Gibson knows about as much about security as Sony.

"Consumers hope to drop Apple as computer supplier"

Oh man, I can't WAIT for the new millennium!

"This religion doesn't rely on needless superstition and blind faith."

"Doesn't fit the criteria, then."

"He looks foreign."

"Get him."

This is the press equivalent of amputating a gangrenous limb to try and stop the spread of the infection, without even acknowledging that the rest of the body is already riddled with disease...

Partial release is more dangerous than no release at all. Without the ability to compile the entire thing for yourself and check the checksums, there is no real way to know that this is the genuine source.

Just because you open the door a crack, doesn't mean the user can see the massive spike pit hiding behind the hinge.

I don't know. I just like to open pages on Redtube in Mosaic and let my imagination do the work.

"http://www.redtube.c-"

"sorry, wrong vt"

In a reply to an email sent to him he said the following as a defence for his use being 'the first':

"The very nature of the crypto transaction renders it impossible to trace and prove a completed transaction in interstate commerce."

If he really thinks this, he is about to get a crypto asskicking...

With a motto that reads "don't be evil" (perhaps with an appended "unless it's profitable"), perhaps the better method is to discern what you actually want to get from having a Google account.

Considering Google's primary source of revenue is advertisement -- the dissemination of data -- it doesn't take much foresight to see that vast swathes of user data is also a valuable commodity that could become a tangible profit for them.

I changed my mother from Ubuntu to Linux Mint around a year ago, and very quickly had to switch her back due to the endless cries of "it's doing something strange!". It was indeed doing something strange -- in around a 2 week period I came across at least two updates that insisted upon pushing Ubuntu branding to core parts of the system. What is the problem with this? Well, frankly -- some LM in-house programs broke, as they weren't expecting this change, but it was their own update system that allowed it to happen.

The main problems that I see with Linux Mint is that it has a very small development team, which appears to have led to significant oversights in the past, which have caused various issues requiring user intervention (for example, fsck on boot was completely broken in LM9, and would simply hang. This was on the tracker for a very long time, with the only message of hope being 'it will be fixed in LM10'.). This would be fine for someone who was more familiar with Unix problem solving, but frankly my mum and many others like her just want to sit down with the computer and have it work without need for troubleshooting. Sure, other distros (including Ubuntu) have messed things up in the past, but they have had a large enough vocal community to get a decent consensus on how to solve the problem. Linux Mint simply doesn't.

Linux Mint does a lot of things better than Ubuntu and in general seems to understand its demographic better (as it is, perhaps, a less diverse demographic). At the present time I would hesitate to recommend it for people who just want a works-out-of-the-box-and-stays-that-way experience, however, as the caveats are simply too numerous.