Everything you post on facebook, twitter, hell any service that has an office in the USA will get into the FBI, CIA an SS databanks and you will get in trouble if you post something those warmongers don't like.
The problem with that is that just going into hiding won't stop the warmongers. If you want to stop them, you have to take against against them. Just going into hiding won't restore your freedom, the requirement to hide is just an indicator that you already lost it. If you want that your data is a little more save, get laws in place that outlaw collection and data mining. It won't be easy and it won't be fast, but it might still be a lot easier then to convince all your friends to communicate via GPG and avoid all social networking forever.
Can you establish even an iota of plausible evidence, that is not contradicted by any other criteria...
The problem is that you assume that you can evaluate the evidence and get a clear true/false response, while what you really get are just probabilities, one really really high, the other really really low. Whenever you have a human or even a computer evaluating a math problem or verifying a proof, there is a chance that he ends up with the wrong conclusion, mistakes happen. I can look at a wrong proof and conclude, yep, looks correct, while it's not. The more resources you throw at the problem and the more often you repeat the test, the lower the chance for a mistake will be, but you never reach some kind of 100% philosophical truth.
Math is of course on the far end of the spectrum, the facts are very clear and the chance for error reasonably low, so that you get really close to a clear true/false, other fields of research things aren't quite as clear cut and the evidence is far more uncertain.
All you can ever really do is gaining confidence in your hypothesis by repeated observation and experiments. Even in math it will be impossible to ever reach absolute certainty without leaving room for doubt, as you can never be fully sure that the proof you did is actually correct, as it could always contain a mistake. Having other people look over the work and repeat it will of course shrink the doubt to a negligible tiny fraction that allows you to assert for practical purposes that something is true.
Yep, my last experience with fsck was after a HDD has gotten a few bad sectors. fsck on the ext3 file system let me recover the data alright, except of course for the filenames, thus I ended up with a whole lot of unsorted and unnamed stuff in/lost+found, which wasn't very helpful. I'd really like to see more focus on how secure the filesystems are and less on how fast they are.
22 light years is not all that far away, with nuclear propulsion you could get there in around 500 years. Not good for a weekend trip, but not really unreachable either.
Yes, the problem with LGP is that their business model was essentially: Take old cheap and old Windows game, port it to Linux and sell it for full price. The audience for that is very tiny, as either people will already have played the Windows game or don't see a point in buying a Linux version for $50 when they can get the Windows version for $5. The Linux version might also suffer from being incompatible to mods, patches, add-ons and so on.
Aside from gesture control, you can also use Kinect (in theory at least) for making better video chat. One problem with video chat is that the eyes never match, i.e. you look at the other persons face, but they see you looking off into the wild, as the cameras are on top of the monitor, while they should be inside the monitor. With Kinect you have a 3D image where you can correct the perspective of the image so that you looking at the other person ends up looking like you are actually looking at the other person, canceling the camera offset.
Not sure if it will actually be used for that, but it would be one possible usecase.
No, only games that have been bought as a gift, and thus have never been played, can be traded. Once the Steam Gift is opened and added to your game library, you won’t be able to trade it again.
Don't make a judgment until you have actually played all the games. I haven't, but at least from what one can read on the Internet from people who have: SimTown plays quite different, TinyTower and Zyngas game almost identical and it's not like this is the first time Zynga has done something like this, see FarmTown vs FarmVille.
Unless you happen to have one of the few routers that actually supports IPv6 or provides a firmware upgrade, yes, you will have to get a new router. However you won't have to get one anytime soon. IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for many years or even decades to come. It will be a long time before any major service switches off it's public IPv4 address. The first piece of IPv6-only service will probably be some obscure P2P thing, but even those will take years to even show up.
HLE, aka high level emulation, works by intercepting things essentially at the API level, not the hardware level. Thus instead of emulating all the math that the GPU does to draw a pixel, you simply translate the draw_triangle() code so that it fits to your GPU. The problem with that is that I don't think that approach works that well with modern hardware, GPUs are no longer about just drawing triangles really fast, they are now programmable, thus simply intercepting API calls isn't going to work, you have to intercept the code uploaded to the GPU and write a full emulator or translator for that. So I wouldn't expect PS3 compatibility on PS4, unless they build compatibility right into the hardware.
But the Wii has sold a lot more consoles then Sony and Microsoft.
No, the Wii has sold more consoles then Sony or Microsoft, not and. When I look at the numbers I see:
90 million casual consoles sold. 121 million hardcore consoles sold.
The later market was split between two competitors, while Nintendo was pretty alone in the casual segment. With the iPhone and iPad around that is no longer the case. Even Microsoft and Sony are trying to push in the casual market. While Nintendo is still strugeling to get a food back into the hardcore market, which they haven't been very successful in for well over a decade.
That said, I don't expect Nintendo to die anytime soon, they had two consoles that essentially printed money, have a tendency to not sell things at a loss and their Mario and Zelda stuff still less pretty damn good. So it will take quite a while for them to drop out of business even if the Wii U and 3DS flop.
For those that think NAT is some kind of security feature I suggest learning what it actually is instead of throwing three letters around as some sort of incantation. The features actually come from the firewall that just happens to be on the same physical device that gives you NAT and you still need something like that device anyway to get the net into the office with IPv6.
While it is true that NAT itself isn't a security feature, being limited to only a single IPv4 address and being forced to hide all devices behind a single IP address actually is. With a typical single-IPv4 address NAT network you simply can't expose all your devices to the Internet, it's impossible. It's secure by default and there is not even a way to missconfigure it. At worst you can expose a few selected services to the Internet or a single machine, but not much more.
With IPv6 and Firewalls that will change. While you can, in theory, get all the same security and block everything incoming with a Firewall. With IPv6 and a whole subnet under your control, you now can expose all your devices to the Internet and when the software on your router isn't good you not only can do that, it will be the default.
So essentially in the worst case we will go from: Everything closed by default, without even a way to open it all up, to a world where everything is open for everybody. So while NAT might not be a security feature by itself, going IPv6 will pretty certainly open up a whole lot of new holes that we simply didn't need to worry about before.
Google isn't withholding access from anybody, all their services are perfectly reachable via IPv4 on a dual-stack network. The whole point of their police is to not block people with broken IPv6 setup, which they would be if they would enable dual-stack use for everybody.
First of, NAT provides no privacy, it's just a hack to allow you to use multiple devices behind a single IP, so while it might hide what device you are using, it doesn't hide the fact that you own that IP. What provides privacy on IPv4 are the dynamic IP addresses that you almost always get, as static IP addresses are an premium-only service. And those dynamic addresses don't just provide an illusion of privacy, they provide pretty real one, not unbreakable of course (cookies, Facebook-like buttons, browser fingerprinting, ISP log files, etc.), but good enough to circumvent any service that blocks you by IP and to make sure that the IP address isn't attached forever to your name, but only has long as the ISP log files aren't deleted (which might be weeks or month, but that still much better then years).
The problem with IPv6 is that there is no longer a need to force dynamic IPs on the user, so ISPs can assign you a fixed prefix that will be the same for however long you don't change your ISP. You can still randomly switch the suffix port of your IPv6, but that won't really hide you when your prefix stays the same and identifies your account. So far with the bad news. The good news is that IPv6 doesn't require that behavior. First of, to get back the "hide my devices" "feature" of NAT can be replicated with the IPv6 Privacy Extension. And secondly, nobody is forcing your ISP to give you a static address, quite the opposite, IPv6 allows far more freedom in that regard. An ISP can give you for example both a static prefix, for your server hosting needs, and a dynamic one, for your random browsing needs, at the same time, and with IPv6 such a setup should be rather easy to setup. Furthermore IPv6 also has features to handle IP address changes cleanly, so as far as I understand, you should be able to switch IP address while you are transfering things without having the connection break down. You couldn't do that with IPv4, so IPv6 could allow more frequent address changes.
And all that aside, IPv6 also has the very basic advantage that it turn the Internet back into peer2peer, without all the NAT trouble anonymization services and peer2peer services could work much more smoothly and thus make it much easier to build a real anonymous network on top of the Internet.
There is nothing daft about that policy, it simply makes sure that their services work and are responsive, as there used to be a lot of broken IPv6 setups in the wild.
I'd understand that you might have a very old home router at home that wouldn't support it though,
That is blandly false. Even many brand new routers have zero IPv6 support. Lack of IPv6 support in home routers is essentially one of the biggest issue of an IPv6 transition, right next to ISPs not providing IPv6 to their customers in the first place.
There are a shitload of server clusters which run on a single public-facing IP address,
The problem that you need to solve isn't hiding multiple servers behind a single IP, but making them visible behind a single IP. NAT can't do that. The only way to do that would be via protocol specific hacks, i.e. HTTP Vhost. It of course can be done, but you end up having to reinvent an address scheme with every new protocol.
RMS and Moglen, who would've guessed, 10 years ago, they'd be right?
The problem with that is that being right doesn't fix the problem, if you want to change the situations your arguments have to be actual good and you have to provide an alternative. A simple "don't use that, it's evil" is neither a good argument nor does it point the users into the direction of an alternative. A Freedombox that one day will do the same thing, just more complicated, more expensive and potentially less secure, isn't all that shiny of an alternative either.
You need to familiarize yourself with the use of data by a certain government in Germany between the years of 1933 and 1945.
All that shows is that they didn't need Facebook to commit their crimes. So how exactly is stopping Facebook going to protect you from that? If anything, lack of Facebooks makes it harder to organize protests against such movements.
Discussions: usenet -> a ton of separate web-forum fiefdoms
Isn't that the wrong way around? Usenet was quite centralized, governed and archived in all eternity. Some parts of usenet (i.e. de.*) even had a realname policy. Webforums are decentralized, not archived, make it much easier to use pseudonyms and everybody can setup their own. They provide far more freedom and privacy for the user.
Now in theory you could do that with an NNTP server as well, but I can count the number of times I have seen a non-ISP provided NNTP servers on one hand.
Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet,
Easy to answer, proprietary approaches deliver new solution and innovation and make them usable to the average user, the RFC based approach doesn't. It's just to slow and complicated for that. Back when webforums got popular everybody on Usenet was still fighting over lines being longer then 80 characters and their shitty newsreader being unable to handle that and umlauts never worked.
Same with everything else, the existing solutions simply didn't do the job. IRC is for public discussions, IM is for private ones. Email completely sucks for anything involving more then two people communicating, doesn't have any persistence and sucks at handling big files (try to share a photo album when you have a 5mb mail size limit). Personal webpages where never easy enough to run and there simply wasn't software available give you the same feature set as a social network does.
Simply put: If you want people to use your tool, make sure that it's actually the best tool on the market. So far the Open Source world hasn't come up with anything that can replace centralized social networks.
GIMP, Blender, etc. have a lot of great work under the hood, from a lot of very dedicated and skilled programmers. Too bad they've traditionally been buried beneath a *horrid* UI that would have made Steve Jobs commit seppuku.
Gimps UI, yeah, that leaves something to be desired, but overall, while still not great, has become perfectly usable over the years. I'd say the UI is the least of Gimps problems, it's the lack of features that bothers me the most these days (lack of support for 16bit/HDR images formats, adjustment layers, complete lack of advanced brushes, etc.).
Blender on the other side has after the recent rewrite easily become one of the best UIs in the Free Software world. It started out rather bad, years and years ago back when it was first Open Sourced, but since then has made continous improvements and today it's actually pretty awesome and easy to use. Most notably: Blender gives you access to every function it offers via a text search box, so no more digging through menus, you just type it and even more cool, you can hover over any GUI element and it will not only tell you the keyboard shortcut, but also how to access that functionality via Python scripting. Of course the basic GUI layout is now also much more organized then its used to be. That said, Blender of course isn't easy to use, but that's because 3D rendering is a pretty complex topic, not because the UI is bad.
The UIs that bother me the most in the Free Software world are the basic stuff, Gnome applications that don't allow you to reorder the toolbars, that provide no scripting support what so ever and DE environments and distributions that reinvent the wheel with every new versions, without actually providing new features or improving anything. They simply shuffle things around, remove some features in the progress and provide no noticable benefit to the user.
I wouldn't be so fast. Moglen is of course right that we would all have more privacy if everybody would just stop using Facebook, but that's simply unrealistic. That's pretty much the same has having said 10 years ago that everybody should just stop using email, usenet and of course that Slashdot thing, as that it also just making information available to others that otherwise wouldn't be (and yeah in the de.* part of usenet there was a realname policy). So who would have actually done that? Giving up all that new tech and went back to phone and regular snail mail? Not very many, that's simply not how people work and that's not how you can fix the privacy issues.
So what are the alternatives? Creating a better, user controlled, version of Facebook with more privacy is of course worth a try, but it's not exactly an easy goal to archive. Facebook is already way to big to make it easy to switch the users. And creating that box has all sorts of problems in itself, users might find it to be not reliable enough, not be allowed to run it due to ISP policy against running servers 24/7 on a non-business account and security might be a very big issue when you have millions of unpatched boxes running around with a whole lot of private data. Random users simply aren't the kind of people who make good server administrators.
The other alternative would of course be to attack the thing from the law side, don't make people go back into hiding their data, but make sure that exploiting that data is illegal. There are already laws that forbid it to snoop around in peoples email, it wouldn't be very far fetched to extent that to all the data a user stores on a server.
What to do with the data that users make willingly or unknowingly public through Facebook and Twitter is a lot trickier. As that is creating a trail that can be exploited not just by Facebook and the government, but by everybody. But for one that is a thing that isn't specific to Facebook and could happen with Diaspora or just old Blogs and Webpages just the same, some people like to talk a lot about what they do. Facebook wasn't the first thing to make that possible, it just made it convenient enough for everybody to use it.
In the end I am not quite sure what the answer is, but I doubt that it will be giving up on Facebook and moving onto the next big social network thingy. I think it would be time to do a little deeper investigation about what the actual negative consequences of loss of privacy are that one wants to stop, instead of trying to turn back the clock on the technology side.
We would need to get very close to the speed of light for it to take a reasonable period of time to get there.
Depends on how much in a hurry you are. With a Project Orion type spacecraft you could get there in a few thousand years. And while that sounds like a long while, humanity has already build things that latest that long, i.e. the pyramids.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything you post on facebook, twitter, hell any service that has an office in the USA will get into the FBI, CIA an SS databanks and you will get in trouble if you post something those warmongers don't like.
The problem with that is that just going into hiding won't stop the warmongers. If you want to stop them, you have to take against against them. Just going into hiding won't restore your freedom, the requirement to hide is just an indicator that you already lost it. If you want that your data is a little more save, get laws in place that outlaw collection and data mining. It won't be easy and it won't be fast, but it might still be a lot easier then to convince all your friends to communicate via GPG and avoid all social networking forever.
Can you establish even an iota of plausible evidence, that is not contradicted by any other criteria ...
The problem is that you assume that you can evaluate the evidence and get a clear true/false response, while what you really get are just probabilities, one really really high, the other really really low. Whenever you have a human or even a computer evaluating a math problem or verifying a proof, there is a chance that he ends up with the wrong conclusion, mistakes happen. I can look at a wrong proof and conclude, yep, looks correct, while it's not. The more resources you throw at the problem and the more often you repeat the test, the lower the chance for a mistake will be, but you never reach some kind of 100% philosophical truth.
Math is of course on the far end of the spectrum, the facts are very clear and the chance for error reasonably low, so that you get really close to a clear true/false, other fields of research things aren't quite as clear cut and the evidence is far more uncertain.
One can prove, without leaving room for doubt, ...
All you can ever really do is gaining confidence in your hypothesis by repeated observation and experiments. Even in math it will be impossible to ever reach absolute certainty without leaving room for doubt, as you can never be fully sure that the proof you did is actually correct, as it could always contain a mistake. Having other people look over the work and repeat it will of course shrink the doubt to a negligible tiny fraction that allows you to assert for practical purposes that something is true.
Yep, my last experience with fsck was after a HDD has gotten a few bad sectors. fsck on the ext3 file system let me recover the data alright, except of course for the filenames, thus I ended up with a whole lot of unsorted and unnamed stuff in /lost+found, which wasn't very helpful. I'd really like to see more focus on how secure the filesystems are and less on how fast they are.
22 light years is not all that far away, with nuclear propulsion you could get there in around 500 years. Not good for a weekend trip, but not really unreachable either.
Yes, the problem with LGP is that their business model was essentially: Take old cheap and old Windows game, port it to Linux and sell it for full price. The audience for that is very tiny, as either people will already have played the Windows game or don't see a point in buying a Linux version for $50 when they can get the Windows version for $5. The Linux version might also suffer from being incompatible to mods, patches, add-ons and so on.
Science does not give truth, it only gives the best known approximation. There is no way to get truth.
Aside from gesture control, you can also use Kinect (in theory at least) for making better video chat. One problem with video chat is that the eyes never match, i.e. you look at the other persons face, but they see you looking off into the wild, as the cameras are on top of the monitor, while they should be inside the monitor. With Kinect you have a 3D image where you can correct the perspective of the image so that you looking at the other person ends up looking like you are actually looking at the other person, canceling the camera offset.
Not sure if it will actually be used for that, but it would be one possible usecase.
To quote from the page you linked:
Don't make a judgment until you have actually played all the games. I haven't, but at least from what one can read on the Internet from people who have: SimTown plays quite different, TinyTower and Zyngas game almost identical and it's not like this is the first time Zynga has done something like this, see FarmTown vs FarmVille.
Unless you happen to have one of the few routers that actually supports IPv6 or provides a firmware upgrade, yes, you will have to get a new router. However you won't have to get one anytime soon. IPv4 and IPv6 will coexist for many years or even decades to come. It will be a long time before any major service switches off it's public IPv4 address. The first piece of IPv6-only service will probably be some obscure P2P thing, but even those will take years to even show up.
HLE, aka high level emulation, works by intercepting things essentially at the API level, not the hardware level. Thus instead of emulating all the math that the GPU does to draw a pixel, you simply translate the draw_triangle() code so that it fits to your GPU. The problem with that is that I don't think that approach works that well with modern hardware, GPUs are no longer about just drawing triangles really fast, they are now programmable, thus simply intercepting API calls isn't going to work, you have to intercept the code uploaded to the GPU and write a full emulator or translator for that. So I wouldn't expect PS3 compatibility on PS4, unless they build compatibility right into the hardware.
But the Wii has sold a lot more consoles then Sony and Microsoft.
No, the Wii has sold more consoles then Sony or Microsoft, not and. When I look at the numbers I see:
90 million casual consoles sold.
121 million hardcore consoles sold.
The later market was split between two competitors, while Nintendo was pretty alone in the casual segment. With the iPhone and iPad around that is no longer the case. Even Microsoft and Sony are trying to push in the casual market. While Nintendo is still strugeling to get a food back into the hardcore market, which they haven't been very successful in for well over a decade.
That said, I don't expect Nintendo to die anytime soon, they had two consoles that essentially printed money, have a tendency to not sell things at a loss and their Mario and Zelda stuff still less pretty damn good. So it will take quite a while for them to drop out of business even if the Wii U and 3DS flop.
For those that think NAT is some kind of security feature I suggest learning what it actually is instead of throwing three letters around as some sort of incantation. The features actually come from the firewall that just happens to be on the same physical device that gives you NAT and you still need something like that device anyway to get the net into the office with IPv6.
While it is true that NAT itself isn't a security feature, being limited to only a single IPv4 address and being forced to hide all devices behind a single IP address actually is. With a typical single-IPv4 address NAT network you simply can't expose all your devices to the Internet, it's impossible. It's secure by default and there is not even a way to missconfigure it. At worst you can expose a few selected services to the Internet or a single machine, but not much more.
With IPv6 and Firewalls that will change. While you can, in theory, get all the same security and block everything incoming with a Firewall. With IPv6 and a whole subnet under your control, you now can expose all your devices to the Internet and when the software on your router isn't good you not only can do that, it will be the default.
So essentially in the worst case we will go from: Everything closed by default, without even a way to open it all up, to a world where everything is open for everybody. So while NAT might not be a security feature by itself, going IPv6 will pretty certainly open up a whole lot of new holes that we simply didn't need to worry about before.
Google isn't withholding access from anybody, all their services are perfectly reachable via IPv4 on a dual-stack network. The whole point of their police is to not block people with broken IPv6 setup, which they would be if they would enable dual-stack use for everybody.
NAT provides only the illusion of privacy;
First of, NAT provides no privacy, it's just a hack to allow you to use multiple devices behind a single IP, so while it might hide what device you are using, it doesn't hide the fact that you own that IP. What provides privacy on IPv4 are the dynamic IP addresses that you almost always get, as static IP addresses are an premium-only service. And those dynamic addresses don't just provide an illusion of privacy, they provide pretty real one, not unbreakable of course (cookies, Facebook-like buttons, browser fingerprinting, ISP log files, etc.), but good enough to circumvent any service that blocks you by IP and to make sure that the IP address isn't attached forever to your name, but only has long as the ISP log files aren't deleted (which might be weeks or month, but that still much better then years).
The problem with IPv6 is that there is no longer a need to force dynamic IPs on the user, so ISPs can assign you a fixed prefix that will be the same for however long you don't change your ISP. You can still randomly switch the suffix port of your IPv6, but that won't really hide you when your prefix stays the same and identifies your account. So far with the bad news. The good news is that IPv6 doesn't require that behavior. First of, to get back the "hide my devices" "feature" of NAT can be replicated with the IPv6 Privacy Extension. And secondly, nobody is forcing your ISP to give you a static address, quite the opposite, IPv6 allows far more freedom in that regard. An ISP can give you for example both a static prefix, for your server hosting needs, and a dynamic one, for your random browsing needs, at the same time, and with IPv6 such a setup should be rather easy to setup. Furthermore IPv6 also has features to handle IP address changes cleanly, so as far as I understand, you should be able to switch IP address while you are transfering things without having the connection break down. You couldn't do that with IPv4, so IPv6 could allow more frequent address changes.
And all that aside, IPv6 also has the very basic advantage that it turn the Internet back into peer2peer, without all the NAT trouble anonymization services and peer2peer services could work much more smoothly and thus make it much easier to build a real anonymous network on top of the Internet.
There is nothing daft about that policy, it simply makes sure that their services work and are responsive, as there used to be a lot of broken IPv6 setups in the wild.
I'd understand that you might have a very old home router at home that wouldn't support it though,
That is blandly false. Even many brand new routers have zero IPv6 support. Lack of IPv6 support in home routers is essentially one of the biggest issue of an IPv6 transition, right next to ISPs not providing IPv6 to their customers in the first place.
There are a shitload of server clusters which run on a single public-facing IP address,
The problem that you need to solve isn't hiding multiple servers behind a single IP, but making them visible behind a single IP. NAT can't do that. The only way to do that would be via protocol specific hacks, i.e. HTTP Vhost. It of course can be done, but you end up having to reinvent an address scheme with every new protocol.
RMS and Moglen, who would've guessed, 10 years ago, they'd be right?
The problem with that is that being right doesn't fix the problem, if you want to change the situations your arguments have to be actual good and you have to provide an alternative. A simple "don't use that, it's evil" is neither a good argument nor does it point the users into the direction of an alternative. A Freedombox that one day will do the same thing, just more complicated, more expensive and potentially less secure, isn't all that shiny of an alternative either.
You need to familiarize yourself with the use of data by a certain government in Germany between the years of 1933 and 1945.
All that shows is that they didn't need Facebook to commit their crimes. So how exactly is stopping Facebook going to protect you from that? If anything, lack of Facebooks makes it harder to organize protests against such movements.
Discussions: usenet -> a ton of separate web-forum fiefdoms
Isn't that the wrong way around? Usenet was quite centralized, governed and archived in all eternity. Some parts of usenet (i.e. de.*) even had a realname policy. Webforums are decentralized, not archived, make it much easier to use pseudonyms and everybody can setup their own. They provide far more freedom and privacy for the user.
Now in theory you could do that with an NNTP server as well, but I can count the number of times I have seen a non-ISP provided NNTP servers on one hand.
Joe Sixpack prefers a more authoritarian and more proprietary approach to the internet,
Easy to answer, proprietary approaches deliver new solution and innovation and make them usable to the average user, the RFC based approach doesn't. It's just to slow and complicated for that. Back when webforums got popular everybody on Usenet was still fighting over lines being longer then 80 characters and their shitty newsreader being unable to handle that and umlauts never worked.
Same with everything else, the existing solutions simply didn't do the job. IRC is for public discussions, IM is for private ones. Email completely sucks for anything involving more then two people communicating, doesn't have any persistence and sucks at handling big files (try to share a photo album when you have a 5mb mail size limit). Personal webpages where never easy enough to run and there simply wasn't software available give you the same feature set as a social network does.
Simply put: If you want people to use your tool, make sure that it's actually the best tool on the market. So far the Open Source world hasn't come up with anything that can replace centralized social networks.
GIMP, Blender, etc. have a lot of great work under the hood, from a lot of very dedicated and skilled programmers. Too bad they've traditionally been buried beneath a *horrid* UI that would have made Steve Jobs commit seppuku.
Gimps UI, yeah, that leaves something to be desired, but overall, while still not great, has become perfectly usable over the years. I'd say the UI is the least of Gimps problems, it's the lack of features that bothers me the most these days (lack of support for 16bit/HDR images formats, adjustment layers, complete lack of advanced brushes, etc.).
Blender on the other side has after the recent rewrite easily become one of the best UIs in the Free Software world. It started out rather bad, years and years ago back when it was first Open Sourced, but since then has made continous improvements and today it's actually pretty awesome and easy to use. Most notably: Blender gives you access to every function it offers via a text search box, so no more digging through menus, you just type it and even more cool, you can hover over any GUI element and it will not only tell you the keyboard shortcut, but also how to access that functionality via Python scripting. Of course the basic GUI layout is now also much more organized then its used to be. That said, Blender of course isn't easy to use, but that's because 3D rendering is a pretty complex topic, not because the UI is bad.
The UIs that bother me the most in the Free Software world are the basic stuff, Gnome applications that don't allow you to reorder the toolbars, that provide no scripting support what so ever and DE environments and distributions that reinvent the wheel with every new versions, without actually providing new features or improving anything. They simply shuffle things around, remove some features in the progress and provide no noticable benefit to the user.
Moglen is right, and that reporter is a moron.
I wouldn't be so fast. Moglen is of course right that we would all have more privacy if everybody would just stop using Facebook, but that's simply unrealistic. That's pretty much the same has having said 10 years ago that everybody should just stop using email, usenet and of course that Slashdot thing, as that it also just making information available to others that otherwise wouldn't be (and yeah in the de.* part of usenet there was a realname policy). So who would have actually done that? Giving up all that new tech and went back to phone and regular snail mail? Not very many, that's simply not how people work and that's not how you can fix the privacy issues.
So what are the alternatives? Creating a better, user controlled, version of Facebook with more privacy is of course worth a try, but it's not exactly an easy goal to archive. Facebook is already way to big to make it easy to switch the users. And creating that box has all sorts of problems in itself, users might find it to be not reliable enough, not be allowed to run it due to ISP policy against running servers 24/7 on a non-business account and security might be a very big issue when you have millions of unpatched boxes running around with a whole lot of private data. Random users simply aren't the kind of people who make good server administrators.
The other alternative would of course be to attack the thing from the law side, don't make people go back into hiding their data, but make sure that exploiting that data is illegal. There are already laws that forbid it to snoop around in peoples email, it wouldn't be very far fetched to extent that to all the data a user stores on a server.
What to do with the data that users make willingly or unknowingly public through Facebook and Twitter is a lot trickier. As that is creating a trail that can be exploited not just by Facebook and the government, but by everybody. But for one that is a thing that isn't specific to Facebook and could happen with Diaspora or just old Blogs and Webpages just the same, some people like to talk a lot about what they do. Facebook wasn't the first thing to make that possible, it just made it convenient enough for everybody to use it.
In the end I am not quite sure what the answer is, but I doubt that it will be giving up on Facebook and moving onto the next big social network thingy. I think it would be time to do a little deeper investigation about what the actual negative consequences of loss of privacy are that one wants to stop, instead of trying to turn back the clock on the technology side.
We would need to get very close to the speed of light for it to take a reasonable period of time to get there.
Depends on how much in a hurry you are. With a Project Orion type spacecraft you could get there in a few thousand years. And while that sounds like a long while, humanity has already build things that latest that long, i.e. the pyramids.