That is very wierd, and I don't deny that it was happening, but it is not representive of normal performance.
I have written open apps and there was not noticable difference between running them in gnome compared to twm, and I use both. Furthermore, I remember setting up X to startup running quake3 with no window manager whatsoever, and only saw a 10% increase in performance compared to running in gnome.
As expected on slashdot there are whole ton of stupid comments exonerating Linux for one reason or another. Instead of addressing each of them individually, I will hit a bunch in in this post.
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big? Why does it matter what the requirements on the box say? KDE/GNOME are as slow or slower than windows when run on the same hardware! So the fact that windows has hich system requirements doesn't excuse the fact that Linux has higher ones.
But it isn't as heavy if you don't run those Desktops and applications. That is not a fair comparison. It is easy to be lighter weight when you don't do as much. If you need to do everthing that you can do in windows, then Linux is signifcantly slower (mostly footprint and loading time) than windows.
But Windows preloads thier applications. That is a good argument for Mozilla vs. IE on windows, but in most cases is not valid. Like the submitter stated, even third party applications tend load quicker on windows that most linux applications do in windows. I have used Linux for years and I can't tell you how many times I have gotten tired of the slow responsiveness of KDE and GNOME and have reverted back to my old TWM (or even more lightweight) ways. Where-as on the same machine Windows 98 or 2000 were quite responsive (just not very usefull for what I was doing).
Secondly there is no reason that Linux could not preload common applications to make them run faster, and if that makes the system more responsive they should do so. But I really don't think that would completely solve the problem, it would just make the boot time longer, and boot for a Linux desktop is already longer than for Windows XP or OS X.
So basically it comes down to the fact that it is (relatively) easy to write full-featured software and it is easy to write light-wieght software but doing both is hard. Microsoft is doing a better job than the open source desktops in that regard.
Because there is more to a computer than looking pretty:) Xandros offers the best integrated wine support of any distro. Upgrading applications is easy in part because they are based on debian. Instalation is a snap, and hardware support is great.
The only downside (but a big one) is that much the code they have written and include in the distro is not open source. Hence the reason that having a no-cost version is actually news, whereas it is common practice for most other distros.
PS. That doesn't look like 95, it looks like an XP knock off.
Here is one very important aspect of the decision that I didn't see brought up last time this was addressed on slashdot:
Because Firefox has to be 100% free and open to be included in other open-source projects. If Arvid had 100% control of Firefox's artwork, then the whole Firefox product wouldn't be free. Ben Goodger has every right to change the artwork because of its license, the same way you might change your operating system because of its license. That's how I see it: a licensing issue, not a personal one.
Posted by: LinkTiger at June 8, 2004 03:30 AM
...
""Because Firefox has to be 100% free and open to be included in other open-source projects.""
That makes no sense at all. The current FIREFOX ARTWORK (the globe with fox) is NOT under a free license and is actually protected more than Arvid was trying to protect Qute.
It doesn't matter, but I point is that yoru logic is way off as to what an "Open Source" program entitles.
Firefox has branding which mozilla.org is trying to protect, I don't see why the theme isn't something they consider their official branding.
Posted by: jedbro at June 8, 2004 05:41 AM
...
While I'd prefer if the firefox artwork was under a less restrictive license, it is pretty obvious that the in-program artwork is different.
Lets say that you are writing an extension for Firefox that provides some new functionality. You need to provide a toolbar icon for this new feature, and want it to fit in with the rest of the artwork in the program. With the Qute theme, you'd need to draw the new icon from scratch, while with the new (Pin/Win/Gnome)stripe theme you could take an existing icon and use it as a base for the new one.
From what I understand, this was the exact type of situation that forced the decision: the Qute theme for thunderbird was missing some icons, a third party started drawing some new ones using the existing ones as a base, and was asked to stop.
Posted by: James at June 8, 2004 06:11 AM
Found on a mozillazine blog. I liked the Qute icons, as did everyone else I know, and don't think that there needs to be single theme for all the platforms. But if the Qute artist is going to be a Nazi about how his icons are used I would just as soon change to something (anything) as well. And if a change is in order, then it is best to get it over with as soon as possible.
I absolutely agree that Mr. Turing contributed greatly to society, and benifited his species as a whole through his actions. But he didn't pass on his DNA, and passing on DNA is the only mechanism that evolution has for breeding traits. His contributions to society ensured that heterosexual traits of everyone else were passed on, while his were not.
I'm not saying that homosexuality isn't linked to ones genetic makeup - there is decent evidence that it is. I'm just saying that I don't think that the particular mechanism you gave for this happening is correct.
it never hurts to RTFA though, or research this before posting opinions. laplogic claims the CPU will run cooler or as cool as on a table.
That's one way to interpret that misleading data. Another is that the only thing that they could find that provided less heat conductance than a Guardian Laptop Desk was an insulator! "Your laptop will run cooler on our device than when wrapped in a pillow" is not much of a claim. Your laptop will run signifcantly hotter than when sitting on your lap, which is why they didn't bother to give you data for that.
I can't seem to get thier site know to see what the desks are made of but a much better idea would have been to have a layer of something with a high heat capacity, then a to disipate the heat, then a layer that is comfortable on the lap. Like a gel pack, open air and another gel pack.
I just did something simular a few months ago. My dad is a highschool teacher and runs the "Tech" lab at the school. It has been a windows only lab, but after seeing how easy iMovie is to learn he has been wanting to get some Macs for a while now. Well the district just gave him money for two Macs, and since he isn't familiar with them I helped with integrating them into the Network and locking them down. Here is what I did.
You can lock down alot of things inside the users preferences. For example, you can specify that they are not allowed to changed any system settings (including those that would only effect their account like wallpaper), which applications they are allowed to run, and whether they can edit the doc. I locked all of these down, disallowing running the chat application and other things that they didn't need to be doing in class. I also locked down the terminal and disallowed >console login to prevent them from getting around what I had locked down. Anyway look there before you do anything else.
Not being a networking expert myself I didn't know if it was possible to have the kids logon to the windows domain, and automatically mount a home directory across the network (via smb). Furthermore it would a pain to manually recreate all those users, and I didn't have enough time to make an automated solution from scratch. So instead I just setup a single student account, and then wrote a script to mount thier network directories. I put a shortcut to the script in the doc. I also showed my dad how to create normal accounts, so that if a trustworthy student needs to do more than he can with the locked down student account he could give them an individual account.
For your purposes the big question is do the need to be saving things to the harddrive. If the answer is no (and I would expect it to be since they it is basically acting like a public terminal), just go with a single account. That will suffice for most people, and you can make special accounts for special cases.
As far as locking down the harddrive, by default they are restricted to/Users/student/ anyway. For our purposes this was good enough. All the windows computers had a program which restored the computer to a pristene state every time it was reboot, so the students were well trained that they needed to store everything on disc or thier network drive if they didn't want it to be lost. We were considering making a script that did the same to/Users/student, but decided it wasn't necisarry. The only potential problem would be if a kid messed with settings in/Users/student/Library/ that caused the program to behave unexpectedly. So we made a backup of that folder which the administrator can copy over the bad one if that does happen.
Actually I don't even know if it would be possible to completely lock the students out of using the harddrive altogether. Of course it would be trivial to just chown/Users/student to root and only give student read access, but you might run into problems. Things like programs complaining about not being able to save settings, or access a cache and temporary files in the home directory. You would have to play around with that.
Actually, it seems to me that after several years of drifting aimlessness they are finally in the process of making a firm decision about whether to make a complete shift away from being a hardware/software/service company to being a pure service company. I think it is normal for there to be disagreement and confusion within the company about when, if and how this is going to happen. What I find disconcerting is how much of this is making it out into the public. Don't these people clear with PR before voicing all these claims? Honestly, all these conflicting reports are just plain unprofessional.
Don't you know? Thats an added feature of the tinfoil hat! It keeps you brainwaves in your head, where they belong instead of out in the world where they can be probed. This has the amazing effect of increasing memory, mental accuity and the ability to connect seemly unrelated things.
There is an easy solution to that. Don't ask them to make a password. Give them one of a appropriate security (random sylabols or random passphrases work well), and don't change it for 6 months to a year. This has worked fine in all the work environments that I have been in. If people still have problems remembering their password you should revaluate wheter you are giving them the best possible length password. But humans are horrible random number generators, so don't base you security on expecting them to create secure passwords. I wouldn't trust myself to create a secure password without a good random method.
Oh and I would lie to some for chocolate as well:)
For reference an eight character password consisting of random upper-case, lower-case and numbers has about 200,000,000,000,000 combinations. A twelve character pronouncable password is about the same, and is what I use for all of my "important" passwords with about a 20% chance of typos. If one were to pick a random english word out of/usr/share/dict/words, that password would be twice as secure as this method, and we know easy a dictionary attach is.
For example during the 1970's Cesar Chavez (who is for hispanics what Martin Luther King Jr. is for the blacks) led the nation in boycotting grapes. The effect was great enough to force the land owners to renegotiate favorable terms with the migrant land workers.
But you are right that in most cases the issue really isn't a big enough deal for people to bother. Also in this case the supporters did a very good job bringing things to the public eye, handing out flyers in front of grocery stores, to get people thinking about it right before they made a decision. Much more effective than posting in your blog, or a stupid chain email.
Most of the sheeple don't have the willpower to do so, sadly.
Why do people have to add that snide remark? There are many good reasons for people to prefer movies to renting at home and, while you presented a good argument for renting, people will still disagree with you. Furthermore, even if someone does agree with you they can't be activists about everything. There are way too many just causes to fight for and one has to pick what is most important to them. The fact that people have different opinions and priorities than you does not make them idiots or apathetic slaves. And even if they are, calling them that won't help convince them of your view:)
Sun just announced that they have just created a new gaming division which is expected to release it's first title "Duke Nukem Forever" in the near future. The title will run exclusively on Unix systems including Solaris, and the Java Desktop, but may later be ported to other operating systems when the source as well as all artwork is released to the public domain. When asked how Sun can possibly give away every product they own and still make money, Scott McNeily made vague indications of revenue possibilies from their recently patented method of solidifing plazma in deep subterranean lairs.
Security at every layer is important because none of them will every be perfect. For example, there is an entire industry centered around properly securing networks, and it takes people years to become proficient at it. Yet we still give nearly all home users a raw connection to the internet, expecting them to do the job of a network administrator with no training or even an indication that they are even lacking in knowledge.
This just silly. Most home users neither need, want, or are capable of administrating their own network connection. The ISP's should be doing this unless users specifically request to administer thier own connection. If we properly firewalled off hijacked machines it would cut spam and virus tremendously.
Or more likely, they laid networking infrastructure long before all these other schools, and are waiting until it becomes worthwhile to upgrade before pulling it all up and rewiring.
Some historical information about why copy and paste is the way it is.
And yes I wrote this in a terminal and selected/pasted it with the button.. because Control-C doesn't work in the terminal!
For the terminal at least, there is a good reason for this. You are basically running a console program inside a window, and this console application has it's own meaning for control keys. For example ^C sends SIG-INT to the current program. In pico ^C is shows the current line number. Emacs would be unusable without ^c and ^x. So the terminal emulator interpreted ^c and ^v as copy and paste, instead of passing them onto program running in the terminal, then all of these commands for all of these programs would stop working. Some people have suggested intercepting ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy and paste and then having buttons you can click to actually send the command. I have tried this and found it to be much worse than the original problem.
Because the terminal was the first application to run in X, the designers wanted a way to copy and paste that didn't conflict with these existing keyboard shortcuts. However, any existing keyboard shortcut could concievably already be used by an existing console program. Since the mouse was the only new input for X they came up with the mouse-only copy and paste that we have now.
There really isn't any way to make the ctrl-C, ctrl-V method of copy and paste compatible with terminal applications. It just isn't possible. However there are other ways of doing copy and paste that are compatable with the terminal, by adding additional keys to the keyboard. For example, OS X uses the cmd key for all shortcuts, which doesn't interfere with ctrl shortcuts in the terminal. Some UNIXes have had dedicated copy and paste buttons on the keyboard.
However, seeing as how there would be great revolting if gnome or kde tried to get rid of ctrl-c, ctrl-v and replace them with alt-c,alt-v that it will never happen. The terminal emulator will just have to remain an oddity in these desktops.
One well supported idea about memory is that the act of recalling memories, and talking about them reinforces those memories. But it isn't actually the original memory that is being reinforced, but the recollection or the story, which may be different than how the event really occured.
There are many events in my childhood that I don't remember at all but my friends remember vividly. There are other events that I had forgotten, but the memories came back when triggered. I have other memories which I would swear were true, but turned out to have no grounding in reality, and were just dreams or stories that had become real to me over time.
Living for a long time would be very interesting as you would like lead many differnent lives during that time. Would your own life would take on the meaning of a story or legend to you? Would it be possible to forget an entire section of your life if it was not reinforced latter on? Would this be innevitable no matter how much reinforcement took place simply because of limitations on how much the brain can remember? Or alternately, would you get to the point that constant reinforcement would be necisarry to remember all the important things in life, and instead choose that living life is more important than remembering your own past?
No it isn't like that at all. Both of the examples that you stated involve would require a contract to be valid, and since you are never signed a contract then those claims are not enforceable. However, they do have copyright on the documents that they send you so stating that you have no right to redistribute the document is an enforcable claim. They don't need your permission to enforce the rights that they already have, just additional ones.
One of the big features of this new bios is that it is completely backwards compatible (as far as the OS is concerned) with the current BIOS. I don't think that switching OpenFirmware would be quite as seamless of a transistion.
Slashdot Mirror
That is very wierd, and I don't deny that it was happening, but it is not representive of normal performance.
I have written open apps and there was not noticable difference between running them in gnome compared to twm, and I use both. Furthermore, I remember setting up X to startup running quake3 with no window manager whatsoever, and only saw a 10% increase in performance compared to running in gnome.
As expected on slashdot there are whole ton of stupid comments exonerating Linux for one reason or another. Instead of addressing each of them individually, I will hit a bunch in in this post.
In light of the Windowes System Requirements, is this really that big?
Why does it matter what the requirements on the box say? KDE/GNOME are as slow or slower than windows when run on the same hardware! So the fact that windows has hich system requirements doesn't excuse the fact that Linux has higher ones.
But it isn't as heavy if you don't run those Desktops and applications.
That is not a fair comparison. It is easy to be lighter weight when you don't do as much.
If you need to do everthing that you can do in windows, then Linux is signifcantly slower (mostly footprint and loading time) than windows.
But Windows preloads thier applications.
That is a good argument for Mozilla vs. IE on windows, but in most cases is not valid. Like the submitter stated, even third party applications tend load quicker on windows that most linux applications do in windows. I have used Linux for years and I can't tell you how many times I have gotten tired of the slow responsiveness of KDE and GNOME and have reverted back to my old TWM (or even more lightweight) ways. Where-as on the same machine Windows 98 or 2000 were quite responsive (just not very usefull for what I was doing).
Secondly there is no reason that Linux could not preload common applications to make them run faster, and if that makes the system more responsive they should do so. But I really don't think that would completely solve the problem, it would just make the boot time longer, and boot for a Linux desktop is already longer than for Windows XP or OS X.
So basically it comes down to the fact that it is (relatively) easy to write full-featured software and it is easy to write light-wieght software but doing both is hard. Microsoft is doing a better job than the open source desktops in that regard.
What is it that you want our congressmen to do?
Please elaborate.
Because there is more to a computer than looking pretty :) Xandros offers the best integrated wine support of any distro. Upgrading applications is easy in part because they are based on debian. Instalation is a snap, and hardware support is great.
The only downside (but a big one) is that much the code they have written and include in the distro is not open source. Hence the reason that having a no-cost version is actually news, whereas it is common practice for most other distros.
PS. That doesn't look like 95, it looks like an XP knock off.
Found on a mozillazine blog. I liked the Qute icons, as did everyone else I know, and don't think that there needs to be single theme for all the platforms. But if the Qute artist is going to be a Nazi about how his icons are used I would just as soon change to something (anything) as well. And if a change is in order, then it is best to get it over with as soon as possible.
I absolutely agree that Mr. Turing contributed greatly to society, and benifited his species as a whole through his actions. But he didn't pass on his DNA, and passing on DNA is the only mechanism that evolution has for breeding traits. His contributions to society ensured that heterosexual traits of everyone else were passed on, while his were not.
I'm not saying that homosexuality isn't linked to ones genetic makeup - there is decent evidence that it is. I'm just saying that I don't think that the particular mechanism you gave for this happening is correct.
Read that link again. It is running cooler than a when in pillow, not cooler than when in your lap.
it never hurts to RTFA though, or research this before posting opinions. laplogic claims the CPU will run cooler or as cool as on a table.
That's one way to interpret that misleading data. Another is that the only thing that they could find that provided less heat conductance than a Guardian Laptop Desk was an insulator! "Your laptop will run cooler on our device than when wrapped in a pillow" is not much of a claim. Your laptop will run signifcantly hotter than when sitting on your lap, which is why they didn't bother to give you data for that.
I can't seem to get thier site know to see what the desks are made of but a much better idea would have been to have a layer of something with a high heat capacity, then a to disipate the heat, then a layer that is comfortable on the lap. Like a gel pack, open air and another gel pack.
I just did something simular a few months ago. My dad is a highschool teacher and runs the "Tech" lab at the school. It has been a windows only lab, but after seeing how easy iMovie is to learn he has been wanting to get some Macs for a while now. Well the district just gave him money for two Macs, and since he isn't familiar with them I helped with integrating them into the Network and locking them down. Here is what I did.
/Users/student/ anyway. For our purposes this was good enough. All the windows computers had a program which restored the computer to a pristene state every time it was reboot, so the students were well trained that they needed to store everything on disc or thier network drive if they didn't want it to be lost. We were considering making a script that did the same to /Users/student, but decided it wasn't necisarry. The only potential problem would be if a kid messed with settings in /Users/student/Library/ that caused the program to behave unexpectedly. So we made a backup of that folder which the administrator can copy over the bad one if that does happen.
/Users/student to root and only give student read access, but you might run into problems. Things like programs complaining about not being able to save settings, or access a cache and temporary files in the home directory. You would have to play around with that.
You can lock down alot of things inside the users preferences. For example, you can specify that they are not allowed to changed any system settings (including those that would only effect their account like wallpaper), which applications they are allowed to run, and whether they can edit the doc. I locked all of these down, disallowing running the chat application and other things that they didn't need to be doing in class. I also locked down the terminal and disallowed >console login to prevent them from getting around what I had locked down. Anyway look there before you do anything else.
Not being a networking expert myself I didn't know if it was possible to have the kids logon to the windows domain, and automatically mount a home directory across the network (via smb). Furthermore it would a pain to manually recreate all those users, and I didn't have enough time to make an automated solution from scratch. So instead I just setup a single student account, and then wrote a script to mount thier network directories. I put a shortcut to the script in the doc. I also showed my dad how to create normal accounts, so that if a trustworthy student needs to do more than he can with the locked down student account he could give them an individual account.
For your purposes the big question is do the need to be saving things to the harddrive. If the answer is no (and I would expect it to be since they it is basically acting like a public terminal), just go with a single account. That will suffice for most people, and you can make special accounts for special cases.
As far as locking down the harddrive, by default they are restricted to
Actually I don't even know if it would be possible to completely lock the students out of using the harddrive altogether. Of course it would be trivial to just chown
Anyway I hope that helped.
Sure it will, you just have to know html.
I <3 character codes
Actually, it seems to me that after several years of drifting aimlessness they are finally in the process of making a firm decision about whether to make a complete shift away from being a hardware/software/service company to being a pure service company. I think it is normal for there to be disagreement and confusion within the company about when, if and how this is going to happen. What I find disconcerting is how much of this is making it out into the public. Don't these people clear with PR before voicing all these claims? Honestly, all these conflicting reports are just plain unprofessional.
Don't you know? Thats an added feature of the tinfoil hat! It keeps you brainwaves in your head, where they belong instead of out in the world where they can be probed. This has the amazing effect of increasing memory, mental accuity and the ability to connect seemly unrelated things.
There is an easy solution to that. Don't ask them to make a password. Give them one of a appropriate security (random sylabols or random passphrases work well), and don't change it for 6 months to a year. This has worked fine in all the work environments that I have been in. If people still have problems remembering their password you should revaluate wheter you are giving them the best possible length password. But humans are horrible random number generators, so don't base you security on expecting them to create secure passwords. I wouldn't trust myself to create a secure password without a good random method.
:)
Oh and I would lie to some for chocolate as well
For reference an eight character password consisting of random upper-case, lower-case and numbers has about 200,000,000,000,000 combinations. A twelve character pronouncable password is about the same, and is what I use for all of my "important" passwords with about a 20% chance of typos. If one were to pick a random english word out of /usr/share/dict/words, that password would be twice as secure as this method, and we know easy a dictionary attach is.
For example during the 1970's Cesar Chavez (who is for hispanics what Martin Luther King Jr. is for the blacks) led the nation in boycotting grapes. The effect was great enough to force the land owners to renegotiate favorable terms with the migrant land workers.
But you are right that in most cases the issue really isn't a big enough deal for people to bother. Also in this case the supporters did a very good job bringing things to the public eye, handing out flyers in front of grocery stores, to get people thinking about it right before they made a decision. Much more effective than posting in your blog, or a stupid chain email.
Most of the sheeple don't have the willpower to do so, sadly.
:)
Why do people have to add that snide remark? There are many good reasons for people to prefer movies to renting at home and, while you presented a good argument for renting, people will still disagree with you. Furthermore, even if someone does agree with you they can't be activists about everything. There are way too many just causes to fight for and one has to pick what is most important to them. The fact that people have different opinions and priorities than you does not make them idiots or apathetic slaves. And even if they are, calling them that won't help convince them of your view
Sun just announced that they have just created a new gaming division which is expected to release it's first title "Duke Nukem Forever" in the near future. The title will run exclusively on Unix systems including Solaris, and the Java Desktop, but may later be ported to other operating systems when the source as well as all artwork is released to the public domain. When asked how Sun can possibly give away every product they own and still make money, Scott McNeily made vague indications of revenue possibilies from their recently patented method of solidifing plazma in deep subterranean lairs.
Security at every layer is important because none of them will every be perfect. For example, there is an entire industry centered around properly securing networks, and it takes people years to become proficient at it. Yet we still give nearly all home users a raw connection to the internet, expecting them to do the job of a network administrator with no training or even an indication that they are even lacking in knowledge.
This just silly. Most home users neither need, want, or are capable of administrating their own network connection. The ISP's should be doing this unless users specifically request to administer thier own connection. If we properly firewalled off hijacked machines it would cut spam and virus tremendously.
Or more likely, they laid networking infrastructure long before all these other schools, and are waiting until it becomes worthwhile to upgrade before pulling it all up and rewiring.
Store my collection of lossless 48bit 176.4kHz Dolby 9.3 submersive surround files. Duh.
Good idea on the copy.
Ctrl-V is probably a harder one. I have seen this used in only one form:
ctrl-v is also the traditional page-down key for many utilities.
Some historical information about why copy and paste is the way it is.
And yes I wrote this in a terminal and selected/pasted it with the button.. because Control-C doesn't work in the terminal!
For the terminal at least, there is a good reason for this. You are basically running a console program inside a window, and this console application has it's own meaning for control keys. For example ^C sends SIG-INT to the current program. In pico ^C is shows the current line number. Emacs would be unusable without ^c and ^x. So the terminal emulator interpreted ^c and ^v as copy and paste, instead of passing them onto program running in the terminal, then all of these commands for all of these programs would stop working. Some people have suggested intercepting ctrl-c and ctrl-v for copy and paste and then having buttons you can click to actually send the command. I have tried this and found it to be much worse than the original problem.
Because the terminal was the first application to run in X, the designers wanted a way to copy and paste that didn't conflict with these existing keyboard shortcuts. However, any existing keyboard shortcut could concievably already be used by an existing console program. Since the mouse was the only new input for X they came up with the mouse-only copy and paste that we have now.
There really isn't any way to make the ctrl-C, ctrl-V method of copy and paste compatible with terminal applications. It just isn't possible. However there are other ways of doing copy and paste that are compatable with the terminal, by adding additional keys to the keyboard. For example, OS X uses the cmd key for all shortcuts, which doesn't interfere with ctrl shortcuts in the terminal. Some UNIXes have had dedicated copy and paste buttons on the keyboard.
However, seeing as how there would be great revolting if gnome or kde tried to get rid of ctrl-c, ctrl-v and replace them with alt-c,alt-v that it will never happen. The terminal emulator will just have to remain an oddity in these desktops.
That is a very interesting point.
One well supported idea about memory is that the act of recalling memories, and talking about them reinforces those memories. But it isn't actually the original memory that is being reinforced, but the recollection or the story, which may be different than how the event really occured.
There are many events in my childhood that I don't remember at all but my friends remember vividly. There are other events that I had forgotten, but the memories came back when triggered. I have other memories which I would swear were true, but turned out to have no grounding in reality, and were just dreams or stories that had become real to me over time.
Living for a long time would be very interesting as you would like lead many differnent lives during that time. Would your own life would take on the meaning of a story or legend to you? Would it be possible to forget an entire section of your life if it was not reinforced latter on? Would this be innevitable no matter how much reinforcement took place simply because of limitations on how much the brain can remember? Or alternately, would you get to the point that constant reinforcement would be necisarry to remember all the important things in life, and instead choose that living life is more important than remembering your own past?
No it isn't like that at all. Both of the examples that you stated involve would require a contract to be valid, and since you are never signed a contract then those claims are not enforceable. However, they do have copyright on the documents that they send you so stating that you have no right to redistribute the document is an enforcable claim. They don't need your permission to enforce the rights that they already have, just additional ones.
One of the big features of this new bios is that it is completely backwards compatible (as far as the OS is concerned) with the current BIOS. I don't think that switching OpenFirmware would be quite as seamless of a transistion.