How did you know he didn't?

Thanks! I was about to post a similar JE with pretty much the same question; I want to control an XP box from a Linux box and a W7 notebook and get that monitor, mouse, and keyboard out of my living room (the TV is the Linux box's monitor, have an IR mouse and keyboard for that one).

It looks like it would probably work for d_r as well. I'd probably have found it on Google, but as it's closed source I wouldn't have trusted it without a trusted opinion.

If I find that someone (Person or corporate entity.) has installed software on MY computer without my explicit permission, they will be explaining to law enforcement why they think they have the right.

LOL, who went to prison for Sony's XCP? I was bitten by Sony's malware almost ten years ago but idiots keep buying Sony's shit. It cost them NOTHING, I'll never EVER buy another Sony product but I'm one in seven billion.

Someone should have gone to prison for deliberately infecting thousands of their paying customers' PCs, but no... rich people only go to prison when they fuck over someone with more wealth and power.

Is there a silver lining in this cloud? FOSS will benefit... a tiny bit. There are too many people stupid enough to buy Sony products after XCP, OtherOS, and all the other fuckings over they served their paying customers.

If you have mod points and buy Sony, mod me flamebait because I'm calling you a fucking moron. God damned dumbasses. Yes, I'm still pissed and I still want someone in prison over this, but governments are and have always been owned by the rich. Expect malware in your proprietary shitware.

I want Sony to fucking DIE. Unfortunately, they won't be bothered one tiny bit. They can do any damned thing they want to you. Bend over and take it, serfs.

Stephen Hawking says time travel is possible. Maybe some day, but I doubt even your great great great grandchildren will see FTL or time travel.

Within 50 years (if not much sooner), we'll almost certainly have cured aging.

Well, there are some folks who know a lot more about medicine and biology than I do who believe that, but it's far from a certainty. Note that the average and median life spans for people have increased greatly in the last hundred years, but wake me up when someone makes it much past 115. Those outliers have been around since antiquity, there are quite a few in my family tree from centuries ago (an uncle was into genealogy).

I'm 60 and already starting to feel the effects of aging. I'll be 110 in 50 years. I'm pretty skeptical, they're going to have to figure out how to extend telomeraise (I don't know how to spell it, and neither does FireFox) without giving you cancer. They're going to have to figure out how to stop genetic errors when cells divide, and quite a few other thorny problems. I doubt my ten year old great nephew will see it, let alone me, and it may be an impossibility.

Once you approach even half the speed of light, local time slows down for you, so e.g. a 50 year trip would be 'only' 30 or 40 years (I haven't done the exact math)

Unless I'm mistaken the math is straightforward; at C the trip would seem instantaneous to the traveler, so half C a 50 light year trip would seem like 25.

But then, there's the problem that time speeds up greatly as you age -- remember how far apart Christmases were when you were five? That phenomenon accelerates as you age.

the goal of sending autonomous robotic explorers to stars (a la Mars Curiosity) just 13ly away may be quite feasible in some of our lifetimes

Certainly we'll have robotic probes to the stars in a few hundred years, but I'm very skeptical that you'll see it in your lifetime.

we take for granted, may change dramatically - e.g. the typical human lifespan.

The typical lifespan already has nearly doubled, but the longest lifespan hasn't changed at all.

Also, perspective: We've been 'human' for approximately 2 million years. We have millions of years ahead of us as a species, and even on cosmic scales, you can do an enormous amount in even just 2 million years.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I think our future in space is practically certain, and that we'll probably ultimately reach hundreds of other stars, and establish colonies on other planets. It's a matter of when and how, not if.

That I will agree with. I'm in the middle of writing a sci-fi book set ten million years in the future. In the book, we have evolved into at least four separate species (there may be more, I never know from one chapter to the next what's going to happen), one on terraformed Mars, one Terraformed Venus, and two on Earth. The Earthians have time travel, FTL travel, and a 500 year old is a young man. If you're interested, here's the first chapter. What's done so far is all posted (if you hate it, blame slashdot! They started it...).

Interesting, thanks. Apparently I've been miseducated.

If we did find a planet with technological creatures that close, it would be a pretty good indication that tech civilizations were pretty common.

It would be pretty hard to decipher the signal, though. You've probably seen this and this. We miight not even realize the signals were from an intelligence -- Greg Egan's Luminous has an extraterrestrial race with a completely different math than ours (I read it in 1995's The Year's Best Science Fiction, it's a very good, thought-provoking read. Wikipedia says he has a book by the same name, with that story in it).

Agreed.

It's pretty cold outside here, too (at least in the north right now) and we're alone as far as we can ascertain. But why would the newly found planet not have an atmosphere? It isn't like they can tell if it has a magnetic field. If it does, and it's Earth's mass more or less, it should have an atmosphere.

Vulcan circles a red dwarf? Wikipedia says nothing about the planet or its star, just about the Vulcans themselves. I was thinking Krypton, even though I haven't read a Superman comic since I was 7 or 8; it orbits a red star.

I'm always amused by "only n light years away" in every story about a newly-found planet. Adams was right. "Space is big. I mean really big. You think it's a long way to the chemist..." the Voyagers have been traveling for 40 years and still haven't gotten past the heliopause. Even Adams was understating the vast distances between stars, try as he might to impress how big space is. Getting to Vulcan/Krypton is indeed infinitely improbable, at least for the next few hundred years and maybe never.

Depressing, isn't it?

I reinstalled 10.04 just to have an almost workable machine, but apparently they changed Flash, because it's not working. I suspect I just need more memory (it only has 750 meg). But that Amazon.com BS was kind of the last straw as far as Ubuntu goes, for me anyway.

From all the comments (and I thank everyone who responded!) I think I'll give Mint a try. Maybe even before I buy some memory.

It wasn't the "sexual liberation", it was Johnson's well-intentioned but woefully wrong "war on poverty" and the radical changes to AFDC that did it. If there was a man in the house, he was expected to work, while a single dad (or more usually, mom) was expected to raise kids. Johnson's changes made it incredibly difficult to escape AFDC and poverty. Generational welfare skyrocketed then, as did the rise of one-parent welfare households. It became the norm in many if not most poor neighborhoods. A girl was encouraged to get pregnant so she could get that welfare money.

It got worse with Reagan's reboot of Nixon's "war on drugs" which put many, many poor men in prison and fueled gang wars. It didn't help that black neighborhoods were targeted for drug stings.

Thankfully, AFDC was repealed in 1996 under Clinton and replaced with TANF.

Maybe centuries old traditions of religion and family life are not based on stupid superstitions as many people educated beyond the level of their intelligence seem to think these days

As a Christian, I certainly don't consider it superstition (it isn't superstition when you've experienced God personally). But the stable, two parent family wasn't the norm for most of the last thousand years -- marriage was expected and out of wedlock births were rare, but lots and lots of women died in childbirth, many men died in industrial accidents, war, and other violence. In the 1800s there were probably more single parent households than marriages, since so many parents died from war, childbirth, accident, and disease.

Most kids are indeed better off in a two parent household, but many kids would be far better off if their abusive, violent, alcoholic fathers (or mothers) were to disappear.

All that said, I have no right to insist that anyone else follows my values. I certainly wouldn't want to be forced to follow Islamic values, would you?

I don't suppose you would ever accept the answer being something along the lines of "because they are committing the majority of the crimes in the US"?

Nah..it couldn't possibly be that simple.

Only superficially. A larger percentage of blacks than percentage of whites are poor, and poverty and crime go hand in hand. Have a kid grow up in a poor family with no hope of ever getting a decent education, a future, a life, where everyone he knows is a criminal destined for the grave pr prison, and guess what happens? No matter what color he is?

Yes, the problem is indeed simple. The solution doesn't seem to be.

Not to mention that most people in prison don't have father figures in their lives, which means that marriage has a strong positive effect on society.

Having a father isn't going to help if Dad's a criminal. Criminality, like everything else, tends to run in families. And I think I'd need to see some stats before I could give that credence, as I know a few folks (all white) who have been in prison. Two of them I know had dads. One is my best friend's brother, a former diesel mechanic (before he was arrested) who spent time in Fed for loaning a former high school classmate money (the classmate was a drug dealer, half his graduating class went to prison) and the other, an avowed atheist, was brought up in a strict Southern Baptist family and spent ten years in a Kentucky prison for murder. Another fellow that haunts that bar, a really burned out drug abuser, went to Joliet for cooking meth, but I Don't know if he had a father figure growing up.

Bill Clinton's dad died when his mother was pregnant with him.

Another fellow there, a business owner, has two sons. One is a security guard, the other is a criminal. So what I've seen in my six decades doesn't jibe at all with your assertion.

Bullshit, for the last two years my church has given two weeks' groceries to every family with a chile at Harvard Park Elementary over Christmas break, because it's the poorest neighborhood in town and school breakfast and lunch is all some of those kids get. No sermons involved, volunteers simply drop off the groceries.

I don't believe St John's breadline, run by the Catholics here, makes you say grace or anything. They're just feeding poor people. No sermon attached.