A shotgun would be effective against a spider the size of your fingernail?
You do know there's a reason that shotguns are called "scatterguns" right? They're not very good at hitting very small things, they're good at hitting moderately large things with a whole bunch of tiny pellets. The chance of actually hitting a single very small target is actually quite slim, especially at range. And that's assuming you even see it in the first place....
From what I understand, there's a handful of animals in Australia that can both kill you, and are big enough to be an easy target for a gun... most of them are things like crocs, which don't like the desert which makes up most of the truly remote areas in Australia. (and most of the guns that a civilian could lay their hands on in Australia aren't likely to stop a croc before it kills you)
Most of what lives in the desert and can kill you is small enough that you'd have to be supremely lucky to hit it with anything. A gun won't help you in the deep outback.
Now, if there's a local who wants to correct me, please do. I've never been to the desert areas in Australia.
Commercial airliners are still equipped with other navigation systems, but most of them are beacon systems that are only useful when you're close to an airport. These systems are still used for landing. For long distance navigation, the non-GPS systems are almost all a distant memory. It's *possible* to navigate a plane with a compass and a clock, and if you're flying low enough (and in an area with enough airports) it's possible to navigate by switching beacons, but I wouldn't want to hazard that in a plane the size of most commercial airliners. It's the kind of thing you do (and are trained to do, or at least were when I was taking lessons) in a Cessna, not a 767.
The real concern is that the occupants of the plane have no way of knowing that their GPS information is bad in the first place. You can have a thousand backups available to you, but if you don't know that your primary system is being fed bad information, are you going to check/trust the backup that's based on technology developed a century ago (seriously... clock/compass is how Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were navigating)? And assuming that the GPS actually *crashed* (in the DoS way described in TFA), you'd still have Air Traffic Control to tell you where you were... they don't use GPS, they use radar.
You can do that now with Steam... just put it in "offline" mode. Games will no longer automatically update themselves is about the only disadvantage. All of your Steam games will run just fine, and will continue to run just fine even in "online" mode if you don't have a current Internet connection. As far as DRM goes, Steam is easily the least intrusive.
There's a handful of old games where entering the product key doesn't seem to work properly, and you need to be "online" so you can get your key from the Steam community console every time you play it, but other than that I have never seen a problem running Steam in "offline" mode. In fact, for the first year I had it, I never left offline mode, because all of the "steam" games I had, I had physical media for them too. Never had a problem with it.
Locked down, in this case, I think means something different from what you think it does. When developpers talk about locking down hardware requirements, they mean having a set spec to develop for.
If, for example, the "Steambox" ends up being a Core i3 dual core @ 2.9GHz, with 4GB of RAM, and a Radeon HD 7750 video card, then hardware developpers know that if they make sure their game runs on this spec then they're safe. It's a fairly cheap spec which could easily hit the sub-$400 PC market and go directly for consoles (could probably get it sub-$300 with that spec), and yet it's still powerful enough to run most modern games at max settings on 1080p.
Similarly, if you'd prefer to build your own, maybe have a bigger hard drive (which they'd have to skimp on to keep it sub-$300) and a more powerful processor or an optical drive, then you can. Stick Linux of your choice on there, pull down Steam from the repositories, and you have a reasonable assurance that anything built for the Steambox will also run on your own computer. And if you *really* want to continue running Windows, then you can, for now, and will be able to do so until Microsoft finally kicks Steam out. But Steam is going to be pushing developpers to start making stuff that works on Linux (and is making sure their own engine works on Linux for starters).
I would be surprised if this isn't similar to Gabe's vision, given what he said in the interview itself.
And if we're reading this right, the Steambox is basically a Linux-based computer with connectivity for your TV.
How many desktop monitors are out there with HDMI input these days? And do you really think they're going to invent a new connector when there's already a huge number of game controllers that connect with USB? What's to stop you from plugging your mouse/keyboard into it, and plugging it into a desktop monitor? A majority of games being made for PC these days already have native support for game controllers or a more traditional pc/mouse interface, and it's unlikely that's going to stop any time soon. XBox is using USB for the controllers, and the Nintendo Wii has USB ports that let you plug in a keyboard for use in the browser and configuration screens, after all...
If Valve is halfway smart about it, they'll continue giving you a choice between the traditional and the "big picture" interfaces, and have a way to escape out to a normal desktop on the device as well, or at least integrate apps in. They're already selling non-game software on Steam, and it's really a short trip for them to start offering stuff like LibreOffice and Firefox there, too.
Given the constant evolution of graphics hardware and considering that open-source Linux drivers often lack behind by a generation anyways, the idea of relying on up to 2-3 year old drivers for gaming seems absurd.
You do that all the time on consoles. You don't seriously think that the Nintendo Wii, which hasn't had a firmware update in a while, is running brand new drivers for its video card?
Lock the kernel version, have it do automatic updates at 3am (with a check to delay doing them if the owner is gaming at the time), and there is no reason that a Linux-based console can't succeed. And by going with Linux as a platform, it does exactly what TFA said it would do... you can buy their console, or you can build your own. You also have buy once, play anywhere ability, which gives it a huge advantage over the other consoles... want to play your new game on your desktop computer, just log in and play it. Want it on the big screen/console? then play it there instead. You don't need to buy the game twice to be able to do this.
That's a problem with your implementation. I have a Sandy Bridge laptop, and have never seen any hint of problem, using either Unity/3D or E17's built-in compositor with OpenGL support. Similarly, I have never noticed a problem running OpenGL-based games such as TuxKart.
Seriously... I don't own a single Apple device. I don't consider myself to be in their target market, and I object to paying the prices they're asking for their stuff when I can get gear that's just as good for less. But would it kill you to actually check their fucking website to see if they're still selling it, before you spout off that it's a dead line?
Free speech doesn't mean no consequences. Libel and Slander are two very well known examples of situations where your speech has consequences.
This will hinge on proving that her statements (particularly about the stolen jewelry) were true. If they were, then she's protected by free speech. If they prove to have been false, then she's screwed.
Actually, I think he intended it as an exponential growth function, rather than a linear growth function. Badly worded, though. where day 1 = 1, day 2 = 2, day 3 = 4, day 4 = 8, and so forth.
in other words, f(x) = 2^(x-1), solve for the area under the graph from x=1->30. I'm lazy, however, and will just use wolfram alpha to solve it.
Why does everybody think that crypto has to be done in software?
Better question: why does everyone forget that keyloggers don't need to exist in software? As someone pointed out up above, a hardware keylogger spliced into the keyboard cabling could easily recover your boot password, allowing them to turn around and use that password to access the rest of your "secure" system. It does add an extra inconvenience for them, since they'll need to get access to your computer twice, but if you're there for a business trip, it's likely that they can part you from your laptop during a meal, some socializing, or even if they convince you it's easier to just leave things set up where they are while you go to a different part of the building for another meeting.
Put tamper-resistant stickers over the screws so you can't get at the motherboard without making it obvious it's been done, and you should be safe.
I shouldn't have to quote myself one reply down from the original post... -.-
If your boot software is encrypted, how does your system boot at all?
Dunno what kind of hardware you have, but I'm typing this on a Dell business laptop. Coupled with an Intel SSD, it's capable of encrypting the hard drive in its entirety, at the hardware level. The BIOS is smart enough that it won't boot at all, even to the BIOS, without entering the passkey to decrypt the hard drive, and it's smart enough that you can't circumvent it temporarily by removing the hard drive.
Dell's far from the only company that's able to use a TPM in that way. Put tamper-resistant stickers over the screws so you can't get at the motherboard without making it obvious it's been done, and you should be safe.
Why does everybody think that crypto has to be done in software?
There's essentially 4 ways to transmit electricity wirelessly. Two of them rely on photovoltaics which are nowhere near efficient enough to power a device like a cell phone (not to mention energy lost during conversion to light), one of them relies on microwave radiation which wouldn't be safe, and the last is electro-magnetic induction current. You can do it with heat, too, but that's even less efficient than PV cells, and generally not considered by anybody who has a clue what they're doing.
When using normal magnetic induction, the strength of the magnetic field (and subsequently the amount of energy you can extract from it) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. If you want something strong enough to charge a phone at a distance of a meter, you need to put 400x more energy into it than something to provide the same charge at a distance of 5cm. (5cm * 20 = 1m, 20^2 = 400). The reason that something like this hasn't been done before isn't because it's a new idea, it's because it's horribly inefficient. There's no technical reason the toothbrush's inductant current charger can't work at a greater distance than it does. It's designed to work over short distances because it's more efficient that way.
BTW... this is highschool level physics. Perhaps, just perhaps, you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize that the actual physics behind how technology like this works doesn't change. Also, it's still not a new idea. Note the date on that article. The patent in question was filed in 2010. You are capable of doing the subtraction, right? And since that was done at a publicly funded university....
Also several years after I bought my toothbrush base.
With luck, the person reviewing the patent actually practices oral hygiene, and realizes that wireless charging has been commercially available for decades.
No Android client for NX... at least, not the last time I checked.
If you have a Linux, Windows, or Mac-based laptop to connect to hosted apps, though, it works remarkably well. I've used it to do stuff over a 2G cellular connection, and it's as zippy as VLC over a 100mbit LAN.
Nah. Use the right tool for the job. You'd have to be incredibly naive, or incredibly pig-headed, to think that Linux is a panacea for everything you want to do with a computer. It can do a lot of things reasonably well, but there are a few niche tasks that it's simply not up to par for. There's a reason graphics designers tend to prefer Apple: it's because stuff like Photoshop and CAD software are far better developped on that platform.
Case in point, I quite happily run Linux on my laptop, which accounts for 90% of my computing time (not counting the cell phone). It runs a browser and IRC, word processors and spreadsheets work fine, it has no problem connecting to networked resources, and the laptop was bought without a Windows license (Dell Linux program). Everything "just works" on it. But I still keep a Windows 7 machine around for gaming and to support family members.
Since it's the gaming machine, it's far and above the most powerful computer I own, and so it also gets used for a few other tasks... virtual machine host when I want to muck around with a new distro, gaming (getting Steam to run on Linux is easier now, but most of my library isn't available on it), and it's also the only system I own that has an optical drive any more. While MakeMKV and Handbrake do exist for Linux, they also exist on Windows, and work reasonably well on that system. I know that the original poster wanted something that works on Linux, but the request for suggestions that are genuinely cross-platform isn't unreasonable, as there's other people reading.
As for the actual question being asked... I'd suggest using the hard drive as an intermediary. A *lot* of CD ripping software, including cdparanoia, uses the drive to do error correction on a per-track basis, and that slows it down immensely. Use a tool of your choice to make an ISO of the disc on the hard drive, and then rip from that. You may not get as good error correction (but I've never heard the difference), but you will get a significant speed boost.
Alternately, there's no rule that says you can't have multiple optical drives all running at the same time. CD throughput is nowhere near what a hard drive is capable of, and if you're talking about getting a new optical drive anyway, why not use up an extra bay rather than replacing the drive outright. Put a second cheapo drive in, you've just halved the time it takes to rip the collection by doubling the work you can do at any time. Don't need to spend gobs of cash buying the best drive you can get when you could buy 4 cheap drives for the same price and get more work done.
I sorta got the impression that they were mocking the Caligula of the Far East who's doing the subjugating. The US gubmint isn't going to remove him, because he doesn't have any oil, so this is pretty much all we can do.
Oil has nothing to do with it, in this case: even if they had oil, it's unlikely that the west would liberate them. It's more about China wanting a land buffer between US troops and their mainland. The US military is smart enough to realize that China would almost certainly come in protecting NK if it ever did become a shooting war, and there's too much to lose. The cold war between Russia and the US may be over, but the one between the US and China is just getting started.
You're paying $500/mo for phone+internet. I'm paying less than $60, and have never had the kind of problems calling other carriers like you describe. You are getting faster Internet speeds than I am, but I could get a 10mbit upload and half the download you're getting, and still keep my monthly bill under $100/mo, without needing to switch from DSL, and if I really needed the faster download speed, my provider will let me use MLPPP to bind multiple lines.
You may consider it a good deal, but I don't. I would consider $500/mo to be prohibitive, actually, as that's more than I pay for the loan on a new car. To put it another way, you're paying almost as much for your phone as I am for my rent in a major city. Admittedly, I'm paying 1/3 of the rent for the house we're renting, but I could get a 1br apartment in roughly the same area for the same, and the house is within walking distance of the downtown commercial district where I work (3mi), as well as another couple of major commercial districts(0.5mi and 1mi respectively), and a quarter mile from a beach, too.
In other words: you're getting shafted. It may be a good deal for where you're living, but it's a terrible deal for anywhere that has real competition and providers fighting for your business.
Cell phones are subsidized, in a way, but sat phones aren't. Sat phones cost the same to provide service no matter where in the world you are, because putting a satellite in the sky is a fixed cost and covers geographical area. They are limited in terms of how many customers a given satellite can handle, but the cost per customer for putting a satellite in the sky doesn't change regardless of whether a customer is in New York City or Alert.
Cellular phones, on the other hand, have a different set of problems entirely... there is a limit to how many connections a tower can handle, so towers are more densely placed in cities, but there is also a maximum radius that a tower can reliably serve. In rural/low density areas, it's unlikely that a given tower will be anywhere near the maximum population it can handle, and the per-customer cost to service that tower goes up. The cost of the rural towers is, in effect, subsidized by the urban customers, because the rural customers pay the same monthly rates.
If you look closely, the lengths of the antennas themselves are the same on the one you linked to the one that the GP linked. That's because the frequency an antenna is tuned to receive depends on the length of the antenna itself. A simple dipole made out of a coathanger would work fine, as long as they're the right length and put in the right place.
Now, putting a simple antenna like the one described in probably won't actually improve things, because her cellular modem is probably located in a dead spot, which could be created by metal furniture nearby, or line of sight issues created by the household wiring (unless the antenna isn't attached properly, or is defective, both are possible). What you want is an outdoor antenna that can be mounted on the side of the house with a cable running inside. For that, I don't see anything on the page for less than $80, which puts it in the range where it's worth looking at building your own.
As to exactly how, there's other posts here which detail it, so I won't bother repeating them.
I haven't played all of the games, but I will say that SR3 was the only game (*ever*) that I enjoyed enough to actually buy the DLC. More than that, I didn't feel gypped when I bought it, because it added several hours of gameplay. I especially liked the Genki Bowl missions, but the Weird Science series is hilarious. I'd say that game alone is worth more than the average price at the moment for the bundle.
It's a matter of personal preference, as always, but I don't find the DRM on Steam to be all that onerous, and I think the idea is to encourage gamers to give money to charity more than anything else. I'm sorely tempted to buy the bundle, despite already having half the games in it, simply because of that.
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A shotgun would be effective against a spider the size of your fingernail?
You do know there's a reason that shotguns are called "scatterguns" right? They're not very good at hitting very small things, they're good at hitting moderately large things with a whole bunch of tiny pellets. The chance of actually hitting a single very small target is actually quite slim, especially at range. And that's assuming you even see it in the first place....
From what I understand, there's a handful of animals in Australia that can both kill you, and are big enough to be an easy target for a gun... most of them are things like crocs, which don't like the desert which makes up most of the truly remote areas in Australia. (and most of the guns that a civilian could lay their hands on in Australia aren't likely to stop a croc before it kills you)
Most of what lives in the desert and can kill you is small enough that you'd have to be supremely lucky to hit it with anything. A gun won't help you in the deep outback.
Now, if there's a local who wants to correct me, please do. I've never been to the desert areas in Australia.
Commercial airliners are still equipped with other navigation systems, but most of them are beacon systems that are only useful when you're close to an airport. These systems are still used for landing. For long distance navigation, the non-GPS systems are almost all a distant memory. It's *possible* to navigate a plane with a compass and a clock, and if you're flying low enough (and in an area with enough airports) it's possible to navigate by switching beacons, but I wouldn't want to hazard that in a plane the size of most commercial airliners. It's the kind of thing you do (and are trained to do, or at least were when I was taking lessons) in a Cessna, not a 767.
The real concern is that the occupants of the plane have no way of knowing that their GPS information is bad in the first place. You can have a thousand backups available to you, but if you don't know that your primary system is being fed bad information, are you going to check/trust the backup that's based on technology developed a century ago (seriously... clock/compass is how Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were navigating)? And assuming that the GPS actually *crashed* (in the DoS way described in TFA), you'd still have Air Traffic Control to tell you where you were... they don't use GPS, they use radar.
You can do that now with Steam... just put it in "offline" mode. Games will no longer automatically update themselves is about the only disadvantage. All of your Steam games will run just fine, and will continue to run just fine even in "online" mode if you don't have a current Internet connection. As far as DRM goes, Steam is easily the least intrusive.
There's a handful of old games where entering the product key doesn't seem to work properly, and you need to be "online" so you can get your key from the Steam community console every time you play it, but other than that I have never seen a problem running Steam in "offline" mode. In fact, for the first year I had it, I never left offline mode, because all of the "steam" games I had, I had physical media for them too. Never had a problem with it.
Locked down, in this case, I think means something different from what you think it does. When developpers talk about locking down hardware requirements, they mean having a set spec to develop for.
If, for example, the "Steambox" ends up being a Core i3 dual core @ 2.9GHz, with 4GB of RAM, and a Radeon HD 7750 video card, then hardware developpers know that if they make sure their game runs on this spec then they're safe. It's a fairly cheap spec which could easily hit the sub-$400 PC market and go directly for consoles (could probably get it sub-$300 with that spec), and yet it's still powerful enough to run most modern games at max settings on 1080p.
Similarly, if you'd prefer to build your own, maybe have a bigger hard drive (which they'd have to skimp on to keep it sub-$300) and a more powerful processor or an optical drive, then you can. Stick Linux of your choice on there, pull down Steam from the repositories, and you have a reasonable assurance that anything built for the Steambox will also run on your own computer. And if you *really* want to continue running Windows, then you can, for now, and will be able to do so until Microsoft finally kicks Steam out. But Steam is going to be pushing developpers to start making stuff that works on Linux (and is making sure their own engine works on Linux for starters).
I would be surprised if this isn't similar to Gabe's vision, given what he said in the interview itself.
And if we're reading this right, the Steambox is basically a Linux-based computer with connectivity for your TV.
How many desktop monitors are out there with HDMI input these days? And do you really think they're going to invent a new connector when there's already a huge number of game controllers that connect with USB? What's to stop you from plugging your mouse/keyboard into it, and plugging it into a desktop monitor? A majority of games being made for PC these days already have native support for game controllers or a more traditional pc/mouse interface, and it's unlikely that's going to stop any time soon. XBox is using USB for the controllers, and the Nintendo Wii has USB ports that let you plug in a keyboard for use in the browser and configuration screens, after all...
If Valve is halfway smart about it, they'll continue giving you a choice between the traditional and the "big picture" interfaces, and have a way to escape out to a normal desktop on the device as well, or at least integrate apps in. They're already selling non-game software on Steam, and it's really a short trip for them to start offering stuff like LibreOffice and Firefox there, too.
Given the constant evolution of graphics hardware and considering that open-source Linux drivers often lack behind by a generation anyways, the idea of relying on up to 2-3 year old drivers for gaming seems absurd.
You do that all the time on consoles. You don't seriously think that the Nintendo Wii, which hasn't had a firmware update in a while, is running brand new drivers for its video card?
Lock the kernel version, have it do automatic updates at 3am (with a check to delay doing them if the owner is gaming at the time), and there is no reason that a Linux-based console can't succeed. And by going with Linux as a platform, it does exactly what TFA said it would do... you can buy their console, or you can build your own. You also have buy once, play anywhere ability, which gives it a huge advantage over the other consoles... want to play your new game on your desktop computer, just log in and play it. Want it on the big screen/console? then play it there instead. You don't need to buy the game twice to be able to do this.
That's a problem with your implementation. I have a Sandy Bridge laptop, and have never seen any hint of problem, using either Unity/3D or E17's built-in compositor with OpenGL support. Similarly, I have never noticed a problem running OpenGL-based games such as TuxKart.
That tells me that KDE is doing something wrong.
Better tell Apple that, then.
Seriously... I don't own a single Apple device. I don't consider myself to be in their target market, and I object to paying the prices they're asking for their stuff when I can get gear that's just as good for less. But would it kill you to actually check their fucking website to see if they're still selling it, before you spout off that it's a dead line?
Free speech doesn't mean no consequences. Libel and Slander are two very well known examples of situations where your speech has consequences.
This will hinge on proving that her statements (particularly about the stolen jewelry) were true. If they were, then she's protected by free speech. If they prove to have been false, then she's screwed.
And Netflix will actually run under WINE... install Firefox (or Chrome) for Windows in WINE, and then install Silverlight in WINE, and it does work. :)
Actually, I think he intended it as an exponential growth function, rather than a linear growth function. Badly worded, though. where day 1 = 1, day 2 = 2, day 3 = 4, day 4 = 8, and so forth.
in other words, f(x) = 2^(x-1), solve for the area under the graph from x=1->30. I'm lazy, however, and will just use wolfram alpha to solve it.
Why does everybody think that crypto has to be done in software?
Better question: why does everyone forget that keyloggers don't need to exist in software? As someone pointed out up above, a hardware keylogger spliced into the keyboard cabling could easily recover your boot password, allowing them to turn around and use that password to access the rest of your "secure" system. It does add an extra inconvenience for them, since they'll need to get access to your computer twice, but if you're there for a business trip, it's likely that they can part you from your laptop during a meal, some socializing, or even if they convince you it's easier to just leave things set up where they are while you go to a different part of the building for another meeting.
Put tamper-resistant stickers over the screws so you can't get at the motherboard without making it obvious it's been done, and you should be safe.
I shouldn't have to quote myself one reply down from the original post... -.-
If your boot software is encrypted, how does your system boot at all?
Dunno what kind of hardware you have, but I'm typing this on a Dell business laptop. Coupled with an Intel SSD, it's capable of encrypting the hard drive in its entirety, at the hardware level. The BIOS is smart enough that it won't boot at all, even to the BIOS, without entering the passkey to decrypt the hard drive, and it's smart enough that you can't circumvent it temporarily by removing the hard drive.
Dell's far from the only company that's able to use a TPM in that way. Put tamper-resistant stickers over the screws so you can't get at the motherboard without making it obvious it's been done, and you should be safe.
Why does everybody think that crypto has to be done in software?
There's essentially 4 ways to transmit electricity wirelessly. Two of them rely on photovoltaics which are nowhere near efficient enough to power a device like a cell phone (not to mention energy lost during conversion to light), one of them relies on microwave radiation which wouldn't be safe, and the last is electro-magnetic induction current. You can do it with heat, too, but that's even less efficient than PV cells, and generally not considered by anybody who has a clue what they're doing.
When using normal magnetic induction, the strength of the magnetic field (and subsequently the amount of energy you can extract from it) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. If you want something strong enough to charge a phone at a distance of a meter, you need to put 400x more energy into it than something to provide the same charge at a distance of 5cm. (5cm * 20 = 1m, 20^2 = 400). The reason that something like this hasn't been done before isn't because it's a new idea, it's because it's horribly inefficient. There's no technical reason the toothbrush's inductant current charger can't work at a greater distance than it does. It's designed to work over short distances because it's more efficient that way.
BTW... this is highschool level physics. Perhaps, just perhaps, you can pull your head out of your ass long enough to realize that the actual physics behind how technology like this works doesn't change. Also, it's still not a new idea. Note the date on that article. The patent in question was filed in 2010. You are capable of doing the subtraction, right? And since that was done at a publicly funded university....
Also several years after I bought my toothbrush base.
With luck, the person reviewing the patent actually practices oral hygiene, and realizes that wireless charging has been commercially available for decades.
VNC*. that'll teach me to type while watching TV.
No Android client for NX... at least, not the last time I checked.
If you have a Linux, Windows, or Mac-based laptop to connect to hosted apps, though, it works remarkably well. I've used it to do stuff over a 2G cellular connection, and it's as zippy as VLC over a 100mbit LAN.
Nah. Use the right tool for the job. You'd have to be incredibly naive, or incredibly pig-headed, to think that Linux is a panacea for everything you want to do with a computer. It can do a lot of things reasonably well, but there are a few niche tasks that it's simply not up to par for. There's a reason graphics designers tend to prefer Apple: it's because stuff like Photoshop and CAD software are far better developped on that platform.
Case in point, I quite happily run Linux on my laptop, which accounts for 90% of my computing time (not counting the cell phone). It runs a browser and IRC, word processors and spreadsheets work fine, it has no problem connecting to networked resources, and the laptop was bought without a Windows license (Dell Linux program). Everything "just works" on it. But I still keep a Windows 7 machine around for gaming and to support family members.
Since it's the gaming machine, it's far and above the most powerful computer I own, and so it also gets used for a few other tasks... virtual machine host when I want to muck around with a new distro, gaming (getting Steam to run on Linux is easier now, but most of my library isn't available on it), and it's also the only system I own that has an optical drive any more. While MakeMKV and Handbrake do exist for Linux, they also exist on Windows, and work reasonably well on that system. I know that the original poster wanted something that works on Linux, but the request for suggestions that are genuinely cross-platform isn't unreasonable, as there's other people reading.
As for the actual question being asked... I'd suggest using the hard drive as an intermediary. A *lot* of CD ripping software, including cdparanoia, uses the drive to do error correction on a per-track basis, and that slows it down immensely. Use a tool of your choice to make an ISO of the disc on the hard drive, and then rip from that. You may not get as good error correction (but I've never heard the difference), but you will get a significant speed boost.
Alternately, there's no rule that says you can't have multiple optical drives all running at the same time. CD throughput is nowhere near what a hard drive is capable of, and if you're talking about getting a new optical drive anyway, why not use up an extra bay rather than replacing the drive outright. Put a second cheapo drive in, you've just halved the time it takes to rip the collection by doubling the work you can do at any time. Don't need to spend gobs of cash buying the best drive you can get when you could buy 4 cheap drives for the same price and get more work done.
My money's on the ponies... especially once they bring the pegasi into play. Rainbow Dash kicks butt *nodnod*.
I sorta got the impression that they were mocking the Caligula of the Far East who's doing the subjugating. The US gubmint isn't going to remove him, because he doesn't have any oil, so this is pretty much all we can do.
Oil has nothing to do with it, in this case: even if they had oil, it's unlikely that the west would liberate them. It's more about China wanting a land buffer between US troops and their mainland. The US military is smart enough to realize that China would almost certainly come in protecting NK if it ever did become a shooting war, and there's too much to lose. The cold war between Russia and the US may be over, but the one between the US and China is just getting started.
You're paying $500/mo for phone+internet. I'm paying less than $60, and have never had the kind of problems calling other carriers like you describe. You are getting faster Internet speeds than I am, but I could get a 10mbit upload and half the download you're getting, and still keep my monthly bill under $100/mo, without needing to switch from DSL, and if I really needed the faster download speed, my provider will let me use MLPPP to bind multiple lines.
You may consider it a good deal, but I don't. I would consider $500/mo to be prohibitive, actually, as that's more than I pay for the loan on a new car. To put it another way, you're paying almost as much for your phone as I am for my rent in a major city. Admittedly, I'm paying 1/3 of the rent for the house we're renting, but I could get a 1br apartment in roughly the same area for the same, and the house is within walking distance of the downtown commercial district where I work (3mi), as well as another couple of major commercial districts(0.5mi and 1mi respectively), and a quarter mile from a beach, too.
In other words: you're getting shafted. It may be a good deal for where you're living, but it's a terrible deal for anywhere that has real competition and providers fighting for your business.
Cell phones are subsidized, in a way, but sat phones aren't. Sat phones cost the same to provide service no matter where in the world you are, because putting a satellite in the sky is a fixed cost and covers geographical area. They are limited in terms of how many customers a given satellite can handle, but the cost per customer for putting a satellite in the sky doesn't change regardless of whether a customer is in New York City or Alert.
Cellular phones, on the other hand, have a different set of problems entirely... there is a limit to how many connections a tower can handle, so towers are more densely placed in cities, but there is also a maximum radius that a tower can reliably serve. In rural/low density areas, it's unlikely that a given tower will be anywhere near the maximum population it can handle, and the per-customer cost to service that tower goes up. The cost of the rural towers is, in effect, subsidized by the urban customers, because the rural customers pay the same monthly rates.
If you look closely, the lengths of the antennas themselves are the same on the one you linked to the one that the GP linked. That's because the frequency an antenna is tuned to receive depends on the length of the antenna itself. A simple dipole made out of a coathanger would work fine, as long as they're the right length and put in the right place.
Now, putting a simple antenna like the one described in probably won't actually improve things, because her cellular modem is probably located in a dead spot, which could be created by metal furniture nearby, or line of sight issues created by the household wiring (unless the antenna isn't attached properly, or is defective, both are possible). What you want is an outdoor antenna that can be mounted on the side of the house with a cable running inside. For that, I don't see anything on the page for less than $80, which puts it in the range where it's worth looking at building your own.
As to exactly how, there's other posts here which detail it, so I won't bother repeating them.
I haven't played all of the games, but I will say that SR3 was the only game (*ever*) that I enjoyed enough to actually buy the DLC. More than that, I didn't feel gypped when I bought it, because it added several hours of gameplay. I especially liked the Genki Bowl missions, but the Weird Science series is hilarious. I'd say that game alone is worth more than the average price at the moment for the bundle.
It's a matter of personal preference, as always, but I don't find the DRM on Steam to be all that onerous, and I think the idea is to encourage gamers to give money to charity more than anything else. I'm sorely tempted to buy the bundle, despite already having half the games in it, simply because of that.