Pittsburgh would be the next Silicon Valley, if there were any people with money here. I can't get to work without tripping over computer scientists from CMU. Many of the people here are certainly smart and creative enough, but there's no way to get any funding - unless they leave Pittsburgh, and go to the west coast. More than half of the companies I've worked for in Pittsburgh have either closed down, or moved to the west coast - where the money is.

Though not a perfect analogy, it like the free-as-in-beer vs free-as-in-speech comparison. No, you're not alone; No, nobody is going to remember who you are or what you did, or even that you were there unless you make an effort to be memorable.

Or, y'know, unless there is a recording made of your presence and activities, which is mined and stored forever.

It would make sense to alert potential patrons that they will be monitored in this capacity. I can imagine that a big QR-type code on the front of the building would alert not only the humans, but their smartphones or other gadgets. Perhaps you can correlate your social-networking friends with local patrons, and bring up a chat-list in your iGlasses.

We've seen how certain types of makup and hats can foil facial recognition. I wonder if that will make the Guy Fawkes mask more popular, when people wear for an anonymous nite on the town.

I made the switch to the Gimp years ago. I got tired of pirating Photoshop. Then, when I switched to Linux, Photoshop doesn't run on Linux. Lo and behold, Gimp is an easy install, and I learned that. Now that I've switched to Mac (for the desktop), I still use Gimp. Ooh, and there's a new version out, and the development version handles high-bit images!
 
  gimp.org

When I had some EBS problems a couple years ago, I figured I would run xfs_check. It seemed to do absolutely nothing, even if there were disks known to be bad in the md array. xfs is nice and fast, but I haven't seen the xfs_check or xfs_repair to do either of the things I'd assume they'd do -- check and repair. I found it easier to delete the volumes and start from scratch, because any compromised xfs filesystem seems to be totally unfixable. Is fsck for xfs new?

Long-time MythTV user here. MythTV does the PVR stuff for me that I like. Otherwise, I do not have collections of videos or MP3s, and have stayed away from torrenting media. I've also thrown a Roku into the mix, since I like watching Netflix. If only modern players would support playing from MythTV, and I think Ubuntu TV may be a step in that direction. As it is, I'm experimenting with using the Roku as a MythTV player, but it is annoying to transcode all the video to h.264 or whatever it is. Still, I'm glad to have the linux tools available to hack it together, even if it isn't an elegant solution.