Basically, yes.
Both from conservative to socialists point of view is near impossible to find someone who isn't A) a crook / mafioso / neo-aryan fanatic or B) completely irrelevant.
right now there are just two possible viable alternative on both sides of the political spectrum (Gianfranco Fini and Nichi Vendola)
Meanwhile with Berlusconi is in control they are pretty much safe because their behaviour falls perfectly in line with Berlusconi's one.
Just because it has no lolcats in it doesn't means it's not satire...it is actually shows a very similar tone and style of another pretty much famous italian female satirist, even if this text is quite mediocre and comes out as a very ugly copy of her.
Actually it's pretty much clear for a native speaker that she is speaking in very surreal , "Falling Down" kind of way.
The more probable reason is that right now much of the real political opposition to Berlusconi in italy comes from Intellectuals, journalists and comedians (especially female comedians ) considering that much of the left wing party gave up or just became subordinated to right wing parties trying to get some breadcrumbs from what they're grabbing before leaving the economic wasteland that Italy is going to become in the next few years. If you live in the southern part of italy right now, You wouldn't notice any difference with Colombia or Bolivia.
The concept is useful enough, if you realize what the user needs. They don't care about autorun per se, they care just about displaying the content from their media in less time as possible. That's their problem.
The feature, "Autorun" in such case, is a solution. And if you try to re-implement a solution without understanding the original problem, you're doomed to make the same errors of the first implementation. By looking at the GNOME interface, despite its really good production values, it's apparently a common error.
This is not a "out-of-the-box" experience. It's looks like more to a Tax-Form experience. You would spend more than 10 minutes trying to understand what to do.
And the attention span of the common user is around 7 minutes. Yahoo Answer would be filled in less than half an hour with questions on how to disable it.
Fast. Or Secure. Or Useful for the common layman.
Pick Two.
It's mainly used as an alternative of television by the part of the populace which opinions diverge from the "official positions" of the governments. There are very little doubts regarding this, and it's not the first time that the current government adopted a similar strategy to kill a competitor in the sector of news and media. We're adopting a digital broadcast system which is intentionally crippled to avoid the rise of multiple television stations, and the whole news sector is artificially kept in a state where only party-funded newspapers have any chance to stay afloat.
And before you ask: around the 90% of the nation is completely inert / used to the system, or has some advantage into keeping Berlusconi in power (hint: I live in Sicily, the most mafia-ridden zones have a 90% vote preference for Berlusconi's Party), so the rest ha no other chance than to leave Italy (rough, due to the current economic condition), or go into "Don Quixote" mode trying to fix some social problems. (and getting killed in the meanwhile, see this guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paolo_Borsellino)
So your opinion is that a bookstore should be morally obligated to carry every single book that has ever been presented to them to consider for sale, and that if they decline to carry a book or genre or some other set of books they're engaging in evil censorship?
Please, don't use words as "evil" as some sort of binary moral value. I'm sure that most people at amazon are quite torned regarding this. It's even understandable in their positions, despite being completely aware of the possible consequences. Unfortunately amazon has such relevance in today culture that the effect of their censorship is just nominally different from a violation of first amendment from the US government. I'm not from the US, but from what I've studied the constitution was created protect the population from what was considered the only possible danger for the population as a whole (i.e. the English Monarchy or the United States themselves), from a time where private companies weren't considered capable of doing the same.
You'll forgive me for scoffing; I find it absurd to pretend that Amazon's main customer demographic cares for even a split second that Amazon stopped selling gay rape fantasy books. I would venture to say that most of Amazon's customers, if they even hear about it (which is doubtful), would simply shrug and say "Good, now I won't accidentally stumble on one."
Point is, Male on male sexual violence is depicted inside the Divine Comedy,the Decameron, hinted in the Tempest, and most of the Greek neoclassic tragedies. Actually, gay rape is somewhat tame considering what happens in most tragedies. It's not unknown in french literature, too.
If you're looking for something more "Pop", there's always Fight Club (the book, not the movie), and most of the "Punk" literature movements starting from the '90 in UK and Detroit. Some of these books have been awarded by the New York Times as "book of the year".
Yeah, I'm perfectly conscious that the books here considered are not even close to the cited works. And as I said before, I'm not a psychologist, so I cannot even fantom the real effects of such books. Problem is that such books are still sold, and the writer of the censored books would be entirely in their rights to ask "where is the difference? why aren't they being censored, too?" ; speaking in terms of contents and not artistic merits, of course.
But by using such a broad brush that is censorship, Amazon is basically answering them , "because I say so", which summed with the point I've made before, creates an ugly, ugly precedent.
There's the plain old strict definition of censorship and there's the evil freedom-of-speech-suppressing information-hiding most-commonly-used definition of censorship. We really only need to worry about the latter.
Unfortunately they only diverges in their means and not their mechanics. Censorship it's still censorship, and should be applicable only in cases where it's objectively clear that rampant distribution would be a dangerous thing.
Side note: I live in Italy, a country well known in present day for the effects of lack of separation between the private media and the political power. Previously, it was known for fascism. My grandfather used to tell me that fascism didn't have to get control of the press through violence for a simple reason: the whole production of paper for books and newspapers was owned by Mussolini sympathyzers.
First off, it's their store, and it should be their decision to sell or not sell any particular book.
Well, by this logic I could say that Pre WW2 Nazi-affiliated Libraries in Germany were entirely in their right to burn every book they didn't like. Their nation (their leaders were legally elected by their country)
You could say that there's a distinction between a Library and a bookstore, but from a social and cultural standpoint Amazon is the modern equivalent of Library of Alexandria. It could be fine from a an economic and commercial perspective (but even in this case it's doubtful, considering that the negative backslash is more perceived directly from their main customer targets), but from an ethical, cultural and social perspective it's way more obscene than anything that could be written in those books.
Excuse my "commie" point of view, but I have little to no regard to the free market "sanctity" when it directly damages culture,even if controversial. It should be a tool to improve society*, not the way around.
*Somebody could argue if such books should be considered "culture" or just morbid rape fantasies that creates more serial rapists, and amazon is doing us a favor by removing them. I'm not a psychoanalyst, and I can't comment on such arguments. But if the same could be said for consumption of videogames, Hip Hop, or "esoteric" literature, then I wonder how I've not yet raped and burned down an entire city.
I doubt you're going to do too much CAD related work on an ARM netbook running an extremely specialized OS
And by the way, I'm sure they' will implement a "toggle" option for the left Shift key.
Actually, you've already done something extremely similar with the 700 billion bailout of 2008 if I'm not mistaken. Even if it wasn't called "bolshevic communism" it wasn't all that different from that, both in ideology and the flawed way it was put in pratice, considering that both the government and the related beneficiaries could have been considered an unofficial oligopoly.
But I'm not US american, so maybe my previous intepretation could be flawed, who knows.
I say, try photography for creative expression?
Probably is not the answer you are looking for, but photography puts the same skills (composition, color theory) around most of the same aesthetic concepts, without requiring the same physical requirements on the hand of your friend, especially in case of studio photography, where the camera could be even physically mounted over a tripod.
The CLI is much easier for some tasks.
Nope, it's just faster, if you have the necessary knowledge background. If you miss that and need to learn everything from scratch, it becomes infinitely slower. Especially if it's something that you need to do just once and not that often.
And yes that kind of GUI tool exists, albeit running only on mac os x. it's called Automator, and I would gladly pay to get something like that under Ubuntu.
By the way, if you are doing that kind of operation on more than thousands jpeg files, you would be more confortable by using something like picasa or Adobe Lightroom
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays. Embezzlement is another matter.
