At least in your state they try to disguise it. In Pennsylvania the state house Republican leader came out in a freakin' press event and, during a list of their accomplishments, included the statement "Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania this November."
Seriously. He flat-out said that the reason they fought for voter ID was to help Romney win.
And for the record, there wasn't a single piece of evidence every brought forward showing even a single case of voter fraud in this state. I think they actually admitted in court that there was no known fraud...
As someone who uses dual monitors on KDE fairly frequently, this kinda seems like 'meaningless bullshit' as well to me. Multiple monitors already worked just fine.
So my point was that the OP seemed to essentially say 'rather than improving these things that already work, they should improve this other thing that already works'.
I see the lack of an accelerometer in most computers as a bigger issue. Even when it does have an accelerometer, that also happens to be accessible (perhaps as part of a laptop's mechanisms to help prevent damage to HDDs), a laptop isn't exactly something you start tilting around to e.g. play a racing game.
Linux has as well; the 'news' here is that now, how you set it up will be dependent on your DM rather than your graphics card driver. Unless you want to do it the old way.
In terms of functionality this is _entirely_ redundant. It's just making things a bit easier to find I suppose.
I was confused by the whole 'multiple monitors are a pain' thing. I've been running KDE for close to a decade and for the past couple years multi-monitor support has never been a problem. Of course, I'll admit, mostly when I'm using multiple monitors I'm cloning the display to watch a movie or something...but I plug it in, it mirrors. I unplug it, it disconnects. What's so hard there?
Both DE are fine, i personally choose Gnome because i like C over C++, it is clutter free and if i want to change something i can always edit the the text file configuration or hack the code. Real powerusers do not complain about a mere desktop environment...
Of course, I hope he is an equal opportunity offender -- there are PLENTY of reasons to hate on Obama as well. The only difference is Obama gives better speeches...
Personally I've only really switched distros three times -- and three distros (went back once -- Mandrake/Mandriva > Slack > Mandriva > Arch).
Mandriva was nice because it had a really nice, easy, graphical installer. Easy newbie distro, didn't have to spend much time configuring things, didn't have to know anything about Linux to get it set up. BUT, that also means it installs a bunch of crap you probably don't need, and they have their own 'control panel' type system -- and so does the DM -- so you end up with 'do I configure this in MCC or KDECC or Catalyst?' (Kinda like how on Windows some hardware will have its own special configuration programs in addition to the generic ones in control panel).
So then I switched to Slackware -- it was really minimalist, it didn't do a damn thing for you, you got exactly the system you wanted. It was stable, it was fast...but it took a lot of time configuring it, and it was just more difficult to make changes.
Now I'm on Arch -- the installation isn't the easiest thing (not graphical at all; and once you're done the fresh install has no GUI) but once you know a bit about Linux you can knock the whole thing out in an hour, and once it's set up it's rock stable, it's configured exactly how you want it, with exactly the software you want, and you never have to reinstall (there's no 'versions' with Arch -- the entire system updates over the web. Picture going from Windows XP to Vista to 7 without ever needing to format your drive or put in a Windows CD). But they don't put ANY effort into making it easy for newbies, so it's not a great place to be until you have some idea what you're doing. Also helps that hardware support has gotten a LOT better in the past couple years, so there's a lot less configuration necessary than there used to be.
But yes, there's also some people drawn to distros for the 'hipster cred' of 'you've probably never even heard of this distro' or the geek cred of 'I compile my own kernel!' (not that there aren't legitimate reasons to do that as well)
FWIW, Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in the early 2000's. I haven't edited a text configuration file in years. Dual displays are as easy now on *nix as they are on Windows -- plug it in, your desktop mirrors. Pop open the KDE control center and go into display properties and you can set it up to clone or span; change the sizes, change the relative positions, whatever you want. And of course I'd assume Gnome has something similar as well. Haven't found a wifi card that doesn't work out of the box either in a few years -- those were always a major PITA back then.
If you've got the time and want to give it a shot I personally HIGHLY recommend Arch with KDE. Installer is still pretty basic, and it's a pretty minimal distro, but once you get it set up it's fantastic. And no, screwing with ndiswrapper or figuring out why your sound doesn't work or editing your xorg.conf is _NOT_ part of 'getting it set up'. 95% of that is calling the package manager. You can have a fully functional system in an hour usually.
I've used over a dozen distros, but I can't remember the order and probably wouldn't even remember all the names...but I think the advice I got to start with Mandrake (now Mandriva) was the only reason I'm still a Linux user. Of course that was also before Ubuntu existed and before Linux hardware support was so good -- for a while I ran two desktop PCs right beside each other so I could run XP on one and bridge the wifi connection to a wired connection to my Linux machine beside it -- no matter what I tried I couldn't get the damn wifi drivers running on Linux! And I was in highschool, so I didn't have money to buy a different card, I didn't have a credit card to order one with anyway, and I wasn't paying the electric bill;)
But to get back on topic, the distros that actually stayed installed for more than a couple months were:
Mandrake > Slackware > Mandriva > Arch
Mandrake/Mandriva was and still is an absolutely awesome newbie distro; Slack was great when I was in highschool and had plenty of time to kill configuring it, but these days I want something that just works.
Arch is orders of magnitude nicer than any other distro I've ever used but I wouldn't give it to someone who doesn't have SOME Linux experience already. Once you get everything installed you don't really need much, but the installation process would be pretty tricky if you didn't know what you were doing. And I DEFINITELY don't miss the days when I was on Mandriva waiting for the next version to be released so I could do my annual reinstall. But I'm also the kind of guy who sees a new kernel release announced on Slashdot and immediately go check if there's an Arch package yet. And yea, I know, if I REALLY wanted to be cutting-edge I would compile the damn thing myself, but I just want the bells and whistles without having to work for them:)
When I'm recommending distros to others I go with Mandriva if they don't know anything; Arch if they're good with computers and want to jump right in the deep end. No need for any other distros as far as I'm concerned;)
THANK YOU. I've been making pretty much that same argument for years...unfortunately, people argue the opposite quite fervently. Of course these are the same people who claim to be 'Libertarians' and then argue that unions should be illegal....
I was not at all speaking about the actual policies of the parties. Those cannot, as a whole, be categorized as 'right vs. left'...a better categorization would be 'corporatist vs. corporatist' or 'clusterfuck vs. clusterfuck'.
I was talking about the definitions of left vs. right. Pick any city in America and walk around and ask people which party is 'the right' and which party is 'the left' and, assuming this person has any idea what you're talking about, they'll almost certainly put Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left. Shit that's even how it's taught in highschools.
I dunno, a lot of people on the right use 'liberals' as their general slander term (actually, so do a lot of people on the left -- "FUCKING LIBERALS!" is a common phrase among these Anarcho-Syndicalists...) -- for example, see Fox News. Never heard of them calling anyone 'far right' (not that I watch it, so they could use it daily and I probably wouldn't know...)
I think there _is_ a certain limitation to the 'far right' = 'people I don't agree with' analogy. If it's used in that capacity frequently by news and soft science people (which I don't entirely disagree with; see below), I'd imagine it's more a case of "liberal bias". I can't imagine any situation in which, for example, someone would call universal healthcare or drug legalization to be "far right", no matter how much they disagreed with it. Usually it tends to go with things that are perceived to be corporatist, racist, or authoritarian -- which, yes, is a VERY broad area.
But certainly I do agree that it's never used been to describe something the person using it agrees with. Which is somewhat interesting, as I again know a number of people who would probably take great pride in calling themselves 'far left' if such terminology became common...
As I said, this is among my personal friends and co-workers. Clearly there are plenty of areas or communities where that is not true, but FWIW in most of Pennsylvania that seems to be a bit high. Certainly you'll see a $50,000+ car here and there, but it's definitely a rarity.
Most people in my home town consider my family to be somewhat wealthy, and my parents don't buy cars over $20,000. That's with loans, although on the most recent one those were paid back in around six months IIRC, and really only taken out because the old one's brake lines rusted through so they replaced it sooner than anticipated (it was around ten years old).
Now, in California for example I can imagine $13k being considered quite cheap....but I'm not in California. So like I said, around here and among my friends and co-workers $13k is a bit much. Not exorbitant or anything, just a bit high.
True. There's a lot of definitions of 'far right'; the definition I was using was the 'Conservative vs. Liberal' definition, as that seems to fit in this particular instance. Of course, there's also the 'Democrat vs. Republican' definition here in America (nearly the same thing); there's the 'capitalist vs. socialist' definition; the 'authoritarian vs. libertarian' definition (the one you're using) and even the 'conservative vs. liberal' definition (not capitalized -- may also fit in this instance).
Political philosophies aren't one dimensional, so using any kind of one-word labels tends to cause problems...
FWIW, I've never met anyone who calls themselves a 'leftist' who doesn't also favor a high degree of individual liberty. Most of these people would describe their political philosophy as some form of anarchist. Frequently Anarcho-Syndicalist ("Libertarian Left"); which in the context of this discussion may be worth comparing to Anarcho-Capitalist ("Libertarian Right").
This study isn't comparing [price per liter] of beer. It's comparing [price per liter]/[average salary]. So yes, the beer price is adjusted for average income -- as are the figures in this study. FFS, even the summary says it's about how many minutes the average worker must work to afford a beer. So sure, the drinks may be half the price in Mexico, but the average worker's wage is a lot less than half that of the US.
That's why they measured relative to average wage, rather than absolute dollar amount. Take that $500,000 and divide it by the average salary in each of those cities and then you have a number more comparable to what they were comparing.
In America (and most of Europe I'd assume), the majority religion is Christianity. So they see Islam as some frightening, foreign, strange thing and oppose it.
In Greece, this Orthodox Church is the majority religion (I would assume based on the story and other comments; I don't actually know for certain) so they oppose anyone who attacks it.
Slashdot Mirror
At least in your state they try to disguise it. In Pennsylvania the state house Republican leader came out in a freakin' press event and, during a list of their accomplishments, included the statement "Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania this November."
Seriously. He flat-out said that the reason they fought for voter ID was to help Romney win.
And for the record, there wasn't a single piece of evidence every brought forward showing even a single case of voter fraud in this state. I think they actually admitted in court that there was no known fraud...
As someone who uses dual monitors on KDE fairly frequently, this kinda seems like 'meaningless bullshit' as well to me. Multiple monitors already worked just fine.
So my point was that the OP seemed to essentially say 'rather than improving these things that already work, they should improve this other thing that already works'.
They've got tile at least -- they're still in the bathroom ;)
I see the lack of an accelerometer in most computers as a bigger issue. Even when it does have an accelerometer, that also happens to be accessible (perhaps as part of a laptop's mechanisms to help prevent damage to HDDs), a laptop isn't exactly something you start tilting around to e.g. play a racing game.
Most likely they'll just use the arrow keys...
Linux has as well; the 'news' here is that now, how you set it up will be dependent on your DM rather than your graphics card driver. Unless you want to do it the old way.
In terms of functionality this is _entirely_ redundant. It's just making things a bit easier to find I suppose.
Do you not understand the meaning of the phrase 'getting an overhaul' or did you not even bother to read the _title_ fully before posting?
I was confused by the whole 'multiple monitors are a pain' thing. I've been running KDE for close to a decade and for the past couple years multi-monitor support has never been a problem. Of course, I'll admit, mostly when I'm using multiple monitors I'm cloning the display to watch a movie or something...but I plug it in, it mirrors. I unplug it, it disconnects. What's so hard there?
Hmm, NIH syndrome, and people say Apple copies everything. Interesting.
Hmm, you seem to think those are mutually exclusive. Interesting.
Throw a bunch of 'workers' together without any purpose, capital, tools and management and see how far that takes you in terms of productivity.
Pretty far, actually...
Both DE are fine, i personally choose Gnome because i like C over C++, it is clutter free and if i want to change something i can always edit the the text file configuration or hack the code. Real powerusers do not complain about a mere desktop environment...
C and C++? Bah! Real programmers write in FORTRAN!
Hooray! Someone who gets it!
Of course, I hope he is an equal opportunity offender -- there are PLENTY of reasons to hate on Obama as well. The only difference is Obama gives better speeches...
Different distros have different strengths.
Personally I've only really switched distros three times -- and three distros (went back once -- Mandrake/Mandriva > Slack > Mandriva > Arch).
Mandriva was nice because it had a really nice, easy, graphical installer. Easy newbie distro, didn't have to spend much time configuring things, didn't have to know anything about Linux to get it set up. BUT, that also means it installs a bunch of crap you probably don't need, and they have their own 'control panel' type system -- and so does the DM -- so you end up with 'do I configure this in MCC or KDECC or Catalyst?' (Kinda like how on Windows some hardware will have its own special configuration programs in addition to the generic ones in control panel).
So then I switched to Slackware -- it was really minimalist, it didn't do a damn thing for you, you got exactly the system you wanted. It was stable, it was fast...but it took a lot of time configuring it, and it was just more difficult to make changes.
Now I'm on Arch -- the installation isn't the easiest thing (not graphical at all; and once you're done the fresh install has no GUI) but once you know a bit about Linux you can knock the whole thing out in an hour, and once it's set up it's rock stable, it's configured exactly how you want it, with exactly the software you want, and you never have to reinstall (there's no 'versions' with Arch -- the entire system updates over the web. Picture going from Windows XP to Vista to 7 without ever needing to format your drive or put in a Windows CD). But they don't put ANY effort into making it easy for newbies, so it's not a great place to be until you have some idea what you're doing. Also helps that hardware support has gotten a LOT better in the past couple years, so there's a lot less configuration necessary than there used to be.
But yes, there's also some people drawn to distros for the 'hipster cred' of 'you've probably never even heard of this distro' or the geek cred of 'I compile my own kernel!' (not that there aren't legitimate reasons to do that as well)
FWIW, Linux is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was in the early 2000's. I haven't edited a text configuration file in years. Dual displays are as easy now on *nix as they are on Windows -- plug it in, your desktop mirrors. Pop open the KDE control center and go into display properties and you can set it up to clone or span; change the sizes, change the relative positions, whatever you want. And of course I'd assume Gnome has something similar as well. Haven't found a wifi card that doesn't work out of the box either in a few years -- those were always a major PITA back then.
If you've got the time and want to give it a shot I personally HIGHLY recommend Arch with KDE. Installer is still pretty basic, and it's a pretty minimal distro, but once you get it set up it's fantastic. And no, screwing with ndiswrapper or figuring out why your sound doesn't work or editing your xorg.conf is _NOT_ part of 'getting it set up'. 95% of that is calling the package manager. You can have a fully functional system in an hour usually.
I've used over a dozen distros, but I can't remember the order and probably wouldn't even remember all the names...but I think the advice I got to start with Mandrake (now Mandriva) was the only reason I'm still a Linux user. Of course that was also before Ubuntu existed and before Linux hardware support was so good -- for a while I ran two desktop PCs right beside each other so I could run XP on one and bridge the wifi connection to a wired connection to my Linux machine beside it -- no matter what I tried I couldn't get the damn wifi drivers running on Linux! And I was in highschool, so I didn't have money to buy a different card, I didn't have a credit card to order one with anyway, and I wasn't paying the electric bill ;)
But to get back on topic, the distros that actually stayed installed for more than a couple months were:
Mandrake > Slackware > Mandriva > Arch
Mandrake/Mandriva was and still is an absolutely awesome newbie distro; Slack was great when I was in highschool and had plenty of time to kill configuring it, but these days I want something that just works.
Arch is orders of magnitude nicer than any other distro I've ever used but I wouldn't give it to someone who doesn't have SOME Linux experience already. Once you get everything installed you don't really need much, but the installation process would be pretty tricky if you didn't know what you were doing. And I DEFINITELY don't miss the days when I was on Mandriva waiting for the next version to be released so I could do my annual reinstall. But I'm also the kind of guy who sees a new kernel release announced on Slashdot and immediately go check if there's an Arch package yet. And yea, I know, if I REALLY wanted to be cutting-edge I would compile the damn thing myself, but I just want the bells and whistles without having to work for them :)
When I'm recommending distros to others I go with Mandriva if they don't know anything; Arch if they're good with computers and want to jump right in the deep end. No need for any other distros as far as I'm concerned ;)
You sure it wasn't the Penguin Liberation Front?
THANK YOU. I've been making pretty much that same argument for years...unfortunately, people argue the opposite quite fervently. Of course these are the same people who claim to be 'Libertarians' and then argue that unions should be illegal....
I was not at all speaking about the actual policies of the parties. Those cannot, as a whole, be categorized as 'right vs. left'...a better categorization would be 'corporatist vs. corporatist' or 'clusterfuck vs. clusterfuck'.
I was talking about the definitions of left vs. right. Pick any city in America and walk around and ask people which party is 'the right' and which party is 'the left' and, assuming this person has any idea what you're talking about, they'll almost certainly put Republicans on the right and Democrats on the left. Shit that's even how it's taught in highschools.
I dunno, a lot of people on the right use 'liberals' as their general slander term (actually, so do a lot of people on the left -- "FUCKING LIBERALS!" is a common phrase among these Anarcho-Syndicalists...) -- for example, see Fox News. Never heard of them calling anyone 'far right' (not that I watch it, so they could use it daily and I probably wouldn't know...)
I think there _is_ a certain limitation to the 'far right' = 'people I don't agree with' analogy. If it's used in that capacity frequently by news and soft science people (which I don't entirely disagree with; see below), I'd imagine it's more a case of "liberal bias". I can't imagine any situation in which, for example, someone would call universal healthcare or drug legalization to be "far right", no matter how much they disagreed with it. Usually it tends to go with things that are perceived to be corporatist, racist, or authoritarian -- which, yes, is a VERY broad area.
But certainly I do agree that it's never used been to describe something the person using it agrees with. Which is somewhat interesting, as I again know a number of people who would probably take great pride in calling themselves 'far left' if such terminology became common...
As I said, this is among my personal friends and co-workers. Clearly there are plenty of areas or communities where that is not true, but FWIW in most of Pennsylvania that seems to be a bit high. Certainly you'll see a $50,000+ car here and there, but it's definitely a rarity.
Most people in my home town consider my family to be somewhat wealthy, and my parents don't buy cars over $20,000. That's with loans, although on the most recent one those were paid back in around six months IIRC, and really only taken out because the old one's brake lines rusted through so they replaced it sooner than anticipated (it was around ten years old).
Now, in California for example I can imagine $13k being considered quite cheap....but I'm not in California. So like I said, around here and among my friends and co-workers $13k is a bit much. Not exorbitant or anything, just a bit high.
True. There's a lot of definitions of 'far right'; the definition I was using was the 'Conservative vs. Liberal' definition, as that seems to fit in this particular instance. Of course, there's also the 'Democrat vs. Republican' definition here in America (nearly the same thing); there's the 'capitalist vs. socialist' definition; the 'authoritarian vs. libertarian' definition (the one you're using) and even the 'conservative vs. liberal' definition (not capitalized -- may also fit in this instance).
Political philosophies aren't one dimensional, so using any kind of one-word labels tends to cause problems...
FWIW, I've never met anyone who calls themselves a 'leftist' who doesn't also favor a high degree of individual liberty. Most of these people would describe their political philosophy as some form of anarchist. Frequently Anarcho-Syndicalist ("Libertarian Left"); which in the context of this discussion may be worth comparing to Anarcho-Capitalist ("Libertarian Right").
This study isn't comparing [price per liter] of beer. It's comparing [price per liter]/[average salary]. So yes, the beer price is adjusted for average income -- as are the figures in this study. FFS, even the summary says it's about how many minutes the average worker must work to afford a beer. So sure, the drinks may be half the price in Mexico, but the average worker's wage is a lot less than half that of the US.
That's why they measured relative to average wage, rather than absolute dollar amount. Take that $500,000 and divide it by the average salary in each of those cities and then you have a number more comparable to what they were comparing.
The dirt cheap beer they're talking about in this article certainly is...
far right = conformist.
In America (and most of Europe I'd assume), the majority religion is Christianity. So they see Islam as some frightening, foreign, strange thing and oppose it.
In Greece, this Orthodox Church is the majority religion (I would assume based on the story and other comments; I don't actually know for certain) so they oppose anyone who attacks it.
Real leather will get sold cheaper to people who don't care; beef will get slightly more expensive.