I assume he'll take a cut of any judgments in favor of the Class Action lawsuit. The paperwork I signed with him so he would take my case says that I will owe him a fixed fee (which is quite low) the case is lost... and loosing.. who knows. It seems unlikely given the reputation of the shady law firm trying to extort money, and how far the case appears to have progressed so far.

I'm in the middle of a lawsuit now.

I received a letter from a scummy law firm in another city. They blitzed the city I live in... more than 10,000 letter sent out apparently. They had "proof" in the form of an IP address that was apparently assigned to my account at my ISP and a P2P log showing that someone at that IP apparently downloaded a movie made by the production company they were representing. I've never heard of the movie. I go look it up on IMDB... it appears to be some terrible low quality, low budget SciFi that no one watched... ever. I certainly had never heard of it, and I never downloaded it.

The law firm was demanding money. If I didn't pay up the "I'm guilty" fee, then they said I'd be taken to court and sued for 10's of thousands. I called a lawyer who is well known for defending this sort of crap. He looked at the letter I received, immediately recognized it, and said.. IU know these guys, let me add you to the big pile of people I'm representing on this same threat and I'll make it go away. That was over 2 years ago...

I have had two letters from him informing me what's going on. Basically he said that this rogue law firm was full of crap, that there was now a Class Action suit open against them and they had a fixed period to reply... the law firm never said a word, so now the second letter said that it's going to court with more than 1000 people being represented... but it could take years for it to reach an end. Basically he said.. don't worry about it, it'll be tied up in the courts for years and it's not cost me a cent.

Freedom and not part of the system means you end up living rough.. sleeping in a tent under a bridge.. sleeping on a bench in a U-Bahn station... going hungry.. begging for food. Registering gives you a bed, food, clothes.. some dignity.. and a way out of the mess you're in.

Living in Germany means you are (generally) indexed and catalogued. When you move into a new house/apartment, you are required to unregister from your old address and register as living at your new address. They know everything about you. Walk into your local immigration office to do a renewal of your residence/work permits and they will have all your info on file even if you never went to that office before (personal experience).

The stupid part is, there is a place for them all to go in Germany. There is a whole infrastructure in place to help them out... a dry warm place to live (albeit basic and not luxurious by any stretch of the imagination, but it beats sleeping rough on a U-Bahn floor), food, medical. There is no valid excuse except maybe that they are so far gone they don't care anymore, or they are illegals.. and as such are not in the system... being IN the system in Germany is critical.

So.. move them. That is 100% user configurable.

You're stuck in the dot zero version myth... dot zero means NOTHING. I've been dealing in software development since.. oh.. the mid 80's and never not once has dot zero meant anything other than "the next release". People like to inflate the dot zero or dot one release.. hype it up as the next big thing in the release of thier software, but it could just as easily been a whole number release. Attributing anything special to a dot six release over a dot zero release is just buying into the myth.

Mine does... sort of (the VDSL provider I use). They sell my connection based on a minimum average speed. They state I will get 100/10 Mbit, and I rarely get under that.. usually it's at least 120/20 whenever I test it.

On the mobile side, there are no speed guarantees... just that there will be a connection, and I was explicitly told (and had to initial that part of the contract) how much data I could consume per month before bandwidth throttling took place. There is no hidden mystery. The mobile providers are required by law to make it clear and obvious what you're getting when you sign that contract.

I second this.

I seriously do not understand the whole DEB vs RPM hatred. I use both Ubuntu and openSUSE (among other distros) and apt-get vs zypper... I see ZERO difference in usability for the user from the Command Line. They are so close as to be identical. If you look to the GUI side... Ubuntu uses Synaptic and/or the Software Centre... and while they are different than YaST (with its different QT and GTK interfaces), they do the same task equally well.

openSUSE repos are VERY complete. It's a rare app you can find in the Ubuntu repos that isn't in the openSUSE (either official or community repos)... I can think of... 2 and average user might want... Skype (but a download from the website is available) and SopCast (but you can get it from a user repo).

openSUSE's KDE4 release is rock solid. It's very close to upstream, and the openSUSE devs work directly with the KDE guys. You can add the KDE upstream repo (for example) and have access to the latest stable upstream builds of KDE... I'm running KDE4.8.0 right now and plan on moving to 4.8.1 soon... and updating is a couple of clicks in the software manager.

As someone who uses Linux in many variations at home and at the office, as a desktop OS, a server OS, and even playing with it on my tablet... openSUSE comes out on top almost all the time... it's fast, reliable and an excellent blend of high end server and desktop config.

Ummm what? London is a country? Errr...

Not anymore. You REALLY are behind the times. Oracle dropped OpenOffice.org and StarOffice in the middle of April 2011. They put the entire staff of the Hamburg Germany office (where 99% of the paid OOo developers worked) on paid leave until they sorted out the layoffs. The layoffs officially started around September 2011.

During that same period, Oracle worked with the Apache Foundation to turn over the stewardship of OOo to Apache.... this has... not gone so well... mainly because almost all of the developers, previously paid and otherwise left to go work on LibreOffice. OOo development has stalled and stagnated, while LibreOffice development is going on at a rate that is far above what it saw when Sun was controlling things.

As of now, there are zero paid OOo developers in the same sense as there were during the period when Sun Microsystems was around. There are a few people (like IBM employees) who are paid to work on OOo, but it's very minimal compared to how it was between 2000 and 2010.

Clearly you are clueless... it was actually funny to read your trolling comment.. I actually laughed out loud at your uninformed rant.

I wonder how many years ago it was that you actually used Linux.

A few minor points... Linux is NOT Gnome shell... MP3 support is available from install, ie without searching for anything... standard webcams that use UVC (as in all current consumer grade webscams) work without the user needing to do anything other than plug it in... who installs Skype from a Windows CDROM? Seriously? Are you really that stupid?

I think at this point I'll stop. Each and every one of your points seem to come from a big pile of FUD that you're wallowing in. Nothing you stated about Linux was true... it's not a perfect OS, but... you are seriously misinformed about it.

I run it on an EEE Netbook.. and it's no problem at all. It's responsive and quite usable. Granted it may not be equal to a hot-rod desktop, but it certainly not so slow as to be in the way. It simply works and does a nice job of it too.

Specs: Asus EEE PC 1005HA-M, 2GB RAM, running openSUSE 12.1 with KDE4.8

1. I still say.. Nepomuk is core part of the desktop.. removing it is purposely crippling the desktop. You're basically chopping the legs off... but.. that's fine.. it'll continue to work without it.
2. Window glow? Meh.. it's theme based. I never use the default theme (which seems to be used to show what's possible vs what's usable) Oxygen is a nice dark theme...
3. You are a rare one who only wants one button (which is prob why Gnome is appealing)... but as you discovered... easy to tweak.
4. ...
5. You can change it... you're just seeing the default. Add a exit/shutdown widget/button to the panel... one click then. Change the countdown on the shutdown dialog to zero... although, again, you're crippling useful capabilities if you set it to zero.
6. Dolphin toolbar is evolving... it's much less in KDE4.8 (you're using 4.7.2 on a default openSUSE 12.1 install) with most extra functionality moved under the menu button (spanner icon)
7. Change it to double click then... Dolphin configuration setting.
8. Change it... it's in the KDE configuration
9 Easy to set

Basically 100% of what you want is possible out of the box with the exception of the cashew hiding, and that can be done with an addon... an will hopefully be do-able in a future KDE release.

An interesting aside... did you know that you can make your own spin of KDE using SUSE Studio? Since you haev non-standard needs for your desktop, you can actually build that specific desktop and create your own custom iso (technically it's a custom distro) using the web interface in Studio.

For a completely blank background with no objects at all... leave the default desktop style, remove the wallpaper and set the background color to black, and remove the Desktop Folder widget (click the X on the flyout). That should leave you with nothing there.. and if you put files into /home/$USER/Desktop, they will NOT show on the desktop.

If you notice Nepomuk running beyond the first couple minutes of the very first boot (unless you have it indexing multiple gigabytes/terabytes of data), it should be 100% unnoticeable - as in.. you shouldn't have to disable it. Wit it enabled you get really good desktop search functionality, and meta data can be shown for all files/objects in Dolphin (eg full meta data for images, multimedia etc).

There is a but report (somewhere) open requesting the ability to set transparency or autohide the cashew (ie it stays hidden until you need it)... I don't know the progress on this one though as I haven't been following it.