There is very little that I need to do that can not be done natively in Ubuntu, and for those not in the know, Ubuntu is completely free. So why would I bother buying/downloading ANY version of Windows and even bother installing it, either natively or as a virtual machine? I just don't get it.
Well, obviously I'm not denying the existence of war profiteering. But by profit, I did not just mean financial. And yes, there are religious people who know to use condoms, but over all religion has been a major hindrance to that and many other important human health and happiness issues.
I'm not saying that all religious people are bad or stupid, but I AM saying that all religion is band and stupid. We should care a lot more about human health and happiness, and approach the situation scientifically in a way that increases both.
It would probably seem a lot more obvious to a lot more people if ancient genocidal delusions weren't ruling their thought processes.
Does anybody know if this will be eligible in Southern California?
Does anybody know if this means I can finally download and upload torrents of UbuntuStudio and other FOSS without being throttled down to dial up and repeatedly disconnected?
For the record, those of you who live near San Diego and have Cox communications probably know what I'm talking about.
The solution to accountability with elected representatives exists now. It's called the video camera. From being sworn in, till someone new is sworn in, they should be on camera, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they don't want people watching them fuck or shit, they shouldn't be in public office anyway. I mean, I could probably let America watch me shit and skip sex, if it meant I got to be president.
I'm running in 2012, by the way. I'll be old enough then.
Ah, but see, most atheists bend themselves to the scientific way of thinking, and as a result would have a difficult time making the numbers work out in such a way that a war would actually benefit them.
The primary draw of atheism for me, in fact, is that I can evaluate and rationally CHOOSE from a list of outcomes (wrong or right!), rather than just picking one, and "taking it by faith". Especially when throughout human history, "taking it on faith" has been proven wrong nine times out of ten.
1. Humans have a surprising ability to turn the possible into the real. Often with many unforeseen consequences. 2. Some raw materials (Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen) are AS GOOD AS free, and you can make just about anything you can imagine needing or wanting out of JUST those 4 elements alone. Carbon alone could be 90% of what any machine needs:
Diamond is a VERY strong building material, as are nano tubes. Bucky balls are a very good lubricant, as is graphite. Nano tubes are very good at conducting electricity. Carbon can also be used as a good insulator.
So, while ALL raw materials are not free, with molecular manufacturing, most of the ones you actually need and use would be. With infinite resources, I don't think it would be hard to first make a few solar cells and batteries, and eventually solve most of your energy needs as well, pretty much for free. Particularly as molecular manufacturing is going to massively improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and usefulness of most designed goods essentially over night.
I'm all for a realistic debate on what is possible/probable, but nay-saying without any basis in fact is just FUD. I think most slashdotters can see it pretty quickly.
For instance, I'm very up for a debate as to whether people would still CHOOSE cars over other forms of transportation, if all forms of transportation were essentially free. I could easily see opting for a giant RV or sail boat of some kind, particularly if it was well equipped with solar and a high electrical storage capacity, and had very low operating costs. With nanotech, that kind of residence might be significantly better than a traditional home. I mean, unless you take the overwhelmingly pessimistic view on it.
I understand that a lot of people don't like Michael Moore for various political reasons based on his political history and work. That is hardly relevant though to the simple fact that PEOPLE DIE HERE YOUNGER THAN ANY OTHER WESTERN COUNTRY. That seems like cold hard science to me, and is instructive, to say the least.
Don't shoot the messenger if the message is important and necessary, no matter how much you don't like getting the message. I myself am a victim of the US health care system, and it is most certainly and horrifically broken, to say the least.
We have one obvious huge thing on the horizon, and it's barely even mentioned:
Nanotech. If molecular nanotechnology happens, and many scientists are stating that it IS going to happen, it's just a matter of WHEN, then all those other questions will quickly become irrelevant.
Theoretically, with the advent of molecular nanotech, every man, woman and child on the planet would have infinite personal wealth, and infinite physical power. Other than Wikipedia, and some other new networking technologies, there is very little (and admittedly, those are almost not worth mentioning), or almost nothing that we have done to prepare for that situation. That article is ludicrously irrelevant. Much less what that has to do with the US. I mean, if every man, woman, and child on the planet has infinite personal wealth and power, then what the fuck does it matter where the US physicists are in some global roster? How is that relevant when we are already decimating every other living part of the biosphere and most of the populations of most of the completely corporate owned nation/states still believe some invisible man is going to come out of the sky and smite all the sinners? I mean what the fuck? The sky is falling in a LOT of ways, including the increasingly aggressive stance of China globally (who manufacture EVERYTHING we currently rely on, btw), global warming, nuclear proliferation, countless psychotic wars between invisible man fans in the middle east and elsewhere, corporate enslavement of the populations of nearly every nation.
How can anyone really honestly give a shit if our declining empire is lacking a couple of physicists? Most of our populace talks to invisible men, is grossly overweight, completely relies on cancerous products fed to us by increasingly corrupt corporations and openly hostile trading partners who have us out gunned (they manufacture most of our actual GUNS by the way), and think that the native Americans came over on some land bridge, and we only killed about a million of them to be here (Probably closer to SIXTY million, it turns out). Our whole society is falling completely apart while fake tanned moronic cheerleading talking heads on Fox discuss Paris Hilton's traffic violations. Meanwhile the genocide continues abroad, and the cancer rates continue to go up, inflation continues to rise as our illegal federal reserve continues to attempt to stave off the inevitable by printing increasingly meaningless green paper.
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE REAL NEWS? I CAN'T EVEN GET IT ON SLASHDOT ANYMORE!!
Now, back to your discussion on the "supposed" big questions currently facing us in physics, and how our completely failed education system is not producing PHYSICISTS, as if that is the root core of all our problems.
I don't know. Excellent Question. There are some countries in Europe though that at least pay slightly more window dressing homage to personal liberty. I agree though, it's only a stop gap measure, and I don't really WANT to learn Swedish, or Spanish or something.
If you are really planning on continuing the police state that we already are increasingly living in, I plan to travel. THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.
PS. Good luck ruling the world with a country full of illegal immigrants, mindless corporate automatons and military personnel. I think that's all you'll have left after the rest of us leave.
There are probably a number of things holding back broadband in the US. However, it is my guess, based on personal and professional experience that by far the biggest barrier to broadband penetration is corporate monopolism.
I used to live in Riverside, we had two broadband options (or a local duopoly). Pacific Bell DSL, which was notoriously unreliable and featured dismally low download rates, and notoriously disconnected users from p2p and other modern broadband uses, including (at the time) quake 3, which was a major factor in even WANTING broadband at the time. Our other choice was Charter cable, which was also expensive, unreliable, and invaded your privacy by selecting which part of your bandwidth exactly wasn't going to go well. Both of these networks slowed Napster, and then later gnutella and eMule. I wasn't around to see how they handled torrents, but I'm sure it was poorly.
I now live in San Diego (area), and your choice is Pac Bell DSL (still over priced, unreliable, and slow enough to barely be considered broadband, unless you spend for the "Deluxe" or "Business" or whatever), or Cox.
I've had Cox most of the time I've lived here. They will randomly shut off your cable modem, causing frequent reboots of (Any model) your cable modem, throttle your bandwidth for nearly any application (however sometimes they just SHUT that service down, which often is the case inexplicably for AIM and ICQ), threaten you in numerous ways if you leave your wifi router open for public use, monitor what torrents you download and then threaten to remove you permanently from the network if you get "three strikes" by downloading "Illegal" torrents, even if the likely offender merely used your open wifi point, and you have no idea what they are talking about, and suffer frequently from slow speeds, hangs, connection failures, and complete lack of service.
So yeah, I can see why people who primarily just need email or to surf the news for the day are OK with dial up.
BROADBAND MONOPOLIES SUCK. Just like any other monopolies that have existed: The service is poor, the price is high, and the competition is non existent, meaning people constantly look for other options, or they go without the product altogether. All of this strikes me as patently obvious, now the fact that broadband adoption is holding back our technological advancement as a civilization, well, what did you expect when we allow corporate monopolies to decimate our entire economic system?
Will your program eventually be replaced by a FOSS alternative?
Resounding yes. No reason to play the same Quixotic game the big corporations are all falling for. There are plenty of ways to make money with FOSS anyway.
Well, you could consider Religious Butt-plugs to be a euphemism for Catholic Priests, who tend to plug under-age butts, as it were, and that is generally frowned upon, hence the pejorative. Thank god for FireFox 2. I had no idea how to spell about half those words.
Of COURSE these ignorant butt-plugs want to censor stuff. The only way anybody can keep talking to imaginary men in the sky and believing in that kind of nonsensical clap trap is to keep the blinders fully on. A quick reading of every wikipedia article for every religion shows how ludicrous every religion really is.
Go ahead, god squad, mod me down, but the days when society lacks the information to see through your horse shit philosophy systems is at hand. In a few generations, only real Luddites or actual retards will worship invisible men in the sky.
Information wants to be free. And humans want information. The days of praying to "holy ghosts" and multi-armed gods of war and love are ending. I just wish they would end sooner, like before we have another catastrophic global war, or completely destroy the environment.
They all suck. Now, I'm a big Pidgin fan, but only because it stands an inch higher out of the sewage that currently is instant messaging:
Encryption? Good luck. Maybe with a bunch of hacking and fucked up text files.
File Transfer? Maybe! Pray? Forget anything over 20 kbps, no matter HOW fat your pipe is.
Voice chat? NO! The major ones offer it, MSN, Y!, AIM, but none use speex, and ALL suck.
Video chat? YEAH RIGHT! The grainiest, crappiest, darkest, glitchiest.... Plus crap Audio! Hurray!
Ctrl+Scroll wheel to enlarge fonts? NEGATIVE!
MySpace IM integration? Supposedly in the NEXT version of Trillian. Despite 1.8 BILLION users or whatever.
Interoperability? pffft. Don't get me started.
Play Video games with friends? Maybe you'll get checkers with the SHITTY rules on MSN.
No ZSNES, No Mupen, No Hearts, Spades, Cribbage, Chess, Checkers, Texas Hold'em....
Granted, on Pidgin I can talk to AIM, MSN, Y!, ICQ, Google Talk (not actual talk of course!), ICQ, and some others, but I still can't voice chat, video chat, play ZSNES, or Mupen with my online friends. It's sad when the best client still lacks 20 of the most obvious and fun options that should have been in ALL of them from the get go.
The state of IM right now is horse shit. Pure, unadulterated, CRAP. MAYBE the SOC MySpace plugin will help Pidgin even farther, but still no Zsnes, Speex, or x264, I'm sure.
This situation arose because there ARE real criminals involved, and probably not this poor lady:
1. Microsoft. A monopoly that has created an enormous hegemony that is completely insecure and poorly designed. 2. The Media. A group of corporations that are misinforming the population of a democracy so that 3. The Government. Can keep allowing Microsoft and other bloatware vendors to dominate the market allowing 4. Spam Kings. To put porn all over every computer in the nation insuring that 5. School Administrations. continue to use the hegemonic monopoly products and allow their schools network infrastructure to be completely over run with porn.
I mean, let's talk about how things would have been different if the lady had been running Firefox. Or Firefox on Ubuntu. Or Firefox on Ubuntu on a reliable network that had some reasonable amount of IP protection from the get go.
There are criminals involved in this case, and this poor nit wit lady is very likely not one of them. Just another misinformed, ignorant American who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suffered greatly thanks to Microsoft's inability to design an OS or browser that is remotely secure, and also thanks to the complete erosion of democracy and real news that has allowed that kind of moronic hegemony to take evolve.
...Is one that SHOULD have been implemented, but wasn't mysteriously due to Richard Cheney's "stand down" order.
That is the launch of F-16 fighters to physically force airplanes back on course, or in a worst case scenario, shoot them down for the protection of urban centers.
Now, why that didn't happen on September 11th, 2001, is anybody's guess, but old Dick rarely does interviews, so we may never know.
You know, the default brown of Ubuntu. Is that a technical feature?
My list was describing "Out of box"...
on
Dell Linux Details
·
· Score: 1
and/or ease of use for the n00b crowd who might not even know how to install applications, but Linux has them ready to go automatically for them. I'm not a unrepentant fanboi, but it seems to me for most people (mom, etc.) Ubuntu is set up better than Windows by default.
Unless of course, you consider the horrific shit brown.
Linux is a blanket term describing tons of various Operating Systems, based on a specific core: Gnu/Linux.
Saying it's out of touch with the average user is ludicrous. Who is the average user anyway? How is it out of touch?
There are several great windows replacement distributions out now, I recommend Ubuntu, however some n00bs might prefer PCLinux or some other more windows looking distro.
That DVD playing functionality should be included "out of box", I don't think it's much more difficult than opening synaptic, typing your password, and installing VLC. I agree it should be included in the distribution by default, but it's one of the only things an end user will need that ISN'T pre-included.
1. Open Office, a full office suite. 2. The Gimp, a photoshop clone. 3. Gaim (now Pidgin), instant messaging for every client, msn, aim, icq, yahoo, soon also MySpace) 4. Firefox, arguably the best browser in the market. 5. Evolution, not as good as Thunderbird, but certainly safer virus wise than Outlook. 6. Tomboy Notes, Rhythmbox, literally a laundry list of other great software that end users might want....
I mean, true, having a really good game installed would be nice, but you CAN get Urban Terror for free, and I like it quite a bit more than any version of Counterstrike.
I think compared to the huge list of software I need to buy and then install for windows, the Ubuntu process is much easier and cheaper already!
That's great and all, but are they going to address the "non-broadband" monopolies? I am SO F'ING SICK of Cox disconnecting me from AIM, throttling my Ubuntu torrents, and making me constantly reboot my cable modem by hand, and there is not ONE OTHER ISP in this area that offers anything other than 56k.
I mean, I'd love to have 2mbs "REAL" broadband, but just having reliable service at 300k would be nice, for now, and maybe having more than one company in this area would help?
I'm not an economist, but by all definitions I'm aware of Cox has a monopoly on broadband in this part of San Diego county. Can congress help me with that first?!?
We recently got a cuisinart brand coffee maker from Costco. You fill it with whole beans, water and turn it on. The coffee comes out great. It grinds well, percolates well, and the coffee tastes great. We also got a really good deal on a bulk order of fantastic organic coffee from Amazon.com.
Seriously, before now I didn't drink coffee unless I happened by a cool non-corporate coffee shop and had 5 minutes to kill. Now I have a cup a day at least!
Slashdot Mirror
There is very little that I need to do that can not be done natively in Ubuntu, and for those not in the know, Ubuntu is completely free. So why would I bother buying/downloading ANY version of Windows and even bother installing it, either natively or as a virtual machine? I just don't get it.
Well, obviously I'm not denying the existence of war profiteering. But by profit, I did not just mean financial. And yes, there are religious people who know to use condoms, but over all religion has been a major hindrance to that and many other important human health and happiness issues.
I'm not saying that all religious people are bad or stupid, but I AM saying that all religion is band and stupid. We should care a lot more about human health and happiness, and approach the situation scientifically in a way that increases both.
It would probably seem a lot more obvious to a lot more people if ancient genocidal delusions weren't ruling their thought processes.
Does anybody know if this will be eligible in Southern California?
Does anybody know if this means I can finally download and upload torrents of UbuntuStudio and other FOSS without being throttled down to dial up and repeatedly disconnected?
For the record, those of you who live near San Diego and have Cox communications probably know what I'm talking about.
The solution to accountability with elected representatives exists now. It's called the video camera. From being sworn in, till someone new is sworn in, they should be on camera, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they don't want people watching them fuck or shit, they shouldn't be in public office anyway. I mean, I could probably let America watch me shit and skip sex, if it meant I got to be president.
I'm running in 2012, by the way. I'll be old enough then.
Ah, but see, most atheists bend themselves to the scientific way of thinking, and as a result would have a difficult time making the numbers work out in such a way that a war would actually benefit them.
The primary draw of atheism for me, in fact, is that I can evaluate and rationally CHOOSE from a list of outcomes (wrong or right!), rather than just picking one, and "taking it by faith". Especially when throughout human history, "taking it on faith" has been proven wrong nine times out of ten.
1. Humans have a surprising ability to turn the possible into the real. Often with many unforeseen consequences.
2. Some raw materials (Carbon, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Hydrogen) are AS GOOD AS free, and you can make just about anything you can imagine needing or wanting out of JUST those 4 elements alone. Carbon alone could be 90% of what any machine needs:
Diamond is a VERY strong building material, as are nano tubes.
Bucky balls are a very good lubricant, as is graphite.
Nano tubes are very good at conducting electricity.
Carbon can also be used as a good insulator.
So, while ALL raw materials are not free, with molecular manufacturing, most of the ones you actually need and use would be. With infinite resources, I don't think it would be hard to first make a few solar cells and batteries, and eventually solve most of your energy needs as well, pretty much for free. Particularly as molecular manufacturing is going to massively improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and usefulness of most designed goods essentially over night.
I'm all for a realistic debate on what is possible/probable, but nay-saying without any basis in fact is just FUD. I think most slashdotters can see it pretty quickly.
For instance, I'm very up for a debate as to whether people would still CHOOSE cars over other forms of transportation, if all forms of transportation were essentially free. I could easily see opting for a giant RV or sail boat of some kind, particularly if it was well equipped with solar and a high electrical storage capacity, and had very low operating costs. With nanotech, that kind of residence might be significantly better than a traditional home. I mean, unless you take the overwhelmingly pessimistic view on it.
I understand that a lot of people don't like Michael Moore for various political reasons based on his political history and work. That is hardly relevant though to the simple fact that PEOPLE DIE HERE YOUNGER THAN ANY OTHER WESTERN COUNTRY. That seems like cold hard science to me, and is instructive, to say the least.
Don't shoot the messenger if the message is important and necessary, no matter how much you don't like getting the message. I myself am a victim of the US health care system, and it is most certainly and horrifically broken, to say the least.
rhY
We have one obvious huge thing on the horizon, and it's barely even mentioned:
Nanotech. If molecular nanotechnology happens, and many scientists are stating that it IS going to happen, it's just a matter of WHEN, then all those other questions will quickly become irrelevant.
Theoretically, with the advent of molecular nanotech, every man, woman and child on the planet would have infinite personal wealth, and infinite physical power. Other than Wikipedia, and some other new networking technologies, there is very little (and admittedly, those are almost not worth mentioning), or almost nothing that we have done to prepare for that situation. That article is ludicrously irrelevant. Much less what that has to do with the US. I mean, if every man, woman, and child on the planet has infinite personal wealth and power, then what the fuck does it matter where the US physicists are in some global roster? How is that relevant when we are already decimating every other living part of the biosphere and most of the populations of most of the completely corporate owned nation/states still believe some invisible man is going to come out of the sky and smite all the sinners? I mean what the fuck? The sky is falling in a LOT of ways, including the increasingly aggressive stance of China globally (who manufacture EVERYTHING we currently rely on, btw), global warming, nuclear proliferation, countless psychotic wars between invisible man fans in the middle east and elsewhere, corporate enslavement of the populations of nearly every nation.
How can anyone really honestly give a shit if our declining empire is lacking a couple of physicists? Most of our populace talks to invisible men, is grossly overweight, completely relies on cancerous products fed to us by increasingly corrupt corporations and openly hostile trading partners who have us out gunned (they manufacture most of our actual GUNS by the way), and think that the native Americans came over on some land bridge, and we only killed about a million of them to be here (Probably closer to SIXTY million, it turns out). Our whole society is falling completely apart while fake tanned moronic cheerleading talking heads on Fox discuss Paris Hilton's traffic violations. Meanwhile the genocide continues abroad, and the cancer rates continue to go up, inflation continues to rise as our illegal federal reserve continues to attempt to stave off the inevitable by printing increasingly meaningless green paper.
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE REAL NEWS? I CAN'T EVEN GET IT ON SLASHDOT ANYMORE!!
Now, back to your discussion on the "supposed" big questions currently facing us in physics, and how our completely failed education system is not producing PHYSICISTS, as if that is the root core of all our problems.
I don't know. Excellent Question. There are some countries in Europe though that at least pay slightly more window dressing homage to personal liberty. I agree though, it's only a stop gap measure, and I don't really WANT to learn Swedish, or Spanish or something.
rhY
If you are really planning on continuing the police state that we already are increasingly living in, I plan to travel. THE FUCK OUT OF HERE.
PS. Good luck ruling the world with a country full of illegal immigrants, mindless corporate automatons and military personnel. I think that's all you'll have left after the rest of us leave.
There are probably a number of things holding back broadband in the US. However, it is my guess, based on personal and professional experience that by far the biggest barrier to broadband penetration is corporate monopolism.
I used to live in Riverside, we had two broadband options (or a local duopoly). Pacific Bell DSL, which was notoriously unreliable and featured dismally low download rates, and notoriously disconnected users from p2p and other modern broadband uses, including (at the time) quake 3, which was a major factor in even WANTING broadband at the time. Our other choice was Charter cable, which was also expensive, unreliable, and invaded your privacy by selecting which part of your bandwidth exactly wasn't going to go well. Both of these networks slowed Napster, and then later gnutella and eMule. I wasn't around to see how they handled torrents, but I'm sure it was poorly.
I now live in San Diego (area), and your choice is Pac Bell DSL (still over priced, unreliable, and slow enough to barely be considered broadband, unless you spend for the "Deluxe" or "Business" or whatever), or Cox.
I've had Cox most of the time I've lived here. They will randomly shut off your cable modem, causing frequent reboots of (Any model) your cable modem, throttle your bandwidth for nearly any application (however sometimes they just SHUT that service down, which often is the case inexplicably for AIM and ICQ), threaten you in numerous ways if you leave your wifi router open for public use, monitor what torrents you download and then threaten to remove you permanently from the network if you get "three strikes" by downloading "Illegal" torrents, even if the likely offender merely used your open wifi point, and you have no idea what they are talking about, and suffer frequently from slow speeds, hangs, connection failures, and complete lack of service.
So yeah, I can see why people who primarily just need email or to surf the news for the day are OK with dial up.
BROADBAND MONOPOLIES SUCK. Just like any other monopolies that have existed: The service is poor, the price is high, and the competition is non existent, meaning people constantly look for other options, or they go without the product altogether. All of this strikes me as patently obvious, now the fact that broadband adoption is holding back our technological advancement as a civilization, well, what did you expect when we allow corporate monopolies to decimate our entire economic system?
Will your program eventually be replaced by a FOSS alternative?
Resounding yes. No reason to play the same Quixotic game the big corporations are all falling for. There are plenty of ways to make money with FOSS anyway.
Well, you could consider Religious Butt-plugs to be a euphemism for Catholic Priests, who tend to plug under-age butts, as it were, and that is generally frowned upon, hence the pejorative. Thank god for FireFox 2. I had no idea how to spell about half those words.
Of COURSE these ignorant butt-plugs want to censor stuff. The only way anybody can keep talking to imaginary men in the sky and believing in that kind of nonsensical clap trap is to keep the blinders fully on. A quick reading of every wikipedia article for every religion shows how ludicrous every religion really is.
Go ahead, god squad, mod me down, but the days when society lacks the information to see through your horse shit philosophy systems is at hand. In a few generations, only real Luddites or actual retards will worship invisible men in the sky.
Information wants to be free. And humans want information. The days of praying to "holy ghosts" and multi-armed gods of war and love are ending. I just wish they would end sooner, like before we have another catastrophic global war, or completely destroy the environment.
*sigh* Seems unlikely though.
rhY
They all suck. Now, I'm a big Pidgin fan, but only because it stands an inch higher out of the sewage that currently is instant messaging:
Encryption? Good luck. Maybe with a bunch of hacking and fucked up text files.
File Transfer? Maybe! Pray? Forget anything over 20 kbps, no matter HOW fat your pipe is.
Voice chat? NO! The major ones offer it, MSN, Y!, AIM, but none use speex, and ALL suck.
Video chat? YEAH RIGHT! The grainiest, crappiest, darkest, glitchiest.... Plus crap Audio! Hurray!
Ctrl+Scroll wheel to enlarge fonts? NEGATIVE!
MySpace IM integration? Supposedly in the NEXT version of Trillian. Despite 1.8 BILLION users or whatever.
Interoperability? pffft. Don't get me started.
Play Video games with friends? Maybe you'll get checkers with the SHITTY rules on MSN.
No ZSNES, No Mupen, No Hearts, Spades, Cribbage, Chess, Checkers, Texas Hold'em....
Granted, on Pidgin I can talk to AIM, MSN, Y!, ICQ, Google Talk (not actual talk of course!), ICQ, and some others, but I still can't voice chat, video chat, play ZSNES, or Mupen with my online friends. It's sad when the best client still lacks 20 of the most obvious and fun options that should have been in ALL of them from the get go.
The state of IM right now is horse shit. Pure, unadulterated, CRAP. MAYBE the SOC MySpace plugin will help Pidgin even farther, but still no Zsnes, Speex, or x264, I'm sure.
Just remove the word "take". I should have used the preview button. DOH!
This situation arose because there ARE real criminals involved, and probably not this poor lady:
1. Microsoft. A monopoly that has created an enormous hegemony that is completely insecure and poorly designed.
2. The Media. A group of corporations that are misinforming the population of a democracy so that
3. The Government. Can keep allowing Microsoft and other bloatware vendors to dominate the market allowing
4. Spam Kings. To put porn all over every computer in the nation insuring that
5. School Administrations. continue to use the hegemonic monopoly products and allow their schools network infrastructure to be completely over run with porn.
I mean, let's talk about how things would have been different if the lady had been running Firefox. Or Firefox on Ubuntu. Or Firefox on Ubuntu on a reliable network that had some reasonable amount of IP protection from the get go.
There are criminals involved in this case, and this poor nit wit lady is very likely not one of them. Just another misinformed, ignorant American who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and suffered greatly thanks to Microsoft's inability to design an OS or browser that is remotely secure, and also thanks to the complete erosion of democracy and real news that has allowed that kind of moronic hegemony to take evolve.
...Is one that SHOULD have been implemented, but wasn't mysteriously due to Richard Cheney's "stand down" order.
That is the launch of F-16 fighters to physically force airplanes back on course, or in a worst case scenario, shoot them down for the protection of urban centers.
Now, why that didn't happen on September 11th, 2001, is anybody's guess, but old Dick rarely does interviews, so we may never know.
None of this really matters. There is only one thing that matters:
When is Mario Kart coming out? And will it not totally suck like the Game Cube version did?
In this house we only play one Nintendo game, and it's Mario Kart 64. Emulated, because the new versions suck so bad.
You know, the default brown of Ubuntu. Is that a technical feature?
and/or ease of use for the n00b crowd who might not even know how to install applications, but Linux has them ready to go automatically for them. I'm not a unrepentant fanboi, but it seems to me for most people (mom, etc.) Ubuntu is set up better than Windows by default.
Unless of course, you consider the horrific shit brown.
rhY
Linux is a blanket term describing tons of various Operating Systems, based on a specific core: Gnu/Linux.
Saying it's out of touch with the average user is ludicrous. Who is the average user anyway? How is it out of touch?
There are several great windows replacement distributions out now, I recommend Ubuntu, however some n00bs might prefer PCLinux or some other more windows looking distro.
rhY
That DVD playing functionality should be included "out of box", I don't think it's much more difficult than opening synaptic, typing your password, and installing VLC. I agree it should be included in the distribution by default, but it's one of the only things an end user will need that ISN'T pre-included.
1. Open Office, a full office suite.
2. The Gimp, a photoshop clone.
3. Gaim (now Pidgin), instant messaging for every client, msn, aim, icq, yahoo, soon also MySpace)
4. Firefox, arguably the best browser in the market.
5. Evolution, not as good as Thunderbird, but certainly safer virus wise than Outlook.
6. Tomboy Notes, Rhythmbox, literally a laundry list of other great software that end users might want....
I mean, true, having a really good game installed would be nice, but you CAN get Urban Terror for free, and I like it quite a bit more than any version of Counterstrike.
I think compared to the huge list of software I need to buy and then install for windows, the Ubuntu process is much easier and cheaper already!
rhY
That's great and all, but are they going to address the "non-broadband" monopolies? I am SO F'ING SICK of Cox disconnecting me from AIM, throttling my Ubuntu torrents, and making me constantly reboot my cable modem by hand, and there is not ONE OTHER ISP in this area that offers anything other than 56k.
I mean, I'd love to have 2mbs "REAL" broadband, but just having reliable service at 300k would be nice, for now, and maybe having more than one company in this area would help?
I'm not an economist, but by all definitions I'm aware of Cox has a monopoly on broadband in this part of San Diego county. Can congress help me with that first?!?
We recently got a cuisinart brand coffee maker from Costco. You fill it with whole beans, water and turn it on. The coffee comes out great. It grinds well, percolates well, and the coffee tastes great. We also got a really good deal on a bulk order of fantastic organic coffee from Amazon.com.
Seriously, before now I didn't drink coffee unless I happened by a cool non-corporate coffee shop and had 5 minutes to kill. Now I have a cup a day at least!
rhY