Sure. Or maybe the US violated a sovereign state's airspace and had their aircraft shot down. Looking at both countries' track records for provoking armed conflicts through blatant disregard for international law the latter somehow seems the more likely theory.
Well, if you consider forcing someone to take about half a second's worth of brain time to decide which of their two to three cans to throw their trash in "harming", I really do not know what to say. Amongst countries who are not generally regarded as outright dictatorships the US is probably the one furthest down the line towards a police state with only Israel as a serious contender, but you complain about having to sort your trash?
So road safety regulations are communist? Regulations on sewage disposal are communist? Regulations on what kinds of RF emitting devices you may operate in your backyard are communist?
Well, if preventing individuals from harming the commonality is communist, I urgently need to raise a few red flags.
Not to be pedantic, but apparently you can get a degree in religious studies. [...]
You get that degree for studying religion, not for following it. I do know a handful of people who very successfully study various religions but who are agnostics or atheists. Despite the usual saying you do not have to be a nutter to become a psychiatrist.
But, for fairness' sake, let us take a look at the current College:
José Manuel Barroso, President
Professional politician, holding national offices since at least 1985.
Catherine Ashton, Vice President
Professional politician, holding national offices since 2001, one of the drivers of the Lisbon Treaty in the UK's House of Lords.
Viviane Reding, Vice President
Professional politician, became Luxembourgian MP in 1979, since then in various national governmental bodies and later leader of EPP delegation.
Joaquín Almunia, Vice President
Professional politician, holding national offices since at least 1982, PSOE party leader from 1997 to 2000.
Siim Kallas, Vice President
Professional politician, former Estonian PM, former member of Supreme Council of the Soviet Union.
Neelie Kroes, Vice President
Professional politician, became Dutch MP in 1971, since then State Secretary and minister in several cabinets.
Antonio Tajani, Vice President
Professional politician, spokesman for Berlusconi since 1994, became Italian MP in 2004.
Maros Sefcovic, Vice President
Ex-ambassador, now professional politician.
Olli Rehn, Vice President
Professional politician, became Finnish MP in 1991, special adviser to the PM from 1992 to '93.
Do you want me to continue? I briefly glanced over the political biographies of the other members, they all look similar. Former PM's and cabinet members, party leaders, and so far none who does not come with at least one decade of professional political involvement on at least national level.
Or maybe your definition of "not necessarily political [sic!] connected" differs significantly from mine?
Why would the commission need be made up out of elected members when you can get better people that are not necessarily political connected?
I challenge you to name one single person in the commission who is not "politically connected". Just one. And that does not even touch the question of whether they are "better".
To those who modded Teun insightful: Please spend a few minutes on a search engine of your choice and see for yourself just how good the commission is.
If that "content on the internet" included, say, detailled information regarding said economic crisis from governmental regulatory bodies and from ministries and other administrative institutions responsible for the governance of, say, the financial industry, would you still agree it is insignificant? Here in Germany we had several state banks nearly or actually go bancrupt because of mismanagement, ridiculously risky business practices and outright malpractice. Had all their operational information been freely available to the public this would very likely have been caught early enough to prevent the losses that now have been passed on to the tax payer. And that is just one example.
In a world where politics (and economics) are largely a matter of back-room deals brokered between good ol' boys public scrutiny may well be one of the best ways to fight this crisis. Remember: We are in this situation not because of a sudden Ferengi invation but because a whole - I generally hate the term, but here it fits quite well - class of people had been left to play real-life Monopoly for decades without any real oversight or regulation. This crisis is not some natural disaster. It was brought over us by people.
You may appreciate the difference between a software that essentially is a single building block used in any number of applications where untimely releases of a mass of changes makes it incredibly hard for the developers of those applications to adapt them to this building block, and a complete OS stack that only really works as one complete package and where interest in individual components is secondary to interest in the system as a whole.
There seems to be a misunderstanding on your part: The Pirate Party does not want to cut artists off their fair compensation, quite to the contrary. It is the media industry that cheats artists out of their due pay through business practices that would put the Mafia to shame. The PP wants to balance the interests of the creators of media against those of society in a manner that ensures the livelihood of the former while protecting the freedom of the latter.
Even at best, to try to take the name at face value, their naming suggests they are advocating something that is strongly associated with disobedience and anarchy.
In case you forgot, the Pirates did not invent the term, they were called so by industry propagandists. They took on a label given to them by their adversaries. And they did not take it on to express their taste for "disobedience and anarchy". Calling the party "Pirate Party" actually was both the obvious and also the cleverest thing to do. This way
they use a term that has already been established in public debate and that is at least roughly understood by the majority of the population and
they get to reshape and redefine it, which diminishes its usefulness to their opponents.
I just don't get what the problem is... How can anyone abuse street view and it's images of buildings?
I did not say this behaviour was rational. I for one love StreetView, and I can only shake my head over those people who seriously fear its use by muggers, terrorists etc. But I understand where they are coming from.
On the other hand I run my own mail server because I do not trust any commercial provider to ensure the privacy of my messages. And I run pretty much overkill grade encryption between my mobile devices and my home network. Not that I had anything to hide, mind you, my life is just as "boring" as yours. But since I do nothing wrong why should I allow the state or anyone else to poke through my personal messages? Similarly I am very careful about what and how I post to my Facebook and G+ accounts - which are both registered under pseudonyms using dedicated e-mail addresses. And similarly I am very much against the widespread use of cctv, police video recordings at lawful protests etc. We still have an assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and that extends from the formal legal principle towards an expectation of being left alone by the state as long as one does not break the law.
Besides, if half of all the money that is thrown out of the window on technical solutions that, in the end, work at best 10% of the time, was spent on more and better trained police I would feel much safer. What good is it to you when your being beaten to death by some lowlives is caught on tape from five different angles but the one officer who could have saved your life had to be let go because the state could not afford their salary?
You know that Facebook has an office in Hamburg and that they do business here and therefore fall under German jurisdiction, right? You know that Facebook collects data on members and non-members through embeddings in third-party websites which violates German law, right? You know that Facebook keeps changing its TOS and introducing new privacy-invading features after people signed up on what they thought were acceptable terms, which violates German law, right?
Wait, you say you have no bloody clue as to what is involved in this issue? Sorry, I didn't realise you were an idiot.
Presumably you are not from Germany. Privacy and data protection are regarded quite differently over here compared to, say the US. We had two totalitarian regimes in one century on German soil who drew most of their power from the insane amount of information they collected on individual citizens, and the last few months of public debate have been dominated by several data snooping and retention initiatives by our government and police, and this debate may well cost a few top-ranking politicians and public servants their seats/jobs.
People here regard information about themselves as their property. When Google announced the expansion of StreetView to Germany they brought a shitstorm upon themselves. Take a look around German cities in StreetView. A large number of houses had to be blurred out because of complaints by residents. Google very narrowly avoided concerted legal action from our federal and states' data protection officers. Facebook will have to follow the law or risk being banned. We had quite a few successful social networks here before Facebook opened up to international users. Right now they are barely keeping themselves afloat, but should Facebook be kicked out they would jump to fill the void with a legal alternative.
The office that threatens to sue is not that of a politician but that of the data protection officer of the State (not city!) of Hamburg. This is not about politicians playing web sheriffs, this is about upholding the law.
Some of our data protection laws are slightly overreaching and collide with practical IT needs - server operators who fall under German jurisdiction may not even store IP adresses of visitors, so the stock Apache logging settings violate our laws - but overall our personally identifiable information enjoys strong protection. Several state DPO's are taking initiative against things like Facebook's Like button being embedded into websites, and I clearly see this as a good thing.
Sorry, in that case I must have misunderstood the PP. I read the comment as saying "Facebook allows HTML, G+ does not, therefore G+ is worse". I do have a FB account but I do not remember seeing any custom HTML on the few non-personal pages I have visited there. Obviously not allowing such customisation is a Good Thing, of course.
What worries me about posts like yours is it implies that "pretty" and "productive" cannot be the same. [...]
Well, so far I have seen few examples where "productive" was not compromised in favour of "pretty". Like you I crave aesthetically pleasing UIs that make me enjoy using them. But If I have to choose between pretty and productive, I choose productive, because pretty does not get stuff done.
It did not. The UI designers just managed to undercut the programmers.
Seriously, UIs designed by programmers may not be pretty, and they may not be all that intuitive for people coming from different domains, but at least they usually work and work as expected. UIs designed by Photoshop monkeys (that is "mere" UI designers as opposed to professionally trained UX experts) may be pretty and they might even be half-way intuitive, but they seldom work at all and in even fewer cases work as expected.
While I am with you on the 1% (which I probably belong to) the other 99% are not one homogeneous Borg collective. That is exactly the core matter in this whole debate: Can the new generation of interfaces - Unity, GNOME 3 and the others mentioned in the submission - really cater to all audiences, from the novice to casual to business to power user? That is the claim that the project leaders continue to make.
As others have said many times, all those interfaces are optimised for use on touch-centric devices with little screen real estate and few concurrently running applications. There they clearly offer benefits over the traditional GUI approach. But on my 27" display with several open windows per application and way more than just the default toolbar or on multi-monitor setups those interfaces just plain suck. So we do not need one interface for the 99%. We need a couple of interfaces for different use cases.
You still make it sound as if GNOME 3 was inherently better, as if we all were just not putting enough effort into making the switch.
I have gone from Win 3.11 to Win NT 4 to Win 98 to KDE 3 to Win XP to OS X to GNOME 2, and now added Win 7, Android and Unity to the mix. There are things in each of them that I admire and things that I despise. I see uses for GNOME 3 and Unity. But they are limited to certain tasks and audiences. Which is why at any given time I usually have almost as many tabs open in my shell as I have in my browser.
You may want to lay off the "They're just stubborn old fools" attitude and reread what Rogerborg wrote. I have Unity on my laptop which I use mostly for browsing and OSM editing and - leaving aside such petty annoyances as the lack of a GUI for changing font sizes or anti-aliasing in the stock installation - it is quite a nice interface for such utilisation. But Canonical will have to take GNOME 2 from my cold dead hands as far as my workstation is concerned. I tried Unity there, I tried GNOME 3 there, and I still cannot make up my mind as to which one sucked harder. I have a 27" screen, three panels and almost nothing left of the stock configuration. Not because I have too much time on my hands or because my ego requires daily customisation so I can feel special but because I need to get shit done. And those new interfaces get in the way of that. This is why I, along with quite a number of people, do not see Unity or GNOME 3 as the Second Coming. They are one possible approach to GUI design, and they offer advantages in some areas but fall short in others where more traditional paradigms are better suited.
Slashdot Mirror
They cause problems in the world by shooting down a foreign aircraft that intrudes into their sovereign territory? Interesting.
Sure. Or maybe the US violated a sovereign state's airspace and had their aircraft shot down. Looking at both countries' track records for provoking armed conflicts through blatant disregard for international law the latter somehow seems the more likely theory.
Well, if you consider forcing someone to take about half a second's worth of brain time to decide which of their two to three cans to throw their trash in "harming", I really do not know what to say. Amongst countries who are not generally regarded as outright dictatorships the US is probably the one furthest down the line towards a police state with only Israel as a serious contender, but you complain about having to sort your trash?
So road safety regulations are communist? Regulations on sewage disposal are communist? Regulations on what kinds of RF emitting devices you may operate in your backyard are communist?
Well, if preventing individuals from harming the commonality is communist, I urgently need to raise a few red flags.
Not to be pedantic, but apparently you can get a degree in religious studies. [...]
You get that degree for studying religion, not for following it. I do know a handful of people who very successfully study various religions but who are agnostics or atheists. Despite the usual saying you do not have to be a nutter to become a psychiatrist.
So this incredibly effective screening process must be why a whole College of Commissioners was forced to resign over charges of fraud and corruption which led to the founding of the European Anti-Fraud Office. Right. The best of the best of the best, SIR!
But, for fairness' sake, let us take a look at the current College:
José Manuel Barroso, President Professional politician, holding national offices since at least 1985. Catherine Ashton, Vice President Professional politician, holding national offices since 2001, one of the drivers of the Lisbon Treaty in the UK's House of Lords. Viviane Reding, Vice President Professional politician, became Luxembourgian MP in 1979, since then in various national governmental bodies and later leader of EPP delegation. Joaquín Almunia, Vice President Professional politician, holding national offices since at least 1982, PSOE party leader from 1997 to 2000. Siim Kallas, Vice President Professional politician, former Estonian PM, former member of Supreme Council of the Soviet Union. Neelie Kroes, Vice President Professional politician, became Dutch MP in 1971, since then State Secretary and minister in several cabinets. Antonio Tajani, Vice President Professional politician, spokesman for Berlusconi since 1994, became Italian MP in 2004. Maros Sefcovic, Vice President Ex-ambassador, now professional politician. Olli Rehn, Vice President Professional politician, became Finnish MP in 1991, special adviser to the PM from 1992 to '93.Do you want me to continue? I briefly glanced over the political biographies of the other members, they all look similar. Former PM's and cabinet members, party leaders, and so far none who does not come with at least one decade of professional political involvement on at least national level.
Or maybe your definition of "not necessarily political [sic!] connected" differs significantly from mine?
Why would the commission need be made up out of elected members when you can get better people that are not necessarily political connected?
I challenge you to name one single person in the commission who is not "politically connected". Just one. And that does not even touch the question of whether they are "better".
To those who modded Teun insightful: Please spend a few minutes on a search engine of your choice and see for yourself just how good the commission is.
If that "content on the internet" included, say, detailled information regarding said economic crisis from governmental regulatory bodies and from ministries and other administrative institutions responsible for the governance of, say, the financial industry, would you still agree it is insignificant? Here in Germany we had several state banks nearly or actually go bancrupt because of mismanagement, ridiculously risky business practices and outright malpractice. Had all their operational information been freely available to the public this would very likely have been caught early enough to prevent the losses that now have been passed on to the tax payer. And that is just one example.
In a world where politics (and economics) are largely a matter of back-room deals brokered between good ol' boys public scrutiny may well be one of the best ways to fight this crisis. Remember: We are in this situation not because of a sudden Ferengi invation but because a whole - I generally hate the term, but here it fits quite well - class of people had been left to play real-life Monopoly for decades without any real oversight or regulation. This crisis is not some natural disaster. It was brought over us by people.
You may appreciate the difference between a software that essentially is a single building block used in any number of applications where untimely releases of a mass of changes makes it incredibly hard for the developers of those applications to adapt them to this building block, and a complete OS stack that only really works as one complete package and where interest in individual components is secondary to interest in the system as a whole.
There seems to be a misunderstanding on your part: The Pirate Party does not want to cut artists off their fair compensation, quite to the contrary. It is the media industry that cheats artists out of their due pay through business practices that would put the Mafia to shame. The PP wants to balance the interests of the creators of media against those of society in a manner that ensures the livelihood of the former while protecting the freedom of the latter.
Even at best, to try to take the name at face value, their naming suggests they are advocating something that is strongly associated with disobedience and anarchy.
In case you forgot, the Pirates did not invent the term, they were called so by industry propagandists. They took on a label given to them by their adversaries. And they did not take it on to express their taste for "disobedience and anarchy". Calling the party "Pirate Party" actually was both the obvious and also the cleverest thing to do. This way
Unless "Apple-labeled" is a legal term, which I doubt, this should be a non-issue.
I just don't get what the problem is... How can anyone abuse street view and it's images of buildings?
I did not say this behaviour was rational. I for one love StreetView, and I can only shake my head over those people who seriously fear its use by muggers, terrorists etc. But I understand where they are coming from.
On the other hand I run my own mail server because I do not trust any commercial provider to ensure the privacy of my messages. And I run pretty much overkill grade encryption between my mobile devices and my home network. Not that I had anything to hide, mind you, my life is just as "boring" as yours. But since I do nothing wrong why should I allow the state or anyone else to poke through my personal messages? Similarly I am very careful about what and how I post to my Facebook and G+ accounts - which are both registered under pseudonyms using dedicated e-mail addresses. And similarly I am very much against the widespread use of cctv, police video recordings at lawful protests etc. We still have an assumption of innocence until proven guilty, and that extends from the formal legal principle towards an expectation of being left alone by the state as long as one does not break the law.
Besides, if half of all the money that is thrown out of the window on technical solutions that, in the end, work at best 10% of the time, was spent on more and better trained police I would feel much safer. What good is it to you when your being beaten to death by some lowlives is caught on tape from five different angles but the one officer who could have saved your life had to be let go because the state could not afford their salary?
You know that Facebook has an office in Hamburg and that they do business here and therefore fall under German jurisdiction, right? You know that Facebook collects data on members and non-members through embeddings in third-party websites which violates German law, right? You know that Facebook keeps changing its TOS and introducing new privacy-invading features after people signed up on what they thought were acceptable terms, which violates German law, right?
Wait, you say you have no bloody clue as to what is involved in this issue? Sorry, I didn't realise you were an idiot.
Presumably you are not from Germany. Privacy and data protection are regarded quite differently over here compared to, say the US. We had two totalitarian regimes in one century on German soil who drew most of their power from the insane amount of information they collected on individual citizens, and the last few months of public debate have been dominated by several data snooping and retention initiatives by our government and police, and this debate may well cost a few top-ranking politicians and public servants their seats/jobs.
People here regard information about themselves as their property. When Google announced the expansion of StreetView to Germany they brought a shitstorm upon themselves. Take a look around German cities in StreetView. A large number of houses had to be blurred out because of complaints by residents. Google very narrowly avoided concerted legal action from our federal and states' data protection officers. Facebook will have to follow the law or risk being banned. We had quite a few successful social networks here before Facebook opened up to international users. Right now they are barely keeping themselves afloat, but should Facebook be kicked out they would jump to fill the void with a legal alternative.
Facebook has an office in Hamburg and runs servers in Germany. Any further questions?
The office that threatens to sue is not that of a politician but that of the data protection officer of the State (not city!) of Hamburg. This is not about politicians playing web sheriffs, this is about upholding the law. Some of our data protection laws are slightly overreaching and collide with practical IT needs - server operators who fall under German jurisdiction may not even store IP adresses of visitors, so the stock Apache logging settings violate our laws - but overall our personally identifiable information enjoys strong protection. Several state DPO's are taking initiative against things like Facebook's Like button being embedded into websites, and I clearly see this as a good thing.
Sorry, in that case I must have misunderstood the PP. I read the comment as saying "Facebook allows HTML, G+ does not, therefore G+ is worse". I do have a FB account but I do not remember seeing any custom HTML on the few non-personal pages I have visited there. Obviously not allowing such customisation is a Good Thing, of course.
What worries me about posts like yours is it implies that "pretty" and "productive" cannot be the same. [...]
Well, so far I have seen few examples where "productive" was not compromised in favour of "pretty". Like you I crave aesthetically pleasing UIs that make me enjoy using them. But If I have to choose between pretty and productive, I choose productive, because pretty does not get stuff done.
It did not. The UI designers just managed to undercut the programmers.
Seriously, UIs designed by programmers may not be pretty, and they may not be all that intuitive for people coming from different domains, but at least they usually work and work as expected. UIs designed by Photoshop monkeys (that is "mere" UI designers as opposed to professionally trained UX experts) may be pretty and they might even be half-way intuitive, but they seldom work at all and in even fewer cases work as expected.
While I am with you on the 1% (which I probably belong to) the other 99% are not one homogeneous Borg collective. That is exactly the core matter in this whole debate: Can the new generation of interfaces - Unity, GNOME 3 and the others mentioned in the submission - really cater to all audiences, from the novice to casual to business to power user? That is the claim that the project leaders continue to make.
As others have said many times, all those interfaces are optimised for use on touch-centric devices with little screen real estate and few concurrently running applications. There they clearly offer benefits over the traditional GUI approach. But on my 27" display with several open windows per application and way more than just the default toolbar or on multi-monitor setups those interfaces just plain suck. So we do not need one interface for the 99%. We need a couple of interfaces for different use cases.
Firefox Nightly, logged in Google account, takes me to search. Which browser and version are you using?
[...] Google+ pages don't allow HTML or anything else like Facebook does. [...]
And that is a bad thing because...?
You still make it sound as if GNOME 3 was inherently better, as if we all were just not putting enough effort into making the switch. I have gone from Win 3.11 to Win NT 4 to Win 98 to KDE 3 to Win XP to OS X to GNOME 2, and now added Win 7, Android and Unity to the mix. There are things in each of them that I admire and things that I despise. I see uses for GNOME 3 and Unity. But they are limited to certain tasks and audiences. Which is why at any given time I usually have almost as many tabs open in my shell as I have in my browser.
You may want to lay off the "They're just stubborn old fools" attitude and reread what Rogerborg wrote. I have Unity on my laptop which I use mostly for browsing and OSM editing and - leaving aside such petty annoyances as the lack of a GUI for changing font sizes or anti-aliasing in the stock installation - it is quite a nice interface for such utilisation. But Canonical will have to take GNOME 2 from my cold dead hands as far as my workstation is concerned. I tried Unity there, I tried GNOME 3 there, and I still cannot make up my mind as to which one sucked harder. I have a 27" screen, three panels and almost nothing left of the stock configuration. Not because I have too much time on my hands or because my ego requires daily customisation so I can feel special but because I need to get shit done. And those new interfaces get in the way of that. This is why I, along with quite a number of people, do not see Unity or GNOME 3 as the Second Coming. They are one possible approach to GUI design, and they offer advantages in some areas but fall short in others where more traditional paradigms are better suited.