And to reply to Cringley's comments on identity theft, if everyone put their foot down and *forced service providers to stop using unchangeable, researchable authenticators like SSNs and Maiden names, all of that problem would dry up in a heart beat.

"Press hard, you are making 6 million copies."

Naw; Godwin's Law concerns *comparisons* to Hitler and Nazis. If you're *actually talking about them for a reason*, it trips out, to avoid a recursive black hole in the fabric of the Universe.

ILS receiver antennas aren't "hidden inside the passenger compartment".

They're "attached to the outside of the friggin airframe".

Any story that gets the details that wrong, that fast, receives no credence at all. And if airplanes are having this much trouble with my 2mw iPad, what the *hell* are they doing about getting hit by 2GW of lightning?

(And don't tell me "Faraday cage"; that protects the occupants, but not necessarily the things connected to antennas outside the cage.)

I'm fairly certain this gent has a 42USC1983 claim against all of the individual officers involved, and I *certainly* hope he's taking advice on that point.

Not with a Slashdot ID with that many digits in it, you can't... :-)

Basic statistics: ~10% of the desktop audience is on a Mac, well under 5% on Linux. So *by definition*, people coming to KDE as their first Linux desktop are coming there from Windows.

Yes, yes, he doesn't actually say that in the quote, per se, but he implies it, and you accept it in your reply.

So the *real* question is: who set those machines up, and what did *they* prefer.

And yes, KDE (3, and now 4) was the preferred desktop on SuSE, all the way back to, I think, 9.0, which was my first version of that work.

Note that what you're *really* replying to is an assertion he did not *make* in the section you quote: that people coming from windows are *going to* KDE. He's talking about the people *already on KDE*, a different proposition entirely.

Oh. I see that they *haven't* fixed Plasma. Got it.

Since there seem to be some KDE devs here, I will engage.

I concur with some posts below me that KDE3.x was much more similar in UX design than Gnome to the post-95 Windows's, which is what the entrenched user base is coming from, in large part. I always preferred it to Gnome myself for that reason.

Plasma? Can't figure it out at all. I'm sure it's The Cutting Edge, but it left me bleeding. And while I see that the Trinity project is still chugging along on it, SuSE dropped KDE3 after 11.2, so I can *either* ship to clients a desktop that they can understand without a 3000 level college course, *or* I can ship an OS that's still getting security upgrades (SuSE 11.1, the last release to offer KDE3 from the installer, is EOL).

That's a pretty coffin corner situation, folks, for a desktop manager that breaks as much new ground (read: been at this for 3 decades, really sat down and tried to understand what they were on about, failed miserably) as Plasma does...

"should look similar [to Windows]"

Did I miss something? Or did they finally fix Plasma so mere mortals can figure it out?

cater to DIYs.... it's that there *weren't* any.

Make is changing this, of course, but we *all* turned into appliance operators over the last 50 years; no surprise Rat Shack went with the flow...

Presumably, by using it for commercial purposes, in violation of what I assume are the ToS for that service. Just like people who try to use Googlemaps as a realtime dispatching service...

They think that people are unaware of the fact that LTE *is not 4G*, according to the international organzation who hold that namespace (ITU) ... and they're *right*. So...

In fact, from the research I did back in 2008, I think the best alternative vote-counting method, from a technical standpoint, considering the requirements of a public plebiscite, is Cloneproof Sequential Schwarz Dropping... or whatever they've (I think) renamed that now.

Problem is that voters *can't understand it*.

These days, that trumps "does what I actually want".

Google's Android crew isn't *privately* rooting for you to find a way to do it anyway.

Just shut up about it already, so you don't get them in dutch with the studios, alright?

Oops, sorry: "Letting a co-op have that right against other commercial comers gets a bit murky, legally, *I think*."

You know, a non-municipal co-op is an idea I don't actually think I've heard put forth before. The *general* argument is that the municipality has to itself install (or have installed at its instance, as the telco guys used to say) the fiber, and allow all comers on it at non-discriminatory terms, as compensation for *denying any other comers* the franchise right to dig up all the yards *again*, which is the *real* goal here: last-mile fiber is a Natural Monopoly, and should -- and can -- be run in a fashion which *benefits* the municipalities residents (which is the goal of the muni itself, and is *decidedly* not the goal of any of the Public Corporations[1] which might want to trench their own fiber).

[1]Public Corporations Suck.