You can no more "monitor every clock cycle" with one of these than with any other. No more do you have to "guess" than with any other. Intel and AMD have both shipped chips with WELL DOCUMENTED bugs in them. Moreover, they shipped REPLACEMENT chips in many cases. Sure sounds like a "greedy corporation" to me. Think one of these socialistic corps will be able to afford that?

Too bad that, because it's an ASIC, all you can do is LOOK at that source code then try to design your code around the problem.

I'm down with open source, but this seems fantastically stupid to me. I can buy a pretty powerful CPU from a host of manufacturers at some very good prices - less than the $25 donation they request on their page, in fact.

We want to provide an alternative to the profit-hunting semiconductor giants who only provide "cost efficient prices" to large multi-national companies...

This is bullshit. This is about an agenda, not about the economic reality of "competing."

Not just that. Reno pushed cases to the supreme court to establsh precedent, then the white house started lobbying for more crackdowns on "the coming plague of online child pornography."

There were lots of articles about it at the time, including warnings of the toxic effects this increased focus on child porn would have on our society.

I argue that these laws, intended to protect children from sexual exploitation, threaten to reinforce the very problem they attack. The legal tool that we designed to liberate children from sexual abuse threatens to enslave us all, by constructing a world in which we are enthralled - anguished, enticed, bombarded - by the spectacle of the sexual child.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/ilaw/Speech/Adler_full.html

Of course, those articles were dismissed. Still are today, and yet....

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article5516511.ece

But, in the case of child abuse, the potential harm greatly outweighs the small amount of freedom granted.

PROVE IT.

I know lots of people who were abused. I know many who were abused and quite successful, and I know others who were never abused and turned out 8 ways of lunacy.

Don't forget that "abuse" is often only abuse when someone else says it is. I've had friends who were "abused" by having sex with older partners at a young age who would laugh in your face if you tried to call them victim. But oif course, when you KNOW YOU ARE ALWAYS RIGHT that just makes them "poor souls who don't know any better."

Fuck you arrogant PC pricks.

Yeah! Just like watching Brokeback mountain will make straight men into fags, and playing Madden 2010 will make geeks into NFL linebackers!

Do you even hear the bullshit coming from your fingertips? Do you sound this insane in person?

Because it's not fucking debian and it's not great lengths. It's a matter of running a script I keep updated that does things like

apt-get install build-essential privoxy spamassassin
apt-get remove mono-runtime

and so forth. It's not fuckign hard, and as I said I LIKE some of the ubuntu features like maximus and global-menu. I don't give a shit that they no longer include gimp because it takes like 30 seconds to install it and it's still updated with the rest of the packages.

Debian, otoh, means learning a whole new "base install." I have no idea what's isntalled and some of the ubuntu-ish features won't be included and I now I gotta go looking for them. Sounds like more work to me than what I got. Features are generally easier to remove than to add.
 

the dude has lots of money, and apple started in steve's dad's garage. So ya... duh. Canonical could start selling prepackaged systems in a minute.

That's crazy. Ubuntu isn't perfect but nothing is. I like many of the added geegaws that you get with ubuntu that don't come with other distros, and it's trvivially easy to switch pulseaudio for alsa and to switch to "classic gnome mode" if that's what you ant (I actually use a hybrid myself, I find it works great in my living room). I don't even like compiz because since I've removed it completely I almost NEVER have desktop crashes and even getting rid of that is pretty easy. Mono? Also gone.

http://mypicturepalace.com/poptones/Screenshot.png2.jpg

Everyone has favorite stuff they install and configurations they prefer. Given this, it's insane to say "I'm not using that open source distro X" simply because they offer, by default, packages you don't like. I also have my own thumbnailer I prefer to use. Should I throw a fit because ubuntu uses that SLOW-ASS video thumbnailer? Of course not - It's just too damn easy to fix.

Um, no. A contract with an ISP is like an electric bill. you pay your money and you get your service. By accepting that money each month they are not held responsible for your acts, but they are agreeing to the service as it has been delivered and used.

Spoken like a true AC.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000512----000-.html

Put up a shared wap. Make it so that they have to click through a web page every 24 hours to get access enabled. Make sure there is a contact email address on your web page.

Make the DHCP leases expire, say, every 30 minutes. That will allow sporadic youtube viewing, email checking and all sort of other activity without allowing lengthy file transfers.

Now your neighbors have access, you have good qos, and you may be reasonably protected under the dmca.

The DMCA protects service providers. If I am deliberately sharing my internet connection, I AM a defacto service provider. There are rules one must follow but most of them apply only to operators of a certain size - which means we enjoy the protections of the DMCA without sharing the burdens like forced record keeping.

People have been abused by law enforcement for al sorts of reasons. If they go to far, you sue. Of course, if they are led to your house by the actions of a neighbor and then find, through some poetic justice, that you are in fact doing what they suspected even though it wasn't your actions that directly led to the raid, well then it sucks to be you.

Unity is DEFAULT, not ONLY. You can turn unity off and on just by changing a couple settings and logging in again.

The global menu isn't going to work with everything right off because this ISN'T OSX we're dealing with - it's open source software written from a variety of apis and toolkits. The most important ones seem to work well, and firefox is being integrated which will solve the most glaring and annoying niggle.

Unity is intended to save screen real estate - which it does quite well. I use my pc in the living room, from the couch across the room. So my 1920x1080 resolution screen gets filled with larger than usualy icons and fonts because I'm an old fart and my eyes don't work so good anymore. And while I'm NOT using unity iteslf I do use some components of it - maximus, global menu, and a dockbar - and it works great.

I really dislike the displacement of nautilus in the new desktop. That's my one real problem with unity as it is. The preview icons don't work properly and I find it confusing because the settings do not migrate so the experience is VERY inconsistent. It will definitely need some work, but it's not all bad.

They don't go after people who "download" it. Just the other day there was a story on here about someone arrested for "downloading" KP. It also mentioned in the same article the story of another who was arrested for "downloading" Millions of images from a boat using a cantenna several blocks away from the WAP.

But if you actually read the SOURCE articles for that, the truth comes out: the one who "downloaded Millions" did NOT "download" but UPLOAD. And it wasn't Millions that were UPLOADED (for, obviously, that would take many many hours and this was alleged to have happened in one very late night) but MILLIONS of images that were found on the guy's PC when he was raided.

This seems to be a deliberate confusion of the truth. "Upload" is consistently confused with "download" in articles like this so the reader is led to believe if you even download something from the internet big brother doesn't like then the MIB will come knock down your door and drag you to hades. Of course this is in the interests of the MEDIA OWNERS who publish this nonsense, because the more fear of the internet they can generate the more likely people are to be good little sheep who only use their connections as an extension of their TV sets, thus ensuring even more monthly income for the big media giants who own shit like hulu and who profit from others like netflix.

The witch hunt won't end until the last big media conglomerate lies dead in its grave. This is why I don't have cable, I don't go to movies, I don't subscribe to magazines, and I don't "rent." Ayup, I watch what the fuck I want to watch, and listen to what the fuck I wanna listen to. Sorry Alice, I know you own your work but I've bought enough copies of Billion Dollar Babies in my life from people who show absolutely no respect for the rights of the people of the society from which they profit.

I hate them all. Microsoft office, open office - I hate them all. The closest I came to liking one was abiword, and it is too buggy and crash prone for me. I almost always end up using gedit or something similar because I hate looking through all those goddamn menus for simple formatting commands.

HTML used to be such a simple markup language, and it would do about 90% of all anyone needed to do. A "word processor" that uses markup language without being so strict (html doesn't recognize cr/lf for example) would be ideal.

Is it really so hard to learn new menus? Yes. I've been using linux so long my last experience with windows was win2k. So I am utterly lost in Vista and 7. Friends still ask me about doing things in windows, and I have nothing to tell them except ask someone who uses windows, or use linux and I can help.

I think it interesting no one has actually seen a screencap of this here, yet everyone seems hung up on the "ribbon" business. I'm more puzzled by the "immersive browser." WTF is an "immersive browser?"