Why is it more important that advertisers have the ability to advertise a single price all over the country than consumers being able to easily tell what something actually costs once they're in a store? This seems like a really weird (or at least one-sided) argument.

What exactly are you typing? I used my N900 to irc on regularly (like, always) and I cannot imagine being able to do it anywhere near as properly without a keyboard. I got myself a stratosphere ii now because of the keyboard, and while it's better than no keyboard I sadly can't type as fast (or accurate) on it as I could on the N900.

I wonder how many years he'll be gone from society if he discovers minecraft..

You can't begin by saying that they have had no influence at all and then immediately go on to say that they have "vulgarized the debate" so much that politicians wouldn't even dare touch the issue. That's kind of impossible.

I think you are wrong on both points. Both the green party and the left party now have stances on copyright that are very similar to the ones that the pirate party have propagated. The pirate party were also quite visible in the media at times, although I'm sure they were ignored by many.

I think that the public debate before the entry of the pirate party (and the pirate bureau) was one of "I want free stuff" against "we need to pay the artists", after their entry it turned more sophisticated and idealogical. I think this is a good thing.

Of course, there are also complete nuts in the party, and some of the arguments put forward aren't particularly good. I never really liked the former party leader.

However, Christian Engström seems to be doing some good down in the European Parliament right now, and as a force against what I perceive to have been a very one-sided "we need longer copyrights, and we need to jail everyone as soon as they copy one song!!!1" discourse I think they have been a very valuable force.

Another happy user of Gnome 3 here.

Ubuntu doesn't even come with gnome-shell installed by default, why would they profit (much) from this?

Could you clarify what you mean by this, preferably with a reference?

Eh, what the hell? You are complaining that his "rant" posted online isn't intellectual? Why would his rant need to be more intellectual than a simple statement of facts regarding the censorship (I use the term loosely here) of the video? And can you point me to where he ever makes the claim that being posted on slashdot proves that he won the debate?

Based on your comment I don't think you've bothered to read more than a few random words of these stories and the associated blog posts.

You'll be happy to know that this has been improved in gnome 3.2.

If his job were to - as you speculate - rely on him remaining intellectually dishonest in public, I don't quite see how that's a redeeming factor..

A good reason to get our act together and throw parts of our civilization out into space, perhaps? I mean, better do it now before something like this cripples our space-travel abilities forever and war for resources wipes out the rest of us.

You could argue about whether it matters if we survive as a species or not, but I would argue that we are almost obliged to try our best at doing just that. What else could be more important, if you at all care about anything except your short-term survival and enjoyment of life.

Wouldn't have helped in this case since the article too talks about opt-in. Maybe all you can wish from the slashdot editors is that they read the linked articles before posting a story (which would have cleared them in this case) but there are times they have obviously not done even this.

Replying to myself, it seems to actually be opt-in. Good thing I just answered the Slashdot reader survey with a complaint about misleading and/or outright false stories.

I would buy your argument if it was opt-in. Why does it need to be opt-out?

Can you see a problem with attacking the science just because you don't agree with the policies people are trying to push based on it?

I mean, if someone claims that the fact that the earth orbits around the sun means that we must adopt communism, the right thing to attack is the said "communism policy" by point out the step where they go wrong in their logic ("The earth does indeed go around the sun, but this is why I think this should not lead to communism.").

The wrong thing to do is to start to spew nonsense about how the sun is actually orbiting around the earth.