And while idiots hate to admit it, much of the middle east owes a thank you to GWB. I think the only real surprise here is it happened everywhere else but Iran.

Thanks for all the dead relatives, violence and instability? If people really want to get rid of a dictator they will do it themselves, thank you very much. (See Egypt and Tunisia) All that international community needs to do is to end dealing with these dictators and give revolting population some moral support. Democracy comes from the people, not from the barrel of a gun. Military invasion and occupation is the worst you can do.

Almost any dictator is better than hundreds of thousands of dead people (mostly civilians) and chaos continuing to this day that resulted from the US invasion.

If the lens can't resolve sharp image even for 5MP, then 15MP won't help anything. With a better lens (which also has to be physically larger) higher sensor resolution will start to matter, but then we are talking about SLRs, not smart phones.

All this talk about megapixels is mainly just marketing for clueless people.

Underclocking doesn't necessarily improve the battery life. The idea is that faster the processor can get thru the task on hand the sooner it can go back to idling, which is good for battery life. I.E. In case of N900 moderate overclocking actually increases the battery life as the processor will spend more time idling. For systems with fixed clock speed you might be right though, but you will have hard time finding modern tablets with CPUs that aren't capable of frequency scaling.

("km/h" is preferred, "kph" is confusing.)

Not only that but kph is plain wrong as it doesn't tell the unit at all. Kilo means thousand. Thousand of what?

Abbreviation for kilometre (1000m) is km. So correct abbreviations for kilometres per hour are km/h or kmph.

I think they just used a stock photo of UFO to illustrate the article. It's not supposed to be any more real than the Bill Gates with Borg apparatus picture that the Slashdot uses ever so often.

The real one should probably look something like this: http://www.isna.ir/ISNA/PicView.aspx?Pic=Pic-1736235-1&Lang=E

Let's just review :...

Please get back under the bridge and shut up.

Is Assange finished with his "I hate America and want to bring down their evil, corrupt regime" business for the time being, then? Because I approve of this sort of leak; it does a lot more good in the world than the dubious Afghanistan-related stuff.

I guess it's Americans like you who haven't been bothered to read WikiLeaks before US related leaks came into spotlight. Maybe it's new to you, but majority of leaks have been about things other than US of A and their dealings with other nations. Also whoever exposes thruth about your government's wrongdoings does not necessarily hate America, in fact he might care of you and do you a favor by doing so.

Would you rather stay in the dark and unknowingly support torture, selling children for Afghan cops' sex slaves (google for "DynCorp" and "Bacha Bazi") and whatever other disgusting stuff your tax money has been spent in? Is that just dubious Afghanistan related stuff that you have no interest in aware of? Well... some people say that ignorance is a bliss.

the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is claiming that merely linking to copyrighted material is a crime.

Google is in trouble. Unless the law is different for those who have wealth and power. ;)

It's been working pretty doggone well for me on my desktop (variously dwm, e17, and awesome on different machines over the past 7 years), but then I don't see the need to engage in a dick-waving contest about marketshare -- it's not like, even if the year-of-Linux-on-the-desktop never comes, it will lose its utility for us who do use it.

I wish I had some mod points to mod this very important comment up. Too many people today are treating Linux as some sort of popularity contest.

People coding open source should continue to fork and create whatever they need or want. One of the main advantages of Linux used to be that there was no need to make compromises due to market. Having everyone and his mum to do the same thing kills the innovation and limits the choice. If our niche is gone many of us could as well be using Windows.

Imagine what can happen if some autocratic regime gets into power in and confiscates all the data that social network corporations have in store of their users. Then the said regime can use that data to search for probable dissidents and make their lifes hard. IMO that's good enough reason for not to use high profile social networking services with anything linked to your own name.

So for me it's not about telling something I don't want my mum to hear. Such things could cause only minor problems, maybe a lost job at worst. But there are scenarios that could lead in loss of ones life.

I don't think something like above is likely to happen anytime soon, but it doesn't hurt to play safe. I use open protocols like XMPP and IRC with known (or own) servers and have control of logs myself when it's possible. Probably my contact information (even if I try to avoid spreading such details) and discussions I've taken part in are still all over the world in various message boards, but the least I can do is to try to stay in control of my data where I can.

But when you rely on education being paid with other money in the form of taxation, it's simply *not* free. It's not free because you're tapping into units of work performed by others. And you have no metrics to judge whether or not you're worthy of such expenditure. Socialistic systems obfuscate the numbers -by design- so as to prevent class-warfare and other (fabricated or otherwise) "injustices".

Also when you rely in education paid by tax money you quarantee that smartest kids get the education they want, not the eduction their parents can afford. Sure it's not free (for the society) but it's well worth the investment and pays back for everyone.

Other forms of public services can also improve society's quality of life as whole. Just compare how many people you have in jails in US and what class in your society they belong to (mainly poor and uneducated i would guess) and compare it to some countries with less pronounced income differences. If people are not poor they don't need to resort to crime, which again makes the society nicer for everyone to live in.

Sure every system has it's problems. I think Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland etc.) had it pretty well in 70s-late 80s. Good quality free education (best in the world by many indicators), small wealth differences (basically just huge middle class with few rich and none of really poor people) and low crime rate. Much of the benefits of taxes paid and work done back then it is still visible in these societies, but these things tend to erode when they are not taken care by the people. So in a way you have a point.

People start to take benefits for granted and don't see value or understand that they have to pay for it (through the tax). This makes it possible for politicians to get more votes by promising tax cuts, thus wealth differences have increased (today average CEO in Finland earns 52 times average wage, in 1990 it was 9 times average wage...and what we get, guys like Elop who only fuck things up for us and will get away with a golden parachute), there's more crime, politicians seem more concerned with serving corporations than the people and people seem to be suprisingly indifferent about it all.

What is a 'Kyrgyz researcher' ?

It's a researcher who belongs into Turkic ethnic group that mainly resides in Kyrgystan.

You might know where Afghanistan is, Kyrgystan is about 100km (or 62miles) NE of it.

Not really biting, but on the subject of Ubuntu: What I really love about Ubuntu is having a Debian stack underneath, with a nice desktop setup on top. I can do normal desktopy things without extra fuzz, but when I happen to need backend-component-x for our webdev stack I can just apt-get install it with a 95% probability. I really like the blend of user friendlyness and a solid foundation that Ubuntu provides, and a lot of it is really thanks to Debian. For me, it's a win-win.

Ubuntu's OS X mimicry, especially in its recent versions and fast release cycle - which tends to break things - are few things I dislike in it. Though LTS releases make the second issue less important. I'd like to see such highly visible distro having it's own style, trying to lead the way - or choosing its own way - rather than following others. In other points you mention I agree though. Ubuntu is still the distro I recommend to most people that are new to Linux.

If user has some clue what specific software he likes to use, then my vote goes to Debian. 'Stable' for servers and 'testing' for desktops. It doesn't have any of annoyances of Ubuntu, while all the good stuff (apt, Debian configuration tools, etc.) is there.

It also has the nice advantage that if certain software package in 'testing' happens to have a bug you can always fetch another version from 'unstable'. I've now had my desktop 'testing/unstable' install for some 5 years, incrementally upgrading to newer software as it comes available and haven't run into bigger problems than occasional bug that hasn't been too hard to work around. Usually the way I mentioned above, just by installing another version of the said package.

Ya. I've always wondered if the US gives 2 shits about other's IP, e.g. anime, J/K-pop, korean horror, bollywood, european indie music, indie flicks like OM BAK before they were officially released, etc. Seems hypocritical if you ask me.

Ong-bak (2003) doesn't seem so indie to me. Their production company Sahamongkolfilm Co. has produced and distributed more than 30 films between late 90s and the present.

But yes, I think the South America and Asia makes most of the better films nowadays. Last two films I saw were Tropa de Elite 2 (Brazil) and El Aura (Argentina), both were pretty good.

It's been quite some time when I last watched anything from Hollywood. Frankly, I don't care what happens to big studios there. Maybe if they went bust we would start to see some quality American films again. That would be a good thing, eh? What they produce now is just mass consumer goods targeted to dumb people with short attention spans. It's the McDonalds of the movie industry. (emphasis on the word industry)