> (We wound up taking down our trees for unrelated reasons - one was
> dead and the second dropped berries all over our lawn rendering our
> back yard unusable and attracting flies.)

Just be thankful you don't live in Toronto. See http://www.toronto.ca/311/know... Even removing a *DEAD* tree will cost you several hundred dollars for the paperwork+approval alone...

> Private tree permit exemptions
>
> A tree that is dead, terminally diseased or imminently hazardous does
> not require a permit, however the applicant must send a detailed Arborist report
> and receive approval from Urban Forestry before proceeding with any tree work.

The cost of a contractor to cut down+remove the tree+stump is additional. An "Arborist" is a licenced professional "tree doctor" with an applicable university degree. Their reports are equivalant to an MD's "medical opinion", and their fees are equivalant to having a medical specialist examine you without medical insurance. And in case you're wondering...

> Fines for illegal tree removal
>
> A person convicted of an offence under City of Toronto Municipal
> Code Chapter 813, Article III is subject to a minimum fine of $500.00
> and a maximum fine of $100,000.00 per tree involved in an offense;
> a special supplementary fine of $100,000.00 is also possible.

> Exactly. Caller ID should not be allowed to be spoofed, ever. Make it
> really illegal and start to crack down on any provider that allows it to happen.

Caller ID is too simple. You really need to use ANI (Automatic Number Identification), which is a much more robust protocol. It is accurate because it's used for billing on telephone landlines. Only problem is that it costs money, and I don't know if you can get it on a residential account. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Note that I said it's used for telephone landlines. It can be defeated by using an outbound-only VOIP line.

Only dumb criminals/terrorists would use social networks to plan crimes. Remember how Osama Bin Laden dropped out of sight after 9/11? No cellphones, no landlines, no email, etc. Just communicating via messangers. It took the best intelligence services on the planet years to find him. After the first few splashy cases hit the news, criminals/terrorists will go back to "sneakernet", and the social-network monitoring infrastructure will go to waste.

That should be "wreaking havoc", not "raking havoc".

> It's not like the journal format is some state secret. It's documented
> and there are already several journal parsers to choose from.

Please explain http://lwn.net/Articles/468049...

> From the FAQ:

> Will the journal file format be standardized? Where can I find an explanation
> of the on-disk data structures?

> At this point we have no intention to standardize the format and we take the
> liberty to alter it as we see fit. We might document the on-disk format
> eventually, but at this point we donÂ't want any other software to read, write
> or manipulate our journal files directly. The access is granted by a shared
> library and a command line tool. (But then again, itÂ's Free Software, so
> you can always read the source code!)

> What's wrong with harfbuzz?
>
> It's just a font-shaping library, needed to correctly render south-asians scripts.
[...deletia...]
> And ghostscript is needed to be able to print your spreadsheets. If
> you package a program for a distribution, you want it to work out-of-the-box.

Gnumeric used to work out-of-the-box with this stuff as *OPTIONAL*. What I'm complaining about is that it's now *MANDATORY*. Why the change, when it used to work just fine? What's next? Pull in the entirety of GNOME, complete with systemd?

It's not just the init, it's also the applications that are being infected with Lennart-ware, e.g. gnumeric. It's a great spreadsheet, but recently it's been picking up various egregious hard-coded dependancies that simply don't make sense. This occurs mostly via GTK, which seems to pull in a significant chunk of GNOME.

I run a minimalist Gentoo desktop, and I notice when additional dependancies are dragged in. The past year or 2 has seen goffice, ghostscript, harfbuzz, dbus, and various other crap become hard-coded dependancies for gnumeric. It was not necessary a couple of years ago. If I had several million dollars, I'd hire a bunch of progragrammers to port gnumeric from being dependant on GTK to being dependant on FLTK (Fast Light ToolKit) http://www.fltk.org/ Some of the money would go to ongoing maintenance.

Another few million dollars, and I'd like to hire a team to hack and slash away at Firefox. I was around when "Phoenix" was forked as a lightweight alternative to the Mozilla web-browser. I savoured that promise. That promise has been dashed into the ground, with a Firefox that's bigger, heavier, and slower than the original Mozilla ever was. Time for a new fork.

I want GNU-Linu-x, not GNOME-Lenna-x

"Honed" is a term I've coined in honour of Mat Honan and how his info got owned/wiped... http://apple.slashdot.org/stor...

It's one thing for trusting/ignorant people to put their data in the cloud, and get it stolen. What's the reaction going to be when everybody's data is forcibly put in the cloud?

> Sorry, you are wrong here. The chips with pid0 works fine with Linux, so
> there is no reason, the vendor could not make a working Windows driver.

Sorry, *YOU* are wrong here. The current Windows kernel will not mount a device with pid0, period, end of story. If the kernel won't mount a USB device, no driver will run it. You would need specialized bit-banging software to fix it.

The Linux kernel acted similarly, but there is now a patch out for the kernel to allow fixing FTDI devices.

> They are now being coerced into supporting other chips that are not under their control.

I call bull****. They are not being coerced to do anything, except follow the law. If they detect a clone, they have every right to program their driver to throw an error/exception saying that it's an unsupported device. When they deliberately start bricking hardware, that crosses the line.

An example of "doing it right" is MS Windows checking whether it's a valid copy. If it decides it's not, it goes into reduced functionality mode, and gives you time to verify. It does not go around wiping the hard drive and flashing the BIOS to all zeros. And I'm a linux user, so I'm not exactly an MS fanboi.

> In this case, they haven't "destroyed" anything. The hardware is still there,
> with all of the capabilities it used to have, as long as you can find a
> driver for it. They just changed the ID on it, and you can change it back.

OK, so how does Grandma change the ID and install an older driver? Note that changing the ID to 0 means that it is *NOT* treated as a USB device by any standard software. You are looking at specialized programming-to-the-hardware to be able to interact with it, in order to try unbricking it.