You are too narrow-sighted. The creation of copyrighted material takes resources outside of information technology. Inside of information technology the replication cost is practically zero. However, to create the information in the first place requires resources from the wider world. Once resources in the wider world also have near-zero costs then you can copy everything freely without being a parasite to another.

In Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists it really shows how much things were different way back in 1974 - or one year after I was born. When I was growing up - in the heyday of the Commodore 64 - piracy wasn't even questioned one iota. Everyone did it, you pooled together $5 each from your circle of friends, bought a game, and promptly pirated it for everyone and drew a lot to see who would get the original. Back then DRM-cracking-copy-programs were legal and the hypocrisy of the times is that they would copy everything but themselves. You had to use a different copy program to copy a copy program for your circle of friends.

Now, it's different. We're slowly being taught that information is analogous to physical property. I'm coming around to it. I no longer pirate any software at all. If it wasn't for gaming I'd be 100% free software. I have a ways to go yet before I'm fully compliant but it's coming. Free software at it's core also depends on copyright, the protections afforded to commercial software are what also enables FOSS. If you're FOSS evangelizing you automatically should be a supporter of copyright.

Music, books, software: they are all different facets of the same thing. If someone wants to give their effort away - FOSS - then that is their right and it needs to be respected. If someone want's to charge for it it is the exact same right. You don't need it that bad if you don't want to comply with the license to acquire some information - go make it yourself and release it if you want under your own terms.

The sad fact is that it doesn't matter if there's a resource for politicians to get sound information from to make decisions. With the structure of today's congress/senate what you need are actually lobbyists - lot's of them and bribes, err, campaign donations too!

Look at what happened to Microsoft: they didn't lobby enough and found themselves on the wrong-end of an antitrust suit. Now they lobby enough that that's not a problem anymore.

In Arch (from AUR) I have "gnome-shell-extension-icontopbar" installed which does exactly that. My "system-tray" icons are always visible and on the top-right of the screen on the top-bar!

How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.

Anyway, I'm typing this on Arch Linux 64-bit with GNOME 3.2.1 and a few (needed!) shell extensions. I find it fine and I thought I would be a GNOME 3 hater but I'm actually not.

I don't even bother to moderate anymore. I read the comments at -1 because that is the only way to combat moderator abuse. It happens too often that you see a completely worthwhile comment moderated -1. Slashdot's game has been fixed. I blame the "Friend/Foe" system: that let's you instantly know whether to mod up/down if you were so inclined.

Source: HAL: Look Dave, I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.

Seriously, this is it: Kafka's The Trial.

The protagonist was arrested, tried, and sentenced to die under charges and laws he was never allowed to examine. First published in 1925 so maybe that's why it's not in much memory.

My new mall has a policy that it's against the rules to be black in it. So, can my rent-a-cops call real cops and make black people leave and maybe arrest them too? There's a big difference between "policy" and "illegal." When your "policy" becomes "law" then we're back to fiefdoms.

Here's what I don't like about "secure boot" (from this article): "...The end user is not guaranteed that their system will include the signing keys that would be required for them to swap their graphics card for one from another vendor ..."

So, given that major OEM's tend to ship as minimal as possible BIOS/UEFI options: If you buy a Dell computer and cannot turn off secure boot, are you limited by hardware signing to Dell branded (and priced) graphics cards and etc?

"I would like to learn more about Artificial Intelligence and Game Theory. I know these are both large areas of study; however, my main interest is in how these affect decisions in the world. This would include politicians, business people, and general society. I'm not looking for a career or anything; this is just a personal interest of mine. Where are good places to start in these areas for somebody new to them? I'm aware of the Stanford on-line classes, but those don't work with my current schedule."

Do you really understand how unwise it is to put those words together in that manner? Don't interfere.

This is just another scarcity that is being encroached on. Scarcity of labor. Once all scarce needs of humans are met by a self-sustaining system then we will be in the "Star Trek Economy" future where you just do what you want and status is what you fight over by being exceptionally good at something. Like providing "status" human-made (not robot made!) food.

Sorry man, didn't mean to put you on a defensive: I was more babbling about love of "geek" stuff! ;) If you have a spare Windows license lying around: you can get VirtualBox for a Linux host too! You could try it the other way: see how Aero performs if you have a Vista or 7 license. It's not going to be up-to-par for Windows games I would think but the equivalent compiz:aero should work good enough for you to try? Best part: delete a file when you're done and it's gone!

This is a fairly new machine (obviously!) and when I built it support for a 6870 just wasn't any good. It may have changed but I'm already having the best of all worlds to change. I have 8GB of RAM in it. The host is Windows 7 64-bit, and the guest is Ubuntu 11.04 64-bit. I'm not kidding when I say video performance and performance in general is extremely good: it is. A part of it is because my processor supports hardware virtualization features such as nested-pages. That helps for running programs faster. The video wasn't always as good but is now since VirtualBox added 3D support and therefore the ability to use composited desktops, which again, run perfectly fine. I have a 64GB disk image for Ubuntu - which is plenty because I just use it for web-browsing and programming. My hard drive on the host is 1TB. And it's full of Windows games. When I'm in Ubuntu - at full speed - the CPU (measured from Windows 7) is sitting between 1-3% usage idle. So it's not a resource hog. I give the VM 4GB of RAM. I have a shared machine folder between the guest and host so transferring files is super simple. And here's the best part: when a new version of Ubuntu comes out (or just another distro I'd like to toy with): No reinstall. Put the files I want to transfer to the new version through the machine folder into the host and then back through a different machine folder into a new guest. It's just all around awesome! I get games and trouble-free-whatever-distro(s)-I-want at the same time. What makes it perfect is that the virtualization for the guest is just so darn good. I remember when that wasn't the case. It is now!