hobin

Because then they would no longer have complete control over what gets in their packages. In a place like CERN, total control is something people like to have.

Well, yes. The problem is that a president with crazy and completely wrong ideas is also more likely to have a whole bunch of just-slightly-wrong ideas because of his (or her) complete lack of rationality.

I don't think that's a European thing, per se. Have you ever been to Holland? ;)

And he did. He banned federal funding for stem-cell research for biblical reasons. It might not have made the USA a theocracy, but he actually came pretty close with many of his decisions.

Errr, no. He actually said that 'satan' has taken over academics, and other such nonsense.

In the case of the OP, I agree. I was speaking in more general terms what the general intent of 'lawyers threatening you' tends to be.

I don't know whether such extreme talk is legal, no, but it's quite common for lawyers to talk in this way.

Remember those letters you got when you forgot to pay for something on time? You know, the ones with a nice little addition saying "if you do not pay before X, we will be forced to take legal action."

It's the same thing, whether they will take action or not. The intent behind the statement is 'this will make it more likely that our victim is going to pay, so we don't have to deal with expensive legal stuff.'

I don't think Wikipedia is going down the toilet, nor do I think it was a failure. Personally, I don't think the graphs are surprising: first Wikipedia becomes a big hit, and loads of people sign up. Then, as time passes, some people become unactive. In the end, I think we'll still have a pretty large baseline editing Wikipedia.

The biggest problem I see with Wikipedia is that it's only reliable as long as you're looking up non-controversial issues. Thus, it's fine when you're looking for definitions and trivia, but when it comes to the interesting stuff - pretty much all of which is controversial, because that's where the good bits of science happen - Wikipedia is horrible. In these cases, it is much better to check out (for example) Google Scholar and search for scientific articles directly.

Ah, if only there were an encyclopedia that would directly list all the appropriate references for a given subject. I'd pay good money for that.

There's not much here to say except: this is the awesomest thing I've ever seen game developers do.

Being a scientist (physicist), I think I can answer that question.

I am deeply interested in helping people, and yes, this means if it were up to me, I'd try to replace all sorts of legislation, and I think there are many things that could be dealt with much, much better.

In the end, however, I think I would find a job as a politician extremely frustrating. Sure, I might be able to deal with the bureaucracy, but I like to have a job that I, well, like. Being a politician would mean voluntarily surrendering myself to the plague of bureaucracy, and I would probably go mad. Call me arrogant if you wish, but I simply don't think I could deal with many of those politicians for very long before getting all upset and claiming they're all a bunch of fools who should stop being such ideological illogical idiots.

Thus, I try to help people in a more indirect way, by doing what I enjoy. Namely, science.

You pretty much described how I type. My hands may fly all over the keyboard, but 1.) I don't need to look at the keys, and 2.) I'm pretty fast. Ergo, I don't think there's a problem. (Not counting when I have to use a keyboard with those big keys and make an awful lot of noise.)

"I'm with you on the communication issue. After all, no one is 100% introverted. That term has also become misunderstood and misused."

Yet you still seem to think that introversion and communication skills have something to do with each other ('after all ---'). I don't think this is true. The fundamental difference between introversion and extraversion appears to be how people 'spend' energy and how they 'gain' energy.

For example, I'm probably as introverted as they come. Yet in social situations I seem like an 'extraverted' person, because when I'm with people, I like to talk quite a bit, have some social chatter, all that stuff. But this can tire me. And then there are months when I don't go out and socialize, simply because I'm tired and like to be alone with my thoughts. None of this has much to do with skills of any kind.

Truthfully, I don't think 'proper' touchtyping is necessary, per se. I type without looking at the keys, but I only use - I think - three or four fingers of each hand, tops. No doubt proper touchtyping would be more natural for me had I learnt it from the beginning, but I haven't, and trying the proper way hurts my hands after a few hours. I'm able to keep up 100wpm with ease just by having typed a lot in my life. I don't think I'll ever need to type faster than that. Thus, I don't see a reason to learn to touchtype.

Also, I've always disliked those exercises where you have to type jj ff jj ff jj ff jjf jfj ffj fff fjf etc. etc. One of the reasons I can type fast is because I like to hold complete sentences (or blocks of text) in my head and then WHAM it all in on my keyboard. With these exercises, there is no such link, and I have to look at each specific character on my screen. It annoys the crap out of me.

^That.

A simple rule of thumb is: don't run any commands you don't understand before looking up a few descriptions of what it means (or use man pages).

Number 2, for example, is just a bunch of shellcode, and unless you do penetration testing for a living, you probably can't directly see what it'd do. This goes not only for this particular script, but for mostly every piece of shellcode that can be written. (And make no mistake, there are a frapillion ways in which a piece of shellcode can utterly destroy your computer.) Ergo: don't run them if you don't get them.

The difference with Russian roulette is, of course, that your skills/wits make no to very little difference. When trying to avoid the authorities, it does (or at least I'd like to think so). But, like I said, I would not encourage those people to run, my point was more along the lines of "now, now, chaps, let's not get overly dramatic". ;)

In fact, this shouldn't be too difficult to build. I don't know much about Freenet, but I do know that if we can use bittorrent to share files using P2P, the same can presumably be done with websites. The most immediate problem that comes to mind is that, while the files being shared over P2P stay fairly constant, a website is more dynamic and gets updated a lot. I presume this could be solved by a PGP-like web of trust.

I'm sure there are plenty of other difficulties to deal with I and other can think of if I spend some more time thinking about it, but I think this would actually be a pretty neat thing to build. The great thing about this would be that the more likely something is to be censored right now, the less likely it is to be censored on something like this - more people would visit/download such things, thus creating extra nodes for other people to visit/download from.

EDIT: I just thought there would be an issue of privacy here that needs to be solved first. For example, if you can track the IP addresses of the people you're downloading your 'website updates' from, and you're visiting explicit sites, it becomes easy to tell whom of your friends are viewing those. ;) The easiest solution is to let people decide for themselves which sites to share, of course, but I wonder if this would mean many sites would be excluded, or whether the effects of this would be minimal.

"they will be caught"

That's debatable. Not that I'd want them to run, but getting caught is in no way a certain thing.

I'm a strong supporter of academic Open Access whenever possible, so it should be no surprise to anyone that I rather like this. To be completely honest, I had expected this to go like many protests and boycotts do and to have minimal impact. I'm glad it appears I'm going to be wrong about that.

Google Search, Wikipedia, Dropbox, HN, Dilbert, Facebook.

I dislike these quotes. I would expect a good designer to be a professional, and to understand how all the people working on a product are important. In 'Confessions of a Designer', I sense mostly elitism and the idea that if you're not a designer, you can't make good-lucking stuff. Admittedly, none of these things are said quite that literally, so maybe it's just me interpreting the quotes that way.

The TPB blockage is not about the government, but about the record companies protecting their interests (read: screwing pretty much everyone else over).

Arguably, net neutrality is about the government 'taking control' over the internet, but I don't think what's being done here is necessarily a bad thing. Here, the government is clearly protecting the freedom of the people. And yes, that means there is a little less freedom for the big companies. I'm fine with that.

I'm not saying you're wrong here, but do you have a source for that? Though I had heard of the investigation, I didn't know any proof had been found.

I, too, have to disagree with you. As skrebbel (I like that nick, by the way) said, practically everyone knows you mean that tiny country somewhere in Western Europe called 'the Netherlands', when you say 'Holland'. And I'm from Zuid-Holland.

Unless 'proper dental hygiene' includes putting stones in your mouth and trying to make it bigger.

Truth be told, in most cases, it will 'just go away'. (Read: said tooth will fall out, and it will HURT.) Though it's better not to take these kind of chances.

That's not too hard. Having a minor or even a somewhat annoying toothache for a day won't kill you. As can be seen in the article, such infections don't develop overnight. Just wait a few days, and if you still need to use ibuprofen or what have you to make it go away, then you can be sure you need to go visit a dentist. Making it a habit to use painkillers to deal with toothache = bad.

"Neither Dutch politicians nor the Dutch media really give a shit about digital civil rights."

O.o

Where do you get your information about Dutch politicans and the media? When a judge ruled that XS4ALL and Ziggo should block TPB, it caused an uproar in The Hague. Ok, said uproar wasn't that bad, but most oppositional parties (D66, PvdA, GroenLinks and SP) together introduced a motion about the issue, and were very much against it. Given that the PVV approved of the motion, and recently called the blockage 'censure', I can say without a doubt that msot politicians in the Netherlands 'give a shit' about digital civil rights.

As for the media, I don't see where you got that, either. Pretty much anything that concerns digital media rights and the Netherlands gets printed in most major newspapers here.

Not that there aren't some things in politics here that I think are stupid, but digital civil rights isn't what I'd think of first.

<.<

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People actually use those buttons?

Except that we don't know this. For all we know, said employee really was, to put it in my own terms, a wool-brained idiot. Then, because he just happened to be an old chap, 'old fuddy duddy' obviously was the right derogatory term to use. That does not make these terms any less demeaning, and I would not want the people I work with to use them, but neither does it mean Google is discriminating against people because of their age, per se.

ArchLinux, in its current state, is vulnerable. I suspect it will be patched soon enough.

/me sends a note to the package maintainers anyway.