I'm thinking about being able to do this for non-geek friends. I love cyanogenmod and would never go back a non-cyanogenmod-able phone, but a quick root and edit of the hosts file is invisible as far as non-geeks are concerned. Also, not all phones have cyanogenmod builds available.

Is it possible to simply edit the hosts file on a rooted android phone to block carrier iq, or does it use ip addresses directly? Just rooting android is easier than doing the entire root/custom recovery/custom ROM dance for most people.

Compiling a full Gnome 2 desktop from source is an exercise in masochism.

A Fedora final release is a RHEL public beta, no more, and no less.

The Vox's power management is awful as of the current firmware, v15. If you let the Vox handle power management, it often refuses to wake up wifi (if it wakes up at all) and you need to power cycle it to fix it. If you leave wifi on, the battery life goes to hell. I'm returning mine this afternoon.

If there's a cyanogenmod release with the market for it in the future, I might pick up a new one again just for CM. The Vox's Kobo app is the exact same one that can be downloaded through the google market, so I wouldn't be losing anything by going this route.

I've started to hate Endermen more. There's ways to defend against Creepers, but aside from building every wall double-width with half-height slabs or putting moats everywhere, Endermen are gonna screw your structures up. Mob towers quickly become swiss cheese unless every floor is only two spaces high.

For me, it's drivers. I've tried the last five Fedora releases on their respective release dates, and each one of them had a wifi or GPU (or both) driver-related showstopper of some kind. Ubuntu and its variants have handled the same hardware perfectly. Even stock Debian stable seems to handle my desktop, netbook and laptop's wifi and graphics better than Fedora 16.

I've just installed 11.10 on an older pentium D desktop (basically my distro-testing machine), and after finding Unity to be unusable I installed the standard Gnome 3 shell. It's definitely inspired by fisher-price baby's-first-tablet UIs, but at least it's responsive and stable and doesn't make running programs inaccessible. It's worth giving Gnome 3 a try for a day or so.

The US heavily subsidizes financial institutions much more than manufacturers. Don't you know that banks are the real Job Creators(tm) in the 21st century?

Forgiveness of debts was feasible when AIG was in trouble, and I didn't hear much argument from conservatives to the contrary at the time.

Kobo uses Adobe Digital Editions DRM. It's trivial to strip off. Just google "ineptepub" and you'll find an easy solution.

If they do, they'll laugh.

Oh, come on. Don't you know anything about capitalism? If there's sufficient demand for oil, then the market will provide for more dinosaurs to be turned into oil on the supply side. Didn't you ever take an economics course?

I thought we were talking about "a moderately successful tablet device", not "a near-total failure".

I would buy this simply because these guys screwed Michael Arrington over. The guy's a bully, and had it coming.