Just for the record, my family had a Packard Bell that ran Mandrake Linux extremely reliably for many years. Though from listening to other people complain about Packard Bells online, I guess we got the only good one they ever made :)

You could only stream the Olympics (in the U.S.) if you had cable (they required a log in). Even if you could watch it OTA, you couldn't stream it.

Because, AIUI, the part of the DMCA takedown request that is backed under penalty of perjury is that Microsoft owns the copyright to Windows 8. There's nothing in the takedown certifying that the site is in fact infringing on that copyright. Since no one disputes that Microsoft owns the copyright to Windows, there's no perjury. Just annoyance.

Of course, IANAL, etc, etc.

It's not the music and movie industries that control the debate (if there were one). Sure, they try, but it is the various news media programs out there which tell everyone about the "piracy problem". The news programs which only give one side, that copyright is a great thing and that pirates are stealing money out of starving artists hands.

Of course, the news media themselves have a vested interest in stronger copyright, since they directly benefit from that copyright. Whether MSNBC, the New York Times, NPR, or Fox News, all of them make their living peddling copyrighted goods that they created. Why would any of them favor a policy or a candidate that would want to limit their (perceived) ability to make money?

It doesn't help that copyright law makes the average person's eyes glaze over faster than a discussion on tax policy, so they just go with whatever the news person on TV told them. They wouldn't lie to make money, would they?

So, what you're saying is that DirectTV used social engineering techniques to convince people to install malicious software on their receivers and then sent a signal to those receivers that destroyed them, potentially causing millions of dollars in damages? It seems to me that if I did that, I'd be prosecuted, no matter what the people I attacked did to me.

OTOH, after reading some more about the details, the smart cards may have actually been DirectTV's property that they had lent to the hackers because they were DirectTV subscribers. The hackers were just changing their subscription level to get more than they paid for. So, in effect, DirectTV was destroying their own property. And I guess since the hackers didn't really have "clean hands", they couldn't very well claim that DirectTV wasn't providing the basic service that they were paying for.

Still, I bet they didn't tell their legal department what they were doing until after it was done, and it does sound like a neat hack :)

$ type bcc
bcc is a function
bcc ()
{
    echo "$@" | bc -l
}

This is a great little bash function I made many years ago. It's very nice to be able to add up a long string of numbers, or do large multiplies, or even more complicated stuff like '256/sqrt(2)' right on the command line. You have to be a little careful about shell expansions: 42*7 is OK, but 42 * 7 is not, and parenthesis are a pain (I usually just put the whole expression in single quotes if there's a parenthesis somewhere in it). The best part is the answers are just printed out to the terminal ready for a quick double click/middle click to paste it into the next computation.

Running an X server only fixes part of the problem. Sure, today, most applications are X clients, and thus running an X server on Wayland will allow for network transparency. But what happens in a few years when many applications start becoming only Wayland clients? I won't be able to ssh somewhere and run the Wayland applications, no matter what server (Wayland and/or X) I'm running locally. And even if someone comes up with a way of forwarding Wayland traffic, what happens when I'm sitting at a machine that only has X installed?

There is a big difference from the caller's point of view between foo(char*) and foo(const char*). The former allows modification of the string being passed while the latter does not. This can be important to the caller, and can mean the difference between calling foo("some string literal") and having to copy that literal into a character array to pass.

You can make something more const in a method, if you really want:

void foo(double d)
{
  const double* const dPtr = &d;
 
/* read "d" by accessing *dPtr */
  printf("d is %f\n", *dPtr);
}

If you're using c++, you can also use const references, which won't add any overhead (I don't think these have been added to the C spec, but I could be wrong):

void foo(double d)
{
  const double& dRef = d;
 
// read "d" by accessing dRef
  std::cout << "d is " << dRef << std::endl;
}

I've done the const reference trick before when I've wanted to call the const overload of a method on a C++ class because I knew the non-const overload did extra work I didn't want it to do (because it was non-const).

To reduce the slowdown from other sites using facebook scripts, add these to your adblock rules:

||facebook.com^$third-party
||facebook.net^$domain=~facebook.com
||fbcdn.net^$domain=~facebook.com
||fbcdn.com^$domain=~facebook.com

I don't think that last one is actually necessary, but it was in the list I saw. These block facebook scripts from any site other than facebook itself. Blocking them also keeps facebook from tracking you all over the web.

The FSF could conceivably bring a slander (or in this case, libel) case against MS. After all, MS is telling a third party (their customers) something false about the FSF that could conceivably cause damages. It's that last part that's tricky though. It would be tricky to prove any actual damages.

It's probably worth more to the FSF as PR to get people sympathetic to their cause to donate more money. It's kind of like how political party X likes the most extreme member of party Y because they can use what that person says and does to raise money from their own members.

They may not see it, but just about everything that gets the user from the kernel booting to being able to launch a web browser like Chrome is a lot of GNU software. To say that it is irrelevant is misleading. Besides, many people do things on their computers that aren't in a web browser, and on Linux, much of that depends on GNU software. Even those web browsers typically depend on GNU library software like glibc.

The only place you could use Linux without GNU is on Android (which interestingly, isn't called "Android/Linux").

RMS gets a lot of flack for the GNU/Linux thing, but he has a good point that the user's experience on Linux is as much "Linux" as it is "GNU". Of course, by extension that might mean we should call it Gnome/X/GNU/Linux, or something similar. So, most people just use "Linux", probably because it's easier to say :)

What Hulu brings is all the shows in one convenient interface. When a new episode comes out, it gets added to your queue, and you can easily click to watch it. You don't have to go through some poorly designed show site that tries to hide the full episode videos from you to get it.

Plus the Hulu flash player is one of the best video players I've seen and works really well on Linux. It even hides the mouse pointer in full screen. Much better than, for example, the Comedy Central one on the Daily Show and Colbert Report that has a habit of randomly skipping to the next section (chapter) of the show.

Though I often watch video on Hulu, I'll probably never give them money, since their subscription service still has advertisements. But Hulu has always been controlled by the major networks (I'm pretty sure they are majority owners), so they have a vested interest in not changing viewers' habits.

Why is this a Firefox bug? What do other browsers do to prevent this type of thing? I was under the impression that cross site scripting prohibitions in the browser prevented sites from doing what you're saying is happening.

Why would a master password protect against this issue? Wouldn't the password autofilling (assuming that's the issue) be available once the user had entered the master password, just as if there were no master password? I admit I've never bothered to set a master password, so maybe the behaviour is different when you have one.

There's also no reason why you individually have to follow it. It's essentially just a social convention. Almost none of the clocks in my house observe it. My TZ variable is set to "EST5". It does mean I have to translate when talking to people about the time, but that's not too hard.

I've been doing this for many years now. I've realized that DST is really just a social hack. Most people don't like getting up early and they do like going to be later. So, if you convince them to change their clocks, they can continue to sleep in and go to bed late, while at the same time actually getting up earlier. It's essentially just a mind game.

But even as someone who opts out of DST, I get benefits, too. I may have to get to work an hour earlier, but I also leave an hour earlier (essentially, working 7-4 instead of 8-5), and the extra hour in the afternoon "feels" like I got more than the hour earlier I lose coming in earlier. Though I'm also more of an early riser now (must be getting old!), so that probably biases my opinion :)

Does that work in all cases? I recently attended a seminar where the speaker advocated making "hybrid" apps for mobile platforms. There are simple wrappers around a web view that downloads the necessary HTML, JS, etc files when it's first launched, and can update automatically. I pointed out that this seems like a huge security issue for users, since the developer could go rogue and change the various files to do something nasty. The speaker didn't really have an answer.

Your backup solution sounds interesting, but even if it restored the cached old version of the HTML, etc files, there's the possibility that they would still get the new versions the next time you run the app. I suppose you could block the app's network access, but that might not always be feasible (the app might need network access to do its job).

I don't have a solution. This is a systemic problem with web apps. But on the phone, these hybrid apps have more access than normal browser based apps. So something to think about.