I know the council consists of our own governments. The main reason they are not a democratic institution however is the severe lack of transparency and the utterly non-democratic laws. I am also of the opinion that they are much to far removed from the people to have any deciding power. I can't speak for all governments, but the Swedish government does not vote in parliament, it can propose laws, but it cannot vote on them, this is left to the elected body, the parliament.
The commission is also not very democratic, they're essentially a group of government paid lobbyists with a very large influence, though they don't have any deciding power on their own.
The fact that the European Council (Swede's take note, this includes our own infrastructure minister, from a party that officially claims to be supporting our rights but in practice has done the opposite) even argued for suspending the right to a fair trial indicates that there is something seriously wrong with the entire system. How can these people be allowed to reign free? We need to realize that the council consists of our own governments and hold them responsible for whatever the council does. The council is not a democratic institution, they conduct negotiations in secret, they advocate draconian measures, they frequently force the European Parliament, the only elected body of the EU, to bend down to it's will. We need to get rid of these people NOW! They are a very dangerous bunch of people. Even with this wording, some, including many parliaments, will interpret the text as not requiring a court hearing, and implement it as such.
On Ubuntu, you get a popup asking if you want to install restricted (ie nvidia) drivers, you accept, enter password and you're done. I don't know if it can be dumbed down much more than that. Regarding touchscreen, I recently installed Arch Linux on my tablet (Thinkpad). The wacom driver was not included, I did yourt wacom and installed the wacom driver, restarted X, and it worked right away, and this was on Arch. I don't know about the latest Ubuntu version, but I imagine that it would work out of the box there, the wacom driver is included as a module by default afaik.
You mean it's not a "real" desktop OS if most of the people using it are geeks? Are we not real people? Do we not count? Aside from this, my experience is that the "clueless" users can install software from the repositories as long as they are instructed in how to do so (just as they have to be instructed on how to install software in Windows or OS X), and they are certainly a lot less likely to end up completely screwing up the computer, leaving reinstall as the only recourse.
I don't know how much your car loan is, but assuming a pretty large sum of US$50,000, and a nickels worth of US$0.05, yes there are definitely more that 1 million Linux desktop users. In fact, you could probably pay off at least 10-20 car loans of that amount...
You may not want it but others do, including me. Linux (currently Debian stable on the desktop and Arch on the laptop) has been my sole desktop OS for years, and the same is true for millions of others. Who are you to say that Windows and Mac are fine?
DAB has been implemented in many European countries for the better part of the decade... It hasn't been very successful in most countries, but it's there. I'm not sure why you would want to listen to OTA radio broadcasts in the age of mobile internet though;)
How about distributing control of the root servers to various organizations, one of them being the UN, one being ICANN, one for Europe, one for Asia, one for Africa, etc. It's not like there's just one server...
I don't know what world you're living in but the media is about as capitalistic as it gets. Pretty much all media nowadays is owned by giant and very much capitalist corporations, and it most certainly shows in their reporting in most cases.
There are some things that just cannot have competition by its very nature. Telephony infrastructure is one of them, railroad and road infrastructure is another. You can have competing operators of these, but competing owners is a difficult proposition. Our (wired) telephony infrastructure in Sweden was sold along with the national telephone company (now known as Telia) and the network is now in the hands of a private monopoly. Luckily the same hasn't been done for our railroad network (yet, you never know, we currently have a right wing government...) My Internet connection is provided to me by a privately owned operator, but over a publically owned fiber infrastructure that allows equal access to all private operators with the result being that I have the choice of 8 ISPs, 2 cable TV companies and 8 telephone operators over fiber.
While the governing of the EU is bad, it can't quite turn into a dictatorship by convincing the commisioners. The commissioners don't make the decisions, they propose legislation. The Council (one minister per country) makes the decisions, although nowadays the parliament (the only elected body in the EU) has to agree. The parliament tends to be very weak-willed though, and when they say no, the council makes some minor modifications and sends it back to parliament, most of the time it goes through.
If the EU is going to have as much power as it currently does, we need to scrap the council and reform the commission. Of course I would prefer the EU having very little power and essentially being relegated to actual cross-border issues, not stuff like data retention, IPRED and the telecoms package.
I can never understand why anyone would do such a thing, it's ridiculous, however flash is not the easiest way to do it. Simply put a transparent div on top of the image and people won't be able to right click and save. They will still be able to save it of course by going to tools-page info in Firefox, or simply finding it in the cache, but who is that paranoid about their images? Most people would probably just take a screenshot...
From what I've read, Galileo receivers will be able to receive GPS signals, increasing the number of satellites available to triangulate your position and thereby increasing accuracy.
In the US, the only city I'm really familiar with is New York (lived there), and IIRC, the recovery rate in the city was about 50%, ie on par with your figure for roads. Of course New York may be alone in this since transit in the US is generally so bad that people simply don't use it. If you want to see how a transit system should be run, go to Europe or Asia, most moderately large cities have transit systems that equal or put New York to shame (factoring in size of course).
In such a study, make sure all the roads are tolled and receive no tax funding as well to make it a fair comparison. Roads get way more funding than public transit.
I can't speak for our German sister party, but as a member of the Swedish pirate party, I can assure you that the Pirate Party is not a fake party.
It's a party that has developed and gained support due to the increasingly anti-democratic attitude of our elected parliamentarians. Last year, parliament voted for a law giving a government institution the right to wiretap all international telecommunications traffic without warrant, suspicion and with minimal public insight. This year the IPRED directive was implemented with the added bonus (for record executives) that private corporations could go to court on their own (and not through the police as is common practice) to request information from ISPs on who was using a specific IP at a specific time. I'm sure you haven't missed ACTA if you've read/. with any regularity. The data retention directive will be implemented in Sweden this fall.
The Pirate Party is against all this. While the party is also of the opinion that non-commercial file-sharing of copyrighted works should be legalized, this is really sort of secondary. In order to enforce a ban on filesharing, you have to implement a totalitarian state that can monitor what every person does all the time. This is in our opinion NOT acceptable.
And many agree with us. In the first poll for the upcoming European Parliament elections, we got 5.1% of the vote, enough to grab one seat, with the Pirate Party not even being an alternative presented by the pollsters, and we are now the fourth, soon the third largest party in Sweden with over 42,000 members.
Oh they will "correct" this here as well soon enough. The data retention directive will be implemented this fall, and all the ISPs will be forced to keep logs for at least 6 months.
Swedes: vote for the Pirate Party in European Parliament election on the 7th of June, early voting begins on the 20th of May Other EU citizens: vote for whatever party has the most integrity friendly platform.
We're facing a big problem in the EU. Corruption is rampant among our politicians and the eagerness of politicians to control our society's access to information and surveil our activities has never been higher.
the Linux community is hostile and unhelpful toward non-techies.
This is a common assertion among some, yet I've never seen anything but isolated incidents of "RTFM noob" stuff since I started using Linux in 2000, and on pretty much all of those occasions there have been other people willing, and often eager to help. I've always found the opposite. Most Linux users I know (including me) are always eager to help a new user with any problems, even spending hours to find the solution to some obscure problem.
Would you please provide a few links demonstrating this hostility that is apparently so prevalent in the Linux community?
Isn't FTTH Fiber to the home? How is that last gen? And what would be the current gen? I mean i suppose technically I could connect to my fiber modem by fiber instead of TP-cable, but my connection is capped at 100 Mbps anyway..
Slashdot Mirror
I know the council consists of our own governments.
The main reason they are not a democratic institution however is the severe lack of transparency and the utterly non-democratic laws.
I am also of the opinion that they are much to far removed from the people to have any deciding power. I can't speak for all governments, but the Swedish government does not vote in parliament, it can propose laws, but it cannot vote on them, this is left to the elected body, the parliament.
The commission is also not very democratic, they're essentially a group of government paid lobbyists with a very large influence, though they don't have any deciding power on their own.
This is exactly what is going to happen.
The fact that the European Council (Swede's take note, this includes our own infrastructure minister, from a party that officially claims to be supporting our rights but in practice has done the opposite) even argued for suspending the right to a fair trial indicates that there is something seriously wrong with the entire system. How can these people be allowed to reign free? We need to realize that the council consists of our own governments and hold them responsible for whatever the council does. The council is not a democratic institution, they conduct negotiations in secret, they advocate draconian measures, they frequently force the European Parliament, the only elected body of the EU, to bend down to it's will. We need to get rid of these people NOW! They are a very dangerous bunch of people.
Even with this wording, some, including many parliaments, will interpret the text as not requiring a court hearing, and implement it as such.
On Ubuntu, you get a popup asking if you want to install restricted (ie nvidia) drivers, you accept, enter password and you're done. I don't know if it can be dumbed down much more than that.
Regarding touchscreen, I recently installed Arch Linux on my tablet (Thinkpad). The wacom driver was not included, I did yourt wacom and installed the wacom driver, restarted X, and it worked right away, and this was on Arch. I don't know about the latest Ubuntu version, but I imagine that it would work out of the box there, the wacom driver is included as a module by default afaik.
You mean it's not a "real" desktop OS if most of the people using it are geeks? Are we not real people? Do we not count?
Aside from this, my experience is that the "clueless" users can install software from the repositories as long as they are instructed in how to do so (just as they have to be instructed on how to install software in Windows or OS X), and they are certainly a lot less likely to end up completely screwing up the computer, leaving reinstall as the only recourse.
I don't know how much your car loan is, but assuming a pretty large sum of US$50,000, and a nickels worth of US$0.05, yes there are definitely more that 1 million Linux desktop users. In fact, you could probably pay off at least 10-20 car loans of that amount...
You may not want it but others do, including me. Linux (currently Debian stable on the desktop and Arch on the laptop) has been my sole desktop OS for years, and the same is true for millions of others. Who are you to say that Windows and Mac are fine?
DAB has been implemented in many European countries for the better part of the decade... It hasn't been very successful in most countries, but it's there. ;)
I'm not sure why you would want to listen to OTA radio broadcasts in the age of mobile internet though
How about distributing control of the root servers to various organizations, one of them being the UN, one being ICANN, one for Europe, one for Asia, one for Africa, etc. It's not like there's just one server...
So post instructions on how to do it on the LKML and try to inform the devs of this problem...
I don't know what world you're living in but the media is about as capitalistic as it gets. Pretty much all media nowadays is owned by giant and very much capitalist corporations, and it most certainly shows in their reporting in most cases.
There are some things that just cannot have competition by its very nature. Telephony infrastructure is one of them, railroad and road infrastructure is another. You can have competing operators of these, but competing owners is a difficult proposition. Our (wired) telephony infrastructure in Sweden was sold along with the national telephone company (now known as Telia) and the network is now in the hands of a private monopoly. Luckily the same hasn't been done for our railroad network (yet, you never know, we currently have a right wing government...)
My Internet connection is provided to me by a privately owned operator, but over a publically owned fiber infrastructure that allows equal access to all private operators with the result being that I have the choice of 8 ISPs, 2 cable TV companies and 8 telephone operators over fiber.
While the governing of the EU is bad, it can't quite turn into a dictatorship by convincing the commisioners. The commissioners don't make the decisions, they propose legislation. The Council (one minister per country) makes the decisions, although nowadays the parliament (the only elected body in the EU) has to agree. The parliament tends to be very weak-willed though, and when they say no, the council makes some minor modifications and sends it back to parliament, most of the time it goes through.
If the EU is going to have as much power as it currently does, we need to scrap the council and reform the commission. Of course I would prefer the EU having very little power and essentially being relegated to actual cross-border issues, not stuff like data retention, IPRED and the telecoms package.
I can never understand why anyone would do such a thing, it's ridiculous, however flash is not the easiest way to do it. Simply put a transparent div on top of the image and people won't be able to right click and save. They will still be able to save it of course by going to tools-page info in Firefox, or simply finding it in the cache, but who is that paranoid about their images? Most people would probably just take a screenshot...
From what I've read, Galileo receivers will be able to receive GPS signals, increasing the number of satellites available to triangulate your position and thereby increasing accuracy.
In the US, the only city I'm really familiar with is New York (lived there), and IIRC, the recovery rate in the city was about 50%, ie on par with your figure for roads. Of course New York may be alone in this since transit in the US is generally so bad that people simply don't use it. If you want to see how a transit system should be run, go to Europe or Asia, most moderately large cities have transit systems that equal or put New York to shame (factoring in size of course).
35 miles per gallon on a motorcycle? That's probably about what the average *car* gets around here...
In such a study, make sure all the roads are tolled and receive no tax funding as well to make it a fair comparison. Roads get way more funding than public transit.
As an active member of the Swedish pirate party, I'm interested to know what our German counterpart does to make it "very different?"
I can't speak for our German sister party, but as a member of the Swedish pirate party, I can assure you that the Pirate Party is not a fake party.
It's a party that has developed and gained support due to the increasingly anti-democratic attitude of our elected parliamentarians. Last year, parliament voted for a law giving a government institution the right to wiretap all international telecommunications traffic without warrant, suspicion and with minimal public insight. This year the IPRED directive was implemented with the added bonus (for record executives) that private corporations could go to court on their own (and not through the police as is common practice) to request information from ISPs on who was using a specific IP at a specific time. I'm sure you haven't missed ACTA if you've read /. with any regularity. The data retention directive will be implemented in Sweden this fall.
The Pirate Party is against all this. While the party is also of the opinion that non-commercial file-sharing of copyrighted works should be legalized, this is really sort of secondary. In order to enforce a ban on filesharing, you have to implement a totalitarian state that can monitor what every person does all the time. This is in our opinion NOT acceptable.
And many agree with us. In the first poll for the upcoming European Parliament elections, we got 5.1% of the vote, enough to grab one seat, with the Pirate Party not even being an alternative presented by the pollsters, and we are now the fourth, soon the third largest party in Sweden with over 42,000 members.
Oh they will "correct" this here as well soon enough. The data retention directive will be implemented this fall, and all the ISPs will be forced to keep logs for at least 6 months.
Swedes: vote for the Pirate Party in European Parliament election on the 7th of June, early voting begins on the 20th of May
Other EU citizens: vote for whatever party has the most integrity friendly platform.
We're facing a big problem in the EU. Corruption is rampant among our politicians and the eagerness of politicians to control our society's access to information and surveil our activities has never been higher.
the Linux community is hostile and unhelpful toward non-techies.
This is a common assertion among some, yet I've never seen anything but isolated incidents of "RTFM noob" stuff since I started using Linux in 2000, and on pretty much all of those occasions there have been other people willing, and often eager to help.
I've always found the opposite. Most Linux users I know (including me) are always eager to help a new user with any problems, even spending hours to find the solution to some obscure problem.
Would you please provide a few links demonstrating this hostility that is apparently so prevalent in the Linux community?
I'll admit that certain individuals may be in Beta, but as a group, I'd say we're all still in pre-Alpha unfortunately.
So false advertising is fine as long as the "average consumer" is sufficiently ignorant not to know the difference? That's insane.
Isn't FTTH Fiber to the home? How is that last gen? And what would be the current gen? I mean i suppose technically I could connect to my fiber modem by fiber instead of TP-cable, but my connection is capped at 100 Mbps anyway..