I don't know what planet you come from, but Mandriva has it's origins as a distro designed specifically as an easy to use distribution for the home desktop. And Mepis is incredibly easy, my grandfather uses Mepis, and he's as computer illiterate as they come.
Yes, commercial Linux distributions are fat (although not in comparison to any other mainstream user OS)....if you go with default installs and the most bloated applications avaliable. However for his project it is entirely possible to trim down and remain highly functional. A lightweight, yet attractive and relatively easy to use WM like windowmaker, or icewm, are perfectly capable and work well for what he wants to do.There are lightweight yet capable word processing and other standalone office applications, like Abiword...which can take the place of Open Office in most cases. Email, basic photo viewing and manipulation, web browsing....all have light weight applications avaliable for them that'll do a fair job.
He's just bitching because his $100 laptop can't use the cool eyecandy filled environments with the exact same application base as most modern expensive computers....and still fit the hardware footprint and budget. He wants the magic GNU Fairy to come and sprinkle pixy dust and wave a magic wand and instantly make Firefox, OO, KDE, and GNOME run on his hardware requirements.
The nanotech aspect may be relevant in that the small particle size would allow the spray to bypass the body's protection mechanisms and directly affect the alveoli. That would be consistent with the symptoms described. It's drawing a long bow to call it a nanotech hazard though.
By those sorts of arguments mere chemistry is "nanotechnology." When it's a nanomachine of some sort that has problems....then they get to make the claim about nanotech going awry.
We have explored archaelogically very little of the Earth's surface, and mostly only where we already have reasons to suspect interesting stuff is buried. Further, consider that almost the entire temperate zone of the Earth has been ground down by glaciers several times in the last 250,000 years.
Hell, end of the last ice age vast amounts of the Earth changed, much of what was coastline became pretty far out into the ocean. In fact, we've only recently really started seriously thinking about looking out there for signs of civilization, mainly after stumbling accross some ancient villages and so forth long covered in ocean. And they've found signs of larger city-like ruins as well in places. Who knows what's out there, and how far civilization really goes.
I didn't misread you, I wasn't replying to you. I was replying to FireFury03, who was basically saying that industrialised countries should close their borders.
1) None of the ultra-user-friendly commercial distros have ever really caught on with the Linux enthusiast community.
Oh you mean like Mandriva, or Mepis, or Ubuntu....wait, there are pretty popular amoung Linux users to my knowledge, unless they are running supercomputers or bigass servers.
2) Linspire's business plan has alwasy been based on charging users for installing sofware, something that is free everywhere else in the Linux world.
3) As #2 illustrates, there's always been something sleazy about Linspire. They appeared, making ludicrous claims about Windows compatability, stepping on Microsoft's trademark while prominently advertising rebadged KDE apps as their own, and they've been like that ever since. They may not do anything wrong but it's always... off.
It's not just OSS applications being offered as pay applications, heck....technically there's nothing wrong with that, in fact many distro companies find some way of making OSS pay (premium distros on disk for example). What's sleezy are things like...their anti-virus software, when Linux hasn't had a virus problem aside from little proof-of-concept viruses and those rare big server software worms...furthermore their anti-virus software is designed to mainly protect against Windows viruses. Seems like selling a product to gullable former Windows users who think their systems must have anti-virus software.
Yet another proof of concept Linux virus that will never actually get out of the lab...oh wait, it's also a Windows virus. I guess it will get out of the lab...
Americans don't typically eat only grain. That's not the problem - it's other forms of food: meat in particular, also vegetables that only grow in small areas of the country. A large amount of the food we eat is imported - even though there's arable land in the Midwest, they can't grow strawberries.
Rural Illinoisan here to tell you how full of shit you are. Meat is easy, we have factory farms for that, a relative of my raises pigs by the tens of thousands....per facility that he owns, and he owns 6. And he's not the only one around here with such facilities. And chickens and other birds are similarly raised, intensively, in what are basically factories. Beef is a bit different, it's more open, but there's no lack of cattle around here either...it's a big business in fact.
And what the fuck do you mean we can't grow strawberries? There are more strawberry farms within a short distance of here than you can shake a stick at, apple and peach orchards as well. And vinyards too while we're on the subject, make damn fine wine.
As for vegetables, there are locally grown vegetables everywhere....but it is true that most large scale commercial production is in certain parts of the country. That's more of a factor of local economics than the condition of the land.
Oh yeah....stopping immigration is working out really well for Japan (well, they've essentially done that anyway), as they're approaching a labor crisis and won't be able to maintain a sustainable work force for many decades at this rate.
These figures cannot be correct, simply because we export far more food than we import, if there is not enough acreage to come anywhere close to supporting the population of the United States...where does all that food come from? Did we secretly master replicator technology and hide it from the world or something?:-D
Aside from that, we are just horridly inefficient with our energy. We need to smarten up for future econmical reasons as well.
See, this I can agree with....not scaremongering about the end of the world. I remember how the last big deal was the population bomb and how that was going to destroy civilization via overpopulation and resource limits, people would be starving because there wouldn't be enough to feed everyone...and then population growth started slowing on it's own, and new technologies and resources became avaliable to help us use what we had more efficiently and obtain materials from places we couldn't get them before...and the population bomb didn't happen.
I also remember how climatologists in the 1970s were convinced the Earth was about to plunge back into another Ice Age due to global cooling. There were even proposals to deliberately start global warming to counteract global cooling. Only way to save the planet!
Oh, and I remember how "in the future" (that far away future of 2000!) we'd all have to wear gas masks, because the air would be too toxic to breathe!
And the forests, we're killing the forests! All the trees are dying, soon we won't have any more trees. Your children will grow up in a world without trees! I remember that one too. At least in the US we have more forest land since the 30s.
It's always some big doom and gloom, end of the world (or at least have the world turn into a horrible distopia) crap that goes around. And now it's global warming.
Oh and "urban sprawl" too, that's a current one (we even have terrorists burning down homes, and city governments afraid to expand), even though we could fit everyone in the world into Texas and have a population density similar to Manhattan. Must be a holdover from the "population bomb" bullshit. Plenty of room for everyone.
There's this wireless broadband internet service around here that's competitive with DSL or cable internet on pricing, and doesn't have nearly as many location limitations as the others. So the only alternative around here isn't dialup.
Problem is...if we aren't responsable, and we act as if we are and start locking away carbon like there's no tomorrow, doing everything in our power to slow it down....and it's a natural process that stops on it's own or even reverses and we don't notice, we could "correct" ourselves right into an ice age by screwing up the planet in the other direction in our eagerness to fix the problem.
Most people are not in situations where they have the ability to pick their Internet provider. Most areas are served by a single monopoly, or at best, one telco and one cable co.
Really? I live in a rural area and there are multiple ISPs avaliable. Are you saying I could move to one of the big cities where most people live....and end up with less choice in internet service?
Sure, but we don't live on Mars. We live on Earth. Here on earth we have SUVs. MAYBE is the SUVs are causing the warming to some degree, MAYBE they aren't.
However, it does make sense to think that if both Earth and Mars are both undergoing global warming at the same time that there might be a causal link between the two doesn't it? It would be an unbelievable coincidence if it were not the case. In fact, I've also read that Pluto seems to be undergoing global warming as well...to the puzzlement of scientists. And we're in a period of increased solar activity. Seems to me that the thing that primarily responsable for the Earth being warm in the first place, might have a role in global warming. I mean, here we are, all these planets undergoing global warming....and only one of them has humans on it. Souldn't we be looking for a common cause, a shared link, rather than simply blaming human activity?
Now, I don't doubt that human activity can effect climate, a couple of the largest deserts in the world are man-made and we're been at least partly responsable for extinctions of various species since ours figured out how to create projectile weaponry. But I don't see us as the primary cause of this one. Hell, it's starting to look like entire solar system is on a bit of a warming trend...I can't imagine how that's our fault. We may have a very slight effect on it here on Earth, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that the Sun has a hell of a lot more to do with it.
The counter argument has been that the warming is related to an increase in the solar output and/or a change in the albedo of the earth.
In fact, there's fair evidence that this is the case....Mars is also undergoing global warming right now. And last time I checked there are no gas guzzling SUVs on Mars.
All those companies who claim to own a piece of my genes are pirates. Last I checked, I own me and nobody else can, but these companies think that my DNA should have a little patent number on each little segment of it. What gives them the right to claim ownership of my DNA? Especially as it's got one hell of a public domain, prior art history behind it.
Now all Google is doing, is trying to make that public domain information accessable to the people. That's perfectly fine in my book.
Actually in most States they are merely ID Cards, rather than non-driving licenses. In any case, they are State IDs....not National government IDs. When the National government starts screaming, "Papers! Your papers citizens! Where are your papers?! You have no papers? You must be one of THEM!" You are in serious trouble. Fortunately, there's some heavy opposition to the attempts to by the Federal government here in the US to impliment that.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what planet you come from, but Mandriva has it's origins as a distro designed specifically as an easy to use distribution for the home desktop. And Mepis is incredibly easy, my grandfather uses Mepis, and he's as computer illiterate as they come.
Um...that subject was supposed to read, "He doesn't know what he's talking about." Don't know how that got messed up...
Yes, commercial Linux distributions are fat (although not in comparison to any other mainstream user OS)....if you go with default installs and the most bloated applications avaliable. However for his project it is entirely possible to trim down and remain highly functional. A lightweight, yet attractive and relatively easy to use WM like windowmaker, or icewm, are perfectly capable and work well for what he wants to do.There are lightweight yet capable word processing and other standalone office applications, like Abiword...which can take the place of Open Office in most cases. Email, basic photo viewing and manipulation, web browsing....all have light weight applications avaliable for them that'll do a fair job.
He's just bitching because his $100 laptop can't use the cool eyecandy filled environments with the exact same application base as most modern expensive computers....and still fit the hardware footprint and budget. He wants the magic GNU Fairy to come and sprinkle pixy dust and wave a magic wand and instantly make Firefox, OO, KDE, and GNOME run on his hardware requirements.
I didn't misread you, I wasn't replying to you. I was replying to FireFury03, who was basically saying that industrialised countries should close their borders.
Yet another proof of concept Linux virus that will never actually get out of the lab...oh wait, it's also a Windows virus. I guess it will get out of the lab...
Plus....open isn't the same as execute on Linux systems.
You can fit the entire world population into Texas with a population density the same as that of Manhattan....the Earth is not overpopulated.
Rural Illinoisan here to tell you how full of shit you are. Meat is easy, we have factory farms for that, a relative of my raises pigs by the tens of thousands....per facility that he owns, and he owns 6. And he's not the only one around here with such facilities. And chickens and other birds are similarly raised, intensively, in what are basically factories. Beef is a bit different, it's more open, but there's no lack of cattle around here either...it's a big business in fact.
And what the fuck do you mean we can't grow strawberries? There are more strawberry farms within a short distance of here than you can shake a stick at, apple and peach orchards as well. And vinyards too while we're on the subject, make damn fine wine.
As for vegetables, there are locally grown vegetables everywhere....but it is true that most large scale commercial production is in certain parts of the country. That's more of a factor of local economics than the condition of the land.
Oh yeah....stopping immigration is working out really well for Japan (well, they've essentially done that anyway), as they're approaching a labor crisis and won't be able to maintain a sustainable work force for many decades at this rate.
These figures cannot be correct, simply because we export far more food than we import, if there is not enough acreage to come anywhere close to supporting the population of the United States...where does all that food come from? Did we secretly master replicator technology and hide it from the world or something? :-D
See, this I can agree with....not scaremongering about the end of the world. I remember how the last big deal was the population bomb and how that was going to destroy civilization via overpopulation and resource limits, people would be starving because there wouldn't be enough to feed everyone...and then population growth started slowing on it's own, and new technologies and resources became avaliable to help us use what we had more efficiently and obtain materials from places we couldn't get them before...and the population bomb didn't happen.
I also remember how climatologists in the 1970s were convinced the Earth was about to plunge back into another Ice Age due to global cooling. There were even proposals to deliberately start global warming to counteract global cooling. Only way to save the planet!
Oh, and I remember how "in the future" (that far away future of 2000!) we'd all have to wear gas masks, because the air would be too toxic to breathe!
And the forests, we're killing the forests! All the trees are dying, soon we won't have any more trees. Your children will grow up in a world without trees! I remember that one too. At least in the US we have more forest land since the 30s.
It's always some big doom and gloom, end of the world (or at least have the world turn into a horrible distopia) crap that goes around. And now it's global warming.
Oh and "urban sprawl" too, that's a current one (we even have terrorists burning down homes, and city governments afraid to expand), even though we could fit everyone in the world into Texas and have a population density similar to Manhattan. Must be a holdover from the "population bomb" bullshit. Plenty of room for everyone.
There's this wireless broadband internet service around here that's competitive with DSL or cable internet on pricing, and doesn't have nearly as many location limitations as the others. So the only alternative around here isn't dialup.
Problem is...if we aren't responsable, and we act as if we are and start locking away carbon like there's no tomorrow, doing everything in our power to slow it down....and it's a natural process that stops on it's own or even reverses and we don't notice, we could "correct" ourselves right into an ice age by screwing up the planet in the other direction in our eagerness to fix the problem.
Problem is there's no way to mod a post as "dumbass."
Being able to reprogram the device itself or not is not something that the GPL covers.
Only true of the big, corporate brands with big advertising dollars. There are smaller, local brands all over that are quite good I hear.
However, it does make sense to think that if both Earth and Mars are both undergoing global warming at the same time that there might be a causal link between the two doesn't it? It would be an unbelievable coincidence if it were not the case. In fact, I've also read that Pluto seems to be undergoing global warming as well...to the puzzlement of scientists. And we're in a period of increased solar activity. Seems to me that the thing that primarily responsable for the Earth being warm in the first place, might have a role in global warming. I mean, here we are, all these planets undergoing global warming....and only one of them has humans on it. Souldn't we be looking for a common cause, a shared link, rather than simply blaming human activity?
Now, I don't doubt that human activity can effect climate, a couple of the largest deserts in the world are man-made and we're been at least partly responsable for extinctions of various species since ours figured out how to create projectile weaponry. But I don't see us as the primary cause of this one. Hell, it's starting to look like entire solar system is on a bit of a warming trend...I can't imagine how that's our fault. We may have a very slight effect on it here on Earth, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that the Sun has a hell of a lot more to do with it.
All those companies who claim to own a piece of my genes are pirates. Last I checked, I own me and nobody else can, but these companies think that my DNA should have a little patent number on each little segment of it. What gives them the right to claim ownership of my DNA? Especially as it's got one hell of a public domain, prior art history behind it.
Now all Google is doing, is trying to make that public domain information accessable to the people. That's perfectly fine in my book.
Actually in most States they are merely ID Cards, rather than non-driving licenses. In any case, they are State IDs....not National government IDs. When the National government starts screaming, "Papers! Your papers citizens! Where are your papers?! You have no papers? You must be one of THEM!" You are in serious trouble. Fortunately, there's some heavy opposition to the attempts to by the Federal government here in the US to impliment that.