About a year ago I upgraded my synaptic (the only user-friendly package manager I know so far). Turns out that the Debian guys missed a critical flaw which made Synaptic crash when loading the repos. Downgrading synaptic using command-line tools was a royal pain in the ass. That's the kind of errors that I hate, and the guys criticizing Ubuntu are much more prone to commit them.

While I don't like Ubuntu myself (for some glitches I've experienced - ironically, in the user-friendliness area), I do agree that it has set the bar on user-friendliness. More user-friendly = more popular. More popular = more pressure on the devs to write software that just works.

As an example, I'll use Mepis 8.5 - it's being released with the latest version of KDE. Well guess what, the installation screen is quite unusable if you have an nVidia video card. You're stuck at 640x480 (or 800x600 if you're lucky), and the installation screens are clipped. Sure, you can install the drivers in RAM, but then you have to reboot. DOH. All installed drivers vanish. Another problem that could be solved with community support.

With more community support, these problems will go again after the devs realize that the world they're writing software for is NOT a world filled with closets stacked with old network cards, cables, old consoles, a hard disk full of debugging and developing software and regexp cheat sheets stappled on a nearby wall.

As much as it hurts, the devs need to get off their clouds, open their eyes and see that the people who use distros like Ubuntu are people who have a life - ok, a busy life - and don't have the resources, the time, nor the brains to solve those pesky problems.

I still remember the days where one had to edit the xfree86 .conf file by hand after following a series of instructions. I sincerely hope those days don't ever come back again.

Ah, but first time criminals aren't aware of the situation. It's those that are easiest to catch. And the police better do it before they become SERIAL criminals.

On the other hand, iPhone storing screenshots of the GPS indicating where you've been... it's outright creepy. Orwell was right, man.

Yes, there was a redundant x in "h4xx0r5".

It makes all sense now! With current technology, the only thing that can make a machine CRASH is a faulty DRIVER!

And don't forget Blackjack, and hookers!

Come to think about it, forget about the bad teachers and child abusers.

Worse. They're saying it's an ILLEGAL exchange.

The DMCA makes it legal UNTIL a takedown notice is issued.

There, fixed it for ya.

Why settle for LIDAR when you can have Orichalcum?

A friend of mine has been recently interested in BDSM. Not as porn, but as a sexual lifestyle, and he's currently exploring contacts in his city. Of course, since this was a completely foreign practice to him, he had to do research.

Where do you think he researched? Wikipedia, of course!

This puts one to think: Is searching for sex articles (in an educational way) bad, even if they're considered "porn"? Let's suppose a couple engages in a wrongly-educated BDSM sexual act, and due to their lack of information, they end up harming each other, in a very bad (bad as in "OMG we need to go to the hospital") way?

This friend of mine told me all the things he learned about SSC (Sane, Safe, Consensual) in Wikipedia. Let's suppose one of these days, these articles vanish.

Poof.

Is ignorance and censorship the right way to do things? Are we going back to the dark ages?

For starters, what the fuck is this "porn in wikipedia" you speak of? So far I've never seen any!

From the article:

"The times in which we living knows a huge widening of the frontiers of communication," he said (according to our Italian fixer/producer) and the new media of this new age points to a more "egalitarian and pluralistic" forum. But, he went on to say, it also opens a new hole, the "digital divide" between haves and have-nots. Even more ominous, he said, it exacerbates tensions between nations and within nations themselves. And it increases the "dangers of ... intellectual and moral relativism," which can lead to "multiple forms of degradation and humiliation" of the essence of a person, and to the "pollution of the spirit." All in all, it seemed a pretty grim view of the wide open communication parameters being demanded by the Internet age."

The Pope wasn't talking about transparency. He talked about the dangers of the information age. The "digital divide" between haves and have-nots is a very good example of it.

Nothing new here, move along.

"Alice and Bob go into a bar..."

Wait a second. You could train the system to find boobies for you, recognize them and tell you to look back at the road!

On the other hand, if the girl with boobies has a T-shirt with a "dangerous curves" road sign... it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy :D

Some Otaku would disagree with you!

Parody about Hitler complaining at Youtube's stupid copyright policies - in 3... 2... 1...

I said it before and I'll say it again: It's all Microsoft's fault. Thanks to the Microsoft swisscheese security model, millions of computers are turned to zombies which in turn send the spam.

Microsoft could very well give free upgrades with improved security models for old boxes - but OH NO, PIRACY! GASP! We must not give the benefit of a secure operating system to those damned overseas pirates!

Thanks to the "genuine advantage" scam, XP users are skipping Microsoft upgrades rather than having to deal with Big Brother taking control of their computers.

Meanwhile, botnets are roaming around the world, running in infected XP machines while their users are oblivious to the fact. How to solve that? Users think that by purchasing antiviruses the problem will be fixed. It's as if botnets and antiviruses formed a very well-thought ecosystem, with the antiviruses relying on the viruses' threat to survive.

Fix the security of the machines, and both will disappear: Botnets will become more and more scarse, and antiviruses will become redundant and disappear for lack of use. Sadly, that doesn't go well with Microsoft struggling to sell us more and more versions of Windows. If Microsoft comes with its own antivirus, antivirus companies will sue.

Spam will not be over until it becomes unprofitable for Microsoft and the antivirus companies to have all those zombies running in the wild. That will only happen if spam quantity becomes exceedingly high. But that won't happen because of the bandwidth costs. The outcome is that spam will increase slowly, as bandwidth costs become lower, and that people will still find it tolerable, as long as they pay for an OS with a slightly improved security and the mandatory antivirus.

For now, all we can do is educate people on spam, botnets, and contribute with our grain of sand by switching to a more secure OS.