I'm not really interested in fairness and 'politcal correctness' towards Sony anymore. As far as I'm concerned Sony 'altered the deal' and is muttering that we should pray it alters it no further.

Unfortunately for Sony, as soon as you change one end of the bargain unilaterally, I feel no obligation to uphold any the deal from my end and so I feel no obligation towards Sony. None. Whatsoever.

(The fact that buying a PS3 was my first Sony purchase after the DRM fiasco and making me feel like a sucker now for slowly starting to trust them again has nothing to do with it. No. Really. ;p )

What he says. There's an XBMC android App that does most of what you want for A/V and I bet you can get apps for most home-automation systems if not now, then very soon :).

Just because he may be (or merely act) paranoid doesn't mean they're not really after him...

More to the point: is Amazon now Judge Dredd?

Oh who are we kidding, they're censoring bloody books. The ship to the new world sailed long ago... :P

I regularly do a pound of coke
Occaisionally even with a straw...

Lets turn that around then. You think it's wrong for an individual to put lives at risk on a few occaisions while claiming to do it for the greater good, but you think it's okay for a governement to kill innocent bystanders and call it 'unavoidable collateral damage'?

I'll take Julian over the US governement any time.

Last year in his speech at the Open World Forum in Paris, Mark was trying to convince people that more open source projects should get in lockstep with the Ubuntu six-month release cycle. I would be surprised if he had changed his mind so soon.

1) I'm not a 'yankee'. I'm European.
2) http://politics.slashdot.org/story/10/10/09/1750214/DC-Internet-Voting-Trial-Attacked-2-Different-Ways
3) The problems with the 2000 presidential elections were exactly what I was refering to, as the problems were with votes that were to be counted electronically. The fact that they were paper ballots makes no difference whatsoever.
4) Are you mad? Paper voting is more secure than electronic voting according to all people that have studied the subject in depth (see point 2). The only real proponents are manufacturers of electronic voting systems and lazy politicians and government employees who only look at the glossy folders made by said manufacturers. In the Netherlands they've reverted back to paper voting exactly because people in-the-know were able to fully convince the government electronic voting is unsafe.
5) What has the current government in Venezuela to do with this topic?
6) I agree completely that the US political system is a mess. They have to fix that for themselves. Making sure at least the voting results reflect reality is a different issue and needs to be taken seriously no matter what political system is in use.
7) With 'STFU' I meant to say: if you keep pushing electronic voting, don't come back and complain once it blows up in your face. You deserve all the negative fallout you get and then some for being too lazy to read up on the subject on your own and unwilling to look further than 'oooh, fast results'.
8) Sorry to hear about your annoying cousin. On the plus side, he might grow out of it. :)

Great point. Let me rectify my statement:

The chance that Brasil openly reverts to some form of dictatorship is quite a bit greater than the same thing happening in the US, or most western european states.

It's always nice to hear from citizens of budding democracies. Brasil has had a democratic government since 1985. A full 25 years. Take it from a citizen from an 'old' democracy, now over 160 years old: democracy needs defending. Always. Even if an electronic process works now, if people start to trust it someone can still take advantage of the flaws at a later moment. Lets do a small mental excercise:

- 2010, electronic elections are a complete succes. No fraud whatsoever.
- 2014, people welcome a new democratically elected leader only two hours after the close of polls.
- 2018, even though the democratically elected leader seems to have less support, he or she wins again, this time by a narrow margin
- 2022, the elected leader, now less popular than ever cannot run for president again. He, however, has a protege that is 'acceptable' to many Brasilians. Polls are uncertain if he will take the lead on election day. The president has managed to influence the electronic voting process in an unexpected and mostly covert way to get his protege into office. The president and the protege assure everyone the elections were democratic and honest, even though the difference with the nearest opponent was less than 2%... Are you sure your new president is truly the man the people wanted?

The funny thing? The US has demonstrated that even a small amount of 'automation' might lead to such results and we all know how that ended.

To summarize: STFU and go insist on paper ballots all the way or don't come and complain that your rights have been 'eroded' come next elections. The chance that Brasil reverts to some form of dictatorship is quite a bit greater than the same thing happening in the US, or most western european states.

*Head assplodes.*

These benevolent people at Adobe at least provide a bloody workaround?!

Why don't they fix the Linux flash player altogether? They're the ones, making it this crappy on Linux in the first place, aren't they?

Sorry, should've mentioned I actually believe it's turtles all the way down... :D

(Un)fortunately, the specific 'non-free' enhancements seem to be excluded. Groklaw has the inside:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100928224103271

Make what you will out of it, but OOXML may stay an outcast in Open^WLibreOffice for the foreseeable future.

Worse, what if our universe is one of a bunch of test-tubes in the drawer of some spotty-faced alien kid? Part of last years science project, now long forgotten about?

What if her mother walks in in a few minutes, finds it and cleanes it out... Will we even realise that our universe ends, never mind how or why?

(The kicker: religious people objecting to the fact that I had to make the alien kid female :P)

It doesn't matter. He did it by extending C-x M-c M-butterfly to include quantum-effects. As a result, all solutions will, by definition, be out-of-bounds.