What I would like to see is the ability for me as a user to add to the existing bounties and start new ones of my own. I would like to be able to propose a bounty and send money to a reputable bounty clearinghouse like at Novell or Ubuntu, and then they could offer the bounty as if it was their own since they have my cash until the bounty expires or is completed. And then while the bounty is still up for grabs I would like to be able to send the clearinghouse money to add to the existing bounties in order to make them more lucrative to potential hackers.
I could setup this site right now fairly easily, but people wouldn't trust my joe random site as well as they would trust a bigger and more established organization like Novell or Ubuntu/Canonical. But I can't be the only one looking to put my money where my mouth is, so why does this functionality not exist?
I'm sorry, but mplayer plays divx, mp4, mov, mwv... are you saying that swf is harder to implement than these? I admit I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that these were implemented because there was no good player for linux, while the flashplayer was "good enough" enough though it's non-free and buggy. You see this also with Java... why does that have no working alternative yet (yes it's getting better), while a working.net alternative is quite viable. I see this as an extension of the same problem... the nonfree solution is considered "good enough" and we users are stuck with a suboptimal solution.
Yes, I could help write instead of complain, blah blah blah I know that already. There needs to be a linux bounty site like the Gnome bounty site where people can add money to certain bounties... I'd put up cash for this flash problem, that's for sure.
Microsoft's leadership position means that more viruses are written for Windows, said Silver, who estimates that 96 percent of all desktops and laptops worldwide used Windows at the end of 2004.
So Microsoft get's a pass on viruses because it is popular and has a lot of software written for it? And then those same people use the amount of software available for MS Windows as a reason why Windows is superior. You can't have it both ways: if you think Windows has an advantage because of a larger application base you have to include the malware applications like viruses and spyware as well.
You could wrongly argue that when Linux has a larger installed base it will have the same problems as MS Windows. But even if that were true, it's new popularity would mean that more commercial applications like Photoshop would be written for it also. The blade turns both ways for better and for worse, yet MS Windows apologists try to claim the best of both worlds.
Gnome is made to look like whatever windows currently looks like? Unheard of!
Copying windows will not get you anywhere. Innovate, damnit!
So uh, what version of windows does that look like? The one with the hideous malformed "start" button, the one with a cartoonishly unprofessional colour scheme, or the one that doesn't exist yet?
To me it looks a hell of a lot more like OSX than it does Windows, if you get beyond the widget set. But there is a hell of a lot more to Gnome than the maximize window widget, for example the open/save dialogs and desktop preferences are quite different from the windows methodology. To judge a desktop entirely by three widgets is just foolhardy...
Dvork had a point, but he vastly overstated it. But consider the case of binary drivers like ATI/NVIDA, and the ndiswrapper and captiventfs drivers mentioned in the article. How many of us can use an open source ATI or NVIDIA driver for 3d graphics? How many wireless cards work without ndiswrapper? And of course the open source ntfs is still read only to my knowledge.
The open source equivilents of thse projects are not dead, but they are moving significantly slower than other projects that have no binary equivilent. Users are not forced to write their own drivers to get hardware compatiblity and people live with the non-free alternatives.
What Dvorak is suggesting is that if such binary driver equivilents existed for other forms of Linux drivers, development on open source equivilents would slow down. Well, he said it would die which is of course not true, but still his trollery had a hint of truth to it. Esoteric hardware would likely never have native drivers written for it, just as most wireless-G cards do not today.
It would most certainly hurt Linux for this to happen, but at the same time it would help in other ways. Increased support for esoteric hardware would have a lot of benefits for Linux too, and people could still write native drivers for more common hardware. It is hard to say if there would be a net benefit or not under what Dvorak proposes. Either way it's utter bullshit because Microsoft would never do this. Oh well.
I don't get what you are saying. If it's theft, you are taking something from someone which is no longer available to the original owner. IP "theft" is about disallowing people to make copies, redistribute copies, convert into other forms, etc. My point is that we are talking about a violation of the government-created monopoly granted to content producers, not "theft" in the sense we mean it when someone robs a bank.
I'm not even arguing against copyright here, just that the usage of the term "theft" is misleading at best and at worst incorrect. Even if you think that these government-granted monopolies are a good thing (I am personally not opposed to copyright law, just some of the implementations that exist today), it is important to distingish what is going on from actual theft in order to put things in the correct context.
One could even make the argument that calling it "theft" is bad for the MPAA/RIAA because people intuitively know that theft of small items usually comes with a slap on the wrist for punishment. If the RIAA/MPAA wants to treat this like a serious crime, they ought to call it by the name of a serious crime in order to convey the seriousness of the penalties that are imposed for infringing on their rights.
The only "rights" involved in this story are the property rights of the film makers, which have been violated.
And that's why it belong here. Some people don't think that Intellectual Property is actually property, you see. What has happened is not theft, but a violation of the government-sanctioned monopoly over reproductive and distributive rights for these films. In other words, your right to download and watch whatever you want off the internet like any other site has been trampled on.
Perhaps you think this is right, and perhaps you think this is wrong -- that is up for debate, but either way it is most certainly at least partially about your rights online.
It's a nice idea, for sure. I just hope it fares a little bit better in reality than Seth Nickell's last grandiose idea. I'd like to see some of these idea implemented and not just discussed. Of course, I've contributed nothing to the success of these projects either -- and Seth's ideas are great. I'm not saying that I'm so much better than him, just that I hope some reality can emerge from this grandiose idea so that Linux doesn't develop the same reputation for vaporware as does Duke Nukem.
Discuss the facts all you like. Discuss findings. Discuss measurements that might hold important meaning. But if you are going to discuss consensus, then you're talking politics, not science.
It's important to talk about consensus because the representatives of oil interests are funding charlatans posing as legitimate scientists doing legitimate research. They are trying to frame the debate as if there is a legitimate division of opinion as to what is happening in regards to climate change. In reality, the overwhelming number of scientists studying climate change realize that something is going on -- this is what we refer to as consensus.
It does not mean that all of these scientists studying climate change actually agree on everything, or even that they are right. It's just a means to point out that the paid shills of the oil industry who make bold claims about lack of climate change are not part of the legitimate scientific inquest into this problem. There always should be debate within any scientific field, but that debate should not be between those people honestly looking at the sitatuation and those people who are paid to present a situation that is favourable to the oil industry.
Re:So what's the big deal for the rest of us?
on
SHA-1 Broken
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· Score: 1, Redundant
Here's a practical example: the RIAA/MPAA could write an application that would generate a valid hash for random data, corrupting bittorrent downloads. Bittorrent uses SHA-1 -- if you don't believe me check the source yourself.
As the slashdot blurb even states, the Mac Mini uses a proprietary wireless driver that does not work with Linux at all. So it does make a difference if you intend to use wireless connectivity with your SFF PC, you should not buy a Mac Mini to run Linux no matter how cool you think it looks.
Think it through for a bit -- let's assume that people did watch downloaded television shows on their PCs. How many of those people would actually *watch* the ads instead of skipping them using one of the myriad of fast-forward options available to them in most media players? Yes, on a television you can use a VCR or TiVo-like device to accomplish the same purpose, but it's a bit annoying and few people actually do this right now. But studios and content producers aren't as stupid as you might think -- they are well aware that the overwhelming majority of people can and would skip ads if their shows were distributed on a free video format that could be played in any player.
More feasible than bittorrent for them would be to allow on-demand medium-quality streaming broadcasts with embedded ads, but to not allow downloads of any kind. This would encourage people to purchase the high-quality DVDs, and would still recoup some of their costs from the ad-supported streaming -- and the free content would itself be an advertisment for the DVD sales. Streaming would entail a larger bandwidth investment by the content producers, but it would actually let them maintain a degree of control and thus is by far the more likely candidate for success.
Actually in 2.10 there is a new feature: anyone beating that particular troll/flame to death on slashdot will be banned from the internet for 48 hours. At least I hope so...
Since when did avoidance and outright lying qualify as a "pretty good job"?
SPIEGEL: When one puts the sentence "Bill Gates is the devil" into the Internet search engine Google, one gets thousands of hits. Does this bother you?
Gates: I have never searched for such a sentence. Plus: if you understand the search engine properly, it doesn't mean that you will find exactly this sentence on these pages.
When you put quotes around it, yes it does mean exactly that. Specifically, google returns the text Results 1 - 10 of about 5,290 for "Bill Gates is the devil", so I'd say his answer is full of shit.
SPIEGEL: Once again: Windows is the most vulnerable.
Gates: You could look at that in many ways. The speed with which, for example, the Linux community reacts to problems is not especially high -- that's because this system, unlike ours, simply does not keep thousands of people on standby to deal with problems. In this respect, a commercially distributed operating system also has decisive benefits. Sweeping judgments don't help because we all have to take the problems seriously. Even Linux developers know that there is no miracle cure in Linuxland. They, too, must continue to work and continue to make progress.
First of all, vulnerabilities in the kernel and critical applications are patched quickly and all major distributions release updates very soon after a problem is released. Much better than the Windows track record for such vulnerabilies which can linger for months and patches are released on a schedule instead of shortly after they are posted.
Second of all, "LinuxLand" uses a superior method of software installation that leaves it immune to the sorts of malware programs that plague windows users. Debian and Ubuntu use apt and synaptic, fedora and red hat use yum, Suse and NDL use red-carpet, Manrake uses urmpi, gentoo has portage, and Xandros and Linspire have their own systems too. All of these systems have something in common: you can easily install a wide range of software from your Linux distributer, and users do not need to install malware-ridden crap software of random websites. This is as close to a "miracle cure" as any Linux user needs to the sorts of problems that plague most Windows users.
Hopefully, if buys instal Windows on the machine they will void the warranty by running an unsafe and unsupported system.:-) Would be a nice twist on the usual.
What it lacked: Wait a minute. Some... thing... isn't... right. I, I, wtf are the Chinese planting cities are pure ice! Wtf are the Romans putting cities are pure rock! Wtf? I gotta keep planting cities like a madman? Um, why is Civ dragging down my honking system? CivIII was promising and nearly became my Civ to keep playing, but the way the AI built cities forever and always at a maddenning pace, the way the game chugged after much growth -- it was too much. I grew to not like it. Why should I have to wait 5 minutes between turns while the AI catches up as the math is hammered out?
It sounds like you are playing maps that are too large for the number of civilizations in the game. Try playing the same number of civs with a smaller map, or put more civs on your favourite map size. Or play freeciv for a bit and be happy that the civ3 AIs build way less cities by comparison.:-)
A great cross-platform solution would be Theora via Flumotion -- you can watch in a java applet or advanced users can play the stream directly in your player of choice if you have the codecs installed.
I thought the US were supposed to be the laissez-faire free marketeers of the world?
HAHAHAHAHA! Ever considered a career in comedy? You seem to be on the right track already. Laissez-faire free marketers... you guys crack me up. And Bush's America respecting a WTO ruling lately? Golden! Priceless! Comedy genius!
If by chance you were not joking about that, I must say your assumptions are deadly wrong. Like every other country I'm aware of, the USA uses a mixed socialist/capitalist system and is protectionist in a variety of ways. If you ignore the rhetoric and look at the reality, this is quite obvious to even the most casual observer.
That's delicious! A *Christian* arguing that *another religious group* has no evidence to support their outrageous claims and that the text is self-contradictory. Pot, meet kettle... kettle, say hello to my good friend pot. And while we're at it... someone call Alanis Morisette, because it sounds to that it's like rain on your wedding day, don't you think?
True, I would have also downloaded them from the producers if they came out on a format I could watch on my PC. Though to be fair, I would have probably used my mouse scroll wheel to skip 30 seconds ahead in Totem skipping each commercial as they happened. I have a feeling most people would do something equivilent to that and it wouldn't be much of a net benefit to the producers. Maybe it would though, I'm not 100% sure.
On the other hand, the positive buzz that the internet response has given thus far might contribute to the SciFi channel's favour. I know a lot of people who aren't savvy enough to get things off bittorrent, but are aware of the show from fans who have been downloading the eps for months now.
Hell, this slashdot article is a testament to that very fact... if the nerd community wasn't already abuzz with how great this show is, would the US air date have made the slashdot front page? We'll never know for sure, but I think it will help not hurt the overall ratings.
The Gnome RSS readers I know of are: Liferea (C), Straw (python), and Blam (C#). Notice the complete lack of the stupid and tacky K/G naming scheme there, or even the lack of language identifier? That's right, Gnome developers pretty much dropped the "G-everything" naming scheme a few years ago and hasn't really looked backed. And this isn't a anti-KDE troll, it's a plea to KDE developers to stop with the insanity, it's an embarrassment to all Linux users.
Excuse me? "we the HIG people, they the Clutter people" is pretty much a summary of the difference between the two projects. Epiphany vs Konqueror, Nautiuls vs Konqueror, Konsole vs. gnome-terminal, Kedit vs Gedit, koffice vs gnome office, k3b vs nautilus/coaster, Kopete vs gossip/gaim. In each of these applications the KDE app has more features but the Gnome app is more streamlined and simple. Hell, you can even find this pattern in the games each project ships, the dialog boxes, the panel, the configuration settings. Nearly every aspect of the projects, where they differ the important difference is Simplicity vs. Features.
The projects are increasinly moving towards each other in some way, soon will be sharing a gstreamer backend, and are ditching the historical C/C++ divide as non-C projects are able to be included into Gnome (and probably non-C++ into KDE, but I don't know that for sure). They are co-operating in freedesktop.org in many important respects. Increasingly, the difference between Gnome and KDE are the choices required in the balance of Simplicity vs. Features. This observation is not a troll or exaggeration, though it is clearly the basis of what trolls use for material.
Sadly, I think you overestimate the wisdom of the general computing public. Yes, they *will* be safe if they use a sane distribution with only safe applications in the respository and only install applications from that repository. But do you seriously think that advice will work with the people who answer "yes" to "do you want to install the comet cursors?" or install kazaa et al?
The saving grace for the future of crapware on linux is that the marketplace is fragment and applications are difficult to install from a GUI. I can't speak for mandrake or SuSE, but I know Ubuntu doesn't have a GUI way to install.debs you download off the net, and last I checked Fedora didn't support a gui way to install.RPMs that you have downloaded. Hopefully that extra step of difficulty will prevent all but the dumbest and most determined users from wrecking their computers.
Slashdot Mirror
What I would like to see is the ability for me as a user to add to the existing bounties and start new ones of my own. I would like to be able to propose a bounty and send money to a reputable bounty clearinghouse like at Novell or Ubuntu, and then they could offer the bounty as if it was their own since they have my cash until the bounty expires or is completed. And then while the bounty is still up for grabs I would like to be able to send the clearinghouse money to add to the existing bounties in order to make them more lucrative to potential hackers.
I could setup this site right now fairly easily, but people wouldn't trust my joe random site as well as they would trust a bigger and more established organization like Novell or Ubuntu/Canonical. But I can't be the only one looking to put my money where my mouth is, so why does this functionality not exist?
I'm sorry, but mplayer plays divx, mp4, mov, mwv... are you saying that swf is harder to implement than these? I admit I'm not an expert, but it seems to me that these were implemented because there was no good player for linux, while the flashplayer was "good enough" enough though it's non-free and buggy. You see this also with Java... why does that have no working alternative yet (yes it's getting better), while a working .net alternative is quite viable. I see this as an extension of the same problem... the nonfree solution is considered "good enough" and we users are stuck with a suboptimal solution.
Yes, I could help write instead of complain, blah blah blah I know that already. There needs to be a linux bounty site like the Gnome bounty site where people can add money to certain bounties... I'd put up cash for this flash problem, that's for sure.
Hopefully this helps encourage more effort towards this player. Right now the lack of an OSS .swf player and browser plugin is downright embarrassing.
Microsoft's leadership position means that more viruses are written for Windows, said Silver, who estimates that 96 percent of all desktops and laptops worldwide used Windows at the end of 2004.
So Microsoft get's a pass on viruses because it is popular and has a lot of software written for it? And then those same people use the amount of software available for MS Windows as a reason why Windows is superior. You can't have it both ways: if you think Windows has an advantage because of a larger application base you have to include the malware applications like viruses and spyware as well.
You could wrongly argue that when Linux has a larger installed base it will have the same problems as MS Windows. But even if that were true, it's new popularity would mean that more commercial applications like Photoshop would be written for it also. The blade turns both ways for better and for worse, yet MS Windows apologists try to claim the best of both worlds.
Gnome is made to look like whatever windows currently looks like? Unheard of!
Copying windows will not get you anywhere. Innovate, damnit!
So uh, what version of windows does that look like? The one with the hideous malformed "start" button, the one with a cartoonishly unprofessional colour scheme, or the one that doesn't exist yet?
To me it looks a hell of a lot more like OSX than it does Windows, if you get beyond the widget set. But there is a hell of a lot more to Gnome than the maximize window widget, for example the open/save dialogs and desktop preferences are quite different from the windows methodology. To judge a desktop entirely by three widgets is just foolhardy...
Dvork had a point, but he vastly overstated it. But consider the case of binary drivers like ATI/NVIDA, and the ndiswrapper and captiventfs drivers mentioned in the article. How many of us can use an open source ATI or NVIDIA driver for 3d graphics? How many wireless cards work without ndiswrapper? And of course the open source ntfs is still read only to my knowledge.
The open source equivilents of thse projects are not dead, but they are moving significantly slower than other projects that have no binary equivilent. Users are not forced to write their own drivers to get hardware compatiblity and people live with the non-free alternatives.
What Dvorak is suggesting is that if such binary driver equivilents existed for other forms of Linux drivers, development on open source equivilents would slow down. Well, he said it would die which is of course not true, but still his trollery had a hint of truth to it. Esoteric hardware would likely never have native drivers written for it, just as most wireless-G cards do not today.
It would most certainly hurt Linux for this to happen, but at the same time it would help in other ways. Increased support for esoteric hardware would have a lot of benefits for Linux too, and people could still write native drivers for more common hardware. It is hard to say if there would be a net benefit or not under what Dvorak proposes. Either way it's utter bullshit because Microsoft would never do this. Oh well.
I don't get what you are saying. If it's theft, you are taking something from someone which is no longer available to the original owner. IP "theft" is about disallowing people to make copies, redistribute copies, convert into other forms, etc. My point is that we are talking about a violation of the government-created monopoly granted to content producers, not "theft" in the sense we mean it when someone robs a bank.
I'm not even arguing against copyright here, just that the usage of the term "theft" is misleading at best and at worst incorrect. Even if you think that these government-granted monopolies are a good thing (I am personally not opposed to copyright law, just some of the implementations that exist today), it is important to distingish what is going on from actual theft in order to put things in the correct context.
One could even make the argument that calling it "theft" is bad for the MPAA/RIAA because people intuitively know that theft of small items usually comes with a slap on the wrist for punishment. If the RIAA/MPAA wants to treat this like a serious crime, they ought to call it by the name of a serious crime in order to convey the seriousness of the penalties that are imposed for infringing on their rights.
The only "rights" involved in this story are the property rights of the film makers, which have been violated.
And that's why it belong here. Some people don't think that Intellectual Property is actually property, you see. What has happened is not theft, but a violation of the government-sanctioned monopoly over reproductive and distributive rights for these films. In other words, your right to download and watch whatever you want off the internet like any other site has been trampled on.
Perhaps you think this is right, and perhaps you think this is wrong -- that is up for debate, but either way it is most certainly at least partially about your rights online.
It's a nice idea, for sure. I just hope it fares a little bit better in reality than Seth Nickell's last grandiose idea. I'd like to see some of these idea implemented and not just discussed. Of course, I've contributed nothing to the success of these projects either -- and Seth's ideas are great. I'm not saying that I'm so much better than him, just that I hope some reality can emerge from this grandiose idea so that Linux doesn't develop the same reputation for vaporware as does Duke Nukem.
Discuss the facts all you like. Discuss findings. Discuss measurements that might hold important meaning. But if you are going to discuss consensus, then you're talking politics, not science.
It's important to talk about consensus because the representatives of oil interests are funding charlatans posing as legitimate scientists doing legitimate research. They are trying to frame the debate as if there is a legitimate division of opinion as to what is happening in regards to climate change. In reality, the overwhelming number of scientists studying climate change realize that something is going on -- this is what we refer to as consensus.
It does not mean that all of these scientists studying climate change actually agree on everything, or even that they are right. It's just a means to point out that the paid shills of the oil industry who make bold claims about lack of climate change are not part of the legitimate scientific inquest into this problem. There always should be debate within any scientific field, but that debate should not be between those people honestly looking at the sitatuation and those people who are paid to present a situation that is favourable to the oil industry.
Here's a practical example: the RIAA/MPAA could write an application that would generate a valid hash for random data, corrupting bittorrent downloads. Bittorrent uses SHA-1 -- if you don't believe me check the source yourself.
As the slashdot blurb even states, the Mac Mini uses a proprietary wireless driver that does not work with Linux at all. So it does make a difference if you intend to use wireless connectivity with your SFF PC, you should not buy a Mac Mini to run Linux no matter how cool you think it looks.
Think it through for a bit -- let's assume that people did watch downloaded television shows on their PCs. How many of those people would actually *watch* the ads instead of skipping them using one of the myriad of fast-forward options available to them in most media players? Yes, on a television you can use a VCR or TiVo-like device to accomplish the same purpose, but it's a bit annoying and few people actually do this right now. But studios and content producers aren't as stupid as you might think -- they are well aware that the overwhelming majority of people can and would skip ads if their shows were distributed on a free video format that could be played in any player.
More feasible than bittorrent for them would be to allow on-demand medium-quality streaming broadcasts with embedded ads, but to not allow downloads of any kind. This would encourage people to purchase the high-quality DVDs, and would still recoup some of their costs from the ad-supported streaming -- and the free content would itself be an advertisment for the DVD sales. Streaming would entail a larger bandwidth investment by the content producers, but it would actually let them maintain a degree of control and thus is by far the more likely candidate for success.
Actually in 2.10 there is a new feature: anyone beating that particular troll/flame to death on slashdot will be banned from the internet for 48 hours. At least I hope so...
When you put quotes around it, yes it does mean exactly that. Specifically, google returns the text Results 1 - 10 of about 5,290 for "Bill Gates is the devil", so I'd say his answer is full of shit.
First of all, vulnerabilities in the kernel and critical applications are patched quickly and all major distributions release updates very soon after a problem is released. Much better than the Windows track record for such vulnerabilies which can linger for months and patches are released on a schedule instead of shortly after they are posted.
Second of all, "LinuxLand" uses a superior method of software installation that leaves it immune to the sorts of malware programs that plague windows users. Debian and Ubuntu use apt and synaptic, fedora and red hat use yum, Suse and NDL use red-carpet, Manrake uses urmpi, gentoo has portage, and Xandros and Linspire have their own systems too. All of these systems have something in common: you can easily install a wide range of software from your Linux distributer, and users do not need to install malware-ridden crap software of random websites. This is as close to a "miracle cure" as any Linux user needs to the sorts of problems that plague most Windows users.
I could go on, but I won't.
Hopefully, if buys instal Windows on the machine they will void the warranty by running an unsafe and unsupported system. :-) Would be a nice twist on the usual.
What it lacked: Wait a minute. Some
It sounds like you are playing maps that are too large for the number of civilizations in the game. Try playing the same number of civs with a smaller map, or put more civs on your favourite map size. Or play freeciv for a bit and be happy that the civ3 AIs build way less cities by comparison.
A great cross-platform solution would be Theora via Flumotion -- you can watch in a java applet or advanced users can play the stream directly in your player of choice if you have the codecs installed.
I thought the US were supposed to be the laissez-faire free marketeers of the world?
HAHAHAHAHA! Ever considered a career in comedy? You seem to be on the right track already. Laissez-faire free marketers... you guys crack me up. And Bush's America respecting a WTO ruling lately? Golden! Priceless! Comedy genius!
If by chance you were not joking about that, I must say your assumptions are deadly wrong. Like every other country I'm aware of, the USA uses a mixed socialist/capitalist system and is protectionist in a variety of ways. If you ignore the rhetoric and look at the reality, this is quite obvious to even the most casual observer.
That's delicious! A *Christian* arguing that *another religious group* has no evidence to support their outrageous claims and that the text is self-contradictory. Pot, meet kettle... kettle, say hello to my good friend pot. And while we're at it... someone call Alanis Morisette, because it sounds to that it's like rain on your wedding day, don't you think?
True, I would have also downloaded them from the producers if they came out on a format I could watch on my PC. Though to be fair, I would have probably used my mouse scroll wheel to skip 30 seconds ahead in Totem skipping each commercial as they happened. I have a feeling most people would do something equivilent to that and it wouldn't be much of a net benefit to the producers. Maybe it would though, I'm not 100% sure.
On the other hand, the positive buzz that the internet response has given thus far might contribute to the SciFi channel's favour. I know a lot of people who aren't savvy enough to get things off bittorrent, but are aware of the show from fans who have been downloading the eps for months now.
Hell, this slashdot article is a testament to that very fact... if the nerd community wasn't already abuzz with how great this show is, would the US air date have made the slashdot front page? We'll never know for sure, but I think it will help not hurt the overall ratings.
The Gnome RSS readers I know of are: Liferea (C), Straw (python), and Blam (C#). Notice the complete lack of the stupid and tacky K/G naming scheme there, or even the lack of language identifier? That's right, Gnome developers pretty much dropped the "G-everything" naming scheme a few years ago and hasn't really looked backed. And this isn't a anti-KDE troll, it's a plea to KDE developers to stop with the insanity, it's an embarrassment to all Linux users.
Excuse me? "we the HIG people, they the Clutter people" is pretty much a summary of the difference between the two projects. Epiphany vs Konqueror, Nautiuls vs Konqueror, Konsole vs. gnome-terminal, Kedit vs Gedit, koffice vs gnome office, k3b vs nautilus/coaster, Kopete vs gossip/gaim. In each of these applications the KDE app has more features but the Gnome app is more streamlined and simple. Hell, you can even find this pattern in the games each project ships, the dialog boxes, the panel, the configuration settings. Nearly every aspect of the projects, where they differ the important difference is Simplicity vs. Features.
The projects are increasinly moving towards each other in some way, soon will be sharing a gstreamer backend, and are ditching the historical C/C++ divide as non-C projects are able to be included into Gnome (and probably non-C++ into KDE, but I don't know that for sure). They are co-operating in freedesktop.org in many important respects. Increasingly, the difference between Gnome and KDE are the choices required in the balance of Simplicity vs. Features. This observation is not a troll or exaggeration, though it is clearly the basis of what trolls use for material.
Sadly, I think you overestimate the wisdom of the general computing public. Yes, they *will* be safe if they use a sane distribution with only safe applications in the respository and only install applications from that repository. But do you seriously think that advice will work with the people who answer "yes" to "do you want to install the comet cursors?" or install kazaa et al?
.debs you download off the net, and last I checked Fedora didn't support a gui way to install .RPMs that you have downloaded. Hopefully that extra step of difficulty will prevent all but the dumbest and most determined users from wrecking their computers.
The saving grace for the future of crapware on linux is that the marketplace is fragment and applications are difficult to install from a GUI. I can't speak for mandrake or SuSE, but I know Ubuntu doesn't have a GUI way to install