I can confirm that the issue does occur on a Debian lenny (testing) laptop (Packard Bell BG45-U-300) with minimal packages installed.
This is easily fixed, however:
apt-get install acpi-support
I don't know how etch (the stable version) is affected, and/or whether the fix has been applied in updates to acpi-support, but it would be worth checking, since there are several pages documenting how to fix the issue when installing Debian etch on a laptop (e.g. here).
I would like to see a citation or an explanation for that allegation, or even an example. I'm pretty sure you're trolling, and it's rather depressing that you've been moderated so highly. "Innocent until proven guilty" is as much a tenet of the British legal system as the American one (more so, perhaps -- America has Guantanamo Bay...). The police are allowed to arrest people if they having convincing evidence that a crime has been committed, and bring them to trial, but they certainly cannot lock a person up for prolonged periods without passing him through the court system -- and, until he is found guilty, he is regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.
The British government is mentioned in only a couple of sentences in the article. The amount of data that it plans to catalogue is certainly disturbing, but to accuse it of wishing to lock people up without trial (thus making them "guilty until proven innocent") is to distort the truth. The article is extremely speculative.
The etymology for the word "chink" as in "chink in his armour" is completely different from the word "Chink" as in Chinese person. They are entirely unrelated words. Similarly, words like "niggardly" and "nigger" (as I understand it).
The issue that many people have with "gay" being used in a derogatory sense is that "gay" as in "bad" does not have an entirely separate etymology from "gay" as in "homosexual". Even if there is no longer any association in the minds of people who use it, originally there was: homosexual == bad, hence gay == bad. The word is tainted by its former use. I don't think anyone would have any problem with it if it could be proven that its new meaning came directly from "gay" as in "happy".
You could argue that it is now an entirely separate word, and its derivation is irrelevant, or that the whole subject is political correctness gone mad (though I would not want to put words in your mouth) but the fact is that there are people who find it offensive. I appreciate that you're not advocating its use, but neither are you condemning it. Most people who use "gay" to mean "bad" are not being homophobic, but I do think they are being rather tactless.
I stand corrected -- The Prisoner was made by ITC. It's gone through several changes of ownership since then, though. I believe it is now owned by Granada Ventures, however.
As I understand it very few British sitcoms use a "canned laughter" track, preferring either to film most of the scenes in front of a live audience or at the very least to play the finished episode on monitors in front of a real audience. The BBC in particular is particularly keen to use live audiences wherever possible (see the BBC Tickets page for information on how to join an audience), and whilst this particular comedy was made for Channel 4 rather than the BBC the same view is held across the entire British television industry.
You can usually tell, anyway -- canned laughter tends to be rather clinical (it starts and stops very abruptly) whereas live laughter will grow or subside as the individual audience members get the joke at different times. That said, a lot of people accuse even live audiences of being distracting or sounding artificial, and that's because the audiences are encouraged by the programme-makers to make as much noise as possible, even if a joke isn't very funny. That doesn't mean they are canned, though.
Unfortunately, it's usually difficult to find out which programmes are and which aren't as those programme-makers that do rely on canned laughter are very reluctant to make the knowledge public. And in all programmes the editors will have tweaked the laughter track a bit afterwards to smooth over glitches, cuts and re-takes.
Firstly, "The Prisoner" wasn't a BBC show. It was made originally by Granada for ITV and as far as I know they still own it. But in fact the BBC has brought back "The Prisoner" -- it bought the rights and reran every episode at the beginning of 2005 on BBC 4. See the BBC 4 Prisoner web site. I can't speak for BBC America and so on as that is not strictly the BBC (it's part of a commercial subsidiary, BBC Worldwide).
Getting back on topic, tbe purpose of a classical sitcom is not to portray real life accurately. If it did, it would be terribly boring. You're welcome to make a case for drama based on a geek lifestyle -- and it might well work, with a little creative licence. However, I do think that there is an amusing comic premise in the portrayal of geeks as people who are able to relate to technology more easily than to other people. If the series carries it off well then both geeks and end users should be able to recognise and empathise with the characters. After all, it's a stereotype that holds true in many cases.
I've used a Sony DSR-PD150 low-end professional DVCAM camera quite a lot over the past year. It's designed for professional use and is pretty rugged. It's also got a lot of the features that you'll need if you plan to get decent broadcast-quality footage out the other end: 3 CCDs, manual focus, iris, gain, audio levels and XLR audio inputs.
It's the location workhorse for a number of television channels and is highly regarded within the industry.
The advantage of DVCAM cameras is that they record on plain old MiniDV tapes (and in standard short play DV if you want it), so you can get tapes just about anywhere.
You can probably get one relatively cheaply second hand, or get an updated model (the PD170) for about £2500 in the UK (maybe $3500-$4000 in the US).
Of course, you don't say how much you'd like to spend. If you have a significantly smaller budget then probably the only way to go is to get a cheap MiniDV camera (though 3 CCDs, manual focus and iris are very nice features if you can afford them) and accept that it's going to break under heavy use.
Slashdot Mirror
I can confirm that the issue does occur on a Debian lenny (testing) laptop (Packard Bell BG45-U-300) with minimal packages installed.
This is easily fixed, however:
apt-get install acpi-support
I don't know how etch (the stable version) is affected, and/or whether the fix has been applied in updates to acpi-support, but it would be worth checking, since there are several pages documenting how to fix the issue when installing Debian etch on a laptop (e.g. here).
I would like to see a citation or an explanation for that allegation, or even an example. I'm pretty sure you're trolling, and it's rather depressing that you've been moderated so highly. "Innocent until proven guilty" is as much a tenet of the British legal system as the American one (more so, perhaps -- America has Guantanamo Bay...). The police are allowed to arrest people if they having convincing evidence that a crime has been committed, and bring them to trial, but they certainly cannot lock a person up for prolonged periods without passing him through the court system -- and, until he is found guilty, he is regarded as innocent in the eyes of the law.
The British government is mentioned in only a couple of sentences in the article. The amount of data that it plans to catalogue is certainly disturbing, but to accuse it of wishing to lock people up without trial (thus making them "guilty until proven innocent") is to distort the truth. The article is extremely speculative.
The etymology for the word "chink" as in "chink in his armour" is completely different from the word "Chink" as in Chinese person. They are entirely unrelated words. Similarly, words like "niggardly" and "nigger" (as I understand it).
The issue that many people have with "gay" being used in a derogatory sense is that "gay" as in "bad" does not have an entirely separate etymology from "gay" as in "homosexual". Even if there is no longer any association in the minds of people who use it, originally there was: homosexual == bad, hence gay == bad. The word is tainted by its former use. I don't think anyone would have any problem with it if it could be proven that its new meaning came directly from "gay" as in "happy".
You could argue that it is now an entirely separate word, and its derivation is irrelevant, or that the whole subject is political correctness gone mad (though I would not want to put words in your mouth) but the fact is that there are people who find it offensive. I appreciate that you're not advocating its use, but neither are you condemning it. Most people who use "gay" to mean "bad" are not being homophobic, but I do think they are being rather tactless.
I stand corrected -- The Prisoner was made by ITC. It's gone through several changes of ownership since then, though. I believe it is now owned by Granada Ventures, however.
As I understand it very few British sitcoms use a "canned laughter" track, preferring either to film most of the scenes in front of a live audience or at the very least to play the finished episode on monitors in front of a real audience. The BBC in particular is particularly keen to use live audiences wherever possible (see the BBC Tickets page for information on how to join an audience), and whilst this particular comedy was made for Channel 4 rather than the BBC the same view is held across the entire British television industry.
You can usually tell, anyway -- canned laughter tends to be rather clinical (it starts and stops very abruptly) whereas live laughter will grow or subside as the individual audience members get the joke at different times. That said, a lot of people accuse even live audiences of being distracting or sounding artificial, and that's because the audiences are encouraged by the programme-makers to make as much noise as possible, even if a joke isn't very funny. That doesn't mean they are canned, though.
Unfortunately, it's usually difficult to find out which programmes are and which aren't as those programme-makers that do rely on canned laughter are very reluctant to make the knowledge public. And in all programmes the editors will have tweaked the laughter track a bit afterwards to smooth over glitches, cuts and re-takes.
Firstly, "The Prisoner" wasn't a BBC show. It was made originally by Granada for ITV and as far as I know they still own it. But in fact the BBC has brought back "The Prisoner" -- it bought the rights and reran every episode at the beginning of 2005 on BBC 4. See the BBC 4 Prisoner web site. I can't speak for BBC America and so on as that is not strictly the BBC (it's part of a commercial subsidiary, BBC Worldwide).
Getting back on topic, tbe purpose of a classical sitcom is not to portray real life accurately. If it did, it would be terribly boring. You're welcome to make a case for drama based on a geek lifestyle -- and it might well work, with a little creative licence. However, I do think that there is an amusing comic premise in the portrayal of geeks as people who are able to relate to technology more easily than to other people. If the series carries it off well then both geeks and end users should be able to recognise and empathise with the characters. After all, it's a stereotype that holds true in many cases.
I've used a Sony DSR-PD150 low-end professional DVCAM camera quite a lot over the past year. It's designed for professional use and is pretty rugged. It's also got a lot of the features that you'll need if you plan to get decent broadcast-quality footage out the other end: 3 CCDs, manual focus, iris, gain, audio levels and XLR audio inputs.
It's the location workhorse for a number of television channels and is highly regarded within the industry.
The advantage of DVCAM cameras is that they record on plain old MiniDV tapes (and in standard short play DV if you want it), so you can get tapes just about anywhere.
You can probably get one relatively cheaply second hand, or get an updated model (the PD170) for about £2500 in the UK (maybe $3500-$4000 in the US).
Of course, you don't say how much you'd like to spend. If you have a significantly smaller budget then probably the only way to go is to get a cheap MiniDV camera (though 3 CCDs, manual focus and iris are very nice features if you can afford them) and accept that it's going to break under heavy use.