I strongly agree. They promised they would publish an account but so far have failed to do so. On kernel.org they wrote "We will be writing up a report on the incident in the future." but I suppose "the future" in this case translates to "never" or even "mind your own business because it's embarrassing".
"The current Linux Kernel Archives OpenPGP key is always posted here, including any revocation certificates which may be outstanding on older keys.
This signature does not guarantee that the Linux Kernel Archives master site itself has not been compromised. However, if we suffer an intrusion we will revoke the key and post information here as quickly as possible."
I find it amazing that after over 4 months this simple act of revoking the bad key has still not been carried out. Even though a signed tarball doesn't guarantee much in the end, the fact that an important organisation can publicly make such a statement and then fail to honour it is actually disgraceful. It's a demonstration of bad faith in itself, and in combination with their failure to be frank about how root was gained on multiple sites and servers, is an indication of untrustworthiness of the most uncomplicated type.
Claiming to be open and honest is in no way a satisfactory substitute for being open and honest.
In English law, yes. In common speech, no. In other legal systems, I don't know.
Common useage is often very different to strict or technical useage or even dictionary definition, and not just in law, so 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe, it depends' are all valid answers to your question (challenge?).
In English Law "steal" refers to "theft". It's the same.
From the Theft Act 1968 (current English Law):
"A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and "thief" and "steal" shall be construed accordingly."
Dishonestly appropriating the contents of another person's database wouldn't be theft in England, though it would be a very serious offence under the Computer Misuse Act. The penalty could be as high as 5 years imprisonment.
In the UK the definition of theft explicitly sets out several tests including:
"dishonestly acquire, with the intention to permanently deprive"
This is why we have other laws such as the offence of "Taking without consent" of a motor vehicle, which covers situations where the acquisition can be proven dishonest but no intent to permanently deprive can be proven i.e. the offender takes, uses and abandons a vehicle, maybe even at or near where the owner left it.
Most of the English speaking (officially/legally) world outside of the USA is likely to be the same.
My little Archos 43IT running Froyo plays mp3, m4a, ogg, wma, flac, wav, ac3, dts, mp2....in fact so far it has played everything I fed it with the sole exception being musepack.
As for video it plays up to 720p and works fine with all kinds of containers and codecs i.e. ts, vob, mkv, mp4, avi, wmv, mov containers and mpeg2, h.264, xvid/divx, wmp, even theora. It handles vobsubs and text subtitles as well, and if there are multiple audio tracks the user can choose. It can play all this from internal storage or microSD or from network shares or by streaming from the www. And it has HDMI out.
"if your not up for doing that, forget about using the command line tools."
That's simple conceit, pure snobbery.
Because I am utterly uninterested in using Latex I should forget about ssh, encfs, apt, yum, git, tar, mencoder, ssh, locate, find, grep, echo, cat etc?
If "your" not up to learning basic English, forget about telling other people in writing what they should or shouldn't be doing.
Negatory. Your response is welcome but mistaken and offers nothing genuinely mitigatory. Please read the following and consider it expurgatory. He didn't write litigatory, he wrote litigagogagig....I'll try again. He wrote litigagatory. Neither litigatory nor litigagatory are English words. They don't feature in normal dictionaries here on earth or in heaven, hell or purgatory.
99.9 %? Perhaps true of dedicated music only devices, but these days there are many other devices that play audio and which are making dedicated audio players redundant for many people. Phones and tablets tend to use DSP hardware decoding instead of software decoding. This is the case for my clunky old Nokia devices (2730 phone and N810 tablet) and for my new Archos A43IT tablet. A quick google and visit to wikipedia shows that both the iPods and iPod Touch use hardware decoders - Sigmatel, Wolfson and Cirrus variously. I didn't check every model. The iPads also use hardware audio decoding. In fact almost anything that isn't a simple audio playback device is going to use a DSP because power consumption/battery life is critical and far less predictable when you go beyond audio playback and have a relatively high resolution display, 3G and wifi.
I'm guessing that you're a Rockbox dev. I've seen other Rockbox devs state extremely forcefully that nobody uses DSPs and it's all done in software these days. Well, the world changed (again) and DSPs are (again) commonly found on stuff that sits in your pocket and plays audio.
It's actually the job of the news media to translate foreign news media into English so that their English speaking readers/viewers/listeners can keep themselves informed and participate effectively in a democracy. This shouldn't come as news to anyone.
I am unable to prove a negative.
Free people should be able to decide what they find significant and important and whether they care or not for themselves. The duty of journalists in a democracy is to report significant events, to ask searching questions, to expose wrongdoing, to hold their government to account, and to present as full a picture as possible. This is vital to any democracy and when it ceases to be the case then democracy fails. This is the case now.
If you actually prefer that other people decide what you ought to hear and who you are allowed to hear then I suggest you have ceased to be free.
I'm not asking anyone to jump through hoops. I've cited an example where it is easily demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that the English language news media has completely failed to resist the will of government and of other powerful interests. One of the most significant figures of the last twenty years, whose actions have helped drag every major western nation into endless, expensive war has not only been physically killed but even more his words are suppressed. This should concern anyone who believes they are living in a free country. It's a very curious kind of free country where the free press has decided to trust the government instead of holding it to account. I'm not satisfied with knowing only about the people I'm told are acceptable. If I am free and living in a free country then I ought to be able to know about my enemy.
I can't tell you exactly what information is contained in those English language transcripts because they are inaccessible. That's the point. I don't know Arabic so I can't read them or understand the spoken word. I do know that all the major news outlets used to transcribe and publish them as a matter of course. That is their job and it was unremarkable and normal. People used to question whether the translations were good or bad but not whether journalists should perform their job as journalists. But these days the English language media have declined to perform their duty and when others step in their publications disappear. The websites vanish, their ability to broadcast is lost, sometimes via commercial pressure, sometimes by licensing or legislative means and sometimes by means of bombing their offices.
I have this idea that if someone has incited and sustained a global insurgency, has reconciled numerous factions and brought them to his cause, has made hugely painful attacks on the cities of the USA and Europe and their allies, then this person is of significance. I suspect that your opinion "these people haven't had anything interesting to say in years/decades, and nobody cares anymore." may be somehat wide of the mark, as it seems a great many people have been paying close attention, care a great deal and then act accordingly.
Yet again, if anyone can offer a simple, verifiable refutation than I'll be pleased to see it. All you have to do is post the direct links.
No, and I didn't claim that the US govt directly publicly edits the US media newsrooms (though of course it does fully control the embeds). It's about interests and unspoken (publicly) compliance, not overt coercive or legislative enforcement.
The US media claims to be free and fearless, with the fourth estate supposed to be an essential pillar of democracy. The Chinese media's world service owes you no such thing and has no such responsibility. If Bin Laden makes a direct address to the American people do the Chinese media have a responsibility to present and analyse this for a US audience? Which country's media might be expected to deal with it in the most honest way?
And remember the Chinese are also fighting an Al Qaeda linked insurgency in western China. There are common interests at work.
Yet again: if anyone can refute the point I made in my earlier post then please do so. If I'm wrong then all you have to do is post the direct links. It isn't complicated. You free people living in your free country where liberty and free speech are as important as the air you breathe: you are not allowed to read those words. You cannot be trusted. Wherever they are published the publication is suppressed and you don't even notice. You have become so effectively conditioned by your "patriotic" news media doing exactly the opposite of their duty that you don't even see the problem. Wake up.
So if this is not the case don't just say so, or be sarcastic or sceptical. Demonstrate it to be so with simple direct links to the information. Not to decontextualised samples or soundbites or hearsay or criticism, just the simple plain text.
Unless you speak Urdu or Pashto those Pakistani and Afghan news sources will offer nothing intelligible. I wasn't just referring to the US media, I was referring to the *English language* media. When the US takes down a website or domain it becomes inaccessible not just to US citizens but to the rest of the world as well. doh.
Again: if you can refute what I stated in my original post then please offer the direct links. It isn't complicated. If you can show that I am wrong then prove it. Put it beyond doubt. Bring it out of the domain of opinion and into the domain of verifiable, repeatable fact.
Do you seriously suggest that citizens of a supposedly free country must learn Arabic instead of insisting that their democracy actually functions? Are people actually preferring to be ignorant? If that's the case then you deserve to have lost the freedoms that have been subverted in the last decade and you are no better than slaves.
In fact Arabic wouldn't be enough. You'd also need, at minimum, Spanish and perhaps also Hebrew, Pashto, Urdu and Cantonese. Once you have a reasonable grasp of 4 or 5 foreign languages you start to be equipped to circumvent the propaganda machine. I don't know about anyone else but I found that my intellectual capacity allows for me to be reasonably proficient in my native language, to be ok but far from fluent in one or two related languages and to be in effect almost incapable of learning to speak or understand languages which differ radically (different alphabet, tonal languages etc). I think the better option is for people who loudly proclaim themselves to be free to actually become so. The point is that once the citizenry is incapable of making itself informed then the democratic process is utterly broken. This is the case now.
At first glance it seems you to find managed 14 good results in total out of a possible 34 to 40 between the mid 90s and 2011. Of those 14 results it turns out that only 5 are actually transcripts and the rest are merely references or even erroneous results. Al Jazeera is certainly worth reading but it is funded by and exists to promote the interests of the state of Qatar, a client of the USA and Saudi Arabia.
If you're happy to be asleep I'm sorry I disturbed you but if you think you can refute what I originally said then please offer direct links, not just an unchecked and pointless link to the output of a search engine
Now find full English language transcripts of those from 2006 onwards. It's not possible. Prior to that you'll find that mainstream, respectable and even publicly funded news organisations would offer full English transcripts, usually in a timely manner. Occasionally their journalists obtained and published interviews or received written replies to submitted questiosn and then published them. Since sometime in 2005 this ceased to be the case and any websites which do publish those transcripts vanish very quickly indeed. You'll find perhaps two or three available out of a possible 24 or so. The rest are off limits. You may not see them. Your government has decided that you are not permitted to read such dangerous words and so they have gone to huge expense and trouble to suppress their publication wherever and whenever it occurs. This is ongoing.
If you can refute this by finding those translations and transcripts then please illustrate this refutation with links and citations. But you won't be able to do so because if your only language is English and you are not part of an intelligence agency then you no longer trusted or permitted to make up your own mind.
This is pure propaganda. The very last thing the US wants is for genuine freedom of information. What it does want is failsafe communication with its own sympathisers, clients and agents. People make comments along the lines of "what about if they start censoring us?" Did you not notice? Will you consider your news media uncensored simply because nobody puts a 2 minute ad on national TV or a full page ad in the NYT explaining that it's already happened? Wake up. Did you not notice that you are never allowed to hear or read your enemies' words directly or in full? You are only allowed to digest small pieces, decontextualised and presented by public relations people masquerading as journalists. You can identify the real journalists if you have a good memory: they are the people who used to ask hard questions, who were also unafraid to cross frontlines and ask hard questions of the enemy, who are no longer welcome, whose access is rescinded and whose names and reputations are slandered and traduced and who are finally ignored. In their place you have the shame and disgrace of "embedded" journalists, people who are a do not deserve to be called journalists and who have made a compact to deceive you. The English language media is now a rather glossy and expensive upgrade of Pravda. Why on earth would the government legislate censorship when it can be outsourced, bought and paid for? This is how free speech and an uncensored media works in a country with free speech enshrined in the constitution and tested and protected in law. How well do you think it will work in projects funded and controlled by the CIA? Does anyone truly believe these projects exists to counter repression? They exist to promote one kind of repression over another.
A 2003 ultra portable (12.1" was ultra portable when the X30 was new in 2003) does have some deficiencies that the author neglects to mention:
With a 2003 laptop you really struggle with modern video codecs such as h.264. HD, even 720p, is quite literally a non starter. The X30 has Intel integrated 830 GPU. This was fairly modest in 2003 and now it's a distinct problem unless you never watch anything except DVDs and cruddy old low resolution divx/xvid and similar. Visiting youtube or iplayer or similar will see your battery drained in short order.
Next problem: yes the Compact Flash slot was great to have integrated but outside of professional SLRs how many cameras still use CF? Most of us these days have devices which use SD, microSD and SDHC and microSDHC. And what's the speed like on that PCMCIA slot if you add a card reader? Glacial.
USB: yes the X30 has USB. But it's USB 1.1! It's so slow it will make you groan.
The display: probably the X30 had a great display in 2003 but please don't try to convince me it ever had the brightness or contrast of a modern display, because it didn't. I have a similar 12.1" Asus from 2004. After 7 years the display is distinctly tired. This is inevitable.
The touchpad: things have really moved on! Modern touch pads have fantastic multi touch features, with single, two and three finger gestures. They are actually pleasant to use, preferable even to a mouse, whereas touchpads of X30 vintage were always something you only used because you forgot to pack your USB mouse....
Imo a 7 year old laptop make for a lousy comparison to a new high end tablet. The keyboard is great, everything else looks less good. A better comparison is a 2010 or 2011 netbook. These are super cheap now. I just bought a refurbished (factory sealed, as new, guaranteed) Asus 1001P. Its screen is superb, it has a nice keyboard, a multi touch touchpad, superb sound, it can play 720p, is so efficient that stock battery lasts a full working day, it has 3xUSB 2 (no USB 1.1 here!), reads SDHC cards, runs very quietly, doesn't get hot etc etc etc. It doesn't have an optical drive, something I considered essential in 2004 when I bought my old 12.1" Asus but now it's become superfluous to the point of being redundant; I'm about as interested in carrying around DVDs and CDs as I am in keeping pockets full of cassettes or minidiscs. Best of all is that the netbook cost $20 less than that tired old X30:-)
Because almost every application/tool is also found packaged for OS X, BSD, even for Windows....obvious likely exception: the Linux kernel docs. So the article is kind of stupid from that premise onwards. But anyway how about someone offer more than a single example, not just anecdotes, cliches and rants? While remembering tfa is about new(ish) users' experiences?
Assuming a new(ish) user is using a graphical environment means that man pages will not be the first place a user looks. So basically we're looking at the docs specific to the environment (Gnome/Xfce/KDE etc) and the docs of the individual applications. Almost every gui application I've seen has a 'help' button on the menu bar. Some of these launch a help doc in a doc browser, some a locally hosted html doc in the default web browser and some do the evil thing of offering only a web address and assume you are connected...grrrr. Most of the apps I use have very decent help docs. A few don't have anything useful and then again some are models of excellence. I notice the same situation when I use Windows. It's really dumb to say this is some endemic problem with Linux/free software.
If the issue is with stuff like 'how do I set up RAID' or 'how do I install with/home encrypted' then this is up to the distribution to get right. Some are better than others. In Debian there is the online Debian Reference, a reference guide aimed at *users* not developers. This can also be installed and so be accessible without a net connection. It covers all kinds of stuff from the introductory section on the UNIX filesystem hierarchy i.e. what are/etc/home/var and what is the root account, right through to setting up your own subversion repo or customising the kernel.
Occasionally a user might come across an application which is poorly documented, that is there is little documentation or the documentation is inaccurate/outdated/difficult to understand. But why should one or two particular/anecdotal experiences lead to a belief that 'omg linx has bad docs!' It's an overreaction, but I suppose it fills column inches for bloggers/journos and offers the casual blowhard the opportunity for a badly informed whinge post on a board.
Thinking back to the last thing I struggled with: wake on lan. I didn't have a clue what to do to set it up. Searched distro wiki for wake on lan, result being a page of good instructions about which tools to use, how to check my ethernet card supports it, how to enable it, a brief comparison of two different wol clients, lots of examples and other helpful stuff. A few minutes later had it all working. Shocking!
a)Why is that picture racially offensive? b)Would it be racially offensive it it portrayed a white person and was made by a black person?
a) because black people have often *racially* abused in terms comparing them to monkeys. Examples: in UK until *relatively* recently people at soccer matches would wave bananas and shout 'monkey' at black players. This still happens a lot in eastern and some parts of southern Europe. In India and Pakistan black cricketers (i.e African/African-Carribean, usually those from UK, West Indies, South Africa, Zimbabwe) are routinely subjected to shouts of 'bandar' from the crowd, bandar being the Hindi word for monkey. Historically people have misrepresented Darwin's theory and presented Africans as being less evolved and closer to the apes than white people and used this to justify racial discrimination.
b) No, it would just be offensive. There would not the *well known and widely understood* racial context.
These points are so obvious as to be almost self evident. To claim not to be aware of them or to understand them is perverse.
You're right, my terminology was incorrect, confused and confusing. I apologise for inducing such sleepiness and appreciate that you overcame your boredom and torpor to the degree that you were able to reply. I'm not sure what *boogle* means though.
The BSD USL lawsuit was indeed about copyrighted works. So is the SCO action, so while I made a stupid and careless error the broad analogy is still good.
As for successful legal actions against the Linux kernel, here's one (perhaps it's unique, I don't know).
Microsoft recently pursued TomTom over a patent related to using both long and short filenames in FAT filesystems, a technique implemented in the Linux kernel (TomTom devices use the Linux kernel). TomTom caved in before it came to judgement. I'd call that a successful legal action by Microsoft (because the defendant conceded) and I also recall that a patch was forthcoming to replace this technique with another that is not covered by any (known) MS patent. See http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/26/313
It does happen. The Linux kernel is no more impervious to legal issues than any other piece of collection of code. The SCO case is ongoing and because I lack prescience I'm reluctant to state that SCO definitely will lose (though I hope they do lose, and lose because their case cannot be substantiated).
The argument "if *BSD ever becomes as popular as Linux is now, it'll have *exactly* the same problem that Linux has now." sounds oddly familiar. My impression is that outside of the consumer/desktop arena the BSDs are widely used and well known. They compete with the same proprietary UNIX systems as do Linux based systems, so this 'below the radar/parapet/insert_car_analogy_here' contention seems invalid.
This is very good news imo. The BSD patent wranglings were done and dusted quite a few years ago, while allegations and legal actions against the Linux kernel are ongoing. What a great insurance policy it is to have a project working on what may become a drop-in replacement as it matures. The HURD will probably never appear in a stable usable form but in the next 6 months we'll see a familiar looking GNU/BSD that is accompanied by all the usual Debian tools and facilities. The fact that it's Debian doing this is very significant because Debian has the developer resources, the legal and ethical framework, the friendly corporate relationships, and the huge distributed community which can make it work. All they need is some money ha ha ha. And look at the vast number of Debian derived distros and projects. This will make a FreeBSD kernel easily accessible to them all, at very low investment in time and adaptation. It could attract and accelerate development, community and vendor, to both Debian and to FreeBSD. Cross pollination can produce very attractive results.
On the other kind it might be a kind of heresy. Best to kill them all and let god sort it out.
"Everyone is familiar with the Linux video ads created by IBM, Red Hat, and Novell...."
Don't the people who write this kind of brazen untruth ever feel embarrassed? I use Debian GNU/Linux, I like it, it runs on all my computers, x86, amd64 and armel, but if I wrote that sentence (unlikely) I'd certainly know it was not true. It's a really crappy way to start and article, except for the fact that it sends a clear message. The message is "The author is blinkered/bug-eyed/deluded/evangelical/worrying. Choose any of the aforementioned and don't bother reading any further."
"Rob McCarthy, founder and Senior Software Developer at Lightspeed Systems has been using MD:Pro since December 2008, and he comments: "I use it every week - without fail. I use the virus samples in my work to first verify that our virus signatures are complete, and secondly to find similarities between different viruses. Some weeks most of the virus samples are completely new and so I am able to test our anti-virus software against threats that our customers haven't even seen yet"
I'm pretty sure they have, even if you haven't and they don't know about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly agree. They promised they would publish an account but so far have failed to do so. On kernel.org they wrote "We will be writing up a report on the incident in the future." but I suppose "the future" in this case translates to "never" or even "mind your own business because it's embarrassing".
They are also still using a signing key which has been publicly stated to be compromised. From http://kernel.org/signature.html
"The current Linux Kernel Archives OpenPGP key is always posted here, including any revocation certificates which may be outstanding on older keys.
This signature does not guarantee that the Linux Kernel Archives master site itself has not been compromised. However, if we suffer an intrusion we will revoke the key and post information here as quickly as possible."
I find it amazing that after over 4 months this simple act of revoking the bad key has still not been carried out. Even though a signed tarball doesn't guarantee much in the end, the fact that an important organisation can publicly make such a statement and then fail to honour it is actually disgraceful. It's a demonstration of bad faith in itself, and in combination with their failure to be frank about how root was gained on multiple sites and servers, is an indication of untrustworthiness of the most uncomplicated type.
Claiming to be open and honest is in no way a satisfactory substitute for being open and honest.
In English law, yes. In common speech, no. In other legal systems, I don't know.
Common useage is often very different to strict or technical useage or even dictionary definition, and not just in law, so 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe, it depends' are all valid answers to your question (challenge?).
In English Law "steal" refers to "theft". It's the same.
From the Theft Act 1968 (current English Law):
"A person is guilty of theft, if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and "thief" and "steal" shall be construed accordingly."
Dishonestly appropriating the contents of another person's database wouldn't be theft in England, though it would be a very serious offence under the Computer Misuse Act. The penalty could be as high as 5 years imprisonment.
In the UK the definition of theft explicitly sets out several tests including:
"dishonestly acquire, with the intention to permanently deprive"
This is why we have other laws such as the offence of "Taking without consent" of a motor vehicle, which covers situations where the acquisition can be proven dishonest but no intent to permanently deprive can be proven i.e. the offender takes, uses and abandons a vehicle, maybe even at or near where the owner left it.
Most of the English speaking (officially/legally) world outside of the USA is likely to be the same.
Debian has documentation in numerous languages. See http://www.debian.org/international/
The book referenced in this article is written by Debian developers but is not part of Debian.
My little Archos 43IT running Froyo plays mp3, m4a, ogg, wma, flac, wav, ac3, dts, mp2 ....in fact so far it has played everything I fed it with the sole exception being musepack.
As for video it plays up to 720p and works fine with all kinds of containers and codecs i.e. ts, vob, mkv, mp4, avi, wmv, mov containers and mpeg2, h.264, xvid/divx, wmp, even theora. It handles vobsubs and text subtitles as well, and if there are multiple audio tracks the user can choose. It can play all this from internal storage or microSD or from network shares or by streaming from the www. And it has HDMI out.
Try that with your iPod Touch.
"if your not up for doing that, forget about using the command line tools."
That's simple conceit, pure snobbery.
Because I am utterly uninterested in using Latex I should forget about ssh, encfs, apt, yum, git, tar, mencoder, ssh, locate, find, grep, echo, cat etc?
If "your" not up to learning basic English, forget about telling other people in writing what they should or shouldn't be doing.
Negatory. Your response is welcome but mistaken and offers nothing genuinely mitigatory. Please read the following and consider it expurgatory. He didn't write litigatory, he wrote litigagogagig....I'll try again. He wrote litigagatory. Neither litigatory nor litigagatory are English words. They don't feature in normal dictionaries here on earth or in heaven, hell or purgatory.
Litigagatory?
Ouch! Looks like the famous *gatory factory is working at full speed.
In English there already exists a word for persons inclined towards litigation. It's litigious.
Thank you for the most obtuse, tangential and silly reply of the thread so far.
99.9 %? Perhaps true of dedicated music only devices, but these days there are many other devices that play audio and which are making dedicated audio players redundant for many people. Phones and tablets tend to use DSP hardware decoding instead of software decoding. This is the case for my clunky old Nokia devices (2730 phone and N810 tablet) and for my new Archos A43IT tablet. A quick google and visit to wikipedia shows that both the iPods and iPod Touch use hardware decoders - Sigmatel, Wolfson and Cirrus variously. I didn't check every model. The iPads also use hardware audio decoding. In fact almost anything that isn't a simple audio playback device is going to use a DSP because power consumption/battery life is critical and far less predictable when you go beyond audio playback and have a relatively high resolution display, 3G and wifi.
I'm guessing that you're a Rockbox dev. I've seen other Rockbox devs state extremely forcefully that nobody uses DSPs and it's all done in software these days. Well, the world changed (again) and DSPs are (again) commonly found on stuff that sits in your pocket and plays audio.
It's actually the job of the news media to translate foreign news media into English so that their English speaking readers/viewers/listeners can keep themselves informed and participate effectively in a democracy. This shouldn't come as news to anyone.
I am unable to prove a negative.
Free people should be able to decide what they find significant and important and whether they care or not for themselves. The duty of journalists in a democracy is to report significant events, to ask searching questions, to expose wrongdoing, to hold their government to account, and to present as full a picture as possible. This is vital to any democracy and when it ceases to be the case then democracy fails. This is the case now.
If you actually prefer that other people decide what you ought to hear and who you are allowed to hear then I suggest you have ceased to be free.
I'm not asking anyone to jump through hoops. I've cited an example where it is easily demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that the English language news media has completely failed to resist the will of government and of other powerful interests. One of the most significant figures of the last twenty years, whose actions have helped drag every major western nation into endless, expensive war has not only been physically killed but even more his words are suppressed. This should concern anyone who believes they are living in a free country. It's a very curious kind of free country where the free press has decided to trust the government instead of holding it to account. I'm not satisfied with knowing only about the people I'm told are acceptable. If I am free and living in a free country then I ought to be able to know about my enemy.
I can't tell you exactly what information is contained in those English language transcripts because they are inaccessible. That's the point. I don't know Arabic so I can't read them or understand the spoken word. I do know that all the major news outlets used to transcribe and publish them as a matter of course. That is their job and it was unremarkable and normal. People used to question whether the translations were good or bad but not whether journalists should perform their job as journalists. But these days the English language media have declined to perform their duty and when others step in their publications disappear. The websites vanish, their ability to broadcast is lost, sometimes via commercial pressure, sometimes by licensing or legislative means and sometimes by means of bombing their offices.
I have this idea that if someone has incited and sustained a global insurgency, has reconciled numerous factions and brought them to his cause, has made hugely painful attacks on the cities of the USA and Europe and their allies, then this person is of significance. I suspect that your opinion "these people haven't had anything interesting to say in years/decades, and nobody cares anymore." may be somehat wide of the mark, as it seems a great many people have been paying close attention, care a great deal and then act accordingly.
Yet again, if anyone can offer a simple, verifiable refutation than I'll be pleased to see it. All you have to do is post the direct links.
No, and I didn't claim that the US govt directly publicly edits the US media newsrooms (though of course it does fully control the embeds). It's about interests and unspoken (publicly) compliance, not overt coercive or legislative enforcement.
The US media claims to be free and fearless, with the fourth estate supposed to be an essential pillar of democracy. The Chinese media's world service owes you no such thing and has no such responsibility. If Bin Laden makes a direct address to the American people do the Chinese media have a responsibility to present and analyse this for a US audience? Which country's media might be expected to deal with it in the most honest way?
And remember the Chinese are also fighting an Al Qaeda linked insurgency in western China. There are common interests at work.
Yet again: if anyone can refute the point I made in my earlier post then please do so. If I'm wrong then all you have to do is post the direct links. It isn't complicated. You free people living in your free country where liberty and free speech are as important as the air you breathe: you are not allowed to read those words. You cannot be trusted. Wherever they are published the publication is suppressed and you don't even notice. You have become so effectively conditioned by your "patriotic" news media doing exactly the opposite of their duty that you don't even see the problem. Wake up.
So if this is not the case don't just say so, or be sarcastic or sceptical. Demonstrate it to be so with simple direct links to the information. Not to decontextualised samples or soundbites or hearsay or criticism, just the simple plain text.
Unless you speak Urdu or Pashto those Pakistani and Afghan news sources will offer nothing intelligible. I wasn't just referring to the US media, I was referring to the *English language* media. When the US takes down a website or domain it becomes inaccessible not just to US citizens but to the rest of the world as well. doh.
Again: if you can refute what I stated in my original post then please offer the direct links. It isn't complicated. If you can show that I am wrong then prove it. Put it beyond doubt. Bring it out of the domain of opinion and into the domain of verifiable, repeatable fact.
Saying so doesn't make it so.
Do you seriously suggest that citizens of a supposedly free country must learn Arabic instead of insisting that their democracy actually functions? Are people actually preferring to be ignorant? If that's the case then you deserve to have lost the freedoms that have been subverted in the last decade and you are no better than slaves.
In fact Arabic wouldn't be enough. You'd also need, at minimum, Spanish and perhaps also Hebrew, Pashto, Urdu and Cantonese. Once you have a reasonable grasp of 4 or 5 foreign languages you start to be equipped to circumvent the propaganda machine. I don't know about anyone else but I found that my intellectual capacity allows for me to be reasonably proficient in my native language, to be ok but far from fluent in one or two related languages and to be in effect almost incapable of learning to speak or understand languages which differ radically (different alphabet, tonal languages etc). I think the better option is for people who loudly proclaim themselves to be free to actually become so. The point is that once the citizenry is incapable of making itself informed then the democratic process is utterly broken. This is the case now.
That's not even close to being true.
At first glance it seems you to find managed 14 good results in total out of a possible 34 to 40 between the mid 90s and 2011. Of those 14 results it turns out that only 5 are actually transcripts and the rest are merely references or even erroneous results. Al Jazeera is certainly worth reading but it is funded by and exists to promote the interests of the state of Qatar, a client of the USA and Saudi Arabia.
If you're happy to be asleep I'm sorry I disturbed you but if you think you can refute what I originally said then please offer direct links, not just an unchecked and pointless link to the output of a search engine
No, in fact you are not allowed. This is not just about broadcast media. The internet is not a forum of free expression. That is an illusion.
You can test this for yourself by trying to access English language transcripts of one of (so far) the most influential figures of this century:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videos_and_audio_recordings_of_Osama_bin_Laden
Now find full English language transcripts of those from 2006 onwards. It's not possible. Prior to that you'll find that mainstream, respectable and even publicly funded news organisations would offer full English transcripts, usually in a timely manner. Occasionally their journalists obtained and published interviews or received written replies to submitted questiosn and then published them. Since sometime in 2005 this ceased to be the case and any websites which do publish those transcripts vanish very quickly indeed. You'll find perhaps two or three available out of a possible 24 or so. The rest are off limits. You may not see them. Your government has decided that you are not permitted to read such dangerous words and so they have gone to huge expense and trouble to suppress their publication wherever and whenever it occurs. This is ongoing.
If you can refute this by finding those translations and transcripts then please illustrate this refutation with links and citations. But you won't be able to do so because if your only language is English and you are not part of an intelligence agency then you no longer trusted or permitted to make up your own mind.
This is pure propaganda. The very last thing the US wants is for genuine freedom of information. What it does want is failsafe communication with its own sympathisers, clients and agents. People make comments along the lines of "what about if they start censoring us?" Did you not notice? Will you consider your news media uncensored simply because nobody puts a 2 minute ad on national TV or a full page ad in the NYT explaining that it's already happened? Wake up. Did you not notice that you are never allowed to hear or read your enemies' words directly or in full? You are only allowed to digest small pieces, decontextualised and presented by public relations people masquerading as journalists. You can identify the real journalists if you have a good memory: they are the people who used to ask hard questions, who were also unafraid to cross frontlines and ask hard questions of the enemy, who are no longer welcome, whose access is rescinded and whose names and reputations are slandered and traduced and who are finally ignored. In their place you have the shame and disgrace of "embedded" journalists, people who are a do not deserve to be called journalists and who have made a compact to deceive you. The English language media is now a rather glossy and expensive upgrade of Pravda. Why on earth would the government legislate censorship when it can be outsourced, bought and paid for? This is how free speech and an uncensored media works in a country with free speech enshrined in the constitution and tested and protected in law. How well do you think it will work in projects funded and controlled by the CIA? Does anyone truly believe these projects exists to counter repression? They exist to promote one kind of repression over another.
A 2003 ultra portable (12.1" was ultra portable when the X30 was new in 2003) does have some deficiencies that the author neglects to mention:
With a 2003 laptop you really struggle with modern video codecs such as h.264. HD, even 720p, is quite literally a non starter. The X30 has Intel integrated 830 GPU. This was fairly modest in 2003 and now it's a distinct problem unless you never watch anything except DVDs and cruddy old low resolution divx/xvid and similar. Visiting youtube or iplayer or similar will see your battery drained in short order.
Next problem: yes the Compact Flash slot was great to have integrated but outside of professional SLRs how many cameras still use CF? Most of us these days have devices which use SD, microSD and SDHC and microSDHC. And what's the speed like on that PCMCIA slot if you add a card reader? Glacial.
USB: yes the X30 has USB. But it's USB 1.1! It's so slow it will make you groan.
The display: probably the X30 had a great display in 2003 but please don't try to convince me it ever had the brightness or contrast of a modern display, because it didn't. I have a similar 12.1" Asus from 2004. After 7 years the display is distinctly tired. This is inevitable.
The touchpad: things have really moved on! Modern touch pads have fantastic multi touch features, with single, two and three finger gestures. They are actually pleasant to use, preferable even to a mouse, whereas touchpads of X30 vintage were always something you only used because you forgot to pack your USB mouse....
Imo a 7 year old laptop make for a lousy comparison to a new high end tablet. The keyboard is great, everything else looks less good. A better comparison is a 2010 or 2011 netbook. These are super cheap now. I just bought a refurbished (factory sealed, as new, guaranteed) Asus 1001P. Its screen is superb, it has a nice keyboard, a multi touch touchpad, superb sound, it can play 720p, is so efficient that stock battery lasts a full working day, it has 3xUSB 2 (no USB 1.1 here!), reads SDHC cards, runs very quietly, doesn't get hot etc etc etc. It doesn't have an optical drive, something I considered essential in 2004 when I bought my old 12.1" Asus but now it's become superfluous to the point of being redundant; I'm about as interested in carrying around DVDs and CDs as I am in keeping pockets full of cassettes or minidiscs. Best of all is that the netbook cost $20 less than that tired old X30 :-)
Because almost every application/tool is also found packaged for OS X, BSD, even for Windows....obvious likely exception: the Linux kernel docs. So the article is kind of stupid from that premise onwards. But anyway how about someone offer more than a single example, not just anecdotes, cliches and rants? While remembering tfa is about new(ish) users' experiences?
Assuming a new(ish) user is using a graphical environment means that man pages will not be the first place a user looks. So basically we're looking at the docs specific to the environment (Gnome/Xfce/KDE etc) and the docs of the individual applications. Almost every gui application I've seen has a 'help' button on the menu bar. Some of these launch a help doc in a doc browser, some a locally hosted html doc in the default web browser and some do the evil thing of offering only a web address and assume you are connected...grrrr. Most of the apps I use have very decent help docs. A few don't have anything useful and then again some are models of excellence. I notice the same situation when I use Windows. It's really dumb to say this is some endemic problem with Linux/free software.
If the issue is with stuff like 'how do I set up RAID' or 'how do I install with /home encrypted' then this is up to the distribution to get right. Some are better than others. In Debian there is the online Debian Reference, a reference guide aimed at *users* not developers. This can also be installed and so be accessible without a net connection. It covers all kinds of stuff from the introductory section on the UNIX filesystem hierarchy i.e. what are /etc /home /var and what is the root account, right through to setting up your own subversion repo or customising the kernel.
Occasionally a user might come across an application which is poorly documented, that is there is little documentation or the documentation is inaccurate/outdated/difficult to understand. But why should one or two particular/anecdotal experiences lead to a belief that 'omg linx has bad docs!' It's an overreaction, but I suppose it fills column inches for bloggers/journos and offers the casual blowhard the opportunity for a badly informed whinge post on a board.
Thinking back to the last thing I struggled with: wake on lan. I didn't have a clue what to do to set it up. Searched distro wiki for wake on lan, result being a page of good instructions about which tools to use, how to check my ethernet card supports it, how to enable it, a brief comparison of two different wol clients, lots of examples and other helpful stuff. A few minutes later had it all working. Shocking!
a)Why is that picture racially offensive?
b)Would it be racially offensive it it portrayed a white person and was made by a black person?
a) because black people have often *racially* abused in terms comparing them to monkeys. Examples: in UK until *relatively* recently people at soccer matches would wave bananas and shout 'monkey' at black players. This still happens a lot in eastern and some parts of southern Europe. In India and Pakistan black cricketers (i.e African/African-Carribean, usually those from UK, West Indies, South Africa, Zimbabwe) are routinely subjected to shouts of 'bandar' from the crowd, bandar being the Hindi word for monkey. Historically people have misrepresented Darwin's theory and presented Africans as being less evolved and closer to the apes than white people and used this to justify racial discrimination.
b) No, it would just be offensive. There would not the *well known and widely understood* racial context.
These points are so obvious as to be almost self evident. To claim not to be aware of them or to understand them is perverse.
You're right, my terminology was incorrect, confused and confusing. I apologise for inducing such sleepiness and appreciate that you overcame your boredom and torpor to the degree that you were able to reply. I'm not sure what *boogle* means though.
The BSD USL lawsuit was indeed about copyrighted works. So is the SCO action, so while I made a stupid and careless error the broad analogy is still good.
As for successful legal actions against the Linux kernel, here's one (perhaps it's unique, I don't know).
Microsoft recently pursued TomTom over a patent related to using both long and short filenames in FAT filesystems, a technique implemented in the Linux kernel (TomTom devices use the Linux kernel). TomTom caved in before it came to judgement. I'd call that a successful legal action by Microsoft (because the defendant conceded) and I also recall that a patch was forthcoming to replace this technique with another that is not covered by any (known) MS patent. See http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/6/26/313
It does happen. The Linux kernel is no more impervious to legal issues than any other piece of collection of code. The SCO case is ongoing and because I lack prescience I'm reluctant to state that SCO definitely will lose (though I hope they do lose, and lose because their case cannot be substantiated).
The argument "if *BSD ever becomes as popular as Linux is now, it'll have *exactly* the same problem that Linux has now." sounds oddly familiar. My impression is that outside of the consumer/desktop arena the BSDs are widely used and well known. They compete with the same proprietary UNIX systems as do Linux based systems, so this 'below the radar/parapet/insert_car_analogy_here' contention seems invalid.
This is very good news imo. The BSD patent wranglings were done and dusted quite a few years ago, while allegations and legal actions against the Linux kernel are ongoing. What a great insurance policy it is to have a project working on what may become a drop-in replacement as it matures. The HURD will probably never appear in a stable usable form but in the next 6 months we'll see a familiar looking GNU/BSD that is accompanied by all the usual Debian tools and facilities. The fact that it's Debian doing this is very significant because Debian has the developer resources, the legal and ethical framework, the friendly corporate relationships, and the huge distributed community which can make it work. All they need is some money ha ha ha. And look at the vast number of Debian derived distros and projects. This will make a FreeBSD kernel easily accessible to them all, at very low investment in time and adaptation. It could attract and accelerate development, community and vendor, to both Debian and to FreeBSD. Cross pollination can produce very attractive results. On the other kind it might be a kind of heresy. Best to kill them all and let god sort it out.
"Everyone is familiar with the Linux video ads created by IBM, Red Hat, and Novell...."
Don't the people who write this kind of brazen untruth ever feel embarrassed? I use Debian GNU/Linux, I like it, it runs on all my computers, x86, amd64 and armel, but if I wrote that sentence (unlikely) I'd certainly know it was not true. It's a really crappy way to start and article, except for the fact that it sends a clear message. The message is "The author is blinkered/bug-eyed/deluded/evangelical/worrying. Choose any of the aforementioned and don't bother reading any further."
From the article:
"Rob McCarthy, founder and Senior Software Developer at Lightspeed Systems has been using MD:Pro since December 2008, and he comments: "I use it every week - without fail. I use the virus samples in my work to first verify that our virus signatures are complete, and secondly to find similarities between different viruses. Some weeks most of the virus samples are completely new and so I am able to test our anti-virus software against threats that our customers haven't even seen yet"
I'm pretty sure they have, even if you haven't and they don't know about it.