It seems like Blu-Ray support on Linux a bit limited at the moment, but there is at least some freeware/shareware that can handle it: MakeMKV which has a Linux beta and DVDFab which appears to run under Wine. DumpHD may also be worth looking at.

Since any new computer with a DVI or HDMI port (i.e. almost all of them) will probably have an HDCP license, yes, it is safe to say that Intel gets money from pretty much every laptop or desktop computer purchase. Also, as a sibling pointed out, Intel has plenty of other tech that they license, so finding a computer with absolutely no Intel tech sounds like a rather difficult task. Of course, they will almost certainly get a significantly larger cut if you buy a processor from them than if you just buy an HDCP license included in a video card, so you could limit the money you give to Intel by avoiding Intel-branded parts.

Actually, it looks like HDMI does not support compressed video, only uncompressed. Your cable video signal may be overcompressed, but from your cable box (or whatever is decoding your cable signal) to your TV, the HDMI cable is transferring those artifacts uncompressed so there is no further loss in quality. Of course, the data rate of uncompressed video is determined by the resolution and color depth which your cable video signal is probably not maxing out, especially given deep color support in more recent revisions of HDMI.

Oops, accidentally modded redundant. I was sure I clicked "insightful"...

But, yes, I agree. The source code is useful to have as a proof-of-concept, but actual real world implementations will be in different languages. Not everybody wants to---or even can in the case of a shared web hosting environment---run Ruby or whatever specific language and database is used.

Of course, as others replying have pointed out, there are other projects with social networking protocols which just do not have as much hype.

I do not know much about command-line / remote CD/DVD burning. Personally, I just use k3b, but for the use-case of never having to interact with the laptop directly, a command-line tool would probably be easier to use.

To share files, any distro should support samba, which should work to watch movies over even on a wireless connection. It would probably be easiest to just setup your netbook's Windows and Linux OSes to show the same samba shares (that might involve making a separate login on both with the same username/password for the laptop to use). If I were setting up what you were talking about in a Linux-only setup, I would probably use SSHFS, but samba should work well and is pretty simple to setup. (It has been a long time since I have tried, but Google should be able to help you with howtos.)

For actually watching the movies, nvlc (the command-line ncurses interface for vlc) works pretty well for displaying the controls on one computer and the video on another. vlc has other remote interfaces if you don't like that one.

I don't think it really applies to your situation, but synergy lets you control two computers with the same keyboard/mouse, which may be useful for some versions of the setup you describe.

I am not exactly sure what you are looking for here. What you quote is an empirical fact verified by psychology studies. If you want a reason for that trait to be common in humans, I guess the reason would probably be something along the lines of it being an evolutionarily successful trait as it allows humans to trust each other and therefore work together, but IANAEP.

As I understand it, they aren't allowed to do that, but there's a workaround: both sites show ads from the same ad service which has an image or iframe on the page which gets the shared cookies.

Firefox has a setting for allowing third party cookies, which I think is disabled by default. You can have Firefox ask to accept all cookies or you can use an extension like CookieSafe to manage which sites you accept cookies from. Someone in this thread already recommended the RequestPolicy extension which lets you set which sites can have content from which other sites. Of course, you can also use AdBlock Plus to block the ads, but I don't know how effectively its ad blocking list blocks sites that set tracking cookies.

As far as I can tell, the key innovation is that the Khan Academy education videos are actually good. He explains concepts in a way that actually works for a lot of people. It is quite possible that there are other good educational videos, which leads into the other innovation: free internet video is a very accessible medium, so the opportunity cost of trying out the Khan Academy videos is almost nothing, and someone who likes the videos can easily and quickly recommend them to their friends who can start watching them immediately if they are interested. To be fair, anyone who is going to be watching the Khan Academy videos is probably self-motivated to learn the topic or they would not be watching the video, so there may be some bias on how well they work vs. a teacher in a classroom who cannot guarantee an interested and well-motivated audience.

I agree that a good, real, live teacher who could answer questions is important for a good education... but a good lecturer means you do not have as many questions in the first place. Putting a good teacher in every classroom is, obviously, a hard problem. I recall from school that pretty much any time there was an educational video, it was awful. I cannot imagine anyone volunteering to sit through any educational video we were shown in school; luckily they were rare. It is possible that a video of a good lecture has its place in a high school classroom. At the same time, doing so seems like admitting that the teacher can't deliver a good lecture.

I should note that I have not actually watched any of the Khan Academy videos; I strongly prefer learning from written information, but I realize that is a personal preference.

I have seen the suggestion before that although the fraud is obvious (the product "sold" never arrives), the spammers use products which people would be embarrassed to admit they were trying to buy, so the scam tends to not get reported.

Peer-to-peer networks solved that issue a long time ago. Kad, Freenet, Tor, and i2p all have ways for a client on the network to maintain an identity tied to something other than an IP address. People should be identified by public keys not IP addresses (especially as mobile internet becomes more popular so static IPs become even more difficult). Figuring out how to tie those keys to real people reliably is a separate issue... but then again Facebook does not even attempt to provide anywhere near that level of security on who you are actually talking to, so leaving key verification/signing to the cryptography geeks/paranoid would probably not be a huge issue.

It looks like they were working on GCJ support a long time ago. This mailing list post from 2005 says it was working with some minor issues. I would suspect the current version would also compile under GCJ... if it doesn't, submit a bug report. I agree that relying on the Java runtime complicates installation and might make it slower (it certainly means that the start time is slower, but i2p is intended to be a long-running application and JITs sometimes do better with those overall).

You seem to have described almost exactly the functionality of Perspectives, which has been discussed on Slashdot, although not recently.

No, not at all. I want to socialize with my friends and acquaintances and possibly their friends as well, not Mark Zuckerberg. What is so strange about that?

Wait a minute, now instead of needing to give online retailers a mailing address for them to send junk mail to (which isn't so bad as most of the time I am buying a physical item that needs to be shipped to a real address anyway), I would be giving them the phone number for a phone I regularly have on me? Who could have possibly thought this would be a good idea? It would make far more sense for identifier given to the retailer be some random unique number (like a credit card number), which the retailer would give to Verizon who would in turn use it to text the verification code to the user's cell phone (hopefully in a text with the amount which will be billed).

There's more to the internet than other people's web sites. The design of the web is intended for each server to control and serve its own information. This is broken by the fact that the vast majority of internet users want to share information via the web but do not run their own servers. The web was simply not designed for this use-case and cannot handle it sanely in the case of information that is private to a group of people who do not run their own servers.

That may be a good reason to assert that currently the prospects for privacy on the internet look rather bleak, but other methods for sharing information involving encryption and/or friend-to-friend networks, etc. could be developed. Even without key verification being commonplace, they could make spying on the everyday communications of ordinary citizens untenable.