I stand corrected. That leaves yours the only factually correct post in this ./ discussion. I wish the mailing list post was the one linked and quoted in the summary.

No, Sun JDK is not being removed from users' computers, only the browser plugin is disabled, which is riddled with security flaws that are only corrected in newer versions that cannot be distributed by Canonical.

And no, removing the package from the repositories does not remove it from the system when already installed.

1. cmake? proprietary? you might want to let KDE know. (hint: it ain't.)
2. if you call it GNU stack, call it Free Software, not Open Source.

This won't cause them any trouble, as when Firefox 3.6 reaches EOL, 4.x will be backported (or whatever will be current then), same as it happened with 3.6 when 3.5 went EOL.

You don't need to upgrade your distro, there are official PPAs that provide backported functionality, such as Firefox Stable Channel or the LibreOffice PPA. Firefox in particular is also likely to make it to lucid-updates (not even -backports!), as this has happened once with the 3.5->3.6 switch.

For the record, PPA refers to "Personal Package Archive". It is on the Ubuntu build infrastructure on Launchpad. Anyone with a Launchpad account who has accepted the Code of Conduct can make one. Only source uploads are allowed, and packages are built the same way as official updates are. See the Packaging Guide for details.

Meaning: if you don't find what you're looking for in an official PPA, and don't feel on relying on the various strangers who happen to have one, you can easily make your own. :)

Here's a couple of others I use on Lucid: GStreamer PPA and MOTU Media for updated codecs, X Updates for stable video driver updates, and the Chromium Stable Channel.

Running LTS doesn't have to mean that your userland can't be updated, just that you prefer what's under the hood not to break. :)

That's not entirely correct. With two commands, you get a full conversion from ext3 to ext4 without a reformat, leaving your data in place:
tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/DEV
e2fsck -fDC0 /dev/DEV

(On an unmounted filesystem, obviously. Source. )

I don't recall having to configure anything to get sound working for KDE under Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04. On Gentoo, you need to configure everything yourself, but it was just setting up the PA device and making it the default in .asoundrc, which worked for everything trying to use ALSA, until Phonon gained the option of direct PA output. Which happened before 4.5, since this is the setup dialog under 4.4 in Lucid. The new work in 4.5 is just better integration, so maybe you won't need padevchooser from now on to connect to network sinks.

I've been using KDE since 4.2 with PA, often using the ability to output to another PA instance on the network, reliably, on Gentoo and Ubuntu, mainly using Amarok. You are trolling hard and fast.

While I agree with the fact that the BSD license is far easier to read than the GPL (and I don't think there are 2 competing version of BSD license out there to muddy it up further), the two licenses have very different goals. BSD license strives mainly to free code so that anyone can do pretty much whatever they want with it and to release yourself of some liability. GPL aims to enforce an "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine" policy in that anyone redistributing the code must release their changes under the same license. If someone could make a concise license like the BSD license but that grants this protection, I feel it would cover the best of both worlds. Creative Commons comes close by having an easy to read description of whats allowed with a link to the legalese for further details, but I would prefer it if the legalese didn't need to be there. Not to mention that Creative Commons isn't really designed to be used for code as far as I can tell.

I can almost guarantee this case will change nothing and do nothing but waste the time of quite a few attorneys.

Dude, at the end of the day, it's all about billable hours. Somebody told me a few years back that there were more kids in law school than there were practicing lawyers at the time. Somebody's got to guarantee them the ability to buy this year's BMW. When your entire culture is a tossup between flipping burgers and suing somebody, guess which gets priority?

I'd rather use the built-in VCS-mode right from Emacs. :)

"With the release of Emacs 22 on June 2nd a new set of version control (vc for short) modes was released as well. The Emacs Tour briefly touches on it, however it fails to point out the geniusness of this feature.

As of 22.1.1 the following version control backends are supported: RCS, CVS, SVN, SCCS, Bzr, Git, Hg, Arch and MCVS. All commands work the same for all backends."

more reading

There is an effort to integrate vimpulse into emacs proper, either as an add-on to viper-mode or a separate package. See the thread on emacs-devel: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.devel/108521

M-x viper-mode