It's not a good idea to use the particularities of a hardware production process as the theoretical basis for authentication.

As so many of us, I've been unsatisfied with recent developments in linux desktop environments. Since the advent of compositing, I've moved away from minimalist window managers, to enjoy window scaling/expo and similar improvements in desktop usability. I consider myself open to progress, in the sense that I've tried both unity and the gnome shell. But these last two have never gotten "out of my way", as they proclaim to do, and attempts to configure things to work the way I want have never been completely satisfying either. My most persistent frustrations have been with window switching and workspace management.

I've just given cinnamon 1.6 a try, and I must say that out of the box, it already fits my needs much better than both unity and gnome shell. I especially like the fact that you can name your workspaces, and dynamically expand them at the same time. Window switching without popups and without flicker also works, even if it's not blazingly fast. Lastly, configuration of behavior and layout (both by menu settings and by editing the theme's css) is more straightforward than I dared to hope.

Long story short: Cinnamon is well worth a try if you're lost in the crack between old and new style destkop environments.

I second this. Working in a research area that involves machine learning, I can say that it's *very* useful to be familiar with linear algebra and calculus. I wish I had taken more of that stuff when studying.

It *is* what RMS was complaining about: if Kazaa would have been free software, spyware would have had little chance, because it would be possible (and legal) to redistribute Kazaa without spyware. As I understand it, RMS's arguments do not concern what software-makers do with their money, but rather what restrictions they pose on you as you use their software.

Actually, we don't need to buy credits for carbon neutrality, just raising the prices will do the trick:

Let's call the carbon load associated with Microsoft activies X, and the price of a Windows license P. Furthermore, Q is the the money the average Windows user earns, after subtracting P. Finally we will denote by Y the total carbon load associated with the goods he/she buys at the value of Q, on average. If we increase the price of a Windows license by 100*((C*X/(Y*P)-1)%, the user will have less money to spend (and subsequently incur less carbon overhead), to extent that Microsoft carbon footprint is neutralized.

one more obligatory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itUMO7VLl0M

Dear dude,

It seems that we both want the same thing: a video format that can be used anywhere, without being forced to use particular software, and without software makers worrying about being sued for patent violations for implementing video codecs.

As this case shows, h.264 is not such a video format, it depends on patented technology. Of course you can embrace such a technology, and tell people to do painful things to themselves every time your favorite software maker gets sued for infringing h.264 patents. But I would argue that it's much better to choose a video format that is not liable to patent trolling (like WebM).

If they manage to do so by patent trolling, maybe it deserves to be destroyed, better sooner than later.

So this is the next standard for video on the web they're talking about?

Give him a break, he had no time to debug.

I think the problem is that the fonts are too small, that's why there appears to be too much white space.

+1