Mod parent up! (crap, I had points left yesterday.... :)

Parent makes the important point: There's existing SCOTUS case law for this, and Sony's legal-ish threats and demand for press et al to refrain from looking at embarrassing things wouldn't stand up in a stiff breeze, much less in a lower court.

Frankly I'm kind of surprised to see a relatively experienced lawyer such as Boies make a demand like this, even if he is a distinguished douchebag. Usually lawyers like him are concerned about appearances, and making laughable demands that evoke a Streisand effect is bad for business.

OP gets things turned around: Canonical released the Unity interface for Ubuntu in the summer of 2010, and then made it the mandatory desktop on Ubuntu in mid-2011 sparking an exodus of users to other distros, Windows, and OSX. Without getting into some curious timing... Just about a year later in the summer of 2012, Microsoft released the Metro interface for Windows 8, copying many of the tiled UI ideas and touch/gesture-on-the-desktop that had been rejected by more geeky and novice users alike -- only this time into a far larger market.

Honestly, from inside Redmond it was very strange to watch this happen, with a lot of people asking 'what the hell are we doing?' and variations on 'didn't the little guy fall on his face when he tried this?' The parallels were almost comical; with Ballmer and Sinofsky insisting that "customers like this!" in words almost identical to Shuttleworth two years earlier, and similar expressions of dismay and denial of the humiliating reception that followed. Though Ballmer and Sinofsky wielded market power Shuttleworth could only dream of, the outcomes were predictable and there had been plenty of warning. The hard part for these guys to accept is that when your ideas are so thoroughly rejected by people/consumers/end users -- and you keep doing the unwanted thing anyway -- it's not like the audience remains as motivated to see what you come up with next**. They just start ignoring you.

** (even if the very same UI concepts work well in another context -- in this case, on a mobile handset)

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Mom?

Is that you?

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I did. They didn't give a shit. And lest you think me a whiner, I also contributed work and donated a bunch of money to the Mint project (among many others), and whaddya know, they listen to both technical and nontechnical contributors... and produce a polished product with great flexibility across a wider audience. So don't tell me it can't be done; it's just that the FF team decided their first principles were "oo shiny" and "I know best" instead of "do the needful things" and "listen."

Make that STILL out.

When the naval-gazing derpfest at FF rolled out that hideous chrome-knockoff "Australis" interface revamp in v29, I used the debian equivalent of the middle finger: sudo apt-mark hold firefox
to stem the tide of f**ck-the-user UI design, common features hidden behind weird hamburger buttons, and unreadably huge defaults.
WOW. MUCH HUGE. SO WHITESPACE IS THE NEW CAPSLOCK.

That gave a me a little time to explore options. With a little work, I can make Seamonkey usable, but I do lament the loss of an easy choice that IU can recommend to less geeky friends. IE is a lost cause even on my work machines and msft doesn't remotely give a shit about user feedback. Chrome's entire skeletal structure is made from IE spyware toolbars working together as a virtualized/rootkit OS. And Firefox's UI team has gone full "Grinch paradigm" [To quote the original: "Here's our new, wonderful product. Isn't it wonderful? Don't you just love it? What do you mean it doesn't do something essential that you've been able to do for years and you don't like it? You ingrate! You're GOING to like our new product! We're not going to fix it just because you and 100,000 whiny little dweebs claim to need those missing functions!" ]

Screw this. I'm gonna donate a little more money to the upstarts, because Firefox is lost.

Do tell. I just updated my custom-stuff-after-installing-Mint script (which has become a go-to for friends and associates), and it's almost clean enough to share and/or xpost to the Mint forums. I'd love to add good ideas from others, and just as importantly, pull out or modify stuff that needs it.

What packages do you find objectionable?
          (e.g. this thread. Care to share that list of 50? Does removal break anything major? )

What are must-haves to add?
          (e.g. little stuff like acpi? mainstream stuff like ms core fonts, and cups-pdf so there's always something that behaves like a printer?)

Any elegant or specific fixes that you consider worth sharing?
          (e.g. have a sed one-liner to change "Label:0" to "Label:1" in /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf so that pdf print jobs don't overwrite each other, but still want a cmd line install of firefox extensions like noscript and ghostery?)

Yes, THIS.

A used car is a USED car, not "pre-owned" any more than I am "pre-dead" as long as I'm vertical, or the food in me belly is "pre-deficated."

I bought my current car (a reasonably lux and sporty V8 sedan that originally sold for just under $70k) from a dealer after it came back from a 3-year lease program. I told the sales droid that if he used the phrase "pre-owned" instead of "used" I would have to assume he was concealing or distorting other information about the car too. I'm sure he would have told me to go get stuffed except he knew I could pay outright. So he rolled, and spoke in plain and truthful terms about the USED car that I eventually bought. Oh, the power of the checkbook.

And one other thing: At 99.9999_% of dealers "Certified" means they had the most junior mechanic in the place run down a checklist, then detail the car. Maybe, maybe even an oil change and filter, but nothing more. Ever. However if Musk designs a CPO program where they throw the vehicle back on the assembly line, have the robots remove the body panels/battery pack/motor, check alignment/tolerances/fatigue, and then reassemble... yeah, that would be worthy of the notion of "certified."

Wait... what? Multiple desktops, same apps behave properly as fullscreen tablet apps or desktop windows, snapping control, hybrid menus, launch/switch/end gestures (copied from WebOS and Unity), a task view with app and desktop preview... Every single one of these features has been out for years on Linux (and most on Android or OS X), in much more polished form. It's 2014 and the Windows team is just now figuring out how to have two window managers co-exist? How very retro!

Windows 10 vs. Linux Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora/etc = iPhone 6 vs. Samsung Galaxy/Note series...
The dominant/big-name brand is _years_ behind and floating forward on market momentum.

The key part: "darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit was hovering over the waters. And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light." I'm the last person to push theology, and not remotely christian, but that's... poetically pretty.

Yes, the waters were here long before us, before the earth, before (our) star. I don't have to agree with anyone's religious tales to appreciate and share a sense of wonder at the bigness and oldness of it all.

Ah, dammit. My bad.
I did a bunch of work in Atlanta, and Pinewood Atlanta Studios (a good sized film/sound stage facility over 1/2 square mile in Fayetteville, Georgia) is just "Pinewood Studios" over there...

They're overthinking the problem. It's in Georgia. All's ya need to do is give BillyBob's thousand-year-old grampy a decent slingshot and a bucket of marbles, and tell him you'll pay him $250 every time he can hit one of those tiny little gummint spy planes.

Better yet, get him to tell his fishing buddies about the prize, and his buddies, etc... until you have a low level permeation thru the community. Just remember to pay 'em (and pay out of the set's lunch fund on an obfuscated line item that says something suitably snarky like "humble pie" or "tasty crow".) Oh, and tell 'em old guys: you can't eat what you catch, but you can resell the parts on ebay.... :)

Oh, wow, dude... Calm down. Have some water.
I gotta say, "goosestepping neckbeard" is the best thing I've been called in weeks. And no, a low UID only means I showed up. Just like you did.

I could type something nice about Minecraft, but I already did in another thread today: stuff about minecraft being an excellent UI for 3D printer data.

And try not to lunge so hard at obvious trollage. :)

Do not poke the elder gods.

The killer app for a commodity 3D printer would be a MineCraft-like interface. I was talking to my teenage kids and their friends about the 3D printer that sits unused in their school lab, and they all complained that the software was incomprehensible. But since they all create amazing structures in MineCraft, I suggested the obvious.... the idea of a crafting UI for 3D design had them jumping up and down yelling “HELL YES we would use that to build amazing things.”

Notch? Are you busy just now? Don't you have some spare cash and free time?
Howzabout a 3D crafting UI that looks like a holodeck room and adopts the standard controls for MineCraft to frame up basic block structures, plus some of the better mod controls for curves, smoothing, and multi-size blocks?

User scenarios would follow something like this:
- Adjust the size of the room you want to work in,
- Rough design using building blocks off the hot bar,
- managing multiple materials or colors from the inventory,
- more complex design with other objects (maybe compound objects) from the crafting table,
- fill/smoothing/spanning following the methods/controls of some of the better mods,
- view/flythrough, save functions, import, export, etc...,
- .... and finally printing.

I’d buy it. Seriously, I would plunk down a grand for the hardware in a heartbeat if the design GUI was fun to use.
(And HP needs to get on the stick, if they want to extend their "ink" market... :)

NOTCH!!! Seriously, you need to get on this.
DREMEL!!!?! Seriously, you need to talk to Notch.

This. By stating that none of the bulk data can be disclosed because of "potential charges," that's a little different than redacting "ongoing investigations" against specific individuals. The latter is a pretty reasonable limitation on the information disclosed from a FOIA request, but the former is a pretty literal form of treason: an appointed or elected official is seeking to subvert the US Constitution's prohibitions on warrant-less searches, and also to bypass constitutional checks and balances by essentially turning judgements into decrees removing rights from every citizen in perpetuity. Add the notion that the topic is secrecy of scope as well as content, and that's pretty much a literal definition of "conspiracy" to violate* the constitution.

*Perhaps "provide a legal contortion that exempts all citizens from certain constitutional protections in a manner that clearly and purposefully violates the intent of the law."