Well, relativity simply solved.

All we need to do is find an object that has a magnetosphere and no aqueous sea.

How about the Sun?

I heard "apt-get remove" is good at that.

Why spend that much time on a proprietary OS just to make it 'work'? Seems that's the manufacturers responsibility of fitness, not the end users. Homepage

I already wasted many hours of my life building nlited XP CDs.
It's the only way to stop all the "non-uninstallable" crap from getting on there in the first place.

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Then perhaps you need to make yourself learned about Eucalyptus.

I would also learn about a little used language called Erlang and how it works. Something screams ultra-distributed network there. Im sure Haskell or Lisp could do similar, but updating programs while users are on it active, just seems so much more powerful.

---This problem cannot be solved by technology.

Oh, it absolutely can. Current transaction costs are exacted by Banks and credit companies. Their merchant fees are insane, something on the range of .5-2$ + 3%. And banks have straight 2-4$ fees for anything money handling. If a digital microcurrency could be made using strong crypto (1995 paper by RSA guys showed how to do it), then we could cut out the banks, other than trading in and out of the microcurrency.

---Sure, you can make a system that reduces the seller's transaction costs to near zero, but all this work has completely ignored the buyer's transaction costs. With micropayments, you're asking your customers to spend more time managing their micro-account than the product you're selling is worth.

Do you honestly think that transaction management of costs ranging from .01 cents (yes, 1/100 of 1 cent) all the way up should be done by a person? What're you smoking?

Your "PayBox" is a forwards and backwards counting micropayment machine. You make the rules on what you allow, and what you deny. You set warnings when certain thresholds are met. You make the general rules, or use preconfigured ones. You can override these "rules" by warning you what the rule break does.

Eventually, everybody would be able to use a micropayment architecture, including massive media. It'd be rather nice if we create the content, and have a very small, nonzero price that we actually pay for our surfing.

---Suppose I have a micropayment account which charges to my credit card each month. I read all the articles I want because, hey, it's only a few cents. One of these days I'm going to look at my statement and the total for that month will be over $100 -- more than I intended to spend.

Your financial rules would have stopped that before you "saw the bill".

---Micropayments are not good for the customers, and unsurprisingly, people have not been willing to pay them.

You're right they're not good for customers, because money handles make is impossible to throw a 1$ at a website for good information without spending 5$ to do so.

Im investigating a business that does precisely this: enables people to make money.

What about guys who liked Sailor Moon? :) Try watching the originals, not the mutilated crap shown here in the US... Those lesbians were hot!

It's the pirates first, but when will it be "Dear Ol Auntie" who gets bit with malware or extreme mistrust by a company (surprise). An attack on "Dear Ol Auntie" has already been done by Sony with little to no real punishment.

We'd like to think that a music recommendation engine would be impartial and fair. The engine is, but the people arent. And aside from that, they most likely broke laws when they handed out identifying information to their corporate owner. There's a lot of laws regarding data security in places like California and throughout the EC.

If Microsoft uses their patents related to crippling their OS, then we will eventually have users.

Right now, Vista64 users must use signed drivers... even if self signed. When will they migrate to a model of Approved Drivers and buying kernel modules to enable parts of the system?

Think Steam+Windows. And think 10$ price point.

Figured I'd make some comments about your adventure.

1) Installation is awesome.

Absolutely. I like using the computer to test for stuff while installing. Using that mode as a demonstration is rather powerful too.

2) Adding third party software is a MAJOR PAIN IN THE ASS!!! Following instrustions meant for a noob, I screwed it up 3/5 times. I swear I can follow instructions. I earn a living on fixing comptuer problems and following instructions.

Usually, most of the software you need are already in the main archives+medibiuntu. Sometimes, you need PPA (personal archives) for some software. And usually they fail to provide signing keys. It gives a bitch about unsigned software, but just continue on.

3) Why do Linux programs close themselves? I dont' think they are crashing. Like I add a software source then hit close, it updates, gives me an error about my key not working, then terminates! So I have to reopen it.

Sometimes, they are crashing. Firefox had a problem like that where it would just close. Now, if you run a console (Applications-Accessories-terminal) and run firefox there, you can see when it exits if it's a crash. Usually Firefox segfaults if it crashes. You can do this with other programs to see if they spit error messages to console before leaving.f you kill the first program, it doesnt touch the second one. Unix based machines do different. If you call a program and that program calls program 2, and then you proceed to kill the first program, it kills both. The idea here is if you kill a parent process, you kill all he children processes. You can see this by giving a kill signal to init (the master process that runs everything). It proceeds to shut down the machine... or hang it.

Also, in the Windows world, when a program runs another program, they both run as though invoked by the user. That means if you kill the first program, it doesnt touch the second one. Unix based machines do different. If you call a program and that program calls program 2, and then you proceed to kill the first program, it kills both. The idea here is if you kill a parent process, you kill all he children processes. You can see this by giving a kill signal to init (the master process that runs everything). It proceeds to shut down the machine... or hang it.

4) Step 3 gave me an error, so naturally, I copied it to the clipboard. I click on okay and the error dissapears, terminating the program. My error, that WAS in the clipboard is now gone... Awesome.

Weirdness: There's 2 clipboards in Linux. There's an XWindows clipboard and a Gnome Clipboard. Simply highlighting stores stuff in the XWin clipboard (middle-mouse pastes text from this buffer). The right_click-copy and right_click-paste does so from Gnome clipboard.

There's a few other weird things that also occur. One is CTRL+backspace actually works. It deletes the last word you typed, which is damned handy in coding. Windows does it too, but broken.

5) Key signing for software packages is a pain in the ass & comlpicated. Surely there can be an easier way to get this working. How about downloading a file that contains the software source, and the key togeather and then import the file? I still can't get this thing working...

Key management is always going to be a pig to set up, just because it's supposed to be. The understanding is we don't want people injecting bad packages (think what would happen if you installed a hacked ssh-server or kernel module). Admittedly, package maintainers on PPAs should make their keys and sign their packages, but most dont. And you will get warnings about that. I guess it'll be fixed eventually when key management becomes more advanced.

6) Synaptic Software manager's sorting is crappy. I open it up search for xbmc and see packages availalbe for installation. I can click the column headers and sort, but for some reason, when I select a package, the list unsorts! This makes it hard to select packages of similar type (skins in this case).

True, synaptic isn't terribly great. I do know that Ubuntu was made for not working with console, but I like installing from console. The commands I use are the following:

apt-cache search (some package) | less
and then
sudo apt-get install (package_name)

And, on the first search you get way too many packages, I do something like
apt-cache search (some package) | grep (search_term) | less

Hopefully, I've either cleared some questions up for you.... or make more questions ;P

TPB are potential buyers. For our reasons, they might have even bought before. The key is we just dont know.

Assuming we want more money, how do we attract these people to pay for our product?

Do we sue? We might get a judgment, or the suit might 'warn' others. Or they could be judgment-proof or just not care. By then though, you alienate users that either have bought or gettng ready to buy.

Then we have a class of users who want goods and the companies refuse to bring them. There's a lot of 'limbo' books, music and movies that have no delineated owner. Piracy is the best option here because no money's made anyways.

And going by your prior posts, you're a copyright lover. Remember that copyright is supposed to serve us as a people. When it's not is a sign or either steep reform or to trash the whole idea.

Ethical or not, you will have to deal with a culture that accepts downloading as "victimless". The numbers of people downloading and trading are growing every day. You cant stop this.

Its the media's choice to either take criminal or tort action, or encourage them to buy. Somehow, suing your potential buyers is just a bad practice. It sure didnt work for SCO.

Although completely off topic, you may want to read this and this before you make any more comments about your drug policy.

In a nutshell: the Socialists and Communists in Portugal came together and said that drug (ab)users are patients, not criminals, and should be offered treatment options. Those dealing should still be criminalized. The cost of the treatment options would be much less than the cost of incarceration.

After 5 years of full implementation, drug use has dropped in all levels. AIDS infections dropped by 75%. Overall health levels have risen, as was the goal. And the negative possible result of these "patient" laws was that Portugal would be a drug mecca. It has not, since dealing is still treated as harsh as before.

WHEN it happens, Ill take interest.

As of now, sites dont do that, nor have an easy way to "verify" that content got on the screen. Or, it could be covered with pixels the same as the background for all it knows.

Sounds like you want some sort of Turing complete ad injection mechanism. Good luck with that.

They decided to take the case. That makes them in part responsible for this garbage.

Perhaps if no attorney is willing to take cases against the public, would laws be a bit more civil.

I just saw this on the slashdot front page:

____
Disable Advertising
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising.
____

Erm.... Adblock Plus and noscript took care of them for years. Why start offering good posters "candy" we've had for years? I have no qualms about blocking every ad and interstitial out there. Its your choice to put them there. Its my choice to "not consume".

And go ahead, detect Im using ABP and NS. I'll start using a blocking proxy. Simply solved. What's it again? apt-get install squid?