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.

In addition to calling in Ortiz, there is a petition to Fire Assistant U.S. Attorney Steve Heymann. The petitions by themselves might not do much but they do keep the ball rolling. What was done to Swartz has been and is done to many others.

The plus (+) is part of the mail standard, so all compliant mail transfer agents should support it. That should include postfix. Other characters are not supported because they are not part of the standard.

Here's two: Citadel and Kolab

Among other things, Kolab is a product of a series of contracts for the federal office for Security in the Information Technology in the German Government, though both are quite secure.

Then there are two more: OpenGroupware and Zimbra. Module options are out there. If you're not finding them, then it's because you are not looking.

How will your business model change if Linux became dominant on desktops as it has for tablets?