I got through just fine, I think turning javascript off stops the NYT paywall from working. Text of TFA:
China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress, under pressure to take action against the theft of intellectual property, is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.
The legislation — the Protect IP Act, which has been introduced in the Senate, and a House version known as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have an impressive array of well-financed backers, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Federation of Musicians, the Directors Guild of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Screen Actors Guild. The bills aim not to censor political or religious speech as China does, but to protect American intellectual property. Alarm at the infringement of creative works through the Internet is justifiable. The solutions offered by the legislation, however, threaten to inflict collateral damage on democratic discourse and dissent both at home and around the world.
The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.
Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company’s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.
The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.
YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted. This in turn would create daunting financial burdens and legal risks for start-up companies, making it much harder for brilliant young entrepreneurs with limited resources to
+1 about firefox, KDE 3, GNOME II, and the sentiments behind the comments. Just to let you know, you're in the vast majority about at least the latter two, and I'd guess firefox as well, hence Trinity, and whatever projects are carrying on the torch of Gnome II.
As for mint, if it's not ready for the prime time, it's getting there. Debian edition, the one that has the most (IMO) promise, as it's not based on ubuntu, is pretty rough, but it's progressing rapidly. The main ubuntu based edition was stable, fast, and easy the last time I had it on my main machine, which would have been earlier this year, I believe. It's got a decent driver manager, updates are tested thoroughly for breakage, and unlike ubuntu, it is improving, not regressing, with every new release. Bit bulkier than what I run now, but it should run smoothly on any XP-era machine with >512Mb RAM. The bulk's mostly padding though, so to speak, and it has some really nice features like out of the box iPod support if I recall correctly. Definitely worth a shot if you've got hardware with decent linux support.
Ubuntu's growth has stagnated recently since the unity idiocy, and I'm hoping this provides an avenue for Linux Mint- they modified gnome shell to make it actually usable for the average user, they actually care about making an easy to use distribution, and they're growing. Couldn't agree more though, in the one major time since the beginning of the movement, they finally have an inlet to bring free software to the masses, and they've been shooting themselves in the foot non-stop since the window opened in '08, first with KDE 4, later the destabilization of ubuntu, and hopefully climaxing with the new lows in usability that are unity and GNOME Shell.
As for testing, that's spot on, along with people doing things like reporting how some software has a bug in n+1, not realizing it's universal, or people with real issues being replied to by inane postings. That granting root terminal automatically thing was called a "feature not a bug" by a staff member.
Besides your anti-terminal vendetta, I actually agree with most of what you're saying. Perhaps if we took a middle ground, we could build a collaborative distro:). Desktop linux lost its way around '05ish, and ubuntu totally destroyed itself circa 2009. I'm sure you've been told this before, but you may want to take a look at linux mint, it's usually rock solid and easier than ubuntu. Their debian edition may even be displacing ubuntu as "THE newbie distro" before too long. Still unpolished, but rolling release so it's less likely updates will break, very light, and solid. Bonus: very little if any required terminal usage.
Anyway, I finally do understand your disdain for linux/FOSS communities: you've apparently not been to the nicer ones. The cultists have overrun most of the more mainstream distros, and in a community driven project, that has really kicked them out of whack.
Also, re: breakage, a lot, I mean a lot, of that is due to the "cult of canonical" to paraphrase myself. What I mean is the ubuntu forums- where most of the testing happens. The testing forum has shriveled up and died of late. Oh it still exists, but it's mostly inane and useless postings. The few useful testers left are leaving in droves because of the stupidity of the developers' decisions- you've got to cater to the power users and end users at the same time. For instance, I recently read a thread in which ubuntu's recovery mode choice in GRUB automatically landed you at a root console, a bug report was filed, and this was called a "feature, not a bug". You can see where I'm going. The sheer stupidity of the decisions that they're not reversing runs off an experienced tester because of the obvious security threat. Pretty soon, the forum will be nothing but people who've not a clue what they're doing. Hell, it already is. Things that break in beta aren't being caught now, and are being broken in release. For the record, I've never had anything broken in arch updates:)
I suppose if I had a main point to make, it would be this: In order to make a good desktop distro, you need to make things easy for the newcomers, but powerful and solid for the hackers. Make things as easy as possible, but strike up a good balance, or else you get another ubuntu. You need for grandma to be able to use it, but you also need your average hacker to be able to deconstruct it, pick it apart piece by piece, and point out problems. More importantly, you need a community that will listen to him instead of the more numerous "why not just focus on teh shinies?" crowd. I think I'll call that "ubuntu syndrome".
That's much more the ubuntu community than the FOSS community as a whole. The ubuntu community is really much like a personality cult, and I wouldn't be surprised if about 69% of them are former or current members of the cult of Jobs (Steve). If you've ever been to ubuntuforums.org, they're not the worst linux community out there, they're the worst community out there, on the internet. Ubuntu's been going downhill since shuttleworth decided to focus on "teh shinies" rather than producing an actual working and stable operating system, and since the people prominent in the ubuntu community have decided to harass and alienate anyone who thinks differently (or at all).
Strange, hairyfeet, I figured you'd love ubuntu's new direction, cut out the terminal and all choice, brutally as necessary, until they're a cheap knock-off of OS X.
A 3rd world country... seriously? Did you know how many US ISPs have data caps? 5 GB/mo is standard for the wireless that is the only broadband available to millions of people on the west coast. 150-250GB is the usual for AT&T DSL that probably provides about half the connectivity in the nation, maybe only a third of the country has uncapped connections... don't you live in an ivory tower?
Things are probably better in Europe with telecos that actually build new hardware rather than jack prices up when bandwidth usage increases, but the US holds the population of around a third of the first world.
Good luck running kde4 quickly on my Pentium III laptop. Gnome2 still runs fine. Well, still meaning that it would if I still used it instead of fvwm....
I've been reading foundation recently, and it's spot on. Nuclear power plants breaking down because they're old and in disrepair? Train new technicians and build new plants? Unthinkable! Restrict nuclear power! Nuclear power is one of the only viable mid-term energy sources until we can get ourselves on to decentralized green energy, and even then it's incredibly useful for base load, non-intermittent power generation. We're now trying to get off of it for what exactly? Solar's not that viable in Europe as opposed to, say, California. Chemical energy only lasts so long, and everything else besides geothermal is pretty intermittent.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't mind the CLI, vim is also installed by default on Macs. Probably one of the better text editors I've ever used.
Bottled water. You can't explain that!
The text of goates posts.
You can't explain that!
I got through just fine, I think turning javascript off stops the NYT paywall from working. Text of TFA:
China operates the world’s most elaborate and opaque system of Internet censorship. But Congress, under pressure to take action against the theft of intellectual property, is considering misguided legislation that would strengthen China’s Great Firewall and even bring major features of it to America.
The legislation — the Protect IP Act, which has been introduced in the Senate, and a House version known as the Stop Online Piracy Act — have an impressive array of well-financed backers, including the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Federation of Musicians, the Directors Guild of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Screen Actors Guild. The bills aim not to censor political or religious speech as China does, but to protect American intellectual property. Alarm at the infringement of creative works through the Internet is justifiable. The solutions offered by the legislation, however, threaten to inflict collateral damage on democratic discourse and dissent both at home and around the world.
The bills would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers and advertising networks, all without a court hearing or a trial. The House version goes further, allowing private companies to sue service providers for even briefly and unknowingly hosting content that infringes on copyright — a sharp change from current law, which protects the service providers from civil liability if they remove the problematic content immediately upon notification. The intention is not the same as China’s Great Firewall, a nationwide system of Web censorship, but the practical effect could be similar.
Abuses under existing American law serve as troubling predictors for the kinds of abuse by private actors that the House bill would make possible. Take, for example, the cease-and-desist letters that Diebold, a maker of voting machines, sent in 2003, demanding that Internet service providers shut down Web sites that had published internal company e-mails about problems with the company’s voting machines. The letter cited copyright violations, and most of the service providers took down the content without question, despite the strong case to be made that the material was speech protected under the First Amendment.
The House bill would also emulate China’s system of corporate “self-discipline,” making companies liable for users’ actions. The burden would be on the Web site operator to prove that the site was not being used for copyright infringement. The effect on user-generated sites like YouTube would be chilling.
YouTube, Twitter and Facebook have played an important role in political movements from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. At present, social networking services are protected by a “safe harbor” provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which grants Web sites immunity from prosecution as long as they act in good faith to take down infringing content as soon as rights-holders point it out to them. The House bill would destroy that immunity, putting the onus on YouTube to vet videos in advance or risk legal action. It would put Twitter in a similar position to that of its Chinese cousin, Weibo, which reportedly employs around 1,000 people to monitor and censor user content and keep the company in good standing with authorities.
Compliance with the Stop Online Piracy Act would require huge overhead spending by Internet companies for staff and technologies dedicated to monitoring users and censoring any infringing material from being posted or transmitted. This in turn would create daunting financial burdens and legal risks for start-up companies, making it much harder for brilliant young entrepreneurs with limited resources to
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/coolpreviews/
Er- all of the ten fastest computers in the world run linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#June_2011
+1 about firefox, KDE 3, GNOME II, and the sentiments behind the comments. Just to let you know, you're in the vast majority about at least the latter two, and I'd guess firefox as well, hence Trinity, and whatever projects are carrying on the torch of Gnome II.
As for mint, if it's not ready for the prime time, it's getting there. Debian edition, the one that has the most (IMO) promise, as it's not based on ubuntu, is pretty rough, but it's progressing rapidly. The main ubuntu based edition was stable, fast, and easy the last time I had it on my main machine, which would have been earlier this year, I believe. It's got a decent driver manager, updates are tested thoroughly for breakage, and unlike ubuntu, it is improving, not regressing, with every new release. Bit bulkier than what I run now, but it should run smoothly on any XP-era machine with >512Mb RAM. The bulk's mostly padding though, so to speak, and it has some really nice features like out of the box iPod support if I recall correctly. Definitely worth a shot if you've got hardware with decent linux support.
Ubuntu's growth has stagnated recently since the unity idiocy, and I'm hoping this provides an avenue for Linux Mint- they modified gnome shell to make it actually usable for the average user, they actually care about making an easy to use distribution, and they're growing. Couldn't agree more though, in the one major time since the beginning of the movement, they finally have an inlet to bring free software to the masses, and they've been shooting themselves in the foot non-stop since the window opened in '08, first with KDE 4, later the destabilization of ubuntu, and hopefully climaxing with the new lows in usability that are unity and GNOME Shell.
As for testing, that's spot on, along with people doing things like reporting how some software has a bug in n+1, not realizing it's universal, or people with real issues being replied to by inane postings. That granting root terminal automatically thing was called a "feature not a bug" by a staff member.
Because this.
If not, I'd be interested in seeing this non-touch iphone.
Which abuses cave in mechanisms to pump magma to space where it falls down and boils away the oceans. At *pinky to lip* one million frames per second.
No, I don't think the Amish would condone this.
Besides your anti-terminal vendetta, I actually agree with most of what you're saying. Perhaps if we took a middle ground, we could build a collaborative distro :). Desktop linux lost its way around '05ish, and ubuntu totally destroyed itself circa 2009. I'm sure you've been told this before, but you may want to take a look at linux mint, it's usually rock solid and easier than ubuntu. Their debian edition may even be displacing ubuntu as "THE newbie distro" before too long. Still unpolished, but rolling release so it's less likely updates will break, very light, and solid. Bonus: very little if any required terminal usage.
Anyway, I finally do understand your disdain for linux/FOSS communities: you've apparently not been to the nicer ones. The cultists have overrun most of the more mainstream distros, and in a community driven project, that has really kicked them out of whack.
Also, re: breakage, a lot, I mean a lot, of that is due to the "cult of canonical" to paraphrase myself. What I mean is the ubuntu forums- where most of the testing happens. The testing forum has shriveled up and died of late. Oh it still exists, but it's mostly inane and useless postings. The few useful testers left are leaving in droves because of the stupidity of the developers' decisions- you've got to cater to the power users and end users at the same time. For instance, I recently read a thread in which ubuntu's recovery mode choice in GRUB automatically landed you at a root console, a bug report was filed, and this was called a "feature, not a bug". You can see where I'm going. The sheer stupidity of the decisions that they're not reversing runs off an experienced tester because of the obvious security threat. Pretty soon, the forum will be nothing but people who've not a clue what they're doing. Hell, it already is. Things that break in beta aren't being caught now, and are being broken in release. For the record, I've never had anything broken in arch updates :)
I suppose if I had a main point to make, it would be this: In order to make a good desktop distro, you need to make things easy for the newcomers, but powerful and solid for the hackers. Make things as easy as possible, but strike up a good balance, or else you get another ubuntu. You need for grandma to be able to use it, but you also need your average hacker to be able to deconstruct it, pick it apart piece by piece, and point out problems. More importantly, you need a community that will listen to him instead of the more numerous "why not just focus on teh shinies?" crowd. I think I'll call that "ubuntu syndrome".
Screw crysis. Let's load dwarf fortress up on this bitch.
Eh, perhaps. I won't lie, the US is a lot closer to a 3rd world nation than Europe.
That's much more the ubuntu community than the FOSS community as a whole. The ubuntu community is really much like a personality cult, and I wouldn't be surprised if about 69% of them are former or current members of the cult of Jobs (Steve). If you've ever been to ubuntuforums.org, they're not the worst linux community out there, they're the worst community out there, on the internet. Ubuntu's been going downhill since shuttleworth decided to focus on "teh shinies" rather than producing an actual working and stable operating system, and since the people prominent in the ubuntu community have decided to harass and alienate anyone who thinks differently (or at all).
Strange, hairyfeet, I figured you'd love ubuntu's new direction, cut out the terminal and all choice, brutally as necessary, until they're a cheap knock-off of OS X.
A 3rd world country... seriously? Did you know how many US ISPs have data caps? 5 GB/mo is standard for the wireless that is the only broadband available to millions of people on the west coast. 150-250GB is the usual for AT&T DSL that probably provides about half the connectivity in the nation, maybe only a third of the country has uncapped connections... don't you live in an ivory tower?
Things are probably better in Europe with telecos that actually build new hardware rather than jack prices up when bandwidth usage increases, but the US holds the population of around a third of the first world.
Eh? Why not? It was shit when they first shipped it, but it's fairly mature now. Not that I don't agree with you...
Good luck running kde4 quickly on my Pentium III laptop. Gnome2 still runs fine. Well, still meaning that it would if I still used it instead of fvwm....
Right, base load nuclear supplemented by solar. I doubt that the actual amount of power needed to run a house will increase too much for that.
I've been reading foundation recently, and it's spot on. Nuclear power plants breaking down because they're old and in disrepair? Train new technicians and build new plants? Unthinkable! Restrict nuclear power! Nuclear power is one of the only viable mid-term energy sources until we can get ourselves on to decentralized green energy, and even then it's incredibly useful for base load, non-intermittent power generation. We're now trying to get off of it for what exactly? Solar's not that viable in Europe as opposed to, say, California. Chemical energy only lasts so long, and everything else besides geothermal is pretty intermittent.
Nice strawman!
*claps slowly*
Obligatory.
Minecraft was based on dwarf fortress, view it as bringing the glory of the dorfs to the masses.
What I mean by the comment is: why does apple not use FLAC, which is a widely supported and mature technology?
It's the only way to be sure.