I grew up in a country with dubbing (all TV was in Italian) and lived for a longer time in a place where all TV was in English (or whatever the original language was), subtitled in Norwegian. I agree that that alone is not sufficient, but once a kid has learnt the grammatical basis at school it is an immense booster. Pronunciation especially improves enormously, but also fluency in common figures of speech and filler words. Yes, filler is important—unless you know that, like, y'know, stuff don't really mean anything, you actually try and waste time trying to figure out how they fit in the sentence.
Unless one lives in an English speaking country outright, school is never going to be sufficient to learn a workable English—there is simply not enough time for practice. That's valid for English and any other language.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but IIRC, Finnish is also very similar in structure and sound to English.
You're as wrong as you can be. Finnish is an ugro-finnic language, meaning its closest relatives are Estonian and (far away) Hungarian. It is not even indoeuropean: English is closer to Sanskrit, Russian and Farsi than Finnish. Finnish does not have articles, has 15 or 16 cases depending on dialect, has a completely different set of sounds, and sports oddities such as lacking a verb for "to have".
The only thing in common is the Latin alphabet, which the Finns use much better than English speakers since their language is much easier to spell.
The closest language to English is French. Even though it is not a Germanic language, most of the words (and spelling horrors) in English come from French, and English grammar is fairly easy to pick up anyway. This means that language proximity is fairly irrelevant when there is no application in study of the language.
The paper does not even mention global warming or climate change in its abstract. It's about a local temperature change; and as pointed out by others, it actually strengthens the case for global warming, since aerosols cannot be responsible for the full temperature increase.
I'm wondering if you've ever actually read a peer reviewed scientific journal,
You are a bad guess. I happen to be a post-doc (not in climatology though) and in my collection of reference PDFs that I read since I became a PhD in 2002 I have 279 papers. I published 3 journal papers and about 10 conference contributions.
[...] and I seriously doubt you've ever done peer review.
I was called in for journal review about four times (confidentiality obviously bars me from indicating which articles), and I have actually another paper to review right on my desk.
The reason I doubt this is because in my time, I've stumbled across articles that are opposing the standard view of global warming without even looking.
I call bullshit. Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary proofs. I do not see climatologists and scientific panels at climatology conferences stating that global warming is not anthropogenic, that it is non-existing, or that it is a scam. That would make some serious news.
First off, no one has ever said that "global warming will mark the world's end". Its consequences are claimed to be very expensive to handle, involve lots of suffering, massive displacements of populations and annexed refugee problems (see recent Bangladesh flooding pattern).
Second, it is also funny how since the beginning of history, groups of people have been claiming that the world is just fine:
Don't worry, that horse is a sign of the gods! Break the wall to let it pass!
Barbarians? How could that be a problem for the largest empire of the world?
Nah, the Turks are only talking—we Armenians will just have to endure some insults, like all the other times, that's all.
They've been persecuting us for almost two millennia now, yet we're still here.
Ivan, run this test tomorrow night on reactor 4. Stop whining about safety, nothing bad ever happened before.
Levee maintenance? Oh please, every how many years do we get a Cat 5?
Predicting doom may or may not be right. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not. It is the merit of the question that has to be addressed, and if the consequences are claimed to be serious it should be a case for increased attention, not discredit.
Of course, his opinion on this seems utterly pointless to me. The man is a physicist, specializing in solid-state and quantum physics. He's no more qualified to analyze the science behind climate change than an electrical engineer is to build a bridge.
... and get this sentence engraved on every global-warming sceptic's monitor. It will be big news when a climatologist actually publishes research disproving global warming in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
If wattage correlates to heat like I think it does, [...]
Er... in case you had doubts, wattage correlates with heat 100%. When energy enters a computer case, it can only leave as heat, except possibly for the small amount of airborne kinetic energy impelled away by the fans, which is anyway very small.
If you are talking about temperature, you obviously have to consider both heat input (=wattage) and dissipation capacity. In your particular case, in which you want to minimise fan usage, low wattage is very advantageous. You should consider how CPU-intensive your typical recording application will be, and find the CPU that delivers that performance with the minimum wattage.
If you really want to go for something radically silent, try heat pipes or liquid cooling, either convection-driven or with an acoustically insulated pump.
You would drive very, very carefully until you got used to it. When I was a kid, my father would drive the family around without any seatbelts (no one used them where we lived, so it looked dorky), driving like a hog. No wait, no hogs speed down the motorway at 180 km/h. I fortunately grew a better driver and cannot conceive even moving the car without ensuring that I, any passengers and cargo are properly fastened.
I remember that the first times I used the safety belt I felt uncomfortable and I noticed it; after some time, it became second nature. If I were to drive without a safety belt, I can imagine I would feel like hanging from a cliff or something—until I got used to the new situation.
So my take is: this safety-belts-kill effect is a transient. Most people do not think about their safety equipment because they develop habits and use the same configuration all the time. Changing the configuration may increase or decrease awareness, but this will wear off with time.
Other habits, though, can be dangerous: if people get used to ABS braking performance, they might forget the next guy may not be equipped as well. I was in such a situation (as the next guy), and though it taught me to keep more safety distance than what taught at driving school, it was still scary.
Why don't you bitch about Italy! Would you guess that the percentage of Italians who believe in God is: a. above 90, or b. above 90%. The answer, of course, is c. above 90%. Are all Italians stupid?
Ahem. *Points to the current Italian prime minister* Ahem.
Disclaimer: I actually am Italian, and I can confirm that your accuracy (>90% idiots) is quite amazing. It seems you have found a good statistical predictor.
And it could be argued that if my grandma had had balls, she would have been my grandpa.
South Vietnam was not an ally, it was a puppet regime. The North may have been a puppet of the Soviet Union, but that's beside the point. The North won also because the South regime, that represented the Christian urban minority, was never accepted by the Buddhist rural majority. That's what pushed the population to support the Viet Cong, and that's why all major US operations were in South Vietnam, not in the North.
Why, I would have said "tell the same to the Sioux, the Apache, the Comanche, the Pawnee, the Alaska natives," and so on.
It has always puzzled me how some Americans can double-think on such a grand scale when talking about Tibet: almost the entire area of the US was taken by outright theft, swindle or larceny.
At the same time, while China is the evil empire persecuting Tibetans, Israel is "just defending itself". Would be interesting to see how the US public opinion would react if China bombed Tibet the way Israel bombed Gaza, and whether it would be considered that Tibetans actually killed more Chinese of other ethnic groups last year (see Lhasa riots) than Palestinians killed Israelis.
Oh, for crying out loud. The concept of sacrificing one life to save countless others is "chilling" "moral relativism"?
I remember reading something about this attitude, it was either Dawkins or maybe Dennet. It was about the "inherent moral sense" that every human possess, independently of religion or upbringing; I suppose it makes sense, from an evolutionary point of view, for a species to have all its members not acting like assholes to each other.
IIRC, It is innately immoral to hurt others, do nothing while others are being hurt, but for some reason also hurt some to save more: the example I remember was "would you accept a doctor to have the authority to kidnap someone, kill him, and harvest his/her organs to save 10 other people?".
Anyway, the point being, if someone believes that an embryo is indeed a person, the reaction against stem cell research, notwithstanding the prospective benefits, is pretty much automatic and expected. I guess that if you want to convince these people, you need to work on their perception of embryos.
Odd that no one suggested this yet, but you could keep your current HDD as a working area, and install the OS (and programs) on the SSD. I have been thinking about doing something like this in the past few weeks. I have no direct experience but, browsing forums, it seems a popular layout.
On Linux, you would install/ on the SSD, then mount/var and/home on two HDD partitions; on Windows I suppose that you would place C: on the SSD and put a link from C:\...\Documents and Settings to D:, the HDD.
This way, you get lots of storage in your home folder (where you need it), and you can write, delete, rewrite as usual; plus, you get fast system and application start-up, because those files are on the SSD, where you do not write as often but where you also like things to go a bit faster. You can also get away with a ludicrously tiny SSD (e.g. 16 GB for Ubuntu system files are waaay more than enough: at my place/ is 6 GB, of which/var is already 1.4GB), so you can invest on speed rather than capacity.
As someone already suggested, working on a SSD may make you write I/O intensive software that will not fare as well when you run the program on a HDD; but if you have your SVN checkout and your build on a HDD, you will not risk this error to begin with. In any case, most read/write-intensive file operations on user partitions are sequential (storing backups, playing MP3s or movies...), and HDDs are still quite fast on sequential files (assuming no or negligible fragmentation, granted).
If you work for an employer who does these sorts of sleazy things, why are you still employed there and not looking for another job?
That argument does not work well in a recession. Besides, even during economically good times, quitting your job may be not viable for a host of reasons, like having the only available job in little town, the only job close to significant other, being a PhD and thus overqualified for most jobs, working in a "non-essential" field of work (like IT is in the heads of some PHBs), and so on.
This is the kind of issue for which there should be a strong union of IT workers. A lone crusader simply loses the job, a union could actually get results home. I am also aware, however, that unions are not culturally very popular in the US, and that even if a law banning this snooping were to be passed it would be unenforceable anyway.
I guess creating a parallel Web identity, using PGP signatures and gizmos, would probably simpler to implement and more robust. But would a prospective employer hire someone who seems to have been living off the grid?
You are looking at the worst-case scenario. Of course some very motivated criminals may well use advanced cryptography (or learn to fly jumbo jets), but most do not. If you are looking at some run-of-the-mill picciotto (mafia soldier), or even a mafia boss, he will hardly know how to spell properly, let alone using a computer. Using Skype is already pretty advanced for their standards.
Of course you get also experts. But, the kind of 9/11 conspirators you are thinking about are few and far between, and considering the hopeless state of airport security (anyone can grab a knife at a Pizza Hut after check-in, and if caught they can simply admit to petty stealing), they must be rare. And, also those 9/11 terrorists were pretty stupid: how could anyone of them even think of not showing interest in landing lessons? Didn't he think it would be kind of suspicious? Those guys were only lucky no one got wind of their plans.
If criminals knew that much about IT, they would have an IT career, not a criminal one.
Most criminals are at best casual users of computers. While they might hire a whiz kid to encrypt their calls, that is quite rare: hiring someone from outside the criminal environment to encrypt communications opens a much larger security hole than Skype ever could.
You are assuming that the knowledge level common here on Slashdot is common in the real world. It isn't. I remember that Bernardo Provenzano, head of the Sicilian Mafia, used a Caesar cipher using a bible as key to send its orders around, and someone here on Slashdot commenting "what, he does not know of PGP?!?".
Excuse me, I'm just an European, but where are your American values? Can't you just declare war on tax havens? Most of them hardly have any military worth of that name.
You just have to do it once, say the Cayman Islands; claim all assets in their banks as war loot, tell anyone who had money there that they will not see it again. At that point, I guess people will be a tad more careful about offshoring assets.
Saying every time "those ignorant buffoons who don't understand squat about climatology but feel like they are entitled to contest world-leading researchers because the latter ones' conclusions threaten the former ones' god-given right to $1/gal. gasoline" is kind of cumbersome. "Deniers" is a good description, which also captures the irrationality of climate-change deniers: you are yourself a good example of that:
the kind of science you support is to cherry pick unrelated events from around the world and scare people into agreeing with them for the purposes of making money off such schemes as carbon off setting.
That's quite some cloak-and-dagger Illuminati conspiracy theory you have there. If climatologists were that greedy, they would:
Have studied economy to begin with, and pursued a career with a much better monetary return on IQ;
Would not be in research, economically one of the worst fields of employment;
Would try to publish against climate change, and get fat funding from Exxon. No such funding is available for pro-climate-change papers. As a matter of fact I do not know of any other funding given on the condition of reaching certain conclusions.
How exactly are climatologists making money from C offsetting?
The scientific consensus is that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Sure, the consensus is known to have been wrong before, but it was not the scientifically illiterate who corrected it—it was the consensus itself that adjusted. So if you really have good reasons why you think climate change is not anthropogenic, is not that bad, or is not even happening, by all means write a paper, submit it to a peer-reviewed scientific journal or conference, and stop wasting time here on Slashdot: such discoveries would be of the utmost importance and are not just news for nerds.
[...] even now, almost a year later, the prices remain out of reach for ordinary Cubans.
I would rather take my chances with expensive health care [...]
Criticising "freedom for those who can afford it" as no actual freedom is a well founded criticism. Funny that you would use that one to criticise Cuba, but not your own country—if you had been consistent, you should also have supported socialised health care. Unless you are one of those self-deluding libertarians who actually think that getting rich in a capitalist country is somehow correlated to working hard or being useful to the community, rather than being greedy, being born in the right social environment, and having the right connections.
Here is a video of Nova Linux. For the most part it shows the installation process for the GIMP with a package manager that looks like Synaptic. From what I could see in the video, the package repository is hosted by the Cuban IT university. The desktop seems to be Gnome, with some graphical branding here and there.
Any idea of which distro it is based on? It looks like it is Debian-based, possibly Ubuntu-based.
"Nova" is a perfectly fine word in Spanish, meaning "new" in the feminine gender. It is also pronounced/'nova/, while "No va" would be/'no 'va/, with accent on both words; it is therefore written and spoken differently. Obviously if they end up with a crappy distro, people will start making that sort of puns.
Because any climate scientist who isn't in agreement suddenly finds he has no govt funding,
Ever heard of Bjørn Lomborg? He is a nutcase who published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he (who has only one peer-reviewed publication in an unrelated field) said that all environmental scientist were were wrong about pretty much everything.
So, what happened to his career? While he was denounced by Scientific American and Nature, he was defended by The Economist, not exactly a climatology publication. The Danish government gave Lomborg the chair of a newly created "Environmental Assessment Institute", he published further books, and ended up in TIME's list of the 100 most influential people of 2004.
So, that's what happens when one is not in agreement with the scientific consensus, but says things that governments want to hear: lots of money, media attention, skyrocketing career. Lomborg was just a mediocre associate professor with only one peer-reviewed paper from 1996, who was looking at a very boring and uneventful career. By cherry-picking and fabricating data, he's a world star of climate-change denial now (note that last time I checked, he did not deny climate change outright, or even that it is anthropogenic, only that it is "inefficient" to do something about it, in practice reaching the same conclusion as deniers).
If anything, it amazes me that so few scientists do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up in a country with dubbing (all TV was in Italian) and lived for a longer time in a place where all TV was in English (or whatever the original language was), subtitled in Norwegian. I agree that that alone is not sufficient, but once a kid has learnt the grammatical basis at school it is an immense booster. Pronunciation especially improves enormously, but also fluency in common figures of speech and filler words. Yes, filler is important—unless you know that, like, y'know, stuff don't really mean anything, you actually try and waste time trying to figure out how they fit in the sentence.
Unless one lives in an English speaking country outright, school is never going to be sufficient to learn a workable English—there is simply not enough time for practice. That's valid for English and any other language.
You're as wrong as you can be. Finnish is an ugro-finnic language, meaning its closest relatives are Estonian and (far away) Hungarian. It is not even indoeuropean: English is closer to Sanskrit, Russian and Farsi than Finnish. Finnish does not have articles, has 15 or 16 cases depending on dialect, has a completely different set of sounds, and sports oddities such as lacking a verb for "to have".
The only thing in common is the Latin alphabet, which the Finns use much better than English speakers since their language is much easier to spell.
The closest language to English is French. Even though it is not a Germanic language, most of the words (and spelling horrors) in English come from French, and English grammar is fairly easy to pick up anyway. This means that language proximity is fairly irrelevant when there is no application in study of the language.
...disproving global warming? That was not the impression I got by reading the article.
The paper does not even mention global warming or climate change in its abstract. It's about a local temperature change; and as pointed out by others, it actually strengthens the case for global warming, since aerosols cannot be responsible for the full temperature increase.
You are a bad guess. I happen to be a post-doc (not in climatology though) and in my collection of reference PDFs that I read since I became a PhD in 2002 I have 279 papers. I published 3 journal papers and about 10 conference contributions.
I was called in for journal review about four times (confidentiality obviously bars me from indicating which articles), and I have actually another paper to review right on my desk.
I call bullshit. Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary proofs. I do not see climatologists and scientific panels at climatology conferences stating that global warming is not anthropogenic, that it is non-existing, or that it is a scam. That would make some serious news.
First off, no one has ever said that "global warming will mark the world's end". Its consequences are claimed to be very expensive to handle, involve lots of suffering, massive displacements of populations and annexed refugee problems (see recent Bangladesh flooding pattern).
Second, it is also funny how since the beginning of history, groups of people have been claiming that the world is just fine:
Predicting doom may or may not be right. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it does not. It is the merit of the question that has to be addressed, and if the consequences are claimed to be serious it should be a case for increased attention, not discredit.
... and get this sentence engraved on every global-warming sceptic's monitor. It will be big news when a climatologist actually publishes research disproving global warming in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
Er... in case you had doubts, wattage correlates with heat 100%. When energy enters a computer case, it can only leave as heat, except possibly for the small amount of airborne kinetic energy impelled away by the fans, which is anyway very small.
If you are talking about temperature, you obviously have to consider both heat input (=wattage) and dissipation capacity. In your particular case, in which you want to minimise fan usage, low wattage is very advantageous. You should consider how CPU-intensive your typical recording application will be, and find the CPU that delivers that performance with the minimum wattage.
If you really want to go for something radically silent, try heat pipes or liquid cooling, either convection-driven or with an acoustically insulated pump.
You would drive very, very carefully until you got used to it. When I was a kid, my father would drive the family around without any seatbelts (no one used them where we lived, so it looked dorky), driving like a hog. No wait, no hogs speed down the motorway at 180 km/h. I fortunately grew a better driver and cannot conceive even moving the car without ensuring that I, any passengers and cargo are properly fastened.
I remember that the first times I used the safety belt I felt uncomfortable and I noticed it; after some time, it became second nature. If I were to drive without a safety belt, I can imagine I would feel like hanging from a cliff or something—until I got used to the new situation.
So my take is: this safety-belts-kill effect is a transient. Most people do not think about their safety equipment because they develop habits and use the same configuration all the time. Changing the configuration may increase or decrease awareness, but this will wear off with time.
Other habits, though, can be dangerous: if people get used to ABS braking performance, they might forget the next guy may not be equipped as well. I was in such a situation (as the next guy), and though it taught me to keep more safety distance than what taught at driving school, it was still scary.
Not really going to answer to everything, but...
Ahem. *Points to the current Italian prime minister* Ahem.
Disclaimer: I actually am Italian, and I can confirm that your accuracy (>90% idiots) is quite amazing. It seems you have found a good statistical predictor.
And it could be argued that if my grandma had had balls, she would have been my grandpa.
South Vietnam was not an ally, it was a puppet regime. The North may have been a puppet of the Soviet Union, but that's beside the point. The North won also because the South regime, that represented the Christian urban minority, was never accepted by the Buddhist rural majority. That's what pushed the population to support the Viet Cong, and that's why all major US operations were in South Vietnam, not in the North.
Why, I would have said "tell the same to the Sioux, the Apache, the Comanche, the Pawnee, the Alaska natives," and so on.
It has always puzzled me how some Americans can double-think on such a grand scale when talking about Tibet: almost the entire area of the US was taken by outright theft, swindle or larceny.
At the same time, while China is the evil empire persecuting Tibetans, Israel is "just defending itself". Would be interesting to see how the US public opinion would react if China bombed Tibet the way Israel bombed Gaza, and whether it would be considered that Tibetans actually killed more Chinese of other ethnic groups last year (see Lhasa riots) than Palestinians killed Israelis.
I remember reading something about this attitude, it was either Dawkins or maybe Dennet. It was about the "inherent moral sense" that every human possess, independently of religion or upbringing; I suppose it makes sense, from an evolutionary point of view, for a species to have all its members not acting like assholes to each other.
IIRC, It is innately immoral to hurt others, do nothing while others are being hurt, but for some reason also hurt some to save more: the example I remember was "would you accept a doctor to have the authority to kidnap someone, kill him, and harvest his/her organs to save 10 other people?".
Anyway, the point being, if someone believes that an embryo is indeed a person, the reaction against stem cell research, notwithstanding the prospective benefits, is pretty much automatic and expected. I guess that if you want to convince these people, you need to work on their perception of embryos.
Odd that no one suggested this yet, but you could keep your current HDD as a working area, and install the OS (and programs) on the SSD. I have been thinking about doing something like this in the past few weeks. I have no direct experience but, browsing forums, it seems a popular layout.
On Linux, you would install / on the SSD, then mount /var and /home on two HDD partitions; on Windows I suppose that you would place C: on the SSD and put a link from C:\...\Documents and Settings to D:, the HDD.
This way, you get lots of storage in your home folder (where you need it), and you can write, delete, rewrite as usual; plus, you get fast system and application start-up, because those files are on the SSD, where you do not write as often but where you also like things to go a bit faster. You can also get away with a ludicrously tiny SSD (e.g. 16 GB for Ubuntu system files are waaay more than enough: at my place / is 6 GB, of which /var is already 1.4GB), so you can invest on speed rather than capacity.
As someone already suggested, working on a SSD may make you write I/O intensive software that will not fare as well when you run the program on a HDD; but if you have your SVN checkout and your build on a HDD, you will not risk this error to begin with. In any case, most read/write-intensive file operations on user partitions are sequential (storing backups, playing MP3s or movies...), and HDDs are still quite fast on sequential files (assuming no or negligible fragmentation, granted).
That argument does not work well in a recession. Besides, even during economically good times, quitting your job may be not viable for a host of reasons, like having the only available job in little town, the only job close to significant other, being a PhD and thus overqualified for most jobs, working in a "non-essential" field of work (like IT is in the heads of some PHBs), and so on.
This is the kind of issue for which there should be a strong union of IT workers. A lone crusader simply loses the job, a union could actually get results home. I am also aware, however, that unions are not culturally very popular in the US, and that even if a law banning this snooping were to be passed it would be unenforceable anyway.
I guess creating a parallel Web identity, using PGP signatures and gizmos, would probably simpler to implement and more robust. But would a prospective employer hire someone who seems to have been living off the grid?
I think it is the count of how much time Microsoft has been working on the bug.
You are looking at the worst-case scenario. Of course some very motivated criminals may well use advanced cryptography (or learn to fly jumbo jets), but most do not. If you are looking at some run-of-the-mill picciotto (mafia soldier), or even a mafia boss, he will hardly know how to spell properly, let alone using a computer. Using Skype is already pretty advanced for their standards.
Of course you get also experts. But, the kind of 9/11 conspirators you are thinking about are few and far between, and considering the hopeless state of airport security (anyone can grab a knife at a Pizza Hut after check-in, and if caught they can simply admit to petty stealing), they must be rare. And, also those 9/11 terrorists were pretty stupid: how could anyone of them even think of not showing interest in landing lessons? Didn't he think it would be kind of suspicious? Those guys were only lucky no one got wind of their plans.
If criminals knew that much about IT, they would have an IT career, not a criminal one.
Most criminals are at best casual users of computers. While they might hire a whiz kid to encrypt their calls, that is quite rare: hiring someone from outside the criminal environment to encrypt communications opens a much larger security hole than Skype ever could.
You are assuming that the knowledge level common here on Slashdot is common in the real world. It isn't. I remember that Bernardo Provenzano, head of the Sicilian Mafia, used a Caesar cipher using a bible as key to send its orders around, and someone here on Slashdot commenting "what, he does not know of PGP?!?".
Excuse me, I'm just an European, but where are your American values? Can't you just declare war on tax havens? Most of them hardly have any military worth of that name.
You just have to do it once, say the Cayman Islands; claim all assets in their banks as war loot, tell anyone who had money there that they will not see it again. At that point, I guess people will be a tad more careful about offshoring assets.
Looking at the moderation profile of this and other threads, it seems that the ancestor AC prediction was right on target.
Saying every time "those ignorant buffoons who don't understand squat about climatology but feel like they are entitled to contest world-leading researchers because the latter ones' conclusions threaten the former ones' god-given right to $1/gal. gasoline" is kind of cumbersome. "Deniers" is a good description, which also captures the irrationality of climate-change deniers: you are yourself a good example of that:
That's quite some cloak-and-dagger Illuminati conspiracy theory you have there. If climatologists were that greedy, they would:
The scientific consensus is that global warming is real and anthropogenic. Sure, the consensus is known to have been wrong before, but it was not the scientifically illiterate who corrected it—it was the consensus itself that adjusted. So if you really have good reasons why you think climate change is not anthropogenic, is not that bad, or is not even happening, by all means write a paper, submit it to a peer-reviewed scientific journal or conference, and stop wasting time here on Slashdot: such discoveries would be of the utmost importance and are not just news for nerds.
Criticising "freedom for those who can afford it" as no actual freedom is a well founded criticism. Funny that you would use that one to criticise Cuba, but not your own country—if you had been consistent, you should also have supported socialised health care. Unless you are one of those self-deluding libertarians who actually think that getting rich in a capitalist country is somehow correlated to working hard or being useful to the community, rather than being greedy, being born in the right social environment, and having the right connections.
Here is a video of Nova Linux. For the most part it shows the installation process for the GIMP with a package manager that looks like Synaptic. From what I could see in the video, the package repository is hosted by the Cuban IT university. The desktop seems to be Gnome, with some graphical branding here and there.
Any idea of which distro it is based on? It looks like it is Debian-based, possibly Ubuntu-based.
"Nova" is a perfectly fine word in Spanish, meaning "new" in the feminine gender. It is also pronounced /'nova/, while "No va" would be /'no 'va/, with accent on both words; it is therefore written and spoken differently. Obviously if they end up with a crappy distro, people will start making that sort of puns.
Ever heard of Bjørn Lomborg? He is a nutcase who published a book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, in which he (who has only one peer-reviewed publication in an unrelated field) said that all environmental scientist were were wrong about pretty much everything.
So, what happened to his career? While he was denounced by Scientific American and Nature, he was defended by The Economist, not exactly a climatology publication. The Danish government gave Lomborg the chair of a newly created "Environmental Assessment Institute", he published further books, and ended up in TIME's list of the 100 most influential people of 2004.
So, that's what happens when one is not in agreement with the scientific consensus, but says things that governments want to hear: lots of money, media attention, skyrocketing career. Lomborg was just a mediocre associate professor with only one peer-reviewed paper from 1996, who was looking at a very boring and uneventful career. By cherry-picking and fabricating data, he's a world star of climate-change denial now (note that last time I checked, he did not deny climate change outright, or even that it is anthropogenic, only that it is "inefficient" to do something about it, in practice reaching the same conclusion as deniers).
If anything, it amazes me that so few scientists do the same.
Bollocks. Open a GMail account, move your mail there, migrate Linux, download your mail again.
SMTP is to send mail, genius. To receive it you use POP or IMAP.