Some have four chemicals in their eyes. Specifically, some women can see four colors instead of our standard RGB. Also, some animals can see into the UV range.

You forgot Zune, Kin, and Xbox. Yeah xbox is still a money loser in spite of all the paid hype. It has lost $3 billiion in 10 years and is kept alive only by money from the Windows (OEM) monopoly and the Office (file format) monopoly. It has by far the most hype, so that may be why perception flies in the face of reality.

I thought constant-speed wind turbines were an outdated technology already. The wind blows with varying force, the turbine should be able to adapt. More energy can be collected by variable speed turbines. The fixed speed turbines are also, as you point out, higher maintenance.

You certainly can grow things up north, but the main problem is that while this sort of thing will expand the northern limits of arable land, that won't come close to compensating for the much more productive land further south that will suffer desertification.

That's a point that many miss. Not all land is equally productive. On some land you can get a high yield with minimal effort. On other land it takes all kinds of effort and chemicals. Unfortunately between urban sprawl and global warming we are losing the former. I've only seen one or two new subdivisions built on boulders or bedrock. I've seen hundreds tearing up rich fields prime for farming. That's not land we can get back. The best use of that land is for growing food.

In addition to the soil, there are factors like light and microclimate. The best farm land was scoped out before the 1900's and if we pave it over, it is gone.

The USDA has updated its map of plant hardiness zones to reflect the new, warmer conditions. You can argue about whatever you want to argue about, but the reality is here that you can grow things further north than you could before.

Rick Falkvinge of the Swedish Pirate Party has a good summary of the attempt to ban porn as well as a call to action. Apparently getting e-mail through to the parliamentarians is not as straight forward as one might wish. Christian EngstrÃm, MEP, also of the Swedish Pirate Party has a good analysis of the attempted ban. Basically it's a grab at control and censorship under another guise.

"And of course this analysis overlooks the most reliable way of rigging an election, and one that is most certainly practiced here: hand-picking the electorate. Who appointed those cardinals in the first place, eh? "

That can be done on a large scale, too. It's known as gerrymandering and is done by both parties. It's especially common for congressional districts. If you look at the national map, you see all kinds of bizarre shapes designed to give one party or the other a majority. They don't follow any natural or geographic boundaries. You end up with all kinds of loops, horseshoes, dumbells, and other weird shapes. The composition of congress would be quite different if the districts were restrcited to existing counties or a plain grid.

There's not just Mint. You could first try Xubuntu. It's got a better interface than plain Ubuntu and does not (yet) have any of the spyware issues. You can upgrade to xubuntu sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop and then clean off all that is not Xubuntu. Xubuntu gives you XFCE. There is also the KDE route with Kubuntu. That is also missing the spyware, for now.

I'd rather see the format scrapped and replaced with either better man pages or else HTML2. With HTML 2 you can use a text based browser like Lynx, which is more polished and gives you better navigation capabilities. There are also more modules, libraries and packages that can work directly with HTML, so less time is spent trying to reinvent the wheel.

You're right, the documentation for python or javascript macros in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org are quite poor. Basically it's missing, and for such a sought after feature, this is quite a problem. Also missing are the docs for using java macros. I'm not sure what else LO and OOo can support, there might be more, but even these three are a major advantage that could use publicity.

Both LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org support macros in Python or Javascript. Chances are you already know one of those, so you don't even need to learn a new language.

Don't mistake inconvenience for security. A lot of security theater is very inconvenient, often on the premise that if it hurts more it must be working better. Real security improvements have little or no effect on usability, and can actually go either way easier or harder.

Agreed. Just check out this screenshot:

C:\>_

If you miss it, you can set your shell prompt to something more nostalgic:
PS1='C:$(echo ${PWD//\//\\\} | tr "[:lower:]" "[:upper:]" | sed -e"s/\\([^\\]\\{6\\}\\)[^\\]\\{2,\\}/\\1~1/g" ) >'

Bwuahahahaha.... that was ... oh... wait... you are serious?

Windows 8 will succeed not because it's any good, but because it has to - MS has a lot riding on this one, more than on ME or Vista or the other dogs. They will spend billions to make it successful, but it doesn't stand a chance at beating competition that is actually somewhat good.

You can buy market share. But you can't buy being good.

They really will spend billions. The esimates are that M$ will flush over $1.5 billion in marketing Vista 8. Some estimates are a little higher. Whether that is enough to overcome the suckiness and buy some market share still remains to be seen. So far it's not doing well on the desktop and is still a no-show in the tablet space. And what they are about to try with Dell might tip the hands of the other OEMs over to Android/Linux or GNU/Linux

As KiloByte wrote, your list is very incomplete. You can block Facebook at the firewall if you use the ASN to look up all the nets involved.

/usr/bin/whois -h whois.radb.net '!gAS32934' | tr ' ' '\n'

From there you can munge the list of nets into a list of firewall rules and add them to your firewall. No more tracking by Facebook.