I work with a man from Egypt, a Christian with family over there. I asked him what he thought about all this and his eyes lit up, "my family is finally free."

Great! So they can now start suppressing gays, abortion, science, etc just like they do here in the US!

Trading one form of hatred for another isn't progress.

The reality is that Chavez did more for social conditions in his country than any other president in living memory.

Yeah, except for those rampant human rights abuses. "Social conditions" includes things like free speech, whether you feel you can get justice, feel safe. Even if what you claimed were true - that his people were better off with him than without him - the ends do not justify the means.

Whether US government officials (not "USA"; don't confuse a country's government or leadership with its people) found him a threat and a risk (not "hated him viciously") is irrelevant to Chavez's power-grubbing, human-rights-abusing, autocratic ruling. That you use the word "vicious" to describe the US government's attitude towards him, instead of how he treated his own people, shows that you have a serious perspective problem.

They're no longer really part of the first world.

Sigh. Yet another person who doesn't understand what "third world", "first world", etc mean.

"Worlds" rank countries whether they're with us (NATO/democratic: 1st) vs them (non-democratic/communists, 2nd) vs undeveloped economy (3rd), no, actually.

Unfortunately, there's been a setback in the schedule. They tested it on Slashdot and it exploded.

Thanks.

I don't have a ton of experience with native English speakers outside of Americans so I didn't want to claim that problem for anyone else.

The lack of third person plural is an interesting thing. The funny thing is in some places in the USA y'all wont do it either. Y'all has become second person singular and "all y'all" is the plural.

Of course every language has it's oddities. I do think getting a functional command of English is pretty easy. I think that part of this is that English speakers are used to hearing it used in so many different ways. I'm trying to learn Hungarian and let me tell you, aside from being intrinsically difficult, native speakers are not used to hearing it from any one but other native speakers who all use it in pretty much identical fashion. (There is one small group that have an 'accent' sort of but I think that's pretty uncommon.)

The really nice thing about having more than one language at your disposal is that you can use the one that works better for the situation. When I'm talking with a Hungarian in English and I'm not sure if they are saying 15 or 50, I just switch to Hungarian numbers and there's not an issue any more.

Feel free to knock yourself out with wxPython - but I really recommend taking a good look at PyQT if you haven't already. It is a joy to work with and just a very, very nice way to build good Python guis.

They have great tools for building the interface if you want to go that route. Though of course you don't have to, you could code it all. And there are a ton of really good guides out there to help show you how to get started. The new Python plugin for KDevelop includes a nice template that will give you everything you need to get started right out of the box.

Anyway - just a thought.

Yeah, my number is one digit off from some company's support line, I get their calls all the time. I've been tempted to start messing with them but never have, yet...

Our wii is region locked. So my son's friend brought over a game and they couldn't play it. I've seen that the new xbox and playstation wont have region blocking so that seems to be moving in a good direction.

A lot of stuff on the web is region locked - I run into it on youtube constantly. The vpn I use gets me around a lot of stuff but misses on youtube a lot. (It only routes traffic for certain things so that I don't take the performance hit when I don't need to.) In fact google is horrible about this. Often when they release new Android apps they are US only. I can't even go to the Nexus 7 sales page without being on the vpn.

That's mostly it. There are the things that are just different - but that's not the same. It is annoying how much stuff the US does differently than just about everyone else. It would be nice if my home country got on board with everybody else in terms of the metric system for example. Coax connectors in Europe are different. The power system of course and so on. My son's bicycle might have a leaky tire, so I'll be finding out if wheel sizes are the same. I know valve stems are different so it will mean a new pump. But the longer I live here the less stuff I have where that matters.

I would say that so far in my travels and living in Europe my experience hasn't been that these schemes enforce higher prices in the US. I'd guess the US is in the middle, with developing nations lower and developed nations other than the US paying higher prices. Though this can be tough to judge. For example here the sales tax is higher and the manufacturer has to honor much longer warranty terms per EU law.

I was never good at Brood War. I'm way too slow to play other people. I still play the campaign though. I agree about game play in the new one. And the graphics. I do enjoy watching other people play though even if I haven't fired it up myself in a long, long time.

"I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?

Gingerbread? Honeycomb?"

Well, no. There's a very superficial similarity, but in practice the difference is huge. On Android there is a top panel with icons in it, but you're not expected to actually touch those icons. They're purely indicators. They'd be terrible touch targets; far too small.

In GNOME 3 the stuff on the top panel isn't just informational, it is a bunch of targets you're actually supposed to use. You click on the network icon to configure the network, you click on your user name to get the User menu, etc etc. This would make a terrible tablet UI; those elements are far too tiny to be viable targets for finger touching.

"Sure Gnome3 isn't exactly the same but there most certainly are similarities especially in how applications are presented to the user.""

Here is the design document for the overview: https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design#Activities_Overview . Here is the reasoning for the application picker design: "This enables new applications to be launched and open applications to be switched to. The avoidance of exclusive application categories and nested sub-menus is a distinct advantage of application launching in the shell compared with the GNOME 2 desktop. Users do not have to guess which category an application is in, and the motor control demands of the application picker are lower than those of menus. The application picker also utilises spatial memory, making it quick and easy to relocate applications." Nothing at all about tablets. (The key point is the thing about 'motor control demands': IIRC, the GNOME team did some usability testing on GNOME 2, and found testers often made errors in launching applications through nested menus, especially when using touchpads, because of how close items are together and how easy it is to move the pointer a bit wrongly and lose your spot in the menus).

"Yes, but that doesn't mean it's not "mobile inspired" in the same way that Unity on Ubuntu and Metro/Modern on Windows 8 are."

It just isn't. I don't know why you're so determined to believe something to be the case which is not, in fact, the case. It's not like the Shell design is some kind of huge top secret, the files are right there on the Wiki. You can go and look at them. If it was 'mobile inspired', they would say so. It just isn't. This is a plain fact, it isn't up for debate.

"Rahul Sundaram also keeps saying the same thing."

He keeps saying the same thing because it's true. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time accepting that. Why would we lie about it? If GNOME Shell was 'mobile inspired' I'd say it was. I don't see what mileage there'd be in lying about it.

"But ......you just said, " 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'". Fedora and Gnome developers can't have it both ways!"

I don't know why you keep trying to lump us together, we are not the same thing at all. As I've said a thousand times, I like to talk about GNOME 3 because I like GNOME 3, I think it gets an unfair rap around here. It's entirely a personal choice, and has nothing to do with Fedora in particular. I was using GNOME Shell (the very early versions) before I ever used Fedora, on Mandriva, which is generally considered a KDE-native distro.

What I meant by the 'keep them in mind, kinda' thing was this single bit from the design document I linked above:

"Effectively works on contemporary hardware: the Shell will provide an excellent experience on touch-based devices and will scale down to small screen sizes. It has also been designed with wide-screen in mind"

That's it, that's all it has to say about 'tablets'. It's the last bullet point in a six bullet point list of 'Goals and advantages'. If you think that makes it 'mobile inspired', well, I dunno what to say.

Oh, sorry, I thought we were just talking about the display resolution, didn't realize we were discussing the MBP Retina specifically in terms of that whole system. We do try reasonably hard to make Fedora run as well as possible on Macs, though there is unfortunately a bug in F19 which makes the install a bit harder than it needs to be on Macs:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=979205

It needs a bit more testing to confirm, but it looks like a late change we put in to re-use existing EFI system partitions instead of always creating a new one rather screwed up Macs, and you'll have to use custom partitioning to get a working install on one :/

But aside from that bug we do try to have all the right stuff in place for Mac support, and Fedora is probably one of the better distros for installing on Macs. Nowhere near perfect, but probably one of the better choices.

I'm no expert in the field (I've never run RHEL or OEL) but from what I understand, they clone each RHEL release, then provide it with a choice of a kernel that matches the RHEL kernel or Oracle's own kernel that has some stuff they think is good in it.

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

The design of GNOME 3 has very little to do with tablets, I really don't know where that meme came from. You can read through the whole design document and about all it says about tablets is 'yeah, there's these tablet things kinda happening, maybe we should keep them in mind, kinda'. I mean, look at the top panel: does that look like something you'd want to use on a tablet?

It was designed for computers, pure and simple. You're perfectly free not to like it, but it doesn't have anything to do with tablets.