It's a pretty interesting new take at things.

Downloaded and installed yesterday and played around with it a little. Quite nifty.

What bugs me is that on OS X, a lot of the keys it uses are assigned elsewhere and thus don't work. I'll have to figure out how to redefine the keyboard shortcuts, and the preferences dialog doesn't work. It's a beta, ok. I'm not complaining, just saying what I noticed.

The other thing is that right now I don't know what to use it for. But that might just be because I'm not a heavy spreadsheet user and if I use Numbers, the (missing in TreeSheets) calculation functions are exactly what I'm using it for.

I've been posting for years every time discussions about ICANN, DNS and other US-centric Internet systems came up that the party line "but only US control guarantees that it remains free and open" is bullshit at best.

Frankly, putting everything under UN control is probably the best thing we could do. Not because the UN were any less power-hungry or insane than any individual government, but because they have more trouble ever agreeing on anything, and less resources to do crap in secret.

Cue the USA-USA-USA answers...

I've been documenting this and have all the background here:

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/German_parliament_petition_against_software_patents

One of the most important things you learn when you study history is the difference between source and occasion.

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was the occasion to start WW1, but not the cause.

Likewise, the Declaration of Independence was not caused by one single tax. That was the straw that broke the camels back, but hardly the only reason.

I believe the crucial error everyone makes in this area is to assume that a fixed system will maintain its state in a world of constant change. No matter if your vision of the ideal government is a big, a small or an ultra-minimalist government, most of these visions share one fatal flaw: They are static. Real life isn't static. What your vision needs is a mechanism of adaption to constant change.

omg

You really think that "libertarian" is an american speciality? You're going to ignore Joseph Déjacque? You're going to ignore that the term had a considerable change of meaning in the US in the 1950s? You're going to ignore the Austrian School of economics?

Change, my friend. Change is the only constant phenomenon.

Agreed, especially on the 2nd point. We have almost no data on how long intelligent life persists. There's one theory that I forgot the name of that says most intelligent species will probably wipe themselves out once they discover nuclear war.

That's the point. Even putting them into the fridge to kill them (as in this concept) is something lots of people wouldn't want to do.

Then again, two hundred years ago, most people did kill their own farm animals prior to eating them, so it very much is a cultural thing.

It's official then, it's not the land of the free anymore. Because if you don't want your freedom, you don't deserve it.

Oppressed people at least know that things should be different. They might lack the resources or resolve to fight the system right here and now, but they know things aren't right and just might stand up any moment.

The US, on the other hand - and to be honest, lots of the west - has become the worst kind of oppressive system, worse than 1984. The kind where the oppressed believe the lies they are told. Russians knew that Prawda wasn't telling them the truth. Way too many americans believe Fox does.

They do, just like US-democracts and US-republicans are unlike their counterparts in other countries.

A US-republican would be considered a hardcore right-winger in most of Europe, for example.

But why?

If got go deeper on this question - and we desperately need more people answering questions on more than just the surface layer - you will find that the reason that corporations do not have armed forces is, oops, that the strong government prevents it. In many 3rd world countries, they in fact do have armed forces in pay.

The strong government you abhor so much is what stands between you and everyone else oppressing you in very much the same ways.

While at the same time giving it enough power to still function as a government. The founding fathers weren't libertarians and did include rules about things like taxation that modern-day-US-style-libertarians condemn as stuff straight out of hell.

Not in the US and not at this point of time, and that doesn't mean they are any better just because they have other means.

Besides, in many cases that power is largely theoretical. If you don't pay a parking ticket, the government won't storm your house with a SWAT team - they will sue you. Oh, you probably don't make a difference between the three arms of government, do you?

Tell that to people who got into Scientology and don't like it anymore. We have quite a few first-person accounts that it ain't this easy.

I call bullshit on this one.

If you were really hired by a medium-size company, you would be professional enough to a) not require advise from /. on the very stuff you're being paid for and b) would not post any details of a job on a public forum, with our without names.

My best guess is that you're in the IT department and don't like your boss, and the imaginary consultant is someone who you hope/dream/fantasize about. Not judging you, we've all been there. IT management is notoriously incompetent, and if you haven't had at least one boss in your career who was utterly and completely a result of the Peter Principle, then you haven't had much of a career, yet. :-)

But please, don't take your fellow geeks for fools, we aren't.

Bingo.

This is what I don't get about US-style libertarians. Somehow, the government is evil by definition, but what about all the other types of organizations, corporations, churches, interest groups, etc, etc.

The machine will care whether or not he's a future danger, because past damage is done.

And I'm pretty sure that if he is any smart, he has made sure that in the event of his demise, news agencies will be informed and at least one additional secret document will be released.

So yes, 6 months down the line, this would still be a big story and the news would bring it. If you want to talk time, try 6 years.

Again, just like Asange, being in the news is a pretty good safety net. Better than hiding.

If your safety is anonymity, you will never know if it has been pierced.

And if they'd kill him now, or in the very near future, it would be an instant news item and there would be many, many questions. In fact, if I were the NSA, I'd probably send out a team to make sure that he doesn't have an accident, because if he dies in a car crash tomorrow, everyone will assume it wasn't an accident.

That's total nonsense. And you contradict yourself in the next sentence:

We know nothing about life in the universe. Nothing. Zero, nada, zilch, null. Until we have a much larger data sample, it is all just theoretical. Completely true, and until the intervention of interstellar travel, unavoidable.

That is exactly why we're looking for any clues we might find. That includes not only Mars, but also Europa, for example, where some scientists believe we might find primitive life.

We know for sure that there's life on Earth. We can exclude most of the other planets and moons as they can not possibly sustain any life based on anything we can imagine.

But that's just the solar system. For the rest of the universe, we have, for example, just recently changed our estimate about how common planets are. We thought that most suns wouldn't have any, now we think almost the opposite.

We have just started having methods to find planets of earth size.

But still, life somewhere else in the solar system would be a pretty big deal.

Wrong. Biomass is not the deciding factor. Right now, our sample size indicates that 100% of planets with life at all will bring about intelligent life. But that could just be due to the anthropic principle. We don't know if Earth is a rare exception, or if there's something to evolution that will result in intelligence in most cases.

Again, getting closer to an answer here, in either direction, would be a pretty big deal.

Yeah, that quote is really, really old and gets used by politicians a lot.

Lately, here in Germany, we've started throwing it back at them whenever they are hiding something from us. Like who gives them how much money or which companies they work for after their term, or who paid their campaign, or indeed their last holiday.

The "if you have nothing to hide..." should be told to them a lot more often, because they've been abusing it for a long, long time.

Also, since we know that sexual favours are as successful in swaying people as financial incentives, I would like a full record of who my politicians have been sleeping with during their terms. As there are more lies in this area than in any other, we should have 24/7 surveilance and automated reporting. What? You don't have anything to hide, do you?