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"Posted by Gary Newell | at 20:51 3 comments Introduction For the past couple of years I have been producing analysis guides for the top 10 Linux distributions as listed on Distrowatch. Click here for the guide for 2013 Click here for the guide for 2014 The point of this article is to look at the top 10 Linux distributions as listed on Distrowatch for the year 2015 and analyse their suitability for the average Joe. The criteria for an Everyday Linux distribution is as follows: Must be relatively easy to install Must have an intuitive desktop environment Must be easy to use Must have a standard set of applications pre-installed (i.e. web browser, audio player, media player) Must have a decent package manager in order to install further software Must be ready to use from the get go"

"by Pradeep Kumar · Published May 7, 2016 · Updated May 10, 2016 We have always felt that Windows is one of the most user-friendly interfaces among the Operation Systems that have been developed and upgraded in this technological era. However, this has become a myth with the release of the Linux Desktops as they have proved to be more user-friendly and safe compared to that of the Windows Desktops."

"We might not have the money we want but we do have some control over our happiness levels. Dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins are the brain chemicals responsible for our happiness. These chemicals are can be triggered all the time, even by mundane events. But rather than thinking we have no control over them, science has proven that we can intentionally boost them. And being in a good state of mind is important for happiness, health and success. So here are some simple ways to hack our positive neurochemicals:"

"Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Thousands of high school and university students used Classroom Salon (CLS), http://www.classroomsalon.org/, this past academic year to share their ideas about texts, news articles and other reading materials or their critiques of each others' writings. With the support of the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, CLS will be used in an innovative experiment at the University of Baltimore to see if it can help students who are in danger of failing introductory courses or otherwise dropping out of college. "Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have captured the attention of young people in a way that blogs and online discussion forums have not," said Ananda Gunawardena, associate teaching professor in the Computer Science Department, who developed CLS with David S. Kaufer, professor of English. "With Classroom Salon, we've tried to capture the sense of connectedness that makes social media sites so appealing, but within a framework that that allows groups to explore texts deeply. So it's not just social networking for the sake of socializing but enhancing the student experience as readers and writers.""

"Computer security researchers who expose hackable vulnerabilities in digital products face plenty of occupational hazards: They can have their work censored by threats of lawsuits from the companies whose products they hack, or they can even be criminally indicted if their white-hat hacking runs afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one still-mysterious encounter between security researchers and the law points to a newer, equally troubling possibility: They can have their work subpoenaed in a criminal investigation and used as a law enforcement tool."

"Computer security researchers who expose hackable vulnerabilities in digital products face plenty of occupational hazards: They can have their work censored by threats of lawsuits from the companies whose products they hack, or they can even be criminally indicted if their white-hat hacking runs afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But one still-mysterious encounter between security researchers and the law points to a newer, equally troubling possibility: They can have their work subpoenaed in a criminal investigation and used as a law enforcement tool."

"The lessons we should have learned from post-9/11 government overreach. By Karen J. Greenberg / TomDispatch "

"The lessons we should have learned from post-9/11 government overreach. By Karen J. Greenberg / TomDispatch "

"Jul 06, 2016 By Doc Searls in Community Identity kernel Privacy I believe the best and worst thing about Linux is its hard distinction between kernel space and user space. Without that distinction, Linux never would have become the most leveraged operating system in the world. Today, Linux has the largest range of uses for the largest number of users-most of whom have no idea they are using Linux when they search for something on Google or poke at their Android phones. Even Apple stuff wouldn't be what it is (for example, using BSD in its computers) were it not for Linux's success. "

"Henry Ford famously quipped that if he'd asked what people wanted, they'd have said, "faster horses." There are countless numbers of ideas being funded every day that are aimed at essentially building faster horses. The result is that we have available an enormous embarrassment of riches in technology, information and economy - but how many of them are truly groundbreaking or innovative?"

"If you actually know your stuff, you will know that a good quality harmonica is gonna cost way more than a few dollars... especially a chromatic, which is $100 or more. Even though most harmonicas have good manufacturing, proper maintenance and preventative measures are still needed. Aside from the cost of repairs, you might have difficulty finding someone skilled enough to repair your harmonica, especially if you are not good at repairing!"

"Every Fedora system runs a kernel. Many pieces of code come together to make this a reality. Each release of the Fedora kernel starts with a baseline release from the upstream community. This is often called a 'vanilla' kernel. The upstream kernel is the standard. The goal is to have as much code upstream as possible. This makes it easier for bug fixes and API updates to happen as well as having more people review the code. In an ideal world, Fedora would be able to to take the kernel straight from kernel.org and send that out to all users."

"This tutorial will show you how to install and uninstall applications in Fedora using PackageKit(Graphical) and yum(Terminal). I am using the Fedora 18. If you are the Ubuntu user, see managing software's in Ubuntu via Terminal. If you have just switched from Windows environment to Linux, first do the installing using the Graphical interface. It's way simple and easy. Whereas, application installing and uninstalling is much more faster via Terminal. You just have to be little bit familiar with the command language and Linux commands. Try both and implement which one u feel comfortable and easier."

[ Posted May 6, 2015 By Bruce Byfield Submit Feedback » More Articles » Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable-- and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided.]

[ Posted May 6, 2015 By Bruce Byfield Submit Feedback » More Articles » Every since Linux first became popular, articles have been condemning its shortcomings. Hardly a month goes by without someone explaining what Linux lacks, or how it needs a particular feature, application, or service to be usable-- and, as often as not, the complaints are misguided.]

"Think back on your career and the managers you have had. I am sure that you have had good managers and others who were maybe not so great. When I ask people to list what made the good managers "good", most of the examples they give me are to do with behaviour, or style." [# ! Via Alfred Hankell's http://www.scoop.it/t/women-on-the-go]

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years-the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success-tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language-seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands of years and the ecological impact of people was minimal. Then suddenly-bang!-culture exploded, starting in Africa. Why then, why there?

"When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs? In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts. Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist - he popularized the term "virtual reality" - wonders if the Web's structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against "hive thinking" and "digital Maoism," by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity."

Still 30-below! lol

it's a balmy -11 now, breaking out the beach shorts tomorrow

"The impact of technological change on culture, learning, and morality has long been the subject of intense debate, and every technological revolution brings out a fresh crop of both pessimists and pollyannas. Indeed, a familiar cycle has repeat itself throughout history whenever new modes of production (from mechanized agriculture to assembly-line production), means of transportation (water, rail, road, or air), energy production processes (steam, electric, nuclear), medical breakthroughs (vaccination, surgery, cloning), or communications techniques (telegraph, telephone, radio, television) have appeared on the scene. The cycle goes something like this. A new technology appears. Those who fear the sweeping changes brought about by this technology see a sky that is about to fall. These "techno-pessimists" predict the death of the old order (which, ironically, is often a previous generation's hotly-debated technology that others wanted slowed or stopped). Embracing this new technology, they fear, will result in the overthrow of traditions, beliefs, values, institutions, business models, and much else they hold sacred. The pollyannas, by contrast, look out at the unfolding landscape and see mostly rainbows in the air. Theirs is a rose-colored world in which the technological revolution du jour is seen as improving the general lot of mankind and bringing about a better order. If something has to give, then the old ways be damned! For such "techno-optimists," progress means some norms and institutions must adapt-perhaps even disappear-for society to continue its march forward. Our current Information Revolution is no different. It too has its share of techno-pessimists and techno-optimists. Indeed, before most of us had even heard of the Internet, people were already fighting about it-or at least debating what the rise of the Information Age meant for our culture, society, and economy."

does Kurtopia need someone to mow the lawn?

no, but we do need someone to take our throm-dib-u-lator apart though

""This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness" - Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society."

"Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who's who. The findings suggest that face-recognition and other cognitive skills may be separate from each other, and independent of general intelligence. This could help explain what makes one person good at math but bad at music, or good at spatial navigation but bad at language "People have wondered for a long time what makes one person cognitively different from another person," said cognitive psychologist Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, coauthor of the study published Jan. 7 in Current Biology. "Our study is one tiny piece of the answer to this question." The ability to recognize faces is not just handy for cocktail parties, it's crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and facilitating social interactions. If face recognition increases our ability to fend off predators and find mates, there is an evolutionary drive to encode this ability in our genes. To test this, Kanwisher's team looked at whether the ability to recognize faces runs in the family. They found that identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, were more similar in their face-recognition ability than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. This suggests the ability to recognize faces is heritable."

"Dave Ng sez, "The Canadian government is poised to once again abhor evidence-based decision making. 300 scientists have looked over the Joint Review Panel Report that is being used to push forward the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project have concluded that it 'has so many systemic errors and omissions, we can only consider it a failure.'" "