuff that hits the main stream news.
I bet a lot was still changing, and that perhaps those copies were lacking Aero and what not. But still, if a university had copies of Vista Betas in advance, I can only suppose that OEMs like Dell, HP, Intel, could test the whole of Vista with Aero and everything. They could not know for sure how well it would run, but they had a very good idea.
But what is an OEM supposed to do? Ship without the stickers? When everybody else was going to ship with them?
3 laptops on sale next to each other with similar price and specs, 2 have a "Vista Ready(tm)" sticker, 1 doesn't. Which computer do you think would
You double-click the icon, you get music or you don't; If you didn't, it failed. You can research why it failed, it might even be easy to research, but it already failed.
I also expected to get a hippopotamus for my birthday. But I didn't. I call that an unrealistic expectation.
Linux is not sold pre-installed (due to market pressure from MS). Real attempts to sell Linux pre-installed like the EEE (and not the Dell laptops) will play your mp3s just fine. Please compare oranges to oranges. **Buy** a linux dist for the desktop (say Linspire), install it, it will play the mp3s.
The problem is that the Free as in Pizza && as in Freedom linux dists do such a good job putting on a OS, that people assume that they should also be able to provide for free (as in Pizza) stuff which they legally (in the US) have to pay for. That is unrealistic.
IMHO the problem is the lack of pre-installed desktop systems, where the costs for these codecs would be paid by the user in the same way they are with Windows and Mac machines. Linux failure (now changing with the EEE) is the lack of main stream pre installed offerings.
Same here ;-)
The ugly:FWIW:
This is leaps and bounds better than what happened 3 to 4 years ago.
Most non-tech savy people I know can't tell the difference between OOffice, and MS Office. Video edition sucks but that isn't a true deal breaker. IMHO the real deal breaker is the lack of marketing that reaches non-IT people, and the fact that until the EEE people just wouldn't walk into a hardware shop and find a linux laptop in the shelves.
I have hope that the EEE (and perhaps the Android) will change change the landscape a lot.
My guess is that that is a result of fearmongering, and the fact that all these populations are getting, on average, older. Thus grumpier, much more susceptible to fearmongering, and missing the nostalgic "gold old days" when life was shinier, and they could have as much salt as they wanted in every meal.