Yes, you are aware of the fact that you're buying a crippled system...

I also live in Germany, and can share your view 100%: nobody is concerned here. I wonder however, if the reason is just because they don't understand the implications. For the regular person, this looks just like "they are doing something to fight child porn, and since child porn is bad and they're fighting it, it must be OK". The only way to change this situation is to get people to understand what's really going on, and that's a big challenge because the issues are not only complex but often highly technical.

Probably, the real problem is that achieving this requires really good communication skills, and this is something we geeks don't excell at. Looking around /., I see that many regular contributors here have an absolutely condenscending attitude towards "average Joes". But when dealing with issues such as this, which are essentially political, it is mostly average Joes who cast the votes, so you'd rather take them seriously and find a way to communicate with them.

Until we understand this and act accordingly, we'll continue to see the decisions we care about being made in the wrong direction by clueless or even ill-intentioned politians.

Do you have concrete examples to mention? Are you sure that those examples are comparable to Germany and other European countries?

Well, the point is precisely that wikis are there for specific purposes. As long as you write about the topics that are relevant for a particular wiki, it is OK to use its bandwidth, but any reasonable person can expect that the owners won't be as happy if the wiki is used for purposes not intended by them. In this sense, the bandwith is actually restricted. Not technically restricted, but ethically restricted, if you will.

There are many comments here reporting that Linux netbooks are becoming impossible to buy. It seems to be the same here in Germany: I haven't seen a single Linux netbook in a brick and mortar store until now.

My impression now is that hardware manufacturers were never serious about Linux netbooks. They were just bluffing so that Microsoft would lower its prices, that's all. Now that microsoft bent its knees, they are happily going back to Windows, which is known territory for them. This explains the lack of advertising for the Linux models, as well as the low quality of the Linux distros preinstalled on many netbooks. Of course, as long as you're just bluffing, any investments into Linux integration are just a waste of resources, so you keep them to a minimum.

On the flip side, TFA shows that Microsoft is realizing that they now own the market, so they'll probably soon start to impose their onereous conditions again. It's indeed interesting times we're living...

Criticism has a value, though. User interface design is a good example of an area where users rarely have good suggestions, or at least, not immediatly after suffering the problem. The designer must find out what the problem is (sometimes by inferring it from the suggested solution) and then try to come up with a good solution that doesn't break the original design altogether. In this sense, users that are good at pointing out where the problems are are potentially better than those who make quick suggestions. The first group is likely to work together with the designers in finding a satisfactory solution, whereas the second group may be much more inclined to defend their own solutions, however inappropriate.

10% is a larger market share than OSX has in the general desktop market. I definitely wouldn't call it a failure.

The project is indeed sponsored by Google. See the last question in their FAQ.

You're saying it yourself: depending on the type of code. Psycho may achieve impressive speedups for certain algorithms, but the gains are not has high in general. These guys are aiming at speeding all Python code up by a factor of about five, which would be far from insignificant if they suceeded.

Pypy is an interesting project. Unfortunately, though, they are progressing very slowly.

You may be right here. Only time will tell.

Although I generally agree with your point of view, I notice you seem to think that the kid was just "psychologically sick" and the whole tragedy happened because his strange illness somehow moved him to wake up one day, take the bus to his old school, and kill 12 people there with a pistol.

I would rather say he was horribly bullied during the years he spent in that school, and this is what actually motivated him to do what he did. This is another problem that seems to be common in schools here in Germany, and that will also be utterly ignored by both media and politicians whenever such a discussion comes up.

Sad state of things, indeed.

Can you be more specific? What gives you the impression that the security models are actually different?

This sounds like a good idea. What about filing an Ubuntu bug for that?

Hmm, gksudo works fine here. That said, it is not recommended to run GUI applications as root, so avoid it if possible.

Would it hurt to spend some time trying to understand how the UNIX file system works? Apparently so...

This stuff is not intended for naive users; it never was. Still, the rules are very clear and not at all difficult to understand, but you have to put some effort into that.

I'm feeling generous today, I'll give you a formula:

cd /etc/X11
gksudo gedit xorg.conf

And, besides, what the heck are you doing with your system that you have to edit xorg.conf that often?

Is it better in Windows? Whenever I have to suffer a Windows command line, I find navigation deeply unnerving, but this is off-topic. Look, I've been using the Unix command line regularly since the early 90s. And you know what I do when I have to find my way arround a large file hierachy? I open a nautilus window (often issuing 'nautilus .' from the command line, so that it opens where I'm standing), and navigate to where I want to go. But, anyway, if you you are so adamant about doing everything from the command line, tab completion is your friend, use it!

'man bash' is your friend here, but, as I said, I'm feeling generous today:

set -P

will solve your problem. And, again, "gksudo nautilus"? Where does your obsession with running everything as root come from? Windows, maybe?

What do you call "find feature" and what do you want to do with it? I would point you to the find and locate commands, but they may or may not fit your needs.

Sorry to say this, but I fear you'll have to learn how the shell works in order to use it effectively. If you really really want to learn (and you seem to) my recommendation to you is to read "The Unix Programming Environment" by Kernighan and Ritchie. It's an old book, but it explains the UNIX philosophy better than anything else I know, and I bet most of the examples there will still run properly on any modern Linux system.

What you're seeing the is not the MIME handling for the most part, but problems with the implementation of nautilus.

Fascinating, indeed! Q. Why is it that I do things similar to those you describe on a daily basis without running into trouble? A. Because I know what I'm doing, of course!. Once again, spend an hour or two reading about the UNIX file system, it will be worth it. I bet you just attempted the operations on directories (this is how "folders" are called here in Unixland) for which you don't have write permissions. And the reason you don't have write permissions is in order to prevent you from messing up your system, which is what you seem to desperately be trying to do right now.

Why did you do that? Typing "fennec ubuntu" into Google led me to this forum thread where someone is kindly maintaining an Ubuntu repository for Fennec, so that you don't have to trash your /usr/share directory by installing it manually. By the way, if you install stuff from hand, do it under /usr/local. Everything else belongs to the distribution and should never be touched if you want to keep it running.

You seem to be surprised by the fact that you're now dealing with an entirely different system, and seem to desperately want to make it fit into the Windows model you have in your head. I don't blame you for that, but accepting that you're now working with something different and dedicating some time to really learning it may actually be the path of less resistance.