"The Dutch OPTA, a national telecommunications watchdog, has decided not to label commercial Bluetooth messages as spam"
The OPTA hasn't formally decided anything. In TFA an OPTA spokesperson (when asked by a reporter) claims that bluetooth spam is probably not covered by current Dutch legislation, but it DOES "go against the spirit of the law". The OPTA so far hasn't investigated matters further, because it (apparentely) needs a formal complaint to be able to do so, and no one has filed one yet.
The Firefox developers have invested a lot of time and effort in reducing what they consider UI bloat. As far as the middle-click option or the close tab button are concerned, I can understand why they decided to make them hidden prefs - both are pretty obscure options that only a minority of mostly power users need, and that particular minority is probably capable enough to use Google and change the appropriate settings in the about:config window.
Personally, I'm more bothered by the removal of 3rd party cookie handling options from the UI (setting "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" to "1" in about:config still works). Even though this setting doesn't always work as well as it's supposed to, and may sometimes confuse new users, this is a privacy and security feature that many people use. And it has been present in every major browser for years.
I also don't like the changes to Find As You Type/the (Quick) Find Bar. The devteam seems to have removed functionality here that makes the default Quick Find next to useless. Luckily, there's an extension to restore a proper Find Bar, but IMHO oversimplifying the browser to the point where it becomes increasingly less usefull is not the way to go.
Oh well, I suppose we all have our pet peeves... In the end, it's all a matter of taste (and flame wars). Remember the Phoenix versus Seamonkey discussions.
In FF2 this doesn't work - a middle click on the browser window != typing something into the URL bar now. No problem, but I don't know what it == so I could set that. I did try Seamonkey but that had bigger problems - thing is, this is a habit I picked up using the old Mozilla suite.
Haven't tried this myself, but doesn't setting 'middlemouse.contentLoadURL' to 'true' in about:config solve this issue?
They also moved the tab close button. The browser is one of the few apps where I make use of the mouse so I like it to be as efficient as possible to do stuff. Being able to close a bunch of windows by repeatedly clicking the same button was very handy.
I agree. The change annoyed me too. There is a hidden pref, though. To restore the FF1.5 style single close tab button, set 'browser.tabs.closeButtons' to '3' in about:config.
Perhaps, but it is a precedent. Unless it's made very clear to Earthlink that this is not acceptable, soon every big ISP in the world will be doing this, and DNS will be broken beyond repair.
I don't think we should kid ourselves. $5/gal gasoline is coming. Sooner than most probably hope.
Personally, I think the sooner it arrives, the sooner my fellow Americans will quit buying SUVs.
I couldn't agree more, especially with that last sentence.
Gasoline is already well over $5 a gallon in many parts of the world, such as the Netherlands (link is in Dutch), where I live. Gasoline prices in the US are notoriously low, which is one of the main reasons US citizens have a disproportionally large ecological footprint. In all fairness, so do most Europeans, but the US are doing a lot worse than most of the world (PDF alert).
The current generation of bot software has grown to the point where open-source software development tools make a natural fit. With hundreds of source files now being managed, developers of the Agobot family of malware, for example, are using the open-source CVS (Concurrent Versions System) software to manage their project.
If that's the best example they can come up with... Geezz, malware writers probably eat cereal, too. Why not blame Kellogg's?
I wouldn't consider it spyware though, unless you would consider any browser that sends out UA headers spyware. The search bar doesn't tell Google that *YOU* are using Firefox, nor that you were looking for [fill in your fetish here]. It just tells Google that *someone* performed a search for [fetish] through Firefox's search bar. IMHO, that's no different from your browser correctly identifying itself as Firefox in my server logs.
If you're that worried about Google spying on you personally, you should block Google's cookies, which are much more of a threat to your privacy, and make sure you're behind an anonymizing proxy.
XFFM certainly takes some getting used to, but IMHO there is very little file management that isn't done faster and easier from a terminal anyway. I've been running XFCE for ages, but I hardly ever use XFFM for anything.
Still, the file manager is probably the most criticised part of XFCE, which is why it's going to be replaced by Thunar from XFCE4.4 onwards. I'm not sure I'm going to like the change, as Thunar seems to be using the GtkFileChooser UI, which I personally find utter crap.
I got a second-hand Toshiba Satellite notebook (K6-2 333Mhz, 64M RAM, 4GB HD) last year. It came with W98 installed, but I wiped the HD and installed Fedora Core 3 (not the lightest-weight distro out there). I opted for XFCE rather than Gnome, though. I can use Firefox 1.5 and even OpenOffice.org 2.0 just fine on this notebook, no need to use Dillo (which, with all due respect, can hardly be considered suitable for your daily browsing, considering the lack of proper support for ssl or even CSS) or Abiword.
FF and OO.o take some time launching (up to a minute, for the latter), but once they're running they're perfectly usable. If it weren't for battery life, I think I'd be using this notebook for years to come.
Linux EFI support already exists in the form of elilo, a special version of the LILO bootloader designed specifically for Intel systems that use EFI and the IA64 architecture. The current elilo code base will have to be ported to Intel's x86 architecture before it can be integrated into Linux distributions capable of running on Apple's new systems. Although such a port is theoretically possible, members of the Ars Technica Linux community have pointed out that bootloaders are generally written with plenty of assembly, and consequently are not easily ported. Elilo is not particularly stable and Red Hat representatives have not discussed the methodology they plan to use, so the solution could end up being something else entirely.
Apology accepted. And you certainly do have a point there. In political sciences, many words have more than one meaning, and many terms are heavily contested - "politics" itself being a prime example. The same goes for the word "democracy". We all have a certain understanding of the concept, and most people will agree that, say, the GDR wasn't one. There are, however, many types of democracy, some of which you may or may not consider democratic. For example: some democratic systems simply decide by majority, which may seem very democratic at first, but can sometimes significantly limit the freedom of minorities - imposing a "tyranny by majority". In other democratic systems, minorities are given a bit more weight in decision-making than they would have had on the basis of their numbers, in order to protect their rights. Some people don't consider majority electoral systems to be very democratic, because the party in government isn't always backed by an actual electoral majority, while others criticise proportional representation for similar reasons.
The same goes for the word "republic". In political theory, it does have a substantive meaning (or probably even several). The early city republics of Italy, for example, were called that because they were not heriditary monarchies, unlike pretty much every other political entity in Europe, but were governed by elected councils. The Italians certainly wouldn't have considered these city republics democracies, though. The term itself was hardly known, because Aristotle's work had largely been forgotten - and even for Aristotle, democracy wasn't a good thing. And to our current standards, these early republics were aristocracies at best, at times plagued by nepotism, violence, corruption and fraud. However, to the Italians "republicanism" wasn't just another state form. It was also a political ideal, according to which all citizens were (at least morally) obliged(!) to actively participate in the council, and to serve the general interest. (Note, however, that only a small proportion of the population was considered citizens in this sense. Most people still had absolutely no say in anything at all.) Republicanism also valued the ideal of freedom, which wasn't as natural as it is today. This more substantive, idealistic meaning of the word "republic" is still very much alive today, especially in American politics. In Europe, however, I think most people would in day to day speech use the word simply to refer to a state that has a president in stead of a king or a queen (or such).
Exactly. Labeling something Democratic does not mean redefining the meaning of word "Democracy". Same goes for "Republic". Your previous post did not in any way deal with possible real differences between those two terms. That in turn provoked me to write an irritated reply, since GDR has both "democratic" and "republic" in it, and it was neither democratic nor republic... duh...
Which was my point exactly. I would consider the GDR a republic, in the sense that it wasn't a monarchy (a republic - in one definition - is just a form of state). OTOH, I certainly wouldn't consider it a democracy. Thus, I named the GDR as one of the examples were democracy and republic are not "strikingly similar", as the original parent had suggested.
I wouldn't draw such a far reaching conclusion from a single case. Obviously, every electoral system can produce undesirable outcomes. If anything, however, I'd say PR has had a tempering effect on (Dutch) politics, for (at least) two reasons. First, PR usually comes with a greater diversity of parties (thus giving people a greater range of alternatives if they're not happy about the ruling party, so they won't all flock with the idiot in the uniform), and second, it forces politicians of different parties to form coalitions (thus making concessions, discussing issues in a peaceful manner and showing some consideration for people with different opinions). Even during the great depression of the 1930s, fascist parties were (relatively) insignificant in the Dutch lower house. If I'm not mistaking, the best result for the NSB (national-socialist movement) in a national election in the Netherlands was just over 4 percent, in 1937.
In a majority system (especially of the "first past the post" type), were "the winner takes all", a party reaching twenty or thirty percent of the vote may gain absolute power - as the great-grand parent pointed out. If they happen to be Nazis, you're screwed.
I live in The Netherlands, which has an electoral system considered "extremely proportional" by most political scientists. A political party that gets a share as small as about 0.7% of the votes has a fair chance of getting one of the 150 seats in the Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, the Dutch equivalent of the House of Commons). When it took it's current form, this system was best suited for a country as deeply divided (culturally, religiously and politically) as The Netherlands, with a protestant North and a catholic South, a rapidly growing labour movement, many small business owners and an important liberal minority.
The upside is that the parliament's composition mirrors actual voter preferences quite closely, so all political and religious minorites can be represented in parliament and have their say in national politics. In addition, political parties are extremely unlikely to reach a majority on their own, so they're always forced to form a coalition government - thus assuring that the government is backed by a fairly large proportion of the Dutch voters. OTOH, in countries that have majority systems, governing parties may sometimes have the support of only a very small minority of the electorate.
The downside to the Dutch system is that we have a fairly large number (currently eleven) of parties in parliament, including the far left, the far right, orthodox Christians, ecologists, populists and plain idiots. They all have their say, and their support may from time to time be indispensable, which doesn't always add to clarity and political decisiveness. Also, being forced to form coalition governments, the main parties tend to iron out their differences and resemble each other more and more, which may obviously impair political debate and take away real choice from the voters. As a result, some highly controversial issues are virtually impossible to decide upon (such as the abolishment of the "hypotheekrenteaftrek", the tax deductibility of mortgage interests, is one example. It's been on the political agenda for over twenty years, but no solution is even close).
The merits of majority systems versus proportional representation are a different debate though. Even though I personally prefer PR to any majority system, I'd still consider the UK to be a democratic country. After all, although you may not like the design (or the outcome) of the electoral system, the UK does have free and fair elections, free press, free speech, a democratically controlled government, an independent judiciary, etc.
Republic and Democracy are strikingly similar (...)
Go tell that to the people of say, North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkmenistan, the former GDR, or most countries in Africa.
Republics and democracies go together well, but they're not "strikingly similar". Regretfully, most republics aren't all that democratic right now, while most constitutional monarchies (the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain...) are.
Currently, you need to manage your feed subscriptions separately for Google Reader, GMail and the personalized Google home page. I don't understand why Google hasn't somehow integrated those. For example, why can't GMail Web Clips just grab my subscriptions from Reader? Seems like the obvious thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
How come a first post that's on topic and raises a legitimate issue be modded Flamebait? Oh wait. This is /.
"The Dutch OPTA, a national telecommunications watchdog, has decided not to label commercial Bluetooth messages as spam"
The OPTA hasn't formally decided anything. In TFA an OPTA spokesperson (when asked by a reporter) claims that bluetooth spam is probably not covered by current Dutch legislation, but it DOES "go against the spirit of the law". The OPTA so far hasn't investigated matters further, because it (apparentely) needs a formal complaint to be able to do so, and no one has filed one yet.
The Firefox developers have invested a lot of time and effort in reducing what they consider UI bloat. As far as the middle-click option or the close tab button are concerned, I can understand why they decided to make them hidden prefs - both are pretty obscure options that only a minority of mostly power users need, and that particular minority is probably capable enough to use Google and change the appropriate settings in the about:config window.
Personally, I'm more bothered by the removal of 3rd party cookie handling options from the UI (setting "network.cookie.cookieBehavior" to "1" in about:config still works). Even though this setting doesn't always work as well as it's supposed to, and may sometimes confuse new users, this is a privacy and security feature that many people use. And it has been present in every major browser for years.
I also don't like the changes to Find As You Type/the (Quick) Find Bar. The devteam seems to have removed functionality here that makes the default Quick Find next to useless. Luckily, there's an extension to restore a proper Find Bar, but IMHO oversimplifying the browser to the point where it becomes increasingly less usefull is not the way to go.
Oh well, I suppose we all have our pet peeves... In the end, it's all a matter of taste (and flame wars). Remember the Phoenix versus Seamonkey discussions.
I agree. The change annoyed me too. There is a hidden pref, though. To restore the FF1.5 style single close tab button, set 'browser.tabs.closeButtons' to '3' in about:config.
That's NSF your W? Jeez, what are you? The pope?
Perhaps, but it is a precedent. Unless it's made very clear to Earthlink that this is not acceptable, soon every big ISP in the world will be doing this, and DNS will be broken beyond repair.
I wouldn't consider it spyware though, unless you would consider any browser that sends out UA headers spyware. The search bar doesn't tell Google that *YOU* are using Firefox, nor that you were looking for [fill in your fetish here]. It just tells Google that *someone* performed a search for [fetish] through Firefox's search bar. IMHO, that's no different from your browser correctly identifying itself as Firefox in my server logs.
If you're that worried about Google spying on you personally, you should block Google's cookies, which are much more of a threat to your privacy, and make sure you're behind an anonymizing proxy.
I wanted to disable it, because I don't need google (or anyone else) to know I'm using firefox.
Ever heard of UA strings?
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060203 Fedora/1.5.0.1-1.1.fc4.nr Firefox/1.5.0.1
If only I had modpoints...
XFFM certainly takes some getting used to, but IMHO there is very little file management that isn't done faster and easier from a terminal anyway. I've been running XFCE for ages, but I hardly ever use XFFM for anything. Still, the file manager is probably the most criticised part of XFCE, which is why it's going to be replaced by Thunar from XFCE4.4 onwards. I'm not sure I'm going to like the change, as Thunar seems to be using the GtkFileChooser UI, which I personally find utter crap.
I got a second-hand Toshiba Satellite notebook (K6-2 333Mhz, 64M RAM, 4GB HD) last year. It came with W98 installed, but I wiped the HD and installed Fedora Core 3 (not the lightest-weight distro out there). I opted for XFCE rather than Gnome, though. I can use Firefox 1.5 and even OpenOffice.org 2.0 just fine on this notebook, no need to use Dillo (which, with all due respect, can hardly be considered suitable for your daily browsing, considering the lack of proper support for ssl or even CSS) or Abiword. FF and OO.o take some time launching (up to a minute, for the latter), but once they're running they're perfectly usable. If it weren't for battery life, I think I'd be using this notebook for years to come.
Why are all the 'fi's missing from TFA?
Actually, I recently noticed Firefox's preferences are called "Preferences" (under Edit) on Linux, and "Options" (under Tools) on Windows.
Apology accepted. And you certainly do have a point there. In political sciences, many words have more than one meaning, and many terms are heavily contested - "politics" itself being a prime example. The same goes for the word "democracy". We all have a certain understanding of the concept, and most people will agree that, say, the GDR wasn't one. There are, however, many types of democracy, some of which you may or may not consider democratic. For example: some democratic systems simply decide by majority, which may seem very democratic at first, but can sometimes significantly limit the freedom of minorities - imposing a "tyranny by majority". In other democratic systems, minorities are given a bit more weight in decision-making than they would have had on the basis of their numbers, in order to protect their rights. Some people don't consider majority electoral systems to be very democratic, because the party in government isn't always backed by an actual electoral majority, while others criticise proportional representation for similar reasons.
The same goes for the word "republic". In political theory, it does have a substantive meaning (or probably even several). The early city republics of Italy, for example, were called that because they were not heriditary monarchies, unlike pretty much every other political entity in Europe, but were governed by elected councils. The Italians certainly wouldn't have considered these city republics democracies, though. The term itself was hardly known, because Aristotle's work had largely been forgotten - and even for Aristotle, democracy wasn't a good thing. And to our current standards, these early republics were aristocracies at best, at times plagued by nepotism, violence, corruption and fraud.
However, to the Italians "republicanism" wasn't just another state form. It was also a political ideal, according to which all citizens were (at least morally) obliged(!) to actively participate in the council, and to serve the general interest. (Note, however, that only a small proportion of the population was considered citizens in this sense. Most people still had absolutely no say in anything at all.) Republicanism also valued the ideal of freedom, which wasn't as natural as it is today. This more substantive, idealistic meaning of the word "republic" is still very much alive today, especially in American politics. In Europe, however, I think most people would in day to day speech use the word simply to refer to a state that has a president in stead of a king or a queen (or such).
Exactly. Labeling something Democratic does not mean redefining the meaning of word "Democracy". Same goes for "Republic". Your previous post did not in any way deal with possible real differences between those two terms. That in turn provoked me to write an irritated reply, since GDR has both "democratic" and "republic" in it, and it was neither democratic nor republic... duh...
Which was my point exactly. I would consider the GDR a republic, in the sense that it wasn't a monarchy (a republic - in one definition - is just a form of state). OTOH, I certainly wouldn't consider it a democracy. Thus, I named the GDR as one of the examples were democracy and republic are not "strikingly similar", as the original parent had suggested.
Yes I do. Do you?
Did you ever notice how most countries that explicitely label themselves "Democratic" are in fact totalitarian police states?
I wouldn't draw such a far reaching conclusion from a single case. Obviously, every electoral system can produce undesirable outcomes. If anything, however, I'd say PR has had a tempering effect on (Dutch) politics, for (at least) two reasons. First, PR usually comes with a greater diversity of parties (thus giving people a greater range of alternatives if they're not happy about the ruling party, so they won't all flock with the idiot in the uniform), and second, it forces politicians of different parties to form coalitions (thus making concessions, discussing issues in a peaceful manner and showing some consideration for people with different opinions). Even during the great depression of the 1930s, fascist parties were (relatively) insignificant in the Dutch lower house. If I'm not mistaking, the best result for the NSB (national-socialist movement) in a national election in the Netherlands was just over 4 percent, in 1937.
In a majority system (especially of the "first past the post" type), were "the winner takes all", a party reaching twenty or thirty percent of the vote may gain absolute power - as the great-grand parent pointed out. If they happen to be Nazis, you're screwed.
I live in The Netherlands, which has an electoral system considered "extremely proportional" by most political scientists. A political party that gets a share as small as about 0.7% of the votes has a fair chance of getting one of the 150 seats in the Tweede Kamer (Second Chamber, the Dutch equivalent of the House of Commons). When it took it's current form, this system was best suited for a country as deeply divided (culturally, religiously and politically) as The Netherlands, with a protestant North and a catholic South, a rapidly growing labour movement, many small business owners and an important liberal minority.
The upside is that the parliament's composition mirrors actual voter preferences quite closely, so all political and religious minorites can be represented in parliament and have their say in national politics. In addition, political parties are extremely unlikely to reach a majority on their own, so they're always forced to form a coalition government - thus assuring that the government is backed by a fairly large proportion of the Dutch voters. OTOH, in countries that have majority systems, governing parties may sometimes have the support of only a very small minority of the electorate.
The downside to the Dutch system is that we have a fairly large number (currently eleven) of parties in parliament, including the far left, the far right, orthodox Christians, ecologists, populists and plain idiots. They all have their say, and their support may from time to time be indispensable, which doesn't always add to clarity and political decisiveness. Also, being forced to form coalition governments, the main parties tend to iron out their differences and resemble each other more and more, which may obviously impair political debate and take away real choice from the voters. As a result, some highly controversial issues are virtually impossible to decide upon (such as the abolishment of the "hypotheekrenteaftrek", the tax deductibility of mortgage interests, is one example. It's been on the political agenda for over twenty years, but no solution is even close).
The merits of majority systems versus proportional representation are a different debate though. Even though I personally prefer PR to any majority system, I'd still consider the UK to be a democratic country. After all, although you may not like the design (or the outcome) of the electoral system, the UK does have free and fair elections, free press, free speech, a democratically controlled government, an independent judiciary, etc.
Republic and Democracy are strikingly similar (...)
Go tell that to the people of say, North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkmenistan, the former GDR, or most countries in Africa.
Republics and democracies go together well, but they're not "strikingly similar". Regretfully, most republics aren't all that democratic right now, while most constitutional monarchies (the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain...) are.
Did anyone else notice the web clips offering "spam recipes" when browsing the spam folder?
Currently, you need to manage your feed subscriptions separately for Google Reader, GMail and the personalized Google home page. I don't understand why Google hasn't somehow integrated those. For example, why can't GMail Web Clips just grab my subscriptions from Reader? Seems like the obvious thing to do.