> Derivative works of PD works are PD by definition
Currently however this is not the case: derivative works based off PD get implicitly copyrighted to the creator _unless_ s/he puts it back in the public domain. For example, the Battlestar Galactica theme is a 1000+ year old (obviously PD) Hindu chant set to music. It's still copyrighted and the Scifi Channel (and ASCAP and friends, undoubtedly) would have a few words to say if I used it for anything.
Like what? I don't know if any law is economically vital. If it is, it will get passed upon sunsetting.
In countries like France and India (where it's very difficult to fire people) lots of economists have been asking for labor reform. So far it's been a tough sell.
Of course, to cut off any 'Heartless MNCs fire people' rhetoric, I'll just point out that heartless MNCs simply move out of your country. Job-security laws mostly affect small and midsize businesses who are scared of adding on staff because they think they'll have to pay major $$$ for an employee they may not be able to justify in a year's time. And the bar for hiring goes up sharply (as many unemployed.de and.fr Slashdotters will tell you).
The problem is, people do not always make rational choices while voting. *Voters* are agenda-driven and selfish. And don't tell me that Foo County can have easy-fire laws if it so wants: most midsize businesses wouldn't want to work in an environment where laws are so narrowly applied and potentially change every 6 years (although I guess any county/town that implemented such a policy would have a thriving smallbiz scene).
That's an awfully large sweeping statement. As China is proving day after day, there's nothing inherent about Capitalism that prevents non-democratic entities from participating--and competing well even.
Big Business only needs a predictable legal climate (barring that, guns -- lots of guns). Capitalism != big business, OTOH. Capitalism is about entrpreneurship and/or innovation and reaping the profits of your time/monetary investment. Unsurprisingly, democratic countries like India, while poorer, fare better in providing opportunities for their citizens compared to China, where one needs a work permit to work in Shanghai even if one's a Chinese national (and these work permits are doled out very stingily). And China mostly competes on wage arbitrage and efficiencies of scale (and yes, Chinese workers have far better living conditions than many Chinese farmers), it's not like it's doing anything stunning in the world of business. If Europe (say) got its head out of its regulatory ass, it could probably compete as well with China. But then you have the pesky 40 hour workweek (no matter that many European factory workers would have willingly worked 44-48 hours a week (as they do in Britain) to keep their jobs instead of being outsourced to Asia) and things like clean air laws (which are nice, I admit, but it does keep Europe uncompetitve w.r.t. Asia -- and unlike the US, the EU's politically correct 'save the environment' messsages fall on deaf ears in Asia).
You're confusing China's foreign-investment driven coastal skyscrapers and the ubiquitous Made in China Walmart items for success in capitalism. In reality, China's economy has problematic fundamentals (astonishing levels of loan defaults and a banking system in tatters, to name but two). The lack of transparency will cover it for some time (just like the USSR covered up their tanking economy from the late 70s to the 80s) but without drastic action from the Chinese govt the truth would have come out years ago. Of course, one reason China's so big on foreign investment is that it's determined to not let the USSR's fate befall them: they will continue to shore up their image with foreign investor money, and the foreign investors will keep giving as long as Beijing keeps telling them that their money is welcome.
Interesting link about unanimocracy. It demonstrated quite illuminatingly why I am suspicious of armchair libertarians. There was a nice post in the previous thread about
Sorry to butt in, but I just wanted to add a little input. I think total unanimity is going too far. There WILL be some jackass who votes 'NO' on "No Murder." So basically, wherever this guy lives, murder is legal. Do you propose that everyone always move away from this fellow, or is he one of the first legally sanctioned murders?
Things only get more interesting from there. Is secret ballot allowed? (I'm assuming yes, because it's a basic feature of modern voting.) In that case, how do you know who voted against the no-murder statute? Was it your neighbour who has the hots for your wife (and you happen to live in a no-divorce state)?
Better still, if murder is outlawed in some states but not in others, how can states reach a balance between playing well with other states and protecting their own citizens? Or reach a balance between playing well with other states and punishing their guilty (who may've fled to another state?)
And-- who votes? do babies vote? do 12 year olds? do convicted felons? (or is that decidable by vote? in that case who can vote for that proposition?) Can *any* proposition be brought to the ballot (good for DDoSing the electoral system) or will it require a certain number of signatures (like Switzerland)? Since laws expire every six years, it means that laws are _constantly_ expiring. Assuming voters vote every year, how many people will have the time to study the issues behind each law in detail? Or will they vote based on gut feel? How will unpopular but economically vital laws get passed, or will unanimocracy be condemned to populist policies forever?
And -- faced with the immense roster of laws they have to vote on, how will you avoid voter apathy? How will you deal with absent/ill voters, or voters who screw up their ballot somehow?
> I don't trust democracy.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." --Winston Churchill, who'd have laughted his gut out at that proposal of yours.
And as for your disdain for lobbying-- I don't care for it myself, but that's the way the game is played. And I'd rather have lobbying done by people I know are professional lobbyists, rather than in the shadows. Kinda like I agree with how most European countries have legalized prostitution because it's better to accept and regulate a very human vice than drive it underground. (and I'm sorry for comparing lobbyists to prostitutes, I do realize it was offensive to prostitutes).
I said 'bulk' because I wanted to avoid the '87.34% of stats are made up on the spot' problem.
However where my anecdote differs from the parent poster is that I am not claiming anything about the stability or instability of Windows *in general* _except to say that_ the folk who go about raving 'Windoz is the cr4sh' generally do a poor job of troubleshooting OS crashes and often blame factors beyond the OS' control.
Most such complaints (especially on/.) go like the parent posters-- a Windows PC in my library crashed. a Windows PC in an internet cafe crashed. Windows sUx! Sorry, but Windows hasn't sucked in that way for me or the people I know since NT4 (Win9x now is another story), so you'll have to give me a little more information about the crash if you want me to believe you.
And yes, my observations are also anecdotes but at least when I look into crashes (one of my responsibilities at work is crash resolution) I try to find out a little more before I blame the operating system.
The problem begins when you generalize the evidence of your own eyes onto the entire population of Windows PCs. In this particular case, it'd be nice to know what stop error caused the blue screen. Was it a device driver? an intermittently working fan causing random mobo failures? (something Linux is just as susceptible to) A genuine Windows install or an ISO grabbed from piratebay? Without knowing these, 2 crashes *on computers you do not own* are just anecdotes.
In my experience, the bulk of deployed/OEM-installed XP PCs (modulo virus/spyware infections) do work well, even after 3-4 years. Yes, computers fail and cause the OS to fail and _sometimes_ it is the OS' fault. But esp on 2000 and above, most of the time it's the hardware's or a device driver's fault. And randomly posting 'OMG Windoz is teh cr4sh' on messageboards doesn't make me want to believe "the evidence of your eyes", it just marks you out as an excellent instance of the not-very-complimentary Slashdot stereotype.
If your in a long relationship were your girl still fancies you but feels secure enough she doesn't have to constantly worship as a god to keep your ego up you will learn to regonize that look
I dare say most of the Slashdot audience have NO idea about what you are talking about. Having girlfriends is one thing, the ability to read minute facial expressions - why, the intersection of those sets must be vanishingly small!
The Economist's audience is more corporate types and anyone with a free-market slant (a slant I support, btw) than academic economists, some of who hold (shock!) distinctly un-free market views.
> Yahoo, MSN, etc, talk to us again when you can boast these 2 features.
MSN Messenger 7.5 (subjective opinion to be sure) actually has better PC-to-PC voice clarity than Skype 1.4 _and_ works through every home network and most office networks I've used. Of course with Skype you still have the advantage of being able to call PC-to-Phone.
> much like Indians have been able to do in a variety of ways for...oh, quite a while.
Nothing stops the reverse from happening though -- the odd thing is, getting an Indian work permit (especially for an American or European citizen) is laughably easy. Not many Indian companies look for American/European employees though, simply because at the end of the day not too many are interested. The downsides are:
- an Indian salary (even a generous one) means your savings get divided by 45 when you come back to the US. (Some Indian firms apparently offer USD salaries but I don't think they are that high) - You'd probably have a nice enough standard of living by Indian standards but there's the tropical heat/rain - and the _very_ different culture which some people might enjoy but which will drive others crazy
That said, I hear there are a number of East Europeans and Russian programmers who work in Bangalore (decent climate, savings comparable to those back home). Also a number of es/de/fr-speaking students have done internships at Indian companies eager to get some (non-English) foreign language skills on board. Most Americans who go there however seem to be fresh b-schoolers looking to get some experience.
GP's misuse of the word racism aside, you've got to be joking if you think the top-rated comments on this thread were insightful or funny. They are the tired old rehashes of 'Microsoft buying ${foo}'s support so they can pwn OSS', 'Indians taking American money again' and (the best of the comments IMO) the 'software is no fun since people who'll work on it for less money than I took over'.
I'm rather anti-political correctness myself, but the comments on this thread have been dumb. Not insightful, not funny. It's just of dumb rants from slashbots who think software is the center of the universe -- FIIs, telecoms and Infrastructure have been investing many more billions in India over the past many years, but do you think _that_ got a mention? India's relatively stable rupee makes it an attractive overseas hedge investment, think _that_ got a mention? And whether it's racism or whether it's phases of the moon, I don't care; but any Slashdot story that even mentions India gets such predictable responses that I'm inclined to think slashbots switch off their thinking caps (to the extent they have one) to find predictable angles to the story. And that (to bring this on-topic) is _very_ characteristic of the execrable ZDNET forums, so the GP wasn't _as_ off the mark as you might think.
But what if emacs' lisp environment was useful to IT departments to roll out internal apps?
Lots of companies (including (most of?) GE) use Notes as a standard not because it's the greatest email client ever, but because they can get lots of internal workflow apps quickly written and deployed, even to a countrywide scale. However, because of late a lot of these apps have been converted to Domino web apps, many users don't even know their intranet apps run on Domino!
Thankfully, IBM's current strategy is to phase out the Notes client in favor of multiple rich clients (Workplace for one), so I'm guessing your pain will go away in a few years:-)
As a Notes user (not developer) I have to disagree. Notes has major suckage, but mostly in client UI. Notes' UI makes complete sense if you get your head around the Notes 'model'. If you try treating it like a simple MUA you'll get a lot of grief (sort of like treating emacs like just another editor).
However, a lot of Notes' ideas were WAY ahead of their time and work well (as long as you aren't worried about scaling, which is more involved). Replication, unstructured data storage, workflow, forms-based development... there's a reason for the oft-heard Notes developers' saying "it was in Notes for years".
RSS is licensed under the Creative Commons. Microsoft's extension (SSE) is licensed under the Creative Commons. Then there is Microsoft's history on XML standards -- good interop even with competitors. This does not prove MS == angels, but it does indicate they're prepared to do the right thing.
Maybe you should lay aside the tinfoil hat and actually RTFA sometime.
No, I'm saying anyone who chooses to use a Mac has a choice of exactly one supplier - Apple. The GP said Apple did not have a monopoly, I'm pointing out that it does have a very real monopoly, just not one lawyers would get excited about (yet).
Are you insane?... You can show them to me when the crows have picked my eyes out of their sockets. I try not look at ads in a magazine. I... change the channel within 5 seconds to minimize ad-exposure.... I rather zap for 5 minutes than watch one damned ad. I block ads... and if one gets through, I go beserk.
I'm quite sure I'm not insane, but I'm equally sure you lack a sense of perspective:-)
Write to your congressmen/senators and ask them the question in my sig.
Equality before law is a fundamental tenet, and before the law, distributing == being a party to (which is a central argument in the P2P lawsuits).
I also think the EFF should get involved in a test case against Sony. If Sony gets whacked, so much the better. If they don't, it'll be a very effective precedent that's likely to favour blackhats (we'll likely see viruses/worms that include media content (maybe the virus writer's home videos?) and EULAs next).
Apple uses the i-prefix fairly consistently, and it's a reasonable prefix connoting both 'interactive' and 'personal'.
Microsoft doesn't use Win- much but 3rd parties do, and honestly win- is a pretty upbeat prefix and it's hard to blame them for it.
Gnome -- well, Gnumeric is pretty much the only culprit here. Most major Gnome apps have reasonable names like Evolution, Nautilus (not, you note, Gnautilus).
By contrast, KDE overdoes the K thing. It was cute up to a point, now it's just irritating.
there are many other Type Managers out there that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users such as digiKam and amaroK
(especially KDE developers) For the love of God, it's not cute to insert arbitrary uppercase Ks into app names anymore. Yes, it's called KDE. Yes, there's that big K where the start button ought to be. You really love K. We get the idea. Now name your apps sanely instead of making them sound like they were named by 13-year olds trying to be cute.
<grumble>...and then the KDE-ers complain KDE gets too little traction in the market compared to Gnome. Feh. </grumble>
Ahead of the summit, rights watchdogs say, both Tunisian and foreign reporters have been harassed and beaten. Reporters Without Borders says its secretary-general, Robert Menard, has been banned from attending.
These people are obviously qualified to run the Internet. Pity they won't get the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
> Derivative works of PD works are PD by definition
Currently however this is not the case: derivative works based off PD get implicitly copyrighted to the creator _unless_ s/he puts it back in the public domain. For example, the Battlestar Galactica theme is a 1000+ year old (obviously PD) Hindu chant set to music. It's still copyrighted and the Scifi Channel (and ASCAP and friends, undoubtedly) would have a few words to say if I used it for anything.
Like what? I don't know if any law is economically vital. If it is, it will get passed upon sunsetting.
.de and .fr Slashdotters will tell you).
In countries like France and India (where it's very difficult to fire people) lots of economists have been asking for labor reform. So far it's been a tough sell.
Of course, to cut off any 'Heartless MNCs fire people' rhetoric, I'll just point out that heartless MNCs simply move out of your country. Job-security laws mostly affect small and midsize businesses who are scared of adding on staff because they think they'll have to pay major $$$ for an employee they may not be able to justify in a year's time. And the bar for hiring goes up sharply (as many unemployed
The problem is, people do not always make rational choices while voting. *Voters* are agenda-driven and selfish. And don't tell me that Foo County can have easy-fire laws if it so wants: most midsize businesses wouldn't want to work in an environment where laws are so narrowly applied and potentially change every 6 years (although I guess any county/town that implemented such a policy would have a thriving smallbiz scene).
That's an awfully large sweeping statement. As China is proving day after day, there's nothing inherent about Capitalism that prevents non-democratic entities from participating--and competing well even.
Big Business only needs a predictable legal climate (barring that, guns -- lots of guns). Capitalism != big business, OTOH. Capitalism is about entrpreneurship and/or innovation and reaping the profits of your time/monetary investment. Unsurprisingly, democratic countries like India, while poorer, fare better in providing opportunities for their citizens compared to China, where one needs a work permit to work in Shanghai even if one's a Chinese national (and these work permits are doled out very stingily). And China mostly competes on wage arbitrage and efficiencies of scale (and yes, Chinese workers have far better living conditions than many Chinese farmers), it's not like it's doing anything stunning in the world of business. If Europe (say) got its head out of its regulatory ass, it could probably compete as well with China. But then you have the pesky 40 hour workweek (no matter that many European factory workers would have willingly worked 44-48 hours a week (as they do in Britain) to keep their jobs instead of being outsourced to Asia) and things like clean air laws (which are nice, I admit, but it does keep Europe uncompetitve w.r.t. Asia -- and unlike the US, the EU's politically correct 'save the environment' messsages fall on deaf ears in Asia).
You're confusing China's foreign-investment driven coastal skyscrapers and the ubiquitous Made in China Walmart items for success in capitalism. In reality, China's economy has problematic fundamentals (astonishing levels of loan defaults and a banking system in tatters, to name but two). The lack of transparency will cover it for some time (just like the USSR covered up their tanking economy from the late 70s to the 80s) but without drastic action from the Chinese govt the truth would have come out years ago. Of course, one reason China's so big on foreign investment is that it's determined to not let the USSR's fate befall them: they will continue to shore up their image with foreign investor money, and the foreign investors will keep giving as long as Beijing keeps telling them that their money is welcome.
Better still, if murder is outlawed in some states but not in others, how can states reach a balance between playing well with other states and protecting their own citizens? Or reach a balance between playing well with other states and punishing their guilty (who may've fled to another state?)
And-- who votes? do babies vote? do 12 year olds? do convicted felons? (or is that decidable by vote? in that case who can vote for that proposition?) Can *any* proposition be brought to the ballot (good for DDoSing the electoral system) or will it require a certain number of signatures (like Switzerland)? Since laws expire every six years, it means that laws are _constantly_ expiring. Assuming voters vote every year, how many people will have the time to study the issues behind each law in detail? Or will they vote based on gut feel? How will unpopular but economically vital laws get passed, or will unanimocracy be condemned to populist policies forever?
And -- faced with the immense roster of laws they have to vote on, how will you avoid voter apathy? How will you deal with absent/ill voters, or voters who screw up their ballot somehow?
> I don't trust democracy.
"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." --Winston Churchill, who'd have laughted his gut out at that proposal of yours.
And as for your disdain for lobbying-- I don't care for it myself, but that's the way the game is played. And I'd rather have lobbying done by people I know are professional lobbyists, rather than in the shadows. Kinda like I agree with how most European countries have legalized prostitution because it's better to accept and regulate a very human vice than drive it underground. (and I'm sorry for comparing lobbyists to prostitutes, I do realize it was offensive to prostitutes).
I said 'bulk' because I wanted to avoid the '87.34% of stats are made up on the spot' problem.
/.) go like the parent posters-- a Windows PC in my library crashed. a Windows PC in an internet cafe crashed. Windows sUx! Sorry, but Windows hasn't sucked in that way for me or the people I know since NT4 (Win9x now is another story), so you'll have to give me a little more information about the crash if you want me to believe you.
However where my anecdote differs from the parent poster is that I am not claiming anything about the stability or instability of Windows *in general* _except to say that_ the folk who go about raving 'Windoz is the cr4sh' generally do a poor job of troubleshooting OS crashes and often blame factors beyond the OS' control.
Most such complaints (especially on
And yes, my observations are also anecdotes but at least when I look into crashes (one of my responsibilities at work is crash resolution) I try to find out a little more before I blame the operating system.
> I guess I'm supposed to doubt my own eyes, now
The problem begins when you generalize the evidence of your own eyes onto the entire population of Windows PCs. In this particular case, it'd be nice to know what stop error caused the blue screen. Was it a device driver? an intermittently working fan causing random mobo failures? (something Linux is just as susceptible to) A genuine Windows install or an ISO grabbed from piratebay? Without knowing these, 2 crashes *on computers you do not own* are just anecdotes.
In my experience, the bulk of deployed/OEM-installed XP PCs (modulo virus/spyware infections) do work well, even after 3-4 years. Yes, computers fail and cause the OS to fail and _sometimes_ it is the OS' fault. But esp on 2000 and above, most of the time it's the hardware's or a device driver's fault. And randomly posting 'OMG Windoz is teh cr4sh' on messageboards doesn't make me want to believe "the evidence of your eyes", it just marks you out as an excellent instance of the not-very-complimentary Slashdot stereotype.
Heh yes. A name right out of Jennifer Government...
If your in a long relationship were your girl still fancies you but feels secure enough she doesn't have to constantly worship as a god to keep your ego up you will learn to regonize that look
I dare say most of the Slashdot audience have NO idea about what you are talking about. Having girlfriends is one thing, the ability to read minute facial expressions - why, the intersection of those sets must be vanishingly small!
The Economist's audience is more corporate types and anyone with a free-market slant (a slant I support, btw) than academic economists, some of who hold (shock!) distinctly un-free market views.
> Yahoo, MSN, etc, talk to us again when you can boast these 2 features.
MSN Messenger 7.5 (subjective opinion to be sure) actually has better PC-to-PC voice clarity than Skype 1.4 _and_ works through every home network and most office networks I've used. Of course with Skype you still have the advantage of being able to call PC-to-Phone.
> much like Indians have been able to do in a variety of ways for...oh, quite a while.
Nothing stops the reverse from happening though -- the odd thing is, getting an Indian work permit (especially for an American or European citizen) is laughably easy. Not many Indian companies look for American/European employees though, simply because at the end of the day not too many are interested. The downsides are:
- an Indian salary (even a generous one) means your savings get divided by 45 when you come back to the US. (Some Indian firms apparently offer USD salaries but I don't think they are that high)
- You'd probably have a nice enough standard of living by Indian standards but there's the tropical heat/rain
- and the _very_ different culture which some people might enjoy but which will drive others crazy
That said, I hear there are a number of East Europeans and Russian programmers who work in Bangalore (decent climate, savings comparable to those back home). Also a number of es/de/fr-speaking students have done internships at Indian companies eager to get some (non-English) foreign language skills on board. Most Americans who go there however seem to be fresh b-schoolers looking to get some experience.
GP's misuse of the word racism aside, you've got to be joking if you think the top-rated comments on this thread were insightful or funny. They are the tired old rehashes of 'Microsoft buying ${foo}'s support so they can pwn OSS', 'Indians taking American money again' and (the best of the comments IMO) the 'software is no fun since people who'll work on it for less money than I took over'.
I'm rather anti-political correctness myself, but the comments on this thread have been dumb. Not insightful, not funny. It's just of dumb rants from slashbots who think software is the center of the universe -- FIIs, telecoms and Infrastructure have been investing many more billions in India over the past many years, but do you think _that_ got a mention? India's relatively stable rupee makes it an attractive overseas hedge investment, think _that_ got a mention? And whether it's racism or whether it's phases of the moon, I don't care; but any Slashdot story that even mentions India gets such predictable responses that I'm inclined to think slashbots switch off their thinking caps (to the extent they have one) to find predictable angles to the story. And that (to bring this on-topic) is _very_ characteristic of the execrable ZDNET forums, so the GP wasn't _as_ off the mark as you might think.
Or for something a little more software-related, try Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary.
Isn't Firefox just a third party program that makes GNU/Linux ... work correctly?
No. Although you have a great career waiting for you in literary criticism and comparative literature studies.
But what if emacs' lisp environment was useful to IT departments to roll out internal apps?
:-)
Lots of companies (including (most of?) GE) use Notes as a standard not because it's the greatest email client ever, but because they can get lots of internal workflow apps quickly written and deployed, even to a countrywide scale. However, because of late a lot of these apps have been converted to Domino web apps, many users don't even know their intranet apps run on Domino!
Thankfully, IBM's current strategy is to phase out the Notes client in favor of multiple rich clients (Workplace for one), so I'm guessing your pain will go away in a few years
As a Notes user (not developer) I have to disagree. Notes has major suckage, but mostly in client UI. Notes' UI makes complete sense if you get your head around the Notes 'model'. If you try treating it like a simple MUA you'll get a lot of grief (sort of like treating emacs like just another editor).
... there's a reason for the oft-heard Notes developers' saying "it was in Notes for years".
However, a lot of Notes' ideas were WAY ahead of their time and work well (as long as you aren't worried about scaling, which is more involved). Replication, unstructured data storage, workflow, forms-based development
RSS is licensed under the Creative Commons. Microsoft's extension (SSE) is licensed under the Creative Commons. Then there is Microsoft's history on XML standards -- good interop even with competitors. This does not prove MS == angels, but it does indicate they're prepared to do the right thing.
Maybe you should lay aside the tinfoil hat and actually RTFA sometime.
No, I'm saying anyone who chooses to use a Mac has a choice of exactly one supplier - Apple. The GP said Apple did not have a monopoly, I'm pointing out that it does have a very real monopoly, just not one lawyers would get excited about (yet).
> For an action to be an abuse of a monopoly position, you first need a monopoly
Apple does have a monopoly on hardware and operating systems (<1% of Mac users run non-Apple OSes) for Macintosh computers.
... and it flopped. *Big* surprise.
Are you insane? ... You can show them to me when the crows have picked my eyes out of their sockets. I try not look at ads in a magazine. I ... change the channel within 5 seconds to minimize ad-exposure. ... I rather zap for 5 minutes than watch one damned ad. I block ads ... and if one gets through, I go beserk.
:-)
I'm quite sure I'm not insane, but I'm equally sure you lack a sense of perspective
Write to your congressmen/senators and ask them the question in my sig.
Equality before law is a fundamental tenet, and before the law, distributing == being a party to (which is a central argument in the P2P lawsuits).
I also think the EFF should get involved in a test case against Sony. If Sony gets whacked, so much the better. If they don't, it'll be a very effective precedent that's likely to favour blackhats (we'll likely see viruses/worms that include media content (maybe the virus writer's home videos?) and EULAs next).
Apple uses the i-prefix fairly consistently, and it's a reasonable prefix connoting both 'interactive' and 'personal'.
Microsoft doesn't use Win- much but 3rd parties do, and honestly win- is a pretty upbeat prefix and it's hard to blame them for it.
Gnome -- well, Gnumeric is pretty much the only culprit here. Most major Gnome apps have reasonable names like Evolution, Nautilus (not, you note, Gnautilus).
By contrast, KDE overdoes the K thing. It was cute up to a point, now it's just irritating.
there are many other Type Managers out there that are gaining market share and a rabid fan base of users such as digiKam and amaroK
...and then the KDE-ers complain KDE gets too little traction in the market compared to Gnome. Feh.
(especially KDE developers) For the love of God, it's not cute to insert arbitrary uppercase Ks into app names anymore. Yes, it's called KDE. Yes, there's that big K where the start button ought to be. You really love K. We get the idea. Now name your apps sanely instead of making them sound like they were named by 13-year olds trying to be cute.
<grumble>
</grumble>
Ahead of the summit, rights watchdogs say, both Tunisian and foreign reporters have been harassed and beaten. Reporters Without Borders says its secretary-general, Robert Menard, has been banned from attending.
These people are obviously qualified to run the Internet. Pity they won't get the chance.