Basically it's because of the lack of corruption in Europe and the Asian nations that achieved high speed broadband rollouts. The USA is a pretty corrupt place, and it's embedded in the culture from the very bottom of the food chain: Tipping for basic goods and services (where a decent minimum wage should be paid by employers rather than just ripping off customers with tips and surcharges which are still a form of corruption), to the top of the foodchain: Golden parachutes, kick backs, earmarks etc. In an environment that allows corruption to flourish, and where people expect to get something extra for just doing the job they are paid to do. Of course there is going to be gross program mismanagement and failures. The US has up until now not been completely destroyed by the internal corruption because it's been focused elsewhere, fighting WW1/2, rebuilding the world, fighting communism, stealing other countries resources etc. Now that the wars against communism in South America (1980s) have ended. The corruption has settled on he closest target: The American People. Until the USA deals with the gross corruption within it's own borders (yes that includes the two-party system, minimum wage, drug wars, war on terror (military handouts) golden handshakes etc) They will continue to decline as a nation. At the same time that America has been declining there has been a serious move in most of the world to stamp out corruption. Sure it hasn't been 100% effective, but it's more than the USA has done and it's why we're seeing other countries pull ahead. Basically when your politics aren't being bogged down with bullshit issues from corrupt people. You get things done. This is why Germany is doing so well, they have strong laws against corruption and they are the manufacturing heart of Europe. Sure countries like Greece and Italy have stuffed up (mainly due to high levels of corruption) But the Nordic/Germanic countries are pulling the whole of Europe with them.

If you think five eyes wouldn't act against a group planning to change the government in the USA/Australia/Britain etc without going through the standard election process you'd be dead wrong. I would even be willing to bet money that they would act against groups calling for new elections trying to force current governments to resign.

So all those servers that are running the internet, and the VoIP servers that require 100% uptime and can be sued for any downtime by large call centres/organisations of people are being stupid by running Linux? Linux meets SLA's, it's idiot engineers who slap systems together without proper testing/maintenance who break SLAs and Windows doesn't save them, it just buys them a bit of time until the excuse that "Microsoft did it" stops buying customer patience.

It's shit like this that actually makes me think the Second Amendment may not be as stupid, as it's tragic consequences have made it seem.

Quite simply. Nvidia is going to be available as an open source solution via Nouveau with decent performance/stability. Long before ATi will have a stable proprietary or open source driver. Just look at the mesamatrix.net charts. Nvidia cards are ahead of ATi for implementing driver features via Nouveau. Reclocking support keeps getting more patches with every kernel release. It's not too far now until we get at least OpenGL 4.2 supported under open source drivers with decent speed on Nvidia. The closed drivers already do OpenGL 4.5 with great speed. ATi is holding the platform back and causing a lot of bad press for Linux gaming. It's time the community called them out on it.

It's time to stop sending keys using dumb methods. Time to start generating keys and physically swapping/installing them.

THIS, I recently started applying for new jobs not because I wanted to move on, but because I need to get a new bond together and by claiming overtime I can snatch some money back from my current employers. Suffice to say, I can walk into a $20,000 payrise just by showing up to an interview. Let alone having to do anything considered hard. ICT is all about having a specialty and just leveraging it. Also about being smart enough to know when you're getting screwed by your bosses and walking away. I'll be leaving a hastle full environment where I get called on weekends and out of hours to a strictly 9-5 monday to friday job where overtime has generous conditions attached.

I agree with you on the File Save/export function, but not on the rest of the issues with the GIMP. They need a much better pathing tool, but other than that the GIMP is fine. I like to fullscreen the artwork window and set all the toolboxes to on top, and place them aroudn the edges. let's me control the layout better which is nice. The single window paradigm stuff people bitch about just isn't an issue 99% of the time.

I am a programmer, but only because I have been forced to become one. When I was much younger I started working on a game project with a friend with similar goals. However he would not create some of the tools I have asked for. As a result I have been pushed into writing my own 3d modelling software and my own functional equivalent to FRED2 from FreeSpace 2. This is a large reason why open source games have sucked until now. At least in space games there are no tools. If you look at FreeSpace2, it survives because some absolute hero programmers on Windows got together and made tools to edit every aspect of the game, from ship hardpoint editors, to archive extractor/viewers. The original game designers also opened the source code and released the level editor to the game. Without these tools the game would have been abandoned and dead long ago. This is a critical area where Linux/Open Source games are failing. No Tools = No Love. I expect that OpenMW is going to do ridiculously well because of the campaign editing tools they are making. Similarly GTKRadiant on the Quake engine allows anyone to edit Quake/Doom levels. Unfortunately though, they will be the few engines for the forseeable future to solve this problem.

FreeBSD is great, except for all the drivers it lacks which Linux has. There is no substituting the kernel as long as FreeBSD doesn't support things that the Linux kernel does. It's unhelpful to suggest that people just change kernels. Especially when there has been no declaration that Linux itself requries systemd, or ever will require systemd. Right now this is a packaging and distribution issue.

Seriously. This is getting silly. If people want to flee the main Distro's because they think that Debian is getting stupid. Can they please just fork Debian and improve on it? Apt-get works really well. I just feel that a ton of people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The Linux kernel does not mandate systemd. There is no reason to ditch Linux. If the problem is distributions mandating systemd then it is time to start a distro that removes systemd and Gnome. Let's not kid ourselves here. Right now it's Gnome and systemd that are pushing this move on everyone. If people don't like it, they should be looking to fork a distribution and fixing the issue. Maybe brand themselves as a POSIX/SYS-V init Compliant distribution.

Actually using SYSVINIT already handled this quite well. Mainly because it was NETWORK MANAGER's job. Not Init's job, to handle network connectivity. I close my laptop, it sleeps, I open it, network manager fires up my wifi and connects. This argument is already invalid because it's already been solved by network-manager.

I had this problem recently when I upgraded my Mac OSX installation to 10.10. It completely broke the /media/OSX mountpoint when the hfsplus filesystem was upgraded to CoreStorage and the hfsplus Linux support broke. The last thing I needed was my Debian installation to crap itself when I was just trying to boot into Linux for the first time since replacing/fixing the bootloader which OSX broke. A lot of people dual/triple booting are going to be affected by these changes. I honestly don't know if systemd is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'd have liked there be a lot more information about this change before it appeared in Debian. As was mentioned just before, I am also concerned that this change is potentially going to break cross platform compatibility with BSD/Solaris/Other Unixes. I develop software which was gtk based and it sounds as if gnome is going to require a lot of dependancies which are not available on other platforms.

Sorry GTK/GNOME, but I am done. I'm fed up with trying to use your API. I'm fed up with trying to shoehorn my systems to fit your paradigms. All I want to do is make a Linux version of a tool I had on Windows, but you won't let me focus on that. Rather you want me to make some weird touch centric/single display centric application which I have no wish or desire for. I am going to move to GNUstep. Yes the API doesn't shift quickly. But I consider this a good thing. An API that for 20 years has allowed users to choose Apple menus, windows menus, or NextStep style menus. There's a lot of freedom and choice in a platform that let's the user decide the UI paradigm they want to use, and which doesn't ram their paradigm of choice down your throat. I am also moving to an api that is inherently cross-platform from day one.

Just remember guys, if you read Linuxjournal.de the NSA considers you to be an "extremist". Because Linuxjournal is an extremist forum. So they are going to be watching the Linux community quite closely. Which makes sense considering that technology hackers are the largest threat to the established powers. Especially now with sub $1500 metal 3d printers starting to come online. As home manufacturing grows the Open Source community will only become a larger threat to bad/wasteful governments. Seriously though, we should all be angry. Angry that our money, is being used for this shit, instead of fixing real problems, building real hospitals/roads/fibre internet/healthy environment/industries/helping people. We should all be angry that this is being done and noone voted for it.