Surely Social Security is just a savings scheme for the wealthy, no? What's the pension worth where you live? Still enough to live on I hope.

Man I remember those BT878 cards. Leadtek WinFast 2000 in my case. Terrific cards that, as you say, just worked in Linux.

That is not discoverable.

Where's the command for "Please show me the DTP programs on this computer"?

For a FLOSS alternative to Ghost I now use and highly recommend Clonezilla.

It's amazing what an all-expenses-paid vacation to the Bahamas can do for one's point of view...

Also drop the " censor, censor, censor" rhetoric... You are free to publish this anywhere else. Why don't you just make a site with rejected wikipedia articles, where people can work on them till wikipedia is ready to accept them.

Using MediaWiki as a nice touch.

I guess I think of it as if you leave your front door open, how much blame must you accept when thieves come in and take your stuff?

Re-install/re-image, effectively the same thing in this context.

An upgrade trashing all of /etc/ is a new one on me though. I'd be keen to hear what upgrade event, if you recall, led to that result.

The newest fun here is that Windows 7, even when sysprepped, will still occasionally barf when cloned to a computer with different hardware. An operation that is trivial in nearly every Linux-based configuration.

You'll have to wait for the next "average Linux user" there, sonny. I have been doing system administration for two decades and have seen Linux systems, yes both rpm and deb based, badly messed up from updates. Some have required several hours work to get back running again. But, repeating myself, nothing that has required a complete reinstall. And it has been several years since I have seen an update require more than a few minutes work post-install.

It's undeniable that dams have a significant environmental impact. However these are a one-off expense, an overhead. They are not dependent on the amount of energy produced so while it gives *some* argument against building new dams, existing ones should be maintained and upgraded so they can generate as much power as possible with effectively zero environmental impact per GW. or diminishing impact per GW if you factor the overheads over time.

Funnily enough I saw an article yesterday about a fish cannon, purportedly to send fish over dams to spawning areas.

I have never seen a Linux distribution where one botched update has resulted in the need to completely wipe and re-install the operating system from media.

I have seen this with Windows 7 and 8.

I have seen this to a lesser extent with Windows XP, but that at least still has the option to re-install system files without affecting the user/program environment. Not so with Windows 7 or 8.

Windows 8 has some nice recovery tools, but they are buggy as all buggery and just as likely to render your system even less usable.

And, or course, the fact that the phone was bricked for no reason. Also, the video will be recoverable.

If video is recoverable then the bricking process is defective.

I don't think they are talking about putting a button in every police car that bricks phones.

Not yet they're not.

Who actually wants a kill switch? Anyone on /. at all?

This anti-feature will be used by not just government but any suffiently motivated hackers to kill your communications. The one ostensible benefit mentioned here is anti-theft, but of course that relies on the mechanism working reliably in the first place and secondly not being circumvented by a thief five minutes after they have acquired it.

Just like the idiotic remote car immobilisers that people who should know better are so quick to adopt. Just wait until some hacker gets the code to your car and holds it to ransom or worse, immobilises it on a freeway. What about when overzealous local law enforcement decides to immobilise all cars exceeding the limit by 1%.

Hi Smidge,

Do you object to such claims because you believe them to be incorrect, or just pedantic and unhelpful?

I'm with you on the second point although I do bring it up as a logical conclusion when someone tries to distinguish between generating and storing energy, since most energy generated on Earth in turn comes from the sun.

Fair enough, but if you carry that logic far enough then fossil fuels aren't an energy source either. They're temporary storage for the sun's fusion energy.