I agree on the common ground aspect.

I'd add that when the story summary on slashdot is incomplete, someone usually reads the article and posts a better summary, gets modded up, and discussion moves on from there.

Most big media outlets will not let you criticise their summary. They usually post short-term rubbish to attract clicks and do advertising revenue. They often use misleading headlines and poor context. Not much of a surprise that the discussion afterwards goes nowhere.

Ideally, I do secretly wish that online discussions could be more similar to a real roundtable. It's very difficult to summarise a slashdot discussion. After 24-48h, it just kind of slows down and we move to something new and shiny. In a roundtable, a moderator usually tries to re-state the divergences of opinion to get a good understanding of the various positions. Otherwise it's just the same people repeating the same thing with different words. "Slashbacks" (something like that?), a while ago, kind of tried to do that, I guess, but they were done by slashdot editors.

I use e-mail a lot, but I also have a hard time keeping track of it. Group discussions over e-mail can be a mess.

For internal communication, most companies fail to use an issue tracker (to keep track of internal task dispatching between teams and announcements). I find that for small-medium sized companies, tools such as Redmine are a great way to reduce the quantity of e-mail. (and yes, even in non-development shops)

It's also nice to have a person create a weekly/monthly digest so that no one misses anything important -- but only one e-mail per week, and only with links to what is in the tracker.

Anyway, I'm sure there are tons of books/articles already on the topic, but I was surprised not to see much talk about issue trackers in this thread.

Well, exploits are used by viruses to spread. You have intent and escalation, the rest is just how you deliver the payload.

But no argument from me on the rest of your post. I haven't used MIcrosoft software in 12 years, including at work. :)

To be fair.. under Linux you do have userspace exploits that allow you to gain root, and from there install a rootkit. They tend to be really obscur and get patched quickly, but they still exist.

So an attacker usually needs to combine, for example, a Firefox/Libreoffice/PDF/Mail/PHP exploit, userspace exploit, then rootkit. And there are tons and tons of servers out there with old versions of PHP and Linux kernel. Most of the time people discover it only because they are exploited by spammers.

You can re-enable nautilus using the gnome-tweak-tool.

I have to admit that I always disliked nautilus in gnome2 (visual clutter), so I was happy to see it disabled by default. I only re-enabled it on my HTPC so that my 4 year old kid can find her stuff easily.

This would probably be better as a poll.. but for what it's worth, I like Gnome 3.

I used fvwm for the past 10 years, always the same config file. I really disliked Gnome 2 (too much clutter, clunky). However, I was starting to have a few annoyances with fvwm and found myself wasting too much time on getting it to work right.

Gnome 3 (using Debian unstable/experimental packages) is great. I tweaked a few things, but even with the default conf I don't mind.. except maybe how alt-tab is broken, and sloppy mouse focus is not great, but I see they are working on it.

Thanks for clarifying. You state valid and interesting points. I agree that paper is deprecated, by "newspaper" I meant news site or whatever, in reference to your 300 000 idiots.

With regards to your second point, I pay to support journalistic independence and editorial integrity. I don't have time to read the news every minute. I take around 15 minutes to read the news in the morning from 5 websites (1 is my local newspaper, the others are a mix of Canadian, British and French). I also like to listen to the short 5 minute bulletin which is aired on the national radio at 7 AM when I wake up, and around midnight they have a short news bulletin which is the summary of all francophone national radios. I appreciate the editorial work that they do in order to communicate as much information as possible in a tiny amount of time.

I want the news to be useful, non-redundant, insightful. I don't want to waste time with tabloid news just because they need to boost their advertising revenue.

About advertising, I use adblock+. I really can't stand advertising.

But I think, as you mention, the problem is that the US media are broken. People on this forum mentioned the Ecoonmist as a good example of a news digest, but personally I'm not a big fan. I have to admit that I am happy that I can read news sources in a few languages. The contrast is often stunning.

Can you elaborate why?

The way I see it, either you're the client, since you are paying a subscription, or the advertisers are the client, in which case you are just a product sold to advertisers.

I gladly pay my 15$/month to my local newspaper. It helps to guarantee their editorial independence, which is why I read their newspaper.

Otherwise, please elaborate on how we could be non-idiotic and have alternative business models. The only one that comes to mind is citizen journalism, such as Indymedia, which I very much appreciate, but I appreciate professional journalism as well.

Have you been to Syria? It's quite a complicated place, and has a fascinating history :)

I was there last year, slightly before the uprisings started. While I did most of the usual backpacker routes (Damascus, Hamah, Aleppo, Palmyra), with the occasional getting lost, hitchhiking and crossing to/from Lebanon using odd routes), I met a lot of people who barely spoke English and just felt like communicating. I found people to be very open minded, proud of their culture, curious about others and somewhat indifferent about their incompetent government (as if it's that big brother who just keeps screwing up, until it reached a breaking point where they figured it's time to kick him out).

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Syria

Generalizing about "arabs" is the same as those who generalize about "americans". Ex: americans are just a bunch of ignorant trigger-happy rednecks who don't realize that sexual abstinence has a high rate of failure (increases the risks of teen pregnancy and STD propagation). The US are capable of doing the best .. but also being irresponsible of doing the worst.

(disclaimer: I am from Montreal, and from the current path we are on right now, it won't be long before we end up in the same ditch)

Slashdot has always been a great place for interesting news and discussion. I wish you the best in your new adventures.

matt

(some random guy who just happens to have a low uid, but let me know if you visit Montreal!)

If you take the train from an Eastern European country to Russia, they usually make you switch trains. It's not a big hassle.

Besides, trains in Russia need a samovar, and the US would probably find a way to consider that too dangerous for passengers :)

A few places in Montreal use round-abouts with zebra crossings for pedestrians, with a small sign that says "100$ fine if you do not give priority to pedestrians". While there are always exceptions, it works pretty well.

Cars drive a bit slower, but given that they don't have long lights to wait for, it is generally faster. Win-win.

(which is a bit surprising, since Montreal is probably one of the worst cities in North America with regards to respecting road signs, by either motorists, cyclists or pedestrians, but my impression is that when removing road clutter, people kind of start thinking again)

I always had a hard time understanding IPv6 until I read the Running IPv6 in practice howto on Debian-administration and tried it at home. The next move is configuring the office where I work to use such a tunnel, then a friend's colo server, then our hosting environment. It's really not hard. Get over the adressing scheme. IPv6 is much easier to manage than NAT.

Tunnelbroker by Hurricane-Electric also does a great job of making IPv6 easy to use and fun to learn (the "certification" games). They also throw in free DNS hosting, and announcing IPv6 addresses using BGP is possible.

Now stop whining and bite the bullet :-)

Nah, it's just to remind developers about all those zombie Windows boxes out there on the networks, reminding us that looking at the past is a way of looking into the future.