Really, Slashdot moderators? You gave this comment a 4-Insightful?

If you can't figure out why Biden's a better candidate than trump, don't waste my fucking time.

I liked Xmarks because I like running different Linux distros off of live media. Most of them included Firefox as the default web browser. Adding Xmarks was a quick, easy, and reliable way to get your bookmarks into Firefox. I also have a bunch of Linux distros installed on my hard drive and Xmarks was a good way to synchronize bookmarks between them. So I'll miss it when it's gone.

As someone else mentioned, Xmarks wasn't the same after Firefox switched to the "WebExtensions" API. For example, among other things, the new version would bother you via popup to put in your username and password multiple times during a Firefox session, even though it was set to remember them. It would sometimes list all your bookmarks twice after a synchronization. And it wouldn't delete bookmarks that you told it to delete.

So I'm not surprised LastPass is discontinuing Xmarks; it didn't seem like it was putting much effort into it lately anyway. For now, I'm using Firefox's sync, but I'll be looking for an extension with more features.

Guns are tools made to kill. BitTorrent isn't.

What a stupid question.

First you should ask yourself why there is a whole separate distribution just to support a different desktop.

Because Xubuntu users want to have only the Xfce desktop, without having to install the Unity desktop first, which, if you're never going to use it, means you're just wasting hard disk space.

We have had a recent lesson in this fallacy in the case of Mint. Mint is also a copy of Ubuntu and it exists primarily as a platform for the Cinnamon desktop. But because they were slow to handle security problems, Mint was hacked and code compromised. I don't trust Mint to this day. So I suggest starting with a secure and solid Ubuntu base and just perfect your desktop on that distro.

What an odd point of view. Linux Mint got hacked through Wordpress running on its web site. They weren't "slow to handle security problems"; they dealt with it as soon as they found out about it, which was almost immediately. And If you had checked the MD5 checksum of the hacked ISO, you would have seen that there was a problem with it.

As its leader, Clement Lefebvre, wrote in response to a comment on his blog, "...we’ll probably also contract a security firm to look into the bottom of this for us, we’re software developers not intrusion experts."

Take your idea to its logical extreme, and we would just have one Linux distro with a number of different desktop environments. Nobody wants that, except you, maybe.

...from the earth before it's all over, as long as it has the potential of making a profit.

If the Keystone XL pipeline isn't approved by this president, just wait a few years for energy prices to get higher and fossil fuels to be more scarce. It'll eventually happen.

It seems pretty obvious (to me, anyway; I'm a home user rather than an IT worker) that in Windows 8, Microsoft wanted to try to appeal to both tablet users with Metro, and to desktop users with the traditional desktop, all in one release. So they bolted a tablet interface to a desktop interface. It's sort of an odd combination, especially if you're new to Metro. Since the OS boots into Metro, it also seems pretty obvious that Microsoft's design choices wouldn't please business users or home users with large, non-touchscreen monitors who aren't interested in their computers looking like a tablet.

As part of its marketing campaign for IE 11, Microsoft's made Windows 8.1 Pro Preview virtual machine images available, so it's easy to try it out for yourself. The Start button takes you back to the Metro start screen, unless you right-click on it, in which case it brings up a context menu allowing you access to some of the more technical aspects of the OS (i.e. control panel; power shell; etc.).

I haven't played with it enough yet to find the setting that allows you to boot straight into the desktop rather than Metro, but even so, it's just one click to go to the desktop. But what they really to make desktop users happy is a Start menu button application launcher, and if you want that, AFAIK, you still have to install a 3rd-party utility.

When it comes to an encyclopedia, I want it to be written by geeks.

I'd rather have articles written by experts in their respective fields rather than written by geeks. "Geek" != "Expert".

Exactly. My first reaction was, "Why is Megan Garber so ugly?" This article's title seemed to be designed to push people's buttons.

Honestly, has it ever occurred to you that Wikipedia was ugly? Did you ever go to Wikipedia because of the way it looked? And did you ever think someone would get paid for a magazine article about her opinion of how ugly Wikipedia is?

You can, obviously, keep trolling your own "news" blog by publishing bullshit like this:

"In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing, the United Nations...."

But you'll have one less reader, in short order.

"Brains Optimized for Browsing" can only mean one thing: zombies optimized for browsing.

(Talk about a case of "soft inheritance"...)

As you imply, "The Internet" didn't get John Derbyshire fired. John Derbyshire's racist views got John Derbyshire fired.

I'm no expert in the history of OLPC, but everything I read about them seemed to indicate that they were all about giving these devices to needy children. I never saw anything written about how, exactly, these devices were supposed to make these childrens' lives better, once they got them. It just seemed to be assumed that, once kids had these computers, their school experience would somehow change for the better.

It would seem to me that a lot more time and money was spent getting these devices in the hands of needy kids than was spent on plans to use them to actually achieve positive change.

Hey, I'm corny and socially awkward, too! Where the hell is my venture capital firm?

Seriously, I think Mitt's unpopular because he's one heck of a flip-flopper who says quite a lot of mendacious things, not because of the way he looks or acts.

At least that's true for liberals. I suspect that, with conservative voters, he's probably unpopular because he's just not conservative enough.

On cursory inspection, Mandriva's new UI uses a GTK+ style, an icon theme based on Elementary, a full-screen launcher similar to Unity's Dash, and a modified version of Dolphin with no menu bar (and no way to enable it). I haven't kept up with why Rosa Labs (page in Russian) has taken over Mandriva UI development, but they have made their mark.

Is the full-screen icon picker, as in gnome-shell, Unity, and now "Simple Welcome" in Mandriva the wave of the future, or just a passing fad? (Personally, I prefer menus.)

Having read the Ars Technica story, I'm disturbed and maybe even a little frightened by the DOJ's actions against Mr. Adekeye. They're determined to take away his freedom and his money while acting as the muscle for Cisco's legal department.

This, along with other recent ridiculous cases, like the trumped-up charges against Aaron Swartz, have left me wondering, what can a US citizen do to change this situation?