This is where I always get so depressed. Not because some police chief wants more rules, but because of the way hordes of slashdotters once again start to spout shallow drivel about what they call "freedom" in an attempt to sound "deep".

First things first, though: when they talk about new rules and regulations, it is not because they imagine that everybody will suddenly be law-abiding, it is because it is not possible to prosecute people for breaking non-existent laws. That is why have sometimes seen people not being brought to justice for what everybody agrees were crimes: there was no law governing what they did. Why have the bank executives that brought about the financial crisis not been put in jail? Because their crimes were not covered by law. This is part of the price we pay for living in a society where the law protects us from random arrests etc.

Next, those who are shouting the loudest about grand principles are also the ones who are least likely to actually know what they are talking about. Anybody, who actually thinks about freedom, will know that freedom is self-limiting. If there were no rules, the strongest bullies will grab as much as they can for themselves and impose their will on others - and that's all the freedom you will ever see.

All in all, instead of talking immature nonsense, go out and take part in the democratic debate - that is where we try to reach the compromises that all laws and rules must be.

No matter how much an expert anybody is, it will always be easy to catch them out; a competent interviewer knows that it is not actually essential if the candidate doesn't know by heart what all the port numbers in /etc/service are used for, or what packet headers you will expect to find in an HTML packet or whatever. It is not only the candidate that loses out because of stupid interviewers, the company also risks not getting the best person for the role.

I think most people are capable of finding their own of using their own computer - if the interface is not actually built to impose things on the user. I used to like GNOME in the beginning, and I stayed with it even when it began to annoy me and I had to reconfigure things in major way; but I decided to leave when they started removing genuinely useful features that I used (like the little pop-up that shows window geometry when you move or resize) and then hard-coded into the thing that you can't log on to a desktop as root.

I am well aware of the security issues involved, and one can discuss the wisdom in logging in as root, but that is beside the point. The decision about that kind of things is mine to make on my own system, it is not the prerogative of some smart-ass to dictate. Any desktop is just a tool, and a tool should not get in the way of what you are trying to do, it should enable you.

And that brings me back to UI design: a good user interface enables you to do the things you want, it may guide you towards doing things with a certain measure of discipline, but at the end of the day, the designer must respect the free choice of the user.

Well, there are some things that it could be handy to have remote access to - like parking spaces - which it is not practical to have with IP4, but the big danger is the endless idiocy and frivolous crap that is inevitable going to swamp us. We've seen it over and over - television, this great tool for mass communication, and now it is 99% worthless entertainment for those hard of thinking. Then the PC and the internet: same thing. And the "internet of things" is going to be mostly hideous idiocy as well, which is a shame, because it could be a good thing.

Sometimes one gets the feeling that when the 'standing on the shoulders of giants' is rolled out like this, it actually means 'Standing on our toes'. We shouldn't begrudge them their success - I know you aren't, but others do.

It is great, in my opinion; space exploration has been stalled for too long, and if we can get to the point where everybody does it, I'm all for it. It would be great if going in to space was no more unusual than what flying out to China is now.

We have again landed in a situation where it is necessary to fight a war; and it IS necessary, much as I hate it. But war will never win us peace - unless we can completely eradicate everybody who opposes us, we will always create new enemies for ourselves. To win a lasting peace, we must convince at least the majority of our opponents that we are their friends. In this case the people who support "Islamic State" simply because they see us as their enemies.

Islamic State and other terrorists can attract young men and women from the West, simply because we make it so easy to hate us. History is one factor in this, but it's not the biggest part - Germany have managed to move past their history, so it is not impossible. Perhaps what we need to realise is that we seem to be so incredibly satisfied with ourselves - we have rolled crusades over the Middle East, we have dictated their rules and exploited them for their resources, we regard Islam with contempt and distrust, and so on. Are we not great enough to change our ways? It may not be easy, but it is a lot easier than making people like us by insulting them; and it mostly involves thinking a little before we speak - like, stop using the word 'crusade' like it was something to be proud of. 'Crusade' is just our word for 'Jihad'.

Here's a TLA for you: FUD. Most countries in the West could in principle do the same, and forbid foreign investors in national companies - and the reasons they don't do it are the same that tell us that China wouldn't do this either. They are, as I think I may have mentioned in the past, not idiots.

But that is perhaps less likely - a farming culture is more sedentary, and therefore less like to go out on raids - although they could be looking for more farming land, of course. Interesting. Good point.

Lies are never acceptable, of course; but I think we have to give a little bit of leeway. It is a very emotionally charged issue for the victims of discrimination.

I expect most people's view on homosexuality is similar to yours; I used to think the same way, but as I have grown older, I have become better informed and less scared of it. What I find helpful is to keep in mind that people are gay, not because they make An Evil Choice, but because they are genuinely attracted to their own sex and digusted by the opposite - probably exactly the way heterosexuals feel attracted by the opposite and repulsed by their own. Gay men are no more ravening, sexual monsters than heterosexual men, and just like men and women can be friends in an un-sexual way, the same hold for gays and heterosexuals. Why would it be any other way?

Just to represent another side to the argument, and because I like getting modded down for expressing my opinion - I don't think Oracle deserves ALL the flak it gets. Just to make it clear - I work for them as an engineer, so I may come with a certain bias, but I also have more actual insight than most on /.

Firstly, I don't think anybody can deny that Oracle RDBMS is top notch; I have worked with many other databases - MS SQL Server, Informix, DB2, MySQL, and I still prefer Oracle. The documentation is better than what you get from the competition. DB2 is the only one that comes close. Plus, you can legally download even Oracle Enterprise Edition for free and use it for development and testing. I think it is excellent.

Secondly, Oracle was amongst the first of the big companies to come out in support of Linux with version 8 of their database. I think that was before IBM came out with an official port of Linux to their mainframe. To me that counts for a lot in terms of street cred.

Thirdly, in my experience Oracle is a very decent company to work for. They are not hugely generous, but they have some good benefits and I feel valued as an employee. I don't whether Larry Ellison is good or bad; I don't expect to find out for myself, but so far I have no complaints.

The fact is that we have too little evidence to guide us, and we can all speculate to some extent. My favourite, based on nothing more than my own wishful thinking, really, is that dark matter consists of not just 1 kind of particle, but of a whole 'phylum' (to borrow a word from biology) of particles that interact with themselves much like the particles we know; there may be several phylums (or phyla, if you prefer). The reason I like the idea is simply that it allows me to fantasize about a kind of parallel universe that we can't see - even life; a sort of ghost universe. Wouldn't that be cool :-) ?

Did you read the original article rather than just skim over it? One of the surprises is that there is a third component in European ancestry. Another surprise is that the blue eyes apparently came with dark skin and the lighter skin colour came with brown eyes.

The third interesting thing is that two of our lineages are very old, but a third contribution came in around 7000 years ago, just at the same time as agriculture. It makes sense, IMO - agriculture meant that this particular group became dominant and thus contributed disproportionately more to the gene pool in a relatively short time.

If you want to post goatses as a surprise to people, don't do it in slashdot, because

1. We have all seen him enough times to find him a bit trivial,
2. The way slashdot presents links gives it away by attaching [goat.cx]

I would recommend Linux- perhaps Ubuntu - certainly if they have no previous experience that has clouded their minds to believe that Windows is the only possible choice. If they must have Windows, I would suggest that you install Linux + a VM with Windows in it, and configure it to log in and start the VM automatically. The reason being that you can then create a backup copy of the Windows disk and leave it somewhere on the Linux disk. This is for when Windows inevitably gets so infected that it doesn't work, at which point you shut the VM down and restore it to its original, freshly installed state.

(hmm, come to think of it - would it work? I have never actually done it; there may be problems with the activation code or something)

This issue keeps being pushed from time to time, but I am not at all convinced that there really is a good justification. It's not that I'm a luddite - or, I hope that I'm not - but introducing technology that doesn't solve a problem is idiotic - like eating oysters despite disliking them, simply because it is a luxury. I can see the use of being able to find free parking spaces in real time - that would be very useful - or having cheap, networked sensors measuring things like temperature, wind speed etc. But other things I have heard of - like being able to check what's in your fridge over your smartphone - that just solves problems that we don't have.