...and if you want to hear him state his full name and how he pronounces Linux: ftp://kernel.org/pub/linux/ker...

Yeah, I was wondering if you could use the onboard wifi as a client, as opposed to their intended use as a low-performance access point.

Of course, if small size / obscenely low power consumption isn't the ultimate goal, a Raspberry Pi has way more bells and whistles at about the same price...

Read TLDP's Coffee HOWTO ( http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Coff... ), messed around with some simple hardware. Now I use Google Voice to control my lights via SMS -- a hack in the traditional sense, I suppose.

These little guys appear to be running Linux, and some are even hackable (I'm not affiliated with any of these companies/blogs): http://www.monoprice.com/Produ...

http://haxit.blogspot.com/2013...
http://hackaday.com/2013/08/12...

If the BBC released their nature documentary series (Life, Planet Earth, Africa, Frozen Planet, etc.) in 4k, that would really be tempting...

I'm sure David Attenborough's voice would sound even better in 4k ;)

http://www.google.com/get/vide...

This is certainly true for some software (GUI/UX-heavy sort of applications, in my experience). Linux kernel, Apache (and the whole LAPP/LAMP stack), FireFox/Chromium, etc. are all OSS (to some extent). Yes, I think Open/LibreOffice is FAR from competitive with Word -- so I guess I'm agreeing with you, it varies a lot; but I take issue with "the quality of OSS is too bad."

I'm certainly not advocating abandoning proprietary software in one fell swoop. But there are cases where it can make loads of sense -- server OS, desktop browsers, etc.

But DVDs *do* have DRM -- it's just easy to circumvent. Is your issue with more advanced DRM that it's centralized (servers owned by some company), so your rights could be revoked at any time?

Just integrate DRM directly into the hardware -- more power efficient, and it Creates Jobs, Too! (But of course you shouldn't count the energy used for designing and fabricating those little ASICs -- that would be silly!)

I know it's huge overkill, but I've had times where it was honestly easier to drop the data into PostgreSQL (MySQL, if you prefer) than edit it in Excel / Gnumeric / Open/LibreOffice's spreadsheet tool.

There was one case where my friend needed to analyze a modest amount of data -- 70k rows, 30 columns or so -- and Excel would absolutely choke on her new laptop running Excel. Dropped it into Postgres on my anemic netbook and queries were lightning fast. No need to specify column types, either -- just load everything as text and do query-time typecasting.

Clearly, choose the right tool for the job; but if you like separating the data from the logic / are comfortable with SQL / etc., I find it much more efficient to write a few lines of SQL to get the data I want (export the queries to a CSV, load 'em up with gnuplot [or Octave as a gnuplot frontend], and you have pretty vector-graphics). To each his/her own, though.

Soft spot in my heart for Slack, too -- although I started off with an old RedHat CD I picked up at a garage sale (2.0 kernel series, I think), Slack was the first distro I really started using. Great stuff, though I've now moved on to Debian.

As to the "start off easy" sentiment, I would highly recommend Project Euler: http://projecteuler.net/proble... fun little programming exercises, and can really be done in any language.

Have you implemented a T9-style predictor (I'm not being glib)?

If so, I suspect there are optimal groupings of letters which minimize ambiguity, etc. (I'm guessing there is published work on this.)

Not to mention the fact that it is, to my way of thinking, stunningly gorgeous: http://www.oocities.org/capeca... http://www.oocities.org/capeca...

Something about the way the jet intakes are integrated into the wing. Very pretty!

It might be interesting if they introduced some user-selectable amounts of simulated decoherance, though -- perhaps to allow for simulation of quantum error correction, etc. Looking at this locally, it could be non-unitary (though I'm not sure the extent of the environment that one would model for such a computer simulator). Fun stuff, in any event.

I would argue there's a bit of a difference. If true, McAfee is using this illegal data for *profit*, as opposed to just using it for entertainment/personal use. I think a more analogous scenario would be grabbing a movie via TPB and then charging your friends to watch it with you.