Except for the fact that Bush never declared war on Iraq.
Oh, and most of those accusations of "unfair tactics" (use of roadside bombs, "sneakily fighting like girls" (note that parent is a misogynist in addition), etc.) could easily be applied to the conventionally-held "good guys" in history.
American Revolution? We engaged in guerrilla warfare and sniping of officers, two things strongly against the rules of engagement of the time.
We also murdered Americans who sympathized with the British.
The English defeated the Spanish Armada by keeping their distance and pounding the Spanish ships with long-range culverins, which carried no long-range weapons. This was also considered not fair by the naval warfare practices of the time.
This isn't to say these actions were either right or wrong... but war is hell, and a nation backed into a corner will engage in desperate measures. If the choice is between "fight dirty" and "die", most people would choose the former.
If the mainland of the US was invaded (somehow) by a strong force, you had better bet we'd use every trick in the book--Geneva Convention be damned--to repel them.
Apart from any additional channels (5.1 or whatever) get added to the new formats, the only one who can tell the difference between 16bit 44.1kHz and 32bit 96kHz is your dog.
This is done all the time on conventional FM radio, but does satellite/digital radio do this also? I'd think that audience would be more inclined toward the "stfu and let me hear the song as it was meant to be heard!" mindset.
There's a story that gets retold in music history classes a lot.
Around 1800 there was an old and incredibly beautiful choral piece that a particular monastery/order/whatever wanted to, in effect, keep a monopoly on. They'd perform the thing as part of the Mass, but wouldn't share the score with any who weren't in the order and performing themselves. This had been the situation for around two hundred years.
Well, around 1800 a smart-aleck goes to one of the Masses, hears the piece, comes home, and writes down all the notes from memory. (Anyone familiar with Renaissance motets knows what a feat this is.)
That smart-aleck? Mozart.
(Dr. Sanders, forgive me if I got a few details wrong.)
Would it be possible for people to bring in their own disks (USB disks, perhaps? How cheap can you make a 10GB USB disk?) with their own copy of HL installed and play off those? They're using their own copy, and not copying it, and not having it installed on multiple machines (read: hard drives), so the license is satisfied.
Heck, with a little special Daemontools-in-revers software it might be possible to convince the Steam installer that an.iso image is a conventional hard disk and to do all its installs there. You then burn the iso image to disk along with any registry keys the install created and delete it. So far you've done nothing even remotely legally shady--you've installed something to an optical instead of a magnetic disk.
The cybercafe, meanwhile, has software on their machines that intercepts any write requests going to read-only drives (ex. the DVD that Bob just brought in) and caches them in memory (/swap). Read requests are checked against this table of writes to see if the files they want to access have been changed.
This is just an alternate version of the portable-hard-drive solution, except with cheaper media and a little finagling to run programs off them.
I don't know how the license is written, but it might also be possible for each customer to purchase a copy of halflife and bring it in, uninstalling it when they get done. In that case the cybercafe is not bound by any EULA, since they have not agreed to it; they are merely leasing the use of computers. The customers are the ones who have the half-life licenses,and they're within their rights, since they're not operating half-life for profit, not copying it, using it on one machine at a time, etc.
I'm not that familiar with the workings of Steam these days, but a hefty download might be required to get half-life up and running after a clean install. In that case, depending on the protocol the downloads use, it might be possible to use some sort of caching proxy to feed them to the new installs... this should be legal if it acts as a general proxy and isn't just a steam cache.
The cybercafe could also turn a blind eye to what users do--they could, for instance, not kick out (condone) people who bring in cd/dvd images of their Steam directories, along with their exported registry keys. (Someone could write a little program that allows for "temporary" registry keys, so people don't cause any permanent damage to the machines.) All the mess gets cleaned up at the end of the day in any event as the disks are reloaded from a pristine image.
This might not be strictly legal--the cybercafe might be liable under some sort of contributory-infringment clause since they're leasing hardware to people who then do something a tiny bit shady (copying of Steam directories). Still, it's got a much lower lawyer-radar signature than the current practice.
"Of course they should be able to sue [the] ass off people who violate their licensing terms."
This discussion is not about whether Valve is acting within their legal rights; it's whether insisting on the legal rights that they do, and then enforcing them in the manner that they do, makes them assholes.
China doesn't "hate" the West; their economy is dependent on Western mazkets, just like our economy is dependent on Chinese goods.
"Islam" hardly has a unified agenda, any omre than "Christianity" does. There's a very small minority that may indeed despise the West, a somewhat larger minority that wants the West out of their business, and a majority that doesn't really care.
20+ million in China? With a population well over a billion? That's probably a lower percentage than in the US, France, etc.
You could argue that Vietnam was an attempt to start WWIII by the Americans, if you really wanted to...
I'm posting this on a Mandrake 10 machine, running on a Celery 433 with 192 MB ram (and a slow-ass disk), using KDE. Pretty much default install--actually, it's very much like a default install, since I left the disks lying around and my mom goes "ooh, this must be the new version he was talking about" and installs it over Mandrake 9. (52-year-old schoolteachers generally do not dig around in the package selector.)
No speed cmplaints here--sure, it's not blazing, but nothing is what I'd call slow.
One subjective thing that might contribute to perceptions of slowness is that Linux applications, when asked to start, generally do nothing for a few seconds, then spit up a window ready to go, while Windows ones create the window first and then load the application piecemeal.
The question is, how cool do those laptops run when under load? Lots of power-minimization tricks (idle modes, low power states, frequency scaling) can reduce heat production--but many laptops forget about this stuff when running off AC, and they're obligated to ignore it when under load.
Mine is an Athlon XP-M--not quite as efficient as the Centrinos, but not bad either... at least when idling. (3.5 hours under Windows, slightly less under Mandrake 10 because of some ACPI issues). But, when you run the thing at full load, it chews through batteries and spews heat. And, no matter how efficiently the case and fan are designed, that heat has to go someplace.
An extreme example: I was playing Diablo II today in my car while waiting on someone. Since my machine eats power when under 100% load (at about 4x the idling rate), I used a cigarette-lighter power inverter to convert the car's 12VDC to 110VAC, then ran the laptop's power supply (110VAC -> 14VDC) off of it. (Yes, this is inefficient, but it's what I have).
The laptop, meanwhile, was sucking down power and spewing around 70W heat in my lap... combined with the overhead of the DC-AC-DC conversions, the wonderful thermal environment of cars, and the climate of the southern US, it got pretty toasty in there.
I discovered that laptop Li-Ion batteries have a thermal safety mode: if they get above a certain temperature they'll refuse to charge until they cool off.:)
NTP in November 2001 filed a complaint contending that RIM's products and services infringe on at least five NTP patents (numbers 5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592) granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) covering the use of radio-frequency wireless communications in e-mail systems.
Does this mean that every time I use wlan0 instead of eth0 to check my mail I'm infringing on their patent?
More generally, I would think the Amateur Packet Radio people would have some prior art on this. APR has been around for a while, I think... and certainly someone has used it to check mail.
I have a friend who's a clerk for a law firm in town. They make her carry one of those beasties around 24/7, and leave it on 24/7. If she turns it off, the Masters know about it.
They can even do GPS tracking with the things.
Incidentally, I can't think there's anything about this device that's patent-worthy. The use of a new networking technology (in this case DPMS or whatever the IP-over-cell-phone protocol is) to do the same old networking stuff isn't patentable, since it's such an obvious application.
The development of practical electrical generation and tramsmission methods is worthy of a patent.
So is running that electricity through a tungsten filament to produce light.
The subsequent development of the alkaline battery is, perhaps, patentable.
The combination of those alkaline batteries with an incandescant bulb to make a flashlight should not be patentable.
They say it "could be as high" as ten million emails. Well, the mean size of an email is probably around 10k, so that's 100GB of old mail.
100G of storage costs about a day's wages for a city bureaucrat.
The main problem they mention is that "it takes too long to make daily backups." That doesn't seem to be the mail system's problem--why are they making *daily* backups of static data?
If you want to make daily backups of your mp3 collection, you don't copy the whole mess every day. You look for new files and copy only those.
I'm not saying they necessarily need to keep all that old mail. But there's no technical reason why they can't.
Most codecs are designed to simply give the best audio per kilobyte, and recent tests point to (a retuning of) Ogg Vorbis as near the top of the heap. It's certainly achieved what it set out to do: a Free audio codec with fairly wide acceptance that sounds better than mp3/wma under most circumstances.
Vorbis, of course, takes much more CPU muscle to decode than mp3. The difference may be between 0.1% and 1% of my Athlon XP[1], but obviously on an iPod it matters.
Maybe it's time for some group to look at weak-CPU audio codecs? You've got to balance audio-quality-per-bitrate with expense (and power consumption!) of CPU required to decode in realtime.
There's got to be something out there that sounds better than mp3 but can still be decoded with a cheap processor using an amount of power that's not really significant compared to the amplification/transmission circuitry required to get the signal out of the device.
Ideally this could be done on the decode side: write a codec that produces Vorbis-quality results when decoded by a fast CPU, but that could be decoded by a slow processor to produce a good-enough signal. This would solve the current dilemma: do I encode in vorbis to save disk space/get better quality, or mp3 to play stuff on portables?
I'm posting from my *mom's* mandrake 10 machine. She got sick of Win98 about 6 months ago.
Turns out she could even do the install herself (Mandrake 9), except for getting X configured for her antiquated video card. And then I left some Mandrake 10 CD's lying around, and came home one day, and Mandrake 10 was on the machine.
(There's no way in hell she could install Win98 on her own... since that comprises installing Win98, an office suite, a web browser that doesn't suck, a mail client that doesn't suck, drivers for all sorts of hardware that Linux runs out of the box, a firewall, Nero, etc. etc. etc. etc.)
Some of them have begun to understand it--Mandrake, for instance. (Proof: I'm typing this on my mom's Mandrake box--she got sick of Win98.)
The problem is that Linux is such a flexible system, there is no one way to put all the pieces together to get a working system. So, you can either have each distro write extensive documentation separately (which is duplication of effort), or you can disperse the documentation like the OSS community has dispersed the development.
The problem with this approach is that, in its current form, nontechnical users have trouble putting together the pieces of the different bits of documentation. What we need (would help geekly-but-not-wizardly users as well) is a Linux documentation wiki, which provides all the documentation in one place even though it's written by different factions.
Microsoft seems to think that non-power-users should never have to refer to the documentation: most things in Windows are automated as hell. Rather than making the man pages easy to read (Windows online documentation sucks, especially for non-obvious things), they're trying to eliminate the need for it altogether. Stick in a thumbdrive, and in WinXP a box pops up asking me if I want to look at the files in Explorer, or look at the pictures in Windows Pixture and Fax Viewer. I know I can get at them through I:\, but to the general populace this is a very nice feature.
Linux, to be widely accepted, probably could use more stuff like this. Granny isn't going to know to run k3b every time she wants to burn a CD; she wants it to run every time she sticks in a blank disk.
... is that there is no uniform method of copy-paste.
Emacs, which I've been using extensively lately for coding, has highlight-to-copy and ctrl-Y to paste.
Pine has ctrl-k and ctrl-u for cut and paste lines--no highlighting, since I access it through telnet.
I use Linux Opera as my web browser, and it uses the Windows ctrl-C/ctrl-V highlight-to-select method. Makes sense, since it appears to be an almost exact port.
gaim's cut-and-paste behavior is weird--I can't get some things to copy, especially those that include smilies.
In konsole windows you have to use the right-click menu.
And, the system seems to sit on various C&P buffers--for instance, I can cut and paste things within emacs, but I can't get anything in or out of emacs. (Yes, I understand that emacs predates kde and such and thus has its own buffers, but can't the folks at the FSF fix this?)
I don't really care what system gets used; ideally, like everything else in linux, it will be configurable. It's slightly annoying, however, to have to use different methods all the time. I don't mind it that much, but casual computer users (ex: my 52-year-old mother, who has the most amazing talent for breaking kmail) get confused--"why isn't it pasting?"
That statement should read "suspicious of unecessary centralisation". Distrust of centralisation is very much a part of the geek world: internet rather than one-to-many media like broadcast TV, bittorrent rather than ftp, the bazaar development model, the division of a working OSS system into hundreds of chunks (the kernel, kde, X, etc.) that can be arranged to suit, enthusiasm for P2P technology that goes beyond free pr0n/warez, etc. etc. etc.
This "screaming to the high heavens" isn't unique to politically-sensitive bugs. This is how the OSS development model works: let a bunch of eyeballs go over something and raise red flags if something is wrong. People would scream to the high heavens if, say, a version of KDE was released with a major memory leak; it's just part of the process.
(Side thought: when does American democracy get a bugzilla page?
Bug #41298: Voters in non-swing states effectively disenfranchised by electoral college system Assigned to: FEC Status: IS_FEATURE_NOT_BUG
That quote gives the Security Council the authority to use force to maintain or restore international peace and security, *not* to enforce UN resolutions.
The US invasion of Iraq does not seem to fall under that category.
In my case (years ago) it was 1) the insufficiency of wordpad* for writing papers, and 2) the fact that the Office download from Kazaa was probably ~600 megs while OO.o fit in a hundred.
*If plaintext documents are good enough for the cDc, they should be good enough for professors. But they seem to disagree, and want formatting. Bah. Next paper I write in emacs.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the fact that Bush never declared war on Iraq.
Oh, and most of those accusations of "unfair tactics" (use of roadside bombs, "sneakily fighting like girls" (note that parent is a misogynist in addition), etc.) could easily be applied to the conventionally-held "good guys" in history.
American Revolution? We engaged in guerrilla warfare and sniping of officers, two things strongly against the rules of engagement of the time.
We also murdered Americans who sympathized with the British.
The English defeated the Spanish Armada by keeping their distance and pounding the Spanish ships with long-range culverins, which carried no long-range weapons. This was also considered not fair by the naval warfare practices of the time.
This isn't to say these actions were either right or wrong... but war is hell, and a nation backed into a corner will engage in desperate measures. If the choice is between "fight dirty" and "die", most people would choose the former.
If the mainland of the US was invaded (somehow) by a strong force, you had better bet we'd use every trick in the book--Geneva Convention be damned--to repel them.
Thank you.
Apart from any additional channels (5.1 or whatever) get added to the new formats, the only one who can tell the difference between 16bit 44.1kHz and 32bit 96kHz is your dog.
This is done all the time on conventional FM radio, but does satellite/digital radio do this also? I'd think that audience would be more inclined toward the "stfu and let me hear the song as it was meant to be heard!" mindset.
There's a story that gets retold in music history classes a lot.
Around 1800 there was an old and incredibly beautiful choral piece that a particular monastery/order/whatever wanted to, in effect, keep a monopoly on. They'd perform the thing as part of the Mass, but wouldn't share the score with any who weren't in the order and performing themselves. This had been the situation for around two hundred years.
Well, around 1800 a smart-aleck goes to one of the Masses, hears the piece, comes home, and writes down all the notes from memory. (Anyone familiar with Renaissance motets knows what a feat this is.)
That smart-aleck? Mozart.
(Dr. Sanders, forgive me if I got a few details wrong.)
Fortunately they can't do the job completely without running afoul of some fairly serious laws... like murder.
I'm a member of a classical choir that specializes in a capella music... and we've got a couple of composers among our ranks, too.
Would it be possible for people to bring in their own disks (USB disks, perhaps? How cheap can you make a 10GB USB disk?) with their own copy of HL installed and play off those? They're using their own copy, and not copying it, and not having it installed on multiple machines (read: hard drives), so the license is satisfied.
.iso image is a conventional hard disk and to do all its installs there. You then burn the iso image to disk along with any registry keys the install created and delete it. So far you've done nothing even remotely legally shady--you've installed something to an optical instead of a magnetic disk.
Heck, with a little special Daemontools-in-revers software it might be possible to convince the Steam installer that an
The cybercafe, meanwhile, has software on their machines that intercepts any write requests going to read-only drives (ex. the DVD that Bob just brought in) and caches them in memory (/swap). Read requests are checked against this table of writes to see if the files they want to access have been changed.
This is just an alternate version of the portable-hard-drive solution, except with cheaper media and a little finagling to run programs off them.
I don't know how the license is written, but it might also be possible for each customer to purchase a copy of halflife and bring it in, uninstalling it when they get done. In that case the cybercafe is not bound by any EULA, since they have not agreed to it; they are merely leasing the use of computers. The customers are the ones who have the half-life licenses,and they're within their rights, since they're not operating half-life for profit, not copying it, using it on one machine at a time, etc.
I'm not that familiar with the workings of Steam these days, but a hefty download might be required to get half-life up and running after a clean install. In that case, depending on the protocol the downloads use, it might be possible to use some sort of caching proxy to feed them to the new installs... this should be legal if it acts as a general proxy and isn't just a steam cache.
The cybercafe could also turn a blind eye to what users do--they could, for instance, not kick out (condone) people who bring in cd/dvd images of their Steam directories, along with their exported registry keys. (Someone could write a little program that allows for "temporary" registry keys, so people don't cause any permanent damage to the machines.) All the mess gets cleaned up at the end of the day in any event as the disks are reloaded from a pristine image.
This might not be strictly legal--the cybercafe might be liable under some sort of contributory-infringment clause since they're leasing hardware to people who then do something a tiny bit shady (copying of Steam directories). Still, it's got a much lower lawyer-radar signature than the current practice.
"Of course they should be able to sue [the] ass off people who violate their licensing terms."
This discussion is not about whether Valve is acting within their legal rights; it's whether insisting on the legal rights that they do, and then enforcing them in the manner that they do, makes them assholes.
Legal != ethical != nice.
China doesn't "hate" the West; their economy is dependent on Western mazkets, just like our economy is dependent on Chinese goods.
"Islam" hardly has a unified agenda, any omre than "Christianity" does. There's a very small minority that may indeed despise the West, a somewhat larger minority that wants the West out of their business, and a majority that doesn't really care.
20+ million in China? With a population well over a billion? That's probably a lower percentage than in the US, France, etc.
You could argue that Vietnam was an attempt to start WWIII by the Americans, if you really wanted to...
I imagine that in order to auction/sell-off/whatever their assets, they have to at least specify unambiguously what they are.
We could at least find out what cards they're holding during the transfer... probably the two of clubs and a bunch of jokers.
I'm posting this on a Mandrake 10 machine, running on a Celery 433 with 192 MB ram (and a slow-ass disk), using KDE. Pretty much default install--actually, it's very much like a default install, since I left the disks lying around and my mom goes "ooh, this must be the new version he was talking about" and installs it over Mandrake 9. (52-year-old schoolteachers generally do not dig around in the package selector.)
No speed cmplaints here--sure, it's not blazing, but nothing is what I'd call slow.
One subjective thing that might contribute to perceptions of slowness is that Linux applications, when asked to start, generally do nothing for a few seconds, then spit up a window ready to go, while Windows ones create the window first and then load the application piecemeal.
The question is, how cool do those laptops run when under load? Lots of power-minimization tricks (idle modes, low power states, frequency scaling) can reduce heat production--but many laptops forget about this stuff when running off AC, and they're obligated to ignore it when under load.
:)
Mine is an Athlon XP-M--not quite as efficient as the Centrinos, but not bad either... at least when idling. (3.5 hours under Windows, slightly less under Mandrake 10 because of some ACPI issues). But, when you run the thing at full load, it chews through batteries and spews heat. And, no matter how efficiently the case and fan are designed, that heat has to go someplace.
An extreme example: I was playing Diablo II today in my car while waiting on someone. Since my machine eats power when under 100% load (at about 4x the idling rate), I used a cigarette-lighter power inverter to convert the car's 12VDC to 110VAC, then ran the laptop's power supply (110VAC -> 14VDC) off of it. (Yes, this is inefficient, but it's what I have).
The laptop, meanwhile, was sucking down power and spewing around 70W heat in my lap... combined with the overhead of the DC-AC-DC conversions, the wonderful thermal environment of cars, and the climate of the southern US, it got pretty toasty in there.
I discovered that laptop Li-Ion batteries have a thermal safety mode: if they get above a certain temperature they'll refuse to charge until they cool off.
NTP in November 2001 filed a complaint contending that RIM's products and services infringe on at least five NTP patents (numbers 5,625,670; 5,631,946; 5,819,172; 6,067,451 and 6,317,592) granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) covering the use of radio-frequency wireless communications in e-mail systems.
Does this mean that every time I use wlan0 instead of eth0 to check my mail I'm infringing on their patent?
More generally, I would think the Amateur Packet Radio people would have some prior art on this. APR has been around for a while, I think... and certainly someone has used it to check mail.
That would work if the issue was trademark violation.
But it's not.
Trademarks are what you call something; patents are what it does.
I have a friend who's a clerk for a law firm in town. They make her carry one of those beasties around 24/7, and leave it on 24/7. If she turns it off, the Masters know about it.
They can even do GPS tracking with the things.
Incidentally, I can't think there's anything about this device that's patent-worthy. The use of a new networking technology (in this case DPMS or whatever the IP-over-cell-phone protocol is) to do the same old networking stuff isn't patentable, since it's such an obvious application.
The development of practical electrical generation and tramsmission methods is worthy of a patent.
So is running that electricity through a tungsten filament to produce light.
The subsequent development of the alkaline battery is, perhaps, patentable.
The combination of those alkaline batteries with an incandescant bulb to make a flashlight should not be patentable.
D'oh, everyone beat me to the 100G math. But I still wonder: why make daily backups of all that shit?
If they do daily backups of everything, seems like that's one hell of a RAID array to store all the bureaucrats' PowerPoint bloat on.
Millions of old emails?
They say it "could be as high" as ten million emails. Well, the mean size of an email is probably around 10k, so that's 100GB of old mail.
100G of storage costs about a day's wages for a city bureaucrat.
The main problem they mention is that "it takes too long to make daily backups." That doesn't seem to be the mail system's problem--why are they making *daily* backups of static data?
If you want to make daily backups of your mp3 collection, you don't copy the whole mess every day. You look for new files and copy only those.
I'm not saying they necessarily need to keep all that old mail. But there's no technical reason why they can't.
Most codecs are designed to simply give the best audio per kilobyte, and recent tests point to (a retuning of) Ogg Vorbis as near the top of the heap. It's certainly achieved what it set out to do: a Free audio codec with fairly wide acceptance that sounds better than mp3/wma under most circumstances.
Vorbis, of course, takes much more CPU muscle to decode than mp3. The difference may be between 0.1% and 1% of my Athlon XP[1], but obviously on an iPod it matters.
Maybe it's time for some group to look at weak-CPU audio codecs? You've got to balance audio-quality-per-bitrate with expense (and power consumption!) of CPU required to decode in realtime.
There's got to be something out there that sounds better than mp3 but can still be decoded with a cheap processor using an amount of power that's not really significant compared to the amplification/transmission circuitry required to get the signal out of the device.
Ideally this could be done on the decode side: write a codec that produces Vorbis-quality results when decoded by a fast CPU, but that could be decoded by a slow processor to produce a good-enough signal. This would solve the current dilemma: do I encode in vorbis to save disk space/get better quality, or mp3 to play stuff on portables?
[1]What a stupid name for a processor.
bzzt.
ccTLD's are two letters, not three.
it'd be "cm".
I'm posting from my *mom's* mandrake 10 machine. She got sick of Win98 about 6 months ago.
Turns out she could even do the install herself (Mandrake 9), except for getting X configured for her antiquated video card. And then I left some Mandrake 10 CD's lying around, and came home one day, and Mandrake 10 was on the machine.
(There's no way in hell she could install Win98 on her own... since that comprises installing Win98, an office suite, a web browser that doesn't suck, a mail client that doesn't suck, drivers for all sorts of hardware that Linux runs out of the box, a firewall, Nero, etc. etc. etc. etc.)
Some of them have begun to understand it--Mandrake, for instance. (Proof: I'm typing this on my mom's Mandrake box--she got sick of Win98.)
The problem is that Linux is such a flexible system, there is no one way to put all the pieces together to get a working system. So, you can either have each distro write extensive documentation separately (which is duplication of effort), or you can disperse the documentation like the OSS community has dispersed the development.
The problem with this approach is that, in its current form, nontechnical users have trouble putting together the pieces of the different bits of documentation. What we need (would help geekly-but-not-wizardly users as well) is a Linux documentation wiki, which provides all the documentation in one place even though it's written by different factions.
Microsoft seems to think that non-power-users should never have to refer to the documentation: most things in Windows are automated as hell. Rather than making the man pages easy to read (Windows online documentation sucks, especially for non-obvious things), they're trying to eliminate the need for it altogether. Stick in a thumbdrive, and in WinXP a box pops up asking me if I want to look at the files in Explorer, or look at the pictures in Windows Pixture and Fax Viewer. I know I can get at them through I:\, but to the general populace this is a very nice feature.
Linux, to be widely accepted, probably could use more stuff like this. Granny isn't going to know to run k3b every time she wants to burn a CD; she wants it to run every time she sticks in a blank disk.
... is that there is no uniform method of copy-paste.
Emacs, which I've been using extensively lately for coding, has highlight-to-copy and ctrl-Y to paste.
Pine has ctrl-k and ctrl-u for cut and paste lines--no highlighting, since I access it through telnet.
I use Linux Opera as my web browser, and it uses the Windows ctrl-C/ctrl-V highlight-to-select method. Makes sense, since it appears to be an almost exact port.
gaim's cut-and-paste behavior is weird--I can't get some things to copy, especially those that include smilies.
In konsole windows you have to use the right-click menu.
And, the system seems to sit on various C&P buffers--for instance, I can cut and paste things within emacs, but I can't get anything in or out of emacs. (Yes, I understand that emacs predates kde and such and thus has its own buffers, but can't the folks at the FSF fix this?)
I don't really care what system gets used; ideally, like everything else in linux, it will be configurable. It's slightly annoying, however, to have to use different methods all the time. I don't mind it that much, but casual computer users (ex: my 52-year-old mother, who has the most amazing talent for breaking kmail) get confused--"why isn't it pasting?"
Minus the rhetoric, the NYT isn't that far off.
That statement should read "suspicious of unecessary centralisation". Distrust of centralisation is very much a part of the geek world: internet rather than one-to-many media like broadcast TV, bittorrent rather than ftp, the bazaar development model, the division of a working OSS system into hundreds of chunks (the kernel, kde, X, etc.) that can be arranged to suit, enthusiasm for P2P technology that goes beyond free pr0n/warez, etc. etc. etc.
This "screaming to the high heavens" isn't unique to politically-sensitive bugs. This is how the OSS development model works: let a bunch of eyeballs go over something and raise red flags if something is wrong. People would scream to the high heavens if, say, a version of KDE was released with a major memory leak; it's just part of the process.
(Side thought: when does American democracy get a bugzilla page?
Bug #41298: Voters in non-swing states effectively disenfranchised by electoral college system
Assigned to: FEC
Status: IS_FEATURE_NOT_BUG
Aargh!)
That quote gives the Security Council the authority to use force to maintain or restore international peace and security, *not* to enforce UN resolutions.
The US invasion of Iraq does not seem to fall under that category.
Because everyone knows that windows machines (at least mine) spend a large chunk of their time rebooting?
In my case (years ago) it was 1) the insufficiency of wordpad* for writing papers, and 2) the fact that the Office download from Kazaa was probably ~600 megs while OO.o fit in a hundred.
*If plaintext documents are good enough for the cDc, they should be good enough for professors. But they seem to disagree, and want formatting. Bah. Next paper I write in emacs.