Dists definitely need to have focus. Every dist should pick one desktop experience and core set of apps and stick with it through thick and thin. It makes for a more integrated experience, reduces administration headaches for people that deploy it and lowers support costs from having to build, test and develop against multiple configurations.
That doesn't mean other experiences are not possible. For example I use Ubuntu with GNOME shell and have even stuck Ubuntu with xfce on one netbook because those packages exist in the Ubuntu / Debian repositories so they can be installed and used instead of the default desktop.
Hidden volumes would only be plausibly deniable if your decoy volume is filled with activity such as timestamps and recent files. If you only use the hidden volume then your opponent is going to openly wonder why your decoy hasn't been used in the last 6 months yet your isp / email logs show you've been connected every single day. Even if if you did use a decoy, the presence of other logs on remote servers may still not tally with your local usage and you'd have to plausibly explain the reason for that too.
So I think it would be prudent to use the decoy virtually all of the time, and practice security it to wipe as much local data which could be used to reveal inconsistencies with online activity. i.e. set your browser to wipe its history on exit, disable restore points, frequently clear event logs, wipe temporary files, defragment often and employ some kind of disk space scrubber. Good security would also be consistent with someone who was inclined to use Truecrypt in the first place. Then you can demonstrate a decoy which is plainly in use and the burden of proving there is a hidden volume is that much harder to make stick.
X11 doesn't blit anything these days. It is just the hoop that has to be jumped through when the screen needs recompositing. Virtually every app renders itself into a surface via GTK / QT so all that framework does is call the damage / compositing extension to flip buffers.
As for input events hacks have to be employed there too. X11 sees the world as a series of 2D bounding boxes and conveys messages relative to those boxes. Which isn't a whole lot of good in a compositing desktop where windows might scaled, thumbnailed, even rotated or tilted. All that stuff in X11 related to fonts, drawing, damage is obsolete in a modern desktop.
So it's a bottleneck. An arcane set of APIs running in their own process space representing an extra context when most of the actual work is then done in other processes. Cutting it out of the loop completely would make the desktop experience a lot smoother and responsive than it is right now. It also doesn't stop X11 running on top of something like Wayland and it could probably done transparently too with X11 being loaded up when something hits the local display device.
I just cited examples. Cairo is used for drawing because the drawing primitives in X11 are so godawful that they are dead code. Similarly fonts in X11 are so arcane so apps use Truetype. And GTK sits on all of this providing another layer of abstraction.
Large chunks of X11 do nothing at all in a modern desktop. Most apps are drawing directly into surfaces managed by a compositor so the main purpose X11 serves is to listen for mouse and keyboard input and call extensions when the screen needs to be recomposited. It's more of an impediment and a bottleneck these days causing extra context switches and hoops to jump through which is why there is major interest in dumping it altogether for Wayland.
That horrible Android java crap is still open source software - Dalvik VM from Google, Apache Harmony Java runtimes, and various other bits and bobs. There is nothing to stop some either from porting QT to work on Android. In fact its already done. So you can write apps and entirely avoid Java if you want.
He was a great man, cruelly betrayed by his own nation.
He wasn't betrayed. He admitted to and was subsequently tried and convicted for something which at the time was a criminal offence. And leading from that lost his security clearance.
QT doesn't need to run on X11 thankfully. So it's more a question of whether QT supports multitouch. X11 is such a dinosaur laden down with stuff that most desktops work around or abstract away (e.g. with QT/GTK, Cairo, Freetype etc.) that even desktop distributions are looking forward to the day it can be dumped.
Some android phones are rootable too. Also, a phone's rootability says very little about the OS sitting on top. I'm sure Nokia could have closed the phone down if they wished.
"100% Linux" is a meaningless term. Perhaps you mean 100% LGPL/GPL. I'm not sure how such a device would be guaranteed to be free of a backend like Google or tracking.
Also, you can fetch and build Android yourself. Nothing to stop you forking it and stripping out anything you disagree with. A vanilla Android doesn't include any of the "premium" Google apps anyway so the tracking is minimal unless you count the default homepage of the browser and a few other vestigial traces. It would be easy enough to fork and strip them out.
Cyanogenmod is example of an Android fork, one that tracks the mainline but also provides a substantial number of enhancements of its own.
That's a fairly unlikely scenario. The Bismarck had 2000 crew. It would have been lunacy for the RN to attempt to board it short of surrender and there was absolutely no chance of that. The Brits would have simply pounded shells and torpedoes into it until it sank.
A French company called Maporama was producing free maps before Google Maps ever turned up. It was like Mapquest for non US destinations and pretty decent for it too. The innovation Google brought to maps was you could interactively drag them around rather than the clumsy d-pad style controls that most map sites including Maporama used. So I don't really buy the idea that free was anticompetitive because it was entering a market where free was the precedent already.
I expect the UK's position is that Sealand isn't worth the effort to take to court. In the extremely remote event that it became a threat to the UK they'd simply land special forces on the platform and remove everyone and then use the platform for target practice.
But I doubt it would even come to that. It's a rusting deathtrap in the middle of sea. Let some nuts occupy it if they want since their plans and delusions are not likely to come to much.
Open printers still cost a lot of money to buy and the results are generally awful, being glorified coil pots made from extruded monotone plastic. That may be fine for printing plastic widgets, but it's not so good for producing artwork, or anything decorative. I think it would be a good idea for someone to produce an inkjet / powder based printer which qualifies as open because if they don't then one of the bigname printer manufacturers is bound to.
It's easy to believe in global warming when that's what pays the bills. Follow the money.
That's a pretty stupid argument right there. If it were all about money then there would be plenty more to be had by shilling for interests which do not want global warming to be acknowledged or acted upon. In fact if it were all about money then these people wouldn't be doing this work at all given how badly paid scientists are in general.
The industry has been pissed off with the likes of Gamestop for a long time, selling used games at a price point far to close to retail copy and cutting into their profits.
I would not be surprised if used game sales are more profitable to stores than brand new games. They can stiff sellers by buying games for less than wholesale and in some countries second hand goods are exempt from VAT so if they markup within 20% of the retail price, they get more money from that end too.
So the industry is packing codes so the second hand games are gimped. People are less inclined to sell because the resale value is less and if they do then the likes of Gamestop can't mark the title up so close to retail because it's gimped. Doesn't stop people buying the game but they'll have to fork out for a refresh code. In theory if the refresh code were $10 and the second hand copy were $10 less then it all balances out to the customer, except that $10 goes to the producer not the retailer. This is entirely reasonable IMO but it has to be done in a manner which does not screw over a user who owns a few consoles or PCs and might need to reinstall a game at some future point.
I think it would also be in the industry's interests to get stores on board with this. Yes they're being screwed over, but at the end of the day they are still major distributors for games. Seeing them go under is not going to help the industry. So if refresh codes are required for a game then it should be possible for the store to sell them from its point of sale and claw back some of that money for facilitating the transaction.
When messages are not possible to spoof they are traceable, and all these things are then policeable.
As I said there are would be plenty of holes in such a system so it wouldn't be perfect. Emails will be forged, stolen, and hacked. Phishers use bots to mass mail their outgoing spam. It would be but a tiny extra step to use it for their incoming responses too - pick a handful of users from their massive botnet to act as daily receivers and that's that. One might also look at "traceable" systems like moneygrams, or electronic bank wires to see they are no remedy against fraud at all.
Your imagined email system is impossible to implement.
Not at all. Just because email could replaced with something better that is traceable doesn't mean forums and blogs disappear. Nor does it mean that other anonymous message systems can't exist for the minority that need that.
Er yes it would. Obviously.
Forums and blogs are hacked all the time. So all I need do is hack a forum or pay someone to and I have a complete, unique, personally identifiable email to each member. Perhaps I could print it out for all to see or just engage in a spot of extortion or blackmail as easily. Also, because forums / blogs were guaranteed to be associated personally identifiable email, it would be so much more attractive to subpoena a blog / forum which is a financial and administrative burden most operators could do without.
Might not matter much if this was a couple of people talking shit a World of Warcraft forum. It might matter a huge deal if it's a forum dealing with rape, incest, criminal / drug rehabilitation, malpractice, corporate oversite, sexuality, whistle blowing, politics, religion or anything else people might talk about in anonymity but not in a personally identifiable way.
There is no down side to this. It's just difficult to make it happen because of the network effect. (Until the vast majority of ISPs and users use it, it doesn't have value as the primary messaging system.)
Except there is massive downsides. If certfied emails were straightforward and desirable to implement then all the big names would have done it. The fact is it is neither.
What I proposed doesn't have throw-away accounts. And because abusers can't spoof, their account is quickly blocked from his early abuses, and few people ever get the password troll or dancing bunnies offer.
Except spammers and phishers will still spoof because there are corrupt ISPs and corrupt people who work for ISPs who'd generate accounts, and lots of people who'd willingly be paid to sign up for accounts to be used by spammers, and lots of people who'd unwittingly be signed up by spammers via botnets, trojans etc
So your measures wouldn't work but they'd certainly have a massive chilling effect on free expression on the internet. Lots of people appreciate being able to separate their real life from their online life yet all that would be toast. I have multiple email accounts myself not because I engage in phishing / spamming but because I want to be able to voice my opinion without any incursions on my real life.
I don't think Android's permission model is very good (it should allow some actions like making calls / SMS / root to be user vetoable) but the fact it has permissions is still better than nothing. When a free "sexy women puzzle" is asking permission to make calls or send / receive SMS messages then if you have a lick of sense you won't install it.
Ah right. It's the user's fault. The classic excuse for bad IT systems.
People have had it drummed into them for the last 10 years not to trust unsolicited emails, attachments, to run av software and to take other simple precautions to protect their computer and their personal data.
At this stage if someone is dumb enough to click on some unsolicited attachment or dubious origin, or install some dodgy software like a game crack, or enter their SSN and credit card details because a phishing email then the consequences are entirely theirs and theirs alone. Even the best IT department is not going to protect users and many people don't even have one. And the same principle applies to smart phones, more so.
Yeah but did you see the names of the affected apps? You would have to be a real moron to be duped by those.
Especially when an app such as "sexy women puzzle" asks for godlike permissions to run on the phone. Of course if Google were doing their jobs they'd be catching this crap a lot sooner.
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That doesn't mean other experiences are not possible. For example I use Ubuntu with GNOME shell and have even stuck Ubuntu with xfce on one netbook because those packages exist in the Ubuntu / Debian repositories so they can be installed and used instead of the default desktop.
So I think it would be prudent to use the decoy virtually all of the time, and practice security it to wipe as much local data which could be used to reveal inconsistencies with online activity. i.e. set your browser to wipe its history on exit, disable restore points, frequently clear event logs, wipe temporary files, defragment often and employ some kind of disk space scrubber. Good security would also be consistent with someone who was inclined to use Truecrypt in the first place. Then you can demonstrate a decoy which is plainly in use and the burden of proving there is a hidden volume is that much harder to make stick.
As for input events hacks have to be employed there too. X11 sees the world as a series of 2D bounding boxes and conveys messages relative to those boxes. Which isn't a whole lot of good in a compositing desktop where windows might scaled, thumbnailed, even rotated or tilted. All that stuff in X11 related to fonts, drawing, damage is obsolete in a modern desktop.
So it's a bottleneck. An arcane set of APIs running in their own process space representing an extra context when most of the actual work is then done in other processes. Cutting it out of the loop completely would make the desktop experience a lot smoother and responsive than it is right now. It also doesn't stop X11 running on top of something like Wayland and it could probably done transparently too with X11 being loaded up when something hits the local display device.
Lots of people saved the country's ass in WWII. Doesn't give them a free pass to break the law after it's over.
Large chunks of X11 do nothing at all in a modern desktop. Most apps are drawing directly into surfaces managed by a compositor so the main purpose X11 serves is to listen for mouse and keyboard input and call extensions when the screen needs to be recomposited. It's more of an impediment and a bottleneck these days causing extra context switches and hoops to jump through which is why there is major interest in dumping it altogether for Wayland.
So because the government shielded him for the war they were indebted to shield him forever?
That horrible Android java crap is still open source software - Dalvik VM from Google, Apache Harmony Java runtimes, and various other bits and bobs. There is nothing to stop some either from porting QT to work on Android. In fact its already done. So you can write apps and entirely avoid Java if you want.
He was a great man, cruelly betrayed by his own nation.
He wasn't betrayed. He admitted to and was subsequently tried and convicted for something which at the time was a criminal offence. And leading from that lost his security clearance.
Wife reception becomes even worse if you "do not hold it right", i.e. put your hand on the antenna section.
If your wife has an "antenna" I think you should check she is a he on her birth certificate.
QT doesn't need to run on X11 thankfully. So it's more a question of whether QT supports multitouch. X11 is such a dinosaur laden down with stuff that most desktops work around or abstract away (e.g. with QT/GTK, Cairo, Freetype etc.) that even desktop distributions are looking forward to the day it can be dumped.
Some android phones are rootable too. Also, a phone's rootability says very little about the OS sitting on top. I'm sure Nokia could have closed the phone down if they wished.
Also, you can fetch and build Android yourself. Nothing to stop you forking it and stripping out anything you disagree with. A vanilla Android doesn't include any of the "premium" Google apps anyway so the tracking is minimal unless you count the default homepage of the browser and a few other vestigial traces. It would be easy enough to fork and strip them out.
Cyanogenmod is example of an Android fork, one that tracks the mainline but also provides a substantial number of enhancements of its own.
That's a fairly unlikely scenario. The Bismarck had 2000 crew. It would have been lunacy for the RN to attempt to board it short of surrender and there was absolutely no chance of that. The Brits would have simply pounded shells and torpedoes into it until it sank.
A French company called Maporama was producing free maps before Google Maps ever turned up. It was like Mapquest for non US destinations and pretty decent for it too. The innovation Google brought to maps was you could interactively drag them around rather than the clumsy d-pad style controls that most map sites including Maporama used. So I don't really buy the idea that free was anticompetitive because it was entering a market where free was the precedent already.
Because it has 'robotics' and 'Uncanny Valley' in its word cloud. Now you know how to get to front page of Slashdot.
For the sake of balance someone should make a Lego Newt Gingrich and upload it to Cuusoo to guarantee him a frontpage post too.
But I doubt it would even come to that. It's a rusting deathtrap in the middle of sea. Let some nuts occupy it if they want since their plans and delusions are not likely to come to much.
Data in the cloud is likely to be backed up.
Open printers still cost a lot of money to buy and the results are generally awful, being glorified coil pots made from extruded monotone plastic. That may be fine for printing plastic widgets, but it's not so good for producing artwork, or anything decorative. I think it would be a good idea for someone to produce an inkjet / powder based printer which qualifies as open because if they don't then one of the bigname printer manufacturers is bound to.
It's easy to believe in global warming when that's what pays the bills. Follow the money.
That's a pretty stupid argument right there. If it were all about money then there would be plenty more to be had by shilling for interests which do not want global warming to be acknowledged or acted upon. In fact if it were all about money then these people wouldn't be doing this work at all given how badly paid scientists are in general.
I would not be surprised if used game sales are more profitable to stores than brand new games. They can stiff sellers by buying games for less than wholesale and in some countries second hand goods are exempt from VAT so if they markup within 20% of the retail price, they get more money from that end too.
So the industry is packing codes so the second hand games are gimped. People are less inclined to sell because the resale value is less and if they do then the likes of Gamestop can't mark the title up so close to retail because it's gimped. Doesn't stop people buying the game but they'll have to fork out for a refresh code. In theory if the refresh code were $10 and the second hand copy were $10 less then it all balances out to the customer, except that $10 goes to the producer not the retailer. This is entirely reasonable IMO but it has to be done in a manner which does not screw over a user who owns a few consoles or PCs and might need to reinstall a game at some future point.
I think it would also be in the industry's interests to get stores on board with this. Yes they're being screwed over, but at the end of the day they are still major distributors for games. Seeing them go under is not going to help the industry. So if refresh codes are required for a game then it should be possible for the store to sell them from its point of sale and claw back some of that money for facilitating the transaction.
When messages are not possible to spoof they are traceable, and all these things are then policeable.
As I said there are would be plenty of holes in such a system so it wouldn't be perfect. Emails will be forged, stolen, and hacked. Phishers use bots to mass mail their outgoing spam. It would be but a tiny extra step to use it for their incoming responses too - pick a handful of users from their massive botnet to act as daily receivers and that's that. One might also look at "traceable" systems like moneygrams, or electronic bank wires to see they are no remedy against fraud at all.
Your imagined email system is impossible to implement.
Not at all. Just because email could replaced with something better that is traceable doesn't mean forums and blogs disappear. Nor does it mean that other anonymous message systems can't exist for the minority that need that.
Er yes it would. Obviously.
Forums and blogs are hacked all the time. So all I need do is hack a forum or pay someone to and I have a complete, unique, personally identifiable email to each member. Perhaps I could print it out for all to see or just engage in a spot of extortion or blackmail as easily. Also, because forums / blogs were guaranteed to be associated personally identifiable email, it would be so much more attractive to subpoena a blog / forum which is a financial and administrative burden most operators could do without.
Might not matter much if this was a couple of people talking shit a World of Warcraft forum. It might matter a huge deal if it's a forum dealing with rape, incest, criminal / drug rehabilitation, malpractice, corporate oversite, sexuality, whistle blowing, politics, religion or anything else people might talk about in anonymity but not in a personally identifiable way.
There is no down side to this. It's just difficult to make it happen because of the network effect. (Until the vast majority of ISPs and users use it, it doesn't have value as the primary messaging system.)
Except there is massive downsides. If certfied emails were straightforward and desirable to implement then all the big names would have done it. The fact is it is neither.
What I proposed doesn't have throw-away accounts. And because abusers can't spoof, their account is quickly blocked from his early abuses, and few people ever get the password troll or dancing bunnies offer.
Except spammers and phishers will still spoof because there are corrupt ISPs and corrupt people who work for ISPs who'd generate accounts, and lots of people who'd willingly be paid to sign up for accounts to be used by spammers, and lots of people who'd unwittingly be signed up by spammers via botnets, trojans etc
So your measures wouldn't work but they'd certainly have a massive chilling effect on free expression on the internet. Lots of people appreciate being able to separate their real life from their online life yet all that would be toast. I have multiple email accounts myself not because I engage in phishing / spamming but because I want to be able to voice my opinion without any incursions on my real life.
I don't think Android's permission model is very good (it should allow some actions like making calls / SMS / root to be user vetoable) but the fact it has permissions is still better than nothing. When a free "sexy women puzzle" is asking permission to make calls or send / receive SMS messages then if you have a lick of sense you won't install it.
Ah right. It's the user's fault. The classic excuse for bad IT systems.
People have had it drummed into them for the last 10 years not to trust unsolicited emails, attachments, to run av software and to take other simple precautions to protect their computer and their personal data. At this stage if someone is dumb enough to click on some unsolicited attachment or dubious origin, or install some dodgy software like a game crack, or enter their SSN and credit card details because a phishing email then the consequences are entirely theirs and theirs alone. Even the best IT department is not going to protect users and many people don't even have one. And the same principle applies to smart phones, more so.
Yeah but did you see the names of the affected apps? You would have to be a real moron to be duped by those.
Especially when an app such as "sexy women puzzle" asks for godlike permissions to run on the phone. Of course if Google were doing their jobs they'd be catching this crap a lot sooner.