Just today I saw KDE goes wild on an SLES9SP2 system and nearly freeze it - the same fucking thing that used to happen back in 2000. Five years past by and not much has changed.
I am just wanting to know if there is going to be a point in my lifetime that I will convert to something other than DVD unless I am forced....why convert to a new format so soon after DVD?
To fit all architectures of your favorite Linux distribution on a single disc?
(Assuming your favorite isn't among those that already do.)
Thats an interesting point of view. If I understand you, you don't believe that a creator should have any say in how his work is redistributed. Once it's published and you have legally attained a copy, you think the creator should have no say in how or if you copy and redistribute it?
Just to play devil's advocate: what's wrong with that point of view? What gives the creator of a work a say in the distribution of that work? Copyright does. What is copyright? An agreement between society and a creator that gives a creator extra rights over their work for a limited time, in exchange for which the creator shares that work with society.
I had an interesting conversation with an author once on this topic. He believed that he had a natural right to own what he wrote. Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to explore why that was.
I assume then, you would be OK with me using modified GPL'd code in a closed source app, without making the source code available? After all, if they didn't want it stolen, they shouldn't have published it, right?
Richard M. Stallman eloquently addressed this precise situation in an interview discussed here a few days ago. He said, paraphrased, that we should obey copyright laws because they are the law, but we should obey the GPL because it is the morally correct thing to do.
Damn uptight americans. What exactly is harassing about that photo?:-/
My understanding is that the primary objection to the photo came from people who wanted to deploy Ubuntu in conservative Muslim countries. I've read of similar disputes on wikipedia, where some cultures would prefer to have non-illustrated articles about certain body parts, and some people say that wikipedia should try to be a useful tool to those cultures by meeting their standards of decency, even if those standards aren't the same as "ours".
I didn't see anything on the Ubuntu image that would be objectionable to a typical American ultraconservative. It's less skin than you'd see at the beach.
It may have been a matter of poor word choice on my part, but what I was thinking of when I wrote "content to be ruled" was people who don't care about who rules them. Some people believe that ordinary people are better off just trying to stay out of the way of the powerful. Those who think that most people should be prohibited from participating in their government are in the "people shouldn't have the means to revolt" camp. This doesn't mean that that particular belief of theirs is wrong, but it makes me more cautious about endorsing it.
I would be content to be governed by just about any type of government, if it were a good government, but the most effective forms of government also carry the most risk. Perhaps today there is a good dictator who governs fairly and accomplishes much good, but in the next generation there may be a bad dictator who causes many problems. It seems like the most practical solution is to limit the size and power of government, to decrease the impact of mistakes or mismanagement. But that's another discussion.
As other posters have said, those who use guns in illegal or immoral ways are not going to be restrained by gun laws.
Yes, they are, simply because it's much harder for them to get a gun.
Perhaps that would be the case if you started from a situation where there were few guns, but that's not the case in my country. In addition, in cases where guns have been hard to come by, the criminal element simply resorts to using other weapons, which increases the imbalance of power between criminals and victims. The end result of this "reverse arms race" is that physical prowess will once again allow a criminal to impose their will on an innocent victim.
Firearms allow the weak to stand up to the strong; by making use of force less practical, they encourage discussion and peaceful behavior.
Right, threatening to use a gun is peaceful behavior and encourages discussion.
No, the increased odds of a potential victim having a gun dissuades borderline criminals and is an obstacle to the unrestricted use of force against strangers. There is a no doubt apocryphal story about an epidemic of carjackings in the Washington DC area a few years ago that only targetted cars with Maryland license plates, because Maryland has strict gun control laws and Virginia has liberal concealed carry laws. I don't know to what extent that actually happened, but the principle that the story illustrates is a valid one: it is easier for a criminal to prey on the unarmed than on the armed.
Guns are not a magic elixir that solves the problem of crime. What they are is an equalizer; they have a high ratio of effectiveness to training required, and they are usable by a wide range of people (you don't have to be an athlete to be competent at using a firearm.) As somebody who's not especially athletic, I really appreciate the fact that should I need to, I can acquire a tool to defend myself against those who otherwise would easily be able to overpower me.
Then there's the political aspect, which is a lot more debatable. It can be argued that it is desirable from a political point of view to have a heavily armed populace, because it makes it easier for them to overthrow the government if that should become necessary (and reduces the chances of it being necessary in the first place.) Among those who disagree with this view are those who feel that people should be content to be ruled, which is a very distasteful concept to me. Nevertheless, I remain agnostic about that one. I wouldn't mind seeing a good debate about it.
There are much better ways to empower the weak.
And by all means, we should do those things. I am weak; in what way should I be empowered to defend myself against a home invasion? My preferred hand-to-hand combat tools, running shoes, are not very useful in that situation.
Uses considered legitimate for guns, like hunting, are generally accomodated by countries that ban guns.
That is to their credit, but the grandparent of my earlier post was talking about the banning of legitimate hunting weapons because they could also be used by snipers, and your post that I responded to did not mention such enlightened exceptions. It made an absolute statement: "a gun is a tool designed for the sole purpose of killing people."
As for people 'needing to kill people', it is true that occasionally people get attacked and the only way they have to defend themselves is to kill (though this does not happen often to the average person!). But this kind of event is pretty rare for people in most countries (except for a few, like South Africa or the parts of the United States). To say that we should all be running around with killing devices just in case we get lethally attacked is nonsense. Particularly when those who are much more likely to find a use for their gun are those who are going to do it in a way that is not in self-defence.
It is not the place of you or I to decide for someone else that their odds of being attacked are low enough that they should be deprived of an effective means of self-defense. I live in a relatively low-crime area and do not own a firearm, but far be it from me to impose my belief on you, who might live in completely different circumstances. I don't think we should all be running around with guns, but I don't object to as many people as want to learn how to safely and correctly use guns running around with them. As other posters have said, those who use guns in illegal or immoral ways are not going to be restrained by gun laws.
Firearms allow the weak to stand up to the strong; by making use of force less practical, they encourage discussion and peaceful behavior.
Likewise, while mobile phones, rucksacks, and bandanas all have a primary purpose which has nothing to do with killing people, a gun is a tool designed for the sole purpose of killing people.
Nonsense. A significant number of guns are designed for hunting animals or for target shooting. There are lots of technological enhancements for making a firearm more effective at killing people (such as large magazines and automatic fire) that these devices do not implement.
Furthermore, just because a firearm is designed to kill people is not sufficient reason to ban it, because ordinary everyday people do sometimes need to kill someone. Ideally those situations would never arise, but we do not live in an ideal world. We can quibble about specifics all day long, such as "under what circumstances is it ok to kill someone" or "how much firepower is necessary to kill someone under the circumstances described in the earlier question" or "how to solve the problem of insufficient firearms training" or "how to decrease violent crime", but those are side issues (except to the pacifist; but while the pacifist's views are admirable on a personal level, they are not viable on a societal level unless everyone else is also a pacifist.)
What's the point of a Debian derivative like Ubuntu? Since you use it, can you explain?
Debian wants (among other things) to support a large number of programs on a large number of platforms, and this results in a longer release cycle. Ubuntu wants to offer most of what Debian does, but is willing to limit the number of programs and platforms (and is willing to hire developers) in order to achieve a faster release cycle. They also want something corporate-friendly, so they emphasize usability and have picked a pretty good default set of programs.
Supposedly, Ubuntu has more newbie-friendly forums.
I use both; for me, Ubuntu on the desktop has hit that sweet spot between not forcing me to tinker and not getting in the way of my tinkering.
Wouldn't it be better if the people working on Ubuntu devoted their energies to Debian instead?
Lots of Ubuntu improvements do make it back to Debian; the two are still very similar under the hood. Ubuntu might even result in a net gain to Debian, by virtue of the fact that Canonical is employing so many people to work on it who otherwise might be working on other things.
I think the first argument was that removing restrictions on campaign contributions won't create a situation where politicians take bribes, because that situation already exists. The second argument was that local politicians should have more power, because they are more likely to get away with being bribed.
I don't necessarily agree, but that's what your parent poster said.
Don't forget about Israel, which has had democratic elections for a few decades now. For a time it was the only place in the Middle East where Arabs could vote freely.
DRM is the compromise the consumer makes to have available to them a quality digital version of a work. Without DRM, there is no incentive for the artist to provide the digital version, as DRM'less digital versions can be immediately redistributed.
Less incentive? Sure. Necessary to perpetuate the current content distribution paradigm? Sure. But no incentive? None at all? Without DRM, nobody would ever create any digital content?
A good DRM scheme is one where the consumer's ability to use the work in the manner they wish isn't impacted while the ability to simply redistribute millions of copies is curtailed.
"Good" DRM appears to be impossible, or at least not invented yet, by my standards. Here's how I wish to use digital media: I want to store it on my file server and access it on whatever device I happen to be sitting in front of at the moment. I want to be able to access it with a variety of programs, and when it's out of copyright (I'm an optimist) I want to be able to manipulate it to my heart's content with a variety of tools that I'm able to apt-get (or write myself, if I'm ever so inclined.) I want to be able to access it locally even when my internet connection is down, and even when the content provider I acquired it from goes out of business / stops making content / decides they don't want me to access the content any more. (I don't enter into contracts that give the content provider that power.)
Tivo + Slingbox is close. MythTV is close. CD music has been there for years.
The problem is that the VAR in question put up an already trojaned copy. If you checked the sums against VAR sums, they would have matched.
Correct, that is the problem in this situation.
And I never said a central authority means you are getting a clean build. I said that without one you cannot guarantee you are getting a clean build.
Yup, my mistake. Looks like I just did the same thing that I accused you of doing.
The point was again, and I was the one who made it (a couple posts up now) that the claims that Mozilla patches within 24 hours aren't really useful to most people, because the first thing that most people need to be concerned with is getting a clean build. Then it's important that every possible bug be patched, after that.
That does sound like an interesting conversation to have, but it's not related to my reply to chill.
It doesn't look that bad. The only green on green was visited links in the menu on the left, and it was a bright green on dark green, which isn't hard to see at all. The blue on dark green was more annoying to me, but the white on greenish-background of the main content of each page was easily visible. It avoids the stuff I dislike most about ugly web pages: movement/change.
Oh right, because they are producing scientific papers and have to use LaTeX. WYSIWYM is better than using notepad...
Personally, I prefer vim for my LaTeX formatting needs, though I've been meaning to give LyX a try.
That is the ideal towards which scientists are supposed to aspire, yes. Some of them probably achieve it, but they're in for a rough ride if they happen to discover something that disagrees with the dogma of their area of specialization.
The sums only check to be sure you got what the VAR sent. It doesn't mean it is clean.
No one has claimed that it does.
My point here, which you missed twice is that without a central patching/release authority, there is no way to have users be sure they are getting a safe build.
That point has nothing to do with this subthread. (And it's wrong: a central patching/release authority does not guarantee a safe build.) My point, which you missed twice, is that an md5sum is useful because it sometimes identifies cases where you have downloaded an altered file. User "chill" asked "How do MD5 sums protect you from trojaned software?" I answered: they protect you from some instances of trojaned software by identifying those instances. (Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.) Whether or not an md5sum provides total protection from all trojans, or whether or not an md5sum goes to the fridge to fetch you a beer, doesn't affect that answer. Those are separate considerations.
(For the record: no, an md5sum does not provide total protection from trojans, and no, an md5sum will not fetch you a beer from the fridge.)
Regardless of the end result:
GOOGLE IS COPYING THE WORK IN IT'S ENTIRETY AND STORING IT ON THEIR SERVERS.
This illustrates a discrepancy between what is legal and what is right. It is often the case that when a computer is involved, actual use of a copyrighted work involves making an illegal copy of that copyrighted work from its original media to the computer's hard drive and from there, to and from different types of memory present in the computer. Sometimes these copies occur across a network (for example, if you happen to store your files on a file server); sometimes there are multiple simultaneous copies (hard disk, hard disk cache, filesystem cache, application memory, etc.)
When ordinary everyday use of legally acquired copyrighted material infringes copyright, the law needs to be fixed.
Something similar to that is what's happening in this case. I don't know how the court will rule, but it's clear that Google's new book indexing service provides a tremendous benefit to the members of the Authors Guild, who thanks to Google will make more money and be more encouraged to create future works. Google's new service results in the same thing that copyright law itself is designed to result in, and yet, a case can be made that Google is violating copyright law. How messed up is that?
Nothing stops a VAR from providing an md5sum for their patch, which allows their customers to verify the integrity of the downloaded patch. If the VAR provided a repackaged version of Mozilla to begin with, then the md5sum of that package never did match the md5sum of the official Mozilla release. You get the md5sum to compare to from the party that released the package in question. If it claims to be an official Mozilla package, then you look to Mozilla for the md5sum. If it claims to be a VAR's package, then you look to the VAR for the md5sum.
So if a VAR were to want to "do the right thing" and patch immediately, as open source allows you to do, they then open up their customers to trojan problems because the md5sums don't match the Mozilla site anymore.
What could possibly cause someone to think that the md5sums should match after applying a third party patch? How does providing a third party patch make a VAR's customer more vulnerable to trojan problems? Why would a customer repackage Mozilla after adding the third party patch and then compare the repackaged version to the md5sum of the official Mozilla package on Mozilla's site?
Enlighten me. How do MD5 sums protect you from trojaned software?
They provide one way for you to discover if the file you downloaded is different from the official release on the official site. As your parent poster noted, this is not always sufficient to protect you from trojaned software, but under some circumstances it does alert you to the fact that you don't have the correct file.
Here's an example: say that you want to download foo.tar.gz. The main ftp site is too slow, so you download from a faster mirror site. When you finish downloading, you compare the md5sum of the file you downloaded to the md5sum that you got from the project's web site. If they're different, then you know not to install the file you've downloaded.
Note that this is not the scenario described by the article. You're correct that it is possible for the site maintainer to provide the md5sum (or digital signature) of a corrupted binary, but this doesn't eliminate the usefulness of md5sum under other circumstances.
Everyone is assuming that man is the cause of what may be the warming of the earth...
Strictly speaking, not everybody is assuming that. Those with a political motivation for assuming so often assume that, and those with a political motivation to assume the opposite often assume the opposite. Those not inclined to let their political inclinations determine their opinion (which includes those cynical enough to see past their political idealism) are a mixed lot. The environment is such a politicized issue that it's hard to take a sensible position without being shouted down by one group of zealots or another. "Obviously mankind couldn't possibly cause global warming" vs "Obviously if we hadn't elected Bush, global warming wouldn't be a problem today."
I, for one, am agnostic about how much mankind has contributed to the current bout of global warming, though I am attracted to some aspects of environmentalism or conservationism for quality of life reasons (I prefer to breathe clean air, etc.)
That sounds like a tautology. People willing to be taught to change their behavior to avoid offending someone are more likely to seem conformist than people who don't care whether their everyday talk offends someone. If someone is willing to conform, then of course that makes them more likely to be conformist. If a person can't be trained, then you can't train them to question authority.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of email server uses a GUI?
To fit all architectures of your favorite Linux distribution on a single disc?
(Assuming your favorite isn't among those that already do.)
Just to play devil's advocate: what's wrong with that point of view? What gives the creator of a work a say in the distribution of that work? Copyright does. What is copyright? An agreement between society and a creator that gives a creator extra rights over their work for a limited time, in exchange for which the creator shares that work with society.
I had an interesting conversation with an author once on this topic. He believed that he had a natural right to own what he wrote. Unfortunately, we didn't get the chance to explore why that was.
Richard M. Stallman eloquently addressed this precise situation in an interview discussed here a few days ago. He said, paraphrased, that we should obey copyright laws because they are the law, but we should obey the GPL because it is the morally correct thing to do.
Is that the truth?
My understanding is that the primary objection to the photo came from people who wanted to deploy Ubuntu in conservative Muslim countries. I've read of similar disputes on wikipedia, where some cultures would prefer to have non-illustrated articles about certain body parts, and some people say that wikipedia should try to be a useful tool to those cultures by meeting their standards of decency, even if those standards aren't the same as "ours".
I didn't see anything on the Ubuntu image that would be objectionable to a typical American ultraconservative. It's less skin than you'd see at the beach.
I would be content to be governed by just about any type of government, if it were a good government, but the most effective forms of government also carry the most risk. Perhaps today there is a good dictator who governs fairly and accomplishes much good, but in the next generation there may be a bad dictator who causes many problems. It seems like the most practical solution is to limit the size and power of government, to decrease the impact of mistakes or mismanagement. But that's another discussion.
Perhaps they thought that the story was about actor Kelsey Grammer.
Perhaps that would be the case if you started from a situation where there were few guns, but that's not the case in my country. In addition, in cases where guns have been hard to come by, the criminal element simply resorts to using other weapons, which increases the imbalance of power between criminals and victims. The end result of this "reverse arms race" is that physical prowess will once again allow a criminal to impose their will on an innocent victim.
No, the increased odds of a potential victim having a gun dissuades borderline criminals and is an obstacle to the unrestricted use of force against strangers. There is a no doubt apocryphal story about an epidemic of carjackings in the Washington DC area a few years ago that only targetted cars with Maryland license plates, because Maryland has strict gun control laws and Virginia has liberal concealed carry laws. I don't know to what extent that actually happened, but the principle that the story illustrates is a valid one: it is easier for a criminal to prey on the unarmed than on the armed.
Guns are not a magic elixir that solves the problem of crime. What they are is an equalizer; they have a high ratio of effectiveness to training required, and they are usable by a wide range of people (you don't have to be an athlete to be competent at using a firearm.) As somebody who's not especially athletic, I really appreciate the fact that should I need to, I can acquire a tool to defend myself against those who otherwise would easily be able to overpower me.
Then there's the political aspect, which is a lot more debatable. It can be argued that it is desirable from a political point of view to have a heavily armed populace, because it makes it easier for them to overthrow the government if that should become necessary (and reduces the chances of it being necessary in the first place.) Among those who disagree with this view are those who feel that people should be content to be ruled, which is a very distasteful concept to me. Nevertheless, I remain agnostic about that one. I wouldn't mind seeing a good debate about it.
And by all means, we should do those things. I am weak; in what way should I be empowered to defend myself against a home invasion? My preferred hand-to-hand combat tools, running shoes, are not very useful in that situation.
Again, I don't see anyone suggesting that anyone should be allowed to take or give bribes.
That is to their credit, but the grandparent of my earlier post was talking about the banning of legitimate hunting weapons because they could also be used by snipers, and your post that I responded to did not mention such enlightened exceptions. It made an absolute statement: "a gun is a tool designed for the sole purpose of killing people."
It is not the place of you or I to decide for someone else that their odds of being attacked are low enough that they should be deprived of an effective means of self-defense. I live in a relatively low-crime area and do not own a firearm, but far be it from me to impose my belief on you, who might live in completely different circumstances. I don't think we should all be running around with guns, but I don't object to as many people as want to learn how to safely and correctly use guns running around with them. As other posters have said, those who use guns in illegal or immoral ways are not going to be restrained by gun laws.
Firearms allow the weak to stand up to the strong; by making use of force less practical, they encourage discussion and peaceful behavior.
Nonsense. A significant number of guns are designed for hunting animals or for target shooting. There are lots of technological enhancements for making a firearm more effective at killing people (such as large magazines and automatic fire) that these devices do not implement.
Furthermore, just because a firearm is designed to kill people is not sufficient reason to ban it, because ordinary everyday people do sometimes need to kill someone. Ideally those situations would never arise, but we do not live in an ideal world. We can quibble about specifics all day long, such as "under what circumstances is it ok to kill someone" or "how much firepower is necessary to kill someone under the circumstances described in the earlier question" or "how to solve the problem of insufficient firearms training" or "how to decrease violent crime", but those are side issues (except to the pacifist; but while the pacifist's views are admirable on a personal level, they are not viable on a societal level unless everyone else is also a pacifist.)
Debian wants (among other things) to support a large number of programs on a large number of platforms, and this results in a longer release cycle. Ubuntu wants to offer most of what Debian does, but is willing to limit the number of programs and platforms (and is willing to hire developers) in order to achieve a faster release cycle. They also want something corporate-friendly, so they emphasize usability and have picked a pretty good default set of programs.
Supposedly, Ubuntu has more newbie-friendly forums.
I use both; for me, Ubuntu on the desktop has hit that sweet spot between not forcing me to tinker and not getting in the way of my tinkering.
Lots of Ubuntu improvements do make it back to Debian; the two are still very similar under the hood. Ubuntu might even result in a net gain to Debian, by virtue of the fact that Canonical is employing so many people to work on it who otherwise might be working on other things.
I don't necessarily agree, but that's what your parent poster said.
Don't forget about Israel, which has had democratic elections for a few decades now. For a time it was the only place in the Middle East where Arabs could vote freely.
Less incentive? Sure. Necessary to perpetuate the current content distribution paradigm? Sure. But no incentive? None at all? Without DRM, nobody would ever create any digital content?
That's a stretch. See http://www.bradsucks.net/ for a counterexample.
"Good" DRM appears to be impossible, or at least not invented yet, by my standards. Here's how I wish to use digital media: I want to store it on my file server and access it on whatever device I happen to be sitting in front of at the moment. I want to be able to access it with a variety of programs, and when it's out of copyright (I'm an optimist) I want to be able to manipulate it to my heart's content with a variety of tools that I'm able to apt-get (or write myself, if I'm ever so inclined.) I want to be able to access it locally even when my internet connection is down, and even when the content provider I acquired it from goes out of business / stops making content / decides they don't want me to access the content any more. (I don't enter into contracts that give the content provider that power.)
Tivo + Slingbox is close. MythTV is close. CD music has been there for years.
Correct, that is the problem in this situation.
And I never said a central authority means you are getting a clean build. I said that without one you cannot guarantee you are getting a clean build.
Yup, my mistake. Looks like I just did the same thing that I accused you of doing.
The point was again, and I was the one who made it (a couple posts up now) that the claims that Mozilla patches within 24 hours aren't really useful to most people, because the first thing that most people need to be concerned with is getting a clean build. Then it's important that every possible bug be patched, after that.
That does sound like an interesting conversation to have, but it's not related to my reply to chill.
That's a pretty harsh thing to say about all the people you know. Yikes.
It doesn't look that bad. The only green on green was visited links in the menu on the left, and it was a bright green on dark green, which isn't hard to see at all. The blue on dark green was more annoying to me, but the white on greenish-background of the main content of each page was easily visible. It avoids the stuff I dislike most about ugly web pages: movement/change.
Personally, I prefer vim for my LaTeX formatting needs, though I've been meaning to give LyX a try.
That is the ideal towards which scientists are supposed to aspire, yes. Some of them probably achieve it, but they're in for a rough ride if they happen to discover something that disagrees with the dogma of their area of specialization.
No one has claimed that it does.
My point here, which you missed twice is that without a central patching/release authority, there is no way to have users be sure they are getting a safe build.
That point has nothing to do with this subthread. (And it's wrong: a central patching/release authority does not guarantee a safe build.) My point, which you missed twice, is that an md5sum is useful because it sometimes identifies cases where you have downloaded an altered file. User "chill" asked "How do MD5 sums protect you from trojaned software?" I answered: they protect you from some instances of trojaned software by identifying those instances. (Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.) Whether or not an md5sum provides total protection from all trojans, or whether or not an md5sum goes to the fridge to fetch you a beer, doesn't affect that answer. Those are separate considerations.
(For the record: no, an md5sum does not provide total protection from trojans, and no, an md5sum will not fetch you a beer from the fridge.)
This illustrates a discrepancy between what is legal and what is right. It is often the case that when a computer is involved, actual use of a copyrighted work involves making an illegal copy of that copyrighted work from its original media to the computer's hard drive and from there, to and from different types of memory present in the computer. Sometimes these copies occur across a network (for example, if you happen to store your files on a file server); sometimes there are multiple simultaneous copies (hard disk, hard disk cache, filesystem cache, application memory, etc.)
When ordinary everyday use of legally acquired copyrighted material infringes copyright, the law needs to be fixed.
Something similar to that is what's happening in this case. I don't know how the court will rule, but it's clear that Google's new book indexing service provides a tremendous benefit to the members of the Authors Guild, who thanks to Google will make more money and be more encouraged to create future works. Google's new service results in the same thing that copyright law itself is designed to result in, and yet, a case can be made that Google is violating copyright law. How messed up is that?
What could possibly cause someone to think that the md5sums should match after applying a third party patch? How does providing a third party patch make a VAR's customer more vulnerable to trojan problems? Why would a customer repackage Mozilla after adding the third party patch and then compare the repackaged version to the md5sum of the official Mozilla package on Mozilla's site?
They provide one way for you to discover if the file you downloaded is different from the official release on the official site. As your parent poster noted, this is not always sufficient to protect you from trojaned software, but under some circumstances it does alert you to the fact that you don't have the correct file.
Here's an example: say that you want to download foo.tar.gz. The main ftp site is too slow, so you download from a faster mirror site. When you finish downloading, you compare the md5sum of the file you downloaded to the md5sum that you got from the project's web site. If they're different, then you know not to install the file you've downloaded.
Note that this is not the scenario described by the article. You're correct that it is possible for the site maintainer to provide the md5sum (or digital signature) of a corrupted binary, but this doesn't eliminate the usefulness of md5sum under other circumstances.
Strictly speaking, not everybody is assuming that. Those with a political motivation for assuming so often assume that, and those with a political motivation to assume the opposite often assume the opposite. Those not inclined to let their political inclinations determine their opinion (which includes those cynical enough to see past their political idealism) are a mixed lot. The environment is such a politicized issue that it's hard to take a sensible position without being shouted down by one group of zealots or another. "Obviously mankind couldn't possibly cause global warming" vs "Obviously if we hadn't elected Bush, global warming wouldn't be a problem today."
I, for one, am agnostic about how much mankind has contributed to the current bout of global warming, though I am attracted to some aspects of environmentalism or conservationism for quality of life reasons (I prefer to breathe clean air, etc.)
That sounds like a tautology. People willing to be taught to change their behavior to avoid offending someone are more likely to seem conformist than people who don't care whether their everyday talk offends someone. If someone is willing to conform, then of course that makes them more likely to be conformist. If a person can't be trained, then you can't train them to question authority.