"Start a movie. Minimize it to the dock. See the movie continue playing. Start a print job. Depending on the print driver you're using, note the printed pages count update in the dock icon. Launch Adium. Set the preferences to display buddy status in the Adium icon. Drag and drop onto dock icons. Watch applications launch or files get saved, etc."
Could I just check -- are you talking about WindowMaker DockApp features here, or is this something that OS-X does too?
If they're aiming for open-source developers, why didn't they include perl, python, ruby, and lisp among the "allowable" languages? You need to choose between something less powerful and something proprietary???
"You have to buy a tv licence to watch broadcast TV. if you do not watch broadcast tv, you do *not* need a tv licence. it's that simple."
When this comment was made, I believe the person said it with knowledge of two things:
(a) if you buy a TV (or in this case, a computer with a tuner), then the shop is required to take your name and address and send it to the TV licensing bureau. That's probably more invconvenient than it sounds, especially if you object to having such information passed-on.
(b) regardless of whether you watch TV or not, regardless of whether you even have a TV or not, if you don't have a license, the licensing authority will hassle you for the rest of your life. They will write letters, red letters, demands, requests for court appearances, things which look like court summonses but are actually just extremely threatening letters, and the only thing you can do about it is sign, swear, and notarise that you don't have a TV, and they will still write to you 18 months later and threaten you with prosecution if you don't buy a license. In some famous cases, they will even print your address on a 4-metre poster in the city centre and tell everyone that you don't have a TV license.
So yeah, while you might technically and legally be correct, I can understand why computer companies wouldn't want to force this experience on their users, especially if it will be associated with their first experience of buying an Apple.
"I use X-chat 2.0.8 and I'm not sure what you meant by x-chat being ugly; it looks normal to me:)"
Indeed. And while I've solved many of the problems, reinstalling everything from kuickshow to xmms that wasn't included on a default 30 minute installation, specifying mozilla fonts in a stylesheet, and wondering why xchat buttons seem to be inverted between "pressed" and "unpressed" views... it's too much. The music collection, installed on an encrypted disk, is just plain Not Working(TM), and probably will be until I learn more than I ever want to know about loopback partitions. Tomorrow I install gentoo, I may not be back...
Mandrake is nice, and I'd recommend it to anyone migrating from Windows (assuming they use KDE and not WindowMaker). But really, too many people have made too many decisions about what I should want. Contrary to popular belief, I actually need to get stuff done in Kmail, want to make a few changes to some programs, and actually getting quite tired with MandrakeUpdate not working in the download edition.
I'll probably come back with a new slashot username, to make you all think that gentoo is horribly difficult and uninstallable, thus reserving developer attention for myself. Perhaps I can sell this UID on ebay, and make you all think I remain...
"# More than 850 command functions (e.g. Bold and Italic are the same command function) # More than 1600 distinct commands (e.g. Bold and Italic are distinct commands) # At any given time roughly 50% of these commands are enabled (conservative estimate) # With just 3 steps, the possible combinations of code execution paths exceeds 500 million"
Conclusion: orthogonality is good. If adding bold text makes your "import excel document" look odd, or your mail-merge feature behave weirdly, it might be worth looking at whether 500 million distinct combinations is too many...
"Okay I'll bite. Here's a fantastic excuse for using ActiveX: every one of your customers will be using Windows with Internet Explorer anyway"
In the real world, you can tell yourself that everybody will be using Internet Explorer. Expecting it to actually happen is a different matter entirely.
Even if you're a BOFH Network Nazi(TM) who's locked down everyone's Win2K machines with your favourite software and a boss who launches inquisitions against anyone found to be using non-MS software, you're still lying to yourself when you say "only IE will ever read this site"
And that's just for intranets. That's just for the companies who have disciplinary hearings for people using Free Software. Now imagine the internet. I can hardly count the number of potential suppliers who've decided that everyone they care about will be using Internet Explorer. Bzzt! Wrong! It's not even safe anymore, anyone who uses IE is by definition someone insecure and dangerous to their own network and others. Are they the type of people you hire? Windows users spewing spam and viruses? No? Hint: lots of people in your office are using a web-browser that doesn't automatically run any EXE file you serve to it.
"Rapid development and a trustworthy [Active X], no-obtrusive, support free platform."
Spoiler warning: put down your coffee and step away from the keyboard before reading this person's comments!
Howabout ActiveX is a nasty hack that you'll spend your whole life maintaining (even if you ignore the constant calls about it not working on "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO RUN THAT!!!" other browsers) which will break in nearly every Windows point release, warn your users not to run it, refuse to run it without certificates, and allow your users to blame you (correctly or not) when they next get an unexplained program wreaking havoc with their desktops (that'll be your fault, since you were the one who insisted that they run insecure ActiveX programs despite the warnings from Microsoft)
Oh, and could we explain the "activeX is trustworthy" statment? That one made the least sense (in an "iraqi information minister is trustworthy" kind of way...).
"Hmm. I wonder if it has a chapter on finger pointing and avoiding blame?"
Upon learning that your systems have been penetrated, proper incident response is as follows:
1. Scream. Hold head between hands and moan.
2. Check passport, one-way tickets to South American country of choice. Express relief that the emergency escape kit is still operational.
3. Remember advising boss to recind deparmental policy of secure sticky-note-on-the-monitor storage for passwords. Recall boss' gales of laughter in response. Take hefty swig of Jack Daniel's.
4. Remember advising boss to please not open random e-mail attachments. Recall boss' blank stare in response. Suck on barrel of.357 revolver for 5 minutes or until sufficiently calmed down.
5. Remember pleading with boss to allow filtering executable attachments. Recall boss' response. Almost pull trigger.
6. Resist urge to yank server out of rack and dump out nineth-story window.
7. Advise boss of break-in. This starts the long chain of blame-passing that ends when the CEO sacks 5 random people in middle management and below.
8. Sit back and watch the spin machine start the vital post-incident response protocol of figuring out who might know what happened and silencing them.
"but what happens to these spam mails? Are they bounced back as an error "no user account found"?"
Well hopefully they're bounced back to whatever email address the spammer listed in the "From:" field, with a friendly message chosen from one of the following helpful formats:
You have a virus!!
You have a W32/* virus!!
You sent this spam email
I've blacklisted you and hacked your computer and will be calling the police, waaaa!
I won't read your email unless you respond to this challenge/response thingie
Your email was deleted. This message sponsored by $COMPANY_NAME
$PRODUCT_NAME is so awesome that it managed to detect a ZIP file in your email, aren't we good? aren't we? Buy your own copy of $PRODUCT_NAME here!
An email filtering program would just be incomplete without that option, and who would want an incomplete filtering program?
"If people were freaking out about context-sensitive text ads in their email, just imagine the reaction to the plan to "scan" IM messages for advertising."
Google competition #1: prepare suitable advertising messages for these
The list of websites which don't work with Mozilla (that's a link to bugzilla, showing Priority 1,2,3 tech-evangalism bugs), and should be a pretty complete list of all major websites that don't work with mozilla. There're 236 such sites at the moment.
Actual URL, if you follow links without displaying a referer tag.
In a default install of Mandrake 10, KMail now displays the images in spam (I prefer just the source-code so I can delete it quicker), it puts a big red header at the top of each HTML message filling the preview pane with something unrelated to the message, it's got a crap default font, it has icons next to each menu item making it more difficult to read, it might have slightly-transparent menus making it difficult to read, the default icons are so bland you can't see what's what (they're all bluish-white circles), I'm not sure it's possible to insist on always-non-HTML outgoing mail, XChat is now ugly, MandrakeUpdate doesn't work, rpmdrakedoes work, but displays error messages even when it succeeds, and it displays dialog-boxes when you start it "I'm about to run rpmdrake, okay?" - "yes, dammit, that's why I typed rpmdrake, duh!". 3-hour install time, advertising during the installer and an end-user license agreement. Didn't configure X properly, and X crashed with "no screens found" first time I ran it. Mouse-wheel doesn't work, extra buttons on the mouse don't seem to be setup to do anything, WindowMaker has a crap default configuration with useless mandrake menus and an ugly config. Text-mode terminals have a distracting white star in the corner of each screen, no matter what you're doing. Default X terminal seems to be Konsole, the slowest program ever, takes about 20 seconds to load on my machine for a console. Xterm doesn't seem to have been installed by default, neither was kppp (the internet dialler, would be nice), neither was kedit. No I didn't use "individual package selections", I've wasted too many hours in there before. New KDE theme is as horrible as the fonts, and good luck finding how to change it from if you're not in KDE at the time (it's 'kcontrol', I should note to myself, and 'gnome-control-center'). There doesn't seem to be any way of turning off the "send this picture" menu in mozilla which is so annoying to hit by accident, nor the "close other tabs" menu, cause of many a day's lost work. Oh, and KMail must have sprouted a new menu or something, because I always seem to have trouble finding anything in what used to be a nice clear layout.
Did I mention that I use KMail so many hours per day that making it even slightly harder to use is a big kick in the teeth from the people working on default configuration at Mandrake? Or that I use rxvt frequently enough that disabling the WindowMaker icon to open a terminal after you've used it once is frustrating enough to make you want to install gentoo, even if it takes you a month of downloading?
And that's just the stuff which has changed since the "quite nice but crashes with a USB key" Mandrake 9 (apart from the EULA which was always offensive). Seriously, I use Mandrake all the time, it's the best OS I've found so far, but after installing Mandrake 10, I've spent nearly every waking hour looking at pictures of Apple iMacs, and counting the cash required to buy one.
Does this comment even get 10 minutes before disappearing beneath the waves of moderation?
Gimp != Photoshop, but Gimp > Photoshop 5, the version that most photoshop-users I know are using, because it was the latest version that they could make "pirated" copies of before activation schemes and the like. Most photoshop users (not the ones who go on and on and on and on about how nothing will ever compete with it) are comparing like with like. Zero-cost with zero-cost. Freedom with fear of a BSA raid.
As for the people whining about how a Free program that they've donated nothing to is worse than a Proprietary program they support to the tune of $600 per user per upgrade -- If they each put that $600 into GIMP development instead of Adobe's dividends, then maybe they could vote with their wallet for which application gets to spend the most money on development.
"And also remember, just because you have a gui to access the program doesn't mean you can't still have the command line access to the program."
More to the point, a well-designed command-line program can be a lot easier to use than a badly-designed GUI program.
As for our webcam, if I type "webcams" and get a list of cameras with their status neatly displayed, then "webcam 1 show" or "webcam 2 diagnostics" or "webcam help" and the commands do sensible things with clear information, that beats the usability out of an obtruse GUI anyday.
(I'm thinking of the comparaison between Perl Package Manager's ease-of-use, and the way I can search for a perl-module, get details of it, and have it installed before the graphical rpmdrake has even finished displaying its splash-screen)
As for GUIs, I'm leaning towards web-interfaces for stuff I write, but it's still a little unclear what works best. There's a lot to be said for a small, fast, stable application with a web-interface, compared to one which tries to manage its own GUI. Not least, being able to run on networked computers, or PCs without video-cards, or being able to run programs from lots of PCs on one screen. (These are all advantages of text-mode programs too, which can be run remotely via SSH, and even better, they continue to work when and not if X-Windows breaks)
"What prevents me from writing my own VOIP software and using that?"
In the words of the almighty gun-nut, show us the code!
Seriously, no point in asking "what if?", just write the damned thing. Everyone posting to this thread knows enough about security and encryption to do system-design for an encrypted phone. GPG is free software and has all the functions you need, so does OpenSSL. Computers are much faster now than when PGP-Fone was written, and there are more people involved in free software. Find a project that looks promising, and help-out.
Regards the original question, look for phrases like "a person who is in possession at a relevant time of both the protected information and a means of obtaining access to the information and of disclosing it in an intelligible form"
"In that case, it won't be long at all before the use of encryption becomes illegal. Simply using encryption will be a enough to put you behind bars, regardless of what you are encrypting.That's how a police state works."
I don't know if you were referring to a real place, but your description is quite similar to English law: here, you can go to prison for failing to turn-over your encryption keys on request, or failing to decrypt something on request (even if the key has been destroyed), and you can even go to prison for revealing that you have given away your encryption keys.
It's basically "assumed guilty of something until you can prove yourself innocent by decrypting evidence" although technically they might say that having a secret from the government is itself the crime. Ironically, this makes England the one place in the world where "RubberHose" [marutuku] is actually needed.
Next to the Nile if you wanted a long strip of landing lights, or an american city if you were coming vertically. Or the ocean, if you want somewhere flat and relatively stable to land. Or nevada, for the same reason the black triangles land there.
"In addition to that if you were an alien why on earth would you choose to fly around in the airspace of one of the most paranoid countries on Earth who also has probably the most sophisticated equipment to spot you"
Because it's been sounding alarms in their SETI project for years? Maybe they can do a cool solar-sail trick with radar-sensitive photocells and search radars?
"As much as I hate cigarette smoke, I'm not sure I want robots running around yanking cigarettes from people's mouths. After all, letting someone smoke would clearly be a violation of the "harm through inaction " law of robotics. Society already mandates the removal of too much personal risk and self-responsibility. The last thing we need is robots deciding what their human "masters" can and cannot do."
"I have a serious question then. What's a good, easy to use Linux distribution for first time computer users that also will have security updates for many (3+) years to come?"
Well the download version of Mandrake 10 is already reporting "no updates available" on my new installation, so suggest you don't try that if you want updates...
No doubt someone will tell me all the configuration files I need to edit as root, just to get security updates... "add the following lines to your updates.conf file... etc." (usually doesn't work, but makes the helpful advocate feel better)
Do we really expect the USPTO to spend any time on technical aspects of a patent, when it takes the best part of a week to figure out what their "invention" is, written in the most convoluted terms possible?
Slashdot Mirror
"Start a movie. Minimize it to the dock. See the movie continue playing.
Start a print job. Depending on the print driver you're using, note the printed pages count update in the dock icon.
Launch Adium. Set the preferences to display buddy status in the Adium icon.
Drag and drop onto dock icons. Watch applications launch or files get saved, etc."
Could I just check -- are you talking about WindowMaker DockApp features here, or is this something that OS-X does too?
"Copy Apple for crying out loud"
KDE screenshot 1
KDE screenshot 2
"C++ is proprietary?"
If they're aiming for open-source developers, why didn't they include perl, python, ruby, and lisp among the "allowable" languages? You need to choose between something less powerful and something proprietary???
"You have to buy a tv licence to watch broadcast TV. if you do not watch broadcast tv, you do *not* need a tv licence. it's that simple."
When this comment was made, I believe the person said it with knowledge of two things:
(a) if you buy a TV (or in this case, a computer with a tuner), then the shop is required to take your name and address and send it to the TV licensing bureau. That's probably more invconvenient than it sounds, especially if you object to having such information passed-on.
(b) regardless of whether you watch TV or not, regardless of whether you even have a TV or not, if you don't have a license, the licensing authority will hassle you for the rest of your life. They will write letters, red letters, demands, requests for court appearances, things which look like court summonses but are actually just extremely threatening letters, and the only thing you can do about it is sign, swear, and notarise that you don't have a TV, and they will still write to you 18 months later and threaten you with prosecution if you don't buy a license. In some famous cases, they will even print your address on a 4-metre poster in the city centre and tell everyone that you don't have a TV license.
So yeah, while you might technically and legally be correct, I can understand why computer companies wouldn't want to force this experience on their users, especially if it will be associated with their first experience of buying an Apple.
"I use X-chat 2.0.8 and I'm not sure what you meant by x-chat being ugly; it looks normal to me :)"
Indeed. And while I've solved many of the problems, reinstalling everything from kuickshow to xmms that wasn't included on a default 30 minute installation, specifying mozilla fonts in a stylesheet, and wondering why xchat buttons seem to be inverted between "pressed" and "unpressed" views... it's too much. The music collection, installed on an encrypted disk, is just plain Not Working(TM), and probably will be until I learn more than I ever want to know about loopback partitions. Tomorrow I install gentoo, I may not be back...
Mandrake is nice, and I'd recommend it to anyone migrating from Windows (assuming they use KDE and not WindowMaker). But really, too many people have made too many decisions about what I should want. Contrary to popular belief, I actually need to get stuff done in Kmail, want to make a few changes to some programs, and actually getting quite tired with MandrakeUpdate not working in the download edition.
I'll probably come back with a new slashot username, to make you all think that gentoo is horribly difficult and uninstallable, thus reserving developer attention for myself. Perhaps I can sell this UID on ebay, and make you all think I remain...
who-ha-haa-haaa!!!
"9. PROFIT!!!"
It's inevitable. The robots have finally learnt to tell joken better than humans.
I, slashdotter.
"# More than 850 command functions (e.g. Bold and Italic are the same command function)
# More than 1600 distinct commands (e.g. Bold and Italic are distinct commands)
# At any given time roughly 50% of these commands are enabled (conservative estimate)
# With just 3 steps, the possible combinations of code execution paths exceeds 500 million"
Conclusion: orthogonality is good. If adding bold text makes your "import excel document" look odd, or your mail-merge feature behave weirdly, it might be worth looking at whether 500 million distinct combinations is too many...
"Okay I'll bite. Here's a fantastic excuse for using ActiveX: every one of your customers will be using Windows with Internet Explorer anyway"
In the real world, you can tell yourself that everybody will be using Internet Explorer. Expecting it to actually happen is a different matter entirely.
Even if you're a BOFH Network Nazi(TM) who's locked down everyone's Win2K machines with your favourite software and a boss who launches inquisitions against anyone found to be using non-MS software, you're still lying to yourself when you say "only IE will ever read this site"
And that's just for intranets. That's just for the companies who have disciplinary hearings for people using Free Software. Now imagine the internet. I can hardly count the number of potential suppliers who've decided that everyone they care about will be using Internet Explorer. Bzzt! Wrong! It's not even safe anymore, anyone who uses IE is by definition someone insecure and dangerous to their own network and others. Are they the type of people you hire? Windows users spewing spam and viruses? No? Hint: lots of people in your office are using a web-browser that doesn't automatically run any EXE file you serve to it.
"Rapid development and a trustworthy [Active X], no-obtrusive, support free platform."
Spoiler warning: put down your coffee and step away from the keyboard before reading this person's comments!
Howabout ActiveX is a nasty hack that you'll spend your whole life maintaining (even if you ignore the constant calls about it not working on "YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO RUN THAT!!!" other browsers) which will break in nearly every Windows point release, warn your users not to run it, refuse to run it without certificates, and allow your users to blame you (correctly or not) when they next get an unexplained program wreaking havoc with their desktops (that'll be your fault, since you were the one who insisted that they run insecure ActiveX programs despite the warnings from Microsoft)
Oh, and could we explain the "activeX is trustworthy" statment? That one made the least sense (in an "iraqi information minister is trustworthy" kind of way...).
"Hmm. I wonder if it has a chapter on finger pointing and avoiding blame?"
.357 revolver for 5 minutes or until sufficiently calmed down.
Upon learning that your systems have been penetrated, proper incident response is as follows:
1. Scream. Hold head between hands and moan.
2. Check passport, one-way tickets to South American country of choice. Express relief that the emergency escape kit is still operational.
3. Remember advising boss to recind deparmental policy of secure sticky-note-on-the-monitor storage for passwords. Recall boss' gales of laughter in response. Take hefty swig of Jack Daniel's.
4. Remember advising boss to please not open random e-mail attachments. Recall boss' blank stare in response. Suck on barrel of
5. Remember pleading with boss to allow filtering executable attachments. Recall boss' response. Almost pull trigger.
6. Resist urge to yank server out of rack and dump out nineth-story window.
7. Advise boss of break-in. This starts the long chain of blame-passing that ends when the CEO sacks 5 random people in middle management and below.
8. Sit back and watch the spin machine start the vital post-incident response protocol of figuring out who might know what happened and silencing them.
"Can I just cover my computer with a rubber sheet? I could even use cherry flavored."
Link
Well hopefully they're bounced back to whatever email address the spammer listed in the "From:" field, with a friendly message chosen from one of the following helpful formats:
An email filtering program would just be incomplete without that option, and who would want an incomplete filtering program?
"If people were freaking out about context-sensitive text ads in their email, just imagine the reaction to the plan to "scan" IM messages for advertising."
Google competition #1: prepare suitable advertising messages for these
"It better have a 'G' in front of the name... instant street cred."
Google Instant Messenger Protocol?
The list of websites which don't work with Mozilla (that's a link to bugzilla, showing Priority 1,2,3 tech-evangalism bugs), and should be a pretty complete list of all major websites that don't work with mozilla. There're 236 such sites at the moment.
Actual URL, if you follow links without displaying a referer tag.
"But linux is already there for me (mandrake 10)"
In a default install of Mandrake 10, KMail now displays the images in spam (I prefer just the source-code so I can delete it quicker), it puts a big red header at the top of each HTML message filling the preview pane with something unrelated to the message, it's got a crap default font, it has icons next to each menu item making it more difficult to read, it might have slightly-transparent menus making it difficult to read, the default icons are so bland you can't see what's what (they're all bluish-white circles), I'm not sure it's possible to insist on always-non-HTML outgoing mail, XChat is now ugly, MandrakeUpdate doesn't work, rpmdrake does work, but displays error messages even when it succeeds, and it displays dialog-boxes when you start it "I'm about to run rpmdrake, okay?" - "yes, dammit, that's why I typed rpmdrake, duh!". 3-hour install time, advertising during the installer and an end-user license agreement. Didn't configure X properly, and X crashed with "no screens found" first time I ran it. Mouse-wheel doesn't work, extra buttons on the mouse don't seem to be setup to do anything, WindowMaker has a crap default configuration with useless mandrake menus and an ugly config. Text-mode terminals have a distracting white star in the corner of each screen, no matter what you're doing. Default X terminal seems to be Konsole, the slowest program ever, takes about 20 seconds to load on my machine for a console. Xterm doesn't seem to have been installed by default, neither was kppp (the internet dialler, would be nice), neither was kedit. No I didn't use "individual package selections", I've wasted too many hours in there before. New KDE theme is as horrible as the fonts, and good luck finding how to change it from if you're not in KDE at the time (it's 'kcontrol', I should note to myself, and 'gnome-control-center'). There doesn't seem to be any way of turning off the "send this picture" menu in mozilla which is so annoying to hit by accident, nor the "close other tabs" menu, cause of many a day's lost work. Oh, and KMail must have sprouted a new menu or something, because I always seem to have trouble finding anything in what used to be a nice clear layout.
Did I mention that I use KMail so many hours per day that making it even slightly harder to use is a big kick in the teeth from the people working on default configuration at Mandrake? Or that I use rxvt frequently enough that disabling the WindowMaker icon to open a terminal after you've used it once is frustrating enough to make you want to install gentoo, even if it takes you a month of downloading?
And that's just the stuff which has changed since the "quite nice but crashes with a USB key" Mandrake 9 (apart from the EULA which was always offensive). Seriously, I use Mandrake all the time, it's the best OS I've found so far, but after installing Mandrake 10, I've spent nearly every waking hour looking at pictures of Apple iMacs, and counting the cash required to buy one.
Does this comment even get 10 minutes before disappearing beneath the waves of moderation?
"For Photoshop Users. No. (Gimp != Photoshop)"
Gimp != Photoshop, but Gimp > Photoshop 5, the version that most photoshop-users I know are using, because it was the latest version that they could make "pirated" copies of before activation schemes and the like. Most photoshop users (not the ones who go on and on and on and on about how nothing will ever compete with it) are comparing like with like. Zero-cost with zero-cost. Freedom with fear of a BSA raid.
As for the people whining about how a Free program that they've donated nothing to is worse than a Proprietary program they support to the tune of $600 per user per upgrade -- If they each put that $600 into GIMP development instead of Adobe's dividends, then maybe they could vote with their wallet for which application gets to spend the most money on development.
"And also remember, just because you have a gui to access the program doesn't mean you can't still have the command line access to the program."
More to the point, a well-designed command-line program can be a lot easier to use than a badly-designed GUI program.
As for our webcam, if I type "webcams" and get a list of cameras with their status neatly displayed, then "webcam 1 show" or "webcam 2 diagnostics" or "webcam help" and the commands do sensible things with clear information, that beats the usability out of an obtruse GUI anyday.
(I'm thinking of the comparaison between Perl Package Manager's ease-of-use, and the way I can search for a perl-module, get details of it, and have it installed before the graphical rpmdrake has even finished displaying its splash-screen)
As for GUIs, I'm leaning towards web-interfaces for stuff I write, but it's still a little unclear what works best. There's a lot to be said for a small, fast, stable application with a web-interface, compared to one which tries to manage its own GUI. Not least, being able to run on networked computers, or PCs without video-cards, or being able to run programs from lots of PCs on one screen. (These are all advantages of text-mode programs too, which can be run remotely via SSH, and even better, they continue to work when and not if X-Windows breaks)
"What prevents me from writing my own VOIP software and using that?"
In the words of the almighty gun-nut, show us the code!
Seriously, no point in asking "what if?", just write the damned thing. Everyone posting to this thread knows enough about security and encryption to do system-design for an encrypted phone. GPG is free software and has all the functions you need, so does OpenSSL. Computers are much faster now than when PGP-Fone was written, and there are more people involved in free software. Find a project that looks promising, and help-out.
"Got a link for that"
Full text of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 -- probably contains answers for lots of questions in this thread.
Regards the original question, look for phrases like "a person who is in possession at a relevant time of both the protected information and a means of obtaining access to the information and of disclosing it in an intelligible form"
"In that case, it won't be long at all before the use of encryption becomes illegal. Simply using encryption will be a enough to put you behind bars, regardless of what you are encrypting.That's how a police state works."
I don't know if you were referring to a real place, but your description is quite similar to English law: here, you can go to prison for failing to turn-over your encryption keys on request, or failing to decrypt something on request (even if the key has been destroyed), and you can even go to prison for revealing that you have given away your encryption keys.
It's basically "assumed guilty of something until you can prove yourself innocent by decrypting evidence" although technically they might say that having a secret from the government is itself the crime. Ironically, this makes England the one place in the world where "RubberHose" [marutuku] is actually needed.
"OK, if you were an alien, where would you land?"
Next to the Nile if you wanted a long strip of landing lights, or an american city if you were coming vertically. Or the ocean, if you want somewhere flat and relatively stable to land. Or nevada, for the same reason the black triangles land there.
"In addition to that if you were an alien why on earth would you choose to fly around in the airspace of one of the most paranoid countries on Earth who also has probably the most sophisticated equipment to spot you"
Because it's been sounding alarms in their SETI project for years? Maybe they can do a cool solar-sail trick with radar-sensitive photocells and search radars?
"As much as I hate cigarette smoke, I'm not sure I want robots running around yanking cigarettes from people's mouths. After all, letting someone smoke would clearly be a violation of the "harm through inaction " law of robotics. Society already mandates the removal of too much personal risk and self-responsibility. The last thing we need is robots deciding what their human "masters" can and cannot do."
Expand upon that thought?
"I have a serious question then. What's a good, easy to use Linux distribution for first time computer users that also will have security updates for many (3+) years to come?"
Well the download version of Mandrake 10 is already reporting "no updates available" on my new installation, so suggest you don't try that if you want updates...
No doubt someone will tell me all the configuration files I need to edit as root, just to get security updates... "add the following lines to your updates.conf file... etc." (usually doesn't work, but makes the helpful advocate feel better)
"I thought that the explosion along the Siberian pipeline was the largest non-nuclear anyways."
Largest ever artificial non-nuclear blast on Earth maybe...
3) The patents themselves are indecipherable.
Do we really expect the USPTO to spend any time on technical aspects of a patent, when it takes the best part of a week to figure out what their "invention" is, written in the most convoluted terms possible?