It's interesting that there's been such outrage over Windows 10's snooping, especially considering that many wildly popular proprietary programs have already been doing this for years. For instance, in 2007 Slashdot reported that Skype reads your/etc/passwd file and Firefox profile; who knows how it uses this data or where it gets sent.
The real problem here isn't Windows 10 in particular, it's running proprietary software in general. With proprietary software it's almost impossible for the average user, and usually very difficult even for experts, to discover and mitigate against privacy violations and security holes. Free software puts up no artificial barriers to security and privacy audits; any competent programmer can check the code herself, and any concerned layperson can delegate a trusted programmer to do so (or read existing reports from programmers or journalists they trust).
The main reason not to join ACM is that they spam the hell out of their members (and even prospective members and former members). Here are just some examples of recent complaints from computing professionals:
I have never been a member of ACM myself, but my e-mail addresses are (or were, the last time I checked) regularly bombarded by their solicitations. Now everything from them just goes straight to the bit bucket.
When I stick a disc in my player it normally will just start up to the movie for me. I've heard this problem before, part of that is player features, part of it is the specific title you're playing. Unskippable content is lame, I agree, but if I get a disc like that I can just do a direct copy of the disc contents with the protections removed and re-burn to a dual-layer blank. Now I can play it back on the player and skip content, no change in quality.
Wait, so let me get this straight. You and your SO make some steaming hot popcorn, dim the lights, and settle down on the couch for a movie night. You pop in your disc, only to find that it starts off with five minutes of annoying "unskippable" advertising. So your solution would be to get up, take out the disc, walk it over to the computer you keep in a separate room, insert it there, load up your disc ripping software, copy the disc to the computer, remove the disc, locate and insert a blank one, burn a new copy with the "unskippable" bit disabled, remove it, walk it back over to your living room player, insert it, and press play? Seems to me that serviscope_minor's solution of using MPlayer to begin with and simply mashing a single button to skip the advertising is a heck of a lot more convenient.
As of today it looks like they've started implementing a new business strategy: sending spam e-mails to their former free account holders for webinars. I've closed my account and added dyn.com to my spam filter.
Must have been before. Except for Crimea, Ukraine hadn't been part of Russia since 1917. And back then their nuclear stockpile was just as big as every other country's, given that nuclear weapons hadn't been invented yet.
With No-IP's free service, host names expire every 30 days. I imagine this will be rather inconvenient for many people, even if all that's required to prevent the expiry is to log into your account (as Dyn.com has required for the past year or so).
Routers manufactured by D-Link come with their own free dynamic DNS service, which is basically farmed out to Dyn.com. I don't see any mention on the Dyn.com or D-Link websites that they're discontinuing this service, so presumably if you've got a D-Link router you can still create a free Dyn.com account with it.
Did you read your own citation? It says that it's South Korea which is censoring Twitter because North Korea is using it to publish propaganda. (I don't doubt that North Korea also restricts access to Twitter, but your claim that it's completely banned there is rather blatantly contradicted by your source.)
You could say the same thing about the United States of America, whose formation in 1776 was a treasonous act against the Kingdom of Great Britain. In both cases it makes little practical sense to consider all their respective laws and treaties void, and as a matter of law they are not (at least insofar as Russia and the USA are concerned).
But there was no revolution, and the only coup was a short-lived one which actually tried to restore the ancien regime. The Soviet Union was dismantled largely peacefully and within the existing political framework, via legislation and referenda. Furthermore there was a continuity of leadership in most republics -- those at the upper echelons of society remained very much in power, except that post-USSR they were fabulously rich as well, having dispensed with the pretense of economic equality and helped themselves to personal ownership of formerly state-run enterprises.
Does that query string also work for the RSS feed? Because I don't browse Slashdot by visiting the front page; I use a feed aggregator and click through to interesting articles that way.
What we really need is "Firefox Classic": a maintainable fork that takes the Firefox code base and strips it down to the essentials, without social networking add-ons or any of that garbage. Sort of like how Firefox itself originally forked off of the Mozilla Application Suite, come to think of it.
What's wrong with just using the Mozilla Application Suite? It got renamed to SeaMonkey a long time ago and development has continued ever since. It's got a mail and news client in addition to the browser, but apart from that there's no bloat or garbage. If, like me, you don't want to use the mail and news client, just don't open that window, and you'll never even know it's there.
His criticisms of Microsoft's deliberate lack of interoperability, ever-changing file-format, and attempts to establish market dominance by force aren't new, but of course it's always good to hear them publicized and repeated. About ten years ago I wrote a similar article, Please Don't Send Me Microsoft Word Documents, which includes links to even earlier essays by others.
Google never dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms; they just changed the syntax without telling anyone. Before you had to prepend a + to any term you wanted to include in the results. Now you instead need to surround the term with quotation marks.
This is precisely why I don't use PGP, TrueCrypt, ssh, or any of those other "cool" encryption tools used by millions of sheeple. All my data privacy and security needs are taken care of by my own custom-written, unbreakable encryption algorithm.
Not necessarily. There are lots of conceivable purposes of a paper ballot. For example, when you have a large number of voters, it's much easier to count ballots if everyone votes on paper and sends them to a counter than to get all the voters into a room and have them raise their hands. Paper records also make recounts easier, regardless of the size of the electorate. Paper ballots may also be used to enforce limited secrecy (for example, secrecy at the time of voting only, but not at the time of counting—this is important if you need the voters to be accountable to their decisions after the fact, but don't want them to make their decisions based on knowledge of what their colleagues are deciding). I have participated and voted in such semi-secret or non-secret ballots as a voting member or officer in various organizations; it's not at all unusual.
Whether or not paper ballots are meant to enforce total secrecy in this particular jurisdiction depends entirely on the applicable legislation. I'm inclined to believe that the judge, as someone familiar with the law and after a dutiful review of the relevant state and federal legislation, has made an informed decision that nothing in that legislation supports the view that ballots are required to be secret. Of course, it's possible he missed or misinterpreted something, in which case a higher court can overrule him; however I wouldn't be so quick to assume that his ruling is the result of malice or gross incompetence. And if the ruling is upheld and people are outraged by oversight on the part of past legislators, then the easy fix is to enshrine ballot secrecy in electoral law.
I think including an ND variant is important for works which are polemic rather than purely informational. For example, if some person or group writes a political manifesto, they may want it distributed as widely as possible, and thus allow redistribution and commercial use. They will probably also want their name associated with that manifesto. What they do not want is someone else to take that manifesto, change the text slightly so that it advocates distasteful or diametrically opposed ideas, and then redistribute the modified version while preserving the original authors' names in the credits. This makes it seem as though the original authors are promoting the ideas contained in the modified manifesto, particularly if the modifier has (deliberately or otherwise) credited them conspicuously. The modifier need not even have bad intentions in doing so; perhaps his intent was not to embarrass the original authors but simply to reuse what he thought was very good prose and very good arguments.
Of course, this is a potential problem even with non-polemic texts; I could find some CC-licensed software manual or Wikipedia article written by some famous figure, incorporate parts of it into a distasteful manifesto, and then release it with the innocent authors' names attached to it. But I think such scenarios are less likely to occur simply because it's more difficult to attach opinions and calls to action to a purely informational text than to one which is already polemic.
The translations look terribly inconsistent and even completely erroneous. The German one, for example, strangely mixes verb forms: "throw" is "wirf" (informal imperative) but "catch" is "fangen" (infinitive). "char" is translated as "aeichen", which isn't even a word in German. Are the "translators" just people with no knowledge of the target language who are simply looking up words in a dictionary? If so I don't see how this project is possibly going to be of use to anyone.
When the government doesn't respect your right to peaceably assemble, how else are you supposed to protest?
With your vote, of course. Last I checked the American government still generally respected your right to do that. If you don't agree with the laws on peaceful assembly, or with the enforcement of same, you can always vote in new representatives who pledge to amend, repeal, and/or better enforce those laws.
Publishers and other IP holders would flee the US in droves. Hollywood and Silicon Valley would cease to exist as world centres of filmmaking and software development, respectively. Without the obscenely long protection period afforded by current copyright and other IP laws, major publishers would no longer consider it profitable to arrange for their works to be produced in the US. They would instead move their operations to countries with IP laws favourable to their monopolies.
Perhaps a better thought experiment would be if most or all countries cut their copyright and other IP terms simultaneously. If just one of them does it all that will do is hurt their competitiveness in the international IP market.
Can we please have a modern command prompt in the year 2012? A modern cmd prompt is: any true type font, any size also full size, completition of commands with tab key, searchable history of cmds, different background, different text color, etc. For an example of a modern cmd prompt, see Konsole (KDE).
You're right about everything except for the tab completion and command history. These features are provided (if at all) by the shell, not Konsole.
I'm not so sure you can definitively say that it's been abandoned. Even before Microsoft bought Skype it would often be months or years between releases.
Slashdot Mirror
It's interesting that there's been such outrage over Windows 10's snooping, especially considering that many wildly popular proprietary programs have already been doing this for years. For instance, in 2007 Slashdot reported that Skype reads your /etc/passwd file and Firefox profile; who knows how it uses this data or where it gets sent.
The real problem here isn't Windows 10 in particular, it's running proprietary software in general. With proprietary software it's almost impossible for the average user, and usually very difficult even for experts, to discover and mitigate against privacy violations and security holes. Free software puts up no artificial barriers to security and privacy audits; any competent programmer can check the code herself, and any concerned layperson can delegate a trusted programmer to do so (or read existing reports from programmers or journalists they trust).
The main reason not to join ACM is that they spam the hell out of their members (and even prospective members and former members). Here are just some examples of recent complaints from computing professionals:
I have never been a member of ACM myself, but my e-mail addresses are (or were, the last time I checked) regularly bombarded by their solicitations. Now everything from them just goes straight to the bit bucket.
Wait, so let me get this straight. You and your SO make some steaming hot popcorn, dim the lights, and settle down on the couch for a movie night. You pop in your disc, only to find that it starts off with five minutes of annoying "unskippable" advertising. So your solution would be to get up, take out the disc, walk it over to the computer you keep in a separate room, insert it there, load up your disc ripping software, copy the disc to the computer, remove the disc, locate and insert a blank one, burn a new copy with the "unskippable" bit disabled, remove it, walk it back over to your living room player, insert it, and press play? Seems to me that serviscope_minor's solution of using MPlayer to begin with and simply mashing a single button to skip the advertising is a heck of a lot more convenient.
As of today it looks like they've started implementing a new business strategy: sending spam e-mails to their former free account holders for webinars. I've closed my account and added dyn.com to my spam filter.
Must have been before. Except for Crimea, Ukraine hadn't been part of Russia since 1917. And back then their nuclear stockpile was just as big as every other country's, given that nuclear weapons hadn't been invented yet.
With No-IP's free service, host names expire every 30 days. I imagine this will be rather inconvenient for many people, even if all that's required to prevent the expiry is to log into your account (as Dyn.com has required for the past year or so).
Routers manufactured by D-Link come with their own free dynamic DNS service, which is basically farmed out to Dyn.com. I don't see any mention on the Dyn.com or D-Link websites that they're discontinuing this service, so presumably if you've got a D-Link router you can still create a free Dyn.com account with it.
Did you read your own citation? It says that it's South Korea which is censoring Twitter because North Korea is using it to publish propaganda. (I don't doubt that North Korea also restricts access to Twitter, but your claim that it's completely banned there is rather blatantly contradicted by your source.)
You could say the same thing about the United States of America, whose formation in 1776 was a treasonous act against the Kingdom of Great Britain. In both cases it makes little practical sense to consider all their respective laws and treaties void, and as a matter of law they are not (at least insofar as Russia and the USA are concerned).
But there was no revolution, and the only coup was a short-lived one which actually tried to restore the ancien regime. The Soviet Union was dismantled largely peacefully and within the existing political framework, via legislation and referenda. Furthermore there was a continuity of leadership in most republics -- those at the upper echelons of society remained very much in power, except that post-USSR they were fabulously rich as well, having dispensed with the pretense of economic equality and helped themselves to personal ownership of formerly state-run enterprises.
Does that query string also work for the RSS feed? Because I don't browse Slashdot by visiting the front page; I use a feed aggregator and click through to interesting articles that way.
What's wrong with just using the Mozilla Application Suite? It got renamed to SeaMonkey a long time ago and development has continued ever since. It's got a mail and news client in addition to the browser, but apart from that there's no bloat or garbage. If, like me, you don't want to use the mail and news client, just don't open that window, and you'll never even know it's there.
Funny how governments the world over routinely and very effectively overrule your god with impunity. Is he not interested in enforcing his divine law?
His criticisms of Microsoft's deliberate lack of interoperability, ever-changing file-format, and attempts to establish market dominance by force aren't new, but of course it's always good to hear them publicized and repeated. About ten years ago I wrote a similar article, Please Don't Send Me Microsoft Word Documents, which includes links to even earlier essays by others.
Unfortunately the article doesn't indicate whether these robots can help elderly jewel thieves carry out big heists. Inquiring minds want to know!
Google never dropped the ability to force inclusion of specific search terms; they just changed the syntax without telling anyone. Before you had to prepend a + to any term you wanted to include in the results. Now you instead need to surround the term with quotation marks.
Quadruple ROT-13.
This is precisely why I don't use PGP, TrueCrypt, ssh, or any of those other "cool" encryption tools used by millions of sheeple. All my data privacy and security needs are taken care of by my own custom-written, unbreakable encryption algorithm.
Not necessarily. There are lots of conceivable purposes of a paper ballot. For example, when you have a large number of voters, it's much easier to count ballots if everyone votes on paper and sends them to a counter than to get all the voters into a room and have them raise their hands. Paper records also make recounts easier, regardless of the size of the electorate. Paper ballots may also be used to enforce limited secrecy (for example, secrecy at the time of voting only, but not at the time of counting—this is important if you need the voters to be accountable to their decisions after the fact, but don't want them to make their decisions based on knowledge of what their colleagues are deciding). I have participated and voted in such semi-secret or non-secret ballots as a voting member or officer in various organizations; it's not at all unusual.
Whether or not paper ballots are meant to enforce total secrecy in this particular jurisdiction depends entirely on the applicable legislation. I'm inclined to believe that the judge, as someone familiar with the law and after a dutiful review of the relevant state and federal legislation, has made an informed decision that nothing in that legislation supports the view that ballots are required to be secret. Of course, it's possible he missed or misinterpreted something, in which case a higher court can overrule him; however I wouldn't be so quick to assume that his ruling is the result of malice or gross incompetence. And if the ruling is upheld and people are outraged by oversight on the part of past legislators, then the easy fix is to enshrine ballot secrecy in electoral law.
I think including an ND variant is important for works which are polemic rather than purely informational. For example, if some person or group writes a political manifesto, they may want it distributed as widely as possible, and thus allow redistribution and commercial use. They will probably also want their name associated with that manifesto. What they do not want is someone else to take that manifesto, change the text slightly so that it advocates distasteful or diametrically opposed ideas, and then redistribute the modified version while preserving the original authors' names in the credits. This makes it seem as though the original authors are promoting the ideas contained in the modified manifesto, particularly if the modifier has (deliberately or otherwise) credited them conspicuously. The modifier need not even have bad intentions in doing so; perhaps his intent was not to embarrass the original authors but simply to reuse what he thought was very good prose and very good arguments.
Of course, this is a potential problem even with non-polemic texts; I could find some CC-licensed software manual or Wikipedia article written by some famous figure, incorporate parts of it into a distasteful manifesto, and then release it with the innocent authors' names attached to it. But I think such scenarios are less likely to occur simply because it's more difficult to attach opinions and calls to action to a purely informational text than to one which is already polemic.
The translations look terribly inconsistent and even completely erroneous. The German one, for example, strangely mixes verb forms: "throw" is "wirf" (informal imperative) but "catch" is "fangen" (infinitive). "char" is translated as "aeichen", which isn't even a word in German. Are the "translators" just people with no knowledge of the target language who are simply looking up words in a dictionary? If so I don't see how this project is possibly going to be of use to anyone.
With your vote, of course. Last I checked the American government still generally respected your right to do that. If you don't agree with the laws on peaceful assembly, or with the enforcement of same, you can always vote in new representatives who pledge to amend, repeal, and/or better enforce those laws.
Publishers and other IP holders would flee the US in droves. Hollywood and Silicon Valley would cease to exist as world centres of filmmaking and software development, respectively. Without the obscenely long protection period afforded by current copyright and other IP laws, major publishers would no longer consider it profitable to arrange for their works to be produced in the US. They would instead move their operations to countries with IP laws favourable to their monopolies. Perhaps a better thought experiment would be if most or all countries cut their copyright and other IP terms simultaneously. If just one of them does it all that will do is hurt their competitiveness in the international IP market.
You're right about everything except for the tab completion and command history. These features are provided (if at all) by the shell, not Konsole.
I'm not so sure you can definitively say that it's been abandoned. Even before Microsoft bought Skype it would often be months or years between releases.