I hate to be *that guy*, but everyone needs to understand two significant points:

1. After a couple month of watching the PRISM scandal unforld I now believe this is a "Hiroshima moment". Never before in human history was it possible to spy on everyone. To have a file on everyone. The secret services (the bad as well as the good) always had to focus on a select few. No more. We are living in 1984.

2. I firmly believe the main reason why other spy agencies are not doing what the NSA is doing is because of their limited capabilities. Both in less money and resources, but also in reach. Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are US based. Many important internet exchanges as well. This point is especially important, because of the US tradition of transparency and whistleblowing. As American as the NSA may be, Snowden is even more so. I can't imagine a Chinese Snowden. And even if he existed, would they have a broad discussion on that subject in China? How about Russia? Or even the UK? GHCQ has been as bad as the NSA, yet do we see a broad and honest discussion about it in London?

I hate the constant and ubiquitous surveillance, but the technology advances were the ones that brought them here. The NSA were only the first and foremost ones that took advantage of the new tools. They become cheap fast. Soon every spy agency will have them. This is a very useful and helpful discussion we are having right now. Because we either need to encrypt everything and move everyone onto Tor, or get used to having a file on everyone. There is no "gentlemen's agreement" (no-spy-agreement, UN accord, whatever), because there is no way to enforce it.

That may very well be, but once you get off your high horse and try to compare an obviously crazy guy wanting to have his weekly schedule rendered with a dtp application to a government project with a deadline, you might realize what it is: A deadline. So there is a law about something people can sign up for. So it is rather important that the website needs to be up for the deadline. You can bungle this project time and technology wise in many ways.

I don't know how much time they actually had between the passing of the ACA and the deadline. But don't you think 12 month should be enough for any website project if you have fairly large resources and absolutely need to be finished on time? Don't you think that kind of project should be possible? Or did the ACA not pass before October 2012?

Yes, the project was obviously bundgled in some way. But not because they didn't have enough time from the start.

They will simply need to use browser fingerprinting via web bugs. In combination with flash cookies, stored content and java cookies. It will just get a little more technically complicated. But not much.

I don't even know why he makes such a big fuss. When the task gets more complicated, web advertising companies will have to use more technical expertise making the market harder to penetrate. Which benefits existing companies. So his customers are safer from new competition.

Canonical is behaving very "weird" lately.

This is an interview with Jonathan Riddell, the lead on Kubuntu [1].

Quotes:

"I only had contact with the Linux Mint developer recently when Canonical claimed that they needed a licence to use the compiled packages from Ubuntu. This is a dangerous misunderstanding of copyright licencing from a company which should understand it. I advised Linux Mint to say some rude things to Canonical but I think they're too polite for that."

"Canonical has the trademark of Kubuntu so they had to get a trademark licence from Canonical which took many months of long and slow negotiations. It was very frustracting to have Canonical be the blocker for part of the Ubuntu community since Canonical should be an enabler for the Ubuntu community (at least when we don't compete directly). So we did look at changing the name of Kubuntu but were told by Mark we'd be kicked out the project if we did that which would be a worst case scenario for everyone."

"Since then Canonical has started asking for donations when downloading Ubuntu and one option is to give "Better support for flavours like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu Slider thumb". Kubuntu has never received any of these funds or seen any better support, so this is a disappointing case of fraud."

[1] http://www.muktware.com/5369/how-will-changes-ubuntu-affect-kubuntu-exclusive-interview-jonathan-riddell

First of all who says debt is a problem? There is much debate on this. A nation does not work like a business or a household. Actually quite the opposite. Debt can be good. And right now a lot of people really, really want to give their money to the US government for safekeeping, because they think the best and safest investment is the US government. Therefore interest rates for borrowing are very low. There are other reasons why debt might not be such a huge issue. As I said, this is really up to debate.

Personally I believe that the rate is borrowing is, in fact, a little high right now.

But this is not about borrowing, but about spending. A lot of people in Congress want to spend money on different things. And they don't want to raise more income. So they have to borrow. The problem, if you are concerned about debt, is not the debt ceiling, but the spending and income.

The debt ceiling is mainly about bullying the president. It's a bargaining chip. It's only about politics.

But no one wants to talk about which programs to cut exactly and which taxes to raise, because this is unpopular. This applies to all players.

The ironic part is that the Republicans are making a huge deal out of the debt (I said at the beginning that debt doesn't have to be bad), while they are being responsible for it through defense spending and tax cutting during the Bush years. And they never had a problem back then.

That makes a lot of sense. Apple probabely also has a gag clause in their app store contracts that forbids them to talk about said contract. So they can't explain why the went closed source.

I thought that was exactly the difference between XEN and KVM. KVM uses the Linux kernel as ring 0, whereas XEN creates it's own 'sort of' kernel as ring 0.

And, I don't think this approach is the best, because Linux and Unix still outperform any other approach by a long shot and have a lot of stability. So I prefer OpenVZ, Linux-Vserver.org and, since it is now the officially sanctioned solution: LXC. On the server side everything is Linux anyways. So why should I virtualize hardware, when I can use the perfectly good Linux kernel, which is very fast and very stable and just virtualize the userland? I get more perfomance AND more stability.

> This hasn't been a financial success, but it's not hurt them that badly either.

Actually it did hurt them bad. They sold something like 2 copies (at 2 bucks) a day afterward, but had to buy freakin *new* servers (at what? $1000 bucks) just to support all the new people.

Partially for monopoly reasons the computer has not seen any major ui revision since Win95. XP brought the stability to that ui. Maybe because of competition from OO.org (I dunno), the Office division of MS was able to push through a minor overhaul. The ribbon interface for Office 2007. Which finally made a change from Office 95. Now it's 2011 and we are still waiting to see anything on the ui front.

Though I do believe Microsoft will do something minor in Windows 8, because they want to make it tablet friendly.

Note that I didn't comment wether or not the ribbon interface is better. Personally I certainly think so, but I didn't want to get into that discussion.

What Win7 image are you using? I seriously didn't know Win7 came with an official option to put it on a usb stick for install. Also: How big does the stick have to be?

Now when you install Linux, you arrive at a machine ready to go. With office and internet applications already installed. When I install any version of Windows I will still need to install drivers and applications afterwards. If you don't have a fresh install, but a new machine and/or a restore to factory you can't start installing, but rather need to start removing crapware, some of which (like anti Virus) will ask you for reboots.

> I don't know why I still consider this a technical forum.

It's not really, but this discussion is clearly going OVER your head, not under.

> but I assume it's better now so I won't condem the entire Linux platform on my bad experience (ancient history now

> That doesn't make Windows a less viable platform or me ignorant on the available options.

It actually does if you don't have any recent experience on Linux.

I personally use Debian for servers and my personal desktop and it IS awsome. Though you have to know what you are doing. I am using apt-pinning to get some recent packages. KDE packages in stable have numerous bugs that are fixed in the current KDE for example and I would like to pull in the KDE from experimental and so far have not been able to, because apt pinning sounds better than it sometimes works.

If you want fresh stuff you can always use Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (XFCE) or Lubuntu (LXDE).

That being said, there are numerous tutorials on the web on how to use either Gnome2 or Gnome3 with the default Gnome Shell instead of Unity on Ubuntu Natty. So where is your problem?

If enough people end up liking the default Gnome3 shell they might even create an Ubuntu spin of their own.

OpenVZ (Virtuozzo) and Linux-VServer used to be the big names in virtualization. Now Linux has LXC in the mainline kernel. Virtualization with Xen and KVM are nice. But when you want to run Linux in virtualized guests you get a much better performance with para virtualization.

Xen and KVM are useful is you want to run Windows as a guest. But for Linux guests I really recommend the above.

But why would you buy a commercial Hyper-V? VMware is there. VirtualBox has excellent support for Windows hosts and is free. I don't see how Microsoft could make any headway with all the excellent products with every ninche (commercial, open source, free, expensive) already taken.

I am a pretty big rts fan. Even though I don't play all that much computer games and even though I run Debian on my desktops I actually purchased copies of Warcraft III and Starcaft. I believe those are among the very few games I ever bought. And the only Windows games I bought within the last ten years (I got myself Tribes 2 and Civilization CTP from Loki and UT2004, all for Linux). I was really looking forward to Starcraft 2 and even considered a Windows partition or a purchase of Crossover Games (Wine on steroids for money). Since I don't follow game news I never thought Blizzard would become one of THOSE companies.

I will definitely buy a copy of Starcarft 2 as soon as I can play it whenever and whoever I want. But now? I tell my friends not to buy Blizzard anymore. They are free to pirate that crap.
I thought Blizzard got it, when a recent (within the last two years or so) patch for Warcraft III removed the need to have an original cd in the cd drive bay. I guess I was wrong. Blizzard can kiss my behind.

If you don't want to go cloud you will either have to set up your own server or directly sync between the desktops and the phones. Since you are already set on Evolution you will have to find a solution that works with Evolution. I have done a lot of research into syncing for myself and for my job. For Evolution there is a mature solution called SyncEvolution that even has corporate sponsors. SyncEvolution speaks SyncML, so you simply have to find either phones or a server that speaks SyncML.

For servers: http://www.synthesis.ch/ or http://www.egroupware.org/

Certain phones can speak syncml. For example the Nokia E-Series (business phones). Also said company Synthesis does offer an Android app to add SyncML capability to Android phones.

Come on. How many times do you need to check your eyes. And shouldn't somebody do this that has an idea of what they are doing?