Cool. It doesn't seem to like the firewall here, though (or the firewall doesn't like it). But if gives me hope of being able to get the stupid thing to work, at least.

They've actually been doing this for a while, and it is hurting my search experience. I prefer to read content in English, but I live in Germany, which means that if I want to buy something online, I want to buy it from a German (or at least European) company to avoid having to go in to the customs office to pay taxes on everything I buy (and so as to receive the products in 1-3 days instead of 2-4 weeks).

I used to be able to achieve this very easily by using the German name for what I needed, and if that name was the same as the English term, adding "kaufen" (buy) to the search. But with the translation technology, that means that I get all the first results in English, wanting to sell me products out of the U.S.A. I haven't found a really good way around this. Admittedly, I could change the settings for what language I want every time I do such a search, but that is a lot of trouble for me. If there were an option to turn this behavior off, I would do so.

The problem is that there is a pot of all the money that they collect, and it is divided according to the popularity of the artist. If you buy a CD from a relatively obscure artist who is covered by GEMA, he is going to get a smaller fraction of the money, and some of the money from the CD you just bought will be going to the popular artists (whom you probably weren't intending to support).

The youtube thing is really frustrating, I keep hoping that Google will manage to come up with a deal, but apparently GEMA wants more money than the RIAA demanded to make it "legal" to stream those videos in Germany. I must admit, though, that GEMA does have its (rather small) upside: since they "represent" practically all the musicians in the world, you only have one place you need to go to pay royalties. I don't think that very much of the GEMA money gets to the artists, of course, probably less than with the RIAA.

I think that the horrors of autoraise can only be understood by someone who has used focus follows mouse (click to raise) for a while. At least on an X-based system, it is really heaven. I am constantly running things in multiple windows and overlapping, and it makes me very happy and productive. But I have had time to learn to work with it. I now have the problem that I am almost paralyzed when I have to use Windows on a small monitor (especially the versions with application grouping in the status bar). However, I do know that my feelings on this are not universal.

More and more, though, we have developers deciding that their opinions are universal. OpenOffice is the big offender in this in the Linux world. They decided at some point to override the window manager, forcing raising on focus, which makes it pretty much impossible to work with severe OOo windows open. I have not yet come up with a good alternative, though. So I am forced to minimize all the OOo windows to prevent them from blocking out what I'm actually trying to do. To be more on topic, I managed to use Gnome 3 for about a day and a half before I gave up and went to XFCE.

I feel so "old-fashioned", but since I'm never really away from a land line, I've never felt a real need to have a mobile phone. I'm probably the most technically literate person (use Linux and still solve everybody's Windows problems) around here, and yet the least capable of composing a text message. It's kind of paradoxical, I know.

The lists are interesting in that this year's list includes an item of required reading for my English classes (Brave New World), and last years includes a book that I required for English, even though it wasn't formally required by the government (To Kill a Mockingbird). [I'm teaching in Germany, where there are centralized exams to graduate from High School, so that everybody has to read at least some of the same books.]

I suppose that it is censorship in a certain way, since the libraries typically receive government monies; on the other hand, the publication and purchase of the books was in no way suppressed, so in that sense, censorship isn't exactly the right word here, as it would be, say, in Iran when the controversy over The Satanic Verses came out.

The solution in Fedora is to just install the rpmfusion repo (there are others, but this is the most likely to keep you stable). There you can get everything you need.except for libdvdcss, which requires installation of the rpm.livna.org repository.

As to the question at hand, I just switched 2 minutes ago to XFCE, and it is looking likely that I am going to stay here I couldn't take the Gnome 3 "You are currently working on application A, therefore all other applications are distractions and I must make it difficult for you to access them" attitude. I spend far too much time translating texts or composing on the basis of something in another window, and so on, to live with that.

I switched to KDE when this happened, but I'm still not 100% happy, so maybe I should look at XFCE as well.

Yep. I had shell access, usenet and FTP from io.com once upon a time. I only had a 386 so didn't try to set up SLIP with them. They literally required you to buy an O'Reilly (or similar) book on SLIP from them in order to sign up for the service. If you could prove that you already owned the book, they would refund a certain portion of the sign-up fee.

I really think that a lot of the problem is that both sides are missing the distinction between science and philosophy. The "evolutionist" side for acting like they can scientifically prove the non-existence of God (this is actually just a hypothesis that exists under their scientific activities) and the "creationist" people for wanting to teach their philosophy (that there is a creative intelligence behind the universe) as science.

As scientists, both sides should really be doing the same thing -- the "evolutionist" side is looking for the mechanisms that drive evolution and for the intermediate types in the fossil record, while the "creationists" should be looking for the mechanism by which the Creator did his work. There's no reason that they have to be at each other's throats, really.

That said, it might be useful to have a couple of days at the beginning of the chapter on evolution where both philosophies are presented, thus calming fears of both sides that their views are not being taught. The actual scientific content should try to avoid (as is generally done in textbooks) any bias toward either of the philosophies.

This argument only works for "intelligent design" type creationists. The "Young Earthers" and the like might be mentioned in the introduction, but then no further attention should be paid to them in science class, because they are simply not doing science.

I could even see allowing additional extensions beyond the first, but the cost of these should increase exponentially. If Disney is convinced that derivatives of Steamboat Willie are going to drive them into the ground, they can pay an ever-increasing fee to protect it. Something like first renewal costs $10,000 (or more), second is $20,000, third is $40,000 and so on. At a certain point, even Disney would be moved to let things slip into the public domain... The reason for the high renewal fee is that if the work isn't generating serious income, there is no point in renewing the copyright, and if the work is that valuable, the public has a vested interest in getting it into the public domain

I just used some Babylon 5 for my English class (I have all boys, so showing soap operas, as the German government would have me do, was really out of the question). From the first season, there are really only one or two episodes that really add to the plot, and one of those would be more noticed in retrospect, once things start happening. Seasons 3-4 are the best part of the series, where the story takes place, and the actors have more or less gelled into their roles. (Season 5 was a bounce back from being cancelled, so that they had crammed most of the story into Season 4, and as a result seems to drag a lot.)

Despite the preview, I messed that one up: s/innocent/guilty/ .

Well, if she ends up not being found innocent, then she doesn't have a criminal record. If the police have to be "beyond a shadow of a doubt" before they can arrest somebody, the justice system might as well not exist. And a reasonable suspicion exists here -- the woman just received a hugely expensive ring from a man who wasn't exactly rich. It is reasonable for the police to think that she might have known that the ring was stolen.