Broadcomm BC43xx? Ugh! Been there. There are fixes documented out there, but it requires some effort at the console (pkg installs + some config changes) to pull it off.
Not really. Ubuntu's restricted drivers section has a B43 module that works with most Broadcom configs I tested with. Granted, it's not open-source kosher, but most people aren't bothered by that if it makes the difference between wireless working or not working.
Rather than encrypt the whole drive (it looks like you have something to hide) I would create a truecrypt volume file (Make it big enough for all your stuff) and give it a.tmp extension, since temp files are common and no one would ever suspect them since various apps automatically create them. I would then erase truecrypt from the computer-- If you don't have any encryption software installed, why would authorities look for encrypted files? Also, remember to act like a stupid tourist who barely knows how to turn the computer on.
Of course, this is assuming you don't need to use the files until you are able to install Truecrypt again and decrypt.
Things like how to balance a checkbook and make a budget
I actually got that in High school economics, complete with a simulated budget assignment. (I probably still have that spreadsheet somewhere, 9 years later)
..is that companies like Disney are inherently unstable. The same thing can be said of entities like record labels and movie companies.
If you are a company whose main (or even only) assets are so-called "intellectual property", then you are basically a time bomb, and copyright is the only thing that maintains profitability. Once Mickey becomes public domain, Disney is screwed, and they know it, since other characters will soon follow. Sure, Disney has other stuff, but will it be enough? (Disney products can be easily copied if they ever fall out of copyright, and theme parks alone would probably be insufficient to keep Disney afloat) In the case of the music/movie people, they don't even have tangible products to fall back on, so it is even worse for them than for Disney. To ensure profitability, I suspect these companies will at least try to extend copyright to the extreme (something like life+1000 years, eventually, if the companies are still around by then) once the already ridiculously-long current copyrights are in danger of lapsing.
Companies that make tangible goods (like cars, wrenches, computers, etc.) don't suffer from this as much because it takes a lot of up-front investment for a viable competitor to appear, and this keeps most people out of the game. In contrast, lots of people can easily draw Mickey and redistribute movies and music, and only legal threats are able to prevent them from freely doing so for profit.
I have read that some people believe that using torrent over TOR is abusive, but I never saw an explanation of why that would be so. If I operate a node (give back) it's fair, isn't it? And if not, why not?
Full disclosure: I'm in the Don't-use-Tor-for-torrenting camp.
I think the issue depends on how much you give back vs. how much you take. If your node is running 24/7 and you aren't limiting how much bandwidth goes through it (since it eats up your own bandwidth) I say torrent away. Whatever you're downloading is your business, BTw. What I take issue with are the people that leech off the Tor network by sending GB of data through it without giving anything back. (leeching http/text doesn't count as being bad, IMO, b/c it 's too small to make much of a difference)
Call me some kind of freak or something, but why the fuck would you want to own a gun?
It's about freedom. As an American, I have certain rights that people before me fought and died to give me. One of these is gun ownership, as described in the constitution. As a competent, law-abiding citizen, I should be able to own a gun if I wish and be able to freely use it in certain instances, such as for sport or in cases where my life or someone else's life is directly being threatened. Even in the last scenario, I would not pull the trigger unless I had no choice.
Now, gun ownership isn't for everyone, and I can understand that. Some people feel the need to have a gun around for legitimate purposes, such as protection, collection, or hunting (I'm from Alabama, and quite a bit of hunting goes on down here) Some people don't want a gun, and that's okay, too.
Freedom is about letting both types of people have what they want. I'm all for keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but never at the expense of freedom.
It's not like they are going to use this to bolster speeding ticket revenue... You suspect nothing until a ticket shows up in your mailbox for going 50 MPH in a 40 MPH zone. Insurance companies are going to love this.
wi-fi security is weak and easily cracked anyway.
That is only true for WEP, which has been next to useless for years. WPA/WPA2 was still decent the last time I checked.
Right about now, I'm wondering what the implications would be for including reCAPTCHA in an open source project. (a PHP-based blog I'm working on) Right now the blog is read-only, since I have yet to build my own working CAPTCHA system and putting up an unprotected reply form is sheer idiocysince it wil lbe a whole five minutes before the spam bots find it. My project is GPLv3, so would including ReCAPTCHA cause me some sort of licensing problem?
It costs them very little to hold a gun to your head and demand "Hand over the encryption keys."
Of course, if they pull the trigger, they will never get the keys. Are they really going to take that risk when they don't know what your encrypted data is? They will never know if they don't get the keys, since brute-forcing 256 or 512-bit AES is a fool's errand these days.
In such a society, "terrorist" will eventually be a label applied to anyone the current administration doesn't like, or those who try to defend their rights.
Alabama doesn't require anything. Sure, most of the time we're the backwards arm pit of America
As a fellow Alabamian, I must respectfully disagree. Birmingham (my home city) is a place with lots of banking/tech. (the 280 corridor going into Shelby county is starting to get really good) Huntsville has lots of military/aerospace development. We're not as bad off as many people think, since some states don't even have that much.
Tangentially off topic, but how do you like the FIOS service?
I had FIOS up until I moved out of my last house. I never had problems with the Verizon router or service; I was able to get things like SSH working without too much trouble (just the typical setup of port forwarding, etc.) I highly recommend the FIOS service for anyone who is able to get it.
I now have DSL service through AT&T/Bellsouth. The speeds are decent (about 6mbs) but I have not been able to get services like inbound SSH working at all, unfortunately. (AT&T does strange things with IP addresses; before I got a static ip from them, I got a new Ip every time the router reset itself after a power failure and what not) My current router is configured for SSH, but I have no idea why it's not working. I'm not trying to be offtopic, but I would really appreciate some help from anyone who is able to give it.
So my question is, is there a very simple word processor that I can use to do simple construction and layout that does *nothing* automatically and works *every single time* without fucking up my formatting?
Try Scribus. It's a nice little desktop publishing program that does quite a bit, (with more being added each release) although it's nowhere near as powerful as Indesign, Quark, or Framemaker. I personaly use the 1.3.4 development version but the stable version is still useful. Note: Files created in any given version of Scribus are not backwards-compatible with older versions. Aside from that, it's a great program.
You should do your writing/editing in a word processor (which is what a WP is really for, layout capability is just a bonus) and then import the document into Scribus to do your layout.
The best notetaking software I've ever used is called Freemind. It's a hierarchical mindmapping tool that provides good structuring and quick notetaking since everything is bound to a key without having to navigate menus (of course, you can do that too, if you want)
I'll go so far as to say that Freemind should be standard issue for every student.
A sane government that truly represented the rights of the people should not even consider legislation like this. Congress has been for sale to the highest bidder for some time now, so any semblance of democracy is thoroughly broken. (Can the average citizen exert the same level of influence as the strongest corporation? If not, you don't have democracy)
I think that the time for radical change has come. Getting rid of congress and passing everything onto the people through referendum (some sort of yearly limit would be necessary for legislation) seems like a better choice to me at this point. ( What are corporations going to do? Bribe everyone?) In such a scenario, lobbying would become pointless because there would be too many people to convince.
OOo, on the other hand stinks. Its slow, ugly, not terribly easy to use, and offers virtually nothing in the way of improvements or new & useful features. It's not quite as bad as early versions of The GIMP, but isn't much better. Apart from the price, there's very little reason for users to switch.
I disagree.
OO.o has done everything that I've needed it to do, which is all that I can ask from any office suite. I concur that OO.o doesn't have as many features as MSOffice, but what OO.o does it seems to do fairly well, IMO. You never mentioned what is so bad about the OO.o interface/feature set (and what is so good about the MSOffice one)
You seem to forget that if not for OO.o, most people would be forced to buy Msoffice if they wanted to get anything done at all. OO.o bridges the gap between truly crappy software like MS Wordpad (i.e. nothing) and a full-fledged office suite like MSoffice. It gives people another alternative, which is never a bad thing.
we had MORE failures with Thinkpads than with any other laptop we worked with.
I can vouch for this. I have an old T22 that is now unusable due to an ERROR 0175 : Bad CRC1, stop POST task. (corrupted BIOS chip) The only way to fix that is to replace the mobo, according to Lenovo. (I've heard that the T2x series were very prone to this error-- some sort of design flaw) I could probably flash the BIOS to fix it, but I've never been able to make it work. (The bIOS flash utilities I've found for that model require a working OS, and this one fails about 30 seconds after boot. )
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Not really. Ubuntu's restricted drivers section has a B43 module that works with most Broadcom configs I tested with. Granted, it's not open-source kosher, but most people aren't bothered by that if it makes the difference between wireless working or not working.
Rather than encrypt the whole drive (it looks like you have something to hide) I would create a truecrypt volume file (Make it big enough for all your stuff) and give it a .tmp extension, since temp files are common and no one would ever suspect them since various apps automatically create them. I would then erase truecrypt from the computer-- If you don't have any encryption software installed, why would authorities look for encrypted files? Also, remember to act like a stupid tourist who barely knows how to turn the computer on.
Of course, this is assuming you don't need to use the files until you are able to install Truecrypt again and decrypt.
Well, as long as he stays out of Alabama....
I actually got that in High school economics, complete with a simulated budget assignment. (I probably still have that spreadsheet somewhere, 9 years later)
Where did you go? I'm a California State University Long Beach alum.
..is that companies like Disney are inherently unstable. The same thing can be said of entities like record labels and movie companies.
If you are a company whose main (or even only) assets are so-called "intellectual property", then you are basically a time bomb, and copyright is the only thing that maintains profitability. Once Mickey becomes public domain, Disney is screwed, and they know it, since other characters will soon follow. Sure, Disney has other stuff, but will it be enough? (Disney products can be easily copied if they ever fall out of copyright, and theme parks alone would probably be insufficient to keep Disney afloat) In the case of the music/movie people, they don't even have tangible products to fall back on, so it is even worse for them than for Disney. To ensure profitability, I suspect these companies will at least try to extend copyright to the extreme (something like life+1000 years, eventually, if the companies are still around by then) once the already ridiculously-long current copyrights are in danger of lapsing.
Companies that make tangible goods (like cars, wrenches, computers, etc.) don't suffer from this as much because it takes a lot of up-front investment for a viable competitor to appear, and this keeps most people out of the game. In contrast, lots of people can easily draw Mickey and redistribute movies and music, and only legal threats are able to prevent them from freely doing so for profit.
Full disclosure: I'm in the Don't-use-Tor-for-torrenting camp.
I think the issue depends on how much you give back vs. how much you take. If your node is running 24/7 and you aren't limiting how much bandwidth goes through it (since it eats up your own bandwidth) I say torrent away. Whatever you're downloading is your business, BTw. What I take issue with are the people that leech off the Tor network by sending GB of data through it without giving anything back. (leeching http/text doesn't count as being bad, IMO, b/c it 's too small to make much of a difference)
It's about freedom. As an American, I have certain rights that people before me fought and died to give me. One of these is gun ownership, as described in the constitution. As a competent, law-abiding citizen, I should be able to own a gun if I wish and be able to freely use it in certain instances, such as for sport or in cases where my life or someone else's life is directly being threatened. Even in the last scenario, I would not pull the trigger unless I had no choice.
Now, gun ownership isn't for everyone, and I can understand that. Some people feel the need to have a gun around for legitimate purposes, such as protection, collection, or hunting (I'm from Alabama, and quite a bit of hunting goes on down here) Some people don't want a gun, and that's okay, too.
Freedom is about letting both types of people have what they want. I'm all for keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, but never at the expense of freedom.
It's not like they are going to use this to bolster speeding ticket revenue... You suspect nothing until a ticket shows up in your mailbox for going 50 MPH in a 40 MPH zone. Insurance companies are going to love this.
That will eventually give rise to tinfoil body kits.
wi-fi security is weak and easily cracked anyway. That is only true for WEP, which has been next to useless for years. WPA/WPA2 was still decent the last time I checked.
Stuff from a well-known group is usually untainted, since a bad release will sink a group's rep really fast.
*JK points wand at lexicon project*
Avada Kedavra!
Right about now, I'm wondering what the implications would be for including reCAPTCHA in an open source project. (a PHP-based blog I'm working on) Right now the blog is read-only, since I have yet to build my own working CAPTCHA system and putting up an unprotected reply form is sheer idiocysince it wil lbe a whole five minutes before the spam bots find it. My project is GPLv3, so would including ReCAPTCHA cause me some sort of licensing problem?
Of course, if they pull the trigger, they will never get the keys. Are they really going to take that risk when they don't know what your encrypted data is? They will never know if they don't get the keys, since brute-forcing 256 or 512-bit AES is a fool's errand these days.
In such a society, "terrorist" will eventually be a label applied to anyone the current administration doesn't like, or those who try to defend their rights.
As a fellow Alabamian, I must respectfully disagree. Birmingham (my home city) is a place with lots of banking/tech. (the 280 corridor going into Shelby county is starting to get really good) Huntsville has lots of military/aerospace development. We're not as bad off as many people think, since some states don't even have that much.
I had FIOS up until I moved out of my last house. I never had problems with the Verizon router or service; I was able to get things like SSH working without too much trouble (just the typical setup of port forwarding, etc.) I highly recommend the FIOS service for anyone who is able to get it.
I now have DSL service through AT&T/Bellsouth. The speeds are decent (about 6mbs) but I have not been able to get services like inbound SSH working at all, unfortunately. (AT&T does strange things with IP addresses; before I got a static ip from them, I got a new Ip every time the router reset itself after a power failure and what not) My current router is configured for SSH, but I have no idea why it's not working. I'm not trying to be offtopic, but I would really appreciate some help from anyone who is able to give it.
Try Scribus. It's a nice little desktop publishing program that does quite a bit, (with more being added each release) although it's nowhere near as powerful as Indesign, Quark, or Framemaker. I personaly use the 1.3.4 development version but the stable version is still useful. Note: Files created in any given version of Scribus are not backwards-compatible with older versions. Aside from that, it's a great program.
You should do your writing/editing in a word processor (which is what a WP is really for, layout capability is just a bonus) and then import the document into Scribus to do your layout.
The best notetaking software I've ever used is called Freemind. It's a hierarchical mindmapping tool that provides good structuring and quick notetaking since everything is bound to a key without having to navigate menus (of course, you can do that too, if you want)
I'll go so far as to say that Freemind should be standard issue for every student.
A sane government that truly represented the rights of the people should not even consider legislation like this. Congress has been for sale to the highest bidder for some time now, so any semblance of democracy is thoroughly broken. (Can the average citizen exert the same level of influence as the strongest corporation? If not, you don't have democracy)
I think that the time for radical change has come. Getting rid of congress and passing everything onto the people through referendum (some sort of yearly limit would be necessary for legislation) seems like a better choice to me at this point. ( What are corporations going to do? Bribe everyone?) In such a scenario, lobbying would become pointless because there would be too many people to convince.
OO.o has done everything that I've needed it to do, which is all that I can ask from any office suite. I concur that OO.o doesn't have as many features as MSOffice, but what OO.o does it seems to do fairly well, IMO. You never mentioned what is so bad about the OO.o interface/feature set (and what is so good about the MSOffice one)
You seem to forget that if not for OO.o, most people would be forced to buy Msoffice if they wanted to get anything done at all. OO.o bridges the gap between truly crappy software like MS Wordpad (i.e. nothing) and a full-fledged office suite like MSoffice. It gives people another alternative, which is never a bad thing.