> The state of development of the various GNU/ Linux distributions has reached a point where everything "just works".
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.
Mobile phones have always been more locked down than PCs, even before smartphones existed. As have other appliances such as microwave ovens, digital cameras, etc.
You can argue that smartphones shouldn't be treated as simple appliances any more, argue about the pros and cons of each approach... but the fact remains that this particular change in Android is fairly minute and doesn't affect the vast majority of users in any negative way, even the type of user that likes to tinker. In fact, it increases security.
You sound bitter. Why do you get so worked up over 'nanny-state crap' that's going on on the other side of the world? Business interests in the EU and don't like to put in the extra effort? Or do you just enjoy that mode of righteous indignation?
I find it amusing that – even taking the Google shills out of the picture –, most of the 'debate' around this topic is along the lines of Americans preaching to Europeans about how they're 'doing it wrong', often with emotionally charged language, just like your comment here. Ever thought that Europeans just might have some slightly different values than you do?
You're entitled to your opinion, but a single comment on a US-centric discussion forum does not convince me that it's a majority opinion as far as Europeans go. My observations so far indicate the opposite.
As a European myself the request of the citizen for the removal of the content was legitimate you can't have past problems looming over you your entire life and certain things are just too personal and shouldn't be so easy to find to begin with.
I don't want a potential google search to reveal I got my home repossessed for instance.
The employer could take advantage of this by offering you a lower wage since you're desperate it's more likely you will take it or not hire you at all.
However the way the court choose to handle this was completely wrong. This shouldn't be handled at search engine level but at the publishing website level.
The ability of anybody requesting content to be removed from the internet should be very limited in the types of things they can have removed and rigorously monitored by a court of law.
Plus there should be a private database containing the Names of the people who had content removed and what was removed.
That would discourage political reasons since the log of their activity exists even if the content doesn't.
What about the right of the employer to know who they're about to employ?
If someone claims to be an expert in a certain area which you need but are not yourself an expert in, it would be very useful to be able to search their name and discover that things they wrote about the topic have been discredited. It'd be even more useful if you could find unflattering opinions about them written by their peers: perhaps it avoids a very long and messy employment of someone who will then be difficult to fire, but who doesn't know what they're doing, potentially crippling your business.
The guy you're looking at would probably love to make the criticism of his work unfindable whilst simultaneously leaving behind the bits that make him look good. But why should he have that right? Employers have needs too.
For what it's worth I quite agree that the existing framework for getting things removed from the internet (by going to the source) works well enough, but that's not what the court has now created.
Generally, no, I have not. That preachy, self-righteous subset of Americans I was referring to is usually very easy to tell apart from concerned Europeans. Which to be sure I've seen as well, but in much lower quantities.
And to be clear, I don't actually have much of an opinion on whether the immediate consequences of the ECJ ruling will be positive or negative ones for EU citizens. My issue is mainly with the way this topic was and is reported on in some of the US media – lots of fear mongering and misrepresentation of facts by mainstream press and high-profile bloggers alike. It smells like a PR campaign. (The completely unreflected freedom-of-speech-as-a-religion type forum commenter is really just a consequence and an extension of that.)
Larry Page happily confirms that suspicion. From the article:
“I wish we’d been more involved in a real debate . . . in Europe. That’s one of the things we’ve taken from this, that we’re starting the process of really going and talking to people” - Larry Page
Translation: "This whole ordeal made us realize we need to do a lot more lobbying in Europe and pay off more media outlets in non-english language markets, since our propaganda there didn't work nearly as well as we had hoped. Don't worry, we're working on it."
At the core of the ECJ decision – whether you consider it good or bad, or hilarious, or plain stupid – lie important questions about what privacy and human dignity mean in this age and how much of them we're willing to give up. These questions deserve more than being drowned in the overwhelming noise of corporate shills.
You going to have to come up with a better defense; the "it's just a different culture" and "you wouldn't understand" and "our values are different" does NOT insulate you from criticism. Your 'balance' is poorly reasoned, and should be openly mocked and despised by anyone in western society.
This ruling affects everybody because of its balkanization effect on the Internet. Other than that, I just feel bad for Europeans who throw fundamental human rights away in favor of populism.
> They are complaining that you are just removing it from google. The info is still there!
Which, as far as I can tell, is the point of the ruling.
The idea is to not have one particular thing that the world found interesting or newsworthy at some point in the past cast a shadow over an individual's life, so to speak. Yes, if you're really interested in someone's dirt, all the info is still there for you to dig up. Again, that's the idea.
Your point about google.com being unfiltered is, if true, somewhat valid. But the inability to enforce a good thing globally does not excuse not making an effort locally.
By the way, most countries in the EU do not use a `.co` domain for commercial entities.
I don't understand the point of it, either. Poems and the like could easily be handled by a special mode, similar to code blocks. Are there other situations where forced newlines would be useful? There may be, but I can't think of any.
Either way, severely restricting how text – source code – can be organized just to simplify some rare special cases seems like a bad idea. It's a shame, since the rest of it looks really nice.
1Password's keychain uses resource forks I think, which makes it inherently not cross-platform (or rather, not cross-filesystem) and could explain the incompatibilities.
Not sure what could be the issue with DMGs, though, since that exact issue is pretty much the reason for their existence.
That's kind of the whole point, isn't it? It's clearly meant to be a Dropbox replacement not for everybody, but for those who consider the lack of mandatory cloud storage a feature. So yeah, technically more a replacement for BitTorrent Sync than Dropbox, but not everybody knows about that.
Missing features can be added. Mobile clients by third party devs will surely crop up if/when this thing gets traction. The protocol is open, after all.
It looks like he just fed it a plain python gist, no Markdown, no nothing. On the site it says the service can be used "to elegantly share gists written in Markdown", so I don't know why he would expect that to work.
I guess a clear error message would be helpful, but then you would either have to rely on everyone using standard file endings, or do some pretty fancy (and unreliable) parsing to determine if it's actually Markdown.
Not really. I'd argue it has actually gotten worse in recent years, unless you enjoy using ancient hardware.
Support for 802.11ac chipsets in particular has been bad in my experience: Intel only works properly with very recent kernels, Broadcom and Qualcomm/Atheros tend to be buggy or they don't work at all. Or they're just barely working and essential features like, oh, using the 5 GHz band, are missing. And these are the three vendors whose chipsets you'll find most commonly in Laptops at the moment.
I guess it's possible I was just very unlucky.
OP also mentions Bluetooth, which I would agree is a bad joke on Linux. The whole stack seems to be garbage.
And of course, if you have a Laptop with anything other than Intel graphics, you might as well not even bother.
All of this – except maybe the Bluetooth part – is of course mostly a problem of hardware vendors being indifferent or even hostile towards Linux, but that does not change the fact that very often it does not "just work". You need to pick your hardware very carefully.