they're all crap, both in hw and sw. Yes, you can install dd-wrt ét al, but it's still generally crap hardware you're installing it on, and the firmware is only valid for certain hardware.

I bought a Fit-PC 1.0 second hand for 500SEK ($76) and installed pfSense on it which is not hardware specific. Best router i've ever had. I have to use another device for wireless, but there I just re-used my old Linksys WRT610nv2 wireless router as a simple access point. You can get wireless-N access points pretty cheap these days, because the market is all for all-in-one router/switch/AP devices which generally cost $150 or more.

in the same vein of making claims without knowing what im talking about...

I agree, there are lots of skimmers at work, and even if the banks absorb the cost (most of the time), and even if it's only a fraction of what they earn, i would hardly say that it's efficient. Plus, the 'only' loss is virtual currency, which is easy to replace if the bank accepts the loss.

If we're talking about passwords to systems, it's data that is stolen, which can have a more profound impact on the person losing the data. So saying that we could go to PIN codes and use the same system as banks would not be evaluating the risk correctly.

I pay 79 SEK/mnth for Netflix and 99 SEK/mnth for Spotify. I get way more value out of Netflix I feel, because I spend more time on Netflix than I do on Spotify. If they increase by 2 dollars, it brings it up to the same price as Spotify, which I still find reasonable. They probably also figured that Spotify had no reason to charge more for their service as they are similar models.

You've got to have balls to come in here as a member of the gnome team. I'll give you that. Respect.

I think that Gnome3 gets more than it's fair share of criticism by a core group of people, and all I ever seem to see are posts like yours. They invariably go like this:

- Gnome sucks
- feature x doesn't work for me ## where feature x is nothing major
- feature y doesn't work for me ## where feature y is important, but not neccessarily a core issue
- there's a bunch of other features that suck as well, but I don't have time to list them right now

You complain about some valid stuff and maybe some pet gripes, but you write off the *whole desktop* paradigm of Gnome3?

I'd respect your post a lot more if you actually listed your issues, and the reasons why they are issues (the clock? seriously? It's such a big issue for you?), but invariably, personal perspective comes into it, and the logic ends up failing in many cases.

Im a techie, so bit more of a power user than normal, but not a developer with any special use-cases. I think that the *layout and organisation* of Gnome3 is the best ever desktop i've used. At first, I was unsure of the reasons behind certain decisions, but I found a bunch of videos on the Gnome website that explained the reasoning behind it, and after watching them, I realised their logical truth. I wish i could find them again.

Sure there are a bunch of things that i'm not happy about but the general feel of this new desktop paradigm is really really working for me om my stationary PC with 23" monitor.

Happened to me once. I drove all day between sites fixing it equipment in northern England. On the motorway one day I was so tired I feel asleep. I woke up moments later to the sound of traffic cones flying over the front of the car, and realised I was driving on the hard shoulder and that the traffic cones saved my life by waking me up before I drove over the embankment. Scary stuff.

I'm not a mainframe guy and don't know much but from what I've read over the years they're pretty good at being able to handle similar situations. Can they not also handle rollbacks?

You brought up a point I was going to make... they did exactly the same thing, in Paris already, years ago! Was it really '97? I thought that it was permanent then, and did not realise it was only for one day.

Wow, is it true? This is the guy that was all about willingly making it easy for folk to install proprietary drivers for everything to ease adoption of Ubuntu. I remember all the forum discussions about that. Has he finally had a change of heart? RMS is likely having a moment of grim satisfaction right now.

"On the other hand, if you mandate heavyweight regulation in such an industry, you're going to see prices go up significantly, and a lot of useful free-as-in-beer software would probably disappear almost overnight because the people writing it are going to be reluctant to accept engineering-level liability for work they do at charity/PR level prices."

I don't think that's a likely assessment of what could happen if regulation was put in place. Why would free software be in any way bound by regulatory rules? I don't think that would happen, because even most bone-heads would be easily able to grasp that you cannot hold a private person accountable to industry regulations when they release something for free. Fair enough, distribution maintainers that are publicly traded companies that release free software _may_ be affected by regulations, like redhat and canonical, but then they'd just start putting clauses in their distro EULA that the work is from many individuals and they cannot guarantee the quality. It's a bit of a different thing for a single corporation such as Oracle, who holds all the responsibility for a piece of software: then it would be acceptable that they would be bound by regulations.

I don't understand your thinking behind why free software would be affected?

So really, if all of these mega corporations were somehow forced to pay every last penny of tax that they were legally bound to pay, then governments would be receiving massive cash injections via those taxes.

At the moment it certainly does feel like the common people get taxed on income, fuel, alcohol, houses, tobacco, and anything else that the government can think of taxing people for, and that those taxes get increased every year because the government is always short of cash and needs a bit of a boost.

Wouldn't it sort of fix the problem if megacorps were paying the taxes they owed? Purely hypothetically of course, because i'm aware that government would never _lower_ taxes on fuel just because they were now receiving massive tax monies from megacorps. Hell, they'd probably just keep raising them at the same pace anyway.

And who doesn't believe that the tax system is totally corrupt anyway? Massive sums are probably siphoned off, hidden away, spent on items the public would deem questionable at best. I mean, i've never heard of any transparent statistics that are completely accountable for, and could easily be verified by the general public like say:

we have 9 million people working in City. The income tax from these people was £X in 2012, Fuel tax income to the government was £X etc.
Total tax income to the government in 2012 was £X.
We spent it on:

transport
------------
£X bus maintenance
£X roadworks in Cities 1,2,3

healthcare
-------------
£X hospital building maintenance at City1 general hospital
£X etc

you get the idea. Seriously, if anyone knows that these statistics exist in black and white for any government, please say so.

Getting into politics and climbing the ladder of political success is in my eyes an ancient human mechanism of gaining power, influence and personal wealth. There is no place in that mechanism for pure altruism, or the concept of "for the good of the people". Sure, the money does get spent on public infrastructure to a large-ish degree, but that is out of neccessity for keeping the balance of power within the political elite, so that the mob does not rise. The concept of altruistic government seems to only exist in Star Trek.

Religious pun intentional.

But seriously, there are a lot of misconceptions in the comments on this. So much ignorance flying around it's quite scary.

We went through IVF because it just wasn't happening after 5 yrs of trying. Got one child out of it, delivered by c-section, which, I may add, is something that you really shouldn't look at, because you sort of go into a mild form of shock seeing your wife split open across the belly. It goes against what you think of as a normal sight. I wouldn't recommend looking.

I am extrmely grateful for IVF and wouldn't have children without it, but the entire process leads me to believe that there is a lot of room for corruption and immoral decisions within that industry. It doesn't surprise me that it's a massive industry to be in.

It cost the state 25,000 SEK per treatment, and we had 3 treatments. We didn't pay a penny for this because we we're referred by the doctor, but the _private_ clinic was getting that money for each try. Then if it still doesn't work, but you've got embryos left over from a previous try, you can pay 10,000 SEK to have one or perhaps two of them implanted. I think these clinics are sitting on a goldmine. Squirt in an embryo without care for the first two goes, so it misscarriages (sod the emotional distress of the couple), then you can be more careful on the third go, and get the full 75.000 SEK from the state. I'm not saying this happens, but with the amount of corruption in the world, it is certainly not an impossibility.

Some people I know weren't successful after 3 tries, and had to continue out of their own pocket for another 3 tries. 105.000 SEK total. Slightly cheaper than adopting a chinese baby girl. Which brings me onto another pet peeve: Many people can shoot out bebbies like it's going out of fashion, but you have trouble getting pregnant and it's going to cost you a small fortune for the _privilege_ of adopting. Another corrupt industry. Last time I checked, you can adopt from China for 130.000-150.000 SEK. It makes adoptive parents very happy, and im truly happy for them, but I think they subconciously wipe over the fact that what they are paying is an immoral amount of money. Anyone out there who's adpoted who wants to comment on that?

Going back to IVF; the thing that you worry about (being a true member of the tin-foil hat brigade) is that they don't destroy the left-over embryos that you don't use, and perform other research on them. But that's just the paranoia speaking. But they were quite blasé with certain things, and especially lax with sending the bills for keeping our 13 remaining embryos in the freezer for 2 years, which gave an impression of it not being a tightly run ship.

I'd like to sign up for the Swedish procreation initiative!

Virginia is in the south, right? That there headline is called "eye-for-an-eye-racism-reply", directed at the people who thought this was a good idea.

disclaimer: im white european.

To begin with, irrespective of social background, I think we can all agree that all humans have more or less the same potential. I think this obvious fact was maybe to obvious to make it into the comments, but still has to be said. Granted, some with tougher backgrounds might have to work harder at it, but our brain capacity is mostly within the same ballpark. Ranking based on race is just beyond idiotic.

Secondly, they don't specify what disabled means. If i've lost both legs, do I not have to score as high. ffs.

Disclaimer 2: im not disabled, and don't have a chip on my shoulder.... unless it involves human dumbasses, from any country.

I moved out of the UK 13 yrs ago, and im no longer part of the daily culture, but I get surprised at how far my homeland has gone in terms of nanny state/police state/big brother.

How did we get to this stage? Is it Camerons gov. that has done the damge, or did blair set the groundwork? I used to take great pride in my nationality, but this is one conversational topic where you hesitate in admitting your British.