Linux customization for the masses?

"Well, I for one resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me--the free man and woman of this country--as 'the masses.'"
--Ronald Reagan, in his speech on behalf of Senator Barry Goldwater, October 27, 1964.

The free users of free software shouldn't be called "the masses" either.

This is ridiculous and stupid. Typical of government bureaucracy. Next thing you know all cameras will be required to make a buzzing noise for ten seconds before snapping each photo, followed by the announcement, "The moving carousel is about to start. Parents supervise your children. Do not sit, stand, or place fingers on the moving carousel."

I would write a book where hackers are part of a punk group with purple hair, weird piercings, crazy loud music and baggy pants falling halfway down with their boxers hanging out. Where they use AOL to hack into secret government computers by manipulating 3D images and going through a walkthru that looks like a level from Quake III. Then they would do a covert operation in the middle of the night, sneaking through a sewer into a building with laser alarm systems by doing crazy acrobatics, to access a console, which they use a password cracker (a device that looks like a joystick with a numeric readout) to crack the code within one second, and then by dragging an icon labeled "Raven Account, $1B" into a folder with their group's name on it, they jack a billion dollars from some evil warlord or something. Because we all know that hacking into secret computers involves solving 3D puzzles and going through a Quake level to shoot the cyber guards, web crawlers, and gate keepers.

Eight billion United States Dollars? That's a lot of money. Let's demonstrate just how much money it is. If you received $8,000,000,000.00 on the day that Jesus Christ was born, and you spent $10,000.00 every single day until now, you'd still have plenty of money left. Especially if you had all this money in an interest bearing government-guaranteed account. Unfortunately, whichever government guaranteed it when you began no longer exists by now. To sum up, it's a lot of money.

You got that right. In Apple, Preview is a wonderful program, instant startup, with lots of nifty features that you'll use all the time, but unfortunately its search feature is teh suxx0rz. If you want to search for a phrase, it finds all instances of each word of your search individually. AFAIK there is no way to force it to search for whole words only, entire phrase, match case, etc. For this reason, it is necessary to get the Adobe program.

I hope it prevents cell phones from breaking when dropped. Think of the effect that will have on landfills! Currently if you drop your cell phone, chances are some connection comes loose. Then the phone shuts down or malfunctions intermittently. What we need are electronic connections that don't break when a shock is received.

I would say that in any given week, I do about 15 minutes of actual, real work.

This all sounds fine and dandy but does it mean that those laid off would have to leave the country? Because it's not quite as simple as it sounds. Think about it. You lose your job to layoffs and to add insult to injury you are KICKED OUT of the country. Bureaucrats.

I can see it now. Journalists unfamiliar with this will write articles discussing Firefox, and among the other "facts" they'll get wrong, they'll note that Firefox sends all your browsing information to its maker. There will be an entire campaign of FUD around this. Maybe they should have released the same exact code under a separate name like Volunteerfox. Volunteerfox will send info about your browsing habits but Firefox will not. Then all the FUD in the world about Volunteerfox won't hurt Firefox.

This story is written very confusingly.

1. Federal agencies are not supposed to track you with long term cookies.
2. YouTube is exempt.

It doesn't make sense. Like you, I would like to know what the hell this means. I know for certain that YouTube is not a federal agency, otherwise it wouldn't be called YouTube. It would be called The Federal Content Service, Audio Visual Department, Internet Bureau, Office of Internet Accessible Audio Visual Content.

Then they'll get sued for not including Browser X in their GUI wrapper, when Browser X is some browser nobody has ever heard of that only five people use, but they swear that it is the ONE TRUE browser.

Ujuuggghhhh, I'm suffocating!

The local spacetime of the Earth is carried with it as it moves through the universe. Einstein showed and later proved that a clock on Earth and an identical clock on a planet somewhere else will, inside their local time frames, tick at exactly the same speed, but compared to each other, one may appear to be nearly at a standstill while the other might be turning so fast you can't see the hands. The difference in the "rate" of time when compared is due to the different velocities at which these local frames of reference are moving through the other three dimensions.

Likewise as you travel through this local time frame, that is, move through the fourth dimension, the mass you're on in the other three dimensions will carry you with it, so that you will not appear to move geographically during your journey through time.

Just as an airplane travels at 300 miles per hour through the air. It's moving horizontally. If you stand in the aisle and jump vertically, you will land in the same spot in the aisle from which you jumped. Because although you are moving along a different dimension, the other two continue to "carry" you with them.

I have a great idea. Make it LAW throughout the EU that ALL computers, regardless of OS, must ship WITHOUT a browser, with an instruction sheet in bold letters that you find as soon as you open the box, like the warranty one that says, "Stop, do not return this to the point of sale if you have a problem," that reads, "Pursuant to EU law, this computer ships with no Internet browser. We recommend downloading the browser of your choice. Doing this when you don't already have a browser with which to do it is clearly obvious and left as an exercise for the reader. At [insert computer builder name here], your satisfaction is important to us."

Someone should write a JavaScript interpreter in Python and then port Bochs to JavaScript so we can emulate a virtual machine's instruction set in an interpreted environment running inside an interpreted environment. Then install Linux with GNOME on a 386, run Windows 3.1 in this environment, and note how much faster it is than you-know-what, when you-know-what is running on the biggest, baddest, the shit, fastest box there is around.