The Constitution does not cover freedom of easy communication.
Does freedom of speech not mean the freedom to speak whenever you like, say whatever you like, in any way you like? Is freedom not hurt when one can execise it only in ways regulated by authorities? Doesn't freedom in fact mean to be free of govermental constaint?
The use of phones and emails is a basic right. Making a phone call or sending an electronic mail does not interfere with anyone's freedoms, and therefore I should be free to phone whenever I want, free of governmental control. If civil liberties did not extend to new, more convinient ways of exercising them, then you would need a permission from the goverment to use each of those new possibilities, but any right you have to ask for is not a right but a privilege.
The goverment does not have the right to force me to use inconvinient technologies, because that forced inconvinience would interfere with the right to pursuit of happiness.
If everyone is now willing to trade their liberties for more perceived safety, the terrorists will succeed in their "attack against the free countries of the world", not by destroying the countries, but by making those countries destroy their freedom.
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."
-- Thomas Jefferson
There is nothing that prevents you from compiling a software written in Java (the language) to something else than the Java VM (Java the platform). Doesn't the latest release of gcc even include a Java-to-native compiler? I don't know how much of Java (the class library) is supported then, though.
Almost no language has any features that tie the language to a single platform exclusively. This includes Java. You could even support operating system functions in Java by writing an appropriate library. That library would likely not be compatible with the Java VM, but if you don't target that platform anyway, who cares?
One problem with Java, I think, is that Sun has marketed "Java" as a programming language and never made any real difference between Java the language, Java the platform, and Java the library. What they should have done, IMHO, is to release the Java VM and the Java class library as one product, and make the Java the language a seperate product that happens to support the Java VM as a target platform. That's essentially what Microsoft is doing with.net -- there is the.net platform, which is basically a bytecode ("intermediate code") format and a class library, and there are the programming languages that support the.net platform, including a new language (C#).
Do A & B style users plan on chaining tools together to form coherent systems? No.
But they already do. What do you think MS Office is, one giant.exe? It's a suite of COM modules, chained together to form a coherent system. Whoever said that the chaining needs to be done by the user exclusively? (Ok, so I didn't read the article, maybe it did say that, I don't know.) Just like with Linux, this can be done by distributors.
The problem with MS Office is that while it has a modular architecture, that architecture is not open. You can use the components, but the ways in which the included components interact are not very customizable. You cannot replace builtin functionality, you can only write add-ons (and even that isn't a simple thing given the amount of programming you need).
Make no mistake - most users, on the order of 75% or more, will never ever want to customize their productivity tools beyond arranging a button or two, or perhaps defining a macro.
Only because they have no option of changing anything beyond that. There are some places where you might want to change the way builtin features work, if it were possible. For example, I would like to make Outlook receive emails first, then send outgoing mails, because my provider blocks SMTP (to avoid spam) until I logged in with POP3 once. This is not possible with Outlook.
If the Free Software movement could produce a set of Office components that are built in a way that allows you to create your own office suite (without hacking the source for each modification), but also offers a reasonable default setup, that might be a reason for network administrators to think about Linux on the desktop. Right now it's not a serious option if there are a lot of non-technical users -- yes, there is StarOffice, but why would you want to do more training (for both users and admins), receive more support calls (at the beginning) and reduce compatibility with MS Office files, when what you really get is just the same features?
For the rest of us, there are plenty of tools - command line tools like grep, sed, awk, and hundreds of others do just great.
Uhh, do they? Last time I checked, things like plain text files were not mentioned in any "corporate standard."
The idea of computers taking over when humans fail (as judged by the machines) is an old idea, and a wrong idea. Who would provide backup for the autopilot, then? Override by ground control might come too late, and anyway, how can they trust the pilot? And if ground control can send an override permission signal, the terorrists can also do that.
What happens, for example, if for some reason the aircrafts position gets reported wrongly by a very small distance, e.g. the plane thinks its 100 meters more west than it actually is. When the pilot tries to land, the plane will think he'll be crashing it (either by missing the runway, or by coming down too early / too late, depending on the runway heading), and take over. There will be no way to land that aircraft.
You might also want to note that you're arguing against having any pilot at all. If you think that machines can handle emergency situations better than a human, then I suppose they should also be able to handle routine situatuations. Would you board a flight where the aircraft has no pilot?
In other words, NATO has agreed that the organization is in a state of war. Even if this doesn't put each individual NATO member country into a state of war, this is not good news.
I'm scared of what might happen next.
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." - Mahatma Ghandi
Do you seriously believe that the kids will really regard this kind of "violance" as the same kind of violance that you're talking about?
This is not violance against humans. This is violance against virtual robots. And the kids can even take an in-depth view at what is actually going on. If they see that it's just an integer counter being counted down when you're hit (or whatever, I've not looked at the code yet), I don't think they'll see this as violance, no matter what the graphical output looks like.
I don't believe in violance caused by computer games anyway (they might be the trigger, but not the cause), but claiming that encouraging kids to develop a virtual robot is like encouraging them to shoot their classmates is ridiculous.
This is not true. If you (I am not a US citizen) keep fighting laws this way, you'll lose. Because the politicians can easily reply "and what's wrong with that?" And, in the eyes of the public, they'll be right.
Suchs laws do not strengthen the position of copyright holders. They enlarge the power of mass media publishers exclusively.
The law will clearly not strengthen the position of computer scientists. Applied strictly (note that I've not read the bill, English is not my native language and I find English legal texts very hard to understand), it would outlaw any OS kernel that does not include usage control in the filesystem layer. This will make innovation in file systems much harder, because if you develop a new system, you cannot legally distribute it to other computer scientists before usage control is implemented.
It will also not strengthen the position of small media publishers, because they won't have any control about which usage control technologies are approved and which are not. This will be controlled by the most influencial companies exclusively, putting smaller publishers into a position where they can either use the available technology (for which they might have to pay license fees), or not protect their works at all.
The law does also not strengthen the position of individuals who publish material, for the same reasons. Individuals who wish to create works of art and science will also have to use technology that will make it harder for them to built upon the works of others, something that has been accepted in scientific publishing for decades.
No, because there is no other operating system called "Windows". X is not an operating system. Also, Windows is not a generic name for an operating system, while Office is a very generic term for an office application. Even Microsoft knows this, and calls its product Micrsoft Office whenever there is a risk of confusion.
Calling Microsoft Office "Office" is not like calling Micrsoft Windows "Windows", it's more like calling Micrsoft Windows "Operating System."
BTW, my comment shouldn't be taken that serious. I do think that one should use the correct product name, especially if two product names are put into one sentence (or even headline), but failing to do that won't seriously keep StarOffice from succeeding is it is a much better product.
And yes, I do say "Office" myself when talking about MS Office.
1. Make a presentation software that's not completely limited to the slide show format. The metaphor should be a stage, and allow for notes on slides, multiple projectors, speakers, etc. Imagine a networked display system between three laptops (two for display, one to control/syncronize, an have your notes on it).
While we are at this, I'd love to have a presentation software that shows only the current slide on the projector, but also the next and maybe the previous slide on the laptop's screen. Personally I don't use any presentation software (maybe the feature even exists already, but I doubt that), but I'm really sick of listening to all those presentations where the speakers advance to the next slide and then go back when they realize it wasn't what they expected.
But I suppose this is also a problem with laptop hardware, which will always have the same image on the screen as on the output connector.
As long as people can say Office, and everyone knows they're referring to what is actually called Microsoft Office, no, StarOffice doesn't have a big change.
The QPL, I think, allows you to write Free Software using Qt, even if it's used commercially, without having to pay them. You just pay if you wirte proprietary software (even if you give it away for free-as-in-beer).
The same goes for Qt's GPL edition, you can write GPL software with it even if it's used commercially, you just can't write non-GPL software with it.
So the QPL discriminates against certain (proprietary) licenses, just like the GPL does, while the SPL discriminates against certain uses, no matter what the license.
No, you missed it. Look at your printer... if it has a resolution of 600dpi, and you change the setting to 300dpi in the driver, what happens? Everything is four times as large? Nope, things just appear in a worse quality. You also can't fit more text on a page by increasing the resolution to 1200dpi, if you want to fit more text on a page, you'll have to use a smaller font size. This shouldn't be any different for a screen.
Berlin would negate this by scaling applications back up to "6in across" instead of staying at "180pixels"
That's correct, but by changing the size setting (as I said, there would be two settings), you can just make the app smaller if you want. The nice thing is, you can even make it that small at 640x480 (it might not look that good, though). Imagine making a screenshot of your application, sizing it down in a picture editor, than putting it back on your desktop and continue to work.
Under the SPL we do expect to get back any changes that are made to the code.
If you intend on building a product offering and reselling it for revenues in the market, you then owe Sistina a license fee for the use of GFS.
To me this reads, if you're going to use your work (that you had to give to us) to make a buck, we want some of that money.
If your going to use it and put it in freely available software, then go ahead.
Not if that free software is also commercial software. Linux distributions are definitely a "product offered and resold for revenues", so they'd have to pay a license fee, too.
Maybe I want to free up screen real estate by switching to a higher resolution.
No. You want to free up screen real estate by switching to a smaller appearance setting. You want to make things appear in more detail by switching to a higher resolution. That's two different settings instead of just one, so this actually gives you more flexibility. At least if the Berlin developers got that right, I haven't looked at how it actually works yet.
Running a lower resolution to "zoom into your desktop" is like slowing down your processor to watch a movie in slow motion. The idea is just wrong. Time and performance are two different (but related) things, and so are size and resolution.
I beleive the same principle is involved with a game's UI, after all the whole point of a game is that you aren't doing something normal like using a spreadsheet, your running around a castle shooting hell knights. It shouldn't look anything like using a spreadsheet.
Yes, but a search and replace feature would be useful sometimes.
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Yes, it's definitely possible. There's a Microsoft product called SMS (Systems Mangement Server?), and there are some great third-party tools like Ghost. Of course, non of these are Free (or free).
I think that everyone has a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
You're comparing apples with oranges. When someone sends you a Visio document to your Linux computer, you also can't just download Visio. And, as you said, you can download a free unzip tool for Windows.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
I'm not sure whether I'd want software to install over the network automatically, as it can lead to totally inconsistent systems, or even the activation of mail-attachment style viruses (if the software is downloaded from the internet).
Anyway, this is also possible with newer versions MS Software that uses the Windows Installer service which will allow application to be "advertised", AFAIK including setting file type associations before the application is installed. When you have the setup files on a network server (I think Microsoft's license explicitly permits that), it can work just the same way. However I don't know if clients that have an application advertised, but not installed, need a license.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
Nothing, because Linux doesn't magically give you a self-administering network. It will cut down license costs, might reduce hardware costs, and may increase reliability and security.
But even with the automatic software deployment you described, you'll still need administrators to set that up before the clients can make use of it. The admins will just have to do less dumb work like walking to each user with the installer CD.
that a system doesn't have 20 copies of apache running around on it.
And what exactly is wrong about that? Maybe a user-specific installation of Apache could have some restrictions, like running only when the user is logged on and serving pages only to localhost, but I don't see why it should be impossible. If someone is about to test a web site, wants to test it on Apache and knows how to locally install it, I don't see why you'd want to require him to call his sysadmin.
If user Apache installations were possible, he could call his sysadmin and say "I'll need a test server that serves to our local network in maybe about a week, can you do that?" The sysadmin will be more than happy to have a week so he can delay the installation in favor of more urgent tasks if necessary, and the user will be happy to have his local setup at once, without having to wait for the admin.
As a German, I'd like to comment on this. First, I know about the arrest you mentioned, and I think it was wrong. There are laws in Germany that regulate if and when foreign citizens can be arrested in Germany. It is for example possible for you to be arrested in Germany when you've been involved in planning a military attack against Germany, which I think sounds reasonable, as such action threatens Germany's "national security". I suppose the US have similar laws. I don't know if those "foreigner arrest laws" can also be applied to publishers of nazi propaganda. From my reading of the law, it should not be possible, but IANAL.
But either way, there is a difference. Not only is racism definitely worse than calling someone a "devious businessman", most foreign publishers of nazi propanga also specifically leave Germany in order to publish in more free countries. They still publish German texts, and generally target a German audience. They know that if they did publish in Germany, they'd be considered criminals. One might even say that such propaganda threatens the national security of Germany (for example if it encourages terrorist activities against politicians or foreigners living in Germany).
The article discussed in this Australian lawcase, on the other hand, was not targeted specifically to an Australian audience. It was also not published in the US in order to circumvent Australia's laws. And probably the publishers didn't even know it would be a criminal offense to publish the material in Australia. It certainly did in no way threaten Australia's national security.
Don't get me wrong, I do not think the German court's judgement was a wise decision. You should fight fascism, but doing so with methods that aren't democratic is the wrong way. But this Australian judgement, IMHO, takes things a huge step further and is a much greater danger to free publishing on the internet.
Because booting Windows it's what 99% of users want when they install Windows. And because most of the users won't understand the question the installer would ask them, no matter how good it's written. Also note that many current Linux distributions will not only overwrite your boot track, they'll also kill your Windows partition (they ask, though) if there's no unpartitioned space.
But the real reason is that the boot track / master boot record is a broken concept. AFAIK the installer has no option of finding out what is currently installed there, unless it knows all possible systems and can identify them. Obviously this doesn't work at least for those systems developed after the installer.
If there were an industry standard "operating system table", OSs could just add themselves to that table on installation and everything would work fine. While we're at it, could we throw away the concept of partitions as well? (No I don't have a solution.)
Slashdot Mirror
Does freedom of speech not mean the freedom to speak whenever you like, say whatever you like, in any way you like? Is freedom not hurt when one can execise it only in ways regulated by authorities? Doesn't freedom in fact mean to be free of govermental constaint?
The use of phones and emails is a basic right. Making a phone call or sending an electronic mail does not interfere with anyone's freedoms, and therefore I should be free to phone whenever I want, free of governmental control. If civil liberties did not extend to new, more convinient ways of exercising them, then you would need a permission from the goverment to use each of those new possibilities, but any right you have to ask for is not a right but a privilege.
The goverment does not have the right to force me to use inconvinient technologies, because that forced inconvinience would interfere with the right to pursuit of happiness.
If everyone is now willing to trade their liberties for more perceived safety, the terrorists will succeed in their "attack against the free countries of the world", not by destroying the countries, but by making those countries destroy their freedom.
"An elective despotism was not the government we fought for."
-- Thomas Jefferson
There is nothing that prevents you from compiling a software written in Java (the language) to something else than the Java VM (Java the platform). Doesn't the latest release of gcc even include a Java-to-native compiler? I don't know how much of Java (the class library) is supported then, though.
Almost no language has any features that tie the language to a single platform exclusively. This includes Java. You could even support operating system functions in Java by writing an appropriate library. That library would likely not be compatible with the Java VM, but if you don't target that platform anyway, who cares?
One problem with Java, I think, is that Sun has marketed "Java" as a programming language and never made any real difference between Java the language, Java the platform, and Java the library. What they should have done, IMHO, is to release the Java VM and the Java class library as one product, and make the Java the language a seperate product that happens to support the Java VM as a target platform. That's essentially what Microsoft is doing with .net -- there is the .net platform, which is basically a bytecode ("intermediate code") format and a class library, and there are the programming languages that support the .net platform, including a new language (C#).
But they already do. What do you think MS Office is, one giant .exe? It's a suite of COM modules, chained together to form a coherent system. Whoever said that the chaining needs to be done by the user exclusively? (Ok, so I didn't read the article, maybe it did say that, I don't know.) Just like with Linux, this can be done by distributors.
The problem with MS Office is that while it has a modular architecture, that architecture is not open. You can use the components, but the ways in which the included components interact are not very customizable. You cannot replace builtin functionality, you can only write add-ons (and even that isn't a simple thing given the amount of programming you need).
Only because they have no option of changing anything beyond that. There are some places where you might want to change the way builtin features work, if it were possible. For example, I would like to make Outlook receive emails first, then send outgoing mails, because my provider blocks SMTP (to avoid spam) until I logged in with POP3 once. This is not possible with Outlook.
If the Free Software movement could produce a set of Office components that are built in a way that allows you to create your own office suite (without hacking the source for each modification), but also offers a reasonable default setup, that might be a reason for network administrators to think about Linux on the desktop. Right now it's not a serious option if there are a lot of non-technical users -- yes, there is StarOffice, but why would you want to do more training (for both users and admins), receive more support calls (at the beginning) and reduce compatibility with MS Office files, when what you really get is just the same features?
Uhh, do they? Last time I checked, things like plain text files were not mentioned in any "corporate standard."
I guess you also perfer to drive a car where a computer takes over when you break the speed limit?
(Sorry for posting two replies, this one came to my mind just after I posted the first one.)
The idea of computers taking over when humans fail (as judged by the machines) is an old idea, and a wrong idea. Who would provide backup for the autopilot, then? Override by ground control might come too late, and anyway, how can they trust the pilot? And if ground control can send an override permission signal, the terorrists can also do that.
What happens, for example, if for some reason the aircrafts position gets reported wrongly by a very small distance, e.g. the plane thinks its 100 meters more west than it actually is. When the pilot tries to land, the plane will think he'll be crashing it (either by missing the runway, or by coming down too early / too late, depending on the runway heading), and take over. There will be no way to land that aircraft.
You might also want to note that you're arguing against having any pilot at all. If you think that machines can handle emergency situations better than a human, then I suppose they should also be able to handle routine situatuations. Would you board a flight where the aircraft has no pilot?
In other words, NATO has agreed that the organization is in a state of war. Even if this doesn't put each individual NATO member country into a state of war, this is not good news.
I'm scared of what might happen next.
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." - Mahatma Ghandi
Yeah, but be careful not to infringe on any software patents or you might be sued for false advertisement.
Do you seriously believe that the kids will really regard this kind of "violance" as the same kind of violance that you're talking about?
This is not violance against humans. This is violance against virtual robots. And the kids can even take an in-depth view at what is actually going on. If they see that it's just an integer counter being counted down when you're hit (or whatever, I've not looked at the code yet), I don't think they'll see this as violance, no matter what the graphical output looks like.
I don't believe in violance caused by computer games anyway (they might be the trigger, but not the cause), but claiming that encouraging kids to develop a virtual robot is like encouraging them to shoot their classmates is ridiculous.
This is not true. If you (I am not a US citizen) keep fighting laws this way, you'll lose. Because the politicians can easily reply "and what's wrong with that?" And, in the eyes of the public, they'll be right.
Suchs laws do not strengthen the position of copyright holders. They enlarge the power of mass media publishers exclusively.
The law will clearly not strengthen the position of computer scientists. Applied strictly (note that I've not read the bill, English is not my native language and I find English legal texts very hard to understand), it would outlaw any OS kernel that does not include usage control in the filesystem layer. This will make innovation in file systems much harder, because if you develop a new system, you cannot legally distribute it to other computer scientists before usage control is implemented.
It will also not strengthen the position of small media publishers, because they won't have any control about which usage control technologies are approved and which are not. This will be controlled by the most influencial companies exclusively, putting smaller publishers into a position where they can either use the available technology (for which they might have to pay license fees), or not protect their works at all.
The law does also not strengthen the position of individuals who publish material, for the same reasons. Individuals who wish to create works of art and science will also have to use technology that will make it harder for them to built upon the works of others, something that has been accepted in scientific publishing for decades.
No, because there is no other operating system called "Windows". X is not an operating system. Also, Windows is not a generic name for an operating system, while Office is a very generic term for an office application. Even Microsoft knows this, and calls its product Micrsoft Office whenever there is a risk of confusion.
Calling Microsoft Office "Office" is not like calling Micrsoft Windows "Windows", it's more like calling Micrsoft Windows "Operating System."
BTW, my comment shouldn't be taken that serious. I do think that one should use the correct product name, especially if two product names are put into one sentence (or even headline), but failing to do that won't seriously keep StarOffice from succeeding is it is a much better product.
And yes, I do say "Office" myself when talking about MS Office.
While we are at this, I'd love to have a presentation software that shows only the current slide on the projector, but also the next and maybe the previous slide on the laptop's screen. Personally I don't use any presentation software (maybe the feature even exists already, but I doubt that), but I'm really sick of listening to all those presentations where the speakers advance to the next slide and then go back when they realize it wasn't what they expected.
But I suppose this is also a problem with laptop hardware, which will always have the same image on the screen as on the output connector.
As long as people can say Office, and everyone knows they're referring to what is actually called Microsoft Office, no, StarOffice doesn't have a big change.
The QPL, I think, allows you to write Free Software using Qt, even if it's used commercially, without having to pay them. You just pay if you wirte proprietary software (even if you give it away for free-as-in-beer).
The same goes for Qt's GPL edition, you can write GPL software with it even if it's used commercially, you just can't write non-GPL software with it.
So the QPL discriminates against certain (proprietary) licenses, just like the GPL does, while the SPL discriminates against certain uses, no matter what the license.
No, you missed it. Look at your printer... if it has a resolution of 600dpi, and you change the setting to 300dpi in the driver, what happens? Everything is four times as large? Nope, things just appear in a worse quality. You also can't fit more text on a page by increasing the resolution to 1200dpi, if you want to fit more text on a page, you'll have to use a smaller font size. This shouldn't be any different for a screen.
That's correct, but by changing the size setting (as I said, there would be two settings), you can just make the app smaller if you want. The nice thing is, you can even make it that small at 640x480 (it might not look that good, though). Imagine making a screenshot of your application, sizing it down in a picture editor, than putting it back on your desktop and continue to work.
That sure sounds like a great business model you've got there.
To me this reads, if you're going to use your work (that you had to give to us) to make a buck, we want some of that money.
Not if that free software is also commercial software. Linux distributions are definitely a "product offered and resold for revenues", so they'd have to pay a license fee, too.
No. You want to free up screen real estate by switching to a smaller appearance setting. You want to make things appear in more detail by switching to a higher resolution. That's two different settings instead of just one, so this actually gives you more flexibility. At least if the Berlin developers got that right, I haven't looked at how it actually works yet.
Running a lower resolution to "zoom into your desktop" is like slowing down your processor to watch a movie in slow motion. The idea is just wrong. Time and performance are two different (but related) things, and so are size and resolution.
Well, he certainly manages to make Slashdot stories look much better.
Yes, but a search and replace feature would be useful sometimes.
Yes, it's definitely possible. There's a Microsoft product called SMS (Systems Mangement Server?), and there are some great third-party tools like Ghost. Of course, non of these are Free (or free).
You're comparing apples with oranges. When someone sends you a Visio document to your Linux computer, you also can't just download Visio. And, as you said, you can download a free unzip tool for Windows.
I'm not sure whether I'd want software to install over the network automatically, as it can lead to totally inconsistent systems, or even the activation of mail-attachment style viruses (if the software is downloaded from the internet).
Anyway, this is also possible with newer versions MS Software that uses the Windows Installer service which will allow application to be "advertised", AFAIK including setting file type associations before the application is installed. When you have the setup files on a network server (I think Microsoft's license explicitly permits that), it can work just the same way. However I don't know if clients that have an application advertised, but not installed, need a license.
Nothing, because Linux doesn't magically give you a self-administering network. It will cut down license costs, might reduce hardware costs, and may increase reliability and security.
But even with the automatic software deployment you described, you'll still need administrators to set that up before the clients can make use of it. The admins will just have to do less dumb work like walking to each user with the installer CD.
And what exactly is wrong about that? Maybe a user-specific installation of Apache could have some restrictions, like running only when the user is logged on and serving pages only to localhost, but I don't see why it should be impossible. If someone is about to test a web site, wants to test it on Apache and knows how to locally install it, I don't see why you'd want to require him to call his sysadmin.
If user Apache installations were possible, he could call his sysadmin and say "I'll need a test server that serves to our local network in maybe about a week, can you do that?" The sysadmin will be more than happy to have a week so he can delay the installation in favor of more urgent tasks if necessary, and the user will be happy to have his local setup at once, without having to wait for the admin.
As a German, I'd like to comment on this. First, I know about the arrest you mentioned, and I think it was wrong. There are laws in Germany that regulate if and when foreign citizens can be arrested in Germany. It is for example possible for you to be arrested in Germany when you've been involved in planning a military attack against Germany, which I think sounds reasonable, as such action threatens Germany's "national security". I suppose the US have similar laws. I don't know if those "foreigner arrest laws" can also be applied to publishers of nazi propaganda. From my reading of the law, it should not be possible, but IANAL.
But either way, there is a difference. Not only is racism definitely worse than calling someone a "devious businessman", most foreign publishers of nazi propanga also specifically leave Germany in order to publish in more free countries. They still publish German texts, and generally target a German audience. They know that if they did publish in Germany, they'd be considered criminals. One might even say that such propaganda threatens the national security of Germany (for example if it encourages terrorist activities against politicians or foreigners living in Germany).
The article discussed in this Australian lawcase, on the other hand, was not targeted specifically to an Australian audience. It was also not published in the US in order to circumvent Australia's laws. And probably the publishers didn't even know it would be a criminal offense to publish the material in Australia. It certainly did in no way threaten Australia's national security.
Don't get me wrong, I do not think the German court's judgement was a wise decision. You should fight fascism, but doing so with methods that aren't democratic is the wrong way. But this Australian judgement, IMHO, takes things a huge step further and is a much greater danger to free publishing on the internet.
Because booting Windows it's what 99% of users want when they install Windows. And because most of the users won't understand the question the installer would ask them, no matter how good it's written. Also note that many current Linux distributions will not only overwrite your boot track, they'll also kill your Windows partition (they ask, though) if there's no unpartitioned space.
But the real reason is that the boot track / master boot record is a broken concept. AFAIK the installer has no option of finding out what is currently installed there, unless it knows all possible systems and can identify them. Obviously this doesn't work at least for those systems developed after the installer.
If there were an industry standard "operating system table", OSs could just add themselves to that table on installation and everything would work fine. While we're at it, could we throw away the concept of partitions as well? (No I don't have a solution.)
"I see a worldwide market for 5, maybe 6 computers"
"We now know he overestimated by four."
-- Clay Shirkey, in a talk on Napster