Well, maybe not so much the free-as-in-beer stuff, but otherwise, yeah.

I think they're saying consumers won't, i.e. don't want to, flash the phone. If it's a meego phone, i.e. linux, gaining root is simple. And then flash away. Aren't people misunderstanding what Hurmola said?

He may be dogmatic, but he's also right WAY more than he's wrong. All of open source owes him a lot.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Vote parent +20.

Why are monolithic methods even discussed any more when we're talking about configurable computers? Well? Why?

News organizations do the exact same thing -- find sources and publish their stories -- and you don't see the US gov going after the Guardian or the NYTimes. (They're some of the news outlets that did the actual publishing. Wikileaks worked through them precisely because they were trying NOT to endanger people on the ground.) The US can't go after news outlets. There's this little thing called the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech.

But by de facto torture of Manning and by making an example of Assange (they hope, if they can get their hands on him) they figure they can "discourage" repeat embarrassments.

Because that's all they are: embarrassed. I didn't see anything come out we didn't already know. All Wikileaks did was provide hard evidence of the obvious.

More agreement from another satisfied Pair user since forever. (2002? 2003?) As the parent says, not the cheapest, but you do get your money's worth. I have had two gnarly problems getting software to run and they have helped me through it both times, through dozens of emails and several days. Any minor problem gets solved within hours.

As for trustworthiness, I believe I saw somewhere that one of their accounts is the White House. (?)

It's still true, five years later. I have my Ph.D. in a related field of molecular bio, and the consumer oriented genetic screening is nothing but a way to separate people from their hard-earned cash.

First, and most important, the science on anything involving multigene inheritance (which is practically everything, including Type II diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer susceptibility, etc., etc., etc.) is far from worked out. You'll get results, but even the scientists don't know what they mean yet.

Second, you need a lot of training to be able to interpret those results even to the extent that's valid under current knowledge. The gene screening outfits are not employing excellent genetic counselors to interpret the results. They have software (perhaps supplemented by drones) who match Dot A with Genetic Disorders Database B.

It's not GIGO, because your genetic input is not the garbage. But what comes out definitely is.

The morphometrics of the hand prints shows those first artists were women, Neandertal (or -thal), but not Vandal (or -dhal).

I use Kde 4.8 and like it a lot. But I have a core i7 with 4GB system memory, etc. etc. The other user in the house switches between two identical legacy laptops which are so old I don't even remember the specs. They'll run Ubu-pangolin with Mate or Mint with Mate, but Kde runs just long enough to think, "Wow. Nice. Shiny!" (which it really is!) and then crashes. (Yes, desktop effects are turned off, and so on.) Kde needs a lightweight streamlined layer.

What iridology does tell you is that people noticed changes in irises decades ago. And they do change a lot and quite quickly in a noticeable number of people with medical conditions, eye irritation, trauma, etc., etc. The researchers at Notre Dame needed to walk across the quad and get some feedback from ophthalmologists before they published.

Your list is a lot more thorough than mine. (I didn't read TFA. I'm on /.) But that was my first thought. Whuuut? "Windows To Go, which allows you to take a portable installation of Windows 8 with you. ... including the return of the Start button on the desktop, virtual desktops...." These are new things?

I haven't used Win since 2005 (except XP in virtualbox to do my taxes) so I'm only tenuously connected to what's possible in Win. I did download the free dev Win8 version they had a while ago and set up a vm to look at it. Tiles. Okay. Move your most-used stuff up from the panel and put it into big blocks. Rearrange tiles. Okay. I can do that, too. Thumbnails on mouseover. Yeah, cool. I turned that off on my desktop a couple of years ago because, honestly, if I don't know why I'm running a minimized thingy it's time to close it. I can open contacts by clicking on it. Uh-huh. Been doing that since the mid-90s. And then I got kinda bored and I haven't looked at it since.

Ads? ADS? Say it ain't so. Ubuntu was my main OS since Dapper, but Unity moved me to LinuxMint Debian and KDE. Now that I've heard about this, I'm not even going to bother checking out their new releases in virtualbox.

First: completely agree that it's (much?) cheaper and more or less as good to get prints from Costco et al.

Second: should you want to do it yourself, the crucial difference is whether the printer uses dye sublimation technology. The Canon Selphys are the cheapest-and-best-at-the-price that I've come across. Buy archival photo paper to feed it, and you have your own set up for under $200.

I've been doing a tiny test by putting a few prints on the fridge which gets direct sun for a few months of the year. They've been there for five (six?) years now and have only just started showing a tiny bit of fading. In an album, they'd be fine for decades at that rate. The ink-jet prints (HP Deskjet? Canon something?) I had up for comparison faded to very bleached-looking in less than a year.

It's a regulatory agency. Just order it, you doofi.

I think it was 2007. Linux was taking off all over the place. Governments were talking about adopting open standards. Schools and municipalities were deploying Linux. You could see it really starting to take hold.

Microsoft's no stupider than everybody else. They could see it, too. And I seem to remember they dropped the price on Windows to $3. (That was on whichever version was old, but still dominant at the time. XP?) Not in the US, but elsewhere, where the danger was highest. Then they also really, really, really pushed to prevent adoption of open standards and, if that wasn't possible, to water those standards down to something that interfered less with their business model.

And, as far as I can see, they've successfully held back the tide that time.

Which isn't to say that the problems with Linux people have identified upthread aren't right. They are. Linux does have problems with lack of advertising and sudden holes where important stuff ceases to work. That is very important and something we really need to get our act together about. But the real problems shouldn't blind us to the equally real problems that have nothing to do with Linux itself.