Most Linux distros have buttons on the right -- it's just Ubuntu (which isn't even the most popular anymore, and is slowly losing popularity) and a few close derivatives that don't follow suit.

"Complete" Themes change the icons as well, not just the backgrounds. It used to be that themes in general changed the icons & background, and the newer background-only customizations were called Personas -- but then Mozilla inexplicably decided to name both types "themes" and make "Personas"refer to some kind of account service.

The SeaMonkey site has an "extract to subdirectory &run" Linux release on the front page. I'm finding that quite a bit can be done to "update" the UIusing just themes & extensions over at "SeaMonkey Addons" like MonkeyFix and Sea Fox, but Iget the sense that a lot more can be done via about:config.

Odd. I use YouTube relatively often, and always have AdBlock Plus &Flashblock enabled/installed. The biggest problem I've run into with the combo is that ABP thus far can't get rid of the smallish semi-collapsing ad that appears within the video and is sponsored by the account holder.

From what I recall, though, the main difference between Firefox and other browsers is that it's the only one that lets ABP block sites from even requesting a resource; on other browsers, all ABP can do is hide elements from view once they're downloaded. That might somehow tie into the problem you're having.

FWIW I'm using Firefox 22 (I dislike the changes made as of 23) in Mepis Linux, on an old 2GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM.

Correction: 24/7 with Firefox almost always in use when I'm actively interacting with the system (6-12 hours/day, maybe). I didn't mean that there's always somebody using Firefox at all hours of day and night.

What distro/environment? In Mepis, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Fedora, it has been rock-solid stable for me using KDE 4, GNOME2, KDE 3/Trinity. I usually only keep 4-10 tabs open and use the Too Many Tabs extension for the rest, and Iusually kill off the Flash plugin via htop an hour or two after watching a video. That's a nine-year-old 2GHz Centrino laptop with 1GB of RAM, running 24/7 with Firefox almost always in use, AdBlock Plus & FlashBlock installed.

OTOH it crashed or froze up fairly often when I was using Ubuntu (roughly May 2008-Jan 2010) on a very similar laptop.

If NASA really was a matter of mankind "exploring strange new worlds" and "seek(ing) out new life and new civilizations"-- or if it had even just given us tangible improvements to the average person's quality-of-life that couldn't have been discovered on land or underwater -- then it wouldn't have eventually lost people's support. Effectively,you want to pour money into a dream based on an exciting science-fantasy TVshow that was as realistic about spaceflight/exploration as fantasy novels/shows are at depicting life in the middle ages.

Consider... What if your grandkids don't turn out to be any good at STEM work or at best could be minimum-wage codemonkeys, and thus land among the masses that make just enough to live paycheck-to-paycheck with few luxuries. Would you still feel it's a great idea to take money that could be spent on finding ways to make survival or employment easier and instead spend it on dreams conjured up by a TVshow from your youth? (Iagree with you about think tanks because they're directly tainted by politics, but the knowledge & research performed by high-end universities can very often predict the end-results of different paths.)

For the past several years, most suicide bombers have been involuntary, as the terrorism org ran low on angry young men and switched over to strapping bombs to people that couldn't fight back or fully understand due to psychiatric illness, cognitive disability, or youth. The ones that do it voluntarily are typically angry young adults that see themselves as having no future and relatively easily convinced that they'd be respected &revered as a hero for their sacrifice -- the same sort of patriotic bullshit that was common in the US up through the Vietnam War, as songs like I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin-To-Die-Rag parodied.

Thank you for making me choke on my soda with unexpected laughter -- I'm from the North Bay (Sonoma County), andmost of the longtimers are tired of both hearing how awesome SF & the wealthier parts of the South Bay are and with having outsiders assume that we share their belief. Insipid articles over-glorifying SF that use "Bay Area"as a synonym don't help.

Q: "What do you like the most about /. Beta?" A: "This Space Intentionally Left Blank"

I agree, but it's too easy to ignore email, so we should also all repost it to our journals with "publicize"checked (and be sure to vote for others doing the same); if enough of us do that, our angry complaints will fill the queue and hopefully part of the front page. That would be much harder for /. Admin & Dice to shrug off, especially as Idoubt advertisers will be happy at seeing the userbase openly planning to implode.

Well, Usenet is slowly growing active again, and public servers for folks whose ISPs don't offer it still exist. (It's probably coming back because it's not controlled by a government or corporation, doesn't require 'real' names, the user controls what it looks like to them, stuff like that.)

I don't know which groups were used for discussing science/tech news articles in the past, though. :-/

They've been working (and receiving near-universal negative feedback) on the Beta for *months* with no sign that they're paying a lick of attention to feedback. Also, website "beta-testing" is, by nature,effectively just a test of the final version under a full load so they can fix any remaining critical bugs.

Corporate rights-holders like Disney are the ones that want over-long copyright periods. The actual creators just want the right to earn an income from their own work during their lifetime, and many would be happy with 10-20 years.

Ifavor an altered form of lifetime rights, as I'll explain quickly in part:
-- The creator should not be able to sell or transfer ownership of the copyright. Instead, they would 'rent' non-exclusive licenses to companies for a limited timespan, with a certain guaranteed profit percentage for the creator (so they couldn't be screwed like writers & musicians are now).
-- The company would have the right to full sell those copies, not rent them. If it sold copies it didn't have a license for, it would then be required to pay the creatorthe full cost plus a fine and any legal costs the creator would incur handling the matter.
-- Ideally, the companies would compete with one another on cost, quality, and speed/ease of delivery. Few people with any money will pirate if they can get a high-quality copy to their device(s) in an instant by clicking a button.
-- DRM wouldn't exist within ebooks. Instead, since many people just do whatever is easiest and don't care about DRM, allow store owners that produce their own branded e-readers have the default software place limits on lending out or reading lent-out books. (People willing to root their device to install third-party e-reader apps or that pick non-store readers could avoid it, as they're the ones motivated enough to crack DRManyway.)
-- Rather than wasting resources fighting it as a blanket criminal issue, a tiny fraction of those funds could be used to stigmatize impersonal 'sharing' (obtaining from a stranger as opposed to a friend) as being on par with accepting the free lunch at school or being on welfare.

My logic:
-- If someone does the hard work of creating something, IMHO they should be in control of it. Not a corporation, their neighbor, or their relatives.
-- If copyright will expire within the creator's lifetime, the companies (Hollywood studios, game studios, publishers, etc.) will all refrain from touching the work until it expires in order to avoid having to pay up.
-- Copyright is essentially an attempt to compensate for the fact that creators are paid by a lot of people over a long time period rather than an equivalent amount all at once by one person/group. These days, it takes far longer to reach that point than it used to.

'Free' is fine for people that are happy with the amateur work found in fan fiction and (to a slightly lesser degree)that still dominates the self-published arena. The problem is, producing a high-quality novel takes a massive amount of time, hard work and frustration:

-- author dedicates 6-9 months worth of full-time to write the best they can on their own
-- editor aggressively criticizes potential flaws, demanding drastic cuts & changes
-- author picks up ego, spends another 2-3 full-time months rewriting based on criticisms
-- editor criticizes that copy &suggests still more changes
-- author (who by now hates the book) spends another1-2 full-time months rewriting it yet again

Writers that are working just from the joy of using their craft (e.g. for free) are very unlikely to go through the painful & frustrating chore of the editing stages (particularly as that would cost hundreds of dollars), will drop that particular story when they lose interest, and most will only share completed work with a small limited group. The ones that do earn some money but not enough to quit their day job don't have remotely as much time to hone the quality of the initial book or the rewrites, so the results end up subpar.