Frank looked hungrily at the establishments on both sides of the main drag of Cedar City, Utah. He’d lost eighteen pounds, and it was payback time.

This article on FOX News is not news for a lot of folks, but it's a nice update even for those who are aware that the Feds are attempting to thwart the freedom of choice concerning supplements with its New Dietary Ingredient (NDI) regulations.

According to those opposing the NDI guidelines, once certain supplements are banned, Big Pharma would likely begin developing and eventually patenting the formulas for those items. Since they, unlike independent manufacturers, are more than capable of footing the hefty bill associated with the regulatory testing process, soon enough the companies bringing you conventional medications would be the same ones offering alternative treatments. Consumers’ money would be going into one big pocket.

People often think that Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks-you know like the ones that knocked the Department of Justice, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and Universal Music recently–require hundreds of attackers generating gigabytes of traffic per second to pound a Website down into the ground. Ah, [...]

Linux Mint 12 KDE has been released which uses Linux Kernel 3.0 and KDe version 4.7.4. It contain many new features compare to its last version like it has Hybrid ISO image which creates Live USB for installation and many other features.

This is an article from the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics: "Should Participation in Vaccine Clinical Trials Be Mandated?". Excuse the long quote from the journal article, but in this case it is necessary to the impact of this blog post:

In recent decades there has been a distressing decline in the numbers of healthy volunteers who participate in clinical trials [7], a decline that has the potential to become a key rate-limiting factor in vaccine development. Reasons for this decline are unclear but are likely to be multifaceted. One familiar problem is the payment of volunteers [8]. To date, the relatively meagre compensation that participants often receive could be seen to belittle and undervalue the contribution of these individuals to global health. The modest financial remuneration commonly provided often means that students and the unemployed make up the bulk of volunteers [6, 8, 9]. As a result, the risks of developing a health intervention that would benefit the whole population are carried disproportionately by some of society’s most poor and vulnerable. This is a situation few would judge to be fair or ethical. However it is hard to increase volunteer payment without creating financial incentives. “Danger money” is frowned upon as an inducement that inevitably clouds an individual’s appreciation of risk, limiting the likelihood that consent is informed [6, 7]. As a result, consensus has generally dictated that payment for volunteers’ trial involvement be modest and limited to compensation for travel, time, and inconvenience only.

If progression of promising vaccines from the lab to the clinic is to remain unaffected and financial inducement is an ethically unacceptable solution to the recruitment shortage, other strategies need to be considered. Compulsory involvement in vaccine studies is one alternative solution that is not as outlandish as it might seem on first consideration. Many societies already mandate that citizens undertake activities for the good of society; in several European countries registration for organ-donation has switched from “opt-in” (the current U.S. system) to “opt-out” systems (in which those who do not specifically register as nondonors are presumed to consent to donation) [10], and most societies expect citizens to undertake jury service when called upon. In these examples, the risks or inconvenience to an individual are usually limited and minor. Mandatory involvement in vaccine trials is therefore perhaps more akin to military conscription, a policy operating today in 66 countries. In both conscription and obligatory trial participation, individuals have little or no choice regarding involvement and face inherent risks over which they have no control, all for the greater good of society.

The article goes on to say that if the severity of a disease is increased (meaning state propaganda and lies exaggerating or inventing crises), the forcing of human beings to become test monkeys "becomes a more palatable option." Accordingly, there is a huge motivation to lie, spread myths, distort studies, and clamp down on dissenters from the conventional wisdom.

The authors also state that "sensationalist and unfounded stories" have been the root cause of more and more people fearing and thus denying the government's vaccination indoctrination. The two authors of this piece are truly evil and perverted individuals. Thanks to Travis Holte for the link.

How many of you who watched the Super Bowl game yesterday caught faux libertarian Clint Eastwood's tacit support of the fascist bailout of Chrysler Corporation? As my friend's son Rafael (a Ron Paul supporter) quipped after the commercial, "I expected to hear 'I'm Barack Obama and I approve this message.'"

UPDATE: But don't worry, Clint, the taxpayers lost $1.3 on Chrysler's "comeback." [Thanks to Eli Cryderman]

Having just bought a Samsung ‘Smart’ TV, I was very keen to take advantage of its built in DLNA media renderer. I already have mediatomb running on my headless file/mail/web/whatever server, so I thought I’d be all ready to go. Sadly, Samsung seems to have not implemented the DLNA standard in a sane way, and despite following a number of guides on I found on the internets suggesting sending custom http headers to the TV, I could not get mediatomb to play nicely with the TV.

If I knew the outcome of this test, I would not even have started it. In my own opinion, the LXDE version is the worst one in Debian family. This is not really Debian as you are used to seeing it: stable, Spartan, but still functional. This is an operating system packed with some enhanced applications but without essential elements. A colossus with feet of clay.

Lew: And this was managed without the use of any "hanging chads" or ballot counters with magnifying glasses? Were any cardsharps brought in to count ballots from the bottom of the deck? Once again, Stalin's Realpolitik prevails!

openSUSE community manager, Jos Poortvliet, wonders if putting a tax on the sharing of knowledge might limit social as well as economic growth…

Want to build your own custom ROM for an Android phone or tablet? This guide will show you how to get started

You must arm your computer with necessary protections with Anti-virus being the basic, where antivirus installation and software applications are must for each and every computer attached to the Internet.Every user requires protection against viruses, Trojans, worms, Adware and spyware.[size=11]Yes I know nothing to do with Linux, but some idiot posted it here and it's good for a laugh - Tracy[/size]

Mozilla Firefox 11 web browser the latest development release brings several new features improves the web browsing experience for regular users and better developing environment for web developers. A couple of new developer features added lately to the Beta version of Mozilla Firefox 11 are a style editor for CSS editing web page elements and 3D web page visualizer tool allows you to easily check the web page structure in 3D.

Welcome to the 185th issue of Softpedia Linux Weekly!

Some of my die-hard Windows friends are very excited by Windows 8 arrival later this year. Others fear that Windows 8 will be a repeat of Microsoft’s Vista disaster. Me? I know Windows 8 will be a Vista-sized fiasco. Before jumping into why I think far most PC users will still be running Windows 7 [...]

Summary: For too long, GNU/Linux has been locked out of the tablet market. That is about to change with the May 2012 arrival of the Open Spark. The Open Spark is a new tablet that will run a variant of GNU/Linux called Mer. A group of 42 Free Software developers have released a wonderful book called Open Advice. It chronicles their lessons learned from working on hundreds of Free Software projects. The Linux Foundation received an esteemed new fellow from SUSE, Mr. Greg Kroah-Hartman. Finally, the Free Software Petition on WhiteHouse.gov received a key endorsement.

Open source hardware is increasingly making the news, as Ford partners with Bug Labs to “advance in-car connectivity innovation”, thousands of US Radio Shack stores start stocking Arduino, and Facebook releases the plans for energy-efficient data centre technology via Open Compute. But could it change the world? Andrew Back takes a look at five projects which just might.

In yet another step toward a cashless society, a homeowner in California was not allowed to pay his monthly mortgage payment in "legal tender." The bank manager even called the police on the customer. Do you see how easy it is for the Banksters' puppets to carry out the Banksters' plans for a cashless society/global worthless currency? The next step will be that instead of a a credit card, debit card, or even a bank check, you will be required to have a microchip implanted under your skin with your account information on it for "security" purposes, i.e., all physical payments will be illegal (or even possible) anymore.

The upcoming Mozilla Firefox 11.0 web browser and Mozilla Thunderbird 11.0 email client just landed in the daily builds of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Alpha 2 (Precise Pangolin) operating system.

While the Ivy Bridge launch is still a number of weeks out, Intel will soon be publishing their initial hardware enablement code for next year's Haswell micro-architecture...