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Comment Android etc showed me customisation isn't a big de (Score 1) 503

I've played ages ago. But that was then and now
bored of that. So just want things to work. Still like to play but more interested in other things now. For me Android showed me how it can be and since then I don't want to play with interfaces.
I don't customise my phone anymore, I don't even play games.
I don't know... just prefer more interesting projects now

Comment the case for preferential treatment (Score 1) 628

Agriculture, specifically intensive farming is of course greater impact then this. That is true. So in that sense why bother with this?

Here's why. Its not good for our well being. If we treat animals with brutality then is it no surprise that our enemy in war shows no mercy?
With farming the whole thing is hidden from us from birth to packet. That doesn't make it OK but it does reduce the damage to us.

But critically it can be argued that WE are semi aquatic marine mammal and these animals are close relatives since we moved out of the sea... Taking in the psychology are they closer to us than apes - our fat distribution matches theirs not an apes. We have the dive reflex.

You can say dolphins are cute but isn't that for a reason? A conversation with a dolphin is easier than a cow. Our ease of compassion is due to them being similar to ourselves.

Really its best to observe the ratio of canines vs masticating teeth under your nose - eat meat appropriately - sometimes, not all the time.

Comment Urbanisation? (Score 1) 635

Motivation for me in Europe, in order:

lack of city parking,
cost of fuel,
it's-destroying-the-planet,
getting ripped off by garages on jobs too big for me to do myself,
Zipcar,
hirecar cheapness in general,
folding bicycles

I think also bigger cities are a factor. For anyone living in a city a car is more of a pain. It really divides people into countryside people and city folk.

As an aside... guys making the rules in the cities and capitals especially have absolutely no idea what it's like to wait for a bus in the countryside that never comes. Outside the city (which almost always are horrible places I don't like to be...) the car is nearly always completely indispensable. Suggestions of bicycles and non self maintainable batteries are so out of touch of non urban living.

Comment cat /dev/urandom /dev/audacity would be nice (Score 1) 383

Great question.

Bitcoin: https://github.com/spesmilo/sx , GoxCLI
Calandar; 'cal'
wget, curl with cut, grep & awk
mplayer... with acsii output, transcode,
irc bots such as malware command and control interfaces - are there benign examples?

There are very few financial command line tools. It's strange but there doesn't seem to be a way to buy or sell securities, forex or futures.

Can anyone tell me why you can't |pipe| GUI programs....? Why can't you pipe audio live from /dev/urandom from a terminal to audacity for example?

Comment absolutely (Score 1) 841

but let me finish that with stating the obvious, when obvious needs stating: ...and if you can't answer with an waterproof convincing answer then you have to stop doing what it is you're doing.

But what you don't do is whine about how ungrateful people are for the work you do when you've abused power. Can't really blame all on the NSA though - power will always be abused so it should not be given and instead processes to prevent it engineered.

Comment Remember the AmigaFormat laughs? (Score 1) 90

I bought last months LinuxFormat and it had really lost it's soul. The magazine seemed to have already died a few months before.

The main thing about LF 2-5 years ago was the humour. I think there was some kind of handover from AmigaFormat where you had guys like JonoBacon taking over. The big thing though was that it had a sense of humour. It was very funny, and in a British way too. That made it stand out from everything else, only Micromart sometimes had something a bit like this but that's been inconsistent.

Jono Bacon went on to Ubuntu as community manager and also wrote Art of the Community (which I'd like to point out is currently down from ~£40 to £4 on Amazon!). Kind of a shame the old crew aren't back together in entirety. I hope this new project can grab the attention.

I can see lots of people talking about the community donation aspect but for me the first thing that struck me was that this could have elements of the LinuxOutlaws style humour to it too. That would be great but it's no guarantee.
  Having a community involvement in any way makes the whole thing that more interesting.

By the spirit of RMS I bless this project

Comment Funding opportunity (Score 1) 234

Many might think "problem"...
    I think "opportunity"!

I've written before how the archive can do a lot more than it presently does. For a start, it could be used as evidence. So how do we make money out of this? Well, the archive only goes so far in what it stores. If there is a page that we want to be stored for longer and more securely then we should be able to pay for that. More securely? How's about paying for it to be backed up to a p2p network, similar to SatoshiProof. You then charge a small fee extra for the service.

Of course, you could do the same for following or not following robots.txt but this is closer to messing with the integrity of archive.org

Just make sure this upper tier in the 2 tier system is genuine new functionality.

Comment Tough at the top. So imagine a higher top. (Score 1) 926

I've been poor (but I was not), and I've been what I thought was rich. This is what I'd say about fear.

To answer this question one source of inspiration could be high stakes investment psychology. The more you have the more you fear to lose. The more you fear, the more you fear to lose. Arrogance blinds us to reality.

Fear of an easy life?
It's tough at the top.

So.... dream of a higher top.

Comment Not going to happen. This is the ~best you'll get (Score 1) 175

Last I looked I think it was Globalstar who will be offering always on internet soon for portable phones, different from the dialup per minute. That might make basic mobile email a bit more usable. This isn't what you're looking for but I think that's the most use you're realistically going to get without a more exact location to research.

Even though internet is probably very poor and slow where you're going it's likely to be better than satellite.

Here's another option. Look into prepay and/or contract mobile phone data. In most countries in SA it's more expensive but still going to be better than satelite. If you want bandwidth you can chain them together - can someone explain how to do that on linux? I remember hearing about a kickstarter project that does it on Windows in a blackbox kind of way...

Also look into striking up deals with any place that has a decent connection and then using a VPN.

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