Certainly not the new version 2.0 "release" of the United States that exists today...the one where one is now automatically guilty until proven innocent.

I want to be very clear on this statement, on behalf of GNU Telephony. It is not simply that we will choose to openly and publicly defy the imposition of such an illegitimate law, but we will explicitly continue to publicly develop and distribute free software (that is software that offers the freedom to use, inspect, and modify) enabling secure peer-to-peer communication privacy through encryption directly to the public worldwide as it is needed especially in nations, such as the United States, where basic human freedoms seem most threatened.

To fully understand the nature of such surveillance and societies, imagine being among several hundred million people who each wake up each day having to prove they are not a "terrorist" by whatever arbitrary means the government has decided to both define the terms of such a crime and whatever arbitrary means they might choose to define you as such. It is a society who's very foundation is built on the idea of everyone being guilty until proven innocent. It is the imposition of an illegitimate society, and one that probably will ultimately require a revolutionary response.

David Alexander Sugar
Chief Facilitator
GNU Telephony

There has always been a scheme to truly learning computer science, and it is spoken of with a lisp...

I imagine it is quite possible that Hercules is the primary reason there is both S/390 linux kernel arch support and packages tested and running for the platform, and GNU/Linux support on these mainframes is something that IBM has also made real money selling.

There is a concept in the U.S. constitution already for such circumstances. If they are acting against people in or of the United States, it is called Treason, Section 3, Article 3, "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court. The Congress shall have power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted."

One thing we learn from this is that treason (and perhaps even so called "enemy combatants") is the exclusive domain of the congress, not the executive branch. We also learn there remains specific due process rights U.S. citizens have even if they choose to take up arms against the United States. Now, if some U.S. citizen is "employed in the service of enemies of this Republic on foreign soil", but his or her actions do not involve waging war against the United States (or citizens of), then the matter is one for the laws of the nation involved to handle, not the United States. Or do you similarly suggest that the Chinese government should be allowed to try and execute dissidents in the United States if they choose? Perhaps Chinese drones should be allowed to freely roam American skies looking for those they decide are enemies of their state too? If one state claims this right to act lawless without it being repudiated, then all states by extension can certainly claim to do the same.

First there are plenty of USB-serial converters, so the lack of old-school DB9 serial ports on laptops is entirely a non-issue.

Also, some devices I see are already offering serial console access over USB, basically simulating I imagine what a USB-serial converter looks like, so if you plug into the device, you get USB-serial console access without the need of converting to serial and then having a serial cable. Also, USB carried serial consoles can operate at higher speeds than traditional rs232 cabling allowed, which should address firmware updates, as well as offering other means, such as USB access to real or simulated filesystems over the same USB port as a multi-device hub.

So the short answer, I see, is that the serial console is not "going away", but rather is slowly migrating to USB.

The problem is that corporations are legal fictions which seem to have been given all of the rights of real people, but with NONE of the consequences or responsibilities. Freedom without responsibility is social destruction.

Actually the whole purpose of modern military training is precisely to psychologically condition people to kill. Back in the "old" days (ww2), in a typical battle only 15% might actively participate. By the time of the Mai Li massacre the use of psychological conditioning had already brought kill rates up to 85%.

Besides the ease of which it enables civilian massacres and war crimes, from Mail Li to Falluja, the other problem with psychological conditioning is that soldiers are discharged cheaply, but there is no immediate "off" switch to such training. But governments care not, for it is not part of the military budget to also return people sanely to civilian life. Some end up in violent incidents and hence the result is damage in the civilian population, but many choose to kill themselves. Just as one example, the suicide death rate for U.S. soldiers who had served in Iraq is actually higher than the battlefield casualty rate! That is more soldiers kill themselves than die in battle today.

The problem is often not that soldiers will not kill civilians, such as to protect an unpopular leader. The problem rather is that most nations cannot afford the psychological conditioning and training needed to maintain a force that will, certainly on a large scale. This was the dilemma faced for example by the Chinese government at Tiananmen Square, who back then did not have the resources to condition a military that completely, though eventually they found units from the countryside who had no connection to the region that would kill.

War robotics can however do more than simply remove people (who may still control them) from combat. It can be used to remove people from knowledge of who is being killed and why, particularly useful when using such troops in local suppression. Imagine if they are told they are fighting a terrorist group in the midst of a city in Afghanistan, with all the audio falsely altered so the language people are speaking no longer sounds English, and the video feeds scrubbed of other identifying features, when in reality they are controlling robots suppressing a domestic protest in Detroit? Of course, if people are no longer needed to control them, then even this issue is eliminated. In this, I agree an AI that follows orders without conscience would be the very best friend of a modern police state.

Whatever you have ever said or done will continue to be used against you for the rest of your life. That is the world this kind of thinking creates. It creates fear to think or act. Privacy is ultimately about liberty.

Hmm...so you may not even know you have been banned....the great Internet wall of Britain?

I have come to think of KDE this way also. It is however different in one other important respect; KDE also tries to offer a cross-platform framework for KDE applications, which in it's own way makes it interesting. That being said, I think there is also room for a (lighter weight) GTK desktop environment based on traditional Unix and X design principles, especially given how easy it is to now run GTK apps under KDE. I am just not sure yet if that is going to be XFCE4, LXDE, or both, but that future is already likely not GNOME. However, GNOME, without GNU, is really GNOME with M, and that means it is GONE ;).

Yet it seems to be the center of this new gnome shell :). With it in the middle of the panel, it ultimately limits what can be done with the "panel", if it is still that underneath...

Application switching and taskbar; Ubintu Netbook remix (UNR), which this seems derived from, actually gets it right and best. Using just icons, one for each app, expanding along the top panel, it is both easy to switch and takes up far less real estate than the old taskbar, making it effective to converge on a single taskbar. Just give it the functionality to close, minimize, etc, by right clicking on the application icon, and have it open a "normal" window rather than automatic maximize with the titlebar in the panel, and the underlyng logic of UNR already accomplishes most of what is needed for a "new" gnome shell, with more functionality easily accessible, and with a very similar look. Indeed, it means gnome desktop and netbook could then converge on many common interface elements rather than this new and rather ugly thing. No pager? Sure, let's go back to the 1980's in desktop functionality, or have a castrated desktop experience, like typically on Microsoft Windows. The only thing that could reduce desirability even further from what I have seen so far would be to make it depend on Mono.

Activity: this may be okay, it clearly takes some getting used to, but to me it overloads different functionality. Hopefully it can be done with a icon rather than the long text on the panel, that way one could also park some launch icons for favorite apps, followed of course by an icon version of taskbar and of course time de-throned from the center. That is what I would want to see.

Any law which does not offer universal access to those claimed to be subject to it should not have universal jurisdiction over said population. A very simple quid pro quo. If you have to pay to know the law, it only can be applied to those who paid :).

That is because most Libertarians association freedom with greed rather than freedom with responsibility.