15 things to do after installing Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE

Edit 30/12/2013: 12 things to do after installing Linux Mint 16 (Petra) XFCE is now available here.

When I did the last one of these after installing Maya, I got way more traffic to that post than pretty much most of this blog any time ever.

For those of you who are visiting for the first time, I don't actually normally blog about tech stuff.  I blog about politics, religion, consumer affairs, pretty much stuff that is totally un-tech.

But I've just installed Linux Mint 14 (Nadia) XFCE on my little old Eee PC, so enjoy my guide to the first 15 things to do after installation.  Please excuse the liberal copying and pasting from the previous version.

This time, for fun, I did an update to my father's netbook as well.  Things went swimmingly for both and I'm pretty happy with how things turned out.

Fixing the news

It's been a little while since the Finkelstein report came out, and we've since seen the Leveson report come out in the UK.  We've also seen the response to Leveson by the British Prime Minister, David Cameron.

The same thing is pretty much happening here with Finkelstein.  Thanks to articles like this, the hysterical reaction pretty much ensures that any government that wants to enforce standards on the news media will be considered to be recklessly trampling free speech beneath satanic jackboots in an Orwellian orgy of dictatorial facsism by the time that media is finished with them.

I don't support this at all.  Leaving aside regulation for a moment, no one seems to have twigged that the problem is with news itself.  In short, we don't really get it any more.  We get something that looks like news, but is quite slanted and biased and, as I alluded to in my previous posts, we now are getting some pretty second-rate product that we, as consumers, don't really deserve.

In other words, the market is not providing and therefore, there is market failure.  Which, in other industries, means that it's time to regulate.

So, I thought I'd have a good think about this.  What is is that we would like a news service to provide us with?  What is it that we, as consumers, think of when we think of news?