It's cheaper!

And besides, the red Chinese invented the computer 3,000 years ago.

In the UK to establish copyright you used to be able to send yourself a stamp addressed envelope containing the relevant work. So long as it remained unopened the postmark served as both a mark of authenticity and also as a timestamp.

I foed him (it) quite a time ago when I noticed that most of its posts consist of verbatim quotes lifted from elsewhere in the discussion and all of them are posted at exactly 30 minutes past the hour – which is why I suspect it's not a human.

Last spring I offered to set up a system for some friend's children to play with (I had a old 600 Mhz AMD laying around). It was going to be pretty basic: web browsing, games, open office. They politely declined due to the fact neither of them are that computer literate and that they didn't want the kids on there unsupervised. Which I totally respect - they are good parents.

Now that I have a little one of my own (month old on the 10th) I would most likely lock down the net except for sites like Treehouse, plus do the pile of educational games available. For learning the keyboard and GUI and the like, I would like to think it's more basic concepts then anything. There's a start menu, a web browser, information bar, etc. For the child I would impose upon him that he can't break anything that can't be fixed and should explore. I would also take the OLPC's 'Sugar' GUI for a test run, or something designed for netbooks.

You can bury any medium and a way to play it aswell, lets say, a cd and a disk man, as for music goes, or maybe magnetic tape and bet that some company will still have ways to read it, since its useful for backups. Depending on your budget there is a bunch of stuff you could bury to play the media you bury, or go for a top tech of nowodays wich should be partially old 10 years in the future,,,

Spot on.

I don't use ubuntu, but for me, my Arch setup with awesomewm lasts almost 1.5 times as long as windows. YMMV.

I think it's more likely that compiz which comes with ubuntu is the culprit here.

I'll admit that I don't follow UK politics very closely. But I thought that draconian censorship was more of a Tory thing.

-Peter

The final paragraph is a pretty good summary of the author's viewpoint:

The author doesn't trust regional variations in the treatment of the public domain. The author doesn't really care about Free Software, much less Open Source software. And as such, his opinion is to use a license that enforces the general understanding of the public domain.

this. Include a copy of ubuntu and you're covered. Trust me, in 17 years she'll b able to find a computer that will run it. hell, if 17 years she'll probably be able to find someone still running windows 98. You overestimate progress. Put them on DVD and be done with it. the whole point of a time capsule is that it's old stuff. If I opened a time capsul from when i was born and it had CD's and flash drives, I'd feel cheated (and I'd wonder where they got those).

Clearly? It's not clear at all. Please refer to GNU's definiton of free. From what I've observed, all the big name "FOSS" licences treat open source as having access to the code and free as having freedom to do what you wish with that source. I don't think any of them require being without cost.

A slimmed down version of Vista with aero disabled and alot of clutter removed can run on pretty much any old system with enough hard drive space.

Except the battery will be all but dead...

Yeah, I know, one of those pesky little things my console can't do is give me a hard copy of the game that I can resell.

Oh wait, that's the PC.

DHS will be along any time now for your admitted terrorist behavior.