Use of open standards for office document exchange.
The ministerial department has decided upon the open standard format to be used for the exchange of office documents.
Minister Vanvelthoven: 'The format of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets is currently based primarily on popular office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Wordperfect Office. Documents produced by these products can usually only be read by those products. When you need to exchange documents with someone else, you're also forcing them to use the same software that the document was made with.'
To reduce the dependencies on these proprietary formats, we need to make use of open standard formats. XML is a standard for the exchange of information between diverse computer systems; an XML based document is thus guaranteed to have long term accessibility to the information within. The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an XML based document format that is approved by the ISO (International Standards Organisation). Hence we propose to to settle on the use of ODF as the standard format for the exchange of office documents such as from word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, as soon as it's approved by the ISO.
All federal government departments must be able to read ODF documents by September 2007. This doesn't exclude the use of other formats. The responsibility of guaranteeing readability is up to the relevent departments.
Depending on the result of a [federal ICT dept] managed impact analysis, from September 2008 the official format for the exchange of office documents will be ODF.
PS. This is probably the only time I will ever watch a soccer event.
Interestingly, I was in the same boat as you until a couple of years ago. As a die-hard geek, I could never see what the point was with soccer, until my girlfriend introduced it to me (read it twice if you have to, yes I was introduced by a girl).
Then I discovered that it's a wonderful game, able to scale from a few kids kicking around a rolled up sock all the way to massive international games of skill. Having a game that can be played by such a wide range of players is quite amazing. Many other sports require significant hardware outlay (American gridiron's a big culprit), but soccer runs on any hardware and is usable in any scale (analogous to Linux scaling from a home adsl router all the way to google)
Also the strategy required is almost mathematical, requiring careful player positioning and analysis of the opposing team, whilst also including elements of trigonometry.
Of course the commercial aspects are somewhat disagreeable (I'm not swayed by the adver^H^H^H^H^Hsponsors), but the game itself is good.
It only samples a very small demographic: people who want to be monitored.
And these are the people they're after. If you're concerned about privacy and not wanting your viewing habits watched, then you're probably too smart to be swayed by TV advertising anyway.
What Wikipedia should do is have an editor branch for each article. All editing would occur on the normal branch of an article by everyone (as is done now with non-locked articles). Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch. Editors would consist of "trusted" users, picked by some sensible criteria.
Something along these lines would be a good idea, but needs to be tweaked to not let some editor's holiday end up with an article remaining out of date. The problem I've seen several times in WP is that an article which once was good enough to reach featured article status gradually becomes inconsistent, even though the topic itself might be static. This is a shortcoming of WP that really needs to be addressed.
*Sigh*. If you bothered to hover your mouse over his "username", you'd have seen the domain is ".de".
He's in Europe, not the US. Mobile phone topics are totally different, especialy when it comes to providers. Please take at least a fraction of a second to find out something about the submitter.
A quick hover over the submitter's link would have shown he's in Europe. Like most of the rest of the world, Europe uses GSM. Reception for GSM there (here) is far better than the US - because it's the only system in most countries, there are more densely spaced nodes.
An in fact GSM is usually superior for the public - I can travel to any european country, or australia, or new zealand, or africa or the middle east or america and when i land, I turn on my phone and it just works. If I buy a new phone, I dont have to go to my provider and pick from their choice, I can buy one from anyone (in any of the above countries), stick in my SIM card and it works right away (subject to the 3 possible bands, most phones are at least tri-band).
OK, so GSM is a bit more picky in rural areas where you might be many km from a base station, but the freedom you get from GSM tends to outweigh a little spectrum inefficiency. 1.6 billion people use GSM.
Yep, I can agree to this. I'm 30 and in my mid-20's I started getting fatigued and sore forearms (and the top too) after long hours at the keyboard.
After reading around, I decided to change the setup of my desk and chair, and now have my arms comfortably at 90 degrees, instead of having my arms rest against the edge of the desk.
I also bought a wireless notebook mouse, the only Microsoft product I've ever bought. Perfect for my small hands and lets me place the mouse where my arms are. Previously, I made the mistake of moving my hand to where the mouse was...nooo..the mouse should be where your hand is naturally.
Now I have no more problems. Bottom line - RSI and carpal tunnel are not a problem, no matter how long you code for...IF you are in a natural position.
Not as absurd as you think. In this country (Holland) the government just introduced a new health care system very similar to what you say.
Firstly, having health insurance is mandatory. If not you can be fined.
Secondly, the rate is fixed by the government at around $90 per month for a basic coverage for the most common requirements. If you don't earn enough to afford it, the gummit can subsidize for you.
The only real competitive edge each company has is through offering extra insurance bonuses and coverage for a fee.
Good! I for one hope they keep bringing out fanless video cards. It's getting tough to build a quiet PC with just about every card on the market growing various fans on them.
The last time I bought a video card I went out of my way to find a fanless one, and it's good to see they're still be made with passive coolers.
Don't use a relatively "proprietary" crypto then. By proprietary, I mean "highly dependent on the running kernel and system". Linux kernel encryption is tough as it's changing regularly. I've avoided it.
Instead I use Truecrypt which gives kernel level encryption but is far more platform independent, and hence by extension needs to be more stable.
Works via a kernel module, but also the same encrypted "partition" (actually a file or partition) can be read and written to in Linux or Windows. Excellent for dual-booting systems.
And because it's a module independent of the main kernel tree, you're not likely to get caught out when Linus changes the crypto that gets included in the kernel.
Re:Drink the right beer!
on
Green Geek Beer
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, you might be surprised that there's a growing trend for small dedicated breweries in America. I don't drink American beers, but given the population in the states, surely someone is tryign to brew good beer. You'd have to look harder than your local cheap liquor store to find them though.
Anyway, it doesnt have to be widely available in the states to be good. The number one beer in the world, Westvleteren, is only sold in small quantities at the gates of a small monastery in a remote corner of Belgium. That's far from America, but it still gets the title of number one.
So yeah, American beers dominate the list, but any beer in the world can make it to the list if it's good.
Drink the right beer!
on
Green Geek Beer
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Most people associate beer with cheap piss, generally only drinking it as a social lubricant and really ignoring the true flavours of the beer. That's true for just about any mass-produced beer (VB, Fosters, Bud, Miller, Heineken).
Go out and trying a real beer for once, and not just Guinness on St Pats (arguably not that great a beer). Some of the world's greatest beers are quite accessible and will blow your socks off with their complexity and flavour.
Similar to wine coinnoseurs, there are also those who are (mostly self-professed) experts in beer, preferring something good like a trappist beer with their meal to wine, and deservingly so. A properly brewed beer's a lot more interesting to have with a meal than wine, and there's infinitely more variety.
Heineken is not a good beer. Really. In Holland it's considered mediocre. If you see a beer everywhere, then it's mosty likely crap. Stella's pissy too. Budvar, Pilsener Urquell, Hertog Jan...they're ok for lagers.
A coding session's a heck of a lot more enjoyable when combined with a decent brew. But be careful, too good a beer will distract! Some of my best output's come after having a good Belgian.
Seriously. Go down to your nearest large speciality bottle shop/liquor store and find a few bottles of the higher rated beers that you can find. Drink them, out of the proper glassware and at the right temperature then you'll never go back to a macro again. It could get more expensive, but damn it's worth it. A hint - drink light-coloured beers in warmer weather and darker ones in cool weather.
Instead of channels instantly changing it's going to be *buffering* for a couple of seconds every channel I flip. No thanks.
No.
A good IPTV implementation (eg the one we're doing at work) has channel flipping times that are sub-second, comparable to current digital TV. You don't request a connection, wait, wait, buffer, etc. Your (IGMP) request goes only as far as the DSLAM at the end of your DSL line (for TV over DSL) and from there the dslam sends the multicast stream to you directly. Multicast video does not buffer, proper hardware will decode immediately.
Of course, for on-demand services the flip time's a bit longer, but then again if you are watching an on-demand program, you won't be flipping channels with a 1 second delay on each, you will already know what you want to watch.
Despite what people say about shite on TV, the technology is there and is being developed. Broadcasters *can* produce good content (eg BBC), but most don't. Unfortunately most IPTV services are somewhat proprietary, but hopefully a DVB-over-IP standard will emerge and we can all happily watch IPTV services with the set-top box (or PC software) of our choice.
i'm running standard ACPI suspend on a Fujitsu-Siemens S7010 laptop, and suspend at least twice each day (on the way to work and on the way home). Now, despite this:
bb@pepper:~$ uptime
12:43:07 up 18 days, 22:02, 5 users, load average: 0.32, 0.39, 0.32 bb@pepper:~$ uname -a Linux pepper 2.6.15 #3 PREEMPT Fri Jan 27 11:25:50 CET 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
And this is with USB, Wireless, audio, 3D graphics and a multitude of other modules and features, so I consider it to be pretty impressive at the moment. I've not yet really looked at suspend to disk, but to ram is very good so far.
I have a P4 2.4GHz machine (Asus T2 machine) and its cpu will happily throttle down to 300MHz. The kernel 'ondemand' governor does wonders. And my LCD supports DPMS power saving modes, plus disks can be spun down. That's gotta be a good amount of savings in that bunch.
Shame that sleep mode (suspend to ram) doesn't work for me.
I detest him for not having the moral fiber to resign.
I think that without Powell, far greater atrocities would have been caused by the Bush regime that we've seen. He helped minimise damage and clearly was not "with" Bush.
+1 to my dad for knowing that the answering machine did have a computer as a component -100 for thinking that it was susceptible to a virus dialing it up and infecting it
That's what they said about email only a few years back...
#2
If you spilt coffee on you from a restraunt or that you made yourself you would probably not even manage FIRST DEGREE burns These were THIRD degree burns, the kind your more used to seeing from actual fires and not boiling water.
I'm sick of this argument. I've no idea about your lukewarm coffee, but coffee is supposed to be served at near boiling point. 96 degrees is going to give anyone third degree burns, so this is something that should be expected. The last time I had a coffee at McDonalds, it was ridiculously cold, and anyone who claims that serving it at 90 degrees+ just doesn't know what coffee is.
For the ultimate SSH tunnel (not limited by TCP ports and the like), it's actually possible to run a full PPP session over an SSH tunnel. As ssh can act as a pseudo-tty to the other end, ppp will happily communicate over it.
All you need are compatible pppd configs on each endpoint box (by this I mean they're setup that when they talk they authenticate and give IP addresses, etc), and tell pppd to use ssh as the serial link.
The magic line in your pppd configuration (/etc/ppp/peers/) is:
You might want to run this from a terminal or use key based ssh authentication as you may have to deal with entering passwords, but overall it's quite impressive.
No need to screw around with IPSec and other crap - as it runs over ssh, it's encrypted anyway.
I've now got a full IP tunnel back to my home network (suitably protected with iptables), and can run stuff that's normally impossible behind a 'tcp only' work firewall. My SIP clients even connect and I'm able to take and make calls with my home Asterisk box.
Drop me a mail if you want more details. I should probably write a proper howto on this because it's so useful.
And don't get me started about Europe where even mentioning events that happened 70-60 years ago is illegal. You didn't mention where you are from, but I'm sure there people are also bound to get offended by some innocent remark.
I live in Holland, and here it's very hard to offend someone. Generally, no matter what you say, you're simply someone with a different view. I don't know of any country in the EU where it's illegal to discuss something from the WWII era, only Germany where denying the holocaust is illegal. Only the most bizaare things could offend (or perhaps doing the goose-step in a german street), but in Holland no one knew what the deal was with this walmark cockup until Americans clarified it.
Going on a tangent here...I saw the Austin Powers movie Goldmember here, and laughed out loud (I'm not actually Dutch) at the portrayal of the Dutch Goldmember. The cloggies in the cinema didn't really laugh, but also they weren't offended by it (I was kinda surprised that they weren't ), but instead they just saw it as "stupid hollywood they're mistaken". I mentioned to some Dutch colleagues how I found some of the dutch stereotypes funny, and they weren't offended. Only not really amused.
How can a computer "know" that, for instance, Planet of the Apes has a similar idea, or whatever you wish to call it, as Martin Luther King? It hasn't watched the movie, certainly. It doesn't know the history. How can it make such a link?
The computer doesnt "know". It bases recommendations on things such as what other buyers bought or looked at, or perhaps it even looks into the description of the movie and looks for connections with other film descriptions.
In this case, the program probably connected something about 'enslaved' and 'struggle for freedom' in the POTA description, with something about slavery and freedom in the MLK documentary.
Put two and two togetherm, and you've got an appropriate link.
I suspect the problem with all this has to do with the title. If POTA had instead been called something like "The struggle for freedom from opression" then walmart wouldnt do this racist act of dropping the connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Use of open standards for office document exchange.
The ministerial department has decided upon the open standard format to be used for the exchange of office documents.
Minister Vanvelthoven: 'The format of office documents such as text documents and spreadsheets is currently based primarily on popular office suites such as Microsoft Office and Corel Wordperfect Office. Documents produced by these products can usually only be read by those products. When you need to exchange documents with someone else, you're also forcing them to use the same software that the document was made with.'
To reduce the dependencies on these proprietary formats, we need to make use of open standard formats. XML is a standard for the exchange of information between diverse computer systems; an XML based document is thus guaranteed to have long term accessibility to the information within.
The OpenDocument Format (ODF) is an XML based document format that is approved by the ISO (International Standards Organisation). Hence we propose to to settle on the use of ODF as the standard format for the exchange of office documents such as from word processors, spreadsheets, presentations, as soon as it's approved by the ISO.
All federal government departments must be able to read ODF documents by September 2007. This doesn't exclude the use of other formats. The responsibility of guaranteeing readability is up to the relevent departments.
Depending on the result of a [federal ICT dept] managed impact analysis, from September 2008 the official format for the exchange of office documents will be ODF.
PS. This is probably the only time I will ever watch a soccer event.
Interestingly, I was in the same boat as you until a couple of years ago. As a die-hard geek, I could never see what the point was with soccer, until my girlfriend introduced it to me (read it twice if you have to, yes I was introduced by a girl).
Then I discovered that it's a wonderful game, able to scale from a few kids kicking around a rolled up sock all the way to massive international games of skill. Having a game that can be played by such a wide range of players is quite amazing. Many other sports require significant hardware outlay (American gridiron's a big culprit), but soccer runs on any hardware and is usable in any scale (analogous to Linux scaling from a home adsl router all the way to google)
Also the strategy required is almost mathematical, requiring careful player positioning and analysis of the opposing team, whilst also including elements of trigonometry.
Of course the commercial aspects are somewhat disagreeable (I'm not swayed by the adver^H^H^H^H^Hsponsors), but the game itself is good.
It only samples a very small demographic: people who want to be monitored.
And these are the people they're after. If you're concerned about privacy and not wanting your viewing habits watched, then you're probably too smart to be swayed by TV advertising anyway.
What Wikipedia should do is have an editor branch for each article. All editing would occur on the normal branch of an article by everyone (as is done now with non-locked articles). Whenever the article reaches a good stable point, as agreed on by community discussions, then an editor would be invited (if not participating already) to merge a requested version of the normal branch onto the editor branch. Editors would consist of "trusted" users, picked by some sensible criteria.
Something along these lines would be a good idea, but needs to be tweaked to not let some editor's holiday end up with an article remaining out of date.
The problem I've seen several times in WP is that an article which once was good enough to reach featured article status gradually becomes inconsistent, even though the topic itself might be static. This is a shortcoming of WP that really needs to be addressed.
I assume that you're in the United States.
//gripe
*Sigh*. If you bothered to hover your mouse over his "username", you'd have seen the domain is ".de".
He's in Europe, not the US. Mobile phone topics are totally different, especialy when it comes to providers. Please take at least a fraction of a second to find out something about the submitter.
(Yeah yeah slashdot, it's post-before-read-etc.)
A quick hover over the submitter's link would have shown he's in Europe. Like most of the rest of the world, Europe uses GSM. Reception for GSM there (here) is far better than the US - because it's the only system in most countries, there are more densely spaced nodes.
An in fact GSM is usually superior for the public - I can travel to any european country, or australia, or new zealand, or africa or the middle east or america and when i land, I turn on my phone and it just works. If I buy a new phone, I dont have to go to my provider and pick from their choice, I can buy one from anyone (in any of the above countries), stick in my SIM card and it works right away (subject to the 3 possible bands, most phones are at least tri-band).
OK, so GSM is a bit more picky in rural areas where you might be many km from a base station, but the freedom you get from GSM tends to outweigh a little spectrum inefficiency. 1.6 billion people use GSM.
Yep, I can agree to this. I'm 30 and in my mid-20's I started getting fatigued and sore forearms (and the top too) after long hours at the keyboard.
After reading around, I decided to change the setup of my desk and chair, and now have my arms comfortably at 90 degrees, instead of having my arms rest against the edge of the desk.
I also bought a wireless
notebook mouse, the only Microsoft product I've ever bought. Perfect for my small hands and lets me place the mouse where my arms are. Previously, I made the mistake of moving my hand to where the mouse was...nooo..the mouse should be where your hand is naturally.
Now I have no more problems. Bottom line - RSI and carpal tunnel are not a problem, no matter how long you code for...IF you are in a natural position.
Question:
Does this cover vendors of complete systems only (eg Dell) or also component vendors (ie can I recycle bits of computers I built myself)?
Not as absurd as you think. In this country (Holland) the government just introduced a new health care system very similar to what you say.
Firstly, having health insurance is mandatory. If not you can be fined.
Secondly, the rate is fixed by the government at around $90 per month for a basic coverage for the most common requirements. If you don't earn enough to afford it, the gummit can subsidize for you.
The only real competitive edge each company has is through offering extra insurance bonuses and coverage for a fee.
It will be interesting to see how it goes...
Good! I for one hope they keep bringing out fanless video cards. It's getting tough to build a quiet PC with just about every card on the market growing various fans on them.
The last time I bought a video card I went out of my way to find a fanless one, and it's good to see they're still be made with passive coolers.
Don't use a relatively "proprietary" crypto then. By proprietary, I mean "highly dependent on the running kernel and system". Linux kernel encryption is tough as it's changing regularly. I've avoided it.
Instead I use Truecrypt which gives kernel level encryption but is far more platform independent, and hence by extension needs to be more stable.
Works via a kernel module, but also the same encrypted "partition" (actually a file or partition) can be read and written to in Linux or Windows. Excellent for dual-booting systems.
And because it's a module independent of the main kernel tree, you're not likely to get caught out when Linus changes the crypto that gets included in the kernel.
Actually, you might be surprised that there's a growing trend for small dedicated breweries in America. I don't drink American beers, but given the population in the states, surely someone is tryign to brew good beer. You'd have to look harder than your local cheap liquor store to find them though.
Anyway, it doesnt have to be widely available in the states to be good. The number one beer in the world, Westvleteren, is only sold in small quantities at the gates of a small monastery in a remote corner of Belgium. That's far from America, but it still gets the title of number one.
So yeah, American beers dominate the list, but any beer in the world can make it to the list if it's good.
Most people associate beer with cheap piss, generally only drinking it as a social lubricant and really ignoring the true flavours of the beer. That's true for just about any mass-produced beer (VB, Fosters, Bud, Miller, Heineken).
Go out and trying a real beer for once, and not just Guinness on St Pats (arguably not that great a beer). Some of the world's greatest beers are quite accessible and will blow your socks off with their complexity and flavour.
Similar to wine coinnoseurs, there are also those who are (mostly self-professed) experts in beer, preferring something good like a trappist beer with their meal to wine, and deservingly so. A properly brewed beer's a lot more interesting to have with a meal than wine, and there's infinitely more variety.
Heineken is not a good beer. Really. In Holland it's considered mediocre. If you see a beer everywhere, then it's mosty likely crap. Stella's pissy too. Budvar, Pilsener Urquell, Hertog Jan...they're ok for lagers.
A coding session's a heck of a lot more enjoyable when combined with a decent brew. But be careful, too good a beer will distract! Some of my best output's come after having a good Belgian.
Seriously. Go down to your nearest large speciality bottle shop/liquor store and find a few bottles of the higher rated beers that you can find. Drink them, out of the proper glassware and at the right temperature then you'll never go back to a macro again. It could get more expensive, but damn it's worth it. A hint - drink light-coloured beers in warmer weather and darker ones in cool weather.
And then you can have good beer all the time.
Instead of channels instantly changing it's going to be *buffering* for a couple of seconds every channel I flip. No thanks.
No.
A good IPTV implementation (eg the one we're doing at work) has channel flipping times that are sub-second, comparable to current digital TV. You don't request a connection, wait, wait, buffer, etc. Your (IGMP) request goes only as far as the DSLAM at the end of your DSL line (for TV over DSL) and from there the dslam sends the multicast stream to you directly. Multicast video does not buffer, proper hardware will decode immediately.
Of course, for on-demand services the flip time's a bit longer, but then again if you are watching an on-demand program, you won't be flipping channels with a 1 second delay on each, you will already know what you want to watch.
Despite what people say about shite on TV, the technology is there and is being developed. Broadcasters *can* produce good content (eg BBC), but most don't. Unfortunately most IPTV services are somewhat proprietary, but hopefully a DVB-over-IP standard will emerge and we can all happily watch IPTV services with the set-top box (or PC software) of our choice.
It's not that bad!
i'm running standard ACPI suspend on a Fujitsu-Siemens S7010 laptop, and suspend at least twice each day (on the way to work and on the way home). Now, despite this:
bb@pepper:~$ uptime
12:43:07 up 18 days, 22:02, 5 users, load average: 0.32, 0.39, 0.32
bb@pepper:~$ uname -a
Linux pepper 2.6.15 #3 PREEMPT Fri Jan 27 11:25:50 CET 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
And this is with USB, Wireless, audio, 3D graphics and a multitude of other modules and features, so I consider it to be pretty impressive at the moment. I've not yet really looked at suspend to disk, but to ram is very good so far.
Great choice of topic and its associated logo :) I dont reckon you can get more appropriate!
1000 years from now even people will be controlled by slime. This is just the start! Resist the slime!
I have a P4 2.4GHz machine (Asus T2 machine) and its cpu will happily throttle down to 300MHz. The kernel 'ondemand' governor does wonders. And my LCD supports DPMS power saving modes, plus disks can be spun down. That's gotta be a good amount of savings in that bunch.
Shame that sleep mode (suspend to ram) doesn't work for me.
I think that without Powell, far greater atrocities would have been caused by the Bush regime that we've seen. He helped minimise damage and clearly was not "with" Bush.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
That's what they said about email only a few years back...
I'm sick of this argument. I've no idea about your lukewarm coffee, but coffee is supposed to be served at near boiling point. 96 degrees is going to give anyone third degree burns, so this is something that should be expected. The last time I had a coffee at McDonalds, it was ridiculously cold, and anyone who claims that serving it at 90 degrees+ just doesn't know what coffee is.
For the ultimate SSH tunnel (not limited by TCP ports and the like), it's actually possible to run a full PPP session over an SSH tunnel. As ssh can act as a pseudo-tty to the other end, ppp will happily communicate over it.
/usr/sbin/pppd passive"
All you need are compatible pppd configs on each endpoint box (by this I mean they're setup that when they talk they authenticate and give IP addresses, etc), and tell pppd to use ssh as the serial link.
The magic line in your pppd configuration (/etc/ppp/peers/) is:
pty "/usr/bin/ssh -e none -c blowfish -t -X -l
You might want to run this from a terminal or use key based ssh authentication as you may have to deal with entering passwords, but overall it's quite impressive.
No need to screw around with IPSec and other crap - as it runs over ssh, it's encrypted anyway.
I've now got a full IP tunnel back to my home network (suitably protected with iptables), and can run stuff that's normally impossible behind a 'tcp only' work firewall. My SIP clients even connect and I'm able to take and make calls with my home Asterisk box.
Drop me a mail if you want more details. I should probably write a proper howto on this because it's so useful.
People often make this comparison: "XXX is dirtier than a toilet seat!"
Very bad comparison. Toilet seats are generally disinfected quite often, so should in fact be pretty clean. Keyboards are not disinfected.
Many things are dirtier than a toilet seat. Especially things that get fingers on them all day long. Engage brain and it all becomes quite obvious.
I live in Holland, and here it's very hard to offend someone. Generally, no matter what you say, you're simply someone with a different view. I don't know of any country in the EU where it's illegal to discuss something from the WWII era, only Germany where denying the holocaust is illegal. Only the most bizaare things could offend (or perhaps doing the goose-step in a german street), but in Holland no one knew what the deal was with this walmark cockup until Americans clarified it.
Going on a tangent here...I saw the Austin Powers movie Goldmember here, and laughed out loud (I'm not actually Dutch) at the portrayal of the Dutch Goldmember. The cloggies in the cinema didn't really laugh, but also they weren't offended by it (I was kinda surprised that they weren't ), but instead they just saw it as "stupid hollywood they're mistaken". I mentioned to some Dutch colleagues how I found some of the dutch stereotypes funny, and they weren't offended. Only not really amused.
The computer doesnt "know". It bases recommendations on things such as what other buyers bought or looked at, or perhaps it even looks into the description of the movie and looks for connections with other film descriptions.
In this case, the program probably connected something about 'enslaved' and 'struggle for freedom' in the POTA description, with something about slavery and freedom in the MLK documentary.
Put two and two togetherm, and you've got an appropriate link.
I suspect the problem with all this has to do with the title. If POTA had instead been called something like "The struggle for freedom from opression" then walmart wouldnt do this racist act of dropping the connection.