I can't really proofread well for either wrong-word (I have a spell-checker) or missing word, at least until much later, as I find I often fill in the right word even for others' writings, let alone my own. Sites like/. where someone comes along and calls attention to such gaffes, often have me going back to reread the original and see that indeed, my brain did automatically fill in the right word.
For that reason, when I preview I often don't reread the entire thing, just symbol-scan to see if any were "eaten" by things like/.'s infamous "plain text", and quick-read to see that the overall thought pattern is reasonably cohesive.
I really hated writing as a kid, and typing thru highschool (tho it was fine on the computer, but typing class was still electric typewriters at the time and I hated that tho I took a year of it to better interface with the computer!), but now I have an ergonomic "split" keyboard (Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro, held in my lap but with frequent position changes) and can compose and type for hours at a time without issue. But my handwriting is worse than ever, since now on top of what was bad to begin with, my fingers just keep wanting to type the letters, so I get a decent number of extra "typing" squiggles in my handwriting. So I do as little as possible, and print some of the time when I must handwrite and it's for someone else to read. But the "typing squiggle handwriting" syndrome probably afflicts quite a number of/.ers.
Back on topic, I don't particularly mind the font, even on-screen (fairly high resolution LCDs), and in fact switched to it in a couple font-preferences. I'll see how it goes for a few days.
I never hated consoles with Internet access, they're useful for running emerge --sync and then emerge --update --deep --newuse --ask --verbose @world for instance. No X need be loaded for that! =:^) But network RELIANCE? Well, I suppose if you're running remotely, you're relying on the network, but what about those of us who only run a single home computer and don't need or want remote console access? Why would we want to RELY on the network to even get a local console CLI running? Are they proposing a TCP socket interface much like X may use, only setup directly from the kernel using (possibly 2.6.28 configured-in) kernel command line options? Why?
Seriously, I read the title in my RSS client and couldn't figure out why Linux console makers (and is that the kernel folks, or the BASH folks, or what?) would be pushing for more network reliance. The best I could come up with was that the maintainers (or some patch submitter) of the early console stuff used for debugging, typically over a serial terminal, wanted to update it to handle Ethernet. It wasn't until I clicked on the link to see what the story was, and started reading the summary, that I realized it was GAME consoles it was talking about.
A lot of people say my writing is too wordy now, and really, if I work at it, I can often cut way down while still conveying the same message, but it takes several drafts and a LOT of work.
I blame it on all those stupid assignments asking for an X page report when the info could be easily covered in.2X. So now most of my writing is stuffed full of flowery language and way in excess verbage (spelling deliberate, see the FOLDOC or jargon file definitions), due to the necessity of developing that habit in school. I couldn't tell you how many long hours I spent developing it to the level of an art form, and now I have trouble due to my perfection thereof. =:^(
That's where individual choice and priorities would come into the picture, IMO. You recognize the choice you made and explained why -- the priorities (some reasonable time and scope of task constraints, etc, that affected your choice based on known and currently available software) you had. I may not personally have the same priorities and consequently would have likely made a different choice but that's immaterial. It was your choice and your priorities, and you made the best choice for you based on those priorities, knowing and living with the consequences of your choice.
But while the OS used at work may indeed be workplace policy, thus not directly your choice, what I'm saying is that it's a/result/ following from your choice. Thus, if the result is sufficiently distasteful to you, you'll change the choice that produces that result.
Or to use a popular if (as always) flawed analogy, if it hurts when you bang your head against the wall, you indeed don't have much of a choice in having the pain given the continued action, but you CAN choose to quit banging your head against the wall.
I'm simply arguing that individual priorities will ideally dictate the choices one makes. There may may, for a short time, be an overriding priority that causes the choice to be continuing to bang one's head against the wall, but nobody seriously complains about having no choice about the pain, because they realize it's the result of the choice to bang one's head against the wall. Thus, if there are indeed such overriding priorities, best recognize the fact and make the choice one has to make, grit one's teeth and bear the pain, recognizing it as the result of that choice (instead of complaining about having no choice in having the pain, which helps no one as it's not the cause of the problem, and there IS a choice that is causing that pain), and get on with it and thru with it so whatever that overriding priority was, it can go away and one's choices can return to more normally sane ones. =:^)
Likewise, it makes little sense to complain about having no choice in that workplace policy, since that's misplacing the focus. There's a choice being made, and the results of that choice follow. Complaining about having no choice about the results is a misdirection, when those results come from a choice that one DOES have control over. Thus, recognize the ultimate choice being made, evaluate the priorities, and dynamically adjust priorities and choices until they come into agreement, thus providing optimum results based on the available possible choices and one's relative priorities while making the choice.
Imagine a that a computer user is actually a hungry person, and that the job this person has to do is eat a bowl of soup to survive.
Well, as all analogies, this one is a rather imperfect fit, but let's examine it, then.
Imagine that this hungry person has only three ways to eat the bowl of soup: With a spoon (Windows) With a fork (Mac) With a knife (Linux)
You're ignoring or failing to see the obvious alternative, slurping directly from the bowl. This isn't uncommon, and failure to see what is to everybody outside the circumstances the most obvious and compelling alternative is in fact one of the prime characteristics of victim syndrome. Remember that girl a few years ago who had been kidnapped and lived for years with her kidnapper? Remember how he took her shopping for cloths and etc several times, and never once in the department stores or whatever did she tell anyone, or ask to make a call to the police, or etc?. Remember that kidnapped guy who was alone at the house of the kidnapper for much of the day while his kidnapper worked at the pizza restaurant? Having been an abuse victim myself, and come out of it, I immediately recognized the trait. They failed to/see/ the otherwise obvious alternative because they were living inside the victim reality distortion field. To the victim, it's as if that alternative literally doesn't exist! There's no logical way to explain it. It can't logically be explained, because the victim isn't thinking logically. They have victim syndrome, and literally cannot see some or all of the best alternatives.
The best defense to such a syndrome once one has had it once, because as I said, it's a pattern that all too often repeats, is to deliberately and actively LOOK for alternatives, constantly and consistently forcing oneself into actively exploring every possible alternative, continually and dynamically reranking personal priorities, and assertively making a choice among those one finds based upon those priorities. Take life by the horns, grab it by the balls, assertively go after it, finding and making choices, accepting responsibility for them, and dynamically adjusting one's priorities and choices based on the results and fate as it happens. Make it instinctive, a survival instinct, because in a very real way, for one who HAS been an abuse victim, one's mental health and possibly very survival DOES depend on it.
Once one starts actively looking for the choices, one does tend to see more of them, as here. But continuing the analogy...
Something else you failed to mention here, tho you mention the option in passing later, is that your "spoon" remains a spoon, while your "knife" comes complete with instructions for a "magic spell" that turns it into a spoon... or a fork... tho both somewhat different than the spoon and fork above... or for "magically" splitting in half with the other half becoming a bowl or a pot, as needed. All this comes for free if you choose the knife, which, by the way, is also free, while the spoon and fork both cost a substantial amount, altho it does seem that in many cases, if you buy a house, you get one spoon and sometimes a cup as well, included for "free", but you MUST choose the spoon that comes WITH the house, tho you can often buy similar houses for less, without the spoon, or optionally with the knife, elsewhere.
Of course, if you choose the spoon above, you can buy it by itself, or by spending more, in a "complete set" bundled with some other utensils. One can also purchase separately from a variety of vendors all sorts of additional cutlery to match. But while the magic spells for the knife also work for the spoon, it doesn't ship with them, and in fact, you must sign an agreement the first time you use the spoon saying you'll never use such "unauthorized" spells, altho for a rather hefty fee, they'll be happy to provide you some rather more limited and at times only single use spells. Or of course, you can ju
Your first line argues it's not the user's choice to make, but the rest of the post then explains that it ultimately is the user's choice, along with the probable consequences of making that choice.
IOW, yes, it may be the employer's choice what OS you use at work, but it's your choice whether you work there. There are certainly consequences to be had for the various available choices. But the choice remains, and which choice you make reflects your individual priorities. The choice you make may be different than mine, as your priorities are different than mine, sure. But as long as I'm comfortable with my choice and you are comfortable with yours, and neither of us are restricting the choice of others to work there or not, fine.
(As I mentioned in a reply to AC) I make the same argument in the context of people complaining they have no choice of ISP as well, when there's only one broadband ISP in their area, pointing out that there remains other choices, dialup, moving somewhere with more choices, doing without, all choices some people make. Which one a particular individual makes depends on their particular individual priorities (they may prioritize family or a job or a home they own in the area above high speed Internet access), but there's certainly a choice to be made, and recognizing it and making the choice assertively, is both far healthier and leaves one in a better position to take advantage of dynamic changes in the situation.
Are you actually comparing an upgrade path, in a non-sarcastic manner, to abuse?
No, I'm simply stating the personal experience which has lead me to take the position that there is ALWAYS a choice available, and that actively and assertively looking for and making those choices is FAR healthier than saying "I have no choice" and defaulting out, passively letting whatever make the the choice for you.
This is true regardless of what the particulars of the case may be. In this particular case I've made mine, am happy with it, and sure, I'd like others to make the same choice, but as I took pains to state, other than for myself, it's not my choice to make. If someone assertively chooses the proprietary route, so be it, but either way they live with the choice, and recognizing it as a choice and assertively making it, taking control of their own destiny, is far healthier than the copout of "Oh, I had no choice, X forced me" (regardless of whether X=MS or RMS, or an abuser, or whatever).
To make it clearer by citing another example, I've made the same argument when people claim they have no choice as to their ISP, since it's the only broadband provider in their area. That it may be, and that may indeed be the best choice by far, but all it takes to see the other choices is to consider what one might do if that ISP went out of business, or raised their rates to say $10k/mo for what was a standard residential account. The choice one might then make would certainly have to do with one's relative priorities, as they do with that ISP still in business with the current offering, but among other possible alternatives, there's (1) dialup, (2) moving to where there are other broadband alternatives (yes, it may mean selling one's house, switching jobs, moving away from friends and family, all perfectly valid reasons for some, but reasons that reflect one's individual relative priorities, high speed Internet vs ??), (3) deciding neither dialup nor moving are worth it and simply doing without Internet, etc. There's absolutely a choice. Actively searching for it, assertively making it, then living with and dynamically adjusting relative priorities and further choices, are all part of the game.
Sure, I'd like everyone to make the choice for freedomware, but I'm not fooling myself that it'll happen, and it's not my place or that of anyone else to attempt to force people's choice one way or the other. Were I to try to do so, I'd be making myself your master, no better and arguably much worse than the proprietary software folks I so despise for attempting to take away my freedoms.
Most folks with Downs I've known seem pretty content.
Actually, more than content. From all I know of the syndrome (which as I'm sure has been pointed out repeatedly already, I got here from a link and haven't read much yet, is more properly "Down Syndrome", no posessive), it's as if fate/$DEITY/whatever (heredity, but anyway) gave them the blessing of happiness in return for what it took away. Despite all the problems they live with that you or I would never choose to have, they tend to be some of the most consistently happy people around and in general tend to spread happiness around to those they are with as well (at least once people get over being uncomfortable around the person and get to know them).
There's certainly some yin/yang balance to be appreciated in that.
Considering the price tag [I am not] impressed with the observation that Microsoft forced me to upgrade to Vista by utterly messing up XP *after Vista was shipped!* *sighs*
OK, I recognize that I'm taking a controversial position with this post, but it's my post and I choose to take it. So be it if people find it radical and it kills my karma. If there's ever an issue I believe it worth losing it on, this is it.
They didn't force anything.
If there's one thing I learned as a victim of abuse (emotional and physical, FWIW the wounds are now healed into scars, a decade after the last one), it's that I ALWAYS have a choice. In the ultimate worst case, it may be only the choice to continue to fight even to the death or to surrender, but once I've given in and let them take away my last choice, I've let them win, and been subsumed by victim syndrome. Once that happens, the reality distortion starts, and the victim fails to see ways out even when they do present themselves. That's classic victim syndrome and the reason so many abuse victims continue to fall into the same pattern again and again. Serial victims, they get out of one victimization situation only to find themselves it another. It becomes the default response to challenge. There's only one way out, learning that you ALWAYS have choices, at whatever level they may be. The abusers CANNOT take that from you unless you allow them to.
Only once I learned that, did I break out of the repeating pattern. Only once I learned to actively look for and assert the choices I had, did I overcome the vicious serial victim cycle. NEVER. EVER. EVER. Let them tell you differently.
Umm... back to the discussion at hand...
So it wasn't that they forced you into anything. Rather, you either actively surveyed the range of choices and made what you perceived to be the best option you had (out of several), or you took the default option, the one the people you have allowed to be your masters (see my sig) wanted you to take, not by active choice, but by defaulting, allowing them to make the choice for you.
(No, using Linux is unfortunately not an option, as we use software everyday that runs only on Windows... using a Mac would bring forth the same problems, its either Windows or not get any work done!)
It's certainly an option, because you can simply recompile that everyday software to the new interface... Oh, wait... you can't... because you allowed someone else to be your master, taking away your freedom and dictating what you could and couldn't do with software you had chosen to run. Again, see the sig.
But it's still an option, because you can, starting now, choose not to put yourself in that position again, while digging yourself out of the hole you find yourself in due to your past choices.
Meanwhile, as you said, a clean install doesn't have the problem. Thus, it's one of the updates. Try applying the updates one at a time (maybe consider the MS Office updates the potential culprit and either test them first or last, given other comments) and checking for the problem, then rolling back (by force of a reinstall if those you have chosen to allow to be your masters decree it) if the problem appears. Or, if there's a lot of updates as there may well be, it may be easier to systematically bisect the problem, installing half the updates, seeing if it's in that half, then either installing half of the remainder or rolling back and installing half of the bad test and checking again.
Eventually you'll pin it to a single update. Don't do that update, while doing the others. Then check the patch (or have someone else do so if you don't read code, it's like taking a car to a mechanic if you aren't one)... oh... right... your masters don't allow that, do they? Umm... look at the patch/update description and decide whether it's a patch you can safely do without while on the net or not. If not, you'll either need to fin
Why do we need more laws covering the same thing? It's like having a law against apples, and another law against red apples.
That's easy. With multiple laws in place of one, the number of laws violated and thus the counts one is or can be charged with multiply dramatically. With a single action, the person who undertook it may violate twenty laws, and have twenty counts registered against them (or whoever LEA chooses to target).
That give them a lot of negotiating flexibility. Consider, even if you didn't do it, and they had some circumstantial evidence and a witness saying you did, would you be tempted to take the offer of dropping all counts but one with say a 1-2 year jail term, provided you plead guilty to it, knowing even if you are acquitted, you'll be rotting in jail during the trial for close to a year anyway, but if you get convicted on even one of the other counts, it's a twenty year jail term?
Many people decide it's not worth the trouble to fight it under those conditions, and LEA and the prosecutor get to stamp a nice SOLVED/CONVICTED on the case file, making them look good, regardless of whether they got the right man or not.... And there's lots of cases where a guy chose to fight it and lost, only to be declared innocent when the DNA evidence and further examination points at someone else a decade or two later. All that time, some poor homeless guy perhaps guilty of passing out drunk at what became the crime scene is framed, while the real criminal is still walking the streets, free to commit more crime.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we have the LEA, and it often works the other way as well, but unfortunately, neither the system nor the individuals that form it are above cynical manipulation of the multiple counts thing to get someone to plead guilty without a trial simply due to the risks, and while certainly many of them ARE guilty, some as equally certainly are NOT.
It's all a game. Pray you don't end up on the wrong side of it. (Of course, keeping your nose clean of petty crime does help in that regard as well, but when that petty crime might be copying a song for a friend, or breaking the encryption to be able to play a DVD you rent or buy on an open-source-only system...)
I recently got infected with Antivirus 2008. Googling for a solution, mainly which windows exploit was used to get it on the system I found the following type of comments.
"You are infected with a malware that you picked up because of your browsing habits"
Yeah right, I got infected because of Google Ads, which can be found on many a mainstream site.
As they said, infected due to your browsing habits.
If you were running an ad blocker, you couldn't have been infected by an ad. It almost certainly required scripting, with a good chance it required cross-site scripting, as well. Thus, scripting off by default, regardless of your ad viewing preferences, would have stopped it in most cases, and even if you had that mainline site whitelisted, the malware site it tried to load stuff from would have fallen into the no-scripting default and thus would have been blocked.
Also, browsing habits could well be defined as inclusive of the platform you choose to browse from, and almost certainly would include your choice of browser. You don't here of so many getting infected running say firefox on MS, and even fewer running any of the even semi-common Linux platform browsers...
All of those can be reasonably included in browsing habits, yet changing just one of them, one of adblocker, script-blocker, browser, browser-platform, would have likely made you immune. Change all four of them, still keeping in mind they all fit reasonably within the definition of browsing habits, and the chances of being infected by an ad that's blocked, requiring scripting that's turned off, targeting a browser you aren't running, on an OS that if you run at all, you don't consider secure enough to browse the web with, are practically nil!
So yes, browsing habits, indeed. Just because they are common browsing habits doesn't make them/safe/ browsing habits.
But really, as long as the customer isn't causing image problems for a company, most don't and shouldn't care/where/ their customers come from, or/what/ else they may do or buy or whatever.
And realistically, a Coke sign in a crack house is likely to have been ripped off from a bar or some such (maybe the bar tender was a customer and traded the Coke sign in for a hit?), or maybe somebody just thought it looked cool and bought it, like any of the other thousands of such signs folks have in their rec rooms or whatever. It's not like Coke likely had anything directly to do with it being there, other than licensing the use of its trademark to the sign maker and retailer, etc.
IOW, the Coke sign in the crack house is likely about as relevant as the Nike swish and the Just Do It logo (and yes, I'm aware of the double entendre, tho I noticed it/after/ I chose the example) on the addict's tee-shirt -- the one they pulled out of a bag left at the Goodwill or Salvation Army dropoff, or out of a dumpster they were diving in, looking for "recyclables".
Almost every place I've ever voted has had optical scans, generally of the connect the arrow type. They mail out sample ballots (marked sample and on different paper, no funny business there) several weeks ahead of time. You walk in with your voting card and/or proof of ID (the laws are getting stricter and require both in many places, now), the volunteers (almost always old people, setup so representatives of both major parties are present) mark your name off as voting and hand you an official ballot. This ballot should match the sample you got in the mail, or there'd be PR hell to pay.
You walk over to the booth, generally a portable table with a cardboard privacy screen fitted around the top. There's a pen of the proper type in the booth -- you can ask to have it replaced if necessary. For each race or proposition, it tells you how many you can mark -- for some state races you can select multiple candidates and the top X number are picked -- and you mark what you wish. For most candidate races (in most states) there's also a blank entry you can mark, and write-in your choice.
You don't have to vote for all races or propositions. If you screw up, you take the screwed up ballot back (using the privacy procedures below) and they give you another. (I've never actually screwed up, but this is what the prominently posted instructions say to do.)
When you are done, there's either a privacy cover (if the cards are printed on both sides) or instructions tell you to turn the marked sides in. You leave the booth and return to the sign-in area, where another volunteer takes the ballot and feeds it into an optical-scan machine right there -- you watch them do it and hear it beep and increment the ballot count. Again at this point, if it fails to read (tho I've never had that happen), you can get a new ballot and try again. The ballot itself is deposited in a lock-box for recounts, if necessary.
Many states have a no-reason-necessary early voting allowed policy. You can either request an absentee ballot and either mail it in or take it to an authorized polling place up to poll closing time on the date of the main vote, or go in and early-vote at the county recorder's office. A few elections ago I did just that, requesting and getting an absentee ballot in the mail, which I filled out, sealed in the provided envelope, and dropped by my normal polling place on the day of the vote. They had a lock-box for them. It was much more convenient than voting as normal, but I missed the voting ritual and it felt kind of weird watching the results come in that nite having not actually voted that day.
States differ in how they check the ballots, but Arizona (where I am now) at least, requires an audit of several (IIRC two) percent of the precincts, randomly chosen (the "random" process of choosing them is encoded in the law, with at minimum witnesses from both parties, both to the choice and to the verifications, the audited precincts are not known previous to the vote so can't be avoided that way). These audits hand verify the count of the optical scan machines.
This system seems pretty reliable to me. I still can't understand why the entire nation doesn't just go opti-scan, as the machines can be used to count and get quick results as necessary, while the paper trail is there for anyone wishing to verify things.
The biggest problem I've heard about, doing it this way, is the lock-boxes disappearing a couple of times. Each one holds a few hundred votes. Of course, there's an accountability trail, but as they say, **** happens. Unfortunately, that's a problem for pretty much any after-the-fact verifiable system. But those cases are few and far between, it seems, and I've not heard of any of them actually affecting an outcome. There have been a few cases of other oddities as well, but nothing even close to the unverified touch-screen issues that seem to come up every year.
BTW, I've worked with touch screens, and whoever came up with the idea of having the untrained public v
Re:Finally have tools to monitor...
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The Quietest Sun
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· Score: 2, Informative
OK, I appreciate all that info you posted and probably wouldn't have mentioned this were it not that your correction missed it too, but as someone who appreciates someone pointing it out to me, let me pass on this favor to someone obviously bright enough to make use of it.
Think allot > allotment. "Allot" has its roots in the way possibly contested assignments (of land, jobs, whatever) were often distributed "in times of lore" and occasionally still are, using the process of drawing lots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_of_lots. Today, it has a broader meaning of distribution in general, whether by random means or not.
"A lot" (two words) is a description of degree, meaning "very much", "a great deal". Even in the two-word form, however, until recently it was considered a colloquialism, unfit for formal use, altho (deliberate (mis)spelling) modern dictionaries seem to omit that, meaning it has graduated to being permissible in formal use only in the last few years. Taking its place has been the single-word form, "alot", which still causes many to shudder and can't be found in many dictionaries, but has come into increasingly common informal usage. Wictionary has this to say about the single-word-form "alot": "When it appears intentionally in print, it is generally either representing the original spelling in a work quoted, or is an attempt by the author to convey poor education in the character using it." Wictionary has more on the word, here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alot.
From personal observation, "a lot" of the misuse of "allot" came about due to spell checkers flagging "alot", dumbly suggesting "allot" but failing to suggest "a lot", either because it's two words or because the term has only recently been accepted for formal use and thus didn't appear. I know this was the case for my personal misuse, as I never/did/ think "allot" looked right, but sometimes accepted it as the only plausible suggestion, without bothering to look it up. Only after seeing a reply such as this one did I realize my error and correct my ways. Fortunately or unfortunately, it also sensitized me to the word, such that seeing either "allot" used improperly, or "alot" used at all, causes me to shudder.
So obviously, your usage "no allot" (I have a hard time writing it even quoting, now, as my fingers just want to do the right thing! ) was doubly wrong, thus the AC's WTF which I'm sure a lot of others thought as well. Then you corrected the no > know, but/still/ skipped the allot > "a lot", while providing a wealth of very interesting information in the same post so obviously you're intelligent enough, which/must/ mean you weren't aware of the problem at all, thus this post, hoping to correct that oversight. As I said, I'm simply passing on the favor, as I learned about the difference myself from just such a post.
Those "netbook" mini-notebooks are practically semi-disposable price-wise, now, plus they're small and great for traveling. Buy one of those for trips where it might get lost (either at the border or forgotten, or swiped). Put most of your data on USB sticks, and do the Internet connectivity thing (some of them have 3g cell connectivity if you wish) and upload to some online storage site (even attach them to mail and google-mail them) periodically (depending on how long you're gone and how many pics you take) and before you return. You can encrypt before you upload if you're worried about someone snagging them as you upload or off whatever site.
That way you aren't taking anything thru customs that worst case, you can't afford to lose. Similarly with losing your laptop at the airport or from your hotel room or whatever. The 300-ish you spend on the netbook isn't something you probably want to spend for every trip, but then the odds are you won't lose it on every trip... and if you lose it on one trip, oh, well. Meanwhile, your data too is backed up, since you uploaded it over the net, and can retrieve it once you get home if the physical copy gets snagged (either at customs, or as I said, from your hotel room or the airport or whatever).
As for the encryption choice you can try gpg/pgp and possibly legitimately say you use it for mail, but they can ask for your key. (FWIW, unlike Britain, it's illegal/unconstitutional to demand it in the US including clearing customs, according to a recent court case, but illegal hasn't seemed to stop a lot of the Gov't thugs recently.) But the Truecrypt solution provides plausible deniability if you do it correctly (the recent/. headlines to the contrary not withstanding, see the discussion threads), and it's open source, so it should be reasonably secure from No Such Agency trojans or the like.
But the little netbook solution, combined with (encrypted) net based storage, should pretty much solve the problem. And if the worst happens and you lose it... you've limited your loses.
I would have expanded a bit but I was on my way to work... So now that I'm back and you replied, I can.
Actually, I've only run it close to totally out only once... with a runaway process. I actually saw it eating RAM before it ever got into swap at all, realized what was happening, got a kill for the process in question all set to run at boosted priority, and then just sat and watched it eat RAM for the fun of it. I let it eat all of the 8 gigs RAM and 15 gigs into the 16 gigs of swap, before I hit the enter on that kill. (If you've ever been in a spot where the kernel is/really/ squeezed for RAM... it hurts, well before the OOM-killer kicks in, and even with swap entirely off so it's not swapping, it's spending all its cycles squeezing those last few bytes of RAM out. I didn't want it to get to that point, a point at which I've actually/been/ before, so I killed it with ~1/2 a gig or so of RAM left, just in case.)
As for what I do with it... not really/that/ much. The computer is my hobby/toy, my "geek hot rod" for the most part. I did mention I run Gentoo. It's on a 2x Opteron 290s, so dual-dual-core 2.8 GHz, top of the line for that mobo (Tyan s2885 dual-CPU-socket). I run it in NUMA-mode, 4 gigs (2x 2-gig sticks) off of each CPU-socket (dual-cores per). I'm running 4-spindle kernel/md/mdp RAID, RAID-0/1/6, RAID-0 for/boot (GRUB understands only RAID-0), RAID 6, so two-way-stripe, two-way-parity, I can lose 2 of the 4 without losing data, for my main system, and 4-way-striped RAID-0 for speed, for various caches and my kernel and Gentoo package trees, since they need no redundancy as I can simply redownload off the net if needed. My latest upgrade was finally to LCDs from CRTs. I was running 2x 21" CRTs @ 1600x1200 stacked for 1600x2400. I/wanted/ to upgrade to two of those 30" 2560x1600 LCDs, but @ the ~$1400+ a piece they are running, plus the fact that I'd have had to upgrade the video card (to one that could handle 2x DVI-D dual-link) at the same time to handle them, it wasn't in my budget. I settled for 2x 1920x1200, ~$350 each, and they're still running on my old video card, one on single-link DVI-D, the other on analog/VGA. The video card is the last thing on my list to upgrade. At present I'm still running an old Radeon 92xx series, since at the time I bought it, it was about the best that could be had that ran freedomware Linux drivers. Now that/that/ has changed... But the mobo is AGP, not the newer PCI-E. But I can still upgrade the video quite a bit from the Radeon 92xx series I'm running now, and intend to do so within the year, capping off my system upgrades for now. I'll continue to run this system for another three years anyway, maybe five, at which point I'll probably more side-grade than upgrade, to a by then lower end quad-core w/ another 8 gigs RAM, but modernizing to PCI-E and by then, probably USB-3, etc, probably for under $500 by then.
Anyway, in context, the 8 gigs real RAM balances the total 4 cores quite well. When I had dual single-core Opteron 242s in the rig, the 8 gigs RAM was simply not all that useful, and would have been a waste of money, but I deliberately over-bought on the RAM, as I figured I'd use it once I got dual dual-cores in it, and I have. 4 gigs wouldn't be squeezed, but since I did the upgrade to the 4 cores total, I do feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of the 8 gigs.
I don't really need 16 gigs of swap, you are correct. However, I was balancing the layouts on the 4 spindles and wanted 4-way striped swap for speed as well. 4 gigs each on 4 swap partitions, one on each drive spindle, set at the same priority so the kernel would stripe them, was what I setup. At the time, I didn't actually realize that the kernel's suspend to disk functionality couldn't stripe the suspend in swap just as the kernel did normal swap, so it was more or less luck that I chose the magic 4 gigs per swap partition that was th
Replying here as it covers one angle I was going to mention.
The parent is correct, but the grandparent misses something. If using (Linux) kernel suspend, the default suspend image is half a gig, but you can make it up to half the size of your actual RAM. This must be in a single swap partition. Why half the size? Because in ordered to avoid various problems with deadlocks and etc, the kernel reads in the swap to the vacant half, then atomically switches to it. (This is in the kernel documentation dir, in the power subdir.)
So if planning on using kernel suspend to full effect, you need a minimum swap of half the size of RAM, in a single partition. Then ensure that the appropriate image size is written to the appropriate file under/sys/power before suspending, or it'll only use a half-gig image, which will dump most of your hard-earned cache.
If using user mode suspend, TuxOnIce being the usual one, it works somewhat differently. I'll not try to explain it since I'm using the kernel built-in suspend, but I know it can compress the image while kernel suspend can't, and saves user-mode and cache separately and first, then dumps it and saves the kernel state, according to the little documentation I've read on it.
For actual swap, that half as much as memory (on a decently modern multi-gig memory system) per swap partition (or file) can be a decent practical limit too, simply because disk is so much slower than RAM... and if you're heavily swapping on a single spindle it'll be about locked up anyway. However, if you have mutliple hard drives, multiple such images are a good thing! I have four drives, 8 gigs of RAM, and a four gig swap partition on each drive. That works reasonably well, even when I DO go heavy into swap.
Finally, if you do compiles or the like, consider making your/tmp and/or/var/tmp tmpfs, and pointing your compiles at it for scratch space. For Gentooers at least, this can make a BIG difference (set PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a tmpfs), as then all those temporary scratch files normally don't hit disk at all. Worst-case, you run into swap and they do, but that'd be the normal case otherwise. Of course in this case you want a big swap. Again, the 16 gigs I mentioned above, 4 gigs each on four different drive spindles, works very well.
Actually, a staffer might be better in some ways. Do you think the politicians themselves have the time to write, or even read, those multi-hundred-page bills they vote on? It's the staffers that do all that, and if you have the ear (umm, the eye, it's email) of one of them in the right place, you've a very valuable policy shaping instrument indeed!
The problem is that a full USENET binary feed is terabytes a day now, much of which will never be downloaded by any user. But it's not the terabytes of incoming or even outgoing bandwidth that's the problem, but the shear technical issue of/reliably/ storing it, for X days before expiration, on beefy enough hardware that thousands of users can reliably access random different messages in that say 20-100 terabytes of data all at the same time, with multiple streams, each of which isn't encountering inordinate delay, all while a couple terabytes of new input a day is coming in, while another couple terabytes of old data a day is being expired and removed from the indexes, all without major hiccup.
All this in an area generally far from an ISP's main expertise, used by only a small (if significant, perhaps 5-10% over a three month period, by one study I saw, but it's a geeky bunch that may make connectivity decisions for others...) minority of its customers. It's essentially impossible to get right "insourcing" it, and outsourcing... costs a decent amount of money when it's coming out of a $30-50/mo account, particularly when so few do use it, but many of them REALLY use it.
By dropping at least binary groups entirely, ISPs get rid of a major source of complaints and support issues, while dropping a non-core service used by only a small fraction of users. Text groups OTOH are MUCH lower intensity resource-wise, something an ISP really/can/ manage decently on its own. Throw in the attacks of the copyright mafioso that come with binaries, and I can definitely see why an ISP would like to be rid of them. It's just a shame that so many are getting rid of the comparatively low maintenance and low resource usage text groups at the same time.
To put these numbers into perspective, the EPAâ(TM)s lead standard for drinking water is 50 micrograms per liter.
Well, yeah, but do you drink wine, brandy, etc, as if it were water? Do you cook with it as if it were water? Do you shower with it (breathing the steam) as if it were water? What about water your garden and sprinkle your lawn (the evaporation) with it as if it were water?
So a thousand or even a couple thousand micrograms per litre in a bottle of wine you have a glass of... isn't anything to get too worried over. That 20K micrograms per litre brandy might be worth giving up if you do it frequently, but even the 5K microgram port isn't something I'd be all/that/ concerned about, unless I was drinking a bottle a week or more over long periods.
So yeah, put the numbers in perspective. If you're drinking/that/ much alcohol, you probably need to stop and ask yourself some serious questions in any case. BTW, I don't have numbers, but the lead in fish is likely to be a bigger dietary source of it for many.
Well questioned/stated. Just tell people that on (Ubunto/) Linux, firefox is called iceweasel. Unlike folks saying the same thing about firefox and IE, it's the truth, at least when Mozilla gets its panties in a twist when the distribution actually starts doing normal free software stuff with it.
Some of the iceweasel artwork is indeed quite nice, every bit as nice as the firefox artwork. The only fly in the ointment I've found is in starting from the command line (as Gentoo installs it anyway, appropriate USE flags set), firefox works but iceweasel doesn't. So set a symlink and be done with it. Besides, the people that would even come across the command line issue almost certainly can figure out what's up in any case. Those that can't, wouldn't tend to use the command line.
From the sounds of things, he can't reboot them either, due to (good founded, if it has been that long) fear they many not ever come up again, and if they are still doing something potentially important enough to keep them around, that rather defeats the purpose of doing so.
No, the other suggestions about either sniffing the traffic or since it/has/ been that long, using one of the certain vulns to gain root access, are the only logical choices. But as also already observed, his/. username is Lord Apathy for a reason, and as he says, he doesn't get paid to care/that/ much.
From experience, what he's describing isn't necessarily drug related. (FWIW, I don't do drugs beyond caffeine, I don't even do alcohol, and no "straight" caffeine either, it's Mt. Dew or other caffinated soda, or green tea, or coffee (not straight, often instant disolved into Dr. Pepper for a stronger caffeine hit, when I'm needing to work after being up too long on the computer at home, say.)
Rather, both the OCD/ADD and the paranoia often seen as side effects of amphetamines or other uppers are more naturally and directly attributable to severe sleep deprivation, generally 48 waking hours or more (commonly by 72) straight, or perhaps just an hour or two of sleep a night for four nights or more in a row. The direct effect of the upper is sleep deprivation. The effect of the sleep deprivation is OCD/ADD and paranoia, thus making it only a secondary side effect of the amphetamines or other uppers. I'll get the OCD/ADD and paranoia just on the lack of sleep at times, if I get stuck on a project like a system software upgrade gone bad I want to fix, or something, even without the caffeine, tho I'll often take it if I have to go to work during the fixing binge.
That said, I never "can't" sleep for more than the ordinary waking day or so. As hinted above, what most often triggers it for me is that after an already long but nothing unusual day, I'll often do my ordinary (home) computer updates -- only I run unstable (Gentoo ~arch) and often hard-masked for testing or testing overlays of gcc, kde, etc, and if there's a hitch in the update that significantly impairs the normal functioning of the computer, all is not well with the world and I have trouble sleeping or eating or pretty much anything (I will drop it to go to work, then pick up again when I get back home) until I trace it and fix or work around the issue. That I'm normally a night person (always have been, 40-some years now), and work evenings, normally sleeping days, doesn't help, because since that's the reverse of normal society, I can never actually/keep/ that schedule for more than a few days. Thus, my sleep/wake cycle is always in/some/ stage of disruption, and that I get some obsessive with the computer sometimes only exacerbates an existing disruption. Still, I never/can't/ sleep, for more than a few hours. It's that I find other things to do, and/don't/ sleep. And as I said, it's not drug influenced except for some caffeine at times to say awake at work, if I need it, which I often do on such an already disrupted cycle.
But yes, it's definitely by hard experience that I know this. At least now, I recognize the symptoms, I've learned to note especially the illogical paranoia and anger reactions before they get too bad, and know that when I do, I gotta ease up on things for a few days. After 10-12 hours of sleep straight, and/or 18-ish hours sleep in two days consecutive, I'm back feeling pretty normal again, paranoia and abnormal cleaning and etc obsessions gone (but I'm still the normal picky about my computer, of course). It did take me over a decade of adult life to learn to notice such things, tho, with effectively a nervous breakdown somewhere in the middle of it.
Well, at this point, civil liberties are about as close as it gets to a litmus test for me, on a weight average they're by far the strongest factor, I'd say accounting for 50% of my consideration more or less, right there, and the problem is, while we see McCain appears willing to deliberately trample them under foot, Obama/said/ he cared about them, then demonstrated otherwise when the rubber met the road in an very important and pretty tight vote. Thus, while McCain is terrible, when the rubber meets the road, Obama certainly can't be counted on either. He's not a guaranteed negative on civil liberties (maybe, maybe he was just saying whatever and he/is/ a guaranteed negative, he certainly doesn't believe in them or he wouldn't have been able to live with himself after that vote), but he can't be counted on, either.
If there's one thing the Libertarians are likely to do it's stick up for civil liberties. Yes, I do disagree with them on a few things, but those things are pretty minor factors compared to civil liberties, at least at this point.
If I were sure we'd be better with Obama, I'd vote for him. But at this point, I just can't say that. Whatever he claimed to stand for... well, now, he's just another Democrat that ran on ending the war, and then repeatedly continued to open the purse strings for more, when that's about the only control the Congress has. They had a majority. In the Senate, it would have taken just 41 votes to filibuster, and they didn't believe strongly enough in what they ran on to hold the line. What DO they believe in strongly enough? Patriot bill? War? All sorts of stuff they say they made mistakes on, yet give them a majority, and instead of fixing them, THEY KEEP MAKING THEM!! Unfortunately, it seems Obama, contrary to his message of change, when put on the hot seat where his vote really counts CAN'T BE COUNTED ON EITHER!! Maybe it's gotten to the point where we gotta go as bad as possible as quickly as possible and hope to shake people to their senses.
It's getting so I'm really seeing what people mean when they call them six of one, a half dozen of the other. I really/don't/ see any more that the Dems, Obama included, are our ticket out of this. If they were, something would be different now than it is.
I'm on the Dems emailing list, and keep getting "rouse the troops" messages. They say how bad McCain is. Yes, we know that. They don't tell me what I need to read, what Obama's going to do about it and how he explains failing to vote to do something about it in the Senate. That's not change, that's politics as usual.
So where's that leave me? Voting for the Libertarians, pretty much, despite what might have seemed serious disagreements in previous years. Well, they don't look so serious matched up against today's issues.
Despite all that, I still hope Obama comes thru with that explanation. I've been waiting for it since that vote. I had hoped to see it in a statement at the convention. We're running out of time...
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I can't really proofread well for either wrong-word (I have a spell-checker) or missing word, at least until much later, as I find I often fill in the right word even for others' writings, let alone my own. Sites like /. where someone comes along and calls attention to such gaffes, often have me going back to reread the original and see that indeed, my brain did automatically fill in the right word.
For that reason, when I preview I often don't reread the entire thing, just symbol-scan to see if any were "eaten" by things like /.'s infamous "plain text", and quick-read to see that the overall thought pattern is reasonably cohesive.
I really hated writing as a kid, and typing thru highschool (tho it was fine on the computer, but typing class was still electric typewriters at the time and I hated that tho I took a year of it to better interface with the computer!), but now I have an ergonomic "split" keyboard (Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro, held in my lap but with frequent position changes) and can compose and type for hours at a time without issue. But my handwriting is worse than ever, since now on top of what was bad to begin with, my fingers just keep wanting to type the letters, so I get a decent number of extra "typing" squiggles in my handwriting. So I do as little as possible, and print some of the time when I must handwrite and it's for someone else to read. But the "typing squiggle handwriting" syndrome probably afflicts quite a number of /.ers.
Back on topic, I don't particularly mind the font, even on-screen (fairly high resolution LCDs), and in fact switched to it in a couple font-preferences. I'll see how it goes for a few days.
I never hated consoles with Internet access, they're useful for running emerge --sync and then emerge --update --deep --newuse --ask --verbose @world for instance. No X need be loaded for that! =:^) But network RELIANCE? Well, I suppose if you're running remotely, you're relying on the network, but what about those of us who only run a single home computer and don't need or want remote console access? Why would we want to RELY on the network to even get a local console CLI running? Are they proposing a TCP socket interface much like X may use, only setup directly from the kernel using (possibly 2.6.28 configured-in) kernel command line options? Why?
Seriously, I read the title in my RSS client and couldn't figure out why Linux console makers (and is that the kernel folks, or the BASH folks, or what?) would be pushing for more network reliance. The best I could come up with was that the maintainers (or some patch submitter) of the early console stuff used for debugging, typically over a serial terminal, wanted to update it to handle Ethernet. It wasn't until I clicked on the link to see what the story was, and started reading the summary, that I realized it was GAME consoles it was talking about.
A lot of people say my writing is too wordy now, and really, if I work at it, I can often cut way down while still conveying the same message, but it takes several drafts and a LOT of work.
I blame it on all those stupid assignments asking for an X page report when the info could be easily covered in .2X. So now most of my writing is stuffed full of flowery language and way in excess verbage (spelling deliberate, see the FOLDOC or jargon file definitions), due to the necessity of developing that habit in school. I couldn't tell you how many long hours I spent developing it to the level of an art form, and now I have trouble due to my perfection thereof. =:^(
That's where individual choice and priorities would come into the picture, IMO. You recognize the choice you made and explained why -- the priorities (some reasonable time and scope of task constraints, etc, that affected your choice based on known and currently available software) you had. I may not personally have the same priorities and consequently would have likely made a different choice but that's immaterial. It was your choice and your priorities, and you made the best choice for you based on those priorities, knowing and living with the consequences of your choice.
But while the OS used at work may indeed be workplace policy, thus not directly your choice, what I'm saying is that it's a /result/ following from your choice. Thus, if the result is sufficiently distasteful to you, you'll change the choice that produces that result.
Or to use a popular if (as always) flawed analogy, if it hurts when you bang your head against the wall, you indeed don't have much of a choice in having the pain given the continued action, but you CAN choose to quit banging your head against the wall.
I'm simply arguing that individual priorities will ideally dictate the choices one makes. There may may, for a short time, be an overriding priority that causes the choice to be continuing to bang one's head against the wall, but nobody seriously complains about having no choice about the pain, because they realize it's the result of the choice to bang one's head against the wall. Thus, if there are indeed such overriding priorities, best recognize the fact and make the choice one has to make, grit one's teeth and bear the pain, recognizing it as the result of that choice (instead of complaining about having no choice in having the pain, which helps no one as it's not the cause of the problem, and there IS a choice that is causing that pain), and get on with it and thru with it so whatever that overriding priority was, it can go away and one's choices can return to more normally sane ones. =:^)
Likewise, it makes little sense to complain about having no choice in that workplace policy, since that's misplacing the focus. There's a choice being made, and the results of that choice follow. Complaining about having no choice about the results is a misdirection, when those results come from a choice that one DOES have control over. Thus, recognize the ultimate choice being made, evaluate the priorities, and dynamically adjust priorities and choices until they come into agreement, thus providing optimum results based on the available possible choices and one's relative priorities while making the choice.
Imagine a that a computer user is actually a hungry person, and that the job this person has to do is eat a bowl of soup to survive.
Well, as all analogies, this one is a rather imperfect fit, but let's examine it, then.
Imagine that this hungry person has only three ways to eat the bowl of soup:
With a spoon (Windows)
With a fork (Mac)
With a knife (Linux)
You're ignoring or failing to see the obvious alternative, slurping directly from the bowl. This isn't uncommon, and failure to see what is to everybody outside the circumstances the most obvious and compelling alternative is in fact one of the prime characteristics of victim syndrome. Remember that girl a few years ago who had been kidnapped and lived for years with her kidnapper? Remember how he took her shopping for cloths and etc several times, and never once in the department stores or whatever did she tell anyone, or ask to make a call to the police, or etc?. Remember that kidnapped guy who was alone at the house of the kidnapper for much of the day while his kidnapper worked at the pizza restaurant? Having been an abuse victim myself, and come out of it, I immediately recognized the trait. They failed to /see/ the otherwise obvious alternative because they were living inside the victim reality distortion field. To the victim, it's as if that alternative literally doesn't exist! There's no logical way to explain it. It can't logically be explained, because the victim isn't thinking logically. They have victim syndrome, and literally cannot see some or all of the best alternatives.
The best defense to such a syndrome once one has had it once, because as I said, it's a pattern that all too often repeats, is to deliberately and actively LOOK for alternatives, constantly and consistently forcing oneself into actively exploring every possible alternative, continually and dynamically reranking personal priorities, and assertively making a choice among those one finds based upon those priorities. Take life by the horns, grab it by the balls, assertively go after it, finding and making choices, accepting responsibility for them, and dynamically adjusting one's priorities and choices based on the results and fate as it happens. Make it instinctive, a survival instinct, because in a very real way, for one who HAS been an abuse victim, one's mental health and possibly very survival DOES depend on it.
Once one starts actively looking for the choices, one does tend to see more of them, as here. But continuing the analogy...
Something else you failed to mention here, tho you mention the option in passing later, is that your "spoon" remains a spoon, while your "knife" comes complete with instructions for a "magic spell" that turns it into a spoon... or a fork... tho both somewhat different than the spoon and fork above... or for "magically" splitting in half with the other half becoming a bowl or a pot, as needed. All this comes for free if you choose the knife, which, by the way, is also free, while the spoon and fork both cost a substantial amount, altho it does seem that in many cases, if you buy a house, you get one spoon and sometimes a cup as well, included for "free", but you MUST choose the spoon that comes WITH the house, tho you can often buy similar houses for less, without the spoon, or optionally with the knife, elsewhere.
Of course, if you choose the spoon above, you can buy it by itself, or by spending more, in a "complete set" bundled with some other utensils. One can also purchase separately from a variety of vendors all sorts of additional cutlery to match. But while the magic spells for the knife also work for the spoon, it doesn't ship with them, and in fact, you must sign an agreement the first time you use the spoon saying you'll never use such "unauthorized" spells, altho for a rather hefty fee, they'll be happy to provide you some rather more limited and at times only single use spells. Or of course, you can ju
Your first line argues it's not the user's choice to make, but the rest of the post then explains that it ultimately is the user's choice, along with the probable consequences of making that choice.
IOW, yes, it may be the employer's choice what OS you use at work, but it's your choice whether you work there. There are certainly consequences to be had for the various available choices. But the choice remains, and which choice you make reflects your individual priorities. The choice you make may be different than mine, as your priorities are different than mine, sure. But as long as I'm comfortable with my choice and you are comfortable with yours, and neither of us are restricting the choice of others to work there or not, fine.
(As I mentioned in a reply to AC) I make the same argument in the context of people complaining they have no choice of ISP as well, when there's only one broadband ISP in their area, pointing out that there remains other choices, dialup, moving somewhere with more choices, doing without, all choices some people make. Which one a particular individual makes depends on their particular individual priorities (they may prioritize family or a job or a home they own in the area above high speed Internet access), but there's certainly a choice to be made, and recognizing it and making the choice assertively, is both far healthier and leaves one in a better position to take advantage of dynamic changes in the situation.
Replying to AC but might as well...
Are you actually comparing an upgrade path, in a non-sarcastic manner, to abuse?
No, I'm simply stating the personal experience which has lead me to take the position that there is ALWAYS a choice available, and that actively and assertively looking for and making those choices is FAR healthier than saying "I have no choice" and defaulting out, passively letting whatever make the the choice for you.
This is true regardless of what the particulars of the case may be. In this particular case I've made mine, am happy with it, and sure, I'd like others to make the same choice, but as I took pains to state, other than for myself, it's not my choice to make. If someone assertively chooses the proprietary route, so be it, but either way they live with the choice, and recognizing it as a choice and assertively making it, taking control of their own destiny, is far healthier than the copout of "Oh, I had no choice, X forced me" (regardless of whether X=MS or RMS, or an abuser, or whatever).
To make it clearer by citing another example, I've made the same argument when people claim they have no choice as to their ISP, since it's the only broadband provider in their area. That it may be, and that may indeed be the best choice by far, but all it takes to see the other choices is to consider what one might do if that ISP went out of business, or raised their rates to say $10k/mo for what was a standard residential account. The choice one might then make would certainly have to do with one's relative priorities, as they do with that ISP still in business with the current offering, but among other possible alternatives, there's (1) dialup, (2) moving to where there are other broadband alternatives (yes, it may mean selling one's house, switching jobs, moving away from friends and family, all perfectly valid reasons for some, but reasons that reflect one's individual relative priorities, high speed Internet vs ??), (3) deciding neither dialup nor moving are worth it and simply doing without Internet, etc. There's absolutely a choice. Actively searching for it, assertively making it, then living with and dynamically adjusting relative priorities and further choices, are all part of the game.
Sure, I'd like everyone to make the choice for freedomware, but I'm not fooling myself that it'll happen, and it's not my place or that of anyone else to attempt to force people's choice one way or the other. Were I to try to do so, I'd be making myself your master, no better and arguably much worse than the proprietary software folks I so despise for attempting to take away my freedoms.
Most folks with Downs I've known seem pretty content.
Actually, more than content. From all I know of the syndrome (which as I'm sure has been pointed out repeatedly already, I got here from a link and haven't read much yet, is more properly "Down Syndrome", no posessive), it's as if fate/$DEITY/whatever (heredity, but anyway) gave them the blessing of happiness in return for what it took away. Despite all the problems they live with that you or I would never choose to have, they tend to be some of the most consistently happy people around and in general tend to spread happiness around to those they are with as well (at least once people get over being uncomfortable around the person and get to know them).
There's certainly some yin/yang balance to be appreciated in that.
Considering the price tag [I am not] impressed with the observation that Microsoft forced me to upgrade to Vista by utterly messing up XP *after Vista was shipped!*
*sighs*
OK, I recognize that I'm taking a controversial position with this post, but it's my post and I choose to take it. So be it if people find it radical and it kills my karma. If there's ever an issue I believe it worth losing it on, this is it.
They didn't force anything.
If there's one thing I learned as a victim of abuse (emotional and physical, FWIW the wounds are now healed into scars, a decade after the last one), it's that I ALWAYS have a choice. In the ultimate worst case, it may be only the choice to continue to fight even to the death or to surrender, but once I've given in and let them take away my last choice, I've let them win, and been subsumed by victim syndrome. Once that happens, the reality distortion starts, and the victim fails to see ways out even when they do present themselves. That's classic victim syndrome and the reason so many abuse victims continue to fall into the same pattern again and again. Serial victims, they get out of one victimization situation only to find themselves it another. It becomes the default response to challenge. There's only one way out, learning that you ALWAYS have choices, at whatever level they may be. The abusers CANNOT take that from you unless you allow them to.
Only once I learned that, did I break out of the repeating pattern. Only once I learned to actively look for and assert the choices I had, did I overcome the vicious serial victim cycle. NEVER. EVER. EVER. Let them tell you differently.
Umm... back to the discussion at hand...
So it wasn't that they forced you into anything. Rather, you either actively surveyed the range of choices and made what you perceived to be the best option you had (out of several), or you took the default option, the one the people you have allowed to be your masters (see my sig) wanted you to take, not by active choice, but by defaulting, allowing them to make the choice for you.
(No, using Linux is unfortunately not an option, as we use software everyday that runs only on Windows... using a Mac would bring forth the same problems, its either Windows or not get any work done!)
It's certainly an option, because you can simply recompile that everyday software to the new interface... Oh, wait... you can't... because you allowed someone else to be your master, taking away your freedom and dictating what you could and couldn't do with software you had chosen to run. Again, see the sig.
But it's still an option, because you can, starting now, choose not to put yourself in that position again, while digging yourself out of the hole you find yourself in due to your past choices.
Meanwhile, as you said, a clean install doesn't have the problem. Thus, it's one of the updates. Try applying the updates one at a time (maybe consider the MS Office updates the potential culprit and either test them first or last, given other comments) and checking for the problem, then rolling back (by force of a reinstall if those you have chosen to allow to be your masters decree it) if the problem appears. Or, if there's a lot of updates as there may well be, it may be easier to systematically bisect the problem, installing half the updates, seeing if it's in that half, then either installing half of the remainder or rolling back and installing half of the bad test and checking again.
Eventually you'll pin it to a single update. Don't do that update, while doing the others. Then check the patch (or have someone else do so if you don't read code, it's like taking a car to a mechanic if you aren't one)... oh... right... your masters don't allow that, do they? Umm... look at the patch/update description and decide whether it's a patch you can safely do without while on the net or not. If not, you'll either need to fin
Why do we need more laws covering the same thing? It's like having a law against apples, and another law against red apples.
That's easy. With multiple laws in place of one, the number of laws violated and thus the counts one is or can be charged with multiply dramatically. With a single action, the person who undertook it may violate twenty laws, and have twenty counts registered against them (or whoever LEA chooses to target).
That give them a lot of negotiating flexibility. Consider, even if you didn't do it, and they had some circumstantial evidence and a witness saying you did, would you be tempted to take the offer of dropping all counts but one with say a 1-2 year jail term, provided you plead guilty to it, knowing even if you are acquitted, you'll be rotting in jail during the trial for close to a year anyway, but if you get convicted on even one of the other counts, it's a twenty year jail term?
Many people decide it's not worth the trouble to fight it under those conditions, and LEA and the prosecutor get to stamp a nice SOLVED/CONVICTED on the case file, making them look good, regardless of whether they got the right man or not. ... And there's lots of cases where a guy chose to fight it and lost, only to be declared innocent when the DNA evidence and further examination points at someone else a decade or two later. All that time, some poor homeless guy perhaps guilty of passing out drunk at what became the crime scene is framed, while the real criminal is still walking the streets, free to commit more crime.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we have the LEA, and it often works the other way as well, but unfortunately, neither the system nor the individuals that form it are above cynical manipulation of the multiple counts thing to get someone to plead guilty without a trial simply due to the risks, and while certainly many of them ARE guilty, some as equally certainly are NOT.
It's all a game. Pray you don't end up on the wrong side of it. (Of course, keeping your nose clean of petty crime does help in that regard as well, but when that petty crime might be copying a song for a friend, or breaking the encryption to be able to play a DVD you rent or buy on an open-source-only system...)
I recently got infected with Antivirus 2008. Googling for a solution, mainly which windows exploit was used to get it on the system I found the following type of comments.
"You are infected with a malware that you picked up because of your browsing habits"
Yeah right, I got infected because of Google Ads, which can be found on many a mainstream site.
As they said, infected due to your browsing habits.
If you were running an ad blocker, you couldn't have been infected by an ad. It almost certainly required scripting, with a good chance it required cross-site scripting, as well. Thus, scripting off by default, regardless of your ad viewing preferences, would have stopped it in most cases, and even if you had that mainline site whitelisted, the malware site it tried to load stuff from would have fallen into the no-scripting default and thus would have been blocked.
Also, browsing habits could well be defined as inclusive of the platform you choose to browse from, and almost certainly would include your choice of browser. You don't here of so many getting infected running say firefox on MS, and even fewer running any of the even semi-common Linux platform browsers...
All of those can be reasonably included in browsing habits, yet changing just one of them, one of adblocker, script-blocker, browser, browser-platform, would have likely made you immune. Change all four of them, still keeping in mind they all fit reasonably within the definition of browsing habits, and the chances of being infected by an ad that's blocked, requiring scripting that's turned off, targeting a browser you aren't running, on an OS that if you run at all, you don't consider secure enough to browse the web with, are practically nil!
So yes, browsing habits, indeed. Just because they are common browsing habits doesn't make them /safe/ browsing habits.
Hmm... within context, which Coke? =:^)
But really, as long as the customer isn't causing image problems for a company, most don't and shouldn't care /where/ their customers come from, or /what/ else they may do or buy or whatever.
And realistically, a Coke sign in a crack house is likely to have been ripped off from a bar or some such (maybe the bar tender was a customer and traded the Coke sign in for a hit?), or maybe somebody just thought it looked cool and bought it, like any of the other thousands of such signs folks have in their rec rooms or whatever. It's not like Coke likely had anything directly to do with it being there, other than licensing the use of its trademark to the sign maker and retailer, etc.
IOW, the Coke sign in the crack house is likely about as relevant as the Nike swish and the Just Do It logo (and yes, I'm aware of the double entendre, tho I noticed it /after/ I chose the example) on the addict's tee-shirt -- the one they pulled out of a bag left at the Goodwill or Salvation Army dropoff, or out of a dumpster they were diving in, looking for "recyclables".
Almost every place I've ever voted has had optical scans, generally of the connect the arrow type. They mail out sample ballots (marked sample and on different paper, no funny business there) several weeks ahead of time. You walk in with your voting card and/or proof of ID (the laws are getting stricter and require both in many places, now), the volunteers (almost always old people, setup so representatives of both major parties are present) mark your name off as voting and hand you an official ballot. This ballot should match the sample you got in the mail, or there'd be PR hell to pay.
You walk over to the booth, generally a portable table with a cardboard privacy screen fitted around the top. There's a pen of the proper type in the booth -- you can ask to have it replaced if necessary. For each race or proposition, it tells you how many you can mark -- for some state races you can select multiple candidates and the top X number are picked -- and you mark what you wish. For most candidate races (in most states) there's also a blank entry you can mark, and write-in your choice.
You don't have to vote for all races or propositions. If you screw up, you take the screwed up ballot back (using the privacy procedures below) and they give you another. (I've never actually screwed up, but this is what the prominently posted instructions say to do.)
When you are done, there's either a privacy cover (if the cards are printed on both sides) or instructions tell you to turn the marked sides in. You leave the booth and return to the sign-in area, where another volunteer takes the ballot and feeds it into an optical-scan machine right there -- you watch them do it and hear it beep and increment the ballot count. Again at this point, if it fails to read (tho I've never had that happen), you can get a new ballot and try again. The ballot itself is deposited in a lock-box for recounts, if necessary.
Many states have a no-reason-necessary early voting allowed policy. You can either request an absentee ballot and either mail it in or take it to an authorized polling place up to poll closing time on the date of the main vote, or go in and early-vote at the county recorder's office. A few elections ago I did just that, requesting and getting an absentee ballot in the mail, which I filled out, sealed in the provided envelope, and dropped by my normal polling place on the day of the vote. They had a lock-box for them. It was much more convenient than voting as normal, but I missed the voting ritual and it felt kind of weird watching the results come in that nite having not actually voted that day.
States differ in how they check the ballots, but Arizona (where I am now) at least, requires an audit of several (IIRC two) percent of the precincts, randomly chosen (the "random" process of choosing them is encoded in the law, with at minimum witnesses from both parties, both to the choice and to the verifications, the audited precincts are not known previous to the vote so can't be avoided that way). These audits hand verify the count of the optical scan machines.
This system seems pretty reliable to me. I still can't understand why the entire nation doesn't just go opti-scan, as the machines can be used to count and get quick results as necessary, while the paper trail is there for anyone wishing to verify things.
The biggest problem I've heard about, doing it this way, is the lock-boxes disappearing a couple of times. Each one holds a few hundred votes. Of course, there's an accountability trail, but as they say, **** happens. Unfortunately, that's a problem for pretty much any after-the-fact verifiable system. But those cases are few and far between, it seems, and I've not heard of any of them actually affecting an outcome. There have been a few cases of other oddities as well, but nothing even close to the unverified touch-screen issues that seem to come up every year.
BTW, I've worked with touch screens, and whoever came up with the idea of having the untrained public v
OK, I appreciate all that info you posted and probably wouldn't have mentioned this were it not that your correction missed it too, but as someone who appreciates someone pointing it out to me, let me pass on this favor to someone obviously bright enough to make use of it.
Think allot > allotment. "Allot" has its roots in the way possibly contested assignments (of land, jobs, whatever) were often distributed "in times of lore" and occasionally still are, using the process of drawing lots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_of_lots. Today, it has a broader meaning of distribution in general, whether by random means or not.
"A lot" (two words) is a description of degree, meaning "very much", "a great deal". Even in the two-word form, however, until recently it was considered a colloquialism, unfit for formal use, altho (deliberate (mis)spelling) modern dictionaries seem to omit that, meaning it has graduated to being permissible in formal use only in the last few years. Taking its place has been the single-word form, "alot", which still causes many to shudder and can't be found in many dictionaries, but has come into increasingly common informal usage. Wictionary has this to say about the single-word-form "alot": "When it appears intentionally in print, it is generally either representing the original spelling in a work quoted, or is an attempt by the author to convey poor education in the character using it." Wictionary has more on the word, here: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/alot.
From personal observation, "a lot" of the misuse of "allot" came about due to spell checkers flagging "alot", dumbly suggesting "allot" but failing to suggest "a lot", either because it's two words or because the term has only recently been accepted for formal use and thus didn't appear. I know this was the case for my personal misuse, as I never /did/ think "allot" looked right, but sometimes accepted it as the only plausible suggestion, without bothering to look it up. Only after seeing a reply such as this one did I realize my error and correct my ways. Fortunately or unfortunately, it also sensitized me to the word, such that seeing either "allot" used improperly, or "alot" used at all, causes me to shudder.
So obviously, your usage "no allot" (I have a hard time writing it even quoting, now, as my fingers just want to do the right thing! ) was doubly wrong, thus the AC's WTF which I'm sure a lot of others thought as well. Then you corrected the no > know, but /still/ skipped the allot > "a lot", while providing a wealth of very interesting information in the same post so obviously you're intelligent enough, which /must/ mean you weren't aware of the problem at all, thus this post, hoping to correct that oversight. As I said, I'm simply passing on the favor, as I learned about the difference myself from just such a post.
... And extending off of that...
Those "netbook" mini-notebooks are practically semi-disposable price-wise, now, plus they're small and great for traveling. Buy one of those for trips where it might get lost (either at the border or forgotten, or swiped). Put most of your data on USB sticks, and do the Internet connectivity thing (some of them have 3g cell connectivity if you wish) and upload to some online storage site (even attach them to mail and google-mail them) periodically (depending on how long you're gone and how many pics you take) and before you return. You can encrypt before you upload if you're worried about someone snagging them as you upload or off whatever site.
That way you aren't taking anything thru customs that worst case, you can't afford to lose. Similarly with losing your laptop at the airport or from your hotel room or whatever. The 300-ish you spend on the netbook isn't something you probably want to spend for every trip, but then the odds are you won't lose it on every trip... and if you lose it on one trip, oh, well. Meanwhile, your data too is backed up, since you uploaded it over the net, and can retrieve it once you get home if the physical copy gets snagged (either at customs, or as I said, from your hotel room or the airport or whatever).
As for the encryption choice you can try gpg/pgp and possibly legitimately say you use it for mail, but they can ask for your key. (FWIW, unlike Britain, it's illegal/unconstitutional to demand it in the US including clearing customs, according to a recent court case, but illegal hasn't seemed to stop a lot of the Gov't thugs recently.) But the Truecrypt solution provides plausible deniability if you do it correctly (the recent /. headlines to the contrary not withstanding, see the discussion threads), and it's open source, so it should be reasonably secure from No Such Agency trojans or the like.
But the little netbook solution, combined with (encrypted) net based storage, should pretty much solve the problem. And if the worst happens and you lose it... you've limited your loses.
I would have expanded a bit but I was on my way to work... So now that I'm back and you replied, I can.
Actually, I've only run it close to totally out only once... with a runaway process. I actually saw it eating RAM before it ever got into swap at all, realized what was happening, got a kill for the process in question all set to run at boosted priority, and then just sat and watched it eat RAM for the fun of it. I let it eat all of the 8 gigs RAM and 15 gigs into the 16 gigs of swap, before I hit the enter on that kill. (If you've ever been in a spot where the kernel is /really/ squeezed for RAM... it hurts, well before the OOM-killer kicks in, and even with swap entirely off so it's not swapping, it's spending all its cycles squeezing those last few bytes of RAM out. I didn't want it to get to that point, a point at which I've actually /been/ before, so I killed it with ~1/2 a gig or so of RAM left, just in case.)
As for what I do with it... not really /that/ much. The computer is my hobby/toy, my "geek hot rod" for the most part. I did mention I run Gentoo. It's on a 2x Opteron 290s, so dual-dual-core 2.8 GHz, top of the line for that mobo (Tyan s2885 dual-CPU-socket). I run it in NUMA-mode, 4 gigs (2x 2-gig sticks) off of each CPU-socket (dual-cores per). I'm running 4-spindle kernel/md/mdp RAID, RAID-0/1/6, RAID-0 for /boot (GRUB understands only RAID-0), RAID 6, so two-way-stripe, two-way-parity, I can lose 2 of the 4 without losing data, for my main system, and 4-way-striped RAID-0 for speed, for various caches and my kernel and Gentoo package trees, since they need no redundancy as I can simply redownload off the net if needed. My latest upgrade was finally to LCDs from CRTs. I was running 2x 21" CRTs @ 1600x1200 stacked for 1600x2400. I /wanted/ to upgrade to two of those 30" 2560x1600 LCDs, but @ the ~$1400+ a piece they are running, plus the fact that I'd have had to upgrade the video card (to one that could handle 2x DVI-D dual-link) at the same time to handle them, it wasn't in my budget. I settled for 2x 1920x1200, ~$350 each, and they're still running on my old video card, one on single-link DVI-D, the other on analog/VGA. The video card is the last thing on my list to upgrade. At present I'm still running an old Radeon 92xx series, since at the time I bought it, it was about the best that could be had that ran freedomware Linux drivers. Now that /that/ has changed... But the mobo is AGP, not the newer PCI-E. But I can still upgrade the video quite a bit from the Radeon 92xx series I'm running now, and intend to do so within the year, capping off my system upgrades for now. I'll continue to run this system for another three years anyway, maybe five, at which point I'll probably more side-grade than upgrade, to a by then lower end quad-core w/ another 8 gigs RAM, but modernizing to PCI-E and by then, probably USB-3, etc, probably for under $500 by then.
Anyway, in context, the 8 gigs real RAM balances the total 4 cores quite well. When I had dual single-core Opteron 242s in the rig, the 8 gigs RAM was simply not all that useful, and would have been a waste of money, but I deliberately over-bought on the RAM, as I figured I'd use it once I got dual dual-cores in it, and I have. 4 gigs wouldn't be squeezed, but since I did the upgrade to the 4 cores total, I do feel like I'm getting my money's worth out of the 8 gigs.
I don't really need 16 gigs of swap, you are correct. However, I was balancing the layouts on the 4 spindles and wanted 4-way striped swap for speed as well. 4 gigs each on 4 swap partitions, one on each drive spindle, set at the same priority so the kernel would stripe them, was what I setup. At the time, I didn't actually realize that the kernel's suspend to disk functionality couldn't stripe the suspend in swap just as the kernel did normal swap, so it was more or less luck that I chose the magic 4 gigs per swap partition that was th
Replying here as it covers one angle I was going to mention.
The parent is correct, but the grandparent misses something. If using (Linux) kernel suspend, the default suspend image is half a gig, but you can make it up to half the size of your actual RAM. This must be in a single swap partition. Why half the size? Because in ordered to avoid various problems with deadlocks and etc, the kernel reads in the swap to the vacant half, then atomically switches to it. (This is in the kernel documentation dir, in the power subdir.)
So if planning on using kernel suspend to full effect, you need a minimum swap of half the size of RAM, in a single partition. Then ensure that the appropriate image size is written to the appropriate file under /sys/power before suspending, or it'll only use a half-gig image, which will dump most of your hard-earned cache.
If using user mode suspend, TuxOnIce being the usual one, it works somewhat differently. I'll not try to explain it since I'm using the kernel built-in suspend, but I know it can compress the image while kernel suspend can't, and saves user-mode and cache separately and first, then dumps it and saves the kernel state, according to the little documentation I've read on it.
For actual swap, that half as much as memory (on a decently modern multi-gig memory system) per swap partition (or file) can be a decent practical limit too, simply because disk is so much slower than RAM... and if you're heavily swapping on a single spindle it'll be about locked up anyway. However, if you have mutliple hard drives, multiple such images are a good thing! I have four drives, 8 gigs of RAM, and a four gig swap partition on each drive. That works reasonably well, even when I DO go heavy into swap.
Finally, if you do compiles or the like, consider making your /tmp and/or /var/tmp tmpfs, and pointing your compiles at it for scratch space. For Gentooers at least, this can make a BIG difference (set PORTAGE_TMPDIR to a tmpfs), as then all those temporary scratch files normally don't hit disk at all. Worst-case, you run into swap and they do, but that'd be the normal case otherwise. Of course in this case you want a big swap. Again, the 16 gigs I mentioned above, 4 gigs each on four different drive spindles, works very well.
Actually, a staffer might be better in some ways. Do you think the politicians themselves have the time to write, or even read, those multi-hundred-page bills they vote on? It's the staffers that do all that, and if you have the ear (umm, the eye, it's email) of one of them in the right place, you've a very valuable policy shaping instrument indeed!
The problem is that a full USENET binary feed is terabytes a day now, much of which will never be downloaded by any user. But it's not the terabytes of incoming or even outgoing bandwidth that's the problem, but the shear technical issue of /reliably/ storing it, for X days before expiration, on beefy enough hardware that thousands of users can reliably access random different messages in that say 20-100 terabytes of data all at the same time, with multiple streams, each of which isn't encountering inordinate delay, all while a couple terabytes of new input a day is coming in, while another couple terabytes of old data a day is being expired and removed from the indexes, all without major hiccup.
All this in an area generally far from an ISP's main expertise, used by only a small (if significant, perhaps 5-10% over a three month period, by one study I saw, but it's a geeky bunch that may make connectivity decisions for others...) minority of its customers. It's essentially impossible to get right "insourcing" it, and outsourcing... costs a decent amount of money when it's coming out of a $30-50/mo account, particularly when so few do use it, but many of them REALLY use it.
By dropping at least binary groups entirely, ISPs get rid of a major source of complaints and support issues, while dropping a non-core service used by only a small fraction of users. Text groups OTOH are MUCH lower intensity resource-wise, something an ISP really /can/ manage decently on its own. Throw in the attacks of the copyright mafioso that come with binaries, and I can definitely see why an ISP would like to be rid of them. It's just a shame that so many are getting rid of the comparatively low maintenance and low resource usage text groups at the same time.
To put these numbers into perspective, the EPAâ(TM)s lead standard for drinking water is 50 micrograms per liter.
Well, yeah, but do you drink wine, brandy, etc, as if it were water? Do you cook with it as if it were water? Do you shower with it (breathing the steam) as if it were water? What about water your garden and sprinkle your lawn (the evaporation) with it as if it were water?
So a thousand or even a couple thousand micrograms per litre in a bottle of wine you have a glass of... isn't anything to get too worried over. That 20K micrograms per litre brandy might be worth giving up if you do it frequently, but even the 5K microgram port isn't something I'd be all /that/ concerned about, unless I was drinking a bottle a week or more over long periods.
So yeah, put the numbers in perspective. If you're drinking /that/ much alcohol, you probably need to stop and ask yourself some serious questions in any case. BTW, I don't have numbers, but the lead in fish is likely to be a bigger dietary source of it for many.
Well questioned/stated. Just tell people that on (Ubunto/) Linux, firefox is called iceweasel. Unlike folks saying the same thing about firefox and IE, it's the truth, at least when Mozilla gets its panties in a twist when the distribution actually starts doing normal free software stuff with it.
Some of the iceweasel artwork is indeed quite nice, every bit as nice as the firefox artwork. The only fly in the ointment I've found is in starting from the command line (as Gentoo installs it anyway, appropriate USE flags set), firefox works but iceweasel doesn't. So set a symlink and be done with it. Besides, the people that would even come across the command line issue almost certainly can figure out what's up in any case. Those that can't, wouldn't tend to use the command line.
From the sounds of things, he can't reboot them either, due to (good founded, if it has been that long) fear they many not ever come up again, and if they are still doing something potentially important enough to keep them around, that rather defeats the purpose of doing so.
No, the other suggestions about either sniffing the traffic or since it /has/ been that long, using one of the certain vulns to gain root access, are the only logical choices. But as also already observed, his /. username is Lord Apathy for a reason, and as he says, he doesn't get paid to care /that/ much.
From experience, what he's describing isn't necessarily drug related. (FWIW, I don't do drugs beyond caffeine, I don't even do alcohol, and no "straight" caffeine either, it's Mt. Dew or other caffinated soda, or green tea, or coffee (not straight, often instant disolved into Dr. Pepper for a stronger caffeine hit, when I'm needing to work after being up too long on the computer at home, say.)
Rather, both the OCD/ADD and the paranoia often seen as side effects of amphetamines or other uppers are more naturally and directly attributable to severe sleep deprivation, generally 48 waking hours or more (commonly by 72) straight, or perhaps just an hour or two of sleep a night for four nights or more in a row. The direct effect of the upper is sleep deprivation. The effect of the sleep deprivation is OCD/ADD and paranoia, thus making it only a secondary side effect of the amphetamines or other uppers. I'll get the OCD/ADD and paranoia just on the lack of sleep at times, if I get stuck on a project like a system software upgrade gone bad I want to fix, or something, even without the caffeine, tho I'll often take it if I have to go to work during the fixing binge.
That said, I never "can't" sleep for more than the ordinary waking day or so. As hinted above, what most often triggers it for me is that after an already long but nothing unusual day, I'll often do my ordinary (home) computer updates -- only I run unstable (Gentoo ~arch) and often hard-masked for testing or testing overlays of gcc, kde, etc, and if there's a hitch in the update that significantly impairs the normal functioning of the computer, all is not well with the world and I have trouble sleeping or eating or pretty much anything (I will drop it to go to work, then pick up again when I get back home) until I trace it and fix or work around the issue. That I'm normally a night person (always have been, 40-some years now), and work evenings, normally sleeping days, doesn't help, because since that's the reverse of normal society, I can never actually /keep/ that schedule for more than a few days. Thus, my sleep/wake cycle is always in /some/ stage of disruption, and that I get some obsessive with the computer sometimes only exacerbates an existing disruption. Still, I never /can't/ sleep, for more than a few hours. It's that I find other things to do, and /don't/ sleep. And as I said, it's not drug influenced except for some caffeine at times to say awake at work, if I need it, which I often do on such an already disrupted cycle.
But yes, it's definitely by hard experience that I know this. At least now, I recognize the symptoms, I've learned to note especially the illogical paranoia and anger reactions before they get too bad, and know that when I do, I gotta ease up on things for a few days. After 10-12 hours of sleep straight, and/or 18-ish hours sleep in two days consecutive, I'm back feeling pretty normal again, paranoia and abnormal cleaning and etc obsessions gone (but I'm still the normal picky about my computer, of course). It did take me over a decade of adult life to learn to notice such things, tho, with effectively a nervous breakdown somewhere in the middle of it.
Well, at this point, civil liberties are about as close as it gets to a litmus test for me, on a weight average they're by far the strongest factor, I'd say accounting for 50% of my consideration more or less, right there, and the problem is, while we see McCain appears willing to deliberately trample them under foot, Obama /said/ he cared about them, then demonstrated otherwise when the rubber met the road in an very important and pretty tight vote. Thus, while McCain is terrible, when the rubber meets the road, Obama certainly can't be counted on either. He's not a guaranteed negative on civil liberties (maybe, maybe he was just saying whatever and he /is/ a guaranteed negative, he certainly doesn't believe in them or he wouldn't have been able to live with himself after that vote), but he can't be counted on, either.
If there's one thing the Libertarians are likely to do it's stick up for civil liberties. Yes, I do disagree with them on a few things, but those things are pretty minor factors compared to civil liberties, at least at this point.
If I were sure we'd be better with Obama, I'd vote for him. But at this point, I just can't say that. Whatever he claimed to stand for... well, now, he's just another Democrat that ran on ending the war, and then repeatedly continued to open the purse strings for more, when that's about the only control the Congress has. They had a majority. In the Senate, it would have taken just 41 votes to filibuster, and they didn't believe strongly enough in what they ran on to hold the line. What DO they believe in strongly enough? Patriot bill? War? All sorts of stuff they say they made mistakes on, yet give them a majority, and instead of fixing them, THEY KEEP MAKING THEM!! Unfortunately, it seems Obama, contrary to his message of change, when put on the hot seat where his vote really counts CAN'T BE COUNTED ON EITHER!! Maybe it's gotten to the point where we gotta go as bad as possible as quickly as possible and hope to shake people to their senses.
It's getting so I'm really seeing what people mean when they call them six of one, a half dozen of the other. I really /don't/ see any more that the Dems, Obama included, are our ticket out of this. If they were, something would be different now than it is.
I'm on the Dems emailing list, and keep getting "rouse the troops" messages. They say how bad McCain is. Yes, we know that. They don't tell me what I need to read, what Obama's going to do about it and how he explains failing to vote to do something about it in the Senate. That's not change, that's politics as usual.
So where's that leave me? Voting for the Libertarians, pretty much, despite what might have seemed serious disagreements in previous years. Well, they don't look so serious matched up against today's issues.
Despite all that, I still hope Obama comes thru with that explanation. I've been waiting for it since that vote. I had hoped to see it in a statement at the convention. We're running out of time...