I think a lot of people are missing the point - nobody will remember steve jobs for Mac OSX.

They will remember him for the ipod, macbook air, mac mini, ipad series etc.

Whatever your views on their corporate behaviour, you have to admit it: mac laptops are shiny! ;)

None of this makes him a better or worse person, but all the talk about Apple's legal disputes and software derived from UNIX is missing the point. OSX is great to use, in a dull sort of way, but I much prefer debian. However, I have seen nothing as good for its size as a mac mini - even my 2008 model is better than non-apple models.

There is this http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/koolu/

There is a fundamental misunderstanding here.

Corporate BB users generally run their own servers, which are encrypted end-to-end and as far as I know are "secure", or at least not directly compromised by RIM.
Consumer blackberries, however, rely on RIM for their servers and it is here that governments may spy on communication.

Governments have treated encryption like a WMD since enigma, and if they cannot access data simply make it illegal to either import, export or run encryption http://www.wassenaar.org/.

This makes me want to find a new continent and set up a country where the citizens are free ... oh wait...

Can you imagine the equivalent chat face to face, perhaps in a bar?

Troll: "Your mother is a slut!!"
Nerd: "I agree she is rather free with her morals, but what makes you think so?"
Troll: "more aggressively because I like ****ing her" & punches...
Nerd: "mphmph" (mouth blocked by fist)

In the real world, we pay big men in black clothing to help such "trolls" leave licensed premises.

Perhaps its just because I mostly associate with gamers, but really, +b http://www.quakenet.org/faq/faq.php?c=52&f=62#62 was invented for trolls.

well said - oh for some mod points.

With his history, as its publicly reported, if he wasn't seeing an oncologist even if only to rule out cancer it would be surprising. This should be expected.

Of course, he could have been going to see a friend there or any one of a thousand things... cancer patients often get to meet each other at clinics and become friends.

I hope he gets well soon, in any case.

"this is obvious."

Since I put debian 6 on her laptop - the frequency of ubuntu updates annoyed her, and she refused to install them (windows failed her long ago - even without viruses the spyware slowed it to a crawl) - she thinks it matters a lot. And who am I to argue...?

I am slightly amused by all the insistence on its geek credentials. For the above installation I put the installation CD in and essentially pressed return until a working desktop came up. I admit I had to type 2 user names and passwords, but I didn't find it too onerous. For my other machines I might do other things - but that is me complicating matters and nothing inherently to do with debian. It seems all my hardware is so old now, it just works out of the box.

{Kindly refrain from posting "j00r m0m" jokes... heard them all before... really. Not a challenge, either.}

Traitorware is something that you pay for thinking that it has a specified purpose (e.g. printing) - but it betrays you.

Spyware is something that you didn't have any knowledge of (e.g. 3rd-party cookies on websites)

I agree that the end outcome isn't so different, but maybe how you get there is important sometimes?

Yeah. Remember this? Part of my recovery from the crash (now just over ten years ago) was learning to deal with having a damaged eye. Part of the damage that drunk f-head did to me was to jam my head through the windshield of my car. (This is what happens when huge SUVs hit tiny cars!) While the eye surgeon could save my left eye, they had to remove the lens to do so. So the eye still receives light, but it's all a blur -- literally. My peripheral vision and depth perception have been greatly reduced, though I've regained some depth perception over the past decade simply by living with it. (My life has been very good in the past five or six years, BTW. Not completely ruined by that calamitous night ten years ago.)

I'd like to see "Clash of the Titans," perhaps at the cheap seats, if only so that I can compare it to the 1981 "Clash" and complain about how much better movies were when I was a kid. ;-)

Add together poor color vision, and near sightedness. Plus, being crossed eyed, but that was corrected as a very young age. Today, it's astygmatism and slowly developing cataracts.

I got used to the idea that I can't see things just like other people see them ages ago. The 3-D glasses do nothing for me, and the movies just seem so much nonsense.

Ehhh. If anything, it's good to hear that I'm not all alone.

Now, maybe if they would start working on holographic movies, they could sell more to people like me.

Then again, maybe not. I mean, most of the movies are ass hat stupid to start with, they wouldn't be improved just because I can see them better. Watch that next action thriller with a critical eye. The good guy never takes cover, standing in plain sight of everyone with a weapon, and no one can hit him. The bad guys actually make good use of cover, but the bad guy picks them off by the dozen, using two machine guns ambidextrously. Ass hat stupid, I say.

I don't bother with content filters. Too many false positives, and too easy to get around. I figure the kids (12yo and 17yo) can handle seeing goatse.cx by accident, and if they actually go looking it's its own punishment. I do have their browsers set up to go through a squid proxy, and I periodically review the logs. I have it set up so that they have to ask me to allow them access; a cron job shuts it down again at bedtime.

That's it, really. The threat of their mom finding porno sites in the logs is pretty effective.

Yeah, they could trivially get around the proxy just by changing their settings. I'm really kind of disappointed that neither one has figured it out yet. I'd actually like them to try; they'd at least be learning something about computers.

Google's motto isn't "do no evil", it's "don't BE evil." Big difference, especially since they have, in fact, done evil.

When President Calderon started the "war against drugs", it was not becuase he wanted to stop drug cartels, but because he tought that it would be an easy way to legalize his goverment... today there still there is a lot of people that think his party stole the elections.. So he started without any particular plan ... Now, drug cartels know they are better armed that the mexican army (the probably have four or five more fire power in small and medium size arms), and know the power of money and terror. The truth is that the only way to stop them, is somthing the goverment would not dare to do... supervise the financial system, where the money is cleaned... That money... goes very high in the goverment... and the poilitical parties.. so nobody want it to stop...