Take quoting Wikipedia with all the grains of salt you want, but I find this relevant and appropriate - Under Character Assassination -> In a Totalitarian Regime, we find:

"The effect of a character assassination driven by an individual is not equal to that of a state-driven campaign. The state-sponsored destruction of reputations, fostered by political propaganda and cultural mechanisms, can have more far-reaching consequences. One of the earliest signs of a society’s compliance to loosening the reins on the perpetration of crimes (and even massacres) with total impunity is when a government favors or directly encourages a campaign aimed at destroying the dignity and reputation of its adversaries, and the public accepts its allegations without question. The mobilisation toward ruining the reputation of adversaries is the prelude to the mobilisation of violence in order to annihilate them. Official dehumanisation has always preceded the physical assault of the victims."

But what do any of you know about his actions except what various media has told you? Were you there? Were you victimized by Assange? Do you personally know someone who was? If the answers to those questions is "no", then you really need to think about who you are trusting: Television and online reporting, from blogs to major outlets. I am browsing at -1 and have yet to see a single comment that is from someone that even speciously purports to have any personal knowledge of his actions.

Beware hearsay.

I see from the comments here that the governmental mission of character assassination of this fellow is largely complete and successful. Do you know Assange personally? Have you ever had dealings with him apart from seeing stories online and on TV about him? I don't and I haven't, and thus I don't pretend the biases against him that most people here seem to have been suckered into (nor do I have any bias toward him).

I don't find a coordinated corporate media campaign to ruin this guy unrealistic in the least, though.

You can't actually be serious? What? I like a good recliner myself, but as an Ask Slashdot this takes things to new lows.

From the replies on the linked blog post, people are having distro-specific successes / failures even after following the instructions. I can imagine this being anything from distro specific paths, to permissions on certain binaries that could be different for say, Fedora from Mint, to codec issues (though as I understand it with Chrome the codecs are all basically wrapped up in the binary?) The specific technical details of this situation are a bit out of my area of expertise but I don't think any of the things I guess at here are out of the realm of possibility.

Technical issues aside - I welcome this development. I know and understand completely that a lot of people have issues with DRM making it's way into the core HTML (5) specs, but I kind of see it as unavoidable if we want to enjoy commercial content without needing completely non-standard garbageware like Silverlight or Flash. I have used Netflix with the Compholio Wine / Pipelight stuff, and while it works, it struggles to do so.

Yeah, there is a slippery slope and lots of compromise - but I would have less reason to ever boot into Windows if my paid subscriptions to content that I enjoy could work natively under "Linux". And just don't ask me to stop watching movies or playing 3xA game titles, because I won't.

Because no matter how strongly they state that a configuration is not supported, if it's not expressly blocked, people will try to get technical support for it. And with the distro landscape as it is, supporting mainstream software on "Linux" is a nightmare.

No. The last Macbook Pro I bought (2010?), online, through the mainstream consumer-facing online Apple store, was customizable to a pretty crazy degree, down to which speed CPU and how many cores, how much RAM, what screen size and what external peripherals I wanted shipped to me. Not just obvious things like how much HDD space. It was more customizable than the Windows laptops from major vendors when I bought it. I am primarily a PC/Win/Linux person, but I was quite happy with everything but the price of my MBP, and the lack of AAA game titles - I do use my computer for both professional productivity AND recreation.

I no longer am in a professional or personal situation where a laptop offers substantial benefits to me, so this year when I bought a new PC, I selected individual components and had a local shop custom assemble it (a first, I have always assembled my own PCs in the past, but in this case there was no significant cost benefit to doing so). I have probably the computing power of a €2.500,00 Mac in a roughly €500 tower and am quite happy with it. It is definitely not as "shiny" as an Apple product, but nobody ever sees it anyway.

Anyway, my point being: buying Apple in no way implies a one-size-fits-all purchasing experience.

As a kid I grew up on Wordstar (running on CP/M, on an Osborne 1) and as such joe (http://joe-editor.sourceforge.net/), which is more or less a command-compatible workalike to Wordstar, suits me perfectly. While it is still available and updated reasonably regularly, it is getting harder to find / install easily for modern *nix systems. I love joe, though, I don't even have to think to use it.

The US Postal Service has been trying to cut losses by ending Saturday delivery of ALL mail for years. I used to be a Netflix DVD subscriber and am admittedly streaming-only now (DVDs are hard to squeeze through my VPN - I live in Germany now), but I fail to see the big deal. Feel fortunate you still receive Saturday delivery of junk mail and bills.

I stand corrected - I really thought they were Russian cars. I also thought Skoda (no Unicode on Slashdot) was a Russian brand, but no, I just looked it up, and they're Czech.

I initially read the title to be referencing Seat, a Russian maker of affordable cars that are common accross Europe, not as the place you put your backside while you are driving. /me chuckles...

If anything it's shocking the process isn't used more. I know in my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska, reverse-osmosis waste water filtering was used at least as early as the 1980s, perhaps even the 70s. I'm trying to find a reference for proof, but haven't come up with one in a couple of minutes of Googling.

The Wikipedia article on RO, by the way, is in pretty shabby shape if anyone gets a rise out of improving such things.

Bullshit. How do you know that you don't know anyone that was affected by it? Do you know which week in 2012 the experiment was conducted? Do you know which of the ~billion FB accounts were the 700k experimented upon? I find it pretty shocking that so many people are having difficulty understanding the difference between A/B testing and intentional emotional manipulation where a significant negative (or positive) result was the data point the study strove to measure.

I can quite imagine that a significant number of offline lives were impacted by this experiment. People exposed to negative content presumably don't limit their negative reactions to behavior only in the venue where they were exposed to the negative content.

I think that the Silent Hill games (at least 1-4) do a fantastic job of having strong themes and plot but still leaving a lot open to perceptual conjecture on the part of the player.