Yeah. But my point is that for many many people handling paperwork and folders are not so frequent that they would aquire an fluidity doing it even in real life.
I don't intend to make a villain out of Negativland. I know enough about band histories to know that they are all real people who try their best, and sometimes fuck up. I'm just angry with them for being so inconsiderate or whatever that was. But then I'm angry with a lot of bands for how they left SST:) Joe Carducci always was against Ginn's signing of non-band formats and "arty" bands because that went against his "new redneck" vision. He doesn't explicity say it in his book, but I get the feeling that part of his reasons was the fear that this woud change the label from the rather close-nit punky community into "just" a label with less solidarity. And I partly could agree. (But then we wouldn't have those Sonic Youth recordings on SST, so he was wrong;)
As far as U2 doing something wrong goes: I see your point that the contract situation being as it is, there's hardly anything they can do. But by entering into a situation where for financial gain the artist signs away the rights to a label to an extent that allows the label to start legal action without the artist even knowing, the band turns itself into a commercial entity. And this in turn makes Bono so the wrong person to preach when other commercial entities exploit -their- advantages.
And such artists I despise. (It's a personal choice). If they move around the corporate world and have such an "alternative" agenda as U2 and esp. Bono, then I simply expect them to know. How hard is a contract clause such as "label has to inform artist whenever they take legal action in the name of the artist".
They are not required to, but then please shut up about charity.
Well, I guess this is one of the cases were the ultimate truth will never be known, and probably lies somewhere in the murky middle.
I don't have the Negativland U2 book, but I do appreciate their work (plug: buy the plunderphonics book/cd they thankfully released).
But from the limited information that is available to me, I tend to stand in SST's camp in this case. I searched, but can't find anymore where I read that SST or Greg Ginn claimed that they had warned Negativland that Negativland were free to use any cover they liked, but that in the case of a lawsuit, SST would not be able to protect the band for lack of resources.
SST had always been short on money for various reasons (stranglehold of the majors on distribution and indie distributers going bankrupt all the time and consequently not paying SST, a - in hindsight - stupid release policy from 86 or so onwards). How Negativland could think that SST would be willing and able to support them in a lawsuit against a major (when over the years many many bands had claimed that SST owes them money), is beyond me.
As for "rolling over", Ginn truly is the man whom everybody left alone in the end. I'm sure he contributed to that, but still. If you read up on the early Flag history, those guys payed so dearly for what they gave and still give to people. Why should Ginn risk what was left of SST (and an income to provide a healthy life for him and the cats he now shelters, or so I read) for a stupid prank by Negativland, however interesting/important it might be.
Personally, I'd rather have a healthy and functioning SST (with a complete back catalogue of tens of bands in vinyl, not the sorry scrap shop it now is) than this one record by Negativland.
All of which doesn't take away from the prime topic at hand: knowingly or unknowingly (even more lame when the latter), letting your label sue the guy who played 100+ shows a year with Black Flag, traveling in a van, to plant the seeds of what later became (much to the dismay of Greg Ginn I guess) the very "alternative" rock your own band lives on. Lame.
If I get sued by someone, the lawyer acts in the interest and name of the client. They are one entity as far as I am concerned.
Besides and IMHO, If your art and image requires a certain consciousness of the environment and economics of production of your art, like U2's does, it's just lame to not know.
I think even in the US not -everyone- runs a business. For sure here in Europe there are many people whose paperwork amounts close to nothing in the job. The plumber (who just has been at my house) is an employee, and he just collects hand-written bills of the day and hands them in in the evening. His private paperwork I guess is handled by 4-ring binders (mine is).
Age makes a difference in so far as people in general like to do things in familiar ways. The 50+ manual workers are usually not the target demographic for the newest gadgets.
In 1991, Bono's band U2 sued seminal independent label SST (home to, among others, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Soundgarden,...) over a satirical record by a band on the label, Negativland. They claimed that Negativland was infringing on U2's IP by using samples and other stuff (e.g., the letter U and the numeral 2).
This nearly ruined SST over the costs of the suit alone, but by forcing SST to fight an expensive suit, while the music they had greatly contributed to for more than 10 years exploded into the mainstream, it greatly contributed to the eventual demise of the label, robbing the artists of an important channel.
Later U2 claimed to have not been greatly involved. "It wasn't us, just the label", paraphrased. I'm sorry, but if you let your lawyer sue, I'll hold you responsible. And if you wanna preach to people about responsible behavior, I'll expect that you know what your agents do in your name.
I have one thing to say about Bono: hypocrite. I think this is a fitting "people of the year" panel: They all give to charity in the limelight, then turn around and fuck people over.
There are people like, uh, you know, 50+ construction workers and plumbers and stuff, who surprisingly don't spend their days storing CDs that came with their computers, or filing paper items in accounts departments.
I think the idea here is that sexuality did not define people's identity* as much as today. That doesn't mean that these otherwise-defined peoples' acts were treated tolerantly.
* To the extent an "identity" as we understand it today even was in use. The concept pretty much arose in its modern form with humanism.
Dude, what are you talking about? Starting with your IBM Deathstar, you started a rant about Ubuntu's alleged userfriendlyness, and said
And this is the award winning, "User Friendly" distro? Treating your users like idiots, but making them have "guru" skills just to play an mp3 is "friendly"? Good thing the average user only plays vorbis files, eh?
Fuck their "philosophy." Gnome not only does not do what I want it to do but appears to go out of its way to set up roadblocks to keep me from doing it.
Regarding your issues with Gnome: The other guy who answered you and I pointed out that it's a licensing issue of the distro, not an issue of "philosophy" or of Gnome "roadblocks". This is evidenced by the facts given in the link to the Ubuntu Restricted Formats page, namely, that by simply installing some codecs (same as DivX in Windows btw) the player will magically support the new format. (gstreamer-0.8 needs a bit more user interaction, but this is already remedied in the 0.10 version.) This is true for mp3 (e.g., via gstreamer soundjuicer, rhythmbox, totem,...) and proprietary video codecs. If you install the libdvdcss package, totem will happily play the DVD, and if you install w32codecs, totem-xine will play them too.
Regarding your issues with Ubuntu: Now, I concede that the legal issues are poorly defined in the link given. Regarding mp3, I should have linked this. Mp3licensing.com says (the fuckers don't let me copy it, at least in firefox, so I need to retype it):
PC software applications which incorporate mp3/mp3PRO decoding (player decoder) and software applications incorporating mp3/mp3PRO encoding capabilities (encoder, ripper, recorder, jukebox): mp3 patent-only license This patent-only license is needed in case the mp3 software is developed in-house or licensed from a third party Decoder: US$ 0.75 per unit or US$ 50 000.00 one-time paid-up Encoder/Codec: US$ 2.50 per unit
I don't know Ubuntu's official stance on this, but mp3-wise, Debian relies on the patent not being actively enforced. This in contrast to your claim that "this is why the maintainers and distributors of software like mpg123 are in no legal jeapordy. They have a license. License does not imply payment. It implies permission.". This is wrong. They are not in jeopardy because the license holder currently chooses not to enforce the patent.
So, the status of mp3 is problematic, and the language used by Ubuntu in the link I gave does not address any concerns that might come up patent-wise. But mp3 was only an example, right? All the other media stuff (proprietary codecs, decss) are a clear case: they can't be distributed legally in most (all?) major markets, and in fact aren't distributed by Ubuntu (you need unofficial repositories). This obviously is not Ubuntus fault.
Well, what can I say, RH != Gnome:) Seriously, the only time there was no official menu editor was the 6 months of Gnome 2.10, and most of that time there were unofficial ones available. Gnome 2.10 was part of neither RHEL 3 nor 4. (It is true however that even though a distro could have easily made a launcher from applications:///, Gnome itself did not provide discoverable access to the feature, which was not cool). Even if RH is a big Gnome supporter, what you describe is simply a distro bug.
Regarding RH being the last major Gnome distro, I happen to believe that it's pretty even. And most new or switching distros go with Gnome: RH - Gnome Debian - agnostic Mandriva - KDE Novell - Gnome Slackware - KDE OpenSuse, - dunno, but does it qualify as major anymore? Fedora - Gnome Ubuntu - Gnome (Kubuntu has a much smaler base, dunno if due to worse integration) Xandros - KDE (heavily de-complicated) Linspire - KDE (heavily de-complicated) (in no particular order)
I need to go on a little rant here. I do appreciate KDE's and Trolltech's work, and it's sad and annoying that the KDE camp have repeatedly dug their own grave with their disregard/not getting of licensing issues. No need for sour grapes, but during KDE 1 it was a supremely stupid decision to base a major desktop environment on a proprietary toolkit (Qt 1, no right to modify, redistribute nor distribute modifed copies of the code, linking from GPL'ed KDE violated the terms of the GPL), and it was clear from the start that this would provoke a reaction, since a free operating system (essentially, GNU) with a desktop environment depending on a toolkit under the Qt 1 license was (and still would be today) inconceivable.
Later, the issue with the GPL-compatibility of the QPL arose, and they just played they had a mental block and couldn't see it.
And while the peculiar way of dual licensing they have now (impossible to develop a proprietary app with the GPL version of Qt and only pay a fee when you ship) is perfectly legal and in the spirit of Free software, it severely hurts their chances for a wide adoption of KDE:
It stifles proprietary development for small developers for whom the licensing cost is an issue. Now, many KDE supporters claim this to be even more in the spirit of Free Software than Gnome's LGPL. But whatever the answer to this is, it makes Linux a little attractive platform for the small shop, and IBM, RH, Novell, etc. know it. The big ones simply cannot accept that customers of theirs which do proprietary development owe fees to a third party. That's also inconceivable, leaving only a buy-out of Trolltech and an LGPL release as an option.
Full disclosure: nowadays, I prefer Gnome because it simply does it's thing, and KDE's visual and functional busyness make me sick. I'm a Linux user since 96, and I have tried every major KDE release, and I simply can't take it. I have seriously used fvwm2, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, KDE 1, Ion, and Gnome 1 + 2, and tried many others) However, I don't do anything serious on my Linux machine anymore. At work I'm stuck with Windows nowadays, and at home I only use a browser, IM, mailer, media player and such things (and those applets KDE just doesn't have). I guess if I did something serious again, like programming, I'd be back to Ion in no time.
Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:
According to RedHat, RHEL 4 (link is a pdf) came with Gnome 2.8. The Gnome 2.8 Userguide lists the ability to edit the menus by going to the URI applications:/// in Nautilus. If RedHat neglected to include a launcher in the menu that starts a Nautilus window with this URI, it's IMHO not Gnomes fault.
The best I find for RHEL 3 is this, which says RHEL3 contained Gnome 2.2. Its User Guide lists the ability to edit menus by going to the "Start here" folder, then clicking on "Applications" (which, IIRC, again openened the applications:/// URI)
Well, as far as the distros go, I don't see a real problem at all - nobody prevented them from including the menu editors, which were available, at least part of the time. The menu editor was just not part of gnome, just like a lot of other stuff that distros include nevertheless. I mean, yeah,the decision was maybe questionable, but then, a reliable release schedule is worth something - nobody ships vanilla gnome, everybody makes distro-specific changes.
most other users, leave their FUCKING PRINTERS PLUGGED IN!
That's a very narrow view. In my company, we have ca. 10,000 users that are on the move inside and outside of the company net with laptops, and only ca. 3,000 users with a fixed desktop.
Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Ubuntu comes with mp3 decoders. Gnome just refuses to support them in their players for philosophical reasons, even though one of the decoders is free as in beer and the other is free as in speech, because they object to the patent, even with a free license.
Get your facts straight. The Gnome apps play the restricted formats quite nicely if you have the codecs. It's Ubuntu who can't supply them legally.
Old gripe, a simple and a more advanced menu editor are now avaiable and should be in distros; there never was a "decision to not have editable menus", just a lack of manpower and a maybe questionable decision to ship without an editor to keep the strict 6-month release cycle.
Oh come one, the old metaphor by Neal Stephenson about the Hole-Hawg immediately comes to mind. If a master craftsman tells my mom to use a Hole-Hawg, because it's the best drill, I tell him to fuck off.
The Gnome window manager, metacity, is by design very simple, but has an extension mechanism. Lack of features by extensions so far has mostly been a manpower issue I guess, or, it seems, those who bitch on/. don't code:) Interesting insight by the coder of metacity, Havoc Pennington, can be found in the mail thread this story points to.
Anyway, you can simply install brightside, which provides a lot of features for metacity:
aptitude show brightside
Add reactivity to the corners and edges of your GNOME desktop
Brightside provides "edge flipping" to allow you to switch to the adjacent workspace simply by pressing your mouse against the edge of the screen.
Brightside also allows you to assign configurable actions to occur while you rest the mouse in a corner of the screen. Currently available actions comprise:
* Fade out volume
* Prevent screensaver starting
* Start screensaver and lock screen
* Enter DPMS standby mode
* Enter DPMS suspend mode
* Enter DPMS off mode
* Dim laptop backlight
* Custom action
I don't want to read any further, I assume the rest of the article is equally-well researched. Obviously, a MMORPG can't be a "shoot-em-up" game, where would the acronym's letters come from? It's Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, an entirely diffent kind of game.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what to think ;) http://english.pravda.ru/fun/2001/11/25/21934.html
Yeah. But my point is that for many many people handling paperwork and folders are not so frequent that they would aquire an fluidity doing it even in real life.
I don't intend to make a villain out of Negativland. I know enough about band histories to know that they are all real people who try their best, and sometimes fuck up. :) ;)
I'm just angry with them for being so inconsiderate or whatever that was. But then I'm angry with a lot of bands for how they left SST
Joe Carducci always was against Ginn's signing of non-band formats and "arty" bands because that went against his "new redneck" vision. He doesn't explicity say it in his book, but I get the feeling that part of his reasons was the fear that this woud change the label from the rather close-nit punky community into "just" a label with less solidarity. And I partly could agree. (But then we wouldn't have those Sonic Youth recordings on SST, so he was wrong
As far as U2 doing something wrong goes: I see your point that the contract situation being as it is, there's hardly anything they can do. But by entering into a situation where for financial gain the artist signs away the rights to a label to an extent that allows the label to start legal action without the artist even knowing, the band turns itself into a commercial entity. And this in turn makes Bono so the wrong person to preach when other commercial entities exploit -their- advantages.
And such artists I despise. (It's a personal choice). If they move around the corporate world and have such an "alternative" agenda as U2 and esp. Bono, then I simply expect them to know. How hard is a contract clause such as "label has to inform artist whenever they take legal action in the name of the artist".
They are not required to, but then please shut up about charity.
Well, I guess this is one of the cases were the ultimate truth will never be known, and probably lies somewhere in the murky middle.
I don't have the Negativland U2 book, but I do appreciate their work (plug: buy the plunderphonics book/cd they thankfully released).
But from the limited information that is available to me, I tend to stand in SST's camp in this case. I searched, but can't find anymore where I read that SST or Greg Ginn claimed that they had warned Negativland that Negativland were free to use any cover they liked, but that in the case of a lawsuit, SST would not be able to protect the band for lack of resources.
SST had always been short on money for various reasons (stranglehold of the majors on distribution and indie distributers going bankrupt all the time and consequently not paying SST, a - in hindsight - stupid release policy from 86 or so onwards). How Negativland could think that SST would be willing and able to support them in a lawsuit against a major (when over the years many many bands had claimed that SST owes them money), is beyond me.
As for "rolling over", Ginn truly is the man whom everybody left alone in the end. I'm sure he contributed to that, but still. If you read up on the early Flag history, those guys payed so dearly for what they gave and still give to people. Why should Ginn risk what was left of SST (and an income to provide a healthy life for him and the cats he now shelters, or so I read) for a stupid prank by Negativland, however interesting/important it might be.
Personally, I'd rather have a healthy and functioning SST (with a complete back catalogue of tens of bands in vinyl, not the sorry scrap shop it now is) than this one record by Negativland.
All of which doesn't take away from the prime topic at hand: knowingly or unknowingly (even more lame when the latter), letting your label sue the guy who played 100+ shows a year with Black Flag, traveling in a van, to plant the seeds of what later became (much to the dismay of Greg Ginn I guess) the very "alternative" rock your own band lives on. Lame.
If I get sued by someone, the lawyer acts in the interest and name of the client. They are one entity as far as I am concerned.
Besides and IMHO, If your art and image requires a certain consciousness of the environment and economics of production of your art, like U2's does, it's just lame to not know.
I think even in the US not -everyone- runs a business. For sure here in Europe there are many people whose paperwork amounts close to nothing in the job. The plumber (who just has been at my house) is an employee, and he just collects hand-written bills of the day and hands them in in the evening. His private paperwork I guess is handled by 4-ring binders (mine is).
Age makes a difference in so far as people in general like to do things in familiar ways. The 50+ manual workers are usually not the target demographic for the newest gadgets.
In 1991, Bono's band U2 sued seminal independent label SST (home to, among others, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Soundgarden, ...) over a satirical record by a band on the label, Negativland. They claimed that Negativland was infringing on U2's IP by using samples and other stuff (e.g., the letter U and the numeral 2).
This nearly ruined SST over the costs of the suit alone, but by forcing SST to fight an expensive suit, while the music they had greatly contributed to for more than 10 years exploded into the mainstream, it greatly contributed to the eventual demise of the label, robbing the artists of an important channel.
Later U2 claimed to have not been greatly involved. "It wasn't us, just the label", paraphrased.
I'm sorry, but if you let your lawyer sue, I'll hold you responsible. And if you wanna preach to people about responsible behavior, I'll expect that you know what your agents do in your name.
I have one thing to say about Bono: hypocrite. I think this is a fitting "people of the year" panel: They all give to charity in the limelight, then turn around and fuck people over.
There are people like, uh, you know, 50+ construction workers and plumbers and stuff, who surprisingly don't spend their days storing CDs that came with their computers, or filing paper items in accounts departments.
there is a correlation between the two which is higher for homosexuals than for straights
Reference please?
I think the idea here is that sexuality did not define people's identity* as much as today. That doesn't mean that these otherwise-defined peoples' acts were treated tolerantly.
* To the extent an "identity" as we understand it today even was in use. The concept pretty much arose in its modern form with humanism.
You are -very- confused. Read up on Window's history. Yes, I'm too lazy to google for you :)
If nobody's using it, it will be swapped out and need only a tiny amount of valuable resources.
Regarding your issues with Gnome:
The other guy who answered you and I pointed out that it's a licensing issue of the distro, not an issue of "philosophy" or of Gnome "roadblocks". This is evidenced by the facts given in the link to the Ubuntu Restricted Formats page, namely, that by simply installing some codecs (same as DivX in Windows btw) the player will magically support the new format. (gstreamer-0.8 needs a bit more user interaction, but this is already remedied in the 0.10 version.) This is true for mp3 (e.g., via gstreamer soundjuicer, rhythmbox, totem,
Regarding your issues with Ubuntu:
Now, I concede that the legal issues are poorly defined in the link given.
Regarding mp3, I should have linked this. Mp3licensing.com says (the fuckers don't let me copy it, at least in firefox, so I need to retype it):
I don't know Ubuntu's official stance on this, but mp3-wise, Debian relies on the patent not being actively enforced. This in contrast to your claim that "this is why the maintainers and distributors of software like mpg123 are in no legal jeapordy. They have a license. License does not imply payment. It implies permission.". This is wrong. They are not in jeopardy because the license holder currently chooses not to enforce the patent.
So, the status of mp3 is problematic, and the language used by Ubuntu in the link I gave does not address any concerns that might come up patent-wise.
But mp3 was only an example, right? All the other media stuff (proprietary codecs, decss) are a clear case: they can't be distributed legally in most (all?) major markets, and in fact aren't distributed by Ubuntu (you need unofficial repositories). This obviously is not Ubuntus fault.
Well, what can I say, RH != Gnome :) Seriously, the only time there was no official menu editor was the 6 months of Gnome 2.10, and most of that time there were unofficial ones available. Gnome 2.10 was part of neither RHEL 3 nor 4. (It is true however that even though a distro could have easily made a launcher from applications:///, Gnome itself did not provide discoverable access to the feature, which was not cool).
Even if RH is a big Gnome supporter, what you describe is simply a distro bug.
Regarding RH being the last major Gnome distro, I happen to believe that it's pretty even. And most new or switching distros go with Gnome:
RH - Gnome
Debian - agnostic
Mandriva - KDE
Novell - Gnome
Slackware - KDE
OpenSuse, - dunno, but does it qualify as major anymore?
Fedora - Gnome
Ubuntu - Gnome (Kubuntu has a much smaler base, dunno if due to worse integration)
Xandros - KDE (heavily de-complicated)
Linspire - KDE (heavily de-complicated)
(in no particular order)
I need to go on a little rant here.
I do appreciate KDE's and Trolltech's work, and it's sad and annoying that the KDE camp have repeatedly dug their own grave with their disregard/not getting of licensing issues. No need for sour grapes, but during KDE 1 it was a supremely stupid decision to base a major desktop environment on a proprietary toolkit (Qt 1, no right to modify, redistribute nor distribute modifed copies of the code, linking from GPL'ed KDE violated the terms of the GPL), and it was clear from the start that this would provoke a reaction, since a free operating system (essentially, GNU) with a desktop environment depending on a toolkit under the Qt 1 license was (and still would be today) inconceivable.
Later, the issue with the GPL-compatibility of the QPL arose, and they just played they had a mental block and couldn't see it.
And while the peculiar way of dual licensing they have now (impossible to develop a proprietary app with the GPL version of Qt and only pay a fee when you ship) is perfectly legal and in the spirit of Free software, it severely hurts their chances for a wide adoption of KDE:
It stifles proprietary development for small developers for whom the licensing cost is an issue. Now, many KDE supporters claim this to be even more in the spirit of Free Software than Gnome's LGPL. But whatever the answer to this is, it makes Linux a little attractive platform for the small shop, and IBM, RH, Novell, etc. know it. The big ones simply cannot accept that customers of theirs which do proprietary development owe fees to a third party. That's also inconceivable, leaving only a buy-out of Trolltech and an LGPL release as an option.
Full disclosure: nowadays, I prefer Gnome because it simply does it's thing, and KDE's visual and functional busyness make me sick. I'm a Linux user since 96, and I have tried every major KDE release, and I simply can't take it. I have seriously used fvwm2, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, KDE 1, Ion, and Gnome 1 + 2, and tried many others)
However, I don't do anything serious on my Linux machine anymore. At work I'm stuck with Windows nowadays, and at home I only use a browser, IM, mailer, media player and such things (and those applets KDE just doesn't have). I guess if I did something serious again, like programming, I'd be back to Ion in no time.
Another thing: you are wrong about the RHEL versions. Neither RHEL 3 nor 4 were affected according to my research:
According to RedHat, RHEL 4 (link is a pdf) came with Gnome 2.8. The Gnome 2.8 Userguide lists the ability to edit the menus by going to the URI applications:/// in Nautilus.
If RedHat neglected to include a launcher in the menu that starts a Nautilus window with this URI, it's IMHO not Gnomes fault.
The best I find for RHEL 3 is this, which says RHEL3 contained Gnome 2.2. Its User Guide lists the ability to edit menus by going to the "Start here" folder, then clicking on "Applications" (which, IIRC, again openened the applications:/// URI)
Well, as far as the distros go, I don't see a real problem at all - nobody prevented them from including the menu editors, which were available, at least part of the time. The menu editor was just not part of gnome, just like a lot of other stuff that distros include nevertheless.
I mean, yeah,the decision was maybe questionable, but then, a reliable release schedule is worth something - nobody ships vanilla gnome, everybody makes distro-specific changes.
most other users, leave their FUCKING PRINTERS PLUGGED IN!
That's a very narrow view. In my company, we have ca. 10,000 users that are on the move inside and outside of the company net with laptops, and only ca. 3,000 users with a fixed desktop.
Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Ubuntu comes with mp3 decoders. Gnome just refuses to support them in their players for philosophical reasons, even though one of the decoders is free as in beer and the other is free as in speech, because they object to the patent, even with a free license.
Get your facts straight. The Gnome apps play the restricted formats quite nicely if you have the codecs. It's Ubuntu who can't supply them legally.
Old gripe, a simple and a more advanced menu editor are now avaiable and should be in distros; there never was a "decision to not have editable menus", just a lack of manpower and a maybe questionable decision to ship without an editor to keep the strict 6-month release cycle.
Oh come one, the old metaphor by Neal Stephenson about the Hole-Hawg immediately comes to mind. If a master craftsman tells my mom to use a Hole-Hawg, because it's the best drill, I tell him to fuck off.
who the fuck watches dvd's on their computer?
You behave just as narrow-minded/clueless as the troll. I watch dvd's on my laptop when I am in some stupid hotel on a business trip. For example.
Interesting insight by the coder of metacity, Havoc Pennington, can be found in the mail thread this story points to.
Anyway, you can simply install brightside, which provides a lot of features for metacity:
I don't want to read any further, I assume the rest of the article is equally-well researched. Obviously, a MMORPG can't be a "shoot-em-up" game, where would the acronym's letters come from? It's Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, an entirely diffent kind of game.
I think it's spelled "secure" :)