that I do not use Adblock personally. I use NoScript, which is a struggle and unsuitable for novices but still prefer because its even safer and lets the GIF/JPEG ads through anyway.
They could more closely emulate the ads of printed media, which drew only rare complaints from readers... or they could emulate the ads of TV, which cause a lot of people to recoil.
What we got on the web are TV-like ads without sound but which:
still flicker, shake and gyrate; actively obstruct the UI; imitate system warnings to mislead; peg the CPU to near 100% on slower systems; act as a programmable vector for malware and surveillance.
Yikes.
In order to keep infection rates of my naive Windows customers down, I have to not only educate them about trojans and phishing (teaching them to hover over links before clicking works wonders)... I also have to install Adblock as an absolute necessity. Otherwise they WILL get infected in short order, often in an attempt to rid themselves of an "infection" that a popup ad "found".
What's more, this is not television. People come to the Internet to find what they want, not to have "Hey we know what you want!!" pushed in their faces twice as often as with ye olde media.
I now believe that ads should be limited to GIFs and JPEGs on the website's main page. The advertisers crossed over into unethical territory before ad-blocking users, about the same time that actual content on websites became heavily dependent on Javascript. That leaves me with the following questions: What are journalists and advertisers doing about this problem? Do advertisers even care that their delivery infrastructure is poisonous?
Adblock might compromise by letting GIF and JPEG through as a default. But these questions still need to be dealt with.
Agreed that bt audio doesn't measure up. The market in wireless headphones is really being hampered by the lack of audio quality.
That and range is an issue. Bt should be able to cover a 1-bedroom apartment so you can at least go to the bathroom or grab a snack without interruptions. It wouldn't even need much of a power boost, maybe 10-15%.
That's fine for Europe and the other countries you mention. Those countries are not democratic republics, they are not the USA, they are not as free. Many of those countries are currently on the verge of economic collapse with the costs of entitlements, including socialized/universal healthcare, being large contributors...
You are really out of touch in your narrow ideological vacuum. Europe has been financing much of our debt. And 'less free' is a very specious argument in defense of a system that keeps far more of its population locked up behind bars.
The US cannot afford it, period, full stop. The US is on the verge of an economic collapse.
Think. What system contributed to this collapse? Aren't you contradicting your own argument?
There will be a long line at the unemployment office for those politicians who have pushed for this against the people's will.
Uh, the people's will based on what polls? Even today a majority still support healthcare reform IF it is a full-blown public option and not the frankenstein the Senate has cooked up. The polls on public insurance only look bad when the polling language is changed to make it appear that there would be no choice.
Filibustering in the Senate is very far from a demonstration of public opinion.
You know what? I think I'd actually like to see congress pass the most egregious version of the healthcare bills proposed.
Its no secret that conservatives prefer to run government according to their belief that government is necessarily evil. But a little reiteration here and there is helpful and you've done that perfectly.
At this rate, it won't be long before Android at least has more types of software than iPhone. And that IMO counts more than 100 different brands of the same thing.
Saying that people should wait as they do now, for personal health problems to appear and then become so severe that going to the emergency wing becomes an option -- just because its worked out for *you* so far -- that really is a load of crap pop philosophy.
The Trek analogy is also poor because we are not living on a military space vessel. In order for it to work even slightly, Spock and the other officers would have had to come from a society where they didn't receive the benefit of universal health care that helped get them to where they were at that moment.
This alternative is humming along fine. Its only about as fast as Tor, but supports full anonymity along with mail, websites, torrents (these first 3 are built-in), chat and custom apps.
They were created to encourage small developers to write large numbers of new apps for their new platforms. "Hey look, if you write an app for our device, we'll make it easy for users to find you!"
As someone else remarked, the FOSS hobbyist + large corporation types that tend to write for 'Linux' don't find that compelling. But what if we want to attract the small biz types that Apple and Google have?
Well, consider this: both iPhone and Android have their respective SDKs to help get started and provide a solid sense for what each platform contains/does. RedHat's platform has no well-defined SDK and I'd even say it is no platform at all, unless you assume that servers are the target system in which case LAMP is the platform. But was RedHat trying to attract server apps with RHX? And isn't the target audience in that case sysadmis and web developers, people who are far too sophisticated to need an app store?
At some point, Google will release Chromium and try to duplicate the Android experience on the desktop/laptop. It will have an SDK and there will be a clear idea of what's included and what isn't (what a dev has to supply in his apps). An app store for such a thing, a real platform, has a far better chance of succeeding.
Sys admins and especially application developers generally do not like frequent major releases for their OS.
The only company to successfully pull off a rapid release cycle is Apple with OS X, and even then they had a roadmap for eventually stabilizing the platform at 10.4 and slowing down the releases after 10.5. So they had about 5 rapid releases on a 12-month cycle.
Compare that to Ubuntu, which has had many more releases than that in a shorter period of time, and with no roadmap pointing to a stabilization of the platform (in fact, with little concept of a platform at all).
Actually, I'd think that broadcasting Voice Of America domestically would be far more honest and healthier for society than making American citizens the targets of a covert propaganda machine.
'Conspiracy theorist' can be reasonably used to describe a crackpot, or it can be (and often is, IMHO) used to marginalize people who refuse to buy into an official reading of history... perhaps with good reasons that are ignored because of the derogatory label.
Problem is, ignoring issues and facts in the old channels doesn't work so well anymore (just look at how poorly the lies about Iraq were propagated this time around) which is why authorities are now attacking the ability of individuals and small groups to share info on so many levels. And people are starting to tire of the 'conspiracy theorist' smear being applied wherever the group dynamics of the powerful and wealthy are portrayed in an unflattering light.
I agree that WND was a really bad link for this article, but it's not the first time here and just look at how much lip service Slashdot gave to the anti-AGW crowd when so-called "climate-gate" broke. The editors here could be more discerning, and the page hits they are getting in these cases are from a corrosive form of controversy... false controversy. Regardless, such oversights do not make the government's plan for domestic propaganda any less nefarious.
The filename problem exists when uploading photos to eBay using Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10.
The Ubuntu LTS releases leave you with rather old versions of applications, as I implied above. OTOH Windows and Mac users get to upgrade their apps immediately without much fuss, even if your OS was released in 2003 like XP.
This sort of atheism is a religious belief system, as in: "My Atheism proves I'm smarter, and my being smarter justifies my Atheism."
It is theistic religion that has the burden of proof, remember? But religion responds with appeals to faith, which is self-referential.
You seem to find forward, out-of-hand dismissals of your religion by some atheists to be distasteful. They may even be ignorant about many things and operating on a 'faith' that the religion is untrue. Even so, your side (popular or not) has the burden of producing a compelling body of evidence.
Your side also regularly mischaracterizes atheists confidence in tangible things, like the reasoning and research performed by others, as fanatic religious faith. But that expression of confidence in others could just as well be science and you wouldn't care. Lamentably, this pattern of smearing has been brought to other debates where conservatives are waging war against coping with new information, most notably global warming, despite enviros having a compelling body of evidence against business as usual. Its as if intellectual dishonesty is enshrined as a tradition.
That many atheists think they're smart is beside the point. You will never like how we say these things as long as you look toward faith as a source of support and comfort.
Getting free software to do ones bidding is really just learning how to use it and doesn't take any more time than non-free software in most cases.
I have to disagree with that as far as desktop applications go. Although I normally hold up Firefox as a shining example of what other FOSS projects could achieve, the 'eco-system' doesn't really work for end users even with this nice browser.
For instance, I recently setup some Ubuntu systems for a shop doing heavy online sales through eBay. One day soon after, someone there decides to get a better camera but can no longer select the resulting JPEG files for uploading because the new camera does filenames in UPPERCASE. This isn't a problem with Firefox on Windows or MacOS, but on Ubuntu the upload file dialog insists on showing only files with all-lowercase extensions. This 'basic incompatibility with some cameras' ruined their Ubuntu experience and they migrated back to Windows. I could have tried a different browser, but I think Opera would have been confusing for them, and other browsers I have low confidence in dealing with the full gamut and combination of eBay / UPS / USPS / PayPal pages (which even Firefox on Windows has had some problems with until recently).
There was also the problem with being stuck with the application versions that Ubuntu gives you, regardless of what the current released versions of those apps are. And I am not going to hazard full distro upgrades every 6 months to get current apps (talk about being disruptive), nor am I going to manually upgrade those apps when they are unlikely to have undergone robust testing on the older version of Ubuntu currently being used.
Additionally, OpenOffice on the latest Ubuntu has been rather unstable and the amount of data my customers and associates have lost hasn't exactly helped my relationships with them. Not only are data lost to crashes but also to those odd crash-recovery dialogs that appear and "recover" (read: erase) your document when there was no crash in the first place. On top of that I've had to work around bizzarre document rendering bugs on some relatively simple documents (a table of numbers with one simple bar graph, for instance, getting the fill patterns wrong for some of the data sets) and then there are the semi-regular complaints that Calc is missing useful features found in Excel.
So even the best FOSS apps have rough edges that are too painful for even unsophisticated users. At the moment, the only ones I'm recommending to people are Firefox and Thunderbird. The rest are either too flawed, or are tolerable only by more sophisticated users who don't see a couple changes for added steps in workflow as a big deal.
I agree with your premise. As for the last bit, my concern is more the collusion of profit centers with authorities: Scaring and restricting us has become a primary vehicle for industry to increase profits, the idea being that we not only hand over our freedoms but nearly all of the money as well. The big problem with that is not just living in a culture that feels sick, but the very real trend for running the system for the benefit of fewer and fewer people and the corresponding need for increasingly large prison systems.
So I see this move as engendering something like 'cyber-prison' where people can be penalized with being cut off from culture and information. Every PC will have the hardware apparatus to put you into a digital prison. Or maybe it will come in the form of an add-on, like an ankle-bracelet device for your laptop.
What gets me is the general lack of appropriate responses from the tech geek culture. It takes 20 minutes for me to educate total novices on how to use https the right way, incl. hovering over links (in both browser and email) before clicking on them. Right there, opportunities for cyber criminals are immensely reduced and all that is required is a certain willingness on the part of the web host and the web user to be mindful of their connection for a couple seconds. Most techies say that people are too stupid to learn how to check a URL domain when the lock appears, and that SSL is too taxing for ubiquitous use on their servers. (Both complaints tend to be grossly overstated.)
Well, guess what?? Now we are expected to move toward a future where the user definitely has NO role in checking their security because the security won't be theirs, it will be the security of the state and corporate interests. And everything will be based on crypto that is not only taxing on servers, it will be a kind of crypto where the end user isn't verifying the server so much as the other way around: It won't tolerate user anonymity and will require a role (and surcharge) for an increasingly deputized ISP sector as well.
With ubiquitous https, we could have cut out so much of this crap, starting with phishing attacks and ISP snooping/interference.
Oh, and another tiny thing -- The Windows monoculture and its rotten architecture has also lead us to this place by the putrid combination of its poor architecture and many anti-competitive tactics (shoving hooks for its proprietary stuff into every conceivable nook and cranny, and numerous underhanded business practices). Microsoft have given cyber criminals much more than a decade of extreme laxity under which criminals could entrench and grow into robust and profitable organizations to the point where authorities don't even need kiddie porn and terrorism as their justifications.
You forgot unprotected text. Newspapers and other periodicals are bound to have a stake in this too. Look at how much they hate Google News and that "copy and paste" function.
'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'
At some point, you have to accept that the government is a part or product of the national culture. So the above quote seems disingenuous to me.
Its interesting that the west does not hyperventilate over Hindu fundamentalism as we do with the Islamic variety. But then, I don't think the Hindu culture and caste system claims very many oil and gas fields among the lands under its control.
I recently switched from KDE to a combo of OS X and Gnome, and the latter has more than a few similarities to OS X like the (less functional) top menu bar.
Its too bad they're mainly superficial similarities. It'd be awesome for Gnome to have been GNUStep with a re-design of the theme and rendering quality.
Alas.
OTOH KDE4's UI seems more VISTA-inspired than anything else. Only its still KDE and rather less organized and neat than a typical Vista installation... chock full of buttons that suggest simple 1-click actions but are actually drop-down menus, and many more confusing things (and the apps have that cluttered look).
Even I'm not looking for radical UI capabilities. As a pro, I look for feature-stability (something that won't reconfigure every 6 or even 24 months) and something I can install for people that is support-able via email, phone, etc.
But as the corporate world began to look for ways to market Linux-based distros, it was Gnome's relative purity (not any of its technical merits, which are few) that got KDE pushed to the sidelines.
It was not "purity", it was greed: You used to have to buy Qt licenses to develop closed source software for KDE. No investment like that was necessary for Gtk apps. This has of course changed now that Nokia has put Qt under LGPL.
Yes, it was greed on the corps part attracting them to Gnome's license purity/simplicity/cheapness.
And yes, KDE became freer (like Gnome used to be) when Qt went LGPL.
Only thing is, back when it was ahead KDE really had nice things attracting users to it. Now that Gnome is ahead and becoming more encumbered, we see that those encumbered aspects are adding things that users don't really want (moonlight, mono, and a cheesy stickynote program to justify MS tech being distributed as standard with most desktop installs).
These people should be mapping out how to build Gnome 3.0 with such things as Java, Python and Qt. Right there, those OSS riches make the moves toward Microsoft formats and patents seem insane.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.i2p2.de
that I do not use Adblock personally. I use NoScript, which is a struggle and unsuitable for novices but still prefer because its even safer and lets the GIF/JPEG ads through anyway.
They could more closely emulate the ads of printed media, which drew only rare complaints from readers... or they could emulate the ads of TV, which cause a lot of people to recoil.
What we got on the web are TV-like ads without sound but which:
still flicker, shake and gyrate;
actively obstruct the UI;
imitate system warnings to mislead;
peg the CPU to near 100% on slower systems;
act as a programmable vector for malware and surveillance.
Yikes.
In order to keep infection rates of my naive Windows customers down, I have to not only educate them about trojans and phishing (teaching them to hover over links before clicking works wonders)... I also have to install Adblock as an absolute necessity. Otherwise they WILL get infected in short order, often in an attempt to rid themselves of an "infection" that a popup ad "found".
What's more, this is not television. People come to the Internet to find what they want, not to have "Hey we know what you want!!" pushed in their faces twice as often as with ye olde media.
I now believe that ads should be limited to GIFs and JPEGs on the website's main page. The advertisers crossed over into unethical territory before ad-blocking users, about the same time that actual content on websites became heavily dependent on Javascript. That leaves me with the following questions: What are journalists and advertisers doing about this problem? Do advertisers even care that their delivery infrastructure is poisonous?
Adblock might compromise by letting GIF and JPEG through as a default. But these questions still need to be dealt with.
Agreed that bt audio doesn't measure up. The market in wireless headphones is really being hampered by the lack of audio quality.
That and range is an issue. Bt should be able to cover a 1-bedroom apartment so you can at least go to the bathroom or grab a snack without interruptions. It wouldn't even need much of a power boost, maybe 10-15%.
Agreed! Let's start with Judges Scalia and Thomas.
That's fine for Europe and the other countries you mention. Those countries are not democratic republics, they are not the USA, they are not as free. Many of those countries are currently on the verge of economic collapse with the costs of entitlements, including socialized/universal healthcare, being large contributors...
You are really out of touch in your narrow ideological vacuum. Europe has been financing much of our debt. And 'less free' is a very specious argument in defense of a system that keeps far more of its population locked up behind bars.
The US cannot afford it, period, full stop. The US is on the verge of an economic collapse.
Think. What system contributed to this collapse? Aren't you contradicting your own argument?
There will be a long line at the unemployment office for those politicians who have pushed for this against the people's will.
Uh, the people's will based on what polls? Even today a majority still support healthcare reform IF it is a full-blown public option and not the frankenstein the Senate has cooked up. The polls on public insurance only look bad when the polling language is changed to make it appear that there would be no choice.
Filibustering in the Senate is very far from a demonstration of public opinion.
You know what? I think I'd actually like to see congress pass the most egregious version of the healthcare bills proposed.
Its no secret that conservatives prefer to run government according to their belief that government is necessarily evil. But a little reiteration here and there is helpful and you've done that perfectly.
But a closed platform creates the whole reverse eng. issue in the first place.
At this rate, it won't be long before Android at least has more types of software than iPhone. And that IMO counts more than 100 different brands of the same thing.
And to some extent littlegreenfootballs and freerepublic, America's culture warriors.
Saying that people should wait as they do now, for personal health problems to appear and then become so severe that going to the emergency wing becomes an option -- just because its worked out for *you* so far -- that really is a load of crap pop philosophy.
The Trek analogy is also poor because we are not living on a military space vessel. In order for it to work even slightly, Spock and the other officers would have had to come from a society where they didn't receive the benefit of universal health care that helped get them to where they were at that moment.
This alternative is humming along fine. Its only about as fast as Tor, but supports full anonymity along with mail, websites, torrents (these first 3 are built-in), chat and custom apps.
...were not created to sell existing apps.
They were created to encourage small developers to write large numbers of new apps for their new platforms. "Hey look, if you write an app for our device, we'll make it easy for users to find you!"
As someone else remarked, the FOSS hobbyist + large corporation types that tend to write for 'Linux' don't find that compelling. But what if we want to attract the small biz types that Apple and Google have?
Well, consider this: both iPhone and Android have their respective SDKs to help get started and provide a solid sense for what each platform contains/does. RedHat's platform has no well-defined SDK and I'd even say it is no platform at all, unless you assume that servers are the target system in which case LAMP is the platform. But was RedHat trying to attract server apps with RHX? And isn't the target audience in that case sysadmis and web developers, people who are far too sophisticated to need an app store?
At some point, Google will release Chromium and try to duplicate the Android experience on the desktop/laptop. It will have an SDK and there will be a clear idea of what's included and what isn't (what a dev has to supply in his apps). An app store for such a thing, a real platform, has a far better chance of succeeding.
And its not like you would ever, ever want to run XP without such a router/firewall box between it and the Internet anyway.
So that XP shortcoming is something of a non-issue in practice.
The netbook mini-revolution was kicked off with a non-Ubuntu distro.
Ubuntu have done very little overall for "Linux desktop" market share, which is about the same as it was 8 years ago.
Sys admins and especially application developers generally do not like frequent major releases for their OS.
The only company to successfully pull off a rapid release cycle is Apple with OS X, and even then they had a roadmap for eventually stabilizing the platform at 10.4 and slowing down the releases after 10.5. So they had about 5 rapid releases on a 12-month cycle.
Compare that to Ubuntu, which has had many more releases than that in a shorter period of time, and with no roadmap pointing to a stabilization of the platform (in fact, with little concept of a platform at all).
Actually, I'd think that broadcasting Voice Of America domestically would be far more honest and healthier for society than making American citizens the targets of a covert propaganda machine.
'Conspiracy theorist' can be reasonably used to describe a crackpot, or it can be (and often is, IMHO) used to marginalize people who refuse to buy into an official reading of history... perhaps with good reasons that are ignored because of the derogatory label.
Problem is, ignoring issues and facts in the old channels doesn't work so well anymore (just look at how poorly the lies about Iraq were propagated this time around) which is why authorities are now attacking the ability of individuals and small groups to share info on so many levels. And people are starting to tire of the 'conspiracy theorist' smear being applied wherever the group dynamics of the powerful and wealthy are portrayed in an unflattering light.
I agree that WND was a really bad link for this article, but it's not the first time here and just look at how much lip service Slashdot gave to the anti-AGW crowd when so-called "climate-gate" broke. The editors here could be more discerning, and the page hits they are getting in these cases are from a corrosive form of controversy... false controversy. Regardless, such oversights do not make the government's plan for domestic propaganda any less nefarious.
The filename problem exists when uploading photos to eBay using Firefox 3.5 on Ubuntu 9.10.
The Ubuntu LTS releases leave you with rather old versions of applications, as I implied above. OTOH Windows and Mac users get to upgrade their apps immediately without much fuss, even if your OS was released in 2003 like XP.
This sort of atheism is a religious belief system, as in: "My Atheism proves I'm smarter, and my being smarter justifies my Atheism."
It is theistic religion that has the burden of proof, remember? But religion responds with appeals to faith, which is self-referential.
You seem to find forward, out-of-hand dismissals of your religion by some atheists to be distasteful. They may even be ignorant about many things and operating on a 'faith' that the religion is untrue. Even so, your side (popular or not) has the burden of producing a compelling body of evidence.
Your side also regularly mischaracterizes atheists confidence in tangible things, like the reasoning and research performed by others, as fanatic religious faith. But that expression of confidence in others could just as well be science and you wouldn't care. Lamentably, this pattern of smearing has been brought to other debates where conservatives are waging war against coping with new information, most notably global warming, despite enviros having a compelling body of evidence against business as usual. Its as if intellectual dishonesty is enshrined as a tradition.
That many atheists think they're smart is beside the point. You will never like how we say these things as long as you look toward faith as a source of support and comfort.
Getting free software to do ones bidding is really just learning how to use it and doesn't take any more time than non-free software in most cases.
I have to disagree with that as far as desktop applications go. Although I normally hold up Firefox as a shining example of what other FOSS projects could achieve, the 'eco-system' doesn't really work for end users even with this nice browser.
For instance, I recently setup some Ubuntu systems for a shop doing heavy online sales through eBay. One day soon after, someone there decides to get a better camera but can no longer select the resulting JPEG files for uploading because the new camera does filenames in UPPERCASE. This isn't a problem with Firefox on Windows or MacOS, but on Ubuntu the upload file dialog insists on showing only files with all-lowercase extensions. This 'basic incompatibility with some cameras' ruined their Ubuntu experience and they migrated back to Windows. I could have tried a different browser, but I think Opera would have been confusing for them, and other browsers I have low confidence in dealing with the full gamut and combination of eBay / UPS / USPS / PayPal pages (which even Firefox on Windows has had some problems with until recently).
There was also the problem with being stuck with the application versions that Ubuntu gives you, regardless of what the current released versions of those apps are. And I am not going to hazard full distro upgrades every 6 months to get current apps (talk about being disruptive), nor am I going to manually upgrade those apps when they are unlikely to have undergone robust testing on the older version of Ubuntu currently being used.
Additionally, OpenOffice on the latest Ubuntu has been rather unstable and the amount of data my customers and associates have lost hasn't exactly helped my relationships with them. Not only are data lost to crashes but also to those odd crash-recovery dialogs that appear and "recover" (read: erase) your document when there was no crash in the first place. On top of that I've had to work around bizzarre document rendering bugs on some relatively simple documents (a table of numbers with one simple bar graph, for instance, getting the fill patterns wrong for some of the data sets) and then there are the semi-regular complaints that Calc is missing useful features found in Excel.
So even the best FOSS apps have rough edges that are too painful for even unsophisticated users. At the moment, the only ones I'm recommending to people are Firefox and Thunderbird. The rest are either too flawed, or are tolerable only by more sophisticated users who don't see a couple changes for added steps in workflow as a big deal.
I agree with your premise. As for the last bit, my concern is more the collusion of profit centers with authorities: Scaring and restricting us has become a primary vehicle for industry to increase profits, the idea being that we not only hand over our freedoms but nearly all of the money as well. The big problem with that is not just living in a culture that feels sick, but the very real trend for running the system for the benefit of fewer and fewer people and the corresponding need for increasingly large prison systems.
So I see this move as engendering something like 'cyber-prison' where people can be penalized with being cut off from culture and information. Every PC will have the hardware apparatus to put you into a digital prison. Or maybe it will come in the form of an add-on, like an ankle-bracelet device for your laptop.
What gets me is the general lack of appropriate responses from the tech geek culture. It takes 20 minutes for me to educate total novices on how to use https the right way, incl. hovering over links (in both browser and email) before clicking on them. Right there, opportunities for cyber criminals are immensely reduced and all that is required is a certain willingness on the part of the web host and the web user to be mindful of their connection for a couple seconds. Most techies say that people are too stupid to learn how to check a URL domain when the lock appears, and that SSL is too taxing for ubiquitous use on their servers. (Both complaints tend to be grossly overstated.)
Well, guess what?? Now we are expected to move toward a future where the user definitely has NO role in checking their security because the security won't be theirs, it will be the security of the state and corporate interests. And everything will be based on crypto that is not only taxing on servers, it will be a kind of crypto where the end user isn't verifying the server so much as the other way around: It won't tolerate user anonymity and will require a role (and surcharge) for an increasingly deputized ISP sector as well.
With ubiquitous https, we could have cut out so much of this crap, starting with phishing attacks and ISP snooping/interference.
Oh, and another tiny thing -- The Windows monoculture and its rotten architecture has also lead us to this place by the putrid combination of its poor architecture and many anti-competitive tactics (shoving hooks for its proprietary stuff into every conceivable nook and cranny, and numerous underhanded business practices). Microsoft have given cyber criminals much more than a decade of extreme laxity under which criminals could entrench and grow into robust and profitable organizations to the point where authorities don't even need kiddie porn and terrorism as their justifications.
You forgot unprotected text. Newspapers and other periodicals are bound to have a stake in this too. Look at how much they hate Google News and that "copy and paste" function.
...do business that would advance any removal of the capitalist system of profit.
But any other kind of evil is A-OK!!! Its just following the local laws, you know.
Indeed. And get this one:
'India does value free speech and political speech. But they are weighing the harm of free speech against violence in their streets.'
At some point, you have to accept that the government is a part or product of the national culture. So the above quote seems disingenuous to me.
Its interesting that the west does not hyperventilate over Hindu fundamentalism as we do with the Islamic variety. But then, I don't think the Hindu culture and caste system claims very many oil and gas fields among the lands under its control.
I recently switched from KDE to a combo of OS X and Gnome, and the latter has more than a few similarities to OS X like the (less functional) top menu bar.
Its too bad they're mainly superficial similarities. It'd be awesome for Gnome to have been GNUStep with a re-design of the theme and rendering quality.
Alas.
OTOH KDE4's UI seems more VISTA-inspired than anything else. Only its still KDE and rather less organized and neat than a typical Vista installation... chock full of buttons that suggest simple 1-click actions but are actually drop-down menus, and many more confusing things (and the apps have that cluttered look).
Even I'm not looking for radical UI capabilities. As a pro, I look for feature-stability (something that won't reconfigure every 6 or even 24 months) and something I can install for people that is support-able via email, phone, etc.
But as the corporate world began to look for ways to market Linux-based distros, it was Gnome's relative purity (not any of its technical merits, which are few) that got KDE pushed to the sidelines.
It was not "purity", it was greed: You used to have to buy Qt licenses to develop closed source software for KDE. No investment like that was necessary for Gtk apps. This has of course changed now that Nokia has put Qt under LGPL.
Yes, it was greed on the corps part attracting them to Gnome's license purity/simplicity/cheapness.
And yes, KDE became freer (like Gnome used to be) when Qt went LGPL.
Only thing is, back when it was ahead KDE really had nice things attracting users to it. Now that Gnome is ahead and becoming more encumbered, we see that those encumbered aspects are adding things that users don't really want (moonlight, mono, and a cheesy stickynote program to justify MS tech being distributed as standard with most desktop installs).
These people should be mapping out how to build Gnome 3.0 with such things as Java, Python and Qt. Right there, those OSS riches make the moves toward Microsoft formats and patents seem insane.