Lets see... New York *Post* (tabloid, basically) is the source of the info. Actual article linked is on the Yahoo "Contributer Network" (content farm). But PETA, favorite slashdot whipping boy, is in the headline; with vague indication of freedom-of-speech issues. Yep, this is going to be big on Slashdot, better promote it immediately.
Queue the endless stream of weirdly rabid PETA hate... 3... 2... 1... go.
I know RTFA is not to be encouraged, but y'all might want to head over the the Post article in this case. It has a picture of half-nude PETA protesters, for no good reason, that you'll probably enjoy laughing at featured at the top of the pathetic and insubstantial little article. After that you might enjoy the current top story on there when I loaded the main page: about local bike shops being run out of business by rich corporate bike-share programs in New York. Serious stuff!
Anyone look at the original report? My scanning of it indicates that all the percentages being give are based on the "value" (i.e. money) of the UEPs (used electronic products). Am I wrong? In this light one would certainly expect that the most valuable and fully functional of the UEPs would remain domestic and be resold!
And, if true, this is quite possibly/probably not actually related at all to the 10+ year old statistic given offered by BAN, which gives me the impression to have been by volume (i.e. physical amount of junk); though the BAN report is not specific about this. The statistic in Bloomberg linked BAN report is offered hardly more than anedotally in a mere pull quote, attributed to "Informed recycling industry sources".
On the topic of data sources, I noticed in the new report, especially around the topic of "export", the data seems to be basically self-reported by the industry, and in places is guessed at as no one really knows what happens with a lot of the stuff that leaves the country. And probably not a lot of people in this industry in the US are anxious to give the impression that they are dumping on 3rd world countries, when reporting their data. Not to say the data isn't good or interesting data, but still there is room for questions as to the meaning and depth of some of the data.
It would also be interesting to know if things have changed significantly in the UEP industry in the last 10+ years. I'd imagine that it would have since the explosion of personal electronics. Surely there is a vastly greater amount of upgrade grind going on now, where people discard working devices just because their phone contract seduces them to upgrade, and the much higher prevalence of other devices such as laptops, tablets, audio players, etc. The percentages may have indeed significantly changed since BANs 10+ year old report.
It seems rather interesting how so many here are taking this as an opportunity to immediately attack Greenpeace, comparing a 10+ year old statistic (which may not even be based on the same units) with a brand new (probably well funded) industry report, reported via Bloomberg (not exactly a publication known for it's defense of the environment, or even science). This seems a little ridiculous, if not entirely pathetic.
And of course, with police cameras on everyone, just hope that future such acts continue to be perpetrated by local amateurs who seem to have done virtually nothing to obscure their appearance, and even remarkably little to mask the planting of their payload.
I think the police should concentrate on their skills at apprehending fully identified criminals without requiring massive suburban shootouts (which they don't even win), and their finding-people-hiding-in-backyard-boat skills, before they get any more toys on the table.
Perhaps more basic than what you're looking for, but I've been having a lot of fun with my 5 & 6 year old with KTurtle. It's a Logo based drawing program where you have only a few basic commands to make the turtle draw stuff. It has variables, loops, functions and conditionals; not to mention graph coordinates, polygons, etc. It's also localisable... which is really cool.
To start the kid out I basically would make little programs that make shapes or patterns, and he'd then mess around with them... mostly just changing numbers to see what would happen. Over time his curiosity has caused him to explore more, to the point where he now writes his own code quite often. He doesn't really understand a lot of the concepts he uses... but just fiddles around with things until it does something cool... which is fine with me.
The KTurtle web page is sadly entirely non-inspiring. But the program is great, which gets too little love. http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/
My nearly six-year-old is doing great things (for a kindergartner) with KTurtle -- which is really a pretty cool environment (I was surprised to find). He also spends much time hacking crazy stuff with redstone in Minecraft. The next logical step to real programming language seems to me, keeping it fun and relevant to his interests, is to introduce some javascript (as much as I dislike it) so he can mess up web pages with little effort. From there it seems python is the friendliest, easiest and most resource-rich multi-purpose playground.
Maybe CodeSpell will be something to check out eventually. Though the java example on their blog doesn't look all that fun to me. I hope its fun. If it gets to the point where I'm teaching the kid OOP, and all the verbose java syntax requirements, he'll probably only want to make minecraft mods. That's what CodeSpell is up against in this house.
And before Transformer was the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t, which is still being used here daily, and quite liked. It runs Windows 7 most of the time, but I dual boot Linux on it sometimes... specifically Kubuntu with the plasma netbook interface. Linux works pretty well, the main thing missing for me is "long tap" support -- lenovo and/or windows detects long presses and pops up context menu (like mouse middle click). Interestingly the S10-3t extremely rarely gets the screen flipped around to tablet mode. It turns out the clamshell is more convenient 95% of the time. Even reading in bed with it... just sit the laptop on the bed beside pillow and have the desktop rotate the display (or use FBReader's built-in display rotation). It sits up nicely with no hands needed, while you lay comfortably reading.
The full size lenovo keyboard is very nice on such a small thing; being able to touch click/drag things is icing on the cake.
The very blog article you have linked has an "update" at the bottom wherein the writer also says he thinks that CAN-SPAM might be too restrictive! His exact words are "too broad", but his description of the broadness is actually criticising the broadness of the restrictions. (ie. "criminalize the sending of “multiple” deceptive emails or the creation of more than five separate email accounts for sending commercial emails.").
Anyhow, even if your description of the ACLU's position was true (which your reference does not seem to support), don't you think it more credible to give the ACLU the benefit of the doubt that they may have a point, given the vast amount of experience, expertise and examples of them standing up for freedoms?
It's also been observed (somewhere) that people take a lot more risks when riding bicycles if they're wearing a helmet (even if a bike helmet logically doesn't save you from most injuries). Besides a theoretical sense of entitlement, perhaps money is strapped around the heads of the rich, in a similar function?
It's been over a year since I read Wind-up Girl, with many books between then and now, so my memory is kind of hazy... but thinking back, I can't remember any electrical energy in that world. Was it all mechanical? If it's all mechanical (for whatever reason), that really limits what sort of energy sources are useful. Especially portable energy sources. Most current energy sources, green or otherwise, are to produce electricity. I'm have no idea why (if I am even recalling correctly) electricity doesn't work, but it would only take a sentence to reasonably dismiss electricity entirely in a sci-fi world. You can write that sentence for yourself in your head while reading, if it doesn't exist.
Of course one thinks first of steam, for mechanical power. But what do you burn to get steam? That's a problem. Also, while the oceans are still abundant, fresh water seems like it might be kind of dear in that world... at least so it seems, as I'm recalling the torture the Windup Girl undergoes constantly trying to get water to keep herself from overheating, and it not being easy to acquire.
It should be noted that Windup Girl takes place in a world already mostly established by Bacigalupi in his short stories in Pump Six. Pump Six is a collection of short stories. Windup Girl is sort of, in some ways, like a really long short story. Not everything is explained. (I think Pump Six is a significantly better work than Windup Girl, though Windup Girl is still quite well done.)
ixquick.com (or startpage.com) is a privacy oriented meta search engine that's been around a long time. Its current incarnation anonymously repackages google search results.
DuckDuckGo is pretty cool. But I don't like Bing's results as much; and also I've been using ixquick for a long time... you hear about duckduckgo a lot these days, but sadly rarely hear of ixquick/startpage.
Here is a list of 500+ Atheist vs Christian debates if anyone is feeling they are missing out on this one. And you might find it interesting to note that actually, though the list is posted on an Atheist site, the Christian side "wins" most of these debates. The reason isn't necessarily that they Christian side is right, but that the Christian side generally has the better public debating skills: they dominate and frame the questions.
In fact there's a bit of an obsession out in Atheist-land at beating one guy: William Lane Craig, who is considered technically by many to be the top Christian debater... and arguably has never "lost" (sorry I really have to put that last word in quotes), as the linked Atheist site describes, despite going up against some serious popular intellectual heavyweights such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Famously, Dawkins recently backed out of a debate with him.
It's worth noting here, for anyone interested, this blog which does a pretty nice job of reviewing and rating many of these debates from an Agnostic perspective.
These debates generally are not specifically on evolution, but virtually all of them include it to greater and lesser degrees.
I got an old G1 online for less than $100 (including shipping). It is a bit slow, but still quite functional, unless you want to be running processor intensive games like Angry Birds. I have around 100 apps installed that run fine. The thing is jail broken, and has a cyanogen mod installed (SparksMod currently). And I actually use it for my primary mobile phone -- with no data plan (because I refuse to be gouged any further by our Canadian oligopolies)... wifi is good enough for me. And I'm loving the 4 row physical keyboard.
I've heard nothing but bad about Mugabe over the years -- and I have non-white inlaws from there. However, I don't really know all that much about the place. But reading over the Wikipedia Mugabe page I found the section on "Social Programs" especially interesting. From the indicators reported there, things seem to have improved radically in terms of literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy during the first 10 years of his leadership. After that the IMF imposed it's usual austerity program on them, in exchange for cash... and things seem to have gone downhill from there. Of course this is just wikipedia... so who knows... but it's interesting to consider that besides the complicated and violent political and ethnic internal problems, that the external influence of the IMF may have (yet again) be also a villain here.
My kids (3 and 5) love, love, love, love, love TuxPaint... they run it on Linux, but I see it's available for Windows as well. They also deeply love StarFall -- which just requires a web browser and flash.
I was also afraid to switching my mom to Linux, but finally after yet-another-windows-disaster I finally snapped... set her up with Kubuntu. I have to say, it was pretty painful for a while. Lots of "but I used to because to do this-like-this" pain. Especially around area of really simple stuff which is actually pretty frustrating on many linux desktops:
- drag web pages from firefox to desktop
- setting wallpaper
- downloading photos from digital camera
But anyhow, things have settled down. She still has constant problems. But now I can fix them so much more easily! It's not a hair-pulling mysterious inexplicable balls of pain. It's definitely worth it switching relatives to Linux if you support their computers. And when they complain that some stupid windows program they are missing, just tell them to go back to windows if they want but you won't be touching their computers anymore... And also "remember all the problems you had on windows?" Amazingly they quickly forget the horrors they experienced on windows fairly quickly, and need to be reminded....
Bottom line. Most people just *hate* change. Force them to change somehow. It *will* be painful. But it's totally worth it in the long run for sooooooo many reasons.
I started on Google Reader, and actually moved to Bloglines. The "beta" interface had some nice features that Google Reader didn't have at the time. And it was nice to have a break from Google.
Casting around for an alternative, I stumbled into NetVibes. At first it doesn't look like a replacement for the type of site that Google Reader or Bloglines are, but after playing around with it for a bit, I found it actually is pretty decent. You can import your.opml file (via the big green "add content" button which took me ages to find!) and it throws all your folders up as "tabs" on your "dashboard". It has decent organization (drag and drop, mostly) and you can toggle from the default block-style mode (widget view) to plain list display (reader view).
NetVibes pretty much entirely avoids mentioning "RSS", obviously aimed at a more oblivious public... which may be a good thing. But really it's quite a decent online RSS reader for the rest of us who know what RSS is all about.
The "western world", of course, is so much more civilized, launching "wars" on pathetic middle eastern countries based on pretexts of lies and killing thousands or millions people --- most of which are civilians. Actions which it is my understanding the enlightened Hitchens, for all his amusingly ironic vitriol, comes down in support of also...
Just saying, the western world's generally seeming freer speech doesn't seem to actually limit the carnage and destruction it wreaks in so many ways in the world, when it comes to violence.
Re:A Gnome user that wants to give this a try...
on
KDE 4.5 Released
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· Score: 1
Even though Kubuntu (I am a user of it) does have some rough edges, I'd stick with it. It is a lot better than it used to be.
The main reason I'd suggest sticking with it though is just familiarity. You can switch back and forth between GNOME and KDE pretty effortlessly running the same distro.
That being said, I hate to discourage exploration! Download live CD's for every distro that sounds interesting! Try them all! (-: Maybe you will like one better... after all, with Linux even switching an entire distro isn't all that big of a deal (if you have time), as long as you save your home directory somewhere safe...
The reason I use Kubuntu on every desktop I can, rather than other more interesting distros (or FreeBSD), is mainly because I see it as the only distro that has any chance of gaining general acceptance in my place of work as a windows replacement. Hence, I put up with some of the choices of Canonical which annoy me, for the sake of hoping to have a better and saner over-all environment in our office someday... KDE tends to impress visually everyone who sees it.
That being said, I actually do love KDE even though I barely use any of its components these days, and it's just mostly a lovely looking desktop. The main KDE app I use is Konsole (which is awesome)! One way to look at it is bloat: another way is that KDE is an amazingly engineered environment, which I really appreciate the design of under the hood. There's just loads of technically interesting goodness in it. I often half hope that one day I'll crack open KDevelop and start hacking on it at lower levels. But I never have time for that.
And I always keep Fluxbox handy for a backup environment if something goes wrong terribly with KDE... but this is very rarely used anymore.
I have been playing GTA San Andreas again, as I recently discovered it runs nearly perfectly under WINE. And it is still a truly awesome game.
I must admit though that now when I'm out on the street, I can't help but want to jump into every car I see and do some crazy burn outs, smash into a few things, and then abandon it in flames.
So far I have resisted. But it's only a matter of time...
A few days ago I had the annoying cops after me in a smashed up car. Cycle cop was on my tail, nailing me with his submachine gun. So annoying! Engine smoking, I just needed to hit the ramp at the end of a parking lot and jump through the hovering star, clear a few lanes of traffic, and the heat would be reduced a little at least.
Noooooo! As I'm launching off the ramp my engine bursts into flames. I hit the star, but I'm airborne and I'm going to "die"! Bail! Bail! Wacking the buttons madly. I'm sailing over a busy two-lane northbound road. My door opens, and my body flings itself out. In an amazing stroke of luck, I land on a passing car which carries me north, as I spin around in time to see my flaming vehicle, now rapidly descending, explode shortly before smashing into the pavement. This sets off a chain reaction in the nearby traffic of exploding cars. Meanwhile I'm rushing away on the roof of another car, like the insane surfer that I know deep down in my heart that I am, the cops no longer quite so interested in my whereabouts.
It all went so gloriously smoothly. I have to admit that I'm not sure I could pull it off quite so nicely in real life... but on the other hand, it didn't seem that hard. I didn't even know I could bail from a car in mid-air like that until I tried. Maybe I think I can't do these things so well in real life just because I haven't tried?
I have kids, alas too young yet to introduce me to the more modern world of video game carnage. But it is some days the only thing that seems worth waiting for in life...
If only I can hold off my urges until then. Then me and the boy, we can probably without too much trouble, kick this entire planet's ass into the sun!
Prepare yourself for solar pwnage, n00bs. I'll teach you about global warming...
Your KDE4 dismissal is rather out of date by this point. KDE 4.3 is quite amazing, and 4.4 now coming out adds even more polish UI niceness. Yes, UI is hard, and KDE 4.0 was a misfire while taking some big bold steps. It's no pale copy. It's grown up, and is quite breath-taking on many levels.
Unfortunately most of those who keep misunderstanding the "appeal to authority" falacy for their own purposes here, and the like, this is not likely to be at all convincing. But I just can't help but quote these poignant words...
Oh, while we're at it, let's redo the epidemiology on smoking and cancer. Until that's done, let's all take up smoking. After all, who can trust the corrupted peer-reviewed literature in leftist journals like the New England Journal of Medicine? --eric
Slashdot Mirror
Lets see... New York *Post* (tabloid, basically) is the source of the info. Actual article linked is on the Yahoo "Contributer Network" (content farm). But PETA, favorite slashdot whipping boy, is in the headline; with vague indication of freedom-of-speech issues. Yep, this is going to be big on Slashdot, better promote it immediately.
Queue the endless stream of weirdly rabid PETA hate... 3... 2... 1... go.
I know RTFA is not to be encouraged, but y'all might want to head over the the Post article in this case. It has a picture of half-nude PETA protesters, for no good reason, that you'll probably enjoy laughing at featured at the top of the pathetic and insubstantial little article. After that you might enjoy the current top story on there when I loaded the main page: about local bike shops being run out of business by rich corporate bike-share programs in New York. Serious stuff!
Anyone look at the original report? My scanning of it indicates that all the percentages being give are based on the "value" (i.e. money) of the UEPs (used electronic products). Am I wrong? In this light one would certainly expect that the most valuable and fully functional of the UEPs would remain domestic and be resold!
And, if true, this is quite possibly/probably not actually related at all to the 10+ year old statistic given offered by BAN, which gives me the impression to have been by volume (i.e. physical amount of junk); though the BAN report is not specific about this. The statistic in Bloomberg linked BAN report is offered hardly more than anedotally in a mere pull quote, attributed to "Informed recycling industry sources".
On the topic of data sources, I noticed in the new report, especially around the topic of "export", the data seems to be basically self-reported by the industry, and in places is guessed at as no one really knows what happens with a lot of the stuff that leaves the country. And probably not a lot of people in this industry in the US are anxious to give the impression that they are dumping on 3rd world countries, when reporting their data. Not to say the data isn't good or interesting data, but still there is room for questions as to the meaning and depth of some of the data.
It would also be interesting to know if things have changed significantly in the UEP industry in the last 10+ years. I'd imagine that it would have since the explosion of personal electronics. Surely there is a vastly greater amount of upgrade grind going on now, where people discard working devices just because their phone contract seduces them to upgrade, and the much higher prevalence of other devices such as laptops, tablets, audio players, etc. The percentages may have indeed significantly changed since BANs 10+ year old report.
It seems rather interesting how so many here are taking this as an opportunity to immediately attack Greenpeace, comparing a 10+ year old statistic (which may not even be based on the same units) with a brand new (probably well funded) industry report, reported via Bloomberg (not exactly a publication known for it's defense of the environment, or even science). This seems a little ridiculous, if not entirely pathetic.
And of course, with police cameras on everyone, just hope that future such acts continue to be perpetrated by local amateurs who seem to have done virtually nothing to obscure their appearance, and even remarkably little to mask the planting of their payload.
I think the police should concentrate on their skills at apprehending fully identified criminals without requiring massive suburban shootouts (which they don't even win), and their finding-people-hiding-in-backyard-boat skills, before they get any more toys on the table.
Perhaps more basic than what you're looking for, but I've been having a lot of fun with my 5 & 6 year old with KTurtle. It's a Logo based drawing program where you have only a few basic commands to make the turtle draw stuff. It has variables, loops, functions and conditionals; not to mention graph coordinates, polygons, etc. It's also localisable... which is really cool.
To start the kid out I basically would make little programs that make shapes or patterns, and he'd then mess around with them... mostly just changing numbers to see what would happen. Over time his curiosity has caused him to explore more, to the point where he now writes his own code quite often. He doesn't really understand a lot of the concepts he uses... but just fiddles around with things until it does something cool... which is fine with me.
The KTurtle web page is sadly entirely non-inspiring. But the program is great, which gets too little love. http://edu.kde.org/kturtle/
My nearly six-year-old is doing great things (for a kindergartner) with KTurtle -- which is really a pretty cool environment (I was surprised to find). He also spends much time hacking crazy stuff with redstone in Minecraft. The next logical step to real programming language seems to me, keeping it fun and relevant to his interests, is to introduce some javascript (as much as I dislike it) so he can mess up web pages with little effort. From there it seems python is the friendliest, easiest and most resource-rich multi-purpose playground.
Maybe CodeSpell will be something to check out eventually. Though the java example on their blog doesn't look all that fun to me. I hope its fun. If it gets to the point where I'm teaching the kid OOP, and all the verbose java syntax requirements, he'll probably only want to make minecraft mods. That's what CodeSpell is up against in this house.
And before Transformer was the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3t, which is still being used here daily, and quite liked. It runs Windows 7 most of the time, but I dual boot Linux on it sometimes... specifically Kubuntu with the plasma netbook interface. Linux works pretty well, the main thing missing for me is "long tap" support -- lenovo and/or windows detects long presses and pops up context menu (like mouse middle click). Interestingly the S10-3t extremely rarely gets the screen flipped around to tablet mode. It turns out the clamshell is more convenient 95% of the time. Even reading in bed with it... just sit the laptop on the bed beside pillow and have the desktop rotate the display (or use FBReader's built-in display rotation). It sits up nicely with no hands needed, while you lay comfortably reading.
The full size lenovo keyboard is very nice on such a small thing; being able to touch click/drag things is icing on the cake.
Hide ya kids! Hide ya wife! And hide ya husband 'cause they're rapin' everybody out here!
(Seriously, is this the best you can do?)
The very blog article you have linked has an "update" at the bottom wherein the writer also says he thinks that CAN-SPAM might be too restrictive! His exact words are "too broad", but his description of the broadness is actually criticising the broadness of the restrictions. (ie. "criminalize the sending of “multiple” deceptive emails or the creation of more than five separate email accounts for sending commercial emails.").
Anyhow, even if your description of the ACLU's position was true (which your reference does not seem to support), don't you think it more credible to give the ACLU the benefit of the doubt that they may have a point, given the vast amount of experience, expertise and examples of them standing up for freedoms?
It's also been observed (somewhere) that people take a lot more risks when riding bicycles if they're wearing a helmet (even if a bike helmet logically doesn't save you from most injuries). Besides a theoretical sense of entitlement, perhaps money is strapped around the heads of the rich, in a similar function?
Then, what you're looking for is the Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. Lots and lots of tits. And scantily clad lady ninjas too. And it's actually a pretty good book, also. Believe it or not.
It's been over a year since I read Wind-up Girl, with many books between then and now, so my memory is kind of hazy... but thinking back, I can't remember any electrical energy in that world. Was it all mechanical? If it's all mechanical (for whatever reason), that really limits what sort of energy sources are useful. Especially portable energy sources. Most current energy sources, green or otherwise, are to produce electricity. I'm have no idea why (if I am even recalling correctly) electricity doesn't work, but it would only take a sentence to reasonably dismiss electricity entirely in a sci-fi world. You can write that sentence for yourself in your head while reading, if it doesn't exist.
... at least so it seems, as I'm recalling the torture the Windup Girl undergoes constantly trying to get water to keep herself from overheating, and it not being easy to acquire.
Of course one thinks first of steam, for mechanical power. But what do you burn to get steam? That's a problem. Also, while the oceans are still abundant, fresh water seems like it might be kind of dear in that world
It should be noted that Windup Girl takes place in a world already mostly established by Bacigalupi in his short stories in Pump Six. Pump Six is a collection of short stories. Windup Girl is sort of, in some ways, like a really long short story. Not everything is explained. (I think Pump Six is a significantly better work than Windup Girl, though Windup Girl is still quite well done.)
ixquick.com (or startpage.com) is a privacy oriented meta search engine that's been around a long time. Its current incarnation anonymously repackages google search results. DuckDuckGo is pretty cool. But I don't like Bing's results as much; and also I've been using ixquick for a long time... you hear about duckduckgo a lot these days, but sadly rarely hear of ixquick/startpage.
Nice try, Dr. Zaius, now back to your cage.
In fact there's a bit of an obsession out in Atheist-land at beating one guy: William Lane Craig, who is considered technically by many to be the top Christian debater... and arguably has never "lost" (sorry I really have to put that last word in quotes), as the linked Atheist site describes, despite going up against some serious popular intellectual heavyweights such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Famously, Dawkins recently backed out of a debate with him.
It's worth noting here, for anyone interested, this blog which does a pretty nice job of reviewing and rating many of these debates from an Agnostic perspective.
These debates generally are not specifically on evolution, but virtually all of them include it to greater and lesser degrees.
I got an old G1 online for less than $100 (including shipping). It is a bit slow, but still quite functional, unless you want to be running processor intensive games like Angry Birds. I have around 100 apps installed that run fine. The thing is jail broken, and has a cyanogen mod installed (SparksMod currently). And I actually use it for my primary mobile phone -- with no data plan (because I refuse to be gouged any further by our Canadian oligopolies)... wifi is good enough for me. And I'm loving the 4 row physical keyboard.
I've heard nothing but bad about Mugabe over the years -- and I have non-white inlaws from there. However, I don't really know all that much about the place. But reading over the Wikipedia Mugabe page I found the section on "Social Programs" especially interesting. From the indicators reported there, things seem to have improved radically in terms of literacy, infant mortality, and life expectancy during the first 10 years of his leadership. After that the IMF imposed it's usual austerity program on them, in exchange for cash... and things seem to have gone downhill from there. Of course this is just wikipedia... so who knows... but it's interesting to consider that besides the complicated and violent political and ethnic internal problems, that the external influence of the IMF may have (yet again) be also a villain here.
My kids (3 and 5) love, love, love, love, love TuxPaint... they run it on Linux, but I see it's available for Windows as well. They also deeply love StarFall -- which just requires a web browser and flash.
I was also afraid to switching my mom to Linux, but finally after yet-another-windows-disaster I finally snapped... set her up with Kubuntu. I have to say, it was pretty painful for a while. Lots of "but I used to because to do this-like-this" pain. Especially around area of really simple stuff which is actually pretty frustrating on many linux desktops: - drag web pages from firefox to desktop - setting wallpaper - downloading photos from digital camera But anyhow, things have settled down. She still has constant problems. But now I can fix them so much more easily! It's not a hair-pulling mysterious inexplicable balls of pain. It's definitely worth it switching relatives to Linux if you support their computers. And when they complain that some stupid windows program they are missing, just tell them to go back to windows if they want but you won't be touching their computers anymore... And also "remember all the problems you had on windows?" Amazingly they quickly forget the horrors they experienced on windows fairly quickly, and need to be reminded.... Bottom line. Most people just *hate* change. Force them to change somehow. It *will* be painful. But it's totally worth it in the long run for sooooooo many reasons.
I started on Google Reader, and actually moved to Bloglines. The "beta" interface had some nice features that Google Reader didn't have at the time. And it was nice to have a break from Google. Casting around for an alternative, I stumbled into NetVibes. At first it doesn't look like a replacement for the type of site that Google Reader or Bloglines are, but after playing around with it for a bit, I found it actually is pretty decent. You can import your .opml file (via the big green "add content" button which took me ages to find!) and it throws all your folders up as "tabs" on your "dashboard". It has decent organization (drag and drop, mostly) and you can toggle from the default block-style mode (widget view) to plain list display (reader view).
NetVibes pretty much entirely avoids mentioning "RSS", obviously aimed at a more oblivious public... which may be a good thing. But really it's quite a decent online RSS reader for the rest of us who know what RSS is all about.
The "western world", of course, is so much more civilized, launching "wars" on pathetic middle eastern countries based on pretexts of lies and killing thousands or millions people --- most of which are civilians. Actions which it is my understanding the enlightened Hitchens, for all his amusingly ironic vitriol, comes down in support of also... Just saying, the western world's generally seeming freer speech doesn't seem to actually limit the carnage and destruction it wreaks in so many ways in the world, when it comes to violence.
Even though Kubuntu (I am a user of it) does have some rough edges, I'd stick with it. It is a lot better than it used to be.
The main reason I'd suggest sticking with it though is just familiarity. You can switch back and forth between GNOME and KDE pretty effortlessly running the same distro.
That being said, I hate to discourage exploration! Download live CD's for every distro that sounds interesting! Try them all! (-: Maybe you will like one better... after all, with Linux even switching an entire distro isn't all that big of a deal (if you have time), as long as you save your home directory somewhere safe...
The reason I use Kubuntu on every desktop I can, rather than other more interesting distros (or FreeBSD), is mainly because I see it as the only distro that has any chance of gaining general acceptance in my place of work as a windows replacement. Hence, I put up with some of the choices of Canonical which annoy me, for the sake of hoping to have a better and saner over-all environment in our office someday... KDE tends to impress visually everyone who sees it.
That being said, I actually do love KDE even though I barely use any of its components these days, and it's just mostly a lovely looking desktop. The main KDE app I use is Konsole (which is awesome)! One way to look at it is bloat: another way is that KDE is an amazingly engineered environment, which I really appreciate the design of under the hood. There's just loads of technically interesting goodness in it. I often half hope that one day I'll crack open KDevelop and start hacking on it at lower levels. But I never have time for that.
And I always keep Fluxbox handy for a backup environment if something goes wrong terribly with KDE... but this is very rarely used anymore.
I must admit though that now when I'm out on the street, I can't help but want to jump into every car I see and do some crazy burn outs, smash into a few things, and then abandon it in flames.
So far I have resisted. But it's only a matter of time...
A few days ago I had the annoying cops after me in a smashed up car. Cycle cop was on my tail, nailing me with his submachine gun. So annoying! Engine smoking, I just needed to hit the ramp at the end of a parking lot and jump through the hovering star, clear a few lanes of traffic, and the heat would be reduced a little at least.
Noooooo! As I'm launching off the ramp my engine bursts into flames. I hit the star, but I'm airborne and I'm going to "die"! Bail! Bail! Wacking the buttons madly. I'm sailing over a busy two-lane northbound road. My door opens, and my body flings itself out. In an amazing stroke of luck, I land on a passing car which carries me north, as I spin around in time to see my flaming vehicle, now rapidly descending, explode shortly before smashing into the pavement. This sets off a chain reaction in the nearby traffic of exploding cars. Meanwhile I'm rushing away on the roof of another car, like the insane surfer that I know deep down in my heart that I am, the cops no longer quite so interested in my whereabouts.
It all went so gloriously smoothly. I have to admit that I'm not sure I could pull it off quite so nicely in real life... but on the other hand, it didn't seem that hard. I didn't even know I could bail from a car in mid-air like that until I tried. Maybe I think I can't do these things so well in real life just because I haven't tried?
I have kids, alas too young yet to introduce me to the more modern world of video game carnage. But it is some days the only thing that seems worth waiting for in life...
If only I can hold off my urges until then. Then me and the boy, we can probably without too much trouble, kick this entire planet's ass into the sun!
Prepare yourself for solar pwnage, n00bs. I'll teach you about global warming ...
Your KDE4 dismissal is rather out of date by this point. KDE 4.3 is quite amazing, and 4.4 now coming out adds even more polish UI niceness. Yes, UI is hard, and KDE 4.0 was a misfire while taking some big bold steps. It's no pale copy. It's grown up, and is quite breath-taking on many levels.