The statement I heard on the news was that they did not allow government have backdoor access to their servers.

But that doesn't say anything about the traffic heading to and from those servers. Think about the name "PRISM" and how it refracts a single ray of light into several. If the network traffic coming into their servers were "refracted" to multiple destinations (say, the originally intended server as well as a government collection site), then technically, the government is not using a backdoor to access the server.

More than cloud?

O'Reilley publishing offers $4.95 "ebook upgrade" for any of their physical books you have. And those ebooks are offered in a variety of non-DRM formats.

They probably don't have a lot of the books you read, but it's good to see at least one publisher with a reasonable model.

So we need a TSA to monitor the TSA?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I've tried Fedora a few times but always end up back with either Ubuntu or Mint.

Those things you mention are frustrating but what stopped me cold the last time was the installer. I've been installing Linux off and on for 15 years and even I was left wondering "what the heck is going on here?". I hope they fix that. I can't take the distro seriously when an advanced user can't even feel safe/certain about the install process.

The problem I've seen is analogous to building skyscrapers and garden sheds. Some projects, like skyscrapers, have be complely designed in advance and built to be a skyscraper. You don't build a 2-story building then decide it works pretty well and then add another floor, and so on, until you have a skyscraper.

At the other end, you want a shed to protect your tools from the weather. While you could design a shed and the process to build it the way you would a skyscraper, but that's a lot of expense and it's going to take a long time. Instead, if you wanted, you could throw up some supports and put up a roof. This gazebo works well and protects your stuff from the rain. It's pretty easy to add walls, and so on.

Agile is useful for certain kinds of projects and the "classic" way is good for other kinds of projects. The real problem is that people try to use the same methodology for every project.

The last times I tried using Google Drive, if you downloaded more than one file, it would make a zip file with the files where the dates were all reset to Jan-1-1980. Does it still do that?

That's a deal-killer to me and makes the service unusable. DropBox doesn't do that - so I know it's not technically impossible to so something so difficult as preserve a file's modify-time.

That wasn't me. But I agree with the sentiments.

lol. The people who have stuff to rob have more guns than you. In a lot of cases, they also have body armor and night vision gear. And they're better shots. Idiots like you and your family won't last too long after the balloon goes up.

If they were banned hopefully I could get a prescription for the soap.

You could probably still get something like a chlorhexidine - it's antiseptic and antibiotic. One brand name is hibiclens. Vets use it a lot with animals with wounds and someone once told me it was also used as a surgical hand scrub.

College is valuable (potentially) in only 3 ways

There's a 4th... that you actually do learn useful skills. I've taken classes in computer modeling & simulation, operations research, data mining, and machine learning. I use quite a bit of this all the time at work and I find it's been helpful to have been given a solid foundation in the subjects - this makes it much easier to explore and learn more on my own.

But, I've been taking these classes for fun and out of interest - I already have a masters degree, so the possibility of an additional degree doesn't help me much.

You don't need a definition of intelligence to build a 1:1 model of a brain and then study it. Defining intelligence belongs in the domain of philosophers.

And I suspect that going through the process of doing this will shed more light on what "intelligence" actually is (if it is just one thing) than a bunch of people sitting around lobbing contractidictory definitions at each other.

plants "breath" co2 so I dont see how more co2 will harm plants.

Well, you breath oxygen, so breathing 100% pure oxygen is no problem, right? Well, actually, it is a problem if you breathe it for any prolonged period of time. Read up on hyperoxia.

It just doesn't follow that because plants need CO2 that more CO2 is better for plants... or at least the plants you want growing.

Mynd you, mÃÃse bites Kan be pretty nasti.

A MÃÃse once bit my sister ...