If you are having a hard time with the way they handle the money, make a billion dollars, contribute half, then tell them what you think. 'Til then, shut up with the pedantry and nitpicking.
I can't criticise Bill Gates until I have a billion dollars? You realise that makes him answerable only to the handful of super-rich of the world?
Shameless cock-sucking, really.
My only regret is that he's not 30 years younger, so that he'd have the energy and lifespan needed to better advance his goals.
Assange was born in 1971. That makes him 39 now. Lifespan yes, but energy (etc.) to do what he's doing at 9 years of age?
Not the politics, certainly, and I hope you don't mean the sex!
Let me tell you this, as someone hailing from a not-so-free country: these kinds of leaks would have much less effect in non-free societies than they do now in the free West. For a very simple reason: in the West, the freedom of press may be imperfect, but by and large it still exists. You can disseminate that information far and wide. Just look at the list of newspapers which published the stories based on the leaks!
the freedom of speech and the press is a fiction that the western corporates/governments have to maintain, because that is an essential element of this whole democracy and free-country illusion that allows them to exploit their citizens largely with their complicity.
but when anyone is naive enough to take it for real, and exercise those freedoms without regard for the status quo, then they come out in their true colours.
russia and china do not need to maintain the illusion. they follow a different exploitation model.
Ideas do not belong to the first being to hold them in their mind. Art does not belong to the artist. I'm not going to say some hippie crap like art belongs to everyone, rather I say it doesn't belong to anyone, it just is. You can't own blue, righteous indignation, the smell of napalm, or the force (sorry Lucas).
You're confusing copyright with patents. Disembodied ideas can be patented, but not copyrighted. Copyright pertains only to specific implementations of artistic ideas. You can't have copyright over the colour blue, but you can have copyright over your painting that uses a certain shade of blue that you envisioned. You could have an idea to write a story about a lame sailor chasing a white whale, but to enjoy actual copyright, you'd have to write Moby Dick.
According to Michelin, there are more three star restaurants in New York than Rome. In any case it is pathetic that you think you can judge and an entire continent-spanning nation of hundreds of millions based on whatever handful of random restaurants you happened upon. Grow up.
Yes, don't you dare make a casual observation here without doing a scientific survey, crunching the numbers, quoting learned sources and including citations. This is slashdot, you know.
Well, here in the states you pretty much have to bite the bullet and pay Microsoft's ransom and get your netbook pre-loaded. Some manufacturers used to install a little application that asked you to agree to Microsoft's EULA before the starting the desktop, which you could then deny and have a chance at getting your license money back, but I've purchased three netbooks from various manufacturers in the last few years and none of them had the app. I just grit my teeth and blow Microsoft away. Anyone who says Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly is blind. A few years ago I stumbled upon a web site that sold ultra-light laptops that specialized in linux on their machines but were still much more expensive than I could afford, I think they were in the realm of $800-1000 so I never purchased and I've forgotten their url, some kind of letter-number combination, like pc2049.com or something. I wish I still had that url so I could see what they are charging for those machine today.
Here in India I bought two Athlon dual-core laptops in the past three years, both from the Acer Aspire series. Both came with Linpus linux preinstalled, which was really only good for checking the hdd capacity and amount of memory and doing an lspci, so I promptly replaced it with OpenSuSE, of course.
Really good performance for the price (sub-US$500). But maybe you're looking for something more powerful.
I'm not connected to Acer in any way.
The way it works in a western post-scarcity economy, [...] may not be the same for a country which still has a scarcity economy.
Post-scarcity economy: A contradiction in terms. Where there is no scarcity, no economic system is necessary. It's a utopian concept that hasn't been reached by any existing nation. There are degrees of scarcity, but no country has yet achieved zero scarcity. When Anthony Giddens used the term, he had something different in mind from what you're implying. Do not make artificial distinctions to bolster your ill-founded sense of western superiority.
Because, really, what would Grandma gain from switching?
Why should Grandma use Linux?
Grandma would gain nothing. But I certainly would, because then I wouldn't have to reformat/reinstall her OS every few months, and wouldn't have to bother about malware infestations.
I can't hope to educate grandma about best security practices, so I'll do the next best thing.
I'll install a solid distro with all the bells and whistles she needs (it may be ubuntu or it may be slackware, won't matter, she'll only be using some programs), customise the GUI to be as simple as possible to meet her simple needs, disable all unnecessary ports and services, configure ssh and port 22 (just in case she asks me to do something later), turn on monthly updates, and be done with it for some years.
To be fair, OpenOffice does this as well. Two weeks ago I was creating a spreadsheet of contact information. Every time I entered an email address, Calc would turn the email address into a link, change the background color to grey, and then would not let me edit the address in the formula field. Don't believe me? Open Calc and enter "address@example.com" in a field, then hit return. The "lightbulb" helper (OO's Clippy) appears in the bottom right to tell me that "An URL has been detected and a hyperlink attribute has been set".
Go to
Tools -> Autocorrect Options -> Options -> URL Recognition.
Turn off.
Before he had a significant amount of followers, Ghandi was a very easy target.
But that's actually not a point against Ghandi's methods,
Now, knowing this, yes, the Nazis would've shot Ghandi
(afterall, it happened even with Ghandi present),
what Ghandi was getting at.
Ghandi might've died, but I for one am almost certain that he, or someone like him...
USE F*CKING PLACEHOLDERS.
I don't know what you're talking about, but if these are inventions that can stop me and my girlfriend from sliding towards the edge of the bed during sex, then I definitely need some!
Opera and Webkit just added little tricks to pass the ACID 3 tests. They don NOT really correctly support all the stuff that ACID 3 is testing.
What is the source of your information? Did you work at either of those places? You seen the code?
Congrats to the hardworking people on the project, however I will be applauding their work with less skepticism when I hear that MIT, Cornell, CMU, etc confirm the results.
Hmmm... I wonder whether, if the announcement had come from MIT, you'd have said 'I shall applaud this only after Cornell confirms', or 'I shall applaud this only when a Chinese university confirms'.
BLISS is ignorance.
