damn, I was too late... :-)

thousands of slashdotters racking their brains right now...

Jesus, that is such a cynical calculation. The righteousness of it makes me gag.

The U.S. was effectively hidden behind an ocean. No enemy soldier ever entered U.S. soil. No enemy bomb ever fell on any of your cities.

Had the Axis ever invaded the U.S. - or Great Britain, for that matter - the death toll would have been far higher.

Also, the Americans and Brits didn't give shit about *enemy* civilians, carpet bombing german cities to stone age.

You might have a moral high point in respect to the Germans, but not to Soviet Russia.

BTW, I'm a German. From what I learned and heard from our grandfathers, the Russian war effort was what toppled the Nazis, not the western front. This might be wrong, but at least I do not have any reason to be biased to either side.

The wealth of the first world is based to quite some extend on exploiting the third.

Of course not exclusively. We also have democracy, liberal rights, free trade, private property... But to some extend we owe them for the cheap resources, for the cheap labor and for the fact that they buy all our nice weapon systems.

You also can read this another way.

The proclaimed issues of the PP were important enough for two percent of the population to actually vote for a small party, well knowing that PP probably does not make it into the government and their votes would be lost, somewhat.

But the actual percentage of population being p**d off at the german government for these reasons is probably far higher, otherwise FDP and green party both would not have gained so much votes.

I disagree,

the people I know who voted for the Pirate Party voted for other reasons.

Internet censorship, surveillance, freedom of speech - the fact that the current german government does not care a rats ass for any civil rights. This brought far more people onto the streets than pirating music; reducing them to that does them injustice. .. oh, I got it. You were just trolling, were you?

... stopped reading after the headline...

Just a pity that the OS sucks so much.

Honestly, I have done quite some windows programming and always thought it better than its reputation. But I always hated developing for Windows Mobile. It felt to me like the most neglected corner of Windows Development. Confusing and contradicting documentation, a toolchain that was a pain, a totally over engineered syncing process (ActiveSync). Part of the .NET toolchain does not work... I could go on and on.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Pirate_Party

This may not sound much, but it is actually pretty good for a new and totally unknown party with a scary name. Hopefully the aims of the party (internet Censorship, civil rights etc) will now get some public attention.

If it comes thinly disguised as a news article at slashdot, it annoys me.

My girlfriend just bought a new laptop and, not wanting to spend money on Windows Vista, installed Ubuntu on it.

She is a pretty normal user (what you would call a slightly above average Windows user), but she was amazed at Ubuntu. She got almost everything to work, and those things which would not work out of the box fired her up to get it to work.

Mostly she liked the all-around-friendly atmosphere of Ubuntu, the decidedly non-elitistic image, the helpful community. Also the fact that Ubuntu is pretty gorgeous helped.

For me it seems that the few problems she fought with had to do with missing drivers and video codecs. Also, for a new user, the package system takes some getting used to.

Just a plug for the Phoronix Test Suite?

maybe I am ignorant, so please enlighten me.

What shortcuts do you mean?

On the command line? Not counting tab completion, which still forces me to remember at least the start of the ridiculous path name?

six years of development and a console to show....

no shit. I wince every time I have to type a path with "Documents and Settings". ..

speaking of "wince" (aka windows ce), that was not so good either...