In next weeks slashdot I expect to see something about Moxie Marlinspike being asked to deliver a nice shiny yacht to Saudi Arabia and it going horribly wrong when he gets arrested for piracy :)

Only if you happen to be an immoral twat trying to justify their argument.

The truth is that thing like paying sales taxes on mail order goods involve you going out of your way to pay more tax. Setting up a dodgy offshore arrangement involves going out of your way to pay less tax. There is a massive difference between these two things in that in one case you are just taking the path of least resistance, in the other you are investing a shitload of extra effort in order to hide money from the taxman. The effort involved is key.

Also, there is the minor difference in terms of reward. By not paying the odd bit of sales tax you can probably save a few thousand or tens of thousands of dollars at most. By hiding money offshore you can save millions if you have it.

Is that fair though? Just because you can find another government that you can pay to take that shit off your hands does not mean the people in the country actually want the damn stuff.

Also, what happens if the country in question falls apart and someone decides they want to give it back to you later in the form of a dirty bomb? Even though you shipped that crap abroad you still have to keep an eye on the stuff to stop it falling into the wrong hands.

Apt is fine for the OS, they even said so. What they want to come up with is something completely different I think. This is not a replacement for apt, it is to complement apt. It actually sounds like this is really designed as a competitor to the APK file you use under android for distributing applications.

However great apt is, it is utterly useless from the point of selling commercial software as there is the possibility of software not installing due to dependency issues. This is not an option with commercial software as the (stupid) end use will blame the software he just bought for not installing, not the fact that his machine is not able to download a dependency package because it is not available upstream. As many have pointed out this wastes disk space, but who cares as it is cheap now.

It sounds like their grand idea is to come up with an additional application wrapper format that will always install everything for a particular application in a single directory also making uninstalling much easier.

So if I do a default Windows 7 or 8 install does Windows XP Mode get installed by default then so hence require no configuration? Thought not, as thats what to configure.

This actually makes perfect sense. On a modern PC it will involve the user learning about virtualisation (to run XP) and then also learning how to configure windows (to not run updates). This is great way of preparing dole claimants for an IT job so by the time you have gained enough skills to claim any dole money you have enough skills to go straight into a job as and IT support worker for the dole office and their crappy old IT systems.

This is a problem that employers deal with in other countries though. My missus is just about to take maternity leave, she is planning to take the full 12 months she is entitled to by law (We live in the UK).

The second 6 months will be on vastly reduced pay though she does have the option to transfer some of this leave to me (in addition to the 2 weeks on full pay I also get by law) but since I earn more it does not make sense to do this unfortunately. The fact that she can transfer some to me if she returns to work though does mean we are both fairly equal in this regard. Note that this applies even though we work for completely different companies, if I earned less than her I would simply go into work and explain the situation to my boss and he has to give me the leave (on the same vastly reduced pay as she would get though, basically my pay would come from the government instead of my employer while I was off and they put a maximum weekly wage in place that is roughly equivalent to working in McDonalds).

Because that is if you break the law. Google are not breaking any laws here, they are just making sure they pay as little tax as legally possible.

Big international companies always have the ability to declare their profits in whatever country they see fit by rigging the rates that the parent companies charge for use of the brand name, this is perfectly legal, if the government want to stop this they can try changing the law. Even if you changed this law though it would be tremendously hard to prove if the fees being charged for use of the brand name were over the top or not.

This is just that the government has to be seen to be doing something as we have local elections today and the ruling coalition is going to take a bath at the hands of smaller parties and desperately want to be seen to be doing something on tax avoidance.

The truth is that the government has already done something, they have lowered the rate of corporate tax to the same level as Ireland to make us competitive as a nation in the race to the bottom. Simply lowering the rate of corporate tax in response to corporations avoiding tax smacks of surrender and weakness though so they do not exactly want to draw attention to this.

If you are a decent techie you can earn far more working in the private sector than you can working in government. Also, it is tremendously frustrating working in the public sector if you are competent because of the utter retards you have surrounding you in the public sector. You also have to deal with people who go sick every other day and never get fired because their manager does not want to take the risk of screwing up firing someone and all the crazy european labour laws you have to follow in the process.

This is all quite annoying to most decent techies I know are pretty driven so the only people who stay in the public sector for longer than it takes to earn their first decent reference (that gets them the better paid private sector job) are the people who seem some benefit from it. The benefit is never financial so usually it is that they get to doss about all day and do fuck all.

They probably asked how much it would cost to securely remove all data from the hard disks with the same 100% cast iron guarantee and got a similar quote back from their outsourced IT as they did for cleaning the viruses off them.

As to reimaging the machines that is the sort of magic that only a techie would know about, not the clueless public servant middle manager who was tasked with the project.

Also, he would get the blame when one of the machines had a perfectly normal hardware failure in a year or so. If he buys he new machine he does not get blamed when it breaks in a similar time frame.

Of course none of this makes any sense whatsoever, it is a government job, it is not supposed to. That was my point. Anyone who doesn't understand should try watching the film Brasil.

Well, there was that new object orientated thingy-ma-whatsit that came out recently?

Of course the admins time probably adds up to about $300 per machine.

Seriously, I can completely believe this story because it would probably take someone at least an hour to clean the PC. It is also quite easy to believe that a government department or big company who outsourced their IT would be paying more per hour for technical staff than they would for a new PC.

This is especially true if you asked the IT outsourcing company to provide a cast iron assurance that the virus was removed with some sort of penalty clause if their was a reinfection. The quote you would get back would be prohibitively expensive because the any company with any sense would run a mile from providing such a ridiculous guarantee.

All of sudden what sounds like a 5 minute job to someone with some technical skills and has a 99% success rate has become such a headache to the bean counters that demanded a 100% success rate that they decide throwing the machines in the bin is actually cheaper. Of course this is ridiculous, but I have heard of things far more ridiculous when government middle management gets involved in IT decisions.

In public sector management you hardly ever get rewarded for things coming in under budget like you do in the private sector but you get torn to shreds if anything ever goes wrong so the whole thing ends up being ridiculously risk averse in the extreme.

Nope. Some GM crops have the restriction built in at the genetic level. Kind of like a crop based DRM. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_technology

If I was Monsanto (and hence only cared about profits) I would make damn sure that I didn't have to rely on the Indian courts to uphold any copyright or patent related stuff after their stances on generic drugs so it stands to reason they would build the legal restriction into the actual product.

Maybe I should have included a link to that page in my original reply. I thought it would mention that many GM crops produce sterile seeds on the main GM crops page I linked but I guess it relies on you to click on the "GM controversies" link. I didn't read all the page as most of what I typed was based on memory as I have been following the GM arguments for years.

Start your post with an insult, nice way to show your own arrogance.

Wrong. The main GM plant that people moan about is GM Soya made by Monsanto. They created GM soya as normal soya was killed if you used roundup weed killer on it. So Monsanto create a GM crop to increase their weedkiller sales.

Ok, you could argue that there is a difference between a pesticide and a weed killer but that is just being pedantic. The truth is the parent poster kind of had a point, they just screwed up by saying "Pesticide" when they should have said "WeedKiller". Interestingly wikipedia has the following to say about pesticides:

"A pesticide is generally a chemical or biological agent (such as a virus, bacterium, antimicrobial or disinfectant) that through its effect deters, incapacitates, kills or otherwise discourages pests. Target pests can include insects, plant pathogens, weeds, mollusks, birds, mammals, fish, nematodes (roundworms), and microbes that destroy property, cause nuisance, spread disease or are vectors for disease. Although there are benefits to the use of pesticides, some also have drawbacks, such as potential toxicity to humans and other animals. According to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, 9 of the 12 most dangerous and persistent organic chemicals are pesticides."

So many people seem to consider it fair enough to call something a "pesticide" when the actual pest being killed is a weed. I know the correct term would be herbicide but hey, who am I to argue with wikipedia :)

You might want to read the following, paying particular attention to the section on Glyphosphate resistant crops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_crops

That is also arguable. That might be the norm in the intensive farming in the developed world but it is not the case everywhere.

I think he was referring to the spate of farmers suicides in India where using seeds from a previous harvest is more common: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers'_suicides_in_India. This was actually blamed on them not knowing they were buying seeds where the crops would produce sterile seeds so that a year after the bought the crop they planted a load of duds that did not grow.

I am not entirely sure why a bunch of farmers started killing themselves in far away country, but keeping some of your seeds from a previous harvest is still common in the case of third world subsistence farming it seems.

Personally I am not sure I agree with all of the anti GM lobby or not, but you were an insulting twat when it was not warranted as some of what he was saying actually had a basis in fact. You could have more politely corrected him without calling him a fool, especially since your post was very light on factual content and evidence itself. I am being deliberately insulting to let you know how it feels, but have tried to include more references to some of my assertions.

Lol. Of course I understood that x11 display server only sent stuff over the network if it was actually talking to a remote client.

What I was saying was the separation of the X11 into two parts is completely unneeded if you are only ever intending your OS to run on single user devices like phones and desktop computers. It might be a nice to have as far as us geeks are concerned, but he is obviously trying to target Ubuntu at having the same OS running on both Phones and Desktops / Laptops. For that market you can throw the client-server stuff away and very few users will care (even if those people who do care shout loudly about how great it was to make up form them being a small minority).

As to running Ubuntu on servers do they actually care about that market either? Personally where I work we use Red Hat (actual paid for RedHat, not Centos) and Debian for all the Linux servers so have no idea how friendly they are as a company to people running Ubuntu as a server OS. My gut feeling says they are probably not friendly at all but I am happy to be corrected in this.

I have been using Linux for a few years and remember playing with getting the X11 client to talk to a different X11 server in the past. I have only ever done this as a bit of fun though on two machines that were right next to each other. I have never actually used this or needed it in the 10 years I have been working as a software developer and system admin.

The first thing I do on a linux server is dive into inittab and change the default run level to something where there is no GUI running unless I start it. On most of the linux servers I build X is not even installed since they are just forming part of a LAMP stack and I do everything via the command line and reckon any system admin worth his salt who replaces / works with me should be able to do the same.