Admittedly I don't know what the situation is in the US but in the UK the legal system views "stealing" telephone usage, bandwidth and so forth as "theft of electricity" the missing goods being the actual electrons (theoretically) - OK, perhaps it may not make complete sense from a scientific point of view.
My Vaio came with a restore disk instead of a proper windows install disk (like I paid for) but there was no problem using the restore disk after I replaced the hard drive. Note: I can't actually remember booting into windows since then.
After an election the Queen sends for the leader of the political party with the most seats in Parliament and asks if he can maintain a majority in division (win parliamentary votes). If he says he can the Queen will ask him to form a government to exercise the powers of the Crown (i.e. run the country).
The Government, via the Civil Service, Courts, Police, Army, etc, exercise the powers of the Crown to do a wide variety of things, such as - raise taxes, enforce the law, and so on.
The logic is that only if a party can win parliamentary votes and thereby create new laws will it be able to effectively run the country.
The BBC is overseen by a "Board of Governors" who are subject to political influence (or possibly can simply be bought) like any other group of individuals (*cough*ongress). That does not mean that the UK Government control the BBC in the way you suggest . . . although, admittedly, it would be naive to believe that an organisation with the power and resouces of a major government could not exert considerable influence if it wanted to (and in the case of Greg Dyke the UK Gov'nt most certainly did).
Evolution - the good distros improve by taking the best from others and the bad distros eventually fade away.
This is the point of having source code available, nobody has to code everything from scratch you can take somebody elses work and use it as a base to build on.
The problem comes when someone wants a desktop Linux distro, and there's an army of them claiming to be exactly what the user wants
There may be hundreds of distros but a newbie only really needs to choose from among the main distros: Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake. That's essentially three and a half distros to choose from (Mandrake is Redhat based) - I can't see that as unreasonable diversity.
A newbie thats considering Yoper, Arch or something equally obscure is asking for unnecessary trouble - as a quick question to a help board, chat channel, newsgroup, etc, will reveal.
I can open.doc files with OO.o or by rebooting and using MS Office but I make a point of asking people who send me.doc files if they can provide them in another format - most people are fine about this if they're asked nicely and you can explain that you're worried about trojans and viruses. Every time somebody asks them for a format other than.doc it reinforces in people's minds that.doc isn't a proper format for exchange.
the power to dissolve parliament and call and election (which she exercised in Canada in 1975
Oops - got confused here . . . I was thinking of the dissolution of the Australian Parliament (1975) and getting it mixed up with the refusal to dissolve the Canadian Parliament (1926).
I can see that your knowledge of any other country's political history is limited entirely to what you learned from Sesame Street. Unfortunately many (but thank god, not all) of your compatriots are equally ingnorant.
Actually the Queen does still have some powers - such as the power to dissolve parliament and call and election (which she exercised in Canada in 1975 - Canada being a commonwealth country).
if she or any other modern monarch were to refuse to sign anything that Parliament had passed into law then the monarchy would certainly be abolished overnight
Not necessarily - for example if it were a matter of consitutional importance and she was acting to protect the political process.
So, whilst Britain is technically a consitutional monarchy it is effectively a democratic republic in all but name.
It all depends on your definitions doesn't it? I think that very few people would really regard the constitution of the UK prior to 1867 as a dictatorship. Although I know many people who claim the current consitution is an "elective dictatorship" - I don't think that's the same thing though.
I really don't see what power a foriegn entity has over America's political machine
Well - none and lot's. All they can do is report their findings . . . but do you really think that if an independent and respected international monitoring group found that the US elections were riddled with corruption and unreliable as a result, this would not have consequences (both within and outside the US).
Put very simply you need a bittorrent client of some type ("Azureus" is a good one). They you go to a torrent site and look for the movie/software/music that you want. The link on the torrent site should give you a ".torrent" file for that download. Store the file on your disk and then "feed" it to the client you installed [i.e. File-> Open -> xyz.torrent] - bingo!
Although personally I find the command line "BitTorrent/btdownloadcurses.py xyz.torrent" more convenient.
why do cable/dsl connections have shit for upstream bandwidth?
They're designed for the "average" user, who will tend to download far more than they upload. As P2P sharing becomes more widespread I expect ISPs will respond with different deals more suitable for this.
For the moment I just leave BitTorrent running in the background but capped to 5kbs, over a week or two it's surprising how it adds up - "screen" is a great program for this purpose it completely hides the interface while you're not interested in what's happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Admittedly I don't know what the situation is in the US but in the UK the legal system views "stealing" telephone usage, bandwidth and so forth as "theft of electricity" the missing goods being the actual electrons (theoretically) - OK, perhaps it may not make complete sense from a scientific point of view.
Or by a USB external enclosure - they're very good and give you a nice 10gigs you can carry in a pocket.
My Vaio came with a restore disk instead of a proper windows install disk (like I paid for) but there was no problem using the restore disk after I replaced the hard drive. Note: I can't actually remember booting into windows since then.
"The ID chip isn't working officer! Why don't they check them before they send them out?"
Man hours are irrelevant - DRM will never work because at some point they've got to give you the key . . . if you can't watch it you won't buy it.
No but they would be remiss if they didn't take obvious measures to increase their revenue stream. They can spend the extra money.
The Government, via the Civil Service, Courts, Police, Army, etc, exercise the powers of the Crown to do a wide variety of things, such as - raise taxes, enforce the law, and so on.
The logic is that only if a party can win parliamentary votes and thereby create new laws will it be able to effectively run the country.
The BBC is overseen by a "Board of Governors" who are subject to political influence (or possibly can simply be bought) like any other group of individuals (*cough*ongress). That does not mean that the UK Government control the BBC in the way you suggest . . . although, admittedly, it would be naive to believe that an organisation with the power and resouces of a major government could not exert considerable influence if it wanted to (and in the case of Greg Dyke the UK Gov'nt most certainly did).
Bored of Directors.
I'm sorry for the people suffering in Sudan but the rest of the world doesn't stop because one country is having problems. This is a stupid comment.
This is the point of having source code available, nobody has to code everything from scratch you can take somebody elses work and use it as a base to build on.
There may be hundreds of distros but a newbie only really needs to choose from among the main distros: Fedora, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake. That's essentially three and a half distros to choose from (Mandrake is Redhat based) - I can't see that as unreasonable diversity.
A newbie thats considering Yoper, Arch or something equally obscure is asking for unnecessary trouble - as a quick question to a help board, chat channel, newsgroup, etc, will reveal.
Sorry but I can't help myself: IT IS NOT THEFT - no argument, by definition, NOT THEFT!!
I can open .doc files with OO.o or by rebooting and using MS Office but I make a point of asking people who send me .doc files if they can provide them in another format - most people are fine about this if they're asked nicely and you can explain that you're worried about trojans and viruses. Every time somebody asks them for a format other than .doc it reinforces in people's minds that .doc isn't a proper format for exchange.
Oops - got confused here . . . I was thinking of the dissolution of the Australian Parliament (1975) and getting it mixed up with the refusal to dissolve the Canadian Parliament (1926).
I can see that your knowledge of any other country's political history is limited entirely to what you learned from Sesame Street. Unfortunately many (but thank god, not all) of your compatriots are equally ingnorant.
Perhaps the French, British, Polish and Swedish have special reason to be interested as a result of having learnt the hard lesson you refer to.
Actually the Queen does still have some powers - such as the power to dissolve parliament and call and election (which she exercised in Canada in 1975 - Canada being a commonwealth country).
if she or any other modern monarch were to refuse to sign anything that Parliament had passed into law then the monarchy would certainly be abolished overnight
Not necessarily - for example if it were a matter of consitutional importance and she was acting to protect the political process.
So, whilst Britain is technically a consitutional monarchy it is effectively a democratic republic in all but name.
In this you are (finally) correct
It all depends on your definitions doesn't it? I think that very few people would really regard the constitution of the UK prior to 1867 as a dictatorship. Although I know many people who claim the current consitution is an "elective dictatorship" - I don't think that's the same thing though.
Well - none and lot's. All they can do is report their findings . . . but do you really think that if an independent and respected international monitoring group found that the US elections were riddled with corruption and unreliable as a result, this would not have consequences (both within and outside the US).
The English civil war finished in 1651, giving 353 years of stable democracy.
Although personally I find the command line "BitTorrent/btdownloadcurses.py xyz.torrent" more convenient.
Pr0n is like porn but involves goats.
Zonealarm is nobody's firewall. Read this link about snake oil.
They're designed for the "average" user, who will tend to download far more than they upload. As P2P sharing becomes more widespread I expect ISPs will respond with different deals more suitable for this.
For the moment I just leave BitTorrent running in the background but capped to 5kbs, over a week or two it's surprising how it adds up - "screen" is a great program for this purpose it completely hides the interface while you're not interested in what's happening.