well, as you say it was modded funny, which is a tad strange, anywho;
What you did was right, and maybe it caused you a little worry but it was for the best. Say you had those symptoms and thought (like most people tend to) it'll jkust go away, I'm sure its nothing. Say it had been cancer. By the time you found out it could well have been too late.
Even though you went through a bad patch, if it had been cancer it would have saved your life
So you should use it to maybe consult on, but never assume that you're able to give a right diagnosis - but always go get stuff checked out!
"preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer"
I wouldn't take this to be not allowing anyone access to the data, and I'm convinced that no judge in the world would interpret it this way. I think that it largely is talking about preventing access from someone who is authorised to access the data. If the FSF is clever here they will bring private prosecutions against the companies who ship DRM trying to get CEOs put in prison over this - because I think that this is within what the law meant far more than what your line of arguement here is... With any new law of course this will need to be argued out, and it might get into the House of Lords if it really can't be settled (which at least would give us clarity on the matter). I wish Labour wouldn't bring in so many new laws each year that not even the lawyers can keep up with them
Well, I partly agree, but this doesn't mean that someone will get 5-10 years in prison for the crime, the judge has discresion over exactly what the sentence that is given is (I don't know how it works in the US, so this might be the same).
Also note that people are automatically released half way through a sentence on licence anyway. So assume that some kid gets caught for this and its his first time and he was just messing about with little mallice involved he'd probably a suspended sentence tops (which means if he doesn't commit another crime in a set period then he's not put in prison, if he does then he goes to prison for the length of time determined at the start), even if they gave a 5 year sentence he'd be out in 2.5... and don't forget 5 years is probably more than the average person would get for stabbing someone (I have seen it just be a fine for this... damn law)
Well I happen to like RPM and really want to see Red Hat do well; I'm a Fedora user.
Part of me knows I shouldn't be that worried because we know Fedora will always be free, they'd rather sink the distro than have to accept not being free, but the support from Red Hat is nice and I honestly think that Fedora would be worse without it.
Should Fedora ever fall I'd have to look at another distro but I'd have to look into which one is the next most free
Besides were all in it together and we all have a vested intrest in each others success, even if they use RPM.
Wouldn't this be really easy to prove, I would have thought that if this was the case it would make the moon notably hotter than the ambient temperature of space, so could they not just stick an infra-red camera at it and look to see if there is a difference?
I know I'm missing something but I'm not sure what...
"Chris: We're always evaluating and prioritizing the most important bugs"
I have to agree with this, working purely on time might make some stats look better, but security is by far the most important thing. It is also worth noting that people will put up with the odd clitch which might be caused by a bug, but not full blown security flaws which should have been fixed (I'm talking, obviously, about the non-MS IE users) might cause some people to look to Opera,epiphany or hell even Dillo (it is REALLY fast).
...One thing I would have liked him to answer is about how the money comes in (I think its from the search bar in the top right) and how the mozilla team will be using the money within the community
""We are a funding organisation that ships £90m around the world - the last thing you want to do is open up your systems to anybody to have a look at to deal with bugs," he said"...
Because of course its better to have JUST the black hats looking at the code... they'd never steal from a charity would they? I'm sure we can trust criminals. This is idiocy of the highest order. And then he goes on to say;
"But one of the things that we find is that Microsoft is viewed as the big, bad organisation - but they've actually got some good corporate social responsibility.
"If you're a charity or an educational institution, you pay pence in the pound for the licence, compared to what a major bank might pay."
He previously said that there were training costs because the staff didn't know how to use non-MS software, why can't he see that they do this as a way of enforcing their hegemony so that people HAVE to use their software. Freedom might not be free, but it is important
I have to disagree with you, from what I've read MS isn't going to allow linux to run MS products and everything will become standards compliant and everyone will be happy. This seems like they will allow SUSE to have a measure of intermingling use but NO other distro. They have always been in the past, and almost certainly will be in the future, openly hostile to FLOSS. Remember when the now CEO of MS said that it was like AIDS? (or some other virus, I forget)
So this should worry us, and getting rid of SUSE is what we should all be ready willing and able to do to support OSS
This could be really useful in the UK, we are getting frightening low on water during the summer months to the point where we thought that we might have to go back to stand pipes. We would have the money to build something like this and the energy to heat the water (it needs to be pretty hot to do it) - I do wonder though if it would be practical for the very poor countries because of the requirements on the heat (although maybe solar could take care of that) and the cost of building them... I wonder if it will be prohibitavely high
also "One unit should be able to produce around 2000 cubic metres a day", that's pretty amazing.
Firstly the idea of each user having their own remote space is good in theory. This is actually something useful which comes with Vista... although there could be serious problems with it; how safe is it? I wouldn't be at all amazed if this was hacked about 3 seconds after the first user puts any files on this because people will refuse to use good passwords. But in principle its good. The T&Cs might change that. Everyone will have to move to IPv6 anyway at some time I think so we shouldn't be too worried about that
As for them pushing the update to Office 2007 - well, that's what they're in business for... I'm not amazed and I'm not disapointed.
It does feel a tad like M$ is going
"Nice distro... shame if something were to happen to it!"
They are obviously just being pretty petty over this, and I suppose that this could be harmful if they used it as a way of avoiding anti-trust rules, other than that I'm happy with my distro (fedora core 6) as it is without having to compromise with MS over my freedom - even, as with OpenBSD, I want to use it in a baby mulching machine (although that might be illegal for other reasons...)
Nethack is an ace game, I usually play as a male human neutral ranger, and over my few games I've gradually been getting deeper - so far I could win one award, well, I say award it is "Killed By A Trickery", which happened to me today... all the word text from pick ups got stuck on parts of the screen so I couldn't tell what was an enemy and then I was killed very slyly by something random like a cyote...
By the way, what is a good level to get to on nethack for a short game after having been playing for a little while?
I have read Roussea to some extent, I must admit, I did find some elements rather attractive within it. I like the notion of the General Will (and the notion that you can force someone to be free), I like his views on citizenship and how that fits into the ideas of the Roman city states. I dare even say that normatively it is an attractive theory, but I think that is about as far as it might go.
I think when application is concerned the theory would fail to be able to be manifested. Take one simple example, that if it is in the General Will that, say, Mr. X should die* he himself should be happy to do so - because if he refuses he is not being free and not following his own rules. I would argue that in reality people wouldn not accept this and would instead run off, leaving the law incapable of opperating effectively. There is also the issue about how long a law from the Gneral Will can last for, but this is more of an internal inconsistency...
So as a bit of a realist anyway I tend to feel that Hobbes' account fits far more into the intuitions which I have. As for a better metric for saying that one theory is "better" than another... I'm not sure that I have one. We could use something akin to the original possition (as per Rawls), in which I'm fairly sure that most people wouldn't chose Hobbes' society (unless they all went for extreme Maximax and hoped to be the soveriegn)... but then we could discount it from a realist stand as having too much abstraction and being a "covenant without the sword". Hobbes' arguement is internally consistent so long as you accept his reasoning on the nature of man (I know, it's pessimistic), although as for being more internally consistent than other theories (which I would say it is) could just be a function of the theory being rather limited in what it is proposing. Hobbes sets out what he thinks society will inevitably be like, why it is and why we shouldn't change it which takes far fewer steps than saying "society should be like this" and then trying to establish end states for all primary social goods.
But hey, I won't argue that good and bad are subjective - if values were just hanging around in the air they would be very queer things (to borrow a phrase). But I remain unconvinced that subjectivity of values actually damages the realist arguement; "sure this might be bad but it can't change", or at least won't, would seem to be the rallying call.
As for a synthesis of these views... maybe it might be better, I'm not too sure. I think we could easily create one which is far less liberal, maybe one day I'll give that a go - I have always fancied having a go at my own political theory, until then I think I'm sticking (largely) with Hobbes.
*I know that the law cannot stipulate a single person to be the object of a law (in Rousseau's terms), but the law could say all people with a specific disease must die and Mr. X could be the only person with that disease
I think your post was largely on topic, those messages seem obviously stupid and we would expect them to have no legal force, but why do we then have a system that acts like EULA and ToS (which are ostensibly the same thing) are legally binding forever?
If I was to send an e-mail to any company who used EULA ot ToS like these I might be tempted to add "Little did you know, but by reading this e-mail you have agreed to never use any silly EULA ever again, also all your software must now go open source... and give me £1million... and never tell anyone about this e-mail or discuss it with anyone, nor remember the words in it"
- I actually have had an e-mail from the BBC with an ending about as stupid as this... maybe they might have a legal force after all - the money will be rolling in!
whilst I agree that long term solutions are the best, like planting more trees or reducing the amount of carbon we emit, the problem has got really bad - a lot worse than most people care to think. We just physically won't be able to get the US/India/China to agree to cut their emissions by an appropriate amount between now and 2050, this could keep us going whilst we're waiting to get an agreement internationally.
very interesting, and I am indeed in my twenties, but I would say that the conclusions which I have reached on this are largely my own as a result of some fairly serious (and largely academic) thought... OK, I know that you can use the infinite regression argument, to say for example that I've obviously fallen for the elites hegemony such as that my ideational preferences have been shaped and I can't come to any rational conclusion. But assuming that the structural power of the elites isn't that high (I don't want to go over the top or, even down the positivist route) but I would argue that where we ourselves are concerned we can know our own choices pretty well.
Now, when I say the conclusions are largely my own I mean that of all that I have read in political philosophy (a large number of the major works from Hobbes to Nozick) I find Hobbes's account of the state and the good society the most appealing. Basically (I'm not sure the extent to which you've read Leviathan) the argument goes that before organization of society we were in the state of nature where people can do whatever they "listeth to whomever [they] listeth"*. Now, in this state the life of man is "nasty, brutish and short" and there is largely no high or civil society, because the fruits of any labour can't be guaranteed. The argument goes that because this is so bad we need to give up our rights to all things (most of the problem in the first place) to a single sovereign who will maintain the power of the state of nature and will be able to force order on people with a natural propensity to violence. I mainly see greater monitoring as an extension of the ability of the sovereign to maintain this order, and so long as they can stop me from being killed we should accept it. If the possibility of being killed becomes too high then we no longer have this obligation. If this reduces the possibility of being killed, or at least make sure that the killers get caught quickly and punished effectively then I'm far better off than I was in the state of nature. The monitoring under this view can't really go too far, because pretty much no matter what is done we're still better off than we would be without it. The fear is always that if you give too much liberty you can undermine the project and society will break down, to use a couple of Hobbes' examples when people are far from the sovereigns police then they are more likely to commit a crime (so we should bring the police to all people) and in response to the argument that they are treating everyone like criminals he suggests that by locking our doors (or chests) we do the same to all of humanity anyway, so the sovereign doing it shouldn't be a problem.
I've not been able to get as much down as I would like defending a lack of "civil liberties", but it might give you some idea of the basis of some of my ideas, and I can recommend reading leviathan, or if you're not so much into the 16th century writing style then you could get a book on political philosophy (of course you might be already fully versed in it and just believe in hegemony, which is fine too)
*maybe a simplification, being overly cruel is a matter of debate, although Hobbes does point that it might still be rational to kill over a something as small as "a word" about the wrong thing...
I think that your viewpoint is pretty typical of people actually who are in the UK, I am and it doesn't really bother me. A lot of Americans (who will be modding you down right about now) cannot understand how anyone could be happy in this situation because they have a tradition of being suspicious of government and put the right to privacy above many other benifits which might come from this kind of thing...
I'm not saying that any one view is better than another, although for my own part I think that it might help reduce crime by increasing the probability of getting caught and thus changing the pay-off matrix for the criminals, and up to a point it doesn't bother me (which I don't belive we will end up in as the slippery slope arguement tells us)... I actually think that the level that it could go up to is pretty high and I wouldn't be that bothered.
most people won't be that pleased though - but they will pretend to be, and that's what counts
As for advice, well, I prefer GNOME, I personally feel it's easier to work with and like that it feels like a more radical departure from what I've been using since '95 (ie. Windows 95-XP with the "start bar") - but some people would rather stick to something similar to what they know... I'd show them both, maybe get SLAX (a Live slackware with KDE) and something like a fedora live CD (yes, we have those now, and they can come with GNOME)... you know, just get them involved and making a choice.
What I want on my system after install (and I'm a fedora user so some of this might not be needed in the Ubuntu context...) would be mplayer, the DVD and mp3 codecs (we don't get them as standard), shutting off SSH (which "nicely" comes with remote root login set to yes), installation of a firewall, rkhunter (which is really good and should ideally go on as soon as you install - if you are as worried about rootkits as I tend to be) maybe ClamAV (although the extent to which it is really "needed" might be questionable), python (if it's not already on there - because it's just a matter of time until everyone uses it), the right drivers for hardware (but that's a given anyway)... and then just a tour of how to use it
I do think that if I gave it to people they would probably still use windows though, after all, they've already paid the tax
well, Apple should, it says "thus opening the possibility for Microsoft's Zune to enter the market", whilst I agree with the other point of the article that it doesn't mean MS WILL take over here it certainly leaves it being more likely than it would be if everyone was clearly aligned to Apple
A true classic game and pretty scary at times, when you get into the village for the first time when the locals have killed the cops - that was scary.
As was the bit where you have to kill the zombies who are chasing you and Ashley in the big truck, it's them getting you from behind that get me...
Oh! and when those walking things are suffling along in a really scary way and you can shot them all you want but they just don't seem to want to die...
almost... but you made one crucial error; "there's a good chance that they start producing higher quality videos more often"
Elephant Dreams did ok, a full length film made in that way could do really well and could make a little money, but it won't get as many hits as someone just making a really cheap video of themselves lighting a fart (...if anyone has a video of this, do post a link), not to mention the fact that I could make about 3000 of the really low quality type videos in the time really talented people could make another ED. What I'm trying to say is that I think this will lead to more really low quality videos which try and caputre a "funny" moment and then just send out thousands of links to it
Slashdot Mirror
The Walkman helped define a generation
Indeed it did, in the same way the iPod has done now. There is a lesson to Apple here about not taking customers and market share for granted.
well, as you say it was modded funny, which is a tad strange, anywho;
What you did was right, and maybe it caused you a little worry but it was for the best. Say you had those symptoms and thought (like most people tend to) it'll jkust go away, I'm sure its nothing. Say it had been cancer. By the time you found out it could well have been too late.
Even though you went through a bad patch, if it had been cancer it would have saved your life
So you should use it to maybe consult on, but never assume that you're able to give a right diagnosis - but always go get stuff checked out!
"preventing or hindering access to a program or data held on a computer, or impairing the operation of any program or data held on a computer"
I wouldn't take this to be not allowing anyone access to the data, and I'm convinced that no judge in the world would interpret it this way. I think that it largely is talking about preventing access from someone who is authorised to access the data. If the FSF is clever here they will bring private prosecutions against the companies who ship DRM trying to get CEOs put in prison over this - because I think that this is within what the law meant far more than what your line of arguement here is... With any new law of course this will need to be argued out, and it might get into the House of Lords if it really can't be settled (which at least would give us clarity on the matter). I wish Labour wouldn't bring in so many new laws each year that not even the lawyers can keep up with them
Well, I partly agree, but this doesn't mean that someone will get 5-10 years in prison for the crime, the judge has discresion over exactly what the sentence that is given is (I don't know how it works in the US, so this might be the same).
Also note that people are automatically released half way through a sentence on licence anyway. So assume that some kid gets caught for this and its his first time and he was just messing about with little mallice involved he'd probably a suspended sentence tops (which means if he doesn't commit another crime in a set period then he's not put in prison, if he does then he goes to prison for the length of time determined at the start), even if they gave a 5 year sentence he'd be out in 2.5... and don't forget 5 years is probably more than the average person would get for stabbing someone (I have seen it just be a fine for this... damn law)
Only if you RTFA ; )
Well I happen to like RPM and really want to see Red Hat do well; I'm a Fedora user.
Part of me knows I shouldn't be that worried because we know Fedora will always be free, they'd rather sink the distro than have to accept not being free, but the support from Red Hat is nice and I honestly think that Fedora would be worse without it.
Should Fedora ever fall I'd have to look at another distro but I'd have to look into which one is the next most free
Besides were all in it together and we all have a vested intrest in each others success, even if they use RPM.
Wouldn't this be really easy to prove, I would have thought that if this was the case it would make the moon notably hotter than the ambient temperature of space, so could they not just stick an infra-red camera at it and look to see if there is a difference?
I know I'm missing something but I'm not sure what...
"Chris: We're always evaluating and prioritizing the most important bugs"
...One thing I would have liked him to answer is about how the money comes in (I think its from the search bar in the top right) and how the mozilla team will be using the money within the community
I have to agree with this, working purely on time might make some stats look better, but security is by far the most important thing. It is also worth noting that people will put up with the odd clitch which might be caused by a bug, but not full blown security flaws which should have been fixed (I'm talking, obviously, about the non-MS IE users) might cause some people to look to Opera,epiphany or hell even Dillo (it is REALLY fast).
""We are a funding organisation that ships £90m around the world - the last thing you want to do is open up your systems to anybody to have a look at to deal with bugs," he said"...
Because of course its better to have JUST the black hats looking at the code... they'd never steal from a charity would they? I'm sure we can trust criminals. This is idiocy of the highest order. And then he goes on to say;
"But one of the things that we find is that Microsoft is viewed as the big, bad organisation - but they've actually got some good corporate social responsibility.
"If you're a charity or an educational institution, you pay pence in the pound for the licence, compared to what a major bank might pay."
He previously said that there were training costs because the staff didn't know how to use non-MS software, why can't he see that they do this as a way of enforcing their hegemony so that people HAVE to use their software. Freedom might not be free, but it is important
I have to disagree with you, from what I've read MS isn't going to allow linux to run MS products and everything will become standards compliant and everyone will be happy. This seems like they will allow SUSE to have a measure of intermingling use but NO other distro. They have always been in the past, and almost certainly will be in the future, openly hostile to FLOSS. Remember when the now CEO of MS said that it was like AIDS? (or some other virus, I forget)
So this should worry us, and getting rid of SUSE is what we should all be ready willing and able to do to support OSS
"I'd actually have more respect for these people if they said they'd be at home and masturbating continuously for the next 10 days."
Hey, I'm moving up in the world; more respected than 7 people!
This could be really useful in the UK, we are getting frightening low on water during the summer months to the point where we thought that we might have to go back to stand pipes. We would have the money to build something like this and the energy to heat the water (it needs to be pretty hot to do it) - I do wonder though if it would be practical for the very poor countries because of the requirements on the heat (although maybe solar could take care of that) and the cost of building them... I wonder if it will be prohibitavely high
also "One unit should be able to produce around 2000 cubic metres a day", that's pretty amazing.
Firstly the idea of each user having their own remote space is good in theory. This is actually something useful which comes with Vista... although there could be serious problems with it; how safe is it? I wouldn't be at all amazed if this was hacked about 3 seconds after the first user puts any files on this because people will refuse to use good passwords. But in principle its good. The T&Cs might change that. Everyone will have to move to IPv6 anyway at some time I think so we shouldn't be too worried about that
As for them pushing the update to Office 2007 - well, that's what they're in business for... I'm not amazed and I'm not disapointed.
It does feel a tad like M$ is going
"Nice distro... shame if something were to happen to it!"
They are obviously just being pretty petty over this, and I suppose that this could be harmful if they used it as a way of avoiding anti-trust rules, other than that I'm happy with my distro (fedora core 6) as it is without having to compromise with MS over my freedom - even, as with OpenBSD, I want to use it in a baby mulching machine (although that might be illegal for other reasons...)
Nethack is an ace game, I usually play as a male human neutral ranger, and over my few games I've gradually been getting deeper - so far I could win one award, well, I say award it is "Killed By A Trickery", which happened to me today... all the word text from pick ups got stuck on parts of the screen so I couldn't tell what was an enemy and then I was killed very slyly by something random like a cyote...
By the way, what is a good level to get to on nethack for a short game after having been playing for a little while?
I have read Roussea to some extent, I must admit, I did find some elements rather attractive within it. I like the notion of the General Will (and the notion that you can force someone to be free), I like his views on citizenship and how that fits into the ideas of the Roman city states. I dare even say that normatively it is an attractive theory, but I think that is about as far as it might go.
I think when application is concerned the theory would fail to be able to be manifested. Take one simple example, that if it is in the General Will that, say, Mr. X should die* he himself should be happy to do so - because if he refuses he is not being free and not following his own rules. I would argue that in reality people wouldn not accept this and would instead run off, leaving the law incapable of opperating effectively. There is also the issue about how long a law from the Gneral Will can last for, but this is more of an internal inconsistency...
So as a bit of a realist anyway I tend to feel that Hobbes' account fits far more into the intuitions which I have. As for a better metric for saying that one theory is "better" than another... I'm not sure that I have one. We could use something akin to the original possition (as per Rawls), in which I'm fairly sure that most people wouldn't chose Hobbes' society (unless they all went for extreme Maximax and hoped to be the soveriegn)... but then we could discount it from a realist stand as having too much abstraction and being a "covenant without the sword". Hobbes' arguement is internally consistent so long as you accept his reasoning on the nature of man (I know, it's pessimistic), although as for being more internally consistent than other theories (which I would say it is) could just be a function of the theory being rather limited in what it is proposing. Hobbes sets out what he thinks society will inevitably be like, why it is and why we shouldn't change it which takes far fewer steps than saying "society should be like this" and then trying to establish end states for all primary social goods.
But hey, I won't argue that good and bad are subjective - if values were just hanging around in the air they would be very queer things (to borrow a phrase). But I remain unconvinced that subjectivity of values actually damages the realist arguement; "sure this might be bad but it can't change", or at least won't, would seem to be the rallying call.
As for a synthesis of these views... maybe it might be better, I'm not too sure. I think we could easily create one which is far less liberal, maybe one day I'll give that a go - I have always fancied having a go at my own political theory, until then I think I'm sticking (largely) with Hobbes.
*I know that the law cannot stipulate a single person to be the object of a law (in Rousseau's terms), but the law could say all people with a specific disease must die and Mr. X could be the only person with that disease
I think your post was largely on topic, those messages seem obviously stupid and we would expect them to have no legal force, but why do we then have a system that acts like EULA and ToS (which are ostensibly the same thing) are legally binding forever?
If I was to send an e-mail to any company who used EULA ot ToS like these I might be tempted to add "Little did you know, but by reading this e-mail you have agreed to never use any silly EULA ever again, also all your software must now go open source... and give me £1million... and never tell anyone about this e-mail or discuss it with anyone, nor remember the words in it"
- I actually have had an e-mail from the BBC with an ending about as stupid as this... maybe they might have a legal force after all - the money will be rolling in!
whilst I agree that long term solutions are the best, like planting more trees or reducing the amount of carbon we emit, the problem has got really bad - a lot worse than most people care to think. We just physically won't be able to get the US/India/China to agree to cut their emissions by an appropriate amount between now and 2050, this could keep us going whilst we're waiting to get an agreement internationally.
very interesting, and I am indeed in my twenties, but I would say that the conclusions which I have reached on this are largely my own as a result of some fairly serious (and largely academic) thought... OK, I know that you can use the infinite regression argument, to say for example that I've obviously fallen for the elites hegemony such as that my ideational preferences have been shaped and I can't come to any rational conclusion. But assuming that the structural power of the elites isn't that high (I don't want to go over the top or, even down the positivist route) but I would argue that where we ourselves are concerned we can know our own choices pretty well.
Now, when I say the conclusions are largely my own I mean that of all that I have read in political philosophy (a large number of the major works from Hobbes to Nozick) I find Hobbes's account of the state and the good society the most appealing. Basically (I'm not sure the extent to which you've read Leviathan) the argument goes that before organization of society we were in the state of nature where people can do whatever they "listeth to whomever [they] listeth"*. Now, in this state the life of man is "nasty, brutish and short" and there is largely no high or civil society, because the fruits of any labour can't be guaranteed. The argument goes that because this is so bad we need to give up our rights to all things (most of the problem in the first place) to a single sovereign who will maintain the power of the state of nature and will be able to force order on people with a natural propensity to violence. I mainly see greater monitoring as an extension of the ability of the sovereign to maintain this order, and so long as they can stop me from being killed we should accept it. If the possibility of being killed becomes too high then we no longer have this obligation. If this reduces the possibility of being killed, or at least make sure that the killers get caught quickly and punished effectively then I'm far better off than I was in the state of nature. The monitoring under this view can't really go too far, because pretty much no matter what is done we're still better off than we would be without it. The fear is always that if you give too much liberty you can undermine the project and society will break down, to use a couple of Hobbes' examples when people are far from the sovereigns police then they are more likely to commit a crime (so we should bring the police to all people) and in response to the argument that they are treating everyone like criminals he suggests that by locking our doors (or chests) we do the same to all of humanity anyway, so the sovereign doing it shouldn't be a problem.
I've not been able to get as much down as I would like defending a lack of "civil liberties", but it might give you some idea of the basis of some of my ideas, and I can recommend reading leviathan, or if you're not so much into the 16th century writing style then you could get a book on political philosophy (of course you might be already fully versed in it and just believe in hegemony, which is fine too)
*maybe a simplification, being overly cruel is a matter of debate, although Hobbes does point that it might still be rational to kill over a something as small as "a word" about the wrong thing...
I think that your viewpoint is pretty typical of people actually who are in the UK, I am and it doesn't really bother me. A lot of Americans (who will be modding you down right about now) cannot understand how anyone could be happy in this situation because they have a tradition of being suspicious of government and put the right to privacy above many other benifits which might come from this kind of thing...
I'm not saying that any one view is better than another, although for my own part I think that it might help reduce crime by increasing the probability of getting caught and thus changing the pay-off matrix for the criminals, and up to a point it doesn't bother me (which I don't belive we will end up in as the slippery slope arguement tells us)... I actually think that the level that it could go up to is pretty high and I wouldn't be that bothered.
most people won't be that pleased though - but they will pretend to be, and that's what counts
As for advice, well, I prefer GNOME, I personally feel it's easier to work with and like that it feels like a more radical departure from what I've been using since '95 (ie. Windows 95-XP with the "start bar") - but some people would rather stick to something similar to what they know... I'd show them both, maybe get SLAX (a Live slackware with KDE) and something like a fedora live CD (yes, we have those now, and they can come with GNOME)... you know, just get them involved and making a choice.
What I want on my system after install (and I'm a fedora user so some of this might not be needed in the Ubuntu context...) would be mplayer, the DVD and mp3 codecs (we don't get them as standard), shutting off SSH (which "nicely" comes with remote root login set to yes), installation of a firewall, rkhunter (which is really good and should ideally go on as soon as you install - if you are as worried about rootkits as I tend to be) maybe ClamAV (although the extent to which it is really "needed" might be questionable), python (if it's not already on there - because it's just a matter of time until everyone uses it), the right drivers for hardware (but that's a given anyway)... and then just a tour of how to use it
I do think that if I gave it to people they would probably still use windows though, after all, they've already paid the tax
Call me a purist but a $15/month isn't "free" - no matter how you try and spin it, free is $0 a month, forever...
well, Apple should, it says "thus opening the possibility for Microsoft's Zune to enter the market", whilst I agree with the other point of the article that it doesn't mean MS WILL take over here it certainly leaves it being more likely than it would be if everyone was clearly aligned to Apple
A true classic game and pretty scary at times, when you get into the village for the first time when the locals have killed the cops - that was scary.
As was the bit where you have to kill the zombies who are chasing you and Ashley in the big truck, it's them getting you from behind that get me...
Oh! and when those walking things are suffling along in a really scary way and you can shot them all you want but they just don't seem to want to die...
almost... but you made one crucial error; "there's a good chance that they start producing higher quality videos more often"
Elephant Dreams did ok, a full length film made in that way could do really well and could make a little money, but it won't get as many hits as someone just making a really cheap video of themselves lighting a fart (...if anyone has a video of this, do post a link), not to mention the fact that I could make about 3000 of the really low quality type videos in the time really talented people could make another ED.
What I'm trying to say is that I think this will lead to more really low quality videos which try and caputre a "funny" moment and then just send out thousands of links to it