Who the fucking idiot are you? It seems that you childish lardass haven't experienced enough abuse personally so that you could understand how serious problem it is. Go back to the playground until you've learned something.
(Sorry about the example) But seriously, people often do not care about abusive behaviour before they get to be targets themselves. This is one reason why bullying is so common in schools and also in later age. People think it's fun to offend "stupid" people, but do not understand (or care) how bad it can really feel. I guess it's kind of social game that the bullies play, to raise their social status or something, but it's a very cruel game.
There are lots of people who just want to get enjoyment from hurting people. I guess there's something really sadistic in human nature.
Abusive people are a real problem in Internet. Especially in IRC and discussion groups. Administrators can throw out one identity after another, but that's a lot of work and it can become very stressful, and abusers can often cause a lot of emotional damage in groups.
ISPs should have stricter codes of behaviour, and they should also enforce the codes even without court orders. If schools had to go to court to resolve every case of abuse, schools would soon be lost in anarchy...
Freedom to insult is not an issue of freedom of speech.
It seems that the European situation varies greatly. As we have heard, Brits are trying to make it mandatory for the ISPs to give the police real time access to the data.
I can tell only about the Finnish law. Currently logging is always prohibited, except for some specific reasons, such as:
billing, for commercial services (rather obvious).
resolving cases of abuse, in which case the information may be communicated with other involved organizations.
"development of the services" (I don't really understand what they mean by this).
for marketing purposes, if explicitly approved by the client! (This definitely includes using cookies for collecting marketing data, if not approved.)
Interpreting all this is not very clear to me. It seems that logging itself is ok, because you can always expect some case of abuse. But you are not allowed to use the logs for anything except for these purposes.
The ethical questions are of course about personal privacy. It's not just the "Evil Big Brother Government", but it might also be...your big brother (the biological one)...snooping at your voyages in the internet. Or your ex-lover, or your wannabe-lover, or your worst enemy...
It also reads: "Who has received or otherwise acquired information about a confidential telecommunication, which was not intended for him, many not unlawfully communicate or use for his advantage the information, or knowledge about the existence of the information."
I am a CS student at the University of Turku, Finland. A few years ago, I had myself written a substantial amount of drugs information on my web pages at our university server (later relocated because of technical reasons). At one point, they removed them, and I received a strict order not to publish them in our university network.
This means that I can't even publish them in my home computer, because it is connected to the Internet through our university. (I'm actually not even allowed to give user accounts to non-university people - which would clearly mean also family members...on a Windows machine there obviously wouldn't be such restrictions...)
Since I had no other server in Finland where I could relocate the drugs information pages, they now reside at Lycaeum.
The university apparently is allowed to censor the publications of its students and researchers, and of persons who pay money for their Internet connection.
I have met similar problems as an administrator of ftp.funet.fi, one of the historically most significant FTP servers. It is maintained by FUNet (Finnish University Network). They also banned keeping drugs information there. ftp.funet.fi is funded by the Ministry of Education, and the administrators feared of cuts in funding, if it were to become public knowledge that the MoE is funding drugs information.
Disclaimer: I am personally not a user of any illicit drugs, nor do I recommend their use to anyone. I might personally have some interest in medical use of marihuana, and perhaps also in recreational use of marihuana and some other drugs. I definitely think that the current prohibition laws of many drugs are bad, because they themselves make drugs much worse thing than they would otherwise be.
I had a discussion with an American recently, and he told me that it was mandatory, in USA, to carry an identification card at all times, or otherwise the police could arrest you. I was shocked. Is this really possible in the "Land of the Free"? In the same country where they stubbornly refuse to allow identification numbers, and other things that could make reliable identification possible.
Well, the situation seems to be about the same elsewhere in the world (although I've succesfully lived in Finland for 30 years without being aware about this kind of law). I guess there are good reasons for enforcing this kind of laws in countries where there are lots of foreigners and illegal immigrants.
- The admistrator of Finnish section of Lycaeum drugs archive
Moving space stations to radically different orbits requires radical amounts of energy. (I have no knowledge about the relative orbits of Mir and ISS.)
For example, if the station circles Earth to the opposite direction, you'd basicly first have to stop it from 11km/s and then accelerate it again to 11km/s to the other direction. The required fuel would be almost twice the amount that was needed to send the station up there in the first place. Well, perhaps less, as the rockets could have better efficiency than the launch rockets. But remember that Mir is not just one module...
Then there are of course the technical incompatibilities - ISS might use new docking systems (probably not though), or have some other critical differences.
But, I guess the main point is that MIR is just too old and outdated. Think about attaching a 10-year-old used 340MB hard drive to your new computer. Not worth the effort.
It would be nice to know how many failures the Russian rockets have had, compared to the western (USA and Europe) rockets. Some of the Russian failures were apparently covered by the Soviet government, so it may be difficult to find reliable figures.
RMS is not very charismatic. ESR is more charismatic than RMS. And Linus is a nicer guy than either one, though I think ESR is more charismatic, and has a more dangerous agenda than RMS, though that's a different post.
Charismatic? Excuse me, but we are now talking about computer geeks, and geeks, almost by definition, are totally anti-charismatic. If they weren't, they really would dominate the world.
I have just spent about two weeks (almost full-time) looking at digital camera reviews. It is definitely not an easy task. I am used to a 15-years old SLR camera and it was really hard to find a digicam that comes even near it with quality and features.
First thing you must always remember is that every camera is a tradeoff - you get something and lose something. There isn't any "best camera for this money", but you must balance between features. Some tradeoffs are even theoretical - if you put more pixels in a CCD, the less light each pixel will receive and you get poor low-light capability and lots of noise. Cameras with big zooms generally have little pixels and poor sensitivity (big F-number; F2.0 is very good, F6.0 or more is rather bad).
I decided to take Casio QV-3000. It is definitely a very good value/money, especially in USA with the 340MB Microdrive bundle. I ordered mine from Germany for about 800 euro, without the drive (they don't offer the bundle here). The Microdrive costs about 450 euro separately.
QV-3000 has very bright (sensitive) optics - F2.0. The optical zoom is 3x (about 35mm-105mm). Resolution 3.34Mpixels (about 2048x1550). Very long exposure times (up to 60s), good manual controls for exposure and focus. Capability for Microdrive. Eats AA-sized NiMH batteries (they are cheap so you can buy a lot of them). Good connections (USB, RS-232, IrDA-TranP, Video). Plus some other nice features. Tradeoffs are lack of external flash connection, slow pic-to-pic-time (3-6sec), a bit weight, and some minor things.
Canon Powershot S20, Nikon Coolpix 990, and the Olumpys C-2500 and C-3030 are very competitive in the same resolution group. They have perhaps slightly more clear pictures and better colors, but that varies greatly on conditions, and often QV-3000 is much better. QV-3000 also a bit cheaper than the competitors, at least in Europe. But, as I've emphasized, it's always a tradeoff.
My QV-3000 will arrive in mail next week. I hope it turns to be *nice*.
The idea is that the moon orbits both Earth and Sun. With such a system, you can get much more complex orbits.
For example, just by combining two ellipses (one around Earth and one around Sun), you can get weird orbits.
Actually, none of the orbits of the planets are "perfect ellipses around the sun", but because the planets also orbit each other a little (although those orbits are "open"), the actual orbits of planets are infinitely complex. And, chaotic. (Remember, three-object problem has not been solved.)
I think the British researchers photographed the asteroid in 1988, found it from the film plate, and possibly even made observations of its subsequent locations. They did not, however, calculate its orbit, and thus did not actually "discover" the asteroid as "second moon" of Earth. However, according to the rules, they were given the right to name the asteroid.
It should be noted that there are probably thousands of asteroids which have been photographed, but have not been identified as asteroids. For example, Pluto was photographed in the Tuorla Observatory some 8 years before it was photographed and identified as a planet in U.S. There might be several hundred asteroids which have been identified, and their positions have been measured, but the orbit has not been calculated.
This seems to be the same "moon" that which orbit was calculated a few years years ago, asteroid 3753. The asteroid was first found over ten years ago, but its orbit could not be calculated.
It might also be that there are several such "Troyan" asteroids, so I'm not totally sure that this is the same one.
I think the orbit was calculated by Seppo Mikkola in Tuorla Observatory, in University of Turku, Finland. But I'm not too sure about this, the following article seems to have two Finnish authors, but the primary author may well be British. It may be that the observations were British, or something like that.
See: *Wiegert, P.A., *Innanen, K.A. and Mikkola, S. 1997: The Earth companion asteroid 3753 (1986 TO) - Nature 387: 685--686.
I'm not sure if this is really a good solution, but...
The client needs to have a checksum checker or something, right? And the client can't be given the opportunity to checksum itself, but it must be done by a closed-source binary code, right? Ok...
Solution: the server generates the executable that checks the client, encrypts it, and sends it to the client. The checker decrypts itself, checks the client, and sends a secured message back to the server. This could happen in perhaps one to ten seconds, so the client isn't really able to fuss much with the checker. And the checker's source would be open.
This is just a quick thought, so I'm not really sure if this would work or be secure. But perhaps it could be a starting point for a solution.
The idea is that, if "closed source" is evil, why let evil people code it? Why not make a code-generator (for example with encryption) that is open-source, but generates closed-source code.
But, this solution of course brings another security problem: the "checker" could be a troyan. Thus, it has to run in a virtual machine. I'm not sure what kind of code this "Quake C" generates, but if it's opcode runnable in a VM, then the checker could be safe in that way.
(Another solution to the troyan might be using trusted Quake signature servers. Safe as long as the trusted servers really are safe...)
But, perhaps the client could have a hacked VM and let the checker see wrong code segment, and actually run on another. This gets very complicated now, and I'm not any longer at all sure if this can be solved. *shrug*
Or perhaps the checker could run all the time. Perhaps it could copy the client into a data segment, and require it to run from there, and make some modifications to it. Perhaps it could fulfill some crucial function in the communication that can't be circumvented (such as encryption). Or download the entire client... OR SOMETHING!
I made a quick web search for +quake +"aim bot", and received for example the following address:
http://go.to/aimbots/
They are proxies that sit between the closed-source client and the closed-source server.
Yeh, there seems to be aimbots for Quake 1, 2 and 3, plus QuakeWorld. (They seem to be for Wincrap, and if they are.exe distributions, as they probably are, they very probably carry a horde of viruses too...so I wouldn't recommend trying them out...)
I've been playing all the ID games, and done fairly well, EXCEPT in last year with the Quake2. For example, I am camping in the perfect place with my trigger-finger ready, and suddenly I'm blown to pieces with a railgun by someone whom I didn't even have time to see. Or I'm running, making evasive actions, and someone again blows me dead with a railgun from the other side of a hall. Repeatedly. And I can't hit almost anyone with the railgun. Maybe the Q2 players are just inhumanely good, I don't know. Also, some people run unnaturally fast (yeh, I've heard there's such a crack too).
I guess making "aimbot detectors" isn't possible. Once you know what the criteria are, you can make a bot that circumvents the criteria somehow, and makes the player look just like a f*king good player.
Nevertheless, I agree with the fact that closed-source software *slows down* finding obvious holes, and prevents it quite well if the application is such that no one bothers to crack it. But, if one can make megabucks of money with it, or get better score in a game, or get high status as a cracker, you can bet that it'll be cracked in a week...
If your X has never crashed, then you're a very lucky person. My XFree86 crashes maybe once every few weeks; I think it does that when some other app fills up the memory. Sometimes opening some menus halts the X, totally, with no way getting out except reset button.
Well, even my Solaris OpenWindows (or whatever) has crashed maybe once a year, so the situation is not THAT much better with commercial servers.
And crashing is not the only problem. XFree86 is severely bloated; typically some 25-30M, at least with the i740 server. The practical upper bit plane limit for this card is 16 (24 works badly, 32 doesn't work at all).
And other problems: being able to change the number of bit planes is simple even in m$ Windows, although it too sometimes requires booting the machine. Having to restart X between changes is almost the same as rebooting, as all windows are lost. Changing the resolution of the X display also sucks. You get this awkward "virtual screen", that is awful to use. Even Windows has always handled this properly.
XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.
Speaking about session control, KDE has some sort of trivial session control that saves the windows when you log out, and restarts them when you log in. Which, of course, is so buggy that it messes up everything if the machine or X crashes; then, it forgets all the window sizes and opens them in the first desktop.
...and so on...I find it very scary that so many trivial problems exist with X, and haven't been fixed during its very long lifetime. Is X dying of old age?
So, you are right, we Finnish programmers really should move to a country where you can't walk in the wrong street without getting shot (and it's possible to buy guns from nearest grocery store), where exporting and importing crypto is illegal, where everyone doesn't have a right to get social security or homes, where public swearing (in front of women and children) is forbidden in some places, where you must be married to live in same rental apartment with a woman, where only rich people can have any kind of justice or security, where people are lawfully murdered by the goverment, where politics are more like a joke......
Well, these were just a few (only slightly exaggerated) points which popped to my so-empty mind...and yes, I know there are some opposite points too. So does one idiotic law matter? It may suck, but not THAT much...
But most importantly, neither would I now be studying nor possibly would Linus (I'm not sure how rich his parents are) have gotten his master's degree, if we had lived in certain-other-country where studying CS costs about $10,000 a year more...
Back to the matter; putting the idiots in the parliament to take an exam in computer security before voting might have been a good idea... And yes, this isn't the first idiotic law they've made...
There's also one common reason for some of such laws; the police can't get a search warrant for crimes that can only get less than 6 months of jail.
Speaking about Linus, we should naturally check the meaning of this number 9 in Finnish.
The pronounciation of the English word 'nine' equals the Finnish word 'nain'; meaning either "I marry" (seldom used) or more often "I fuck" (or "I make love", if you want to be PC).
So, the German law company should NEIN FUCK WITH LINUX!
PS. Letter numbers for 'nain' are 14,1,9,14. (1+4)*1*9*(1+4) is 225 and 2+2+5 = 9! Also, 14*1*19*14 = 1764, 1+7+6+4 = 18, and 1+8=9!!!
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry about the example) But seriously, people often do not care about abusive behaviour before they get to be targets themselves. This is one reason why bullying is so common in schools and also in later age. People think it's fun to offend "stupid" people, but do not understand (or care) how bad it can really feel. I guess it's kind of social game that the bullies play, to raise their social status or something, but it's a very cruel game.
There are lots of people who just want to get enjoyment from hurting people. I guess there's something really sadistic in human nature.
Abusive people are a real problem in Internet. Especially in IRC and discussion groups. Administrators can throw out one identity after another, but that's a lot of work and it can become very stressful, and abusers can often cause a lot of emotional damage in groups.
ISPs should have stricter codes of behaviour, and they should also enforce the codes even without court orders. If schools had to go to court to resolve every case of abuse, schools would soon be lost in anarchy...
Freedom to insult is not an issue of freedom of speech.
I can tell only about the Finnish law. Currently logging is always prohibited, except for some specific reasons, such as:
- billing, for commercial services (rather obvious).
- resolving cases of abuse, in which case the information may be communicated with other involved organizations.
- "development of the services" (I don't really understand what they mean by this).
- for marketing purposes, if explicitly approved by the client! (This definitely includes using cookies for collecting marketing data, if not approved.)
Interpreting all this is not very clear to me. It seems that logging itself is ok, because you can always expect some case of abuse. But you are not allowed to use the logs for anything except for these purposes.The ethical questions are of course about personal privacy. It's not just the "Evil Big Brother Government", but it might also be...your big brother (the biological one)...snooping at your voyages in the internet. Or your ex-lover, or your wannabe-lover, or your worst enemy...
It also reads: "Who has received or otherwise acquired information about a confidential telecommunication, which was not intended for him, many not unlawfully communicate or use for his advantage the information, or knowledge about the existence of the information."
This means that I can't even publish them in my home computer, because it is connected to the Internet through our university. (I'm actually not even allowed to give user accounts to non-university people - which would clearly mean also family members...on a Windows machine there obviously wouldn't be such restrictions...)
Since I had no other server in Finland where I could relocate the drugs information pages, they now reside at Lycaeum.
The university apparently is allowed to censor the publications of its students and researchers, and of persons who pay money for their Internet connection.
I have met similar problems as an administrator of ftp.funet.fi, one of the historically most significant FTP servers. It is maintained by FUNet (Finnish University Network). They also banned keeping drugs information there. ftp.funet.fi is funded by the Ministry of Education, and the administrators feared of cuts in funding, if it were to become public knowledge that the MoE is funding drugs information.
Disclaimer: I am personally not a user of any illicit drugs, nor do I recommend their use to anyone. I might personally have some interest in medical use of marihuana, and perhaps also in recreational use of marihuana and some other drugs. I definitely think that the current prohibition laws of many drugs are bad, because they themselves make drugs much worse thing than they would otherwise be.
Censorship is baad, o'kay?
I had a discussion with an American recently, and he told me that it was mandatory, in USA, to carry an identification card at all times, or otherwise the police could arrest you. I was shocked. Is this really possible in the "Land of the Free"? In the same country where they stubbornly refuse to allow identification numbers, and other things that could make reliable identification possible.
Well, the situation seems to be about the same elsewhere in the world (although I've succesfully lived in Finland for 30 years without being aware about this kind of law). I guess there are good reasons for enforcing this kind of laws in countries where there are lots of foreigners and illegal immigrants.
- The admistrator of Finnish section of Lycaeum drugs archive
For example, if the station circles Earth to the opposite direction, you'd basicly first have to stop it from 11km/s and then accelerate it again to 11km/s to the other direction. The required fuel would be almost twice the amount that was needed to send the station up there in the first place. Well, perhaps less, as the rockets could have better efficiency than the launch rockets. But remember that Mir is not just one module...
Then there are of course the technical incompatibilities - ISS might use new docking systems (probably not though), or have some other critical differences.
But, I guess the main point is that MIR is just too old and outdated. Think about attaching a 10-year-old used 340MB hard drive to your new computer. Not worth the effort.
It would be nice to know how many failures the Russian rockets have had, compared to the western (USA and Europe) rockets. Some of the Russian failures were apparently covered by the Soviet government, so it may be difficult to find reliable figures.
RMS is not very charismatic. ESR is more charismatic than RMS. And Linus is a nicer guy than either one, though I think ESR is more charismatic, and has a more dangerous agenda than RMS, though that's a different post.
Charismatic? Excuse me, but we are now talking about computer geeks, and geeks, almost by definition, are totally anti-charismatic. If they weren't, they really would dominate the world.
First thing you must always remember is that every camera is a tradeoff - you get something and lose something. There isn't any "best camera for this money", but you must balance between features. Some tradeoffs are even theoretical - if you put more pixels in a CCD, the less light each pixel will receive and you get poor low-light capability and lots of noise. Cameras with big zooms generally have little pixels and poor sensitivity (big F-number; F2.0 is very good, F6.0 or more is rather bad).
I decided to take Casio QV-3000. It is definitely a very good value/money, especially in USA with the 340MB Microdrive bundle. I ordered mine from Germany for about 800 euro, without the drive (they don't offer the bundle here). The Microdrive costs about 450 euro separately.
QV-3000 has very bright (sensitive) optics - F2.0. The optical zoom is 3x (about 35mm-105mm). Resolution 3.34Mpixels (about 2048x1550). Very long exposure times (up to 60s), good manual controls for exposure and focus. Capability for Microdrive. Eats AA-sized NiMH batteries (they are cheap so you can buy a lot of them). Good connections (USB, RS-232, IrDA-TranP, Video). Plus some other nice features. Tradeoffs are lack of external flash connection, slow pic-to-pic-time (3-6sec), a bit weight, and some minor things.
Canon Powershot S20, Nikon Coolpix 990, and the Olumpys C-2500 and C-3030 are very competitive in the same resolution group. They have perhaps slightly more clear pictures and better colors, but that varies greatly on conditions, and often QV-3000 is much better. QV-3000 also a bit cheaper than the competitors, at least in Europe. But, as I've emphasized, it's always a tradeoff.
My QV-3000 will arrive in mail next week. I hope it turns to be *nice*.
Look at: www.imaging-resource.com, www.steves-digicams.com, www.dpreview.com
For example, just by combining two ellipses (one around Earth and one around Sun), you can get weird orbits.
Actually, none of the orbits of the planets are "perfect ellipses around the sun", but because the planets also orbit each other a little (although those orbits are "open"), the actual orbits of planets are infinitely complex. And, chaotic. (Remember, three-object problem has not been solved.)
Wiegert is Canadian, and works with Innanen in York University in Canada. Innanen and Mikkola are Finnish, and Mikkola works in Tuorla Observatory.
The asteroid has a homepage:
http://www.asteroid.yorku.ca/
I think the British researchers photographed the asteroid in 1988, found it from the film plate, and possibly even made observations of its subsequent locations. They did not, however, calculate its orbit, and thus did not actually "discover" the asteroid as "second moon" of Earth. However, according to the rules, they were given the right to name the asteroid.
It should be noted that there are probably thousands of asteroids which have been photographed, but have not been identified as asteroids. For example, Pluto was photographed in the Tuorla Observatory some 8 years before it was photographed and identified as a planet in U.S. There might be several hundred asteroids which have been identified, and their positions have been measured, but the orbit has not been calculated.
It might also be that there are several such "Troyan" asteroids, so I'm not totally sure that this is the same one.
I think the orbit was calculated by Seppo Mikkola in Tuorla Observatory, in University of Turku, Finland. But I'm not too sure about this, the following article seems to have two Finnish authors, but the primary author may well be British. It may be that the observations were British, or something like that.
See:
*Wiegert, P.A., *Innanen, K.A. and Mikkola, S. 1997: The Earth companion asteroid 3753 (1986 TO) - Nature 387: 685--686.
The client needs to have a checksum checker or something, right? And the client can't be given the opportunity to checksum itself, but it must be done by a closed-source binary code, right? Ok...
Solution: the server generates the executable that checks the client, encrypts it, and sends it to the client. The checker decrypts itself, checks the client, and sends a secured message back to the server. This could happen in perhaps one to ten seconds, so the client isn't really able to fuss much with the checker. And the checker's source would be open.
This is just a quick thought, so I'm not really sure if this would work or be secure. But perhaps it could be a starting point for a solution.
The idea is that, if "closed source" is evil, why let evil people code it? Why not make a code-generator (for example with encryption) that is open-source, but generates closed-source code.
But, this solution of course brings another security problem: the "checker" could be a troyan. Thus, it has to run in a virtual machine. I'm not sure what kind of code this "Quake C" generates, but if it's opcode runnable in a VM, then the checker could be safe in that way.
(Another solution to the troyan might be using trusted Quake signature servers. Safe as long as the trusted servers really are safe...)
But, perhaps the client could have a hacked VM and let the checker see wrong code segment, and actually run on another. This gets very complicated now, and I'm not any longer at all sure if this can be solved. *shrug*
Or perhaps the checker could run all the time. Perhaps it could copy the client into a data segment, and require it to run from there, and make some modifications to it. Perhaps it could fulfill some crucial function in the communication that can't be circumvented (such as encryption). Or download the entire client... OR SOMETHING!
http://go.to/aimbots/
They are proxies that sit between the closed-source client and the closed-source server.
Yeh, there seems to be aimbots for Quake 1, 2 and 3, plus QuakeWorld. (They seem to be for Wincrap, and if they are .exe distributions, as they probably are, they very probably carry a horde of viruses too...so I wouldn't recommend trying them out...)
I've been playing all the ID games, and done fairly well, EXCEPT in last year with the Quake2. For example, I am camping in the perfect place with my trigger-finger ready, and suddenly I'm blown to pieces with a railgun by someone whom I didn't even have time to see. Or I'm running, making evasive actions, and someone again blows me dead with a railgun from the other side of a hall. Repeatedly. And I can't hit almost anyone with the railgun. Maybe the Q2 players are just inhumanely good, I don't know. Also, some people run unnaturally fast (yeh, I've heard there's such a crack too).
I guess making "aimbot detectors" isn't possible. Once you know what the criteria are, you can make a bot that circumvents the criteria somehow, and makes the player look just like a f*king good player.
Nevertheless, I agree with the fact that closed-source software *slows down* finding obvious holes, and prevents it quite well if the application is such that no one bothers to crack it. But, if one can make megabucks of money with it, or get better score in a game, or get high status as a cracker, you can bet that it'll be cracked in a week...
Well, even my Solaris OpenWindows (or whatever) has crashed maybe once a year, so the situation is not THAT much better with commercial servers.
And crashing is not the only problem. XFree86 is severely bloated; typically some 25-30M, at least with the i740 server. The practical upper bit plane limit for this card is 16 (24 works badly, 32 doesn't work at all).
And other problems: being able to change the number of bit planes is simple even in m$ Windows, although it too sometimes requires booting the machine. Having to restart X between changes is almost the same as rebooting, as all windows are lost. Changing the resolution of the X display also sucks. You get this awkward "virtual screen", that is awful to use. Even Windows has always handled this properly.
XFree doesn't support session control in the same way that the new HotDesk does (I think); you can't just "suspend" the X as you can do with screen(1), and then move to another terminal and reattach the suspended X session there.
Speaking about session control, KDE has some sort of trivial session control that saves the windows when you log out, and restarts them when you log in. Which, of course, is so buggy that it messes up everything if the machine or X crashes; then, it forgets all the window sizes and opens them in the first desktop.
Well, these were just a few (only slightly exaggerated) points which popped to my so-empty mind...and yes, I know there are some opposite points too. So does one idiotic law matter? It may suck, but not THAT much...
But most importantly, neither would I now be studying nor possibly would Linus (I'm not sure how rich his parents are) have gotten his master's degree, if we had lived in certain-other-country where studying CS costs about $10,000 a year more...
Back to the matter; putting the idiots in the parliament to take an exam in computer security before voting might have been a good idea... And yes, this isn't the first idiotic law they've made...
There's also one common reason for some of such laws; the police can't get a search warrant for crimes that can only get less than 6 months of jail.
Well, don't mind my rant...
The pronounciation of the English word 'nine' equals the Finnish word 'nain'; meaning either "I marry" (seldom used) or more often "I fuck" (or "I make love", if you want to be PC).
So, the German law company should NEIN FUCK WITH LINUX!
PS. Letter numbers for 'nain' are 14,1,9,14. (1+4)*1*9*(1+4) is 225 and 2+2+5 = 9! Also, 14*1*19*14 = 1764, 1+7+6+4 = 18, and 1+8=9!!!