FTFA:

So he likes the KDE applications, and wants to have them when he uses Windows. Simple as that!

Well that's because it's not about helping the countries in question, it's about helping the US. The US produces a lot of IP, so from a US perspective good IP laws are those which result in a lot of money being paid to US companies. It's fair enough if you ask me, since the US government is just looking out for its own interests, which I guess is pretty much what it's supposed to do. On the other hand, the governments of other countries might be doing their job best if they tell the US to go to hell.

I used to have a Nokia 5100. The thing was so tough that I used to throw it as hard as I could against brick walls, the pavement or whatever to show people how it wouldn't break. Of course I only have weedy nerd strength but I still thought it was very impressive. After many years of faithful service it died unceremoniously in its sleep, which seemed ironic considering what it had survived. I now have an N900, which is very nice and all that but somehow I don't fancy its chances against a concrete floor...

No need to freak out. Nokia says that there will be an open mode, which will be open and freely modifiable like Maemo 5 is now, and a closed mode which has all the DRM stuff for the app store and media store. Switching between the two will require a device reboot, but if you want a totally open device the option will still be there (or that's what they're saying now). More information can be found on Nokia's wiki here

Of course if they backtrack on this at all and just totally close the thing down, then that would totally suck. But that's not what they say they're planning.

This reminds me of a recent feature in The Guardian, which calls for the preservation of a nuclear power plant in Snowdonia, Wales since it was designed by the British modernist architect Sir Basil Spence. Linky.

I guess that's true now for the core OS install (it wasn't in the past) but on Windows I find I spend a lot of time messing about installing the different pieces of 3rd party software I need. Even when I know the names of all of the software I need, it still involves bouncing around a bunch of websites, sitting through all different installers, often being asked to reboot each time.

In Linux, I find the path to getting a full system much quicker, since it's just a case of going into the package manager, clicking the things I want then playing solitaire while the things download and install automagically. Oh, and it pretty much only needs a restart for kernel updates.

In the article it is mentioned that nepomuk will be moving in 4.4 to a new backend, which offers improved performance. Perhaps this will include a reduced memory footprint. Anyway, if you don't like it, it is very easy to turn off: System Settings -> Advanced tab -> Desktop Search -> The first checkbox.

Well actually I don't think they should have marked it as release, I think it's hard to argue any other way seeing how things turned out. However, upstream software providers can screw things up. Distros should act to shield their users from these screw-ups, by judiciously selecting the package versions that will give the best experience for their users. In the case of the KDE 4.0 release, I think the distros completely failed to do this. So I think they deserve some share of the blame.

IMO a lot of the blame for the KDE 4.0 pain lies with the distros. So KDE 4.0 wasn't ready for prime time, too bad. So why the hell were certain distros inflicting it upon their users if it wasn't ready? Couldn't they have tested it, noticed that it wasn't ready, and waited before deploying it? I really don't know what they were thinking. My distro of choice (Arch Linux) waited til KDE4 was done before rolling it out, and Arch mainly aims to be on the bleeding edge most of the time. In fact I installed 4.0 anyway, because I wanted to try it out, but I really appreciated Arch's common sense in handling the matter. Not so for too many of the other distros though.

I don't think you need to be worrying about KDE 5.0 for a little while, but even if it does turn up sometime soon-ish, there's no reason why it needs to be as painful as 4.0. For example, the change from KDE 2 to KDE 3 was pretty smooth. Even if this hypothetical 5.0 release was a major change from the KDE 4 series, I would imagine that the KDE devs might learn from past mistakes (gasp!) and do things differently this time around.

Yes, quite, I wouldn't be surprised. Or maybe it could have been due to political content, but maybe they have a good reason. Perhaps the whole reason they have these organisations is that delicate matters of international politics can be raised in a very neutral and controlled way. I have to point out that I'm not a diplomat or whatever and I've never organised one of these things (putting me in the same boat as pretty much every other Slashdotter commenting on this story), but imagine how pissed off you would be if you had spent all that effort getting important people together into a room from all over the world to talk about things with important global consequences, and the whole thing was scuppered because a bunch of idiots put up posters that led some of the delegates to believe that the hosting organisation was biased against them from the start or politically compromised in some other way.

Now I support free speech, I think it's a good and important thing. However, if everyone is packed into a room, all shouting their viewpoints at the same time so nobody can really hear or be heard above the din, then what bloody good is that? In that situation, I think that free speech would be best served by someone getting everyone to shut the hell up, then organising a way to let everyone say what they want to say without being shouted over by other people. I think the UN is like a much more complicated version of that situation there; you need to have strict protocols controlling how opinions are expressed and viewpoints are put across, or else the whole thing will descend into chaos.

Also, TFA has a quote:

Well, you can do a quick Google search and download a PDF of the conference programme. Apart from the hilarious mistake in naming one of the delegates as "Ms. Bruce Schneier", the programme also details a talk on Security, Openness and Privacy, which includes the following topics:
* The respect for privacy as a business advantage;
* Cultural and technical perspectives on the regulation of illegal Web contents;
* Regulatory models for privacy;
* Ensuring the open architecture of the Internet;
* Enabling frameworks for freedom;
* Ethical dimensions of the Internet.

So perhaps they will be discussing those topics after all - but discussing them perhaps according to some stricter protocol for the reasons I mentioned above. Again, I'd like to point out that I don't actually know anything about all this UN conference business, I'm really just trying to point out that maybe there's something more complicated going on than some of the other comments on here are suggesting.