Any H.264 solution requires some form of playback support (either native in the browser, like Chrome and I believe Opera) or Flash. That means someone must agree to MPEG LA licensing.
This solution (Video for Everyone) doesn't require H.264, and in fact prefers FOSS/license-free Ogg Theora first.
It falls back to H.264 if OGV fails, then H.264 via Flash, and then telling the user to use one of the 2 download links.
It's not a perfect solution, but it solves things where they are right now until Microsoft and Apple can get their heads out of their behinds and support Ogg Theora, or until H.264/MPEG LA opens up H.264 license-free, or until all users install Firefox/Chrome/Opera. Which do you think will happen sooner?
None of the above, so we support all 4 work-arounds with Video for Everyone, and no one has to install anything if they don't want to.
So read up on Video for Everyone. It addresses all 3, and "just makes it work" with whatever solution you have.
FOSS folks get pure FOSS. Closed-source/license folks get that (and hosts until 2016), and IE folks with flash (com'on, you can't navigate almost any sites without flash these days). It does this right now with only two encodings and on block of code.
Also, note that I said, "For now". It's a 5-year solution. Who knows what will change in the internet world in 5 years. That's like 100 "business" years and like 1000 dog years.
Hopefully Ogg Theora will just take over and/or surpass H.264 and/or MPEG LA will get their patents tossed or that sort of patent will be invalidated globally. We can only hope.
Perhaps 2016 will be when all the internet broadcasters "pull the plug" and drop H.264 support since Ogg Theora and "open" browsers will be common-place.
We can speculate a lot about what will be in 2016, but:
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution.
Excellent point. Of course, you'd have it all in Ogg Theora format (Video for Everyone has hosts encoding in both Ogg Theora and H.264), and in 2016 you could always just tell all your users to install the Ogg Theora plugin, install Firefox/Chrome/Opera, or take a hike. That's what users get now with all the Flash requirements anyway.
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution. Works on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome natively with Ogg Theora, and Safari natively with H.264, and Internet Explorer with Flash (loading the H.264 content).
Naturally the best solution would be that everyone implements Ogg Theora as a standard fall-back solution, and use their "better/proprietary" solution when available.
My audiance, clearly more technical folks (as I just blog about technical stuff) say otherwise (this is last month's unique visits to my blog): 1 6962 38.20% Firefox 2 6818 37.41% Microsoft IE 3 1034 5.67% Chrome 8 491 2.69% Safari 9 346 1.90% Opera 22 149 0.82% Wireless Transcoder Google Wireless Transcoder 28 119 0.65% Android 71 44 0.24% Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10 91 37 0.20% Konqueror
It's pretty clear to me then - if you want your kids to tinker, don't use Apple or other closed/proprietary systems.
Move to OSS solutions.
Transition paths are not horribly painful either.
Switch to OSS apps, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, F-Spot or GIMP, Audacity, etc. on your current OS (Mac or Windows). Switch one app at a time, don't do anything drastic. Even use non-OSS "pure" apps that are available on all platforms (I don't know the status of these, but they aren't native to Fedora, so they must have some licensing issues): Google's Chrome and Picasa.
Then switching your OS is much less of a learning curve. They can cut their teeth on Ubuntu for the end-user changeover and move on the RedHat family of Fedora and/or CentOS. VirtualBox can provide your link back to the proprietary Windows world (I'm not sure what Mac emulators are available for Linux, if any) in case there are some apps you just cannot get rid of.
There is so much to tinker on in the OSS world, and you have total and complete control to tinker to the deepest levels. Best of all, you'll almost certainly find a community that is interested in what you are, or perhaps you'll start on and others will find you.
This gun and all its flaws and different situations are good for a movie/tv show plot, and little else.
No doubt there will be a "disable" signal that can be sent by "authorized police" as well in these guns. Yet another movie plotline with, you know, bad crackers getting access to such a code and disabling all police guns, or whatever.
The International domain.int would fit better and isn't limited/bounded by geographic locations nor even political boundaries. iss.int would work. There is esa.int already, for instance.
Fedora and CentOS has had plenty of releases from April 1, 2006 - December 31, 2008.
I'm pretty sure I didn't jump to FC5 right away after release, so it was most likely downloaded during this time. FC6, F7, F9, F10 were all downloaded during this time via BT. C4.6, C5, C5.1, C5.2 were all downloaded during this time via BT. Various other distros and LiveCDs were tried out during this time and also downloaded via BT.
I don't do warez. I don't have time for it and the possible hassle in court. I'd rather not try it, but I'd bet I'd come out on top with a countersuit for damages to my home business should any PCs be taken and there isn't a shred of proprietary crud on them. The only exception is the TV shows I legally encode with my own capture cards or music files for all CDs I own which I personally ripped. Again, I don't want to try it out in court, but I think I'd win pretty slam dunk easy.
That's crap and you know it. No one forces you to use Comcast's DNS servers which they offer in the DHCP lease. You are free to run your own resolver or use any other public resolver (like opendns.com).
I don't know what the calculations are, but take: CPU @ idle vs CPU @ 100% and find out the power supply usage difference (which will also include running the power supply and cpu fans all the time as well, plus extra hard drive spin-up to store the calculation downloads and reads), times 5000 PCs times 10 years.
50,000 "PC Years" only requires using an extra $20/PC/year in power to get to $1M. That's not unbelievable.
One could argue that if the PCs were properly configured with power saving methods, they should suspend when not in use for a certain amount of time, and hibernate after that. I do this with PCs that benefit from it. Even if they weren't configured to do this, I'd bet that running a CPU at 100% 24/7 vs a CPU at idle easily runs up $20/year/PC.
I'm sorry, but unless you pay the power bill or personally own a company (corporations aren't owned by people, people own stock in them, and the Exces duties are to maximize shareholder profits, and wasting power isn't one of them), then you shouldn't be running any CPU utilities like this without testing the extra power that will be consumed and having that bill increase explicitly signed off by those in charge.
I'm sure most places might like the idea of running Cancer-solving stuff on their CPUs (or so the article claims), but if they saw that it would cost them an extra $10/year per PC, times 5000 PCs, they'd probably decide against that $10,000 expense. As nice as it may be, it's a misuse of taxpayer money.
My guess is that he did have a verbal OK from one of the folks in charge before, but he didn't have it in writing, and the new folk(s) in charge have an axe to grind and wanted him gone. This is the only thing they could find.
It's pretty harmless, until you do the math times 50,000 PC years. I agree, something like this just needs to be corrected. If he can't prove he had approval, it should be a disciplinary action, not something one could be terminated for.
Tests you could do to decide would be: was this done in a sneaky fashion and not known to others? Doesn't sound like it if he had a verbal OK from the previous chief. Also, does this violate any policy? Most likely it doesn't, since he was authorized to install software (see question #1) vs. an average student would probably be violating policy.
System - Administration - Add/Remote Software Games - [x] abe Apply
Installed abe (Scrolling, platform-jumping, ancient pyramid exploring game) without any password at all on F12 (not user, nor root). It was not installed in the user directory, it was installed the same as if "yum install abe" was executed by root, solving dependencies as well.
I see others discussing how to solve this via polkit. Another solution for my multi-user systems where non-admins shouldn't be mucking around, I see the simple fix as removing PackageKit: rpm --erase gnome-packagekit. If you want to go to the extreme: yum --erase PackageKit.
This also disables notifications of new software releases, but software updates can still be managed with yum and automation could occur with yum-cron.
It's rather easy to find stolen electricity. Total the usage of the meters in an area vs. how much power was used there. If there is a difference of more than the reasonable margin of error, they have ways to isolate where this is very easy (especially since the thieves are constantly using).
With SmartMeters, stealing electricity will be virtually impossible. Within minutes theft of power is spotted and a truck roll can be sent out within the next day (if not sooner) if it continues.
You were not ignorant of receiving a ticket. You should have followed up what occurred with the ticket with the court.
What is really messed up is if you let a friend borrow a car, they get a parking ticket, and then toss the ticket without telling you. Then years later you get this same sort of problem, for a parking ticket somewhere far from where you live, and you've no clue how it occurred. Didn't happen to me personally, but a friend of the family. I learned that day: Don't loan your car to people you don't really trust to do the right thing.
Same thing with selling a vehicle. To properly sell a vehicle, at least in California, you are still liable until the new owner registers the vehicle. What if they never do? You're liable. The *right* way to sell a vehicle is to arrange to meet with the buyer at the dmv to exchange the payment and pink and have them register it right there, and get a copy of the new registration.
Why doesn't the federal Government use the URDP to just seize the domains? If they're posing at the government, that should be a quick slam-dunk court case, and then the government just takes it to ICANN who forces their registrar to transfer to ownership:
I know it's not as simple as that, but once the ball is rolling it should stop them as appealing method of scamming. Plus, it's "the right way" to get it done without passing any new law that can be abused. Enabling any sort of China-like-firewall-filter is a *bad idea*.
The problem is they've got Flash going direct. If I use Squid and block all other internet access other than Squid, I see direct access trying to go from my PC to Akamia where Lulu is streaming content. I think the real hack would be to use iptables to redirect all internet access to the Squid proxy, no matter what Flash wants to do, and further have Squid hide that it is Squid/proxying.
If there were not evil people in the world and laws that will get you in hot water should that evil person use your network in a bad way, I'd agree. That's not the world we live in.
Yes from your LAN to the internet is wide open, all email from your ISP to another ISP is in the open (GPG if you care), but for me that's not the point of securing my WLAN. It's securing who accesses my internet connection which is tied to me personally, and without physically being in my home/office, WLAN is the only way to do so, so that's why I secure it.
While that might seem nice, it's actually pretty stupid, on both parts (sharing, and using "shared" resources).
Two points, first is that you're opening yourself up to having all your gear seized by the police when you leave things open. How/why? How 'bout your neighbor has an interest in child porn? How 'bout your neighbor uses your internet to send death threats to the President of the United States and guess what, the Secret Service will have your address from your ISP in no time and you'll probably have fun, again with your gear taken and sitting in jail until it all gets sorted. What if your neighbor shares movies/music non-stop and your ISP decides to cut you off? Most likely sharing your internet outside of your household violates their ToS.
At the very least, you should require users to create accounts and use those and that you log access times (and perhaps dns queries or some proof of where they went). When I used to run an open AP, I did that with NoCatAuth (some form of that project is still around). Then should any of these things happen, you could at least have some "proof" that it wasn't you. Granted, your equipment is still seized while you fight this, or you're still offline until you promise to shutdown/limit your access.
Ok, the second point is that, at least here in the US, you're actually committing theft of computer services and unauthorized access when you use someone's "shared" AP without permission. Yeah, I know it's really lame. Unless you have written proof somewhere (like on a sign at a college or in a hotel lobby), or at least connecting to an SSID labelled "somesite-public" so you can say it was open to the public, you're asking for it legally.
A final thought of how stupid it is to use any old open AP is that you're ripe for a M-i-t-M attack and giving up all your account info. You can disagree all you want, all you have to do is look and see all the security issues that come up with this and how SSL really isn't a solution as it is constantly found to be broken.
What I do to prevent such problems is to use a "Guest" firefox profile to login to the ToS or whatever a public place may have and "sign in" to their system if I have to auth somehow. Once that is up, iptables blocks all outbound traffic from my laptop except to my remote proxy server which I SSH to and forward all my traffic. No M-i-t-M attack is possible here since I already have my SSH server's public key stored and that server had my public key, and the only traffic they see is AES-256bit SSH. Nothing else can even leave/leek out of my box thanks to iptables blocking it (dns likes to leak from a lot of apps, and SOCKS proxying will not do DNS and always leak unless you use something like privoxy).
Anyway, I just don't have time to deal with the police or my ISP should someone else do something stupid. I have "PRIVATE" in my SSID string (no excuses for unauthorized access) use WPA2/AES, have MAC address filtering, and only allow SSH access into my host server from my AP to my LAN. Again, I don't trust wireless, even at home. Should WPA2/AES found to be broken and someone spoofs my MAC address, they cannot get anywhere but to my hardened SSH host. A little bit of protection and security mindset goes a long way. This works in a corp setting as well, replacing SSH with VPNs (only allow access from the wireless to your VPN server/firewall, etc.).
Have to nit-pick a few things: Prince of Persia was published by Br0derbund (ref 1) and The Secret of Monkey Island by LucasArts (ref 2), hardly any different than the current crop of game publishers such as EA, etc. Sierra Online was another of the great publishers of their day (before they were bought and turned into what we despise, but that's what happens when the original owners sell out), but then they started from the ground up as developers - and I think that's the key to "getting it."
Developers really do have a choice, though. In the old days it was publishing under the Shareware method or fronting money yourself to get into game shops (yeah right). Today, it's the do-it-yourself model that the 2D Boy folks who made World of Goo used thanks to the internet and Paypal. Oh, and it's even better than that, because they can publish independently for PC/Mac/Linux and then try their hand at publishing via Nintendo WiiWare at the same time. There is minimal risk other than hard work with no profit.
The folks that always bought the published box titles will continue to do so. The folks who went the Shareware method have found OSS and won't drift to the non-free side often (myself, I wait 2-3 years to get a Wii title for $15-20).
I, like you, despise WalMart. As a small business owner, I get it, but as a person trying to keep expenses down, I still go to McDonald's/Burger King and partake of the dollar menu. When we "splurge" it is going to In-n-Out Burger (privately owned burger chain in California who treats employees good and just does it right). I actually would go to In-n-Out more and pay double for the burger if I wasn't feeding a family of 6 while on the go to football games and such and they were closer and not 40 minutes out of the way from home/games.
But I do think really hard before shopping at WalMart, and usually it comes down to not being able to find what I want somewhere else, and not being willing to drive all over town to 2-3 stores to make 4-5 purchases. If I can, I go to WinCo, who again, treats their employees right (interesting how they can be profitable and have an Employee Pension Plan with a Foods Employee Stock Ownership Trust - try that, WalMart).
But that's just it, I make conscious decisions to prefer companies that are doing the right thing over companies that don't. The problem is that most American's do not do this, and they "vote" with their dollars the wrong way. If people really cared about people (cared about the employees of WalMart, for instance), we could change WalMart in less than a month with a boycott demanding they offer real health care plans, refuse to allow (let alone promote) their employees to be on government assistance by paying a real wage, give all workers who want to work 40 hours those hours. One month of a well-organized protest and people helping people coming to WalMart to understand why WalMart in its present form is bad and where they can shop for nearly as cheap, but without the economic hurt to their communities, and things could be turned around.
Looking at the list, I agree. Being a Fedora user, I tend to skip versions just because I don't want to spend the time to get all my one-offs working again. I skipped from FC6 to CentOS5 for a year on my desktop (based on the same major release versions), then went to F9, and now F11. CentOS5 is still solid and loved on my servers.
Fedora just has a twice a year release cycle they're expected to meet. That means sometimes you're just getting many incremental release updates and nothing major. I'm still curious to see what version will make it to RHEL6. I don't think they'll have time to pop out F13 to use as the foundation for RHEL6, but perhaps, since RHEL6 doesn't have to release until 2010 Q1, which could be as late as March.
Myself, I'll try it in VirtualBox and play around, but I probably won't move of my main laptop until F13. But I may try it in another LVM partition and finally blow away my left-over F9 space (I kept that partition just in case I had to dual-boot over to figure out something I'd forgotten, even though I do have backups).
I like multiplayer networked games, especially games I can play with friends or my kids. Of course, not everyone is using Linux, so that's a hurdle too. So the 3 top ones I like to play also happen to be OSS and has multiplatform (Windows, Mac, Linux) releases.
Favorites starting from my most are: Warzone 2100 - Think of a real-time war game such as Command and Conquer. It's not too technical, but technical enough. I like playing with a friend in a 4 on 4 game and tag-teaming the two computer players and then battling it out. Longer games, plus there is a single-player campaign mode.
BZFlag is a classic tank game with modern 3D and maps. There are a ton of online servers hosting fun maps, plus you can download the maps and host the games yourself. Virtually unlimited amount of users can connect and play. Capture the flag mode is a ton of fun (especially with 4 color teams). Great for fast matches during a lunch break.
Freeciv doesn't require a 3D engine, and is basically an Open Source version of Civilization. Also fun with many players.
A someone else posted, there are hundreds of Linux games and even better is a list of OSS games out there, but these are my favorites.
I thought of this back when I had a Tivo and its Thumbs Up/Down rating for shows. Tivo then uses your ratings of different shows and what you record to suggest new shows. I always thought it'd be great if I could do that during commercials. Once I thumbs down a commercial, don't show it to me again (I'm just gonna zap it anyway).
I don't get ads most of the time in my browser (NoScript, content filtering), but I always though it was retarded to insist on throwing useless ads at me. Why do I, a male, care about female personal care items, etc.? I'd much rather have techie/geekie/cool ads if I have to have them. You're more likely to have me follow-up and be interested in it, which is more likely to result in a sale.
I think if most Americans have no choice but to have ads (which, face it, most of the time you don't have a choice), if they really thought about it, they'd want ads that fit them - or at least a way to filter out ads that completely don't fit them.
Not sure where you're getting your info from. Both my local utility power, MID, and the big California utility PG&E (who provides my natural gas) use IPv6 for all their smart meters.
You've got to address those meters somehow so you can read/poll them.
Slashdot Mirror
Any H.264 solution requires some form of playback support (either native in the browser, like Chrome and I believe Opera) or Flash. That means someone must agree to MPEG LA licensing.
This solution (Video for Everyone) doesn't require H.264, and in fact prefers FOSS/license-free Ogg Theora first.
It falls back to H.264 if OGV fails, then H.264 via Flash, and then telling the user to use one of the 2 download links.
It's not a perfect solution, but it solves things where they are right now until Microsoft and Apple can get their heads out of their behinds and support Ogg Theora, or until H.264/MPEG LA opens up H.264 license-free, or until all users install Firefox/Chrome/Opera. Which do you think will happen sooner?
None of the above, so we support all 4 work-arounds with Video for Everyone, and no one has to install anything if they don't want to.
So read up on Video for Everyone. It addresses all 3, and "just makes it work" with whatever solution you have.
FOSS folks get pure FOSS. Closed-source/license folks get that (and hosts until 2016), and IE folks with flash (com'on, you can't navigate almost any sites without flash these days). It does this right now with only two encodings and on block of code.
Also, note that I said, "For now". It's a 5-year solution. Who knows what will change in the internet world in 5 years. That's like 100 "business" years and like 1000 dog years.
Hopefully Ogg Theora will just take over and/or surpass H.264 and/or MPEG LA will get their patents tossed or that sort of patent will be invalidated globally. We can only hope.
Perhaps 2016 will be when all the internet broadcasters "pull the plug" and drop H.264 support since Ogg Theora and "open" browsers will be common-place.
We can speculate a lot about what will be in 2016, but:
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution.
Excellent point. Of course, you'd have it all in Ogg Theora format (Video for Everyone has hosts encoding in both Ogg Theora and H.264), and in 2016 you could always just tell all your users to install the Ogg Theora plugin, install Firefox/Chrome/Opera, or take a hike. That's what users get now with all the Flash requirements anyway.
For now, the Video for Everyone code hack is the solution. Works on Firefox, Opera, and Chrome natively with Ogg Theora, and Safari natively with H.264, and Internet Explorer with Flash (loading the H.264 content).
Naturally the best solution would be that everyone implements Ogg Theora as a standard fall-back solution, and use their "better/proprietary" solution when available.
The solution to the first-time key exchange is SSHFP + DNSSEC.
My audiance, clearly more technical folks (as I just blog about technical stuff) say otherwise (this is last month's unique visits to my blog):
1 6962 38.20% Firefox
2 6818 37.41% Microsoft IE
3 1034 5.67% Chrome
8 491 2.69% Safari
9 346 1.90% Opera
22 149 0.82% Wireless Transcoder Google Wireless Transcoder
28 119 0.65% Android
71 44 0.24% Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.10
91 37 0.20% Konqueror
It's pretty clear to me then - if you want your kids to tinker, don't use Apple or other closed/proprietary systems.
Move to OSS solutions.
Transition paths are not horribly painful either.
Switch to OSS apps, Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, F-Spot or GIMP, Audacity, etc. on your current OS (Mac or Windows). Switch one app at a time, don't do anything drastic. Even use non-OSS "pure" apps that are available on all platforms (I don't know the status of these, but they aren't native to Fedora, so they must have some licensing issues): Google's Chrome and Picasa.
Then switching your OS is much less of a learning curve. They can cut their teeth on Ubuntu for the end-user changeover and move on the RedHat family of Fedora and/or CentOS. VirtualBox can provide your link back to the proprietary Windows world (I'm not sure what Mac emulators are available for Linux, if any) in case there are some apps you just cannot get rid of.
There is so much to tinker on in the OSS world, and you have total and complete control to tinker to the deepest levels. Best of all, you'll almost certainly find a community that is interested in what you are, or perhaps you'll start on and others will find you.
Make the switch, and let the tinkering begin!
This gun and all its flaws and different situations are good for a movie/tv show plot, and little else.
No doubt there will be a "disable" signal that can be sent by "authorized police" as well in these guns. Yet another movie plotline with, you know, bad crackers getting access to such a code and disabling all police guns, or whatever.
The International domain .int would fit better and isn't limited/bounded by geographic locations nor even political boundaries. iss.int would work. There is esa.int already, for instance.
Fedora and CentOS has had plenty of releases from April 1, 2006 - December 31, 2008.
I'm pretty sure I didn't jump to FC5 right away after release, so it was most likely downloaded during this time. FC6, F7, F9, F10 were all downloaded during this time via BT. C4.6, C5, C5.1, C5.2 were all downloaded during this time via BT. Various other distros and LiveCDs were tried out during this time and also downloaded via BT.
I don't do warez. I don't have time for it and the possible hassle in court. I'd rather not try it, but I'd bet I'd come out on top with a countersuit for damages to my home business should any PCs be taken and there isn't a shred of proprietary crud on them. The only exception is the TV shows I legally encode with my own capture cards or music files for all CDs I own which I personally ripped. Again, I don't want to try it out in court, but I think I'd win pretty slam dunk easy.
That's crap and you know it. No one forces you to use Comcast's DNS servers which they offer in the DHCP lease. You are free to run your own resolver or use any other public resolver (like opendns.com).
Furthermore, Comcast has an opt out site.
Are you really that stupid or just playing dumb?
I don't know what the calculations are, but take: CPU @ idle vs CPU @ 100% and find out the power supply usage difference (which will also include running the power supply and cpu fans all the time as well, plus extra hard drive spin-up to store the calculation downloads and reads), times 5000 PCs times 10 years.
50,000 "PC Years" only requires using an extra $20/PC/year in power to get to $1M. That's not unbelievable.
One could argue that if the PCs were properly configured with power saving methods, they should suspend when not in use for a certain amount of time, and hibernate after that. I do this with PCs that benefit from it. Even if they weren't configured to do this, I'd bet that running a CPU at 100% 24/7 vs a CPU at idle easily runs up $20/year/PC.
I'm sorry, but unless you pay the power bill or personally own a company (corporations aren't owned by people, people own stock in them, and the Exces duties are to maximize shareholder profits, and wasting power isn't one of them), then you shouldn't be running any CPU utilities like this without testing the extra power that will be consumed and having that bill increase explicitly signed off by those in charge.
I'm sure most places might like the idea of running Cancer-solving stuff on their CPUs (or so the article claims), but if they saw that it would cost them an extra $10/year per PC, times 5000 PCs, they'd probably decide against that $10,000 expense. As nice as it may be, it's a misuse of taxpayer money.
My guess is that he did have a verbal OK from one of the folks in charge before, but he didn't have it in writing, and the new folk(s) in charge have an axe to grind and wanted him gone. This is the only thing they could find.
It's pretty harmless, until you do the math times 50,000 PC years. I agree, something like this just needs to be corrected. If he can't prove he had approval, it should be a disciplinary action, not something one could be terminated for.
Tests you could do to decide would be: was this done in a sneaky fashion and not known to others? Doesn't sound like it if he had a verbal OK from the previous chief. Also, does this violate any policy? Most likely it doesn't, since he was authorized to install software (see question #1) vs. an average student would probably be violating policy.
System - Administration - Add/Remote Software
Games - [x] abe
Apply
Installed abe (Scrolling, platform-jumping, ancient pyramid exploring game) without any password at all on F12 (not user, nor root). It was not installed in the user directory, it was installed the same as if "yum install abe" was executed by root, solving dependencies as well.
I see others discussing how to solve this via polkit. Another solution for my multi-user systems where non-admins shouldn't be mucking around, I see the simple fix as removing PackageKit: rpm --erase gnome-packagekit. If you want to go to the extreme: yum --erase PackageKit.
This also disables notifications of new software releases, but software updates can still be managed with yum and automation could occur with yum-cron.
It's rather easy to find stolen electricity. Total the usage of the meters in an area vs. how much power was used there. If there is a difference of more than the reasonable margin of error, they have ways to isolate where this is very easy (especially since the thieves are constantly using).
With SmartMeters, stealing electricity will be virtually impossible. Within minutes theft of power is spotted and a truck roll can be sent out within the next day (if not sooner) if it continues.
You were not ignorant of receiving a ticket. You should have followed up what occurred with the ticket with the court.
What is really messed up is if you let a friend borrow a car, they get a parking ticket, and then toss the ticket without telling you. Then years later you get this same sort of problem, for a parking ticket somewhere far from where you live, and you've no clue how it occurred. Didn't happen to me personally, but a friend of the family. I learned that day: Don't loan your car to people you don't really trust to do the right thing.
Same thing with selling a vehicle. To properly sell a vehicle, at least in California, you are still liable until the new owner registers the vehicle. What if they never do? You're liable. The *right* way to sell a vehicle is to arrange to meet with the buyer at the dmv to exchange the payment and pink and have them register it right there, and get a copy of the new registration.
Why doesn't the federal Government use the URDP to just seize the domains? If they're posing at the government, that should be a quick slam-dunk court case, and then the government just takes it to ICANN who forces their registrar to transfer to ownership:
http://www.icann.org/en/udrp/udrp.htm
I know it's not as simple as that, but once the ball is rolling it should stop them as appealing method of scamming. Plus, it's "the right way" to get it done without passing any new law that can be abused. Enabling any sort of China-like-firewall-filter is a *bad idea*.
The problem is they've got Flash going direct. If I use Squid and block all other internet access other than Squid, I see direct access trying to go from my PC to Akamia where Lulu is streaming content. I think the real hack would be to use iptables to redirect all internet access to the Squid proxy, no matter what Flash wants to do, and further have Squid hide that it is Squid/proxying.
If there were not evil people in the world and laws that will get you in hot water should that evil person use your network in a bad way, I'd agree. That's not the world we live in.
Yes from your LAN to the internet is wide open, all email from your ISP to another ISP is in the open (GPG if you care), but for me that's not the point of securing my WLAN. It's securing who accesses my internet connection which is tied to me personally, and without physically being in my home/office, WLAN is the only way to do so, so that's why I secure it.
I have a longer reply about this and the reasoning here:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1423971&cid=29918555
While that might seem nice, it's actually pretty stupid, on both parts (sharing, and using "shared" resources).
Two points, first is that you're opening yourself up to having all your gear seized by the police when you leave things open. How/why? How 'bout your neighbor has an interest in child porn? How 'bout your neighbor uses your internet to send death threats to the President of the United States and guess what, the Secret Service will have your address from your ISP in no time and you'll probably have fun, again with your gear taken and sitting in jail until it all gets sorted. What if your neighbor shares movies/music non-stop and your ISP decides to cut you off? Most likely sharing your internet outside of your household violates their ToS.
At the very least, you should require users to create accounts and use those and that you log access times (and perhaps dns queries or some proof of where they went). When I used to run an open AP, I did that with NoCatAuth (some form of that project is still around). Then should any of these things happen, you could at least have some "proof" that it wasn't you. Granted, your equipment is still seized while you fight this, or you're still offline until you promise to shutdown/limit your access.
Ok, the second point is that, at least here in the US, you're actually committing theft of computer services and unauthorized access when you use someone's "shared" AP without permission. Yeah, I know it's really lame. Unless you have written proof somewhere (like on a sign at a college or in a hotel lobby), or at least connecting to an SSID labelled "somesite-public" so you can say it was open to the public, you're asking for it legally.
A final thought of how stupid it is to use any old open AP is that you're ripe for a M-i-t-M attack and giving up all your account info. You can disagree all you want, all you have to do is look and see all the security issues that come up with this and how SSL really isn't a solution as it is constantly found to be broken.
What I do to prevent such problems is to use a "Guest" firefox profile to login to the ToS or whatever a public place may have and "sign in" to their system if I have to auth somehow. Once that is up, iptables blocks all outbound traffic from my laptop except to my remote proxy server which I SSH to and forward all my traffic. No M-i-t-M attack is possible here since I already have my SSH server's public key stored and that server had my public key, and the only traffic they see is AES-256bit SSH. Nothing else can even leave/leek out of my box thanks to iptables blocking it (dns likes to leak from a lot of apps, and SOCKS proxying will not do DNS and always leak unless you use something like privoxy).
Anyway, I just don't have time to deal with the police or my ISP should someone else do something stupid. I have "PRIVATE" in my SSID string (no excuses for unauthorized access) use WPA2/AES, have MAC address filtering, and only allow SSH access into my host server from my AP to my LAN. Again, I don't trust wireless, even at home. Should WPA2/AES found to be broken and someone spoofs my MAC address, they cannot get anywhere but to my hardened SSH host. A little bit of protection and security mindset goes a long way. This works in a corp setting as well, replacing SSH with VPNs (only allow access from the wireless to your VPN server/firewall, etc.).
Have to nit-pick a few things: Prince of Persia was published by Br0derbund (ref 1) and The Secret of Monkey Island by LucasArts (ref 2), hardly any different than the current crop of game publishers such as EA, etc. Sierra Online was another of the great publishers of their day (before they were bought and turned into what we despise, but that's what happens when the original owners sell out), but then they started from the ground up as developers - and I think that's the key to "getting it."
Developers really do have a choice, though. In the old days it was publishing under the Shareware method or fronting money yourself to get into game shops (yeah right). Today, it's the do-it-yourself model that the 2D Boy folks who made World of Goo used thanks to the internet and Paypal. Oh, and it's even better than that, because they can publish independently for PC/Mac/Linux and then try their hand at publishing via Nintendo WiiWare at the same time. There is minimal risk other than hard work with no profit.
The folks that always bought the published box titles will continue to do so. The folks who went the Shareware method have found OSS and won't drift to the non-free side often (myself, I wait 2-3 years to get a Wii title for $15-20).
I, like you, despise WalMart. As a small business owner, I get it, but as a person trying to keep expenses down, I still go to McDonald's/Burger King and partake of the dollar menu. When we "splurge" it is going to In-n-Out Burger (privately owned burger chain in California who treats employees good and just does it right). I actually would go to In-n-Out more and pay double for the burger if I wasn't feeding a family of 6 while on the go to football games and such and they were closer and not 40 minutes out of the way from home/games.
But I do think really hard before shopping at WalMart, and usually it comes down to not being able to find what I want somewhere else, and not being willing to drive all over town to 2-3 stores to make 4-5 purchases. If I can, I go to WinCo, who again, treats their employees right (interesting how they can be profitable and have an Employee Pension Plan with a Foods Employee Stock Ownership Trust - try that, WalMart).
But that's just it, I make conscious decisions to prefer companies that are doing the right thing over companies that don't. The problem is that most American's do not do this, and they "vote" with their dollars the wrong way. If people really cared about people (cared about the employees of WalMart, for instance), we could change WalMart in less than a month with a boycott demanding they offer real health care plans, refuse to allow (let alone promote) their employees to be on government assistance by paying a real wage, give all workers who want to work 40 hours those hours. One month of a well-organized protest and people helping people coming to WalMart to understand why WalMart in its present form is bad and where they can shop for nearly as cheap, but without the economic hurt to their communities, and things could be turned around.
Looking at the list, I agree. Being a Fedora user, I tend to skip versions just because I don't want to spend the time to get all my one-offs working again. I skipped from FC6 to CentOS5 for a year on my desktop (based on the same major release versions), then went to F9, and now F11. CentOS5 is still solid and loved on my servers.
Fedora just has a twice a year release cycle they're expected to meet. That means sometimes you're just getting many incremental release updates and nothing major. I'm still curious to see what version will make it to RHEL6. I don't think they'll have time to pop out F13 to use as the foundation for RHEL6, but perhaps, since RHEL6 doesn't have to release until 2010 Q1, which could be as late as March.
Myself, I'll try it in VirtualBox and play around, but I probably won't move of my main laptop until F13. But I may try it in another LVM partition and finally blow away my left-over F9 space (I kept that partition just in case I had to dual-boot over to figure out something I'd forgotten, even though I do have backups).
I like multiplayer networked games, especially games I can play with friends or my kids. Of course, not everyone is using Linux, so that's a hurdle too. So the 3 top ones I like to play also happen to be OSS and has multiplatform (Windows, Mac, Linux) releases.
Favorites starting from my most are:
Warzone 2100 - Think of a real-time war game such as Command and Conquer. It's not too technical, but technical enough. I like playing with a friend in a 4 on 4 game and tag-teaming the two computer players and then battling it out. Longer games, plus there is a single-player campaign mode.
BZFlag is a classic tank game with modern 3D and maps. There are a ton of online servers hosting fun maps, plus you can download the maps and host the games yourself. Virtually unlimited amount of users can connect and play. Capture the flag mode is a ton of fun (especially with 4 color teams). Great for fast matches during a lunch break.
Freeciv doesn't require a 3D engine, and is basically an Open Source version of Civilization. Also fun with many players.
A someone else posted, there are hundreds of Linux games and even better is a list of OSS games out there, but these are my favorites.
I thought of this back when I had a Tivo and its Thumbs Up/Down rating for shows. Tivo then uses your ratings of different shows and what you record to suggest new shows. I always thought it'd be great if I could do that during commercials. Once I thumbs down a commercial, don't show it to me again (I'm just gonna zap it anyway).
I don't get ads most of the time in my browser (NoScript, content filtering), but I always though it was retarded to insist on throwing useless ads at me. Why do I, a male, care about female personal care items, etc.? I'd much rather have techie/geekie/cool ads if I have to have them. You're more likely to have me follow-up and be interested in it, which is more likely to result in a sale.
I think if most Americans have no choice but to have ads (which, face it, most of the time you don't have a choice), if they really thought about it, they'd want ads that fit them - or at least a way to filter out ads that completely don't fit them.
Not sure where you're getting your info from. Both my local utility power, MID, and the big California utility PG&E (who provides my natural gas) use IPv6 for all their smart meters.
You've got to address those meters somehow so you can read/poll them.