Maybe its been a while since you looked at it, according to their page it looks like debian and ubuntu are supported.

Of course it will be broken in some ways, but this does sound like it would be an improvement over the current set of problematic ID systems. I mean if an ID with protection in depth that was actually cryptographically secure could be created... Well lets just say I would feel a lot better using it in a more wide spread area (think credit cards / money transfers, or more creative things).

Hey thanks for that, it was pretty clear, but I still am wondering if it was about the specific set of scans that Google made or if it grants Google exclusive rights to the text regardless of the scans which clearly be very bad.

That clarification is really important because clearly blocking all other parties from the book table would be a clear abuse of monopoly position by Google.

Can anyone actually correctly summarize what is going on with this Google book deal, I find it hard to believe that Google is trying to gain exclusive rights over all these unclaimed (copyright wise) books completely and forever for all copies of this book everywhere.

Isn't it really that they just want rights to put up the books that they scanned (and some people that had agreements with them to help scan)? Is there something that would stop people from rescanning those books and posting them up some place else?

Links to clear sources would be best... Where's my Google Security Blanket(TM)!

Mod this guy up big time!

I've worked on SCADA power systems before as well and everything he says here is very accurate. The problem with the system starts with the desk jockey types start to want to view the system from their office desk... It all goes down hill from there.

I'll also point out that I'm sure that if someone wanted to get into the system that was off network they would just put USB thumb drives out in the parking lot with malware on them, then wait for the malware to call home or worm its way around the network to a machine that is connecting to the internet and tunnel in that way.

You clearly haven't played through this last expansion yet because there are at least half a dozen poop collecting or toilet quests to go through. I thought the outhouse quest quite disgusting myself.

Maybe so, but do if you are hoping to get young people - people who wouldn't otherwise notice you - to notice you, then maybe you would post it to some place they go right? I'm wondering why they can't just post them to multiple places - now that seems a more reasonable question to me.

I suppose I should have expected this when I posted the above, ha. The theory of libertarianism should be the things you said, but the party put him as their head representative, so he truly does a grave disservice to their party by his words. All I can say is I was unimpressed by Barr's very un-libertarian like views.

In particular (and to try and return to topic), I wonder what Barr would have said about such policies considering he said he was "unsure" about whole war on terror and DHS stuff (I *believe* he said something to that effect - no time to properly verify my memory). I'm not sure he understands that any law "on the books" but not universally enforceable is essentially a tool for abuse.

The US Libertarian party is marginalized here because they are very socially conservative. Making them rather socially un-liberal. If there is a party that is for social freedom and other reforms, I don't know it. So much for hippies?

I listened to the debate between Bob Barr and Ralph Nader that happened here in DC and IMO Barr did not come off well.

Yeah I agree, it was a public service! But if I wanted to make a case for Google being a monopoly and trying to block other biz from the market, I might make that argument. Personally though, blocking out a known abuser seems like just good sense to me. :-)

They seem to have a whole section of their site made for crowd sourcing out ideas for their game (rather clever of them heh).

I too though couldn't find any screen shots or other game play videos. Their lego creation game was also rather problematic IMO, so I seriously wonder if they will have come up with new ways to actually do the building... And previous stuff has had a lot of issues with only releasing a small set of the blocks which made buildings very annoying. :(

I don't believe at this point Google is a monopoly.

As to the Firefox thing, the point I was getting at is that it is "evidence" of Google leveraging their search to get into another market (browsers and browsers standards). You could equate this to MS's IE antics. If Chrome ever becomes bigger then we might argue that is a more clear cut case.

In fact there seems to have been a number of direct moves that Google has done to undermine MS, but IMO this is just how companies work, see Intel vs Nvidia for recent fun.

Lastly, APIs are of course optional, no more so then on the web currently, but as we move to a more integrated desktop and cloud computing I think it will become more common for them to have external APIs, it only makes sense. You can also view APIs and following open standards as showing "good faith" toward the computing community - you see a lot of demand for MS to do the same, and maybe more demand for Google to do the same.

Its hard to not sound like a fan boy of google, but I'm currently not understanding why google would be considered as a monopoly, but if I was to play devil's advocate here I might argue the following:

• Buying DoubleClick giving google some 70% of the market.
• Attempting to buy into Yahoo to block MS (anti-competitive?).
• Preference of search orders for choice sites (wiki).
• Mozilla support / Firefox integration.
• Limited external api to services.

I don't agree with these, but some could argue (if you really didn't like google anyway).

I'm trying to do that exact same thing myself, but haven't been able to get it right. There are just so many neighbors running their own wifi that I think it is causing signal degradation.

Also, the MythVideo plugin *does* not stream, so you have to share (via SMB or NFS) the directory between the Front and Back ends... This makes those sort of files play too slowly as well.

More so, it seems that its embedding firefox in its window, and has a ~/.miro/mozilla directory, so why the hell doesn't it work?

I've been looking around, and others seemed to have flash working in previous versions... Besides that, without flash support it really cuts down on the amount of legal media Linux users can use when it seems entirely reasonable to have it working.

Now it looks like I'm stuck trying to hack their source, sigh.