And if you don't want to use Prezi online, carry a USB drive/pendrive with portable apps installed and run out of that. Its slow, in my experience, but it works with Libreoffice And OpenOffice.
Look, with just a little bit of attention this "problem" doesn't really exist.
it is the problem with MS office and the "open".pptx "standard" I just got sickand tired of it and switched to Prezi. And am now looking for other, interesting and different web-based solutions. Prezi is cool, makes people go "Ohhh" and pay attention. Screw all of them and move on, being web-based you can usually get to it anywhere, and in extreme situations like conferences I carry a wifi hotspot that gives me the access without paying mad cash for an hour of access. Many problems solved.
Oh and I work in a university which is a MS "partner" school. screw them all!
Did anybody read even the synopsis? They are still using Ooo from 2007. And complaining that it doesn't inter-operate well with what others are using. And they are afraid to choose either LibreOffice or Apache Office, like that makes a whisker of difference, obviously they are not implementing open source software, they are trying to implement open source as if it were closed source and they would have to buy a license for one or the other. Who is informing these decisions? Probably the MS salesmen, they do know their job don't they?
So sorry that you are afraid to use Linux. Fear, like yours, tends to make the object bad, no matter what the reality is. You just need to face your fears with courage to try new things instead of being frightened of the future. It'll be OK, really...
You really don't have a clue about how savvy Chinese (and other Asian: Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, AND Indian) consumers are. They can read and they go online to check reviews, read specs and message friends about anecdotal experiences. They are not the clueless newb you think. And the firewall has nothing to do with hardware. Last year the BEST mobile phone in the world was a HuaWei product sold in China, not in the west. Yeah, it ran Android.
pardon me, but if they have the spark of life, then they are, by definition, God's children. Just as a rapist, by your definition, is just the instrument of God's divine plan, so the creator and inseminator of the artificial womb would be an instrument of the Lord. There is no dishonesty in pointing out that the difficulty faced by the receiver of this gift would be challenged by the Lord as few since the old testament. What a blessing that would be to them!
obviously you don't work with your hands, unless your hands are trained and hardened to actually use a tool, any tool, it is only maybe 10% usable. For example, go buy a handsaw (not electric please, I don't want you to really screw up) and a piece of 2x10 framing lumber. Measure and cut out a triangular piece12 " on the hypotenuse, 7" on the short leg and 10"on the long leg. Then repeat up and down the length of the board. then repeat with two more 2x10s making them an exact copy of the first. Now you can stop and have lunch.
Think you could do it? with even a 6' long board? This is what an apprentice carpenter would be doing at age 15 if you go back 100 years. Almost no one in the US remains strong enough to do work like this with the hand tools my grandfather used. This is just one example of hundreds of things that are skills that come only from the hands and arms. I should also point out that the cuts must be exact, square, true and symmetrical. I seriously doubt that very many of the readers could do it. I trained to do it, could do it 30 years ago, but am not shy to say i would not be able to do the same quality of work today that I could do 20 years ago, my hands are no longer that skilled.
My hands don't read books or computers, information from the internet means nothing to them, they need kinesthesia.
Having lived extensively in both places I would like to say two things: 1) Censorship in China is real and SUPPORTED by most Chinese people. They truly do not want to know, they don't want outside opinions that would complicate their world view and their world. They just want to buy more stuff, that is all. The minority that wants censorship to end is educated activist and dedicated to their idea of freedom. But they are part of a self-focused minority that can be rolled up and thrown away whenever the government chooses to get tough.
2) I've been back here for almost a year and a half, and you ought to be embarrassed. I mean, really, FOX FUCKING NEWS????? CNN, MSNBC????? When I was in China I went to Al Jaziera to get real and reliable news, here in the US, I have to go to Al Jaziera again to get real decent news. This is not freedom, this is tyranny and censorship by commercial interests. You are blinded by the sameness of the crapola you are allowed to watch on TV into believing that it must be true. It is not, it is all bullshit on your TVs, and while Chinese TV is no better, it is really no worse. either
Yeah, soda is just as good as water! um, except for the high-fructose corn syrup and the other lovely "flavor enhancers" that they add to the artificial stuff that gives you not just the taste but the "mouth feel" that is so crucial to making you want more and more of it, oh it is soooo much better than water, water is... (wait for it) boring!
Sorry folks, but tap water is trash, nasty swimming pool water is the same as your tap water. Get a real filter, a big tank type that filters out most of the basic nasties and start to drink real water. Better yet, find a real spring, test the water (do not skip this step) and then drink that. But of course you are probably too lazy to do the first or second step, so....
Let me call bullshit on this. For example: if you turn off your air conditioning while you are away from the house, at work, then you will save about half your electric bill. If you turn off ALL the lights in your house before you leave you will reduce even more. Imagine now that you turn off your refrigerator while you are gone, your hot water heater, your television and your meter stops completely for 1/3 or more of the day. Now you have some real savings.
This is not possible, you might say, but after living in poor areas of Asia (southwest China and north Thailand) I can tell you it is how most middle class people there already live. Poor people don't have aircon or refrig and only use two or three lights to begin with, but middle class people there are very careful with power use. I knew people who had "hot water machines" to make tea and hot water to drink in SW China. They would plug the machine in, turn it on and make a cup of hot water (or more, maybe fill up a thermos) and then turn it off, unplug it and then sit down to drink.
"I would never do that!" "it is so inconvenient" you might say. I think you are a fool, paying 20, 30, 100, 200 dollars a month for your effin' convenience? really, i should say your convenience and your health and your economy because all the above is what you are paying with. And mine too, in case you wonder why I might care.
Although I am happy with Libreoffice, use it every day without complaint, failure or problems (and in a Win7 environment at work) I am happy to see that Apache is supporting another source for developer interest and input to the Office Suite business. It is an incredibly difficult market, well saturated with big players (anybody thinking about IBM Symphony/Lotus) who are all feeding the.odf formats with lots of good stuff. Lets welcome them, encourage them and enjoy the fruits of their labor, as we always have with Open Office and its offspring.
That is correct. According to the CCCP (Central Communist Party of China) Taiwan is "the renegade Province." This policy refuses to recognize Taiwan as a separate state and countries that do recognize Taiwan, especially when it comes to seating in the UN or setting up diplomatic relations and exchange of ambassadors, will need to be super-powers to avoid China's wrath. They will cut you cold, and are quite serious about this. The US has one, but I don't think any countries in Africa or South America do, much less other smaller, Asian countries.
Haven't you read your history: as in the history of the sausage producers in the US in the early 1900s. It was ONLY because of legislation that they cleaned up their factories. That was the creation of the FDA and the meat packing inspection that has been so crippled by the big food industry that you can't get legislation passed to protect us now.
Who do you think has fed your these ideas? people who care about your health? come on, wake up, the big corporations have bought the academics to produce the students that parrot the corporation pre-processed conclusions so that you have something that appears to make sense. But good sense it does not make, my friend, you have been fed the same pig poop as the tilapia eaters.
Sorry, the truth often smells and tastes like poop.
True story: Old friend of mine had a job as an office manager at a resort in Thailand. (tough job eh?) The owner needed to get a mailing out one day and the printing came in botched up, so they had to print overlay stickers to fix the problem and then stay late to stuff the envelopes and stamp them for the post. They worked until ten at night to get it finished.
For the next two years he took two hour lunches, left at 3 for a massage, used the international line for his personal calls when he was too lazy to skype, etc. etc. He told me: "I'm willing to stay up and work really late if I have to, this is just to balance out those extra hours I put in".
So there it is. If the owner had been willing to wait until the next morning he would have saved himself many times the labor. I worked once for an old-school boss who never let anyone work overtime. He said: "you need to be home with your family." That was it. Even 20 years later I respect that man, not for being tight with money, he wasn't that, but for recognizing that people shouldn't be living just for their work. I don't know anyone who had a bad thing to say about him, even if he fired them.
What the fool you were replying too (and others of his ilk) don't understand is that the guy was taking a lappie that is deliberately locked down without open drivers on purpose to make it "impossible" to run linux on it, and we do it anyway. It is not that you "always have to spend all this time doing these things, its that we love to fuck with stuff we aren't supposed to and make it work anyway.
They'll never get it, they don't want to mess with stuff ( or with people, but that's another story) and trying to make them see is hopeless.
Now wait for your buddy above to write back and try to give his geek creds, but let's you and me just go off for a brew and forget about it?
I've lived without cars in Europe and Asia, and of course bicycled daily for work and shopping and entertainment and visiting and going to the metro or tram or bus for longer trips. Not only is the helmet stupid, but the bikes that Americans ride are stupid--they look like you are trying to train for a triathlon. A reasonably priced, sturdy, long-lasting Dutch bike that is an instrument of transport, not a fashion statement, not a life-style statement, not a whatever you want people to think about you thingy: its just a way to go from here to there in whatever effin' clothes you have on at the moment. (OK, I'll stop before I get into the "effin' clothes" rant)
The simple reality is that Americans (and yes I am one) feel compelled to make fashion statements with everything from their t-shirts to their houses and everything in between. Why? I can only assume that they are empty inside, without a sense of self that can support an internal sense of style that is merely reflected on the outside, because of who they are and how , what and why they are.
Did I mention that my wife was a fashion designer? I appreciate design that reflects the inner self, but just carrying a Gucci label doesn't make you a model.
This is incorrect, TFA as corrected said that it was not C&C computers that were compromised but other computers in that part of the White House. The computers infected were not part of the military networks where the C&C resides.
I have watched while this happens everywhere, but most interestingly to me, in my classroom. I teach some two-hour classes that the university requires my to have a ten minute break in the middle of. When I announce the break a small handfull go to the smoking area for a cigarette, but every other student pulls out their phone and starts doing something on the phone. For some it is a game, for others it is texts, for others the news or a blog they follow. , but I am the only person in the room doing nothing. I sit, I watch, I check my lesson plan for the next hour, maybe prepping a video , audio or presentation piece, mostly just doing nothing.
Mostly it is because I am not afraid of the downtime. Once, when I was teaching a listening class for crisis-hotline volunteers, I suggested that the trainees go home, turn off the TV and radio and just sit listening to the ambient noise in their house for 5 minutes. Aside from nobody ever, ever trying it, I had some trainees who refused to even consider it. They said flat out that they were afraid to not have the TV on when they walked in the house so they left it on when they went out. This was before the age of mobile phones, so today these kinds of people would be the ones waking up to check their email in the middle of the night.
Would you be surprised to know that I put my phone on to charge at night, downstairs where I can't hear it? And that I read (on my plain vanilla ereader) every night before I go to bed. And I check my email once every day for the 8 or 10 personal addresses and use a pop-up at work so that i am immediately available at work. I try to adapt in a reasonable way to tech, not be sucked in by the oh wow, stuff. I was doing an "iPad certification" training last week, it was embarrassing "and look at this cool feature" says the "Apple certified educator" (or some such title, he was a nice guy, but he drinks the kool-aid deeply) and the class goes:"ohhh, neat" for the same feature I have in gnome, or you have in KDE or is already there in IceCreamSand already. But presented properly it is "Wow!"
But seriously, if it were a real attack it would have used a live CD/USB and stolen the data without leaving a trace. Is this just a backhand against Linus for being rude about Romney and Mormons, yaknow, a setup by the staff to show that the funny names you are bantering about are real grou;s with an anti-American agenda? Is this a conspiracy, OMG, tinfoil hat time,
Who's that knockin' on the door? What? the cops? which cops? HELP!!!!
Yes, we all used VPNs in China, some of them only cost $5.00 a month and give relatively good service.
As for the parent , I kind of agree with him. It gave me great pleasure when some people I knew in Thailand got busted working there with a work visa, not that I was mean about it, but I had deliberately refused payment for work there, I had an agreement where my work was reimbursed with travel costs, trips around the country for free, all kinds of things I wanted to do, rather than being paid money.
As for his idea of "working " in China, as long as his employer and his pay does not take work away from Chinese people there is really no problem.
And VPNs are legal, they just let you get out, but still your communications are filtered and censored, they can come and get you if they want, when they want.
No, you misunderstand the system: 1) you have the right to walk on any state or locally maintained road, you can also ride your bicycle or low powered electric or gas powered vehicle as long as you do not pose a danger to others in the process. You do not have the right to drive a car or larger vehicle on the road without a license that says you have met minimum standards of ability and understanding about your responsibility to others on the road. This is to protect people and property on and adjacent to the roads.
2) Federal roads in federal lands do not have to meet state standards, so I take my kids to learn to drive on federal roads, nothing wrong with that.
3) Federal Interstate highways are more highly regulated because they are:
a) a federal/ state highway system with their own set of regulations
b) were created as a national defence project to allow the rapid movement of troops and equipment in case of an attack on our borders or lands
So, you see, your idea that you have the right to do assholery on the roads just because you want to, or to act in any fashion you choose because you want to assumes that you should be the sole property owner of the highway. You aren't.
And, as for the second amendment, if you really think that giving a bunch of fat, beer drinking, weekend warriors guns means that you can protect my rights, well, the founding fathers were thinking of a whole different world, a world where the militia was the army. That ended in the days of Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman when they did not send the troops back home after WWII. They kept them in arms to avoid the unemployment of having all those men return to a depleted economy. It saved us from a depression ( the normal depression that follows the economic super-heating of war) but created a military juggernaut that meant that you, the average citizen (see above description, please) hadn't a chance to rebel no matter how nasty things get.
As for the NRA and the protection of our 2nd amendment rights, hahahahahahaha, they are an industrial lobby who charges insane amounts of money for cheap weapons then use that profit to make sure that people can buy more and more of their cheap shit products.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you don't want to use Prezi online, carry a USB drive/pendrive with portable apps installed and run out of that. Its slow, in my experience, but it works with Libreoffice And OpenOffice.
Look, with just a little bit of attention this "problem" doesn't really exist.
it is the problem with MS office and the "open" .pptx "standard" I just got sickand tired of it and switched to Prezi. And am now looking for other, interesting and different web-based solutions. Prezi is cool, makes people go "Ohhh" and pay attention. Screw all of them and move on, being web-based you can usually get to it anywhere, and in extreme situations like conferences I carry a wifi hotspot that gives me the access without paying mad cash for an hour of access. Many problems solved.
Oh and I work in a university which is a MS "partner" school. screw them all!
Did anybody read even the synopsis? They are still using Ooo from 2007. And complaining that it doesn't inter-operate well with what others are using. And they are afraid to choose either LibreOffice or Apache Office, like that makes a whisker of difference, obviously they are not implementing open source software, they are trying to implement open source as if it were closed source and they would have to buy a license for one or the other. Who is informing these decisions? Probably the MS salesmen, they do know their job don't they?
So sorry that you are afraid to use Linux. Fear, like yours, tends to make the object bad, no matter what the reality is. You just need to face your fears with courage to try new things instead of being frightened of the future. It'll be OK, really...
You really don't have a clue about how savvy Chinese (and other Asian: Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, AND Indian) consumers are. They can read and they go online to check reviews, read specs and message friends about anecdotal experiences. They are not the clueless newb you think. And the firewall has nothing to do with hardware. Last year the BEST mobile phone in the world was a HuaWei product sold in China, not in the west. Yeah, it ran Android.
pardon me, but if they have the spark of life, then they are, by definition, God's children. Just as a rapist, by your definition, is just the instrument of God's divine plan, so the creator and inseminator of the artificial womb would be an instrument of the Lord. There is no dishonesty in pointing out that the difficulty faced by the receiver of this gift would be challenged by the Lord as few since the old testament. What a blessing that would be to them!
isn't that the actual job requirement of the old school sysadmin though?
how many pennies on a balance scale equals an ounce?
(this is a pot dealer question, so don't answer too fast)
obviously you don't work with your hands, unless your hands are trained and hardened to actually use a tool, any tool, it is only maybe 10% usable. For example, go buy a handsaw (not electric please, I don't want you to really screw up) and a piece of 2x10 framing lumber. Measure and cut out a triangular piece12 " on the hypotenuse, 7" on the short leg and 10"on the long leg. Then repeat up and down the length of the board. then repeat with two more 2x10s making them an exact copy of the first. Now you can stop and have lunch.
Think you could do it? with even a 6' long board? This is what an apprentice carpenter would be doing at age 15 if you go back 100 years. Almost no one in the US remains strong enough to do work like this with the hand tools my grandfather used. This is just one example of hundreds of things that are skills that come only from the hands and arms. I should also point out that the cuts must be exact, square, true and symmetrical. I seriously doubt that very many of the readers could do it. I trained to do it, could do it 30 years ago, but am not shy to say i would not be able to do the same quality of work today that I could do 20 years ago, my hands are no longer that skilled.
My hands don't read books or computers, information from the internet means nothing to them, they need kinesthesia.
Having lived extensively in both places I would like to say two things:
1) Censorship in China is real and SUPPORTED by most Chinese people. They truly do not want to know, they don't want outside opinions that would complicate their world view and their world. They just want to buy more stuff, that is all. The minority that wants censorship to end is educated activist and dedicated to their idea of freedom. But they are part of a self-focused minority that can be rolled up and thrown away whenever the government chooses to get tough.
2) I've been back here for almost a year and a half, and you ought to be embarrassed. I mean, really, FOX FUCKING NEWS????? CNN, MSNBC????? When I was in China I went to Al Jaziera to get real and reliable news, here in the US, I have to go to Al Jaziera again to get real decent news. This is not freedom, this is tyranny and censorship by commercial interests. You are blinded by the sameness of the crapola you are allowed to watch on TV into believing that it must be true. It is not, it is all bullshit on your TVs, and while Chinese TV is no better, it is really no worse. either
Yeah, soda is just as good as water! um, except for the high-fructose corn syrup and the other lovely "flavor enhancers" that they add to the artificial stuff that gives you not just the taste but the "mouth feel" that is so crucial to making you want more and more of it, oh it is soooo much better than water, water is ... (wait for it) boring!
Sorry folks, but tap water is trash, nasty swimming pool water is the same as your tap water. Get a real filter, a big tank type that filters out most of the basic nasties and start to drink real water. Better yet, find a real spring, test the water (do not skip this step) and then drink that. But of course you are probably too lazy to do the first or second step, so....
Let me call bullshit on this. For example: if you turn off your air conditioning while you are away from the house, at work, then you will save about half your electric bill. If you turn off ALL the lights in your house before you leave you will reduce even more. Imagine now that you turn off your refrigerator while you are gone, your hot water heater, your television and your meter stops completely for 1/3 or more of the day. Now you have some real savings.
This is not possible, you might say, but after living in poor areas of Asia (southwest China and north Thailand) I can tell you it is how most middle class people there already live. Poor people don't have aircon or refrig and only use two or three lights to begin with, but middle class people there are very careful with power use. I knew people who had "hot water machines" to make tea and hot water to drink in SW China. They would plug the machine in, turn it on and make a cup of hot water (or more, maybe fill up a thermos) and then turn it off, unplug it and then sit down to drink.
"I would never do that!" "it is so inconvenient" you might say. I think you are a fool, paying 20, 30, 100, 200 dollars a month for your effin' convenience? really, i should say your convenience and your health and your economy because all the above is what you are paying with. And mine too, in case you wonder why I might care.
no, it could be a real neologism, about women who got married , divorced and then went on the prowl gain so they got "retarted"
Although I am happy with Libreoffice, use it every day without complaint, failure or problems (and in a Win7 environment at work) I am happy to see that Apache is supporting another source for developer interest and input to the Office Suite business. It is an incredibly difficult market, well saturated with big players (anybody thinking about IBM Symphony/Lotus) who are all feeding the .odf formats with lots of good stuff. Lets welcome them, encourage them and enjoy the fruits of their labor, as we always have with Open Office and its offspring.
Thanks Apache!
That is correct. According to the CCCP (Central Communist Party of China) Taiwan is "the renegade Province." This policy refuses to recognize Taiwan as a separate state and countries that do recognize Taiwan, especially when it comes to seating in the UN or setting up diplomatic relations and exchange of ambassadors, will need to be super-powers to avoid China's wrath. They will cut you cold, and are quite serious about this. The US has one, but I don't think any countries in Africa or South America do, much less other smaller, Asian countries.
Haven't you read your history: as in the history of the sausage producers in the US in the early 1900s. It was ONLY because of legislation that they cleaned up their factories. That was the creation of the FDA and the meat packing inspection that has been so crippled by the big food industry that you can't get legislation passed to protect us now.
Who do you think has fed your these ideas? people who care about your health? come on, wake up, the big corporations have bought the academics to produce the students that parrot the corporation pre-processed conclusions so that you have something that appears to make sense. But good sense it does not make, my friend, you have been fed the same pig poop as the tilapia eaters.
Sorry, the truth often smells and tastes like poop.
True story: Old friend of mine had a job as an office manager at a resort in Thailand. (tough job eh?) The owner needed to get a mailing out one day and the printing came in botched up, so they had to print overlay stickers to fix the problem and then stay late to stuff the envelopes and stamp them for the post. They worked until ten at night to get it finished.
For the next two years he took two hour lunches, left at 3 for a massage, used the international line for his personal calls when he was too lazy to skype, etc. etc. He told me: "I'm willing to stay up and work really late if I have to, this is just to balance out those extra hours I put in".
So there it is. If the owner had been willing to wait until the next morning he would have saved himself many times the labor.
I worked once for an old-school boss who never let anyone work overtime. He said: "you need to be home with your family." That was it. Even 20 years later I respect that man, not for being tight with money, he wasn't that, but for recognizing that people shouldn't be living just for their work. I don't know anyone who had a bad thing to say about him, even if he fired them.
What the fool you were replying too (and others of his ilk) don't understand is that the guy was taking a lappie that is deliberately locked down without open drivers on purpose to make it "impossible" to run linux on it, and we do it anyway. It is not that you "always have to spend all this time doing these things, its that we love to fuck with stuff we aren't supposed to and make it work anyway.
They'll never get it, they don't want to mess with stuff ( or with people, but that's another story) and trying to make them see is hopeless.
Now wait for your buddy above to write back and try to give his geek creds, but let's you and me just go off for a brew and forget about it?
I've lived without cars in Europe and Asia, and of course bicycled daily for work and shopping and entertainment and visiting and going to the metro or tram or bus for longer trips. Not only is the helmet stupid, but the bikes that Americans ride are stupid--they look like you are trying to train for a triathlon. A reasonably priced, sturdy, long-lasting Dutch bike that is an instrument of transport, not a fashion statement, not a life-style statement, not a whatever you want people to think about you thingy: its just a way to go from here to there in whatever effin' clothes you have on at the moment. (OK, I'll stop before I get into the "effin' clothes" rant)
The simple reality is that Americans (and yes I am one) feel compelled to make fashion statements with everything from their t-shirts to their houses and everything in between. Why? I can only assume that they are empty inside, without a sense of self that can support an internal sense of style that is merely reflected on the outside, because of who they are and how , what and why they are.
Did I mention that my wife was a fashion designer? I appreciate design that reflects the inner self, but just carrying a Gucci label doesn't make you a model.
This is incorrect, TFA as corrected said that it was not C&C computers that were compromised but other computers in that part of the White House. The computers infected were not part of the military networks where the C&C resides.
I have watched while this happens everywhere, but most interestingly to me, in my classroom. I teach some two-hour classes that the university requires my to have a ten minute break in the middle of. When I announce the break a small handfull go to the smoking area for a cigarette, but every other student pulls out their phone and starts doing something on the phone. For some it is a game, for others it is texts, for others the news or a blog they follow. , but I am the only person in the room doing nothing. I sit, I watch, I check my lesson plan for the next hour, maybe prepping a video , audio or presentation piece, mostly just doing nothing.
Mostly it is because I am not afraid of the downtime. Once, when I was teaching a listening class for crisis-hotline volunteers, I suggested that the trainees go home, turn off the TV and radio and just sit listening to the ambient noise in their house for 5 minutes. Aside from nobody ever, ever trying it, I had some trainees who refused to even consider it. They said flat out that they were afraid to not have the TV on when they walked in the house so they left it on when they went out. This was before the age of mobile phones, so today these kinds of people would be the ones waking up to check their email in the middle of the night.
Would you be surprised to know that I put my phone on to charge at night, downstairs where I can't hear it? And that I read (on my plain vanilla ereader) every night before I go to bed. And I check my email once every day for the 8 or 10 personal addresses and use a pop-up at work so that i am immediately available at work. I try to adapt in a reasonable way to tech, not be sucked in by the oh wow, stuff. I was doing an "iPad certification" training last week, it was embarrassing "and look at this cool feature" says the "Apple certified educator" (or some such title, he was a nice guy, but he drinks the kool-aid deeply) and the class goes :"ohhh, neat" for the same feature I have in gnome, or you have in KDE or is already there in IceCreamSand already. But presented properly it is "Wow!"
i'm gettin' too damn old and cranky.
But seriously, if it were a real attack it would have used a live CD/USB and stolen the data without leaving a trace. Is this just a backhand against Linus for being rude about Romney and Mormons, yaknow, a setup by the staff to show that the funny names you are bantering about are real grou;s with an anti-American agenda? Is this a conspiracy, OMG, tinfoil hat time,
Who's that knockin' on the door? What? the cops? which cops? HELP!!!!
Yes, we all used VPNs in China, some of them only cost $5.00 a month and give relatively good service.
As for the parent , I kind of agree with him. It gave me great pleasure when some people I knew in Thailand got busted working there with a work visa, not that I was mean about it, but I had deliberately refused payment for work there, I had an agreement where my work was reimbursed with travel costs, trips around the country for free, all kinds of things I wanted to do, rather than being paid money.
As for his idea of "working " in China, as long as his employer and his pay does not take work away from Chinese people there is really no problem.
And VPNs are legal, they just let you get out, but still your communications are filtered and censored, they can come and get you if they want, when they want.
No, you misunderstand the system:
1) you have the right to walk on any state or locally maintained road, you can also ride your bicycle or low powered electric or gas powered vehicle as long as you do not pose a danger to others in the process. You do not have the right to drive a car or larger vehicle on the road without a license that says you have met minimum standards of ability and understanding about your responsibility to others on the road. This is to protect people and property on and adjacent to the roads.
2) Federal roads in federal lands do not have to meet state standards, so I take my kids to learn to drive on federal roads, nothing wrong with that.
3) Federal Interstate highways are more highly regulated because they are:
a) a federal/ state highway system with their own set of regulations
b) were created as a national defence project to allow the rapid movement of troops and equipment in case of an attack on our borders or lands
So, you see, your idea that you have the right to do assholery on the roads just because you want to, or to act in any fashion you choose because you want to assumes that you should be the sole property owner of the highway. You aren't.
And, as for the second amendment, if you really think that giving a bunch of fat, beer drinking, weekend warriors guns means that you can protect my rights, well, the founding fathers were thinking of a whole different world, a world where the militia was the army. That ended in the days of Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman when they did not send the troops back home after WWII. They kept them in arms to avoid the unemployment of having all those men return to a depleted economy. It saved us from a depression ( the normal depression that follows the economic super-heating of war) but created a military juggernaut that meant that you, the average citizen (see above description, please) hadn't a chance to rebel no matter how nasty things get.
As for the NRA and the protection of our 2nd amendment rights, hahahahahahaha, they are an industrial lobby who charges insane amounts of money for cheap weapons then use that profit to make sure that people can buy more and more of their cheap shit products.