Tell me, what is the difference between the chinese government installing a filter in the internet cafes 'to protect kids' and the u.s. government installing filters in the libraries 'to protect children'.??
Probably that the Chinese filter will have some code in it to help track people who say negative things online about the regime. Then there's a knock at the door late at night, followed by a swift "trial" and then it's off to the firing squad or the gulag (yeah, they still have those there my friend).
And of course, expressing disdain for internet censorship in the US is perfectly legal and safe. Expressing disdain for the filtering scheme in the PRC will, again probably get you a one way ticket to the grave or the gulag.
Totalitarianism, it's not just for breakfast anymore...
I love it when lefties like yourself compare the occasional foreign and domestic policy screw ups of American presidents with the outrageous actions of a totalitalitarian regime and try to equate the two. It's like trying to justify serial homicide by saying "I may be a serial killer, but I saw you jaywalking last week".
Whatever "tryanny" an American president can manage is at least tempered by a strong constitution, a long tradition of individual civil rights and a democratic process. There is none of that in China, none of it. If Dubya bothers you so much try China for a while. Oh, that's right, once you're there they probably won't let you leave. What a pity.
Note also that the government is trying to crack down only on cafes, not on home users, where presumably, there are parents who will exercise the requisite discipline/enlightenment.
How naive. The vicious, murderous regime in the PRC is not focusing on internet cafes because it thinks that home users have parents who exercise controls but because the internet is a place where the causual user has guaranteed anonymity. Only there can he post "I live in the PRC and though I can't tell you my name let me say it is hell here and the government lies to us and you about what really goes on here."
The best thing for China and the world would be if the leadership of the PRC were to be lined up against a wall and have large caliber bullets blasted through their brains. That is the only thing that will ever free the Chinese people from tyranny and the rest of the world from their leaders' insanity.
My guess is that Microsoft and companies that do business like them or are dependent on MS continuing to dominate everything have already realized that the free market and time are not on their side and that they will eventually lose their monopoly. This whole push is probably part of a strategy that will work something like this.
MS writes all their new OSes such that they will require hardware copy protection to install. This will cause most businesses and a large segment of the smarter consumers to finally decide they've had enough and either move to Linux or simply stick with an existing version of Windows. The RIAA, MPAA, etc will laud the move and the majority of the sheeple WILL upgrade their hardware and software like good little conformists.
MS (and others) will start beating the drum that "piracy is still a huge problem". Guess where the finger will be pointed...yep, Linux and older versions of Windows. Now MS (and friends) begin a political campaign to outlaw OSes which do not support/require hardware copy protection and harware which does not include it and the game is over. I would not be too surprised if a new federal agency (some have suggested SEA, software enforcement agency) were to be created. Hope you all like prison food...
Roger Penrose has come up with a formal argument to the effect that "mind", whatever it may be, is fundamentally not any sort of computation, no matter how complex. His proof rests on a clever use of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. He has written two books on the subject, Shadows of the Mind and The Emperor's New Mind. An interesting question would be whether his arguments can be extended to all life or only "conscious" life such as ourselves and perhaps some of the higher animals. If he's right most of the current AI work is simply doomed.
Fundamentally, it's all about developer mindshare. Linux is fast becoming the cross-platform "glue" that Unix was supposed to be before the various Unix vendors fragmented the whole thing for the sake of building "mini-microsofts" in various niche markets. The advantage of using Linux on a PDA is that can you can hire a zillion geeks out of college who already know it instead of paying top dollar for the relatively smaller number who know PalmOS or some other specialized OS. You can also leverage tons of mature development tools that you can run on fast Linux desktops and then just move the finished app over to the PDA for a final recompile.
As for the CLI-GUI argument, that's really a dead horse. No one is going to produce a PDA that boots up into bash for a mass market! Linux doesn't have a "default shell". You can get rid of all the CLI stuff and replace it with a GUI login/shell quite easily. Most of the people that buy these things won't even know they're running Linux.
You're reading something into my post that I never implied, namely, that the nth generation robot is identical to but scaled down from the n-1th. This isn't what I (or Feynman) meant. The idea is that the micro-assembly process might enable us to produce something that is better at nano-assembly that something like an STM or AFM.
You use tool generation n-1 to create tool generation n and so forth. Note that if something like this isn't possible then we can give up on nano-tech right now since all our efforts, whether with human hands, micro-lithography or whatever ultimately reduce to this process of using iterated generations of smaller and more precise tools to create still smaller and more precise ones.
Good points but I have to think of Feynman's thought experiment (in the 1950s I think) about building a small robot that you use to make a smaller one and then use that one to make one still smaller until you are down to the atom scale. This technology, if it could go 3-d could let us build a not-quite-nanoassembler that would have the spatial control and resolution needed to make a true nano assembler. The fact that it can handle diverse materials is what makes this possible. The IBM work, as I recall was pretty much limited to a very few noble gasses on a Gold plate at like 4 kelvin.
The sad thing is that with the authoritarian direction our society seems to be going some Million Mommy Marcher type will probably propose this in all seriousness eventually. Give 'em a few years...
..except that (unlike real Unices such as Linux) it will still have only token POSIX compliance, a proprietary window system, a proprietary programming API and will still break compatibility with other systems whenever Bill feels like it. No thanks.
My problem with this argument is that the manufacturers and Microsoft are telling you "the computer comes with Windows ME". When someone tells me that a computer "comes with" an OS I expect a full "normal" copy of the OS, not some crocked-up version that won't run on any other hardware. The OEMs and Microsoft could make this special licensing clear but instead they dance around the issue. Hence, it's probably false advertising. Oh well, I haven't had to boot into Windows for about a week anyway - Fuck 'em.
The real issue here is fair use and fair use in under attack in lots of ways. As an example. I recently bought a Compaq with WindowsMe installed. (I know, bad move, but I had a crisis situation and needed a Windows machine fast). Anyway, when I got it home I learned that the machine did not actually come with an installable copy of the OS. It had some kind of "Save" partition that could be used, along with Compaq's special recovery CD to reinstall Windows.
However, I wanted to put Linux on the disk which meant repartitioning. I realized that if I repartitioned the disk I would NEVER get Windows back since I didn't actually have the install media. I complained to Compaq and they finally sent me a "Quick Restore CD". This actually contained WindowsMe, but in a special rebundled form along with Compaq's special software. You could use this to restore Windows even after a disk crash but apparently only on a machine that is substantially identical to the machine I originally bought. I recently tried to use the quick restore disk to install Windows within VMWare under Linux. The install wouldn't even start. Apparently, the virtual machine is too "un-Compaqish" for this to work. So, basically, I have a copy of WindowsMe that I can only use on the machine I bought it for. I have lost my freedom to purchase a different machine and move my Windows license to that system or to virtual hardware running under Linux. Five years ago this was not the case. You bought a machine with Windows pre-installed and they gave you a Windows floppy set or CDROM. The OS media didn't care where you installed it.
I know, piracy,piracy,piracy. Fuck piracy, all I'm trying to do is take a piece of software I legitimately own and move it from one place to another. When and if I really do need WindowsMe again (the original computer was purchased for a freelance gig) I will have to get a pirate copy of the actual Microsoft CDROM. This, in order to use something I already own a copy of!!!
Now back to hard-disks. The copy-bit is nothing more than an extension of this whole trend. The manufacturer wants to control what you do after you have bought the product. He wants to restrict your freedom to move the application, the data or whatever. Kind of like the PC OEMs already do with Windows.
Exploiting the idea that technology as a menace to children is a lot easier and
cheaper than confronting more complex social problems like child abuse or guns.
Ummmmm..... Pardon me but aren't guns technology too? It seems the author wants to shift the Luddite hysteria from the sacred internet, which he presumably likes, to the EVIL WICKED guns, which he presumably does not like.
I watch the Elephant and Jackass parties going round and round with this shit and it never ceases to horrify me:
Elephants: We need the gummint to censor Quake and violent internet sites so our kiddies won't go on killing sprees
Jackasses: We need the gummint to take people's guns away so our kiddies won't go on killing sprees.
>No it doesn't; at the very least having the information available gives you some historical insight as to where we were medically at any given point in time
And remember that one aspect of the police state in 1984 was the control of the past. Old newspapers were rounded up and ammended so that if you read "history" Big Bro had always turned out to be right. One of the great things about having old books around is that you can still see just wrong people were.
I think Miguel is ignoring the fact that when Unix was developed there was no concept of "one huge app". The whole philosophy was based on small utilities that you chained together using pipes. This constraint was enforced by the limited hardware available at the time. In that sense the "atom" of reusability is the utility program itself and so Unix really did have good reusability for what mattered then. Add to that the standard system libraries and you had a ready code base for the creation of new utilities.
Today, people want to build GUI apps and he is right to say that UNIX lags behind Windows in reusability in that regard. But this is clearly not a "design flaw" just a lack of a widely used toolkit of common objects.
Miguel is also ignoring the fact that a closed, tightly controlled platform like Windows will always have a higher level of uniformity (and reusabilty) than an open platform which must rely on de facto standards rather than the "king's edict" so to speak. In that sense then openness is a design flaw. No, I don't buy it either... Gnome is on track to provide the kind of high level reusable objects he wants. He should stop whining and write code.
You are overlooking the mechanisms of actual terror groups. Most of the more dangerous ones are sponsored by various governments around the world and this would be particularly the case with any that could get nukes. The U.S. govt. knows who sponsors these groups and would know who to retaliate against if they were to use a nuke.
And yes, you ARE advocating a police state. You clearly think that government can be trusted with unlimited power in the interest of "protecting" its subjects (notice I don't call them citizens, you are a subject in a police state, not a citizen). The bloody history of 20th century fascism and communism proves this is a lie.
Do you really believe that if the 4th Ammendment were repealed (something which is thankfully not going to happen) that the state would not hesitate to start abusing people's rights for all sorts of reasons? "We think you might have an illegal drug/gun/pirate-copy-of-Windows/can-of-beans/whate ver, we're going to need to tear your house apart." This is how totalitarianism works. You use an "extreme" case (like the fear of terrorism) to get a foot in the door which you then use for all sorts of other things. Nice try. How much did Tony Blair and Bill Clinton pay you to post this crap?
Many posters have pointed out that the flaw in all these music/video "encryption" schemes have is that at some point the data becomes human readable and thus can be captured. This seems like a fatal flaw and probably is from a technical standpoint but we should never forget that when powerful interests don't feel they can protect themselves technologically they will resort to using the law (force, in other words).
I have long thought that government and corporate interests would ultimately conspire together to get laws passed controlling the sale, distribution and modification of computers that are similar to those effecting firearms, using a lot of the same justifications:
From the govt. side:
We have to keep this technology out of the hands of terrorists, criminals, Black Panthers, Klansmen, insert-boogeyman-of-the-month-here.
We need to protect national security/secrets.
We need to protect THE CHILDREN.
From the corporate side:
We need to protect hard-working musicians/authors etc. from copyright infringement.
We need a better way to make sure that people aren't pirating our software. (This would dovetail nicely with the "remote disabling" provisions of UCITA)
I know it sounds farfetched but remember that it wasn't long ago that Louis Free(sp?) at the FBI proposed a "key escrow" system for all encryption keys and that there is a law moving through Parliament in the U.K. right now that would effectively make a criminal out of anyone who would not or could not produce his private keys on request. How long will the various cyber-fascists take to realize that they can just build all this snooping ability right into the hardware and then make it a crime to "tamper" with the box (at least the tattle-tale chip and related harware). The public is already worked up over "hackers" after all...
You're forgetting something important here. When and if we send a probe to Europa it will contain some gadgetry to cut into the ice and run some tests to look for microscopic life. It is likely that the tests will be able to tell if there is life but that's about all.
If we start smashing possibly contaminated probes into the place we will never be able to quiet the skeptics who will say "well it could have been Earth life that spread from an earlier crash".
Namely that the main point of a trade show is to spend a few days on the company dime in a place where you take advantage of one or more of the following
Ski mountains, if it's too warm for that where you live.
Water Skiing, if it's too cold for that where you live.
Gambling, if that's illegal where you live.
Special touristy stuff like theme parks with animatronic cartoon people serving you drinks.
Special historic sights like castles that date from when the wheel was a cool new idea.
And last but certainly not least, the opportunity to spend days in a drunken stupor
Last time I checked the only one of these KC has is the latter and you can drink anywhere outside Utah. Put the next Penguin event in Vegas and you'll be mobbed. OK midwesterners, flame me I guess I deserve it.;)
Although anti-censorship schemes like pad sharing, Freenet etc... should be implemented none of them address the real issue which is that there is simply no length to which totalitarian minded people will not go to keep control. If they can't track information flow within the pad sharing network or Freenet they'll just make it a crime to participate in those things. Eventually, they will simply force every computer to be sold with a "back door" that will transmit everything on your screen to Big Brother upon receiving a certain signal. They will then make it a federal felony to "tamper" with the spook chip, etc...
The precedent has already been set with guns where, pretty soon you can't just buy a "plain old gun" but will have to buy the trigger-locks, smart(stupid) gun tech and 2 meter thick gun safe and then swear on your mother's grave that you'll keep it locked up at times except to take it out once a year to shoot targets
My prediction: Governments will apply the same sort of logic to the computer as to the gun. They will focus on the tools/technology involved and not on the few bad people abusing it. The result will be that computers will ultimately become just as bound up with restrictive laws as guns are now and with much the same result. The criminals and terrorists will gleefully rip out all the spook tech and go online anyway knowing that they're breaking every law on the books while the rest of us will have our rights curtailed.
The real fight is political, not algorithmic (though good algorithms do show how silly information-restriction efforts are). We must focus on keeping our rights and showing the enemies of freedom for what they are. So get your "munitions" (the kind that go bang and the kind that go beep) while you still can.
1) The idea that most computer professionals want nothing to do with a CLI shows the author's Mac bias. This is exacly wrong. Most serious professionals prefer a CLI since it speeds most tasks up once you learn the shell. I can't tell you how frustrated I used to get with NT clicking through 5-10 dialogs every time I wanted to try a different configuration of something.
2) The author glosses over important facts such as that Linux now runs on many different platforms and is also making inroads into the embedded space. MacOS X is only just now beginning to go cross platform. Linux is so far ahead I can't see anyone catching up soon.
3) It is unlikely that people who trust and know Linux will want to move back to something proprietary. AFAIK MacOS X only has an open source "core", everything else is proprietary. You are right back in the situation where you have to trust a big-evil-corporation[tm] with everything. I personally don't believe that Apple has really gotten the open source religion. They will make token efforts in that direction until Micro$oft is safely out of the way and then it's right back to trying to become, well... Micro$oft.
4) Given their track record I don't think Apple's Unix strategy will long be able to resist the urge to shoot itself in the foot. This will probably take the form of idiosyncratic implementations of the various POSIX specs and RFCs. You will end up trying and failing to compile even simple "UNIX" programs on OSX.
I couldn't help but notice that tiny Sealand is on the east coast of England. To gain notoriety/respect I suggest that they do what we've all been wishing someone to do for a long time and invade France. They could sweep through the low countries with little difficulty and be in Paris by bastille day... Yeah, this is flamebait;-)
I personally started programming around 1981 on an Apple ][+. Apple Basic provided very easy access to the graphics hardware but if you were really interested in speedy graphics code the only hope was to buy the 6502 assembler and learn that. I eventually learned both Basic and assembler. Graphics was a major driving force in both areas.
So what to do today? I don't recommend giving them anything to do with Windoze unless you want them to go Borg on you. Probably the closest you can come to easy UNIX graphics today is Java. You can get a Java book and download a free compiler and be writing "Space Wankers from Planet Crock" in a few days.
Perl is basically for CGI and command line work. I'm not sure of the graphics support in Python but it's a much cleaner language than Perl. Simpler, and more object oriented. If it has good graphics and isn't too slow it might be the way to go.
Basic has a bad rep but the modern Basics are pretty modular and don't *necessarily* teach spaghetti code (I had a lot of unlearning to do when I got my first C compiler, by contrast). The only problem is that the only UNIX/Linux Basic interpreters I've seen are VERY rudimentary and don't do graphics at all.
Complete bullshit. Europe has *more* problems with gun toting terrorists than the US. Remember the Red Army faction, the Basque separatists, the IRA, Baeder-Meinhof(sp?). Europe is a good example of what happens when you disarm the people and the trigger-happy fanatics run wild. Except for Switzerland. God Bless their machine-pistol toting hearts...
Slashdot Mirror
Probably that the Chinese filter will have some code in it to help track people who say negative things online about the regime. Then there's a knock at the door late at night, followed by a swift "trial" and then it's off to the firing squad or the gulag (yeah, they still have those there my friend).
And of course, expressing disdain for internet censorship in the US is perfectly legal and safe. Expressing disdain for the filtering scheme in the PRC will, again probably get you a one way ticket to the grave or the gulag.
Totalitarianism, it's not just for breakfast anymore...
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Whatever "tryanny" an American president can manage is at least tempered by a strong constitution, a long tradition of individual civil rights and a democratic process. There is none of that in China, none of it. If Dubya bothers you so much try China for a while. Oh, that's right, once you're there they probably won't let you leave. What a pity.
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How naive. The vicious, murderous regime in the PRC is not focusing on internet cafes because it thinks that home users have parents who exercise controls but because the internet is a place where the causual user has guaranteed anonymity. Only there can he post "I live in the PRC and though I can't tell you my name let me say it is hell here and the government lies to us and you about what really goes on here."
The best thing for China and the world would be if the leadership of the PRC were to be lined up against a wall and have large caliber bullets blasted through their brains. That is the only thing that will ever free the Chinese people from tyranny and the rest of the world from their leaders' insanity.
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As for the CLI-GUI argument, that's really a dead horse. No one is going to produce a PDA that boots up into bash for a mass market! Linux doesn't have a "default shell". You can get rid of all the CLI stuff and replace it with a GUI login/shell quite easily. Most of the people that buy these things won't even know they're running Linux.
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You use tool generation n-1 to create tool generation n and so forth. Note that if something like this isn't possible then we can give up on nano-tech right now since all our efforts, whether with human hands, micro-lithography or whatever ultimately reduce to this process of using iterated generations of smaller and more precise tools to create still smaller and more precise ones.
--
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However, I wanted to put Linux on the disk which meant repartitioning. I realized that if I repartitioned the disk I would NEVER get Windows back since I didn't actually have the install media. I complained to Compaq and they finally sent me a "Quick Restore CD". This actually contained WindowsMe, but in a special rebundled form along with Compaq's special software. You could use this to restore Windows even after a disk crash but apparently only on a machine that is substantially identical to the machine I originally bought. I recently tried to use the quick restore disk to install Windows within VMWare under Linux. The install wouldn't even start. Apparently, the virtual machine is too "un-Compaqish" for this to work. So, basically, I have a copy of WindowsMe that I can only use on the machine I bought it for. I have lost my freedom to purchase a different machine and move my Windows license to that system or to virtual hardware running under Linux. Five years ago this was not the case. You bought a machine with Windows pre-installed and they gave you a Windows floppy set or CDROM. The OS media didn't care where you installed it.
I know, piracy,piracy,piracy. Fuck piracy, all I'm trying to do is take a piece of software I legitimately own and move it from one place to another. When and if I really do need WindowsMe again (the original computer was purchased for a freelance gig) I will have to get a pirate copy of the actual Microsoft CDROM. This, in order to use something I already own a copy of!!!
Now back to hard-disks. The copy-bit is nothing more than an extension of this whole trend. The manufacturer wants to control what you do after you have bought the product. He wants to restrict your freedom to move the application, the data or whatever. Kind of like the PC OEMs already do with Windows.
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Ummmmm..... Pardon me but aren't guns technology too? It seems the author wants to shift the Luddite hysteria from the sacred internet, which he presumably likes, to the EVIL WICKED guns, which he presumably does not like.
I watch the Elephant and Jackass parties going round and round with this shit and it never ceases to horrify me:
Elephants: We need the gummint to censor Quake and violent internet sites so our kiddies won't go on killing sprees
Jackasses: We need the gummint to take people's guns away so our kiddies won't go on killing sprees.
As a gun and gaming nut they both drive me nuts.
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And remember that one aspect of the police state in 1984 was the control of the past. Old newspapers were rounded up and ammended so that if you read "history" Big Bro had always turned out to be right. One of the great things about having old books around is that you can still see just wrong people were.
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Today, people want to build GUI apps and he is right to say that UNIX lags behind Windows in reusability in that regard. But this is clearly not a "design flaw" just a lack of a widely used toolkit of common objects.
Miguel is also ignoring the fact that a closed, tightly controlled platform like Windows will always have a higher level of uniformity (and reusabilty) than an open platform which must rely on de facto standards rather than the "king's edict" so to speak. In that sense then openness is a design flaw. No, I don't buy it either... Gnome is on track to provide the kind of high level reusable objects he wants. He should stop whining and write code.
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You are overlooking the mechanisms of actual terror groups. Most of the more dangerous ones are sponsored by various governments around the world and this would be particularly the case with any that could get nukes. The U.S. govt. knows who sponsors these groups and would know who to retaliate against if they were to use a nuke.
And yes, you ARE advocating a police state. You clearly think that government can be trusted with unlimited power in the interest of "protecting" its subjects (notice I don't call them citizens, you are a subject in a police state, not a citizen). The bloody history of 20th century fascism and communism proves this is a lie.
Do you really believe that if the 4th Ammendment were repealed (something which is thankfully not going to happen) that the state would not hesitate to start abusing people's rights for all sorts of reasons? "We think you might have an illegal drug/gun/pirate-copy-of-Windows/can-of-beans/whate ver, we're going to need to tear your house apart." This is how totalitarianism works. You use an "extreme" case (like the fear of terrorism) to get a foot in the door which you then use for all sorts of other things. Nice try. How much did Tony Blair and Bill Clinton pay you to post this crap?
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Many posters have pointed out that the flaw in all these music/video "encryption" schemes have is that at some point the data becomes human readable and thus can be captured. This seems like a fatal flaw and probably is from a technical standpoint but we should never forget that when powerful interests don't feel they can protect themselves technologically they will resort to using the law (force, in other words).
I have long thought that government and corporate interests would ultimately conspire together to get laws passed controlling the sale, distribution and modification of computers that are similar to those effecting firearms, using a lot of the same justifications:
From the govt. side:
From the corporate side:
I know it sounds farfetched but remember that it wasn't long ago that Louis Free(sp?) at the FBI proposed a "key escrow" system for all encryption keys and that there is a law moving through Parliament in the U.K. right now that would effectively make a criminal out of anyone who would not or could not produce his private keys on request. How long will the various cyber-fascists take to realize that they can just build all this snooping ability right into the hardware and then make it a crime to "tamper" with the box (at least the tattle-tale chip and related harware). The public is already worked up over "hackers" after all...
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You're forgetting something important here. When and if we send a probe to Europa it will contain some gadgetry to cut into the ice and run some tests to look for microscopic life. It is likely that the tests will be able to tell if there is life but that's about all.
If we start smashing possibly contaminated probes into the place we will never be able to quiet the skeptics who will say "well it could have been Earth life that spread from an earlier crash".
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Namely that the main point of a trade show is to spend a few days on the company dime in a place where you take advantage of one or more of the following
Last time I checked the only one of these KC has is the latter and you can drink anywhere outside Utah. Put the next Penguin event in Vegas and you'll be mobbed. OK midwesterners, flame me I guess I deserve it. ;)
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Although anti-censorship schemes like pad sharing, Freenet etc... should be implemented none of them address the real issue which is that there is simply no length to which totalitarian minded people will not go to keep control. If they can't track information flow within the pad sharing network or Freenet they'll just make it a crime to participate in those things. Eventually, they will simply force every computer to be sold with a "back door" that will transmit everything on your screen to Big Brother upon receiving a certain signal. They will then make it a federal felony to "tamper" with the spook chip, etc...
The precedent has already been set with guns where, pretty soon you can't just buy a "plain old gun" but will have to buy the trigger-locks, smart(stupid) gun tech and 2 meter thick gun safe and then swear on your mother's grave that you'll keep it locked up at times except to take it out once a year to shoot targets
My prediction: Governments will apply the same sort of logic to the computer as to the gun. They will focus on the tools/technology involved and not on the few bad people abusing it. The result will be that computers will ultimately become just as bound up with restrictive laws as guns are now and with much the same result. The criminals and terrorists will gleefully rip out all the spook tech and go online anyway knowing that they're breaking every law on the books while the rest of us will have our rights curtailed.
The real fight is political, not algorithmic (though good algorithms do show how silly information-restriction efforts are). We must focus on keeping our rights and showing the enemies of freedom for what they are. So get your "munitions" (the kind that go bang and the kind that go beep) while you still can.
I think this article was weak on several counts.
1) The idea that most computer professionals want nothing to do with a CLI shows the author's Mac bias. This is exacly wrong. Most serious professionals prefer a CLI since it speeds most tasks up once you learn the shell. I can't tell you how frustrated I used to get with NT clicking through 5-10 dialogs every time I wanted to try a different configuration of something.
2) The author glosses over important facts such as that Linux now runs on many different platforms and is also making inroads into the embedded space. MacOS X is only just now beginning to go cross platform. Linux is so far ahead I can't see anyone catching up soon.
3) It is unlikely that people who trust and know Linux will want to move back to something proprietary. AFAIK MacOS X only has an open source "core", everything else is proprietary. You are right back in the situation where you have to trust a big-evil-corporation[tm] with everything. I personally don't believe that Apple has really gotten the open source religion. They will make token efforts in that direction until Micro$oft is safely out of the way and then it's right back to trying to become, well... Micro$oft.
4) Given their track record I don't think Apple's Unix strategy will long be able to resist the urge to shoot itself in the foot. This will probably take the form of idiosyncratic implementations of the various POSIX specs and RFCs. You will end up trying and failing to compile even simple "UNIX" programs on OSX.
I couldn't help but notice that tiny Sealand is on the east coast of England. To gain notoriety/respect I suggest that they do what we've all been wishing someone to do for a long time and invade France. They could sweep through the low countries with little difficulty and be in Paris by bastille day... Yeah, this is flamebait ;-)
I personally started programming around 1981 on an Apple ][+. Apple Basic provided very easy access to the graphics hardware but if you were really interested in speedy graphics code the only hope was to buy the 6502 assembler and learn that. I eventually learned both Basic and assembler. Graphics was a major driving force in both areas.
So what to do today? I don't recommend giving them anything to do with Windoze unless you want them to go Borg on you. Probably the closest you can come to easy UNIX graphics today is Java. You can get a Java book and download a free compiler and be writing "Space Wankers from Planet Crock" in a few days.
Perl is basically for CGI and command line work. I'm not sure of the graphics support in Python but it's a much cleaner language than Perl. Simpler, and more object oriented. If it has good graphics and isn't too slow it might be the way to go.
Basic has a bad rep but the modern Basics are pretty modular and don't *necessarily* teach spaghetti code (I had a lot of unlearning to do when I got my first C compiler, by contrast). The only problem is that the only UNIX/Linux Basic interpreters I've seen are VERY rudimentary and don't do graphics at all.
Complete bullshit. Europe has *more* problems with gun toting terrorists than the US. Remember the Red Army faction, the Basque separatists, the IRA, Baeder-Meinhof(sp?). Europe is a good example of what happens when you disarm the people and the trigger-happy fanatics run wild. Except for Switzerland. God Bless their machine-pistol toting hearts...