Used cars? Have you noticed how the prices have gone up? That's because so few get traded in with new car sales down. Buying a used car from a dealer is absolutely a sucker's bet. Buying from the owner, maybe you get a car where they actually, you know, changed the oil once or twice. But generally to get something in the affordable range it already has most of 100,000 miles on it. And I'm sorry even well-made cars start to require expensive fixes once past 100,000 miles.
The only way to get a car to 200,000 miles is to buy it new and really follow the maintenance schedule religiously. Most people, more than half, pay little attention to maintenance. Those are the used cars on the market, since the well maintained ones the owners are proud of and keep.
If you're a kid with an aptitude for wrench work, something used can be worth while (if you get something old enough you don't need an expensive specialized computer to tune it). For anyone else, get a gas-efficient new car, and maintain the sucker.
Yup, when I was in my 40s living in Brooklyn insuring a very old Toyota that only went about 3,000 miles a year cost more than $110 a month - with insurance that was about at the legal minimum. Now I have two much better cars in Vermont, the same (clean) driving record I had in New York, with much more insurance on them, driving 'em a lot more miles, and it comes to less than $70 a month for the two of them.
The reason for the difference? Mostly that Brooklyn juries routinely grant large awards to people running insurance scams. Insurance gets very expensive where people are greedy and dishonest. I know, who would have thought you'd find folks like that within a few miles of Manhattan?
If you're older, like me, you can remember breaking one or more mercury thermometers as a child. Thermometers have 50 mg to 3 g. So as toxic as mercury may be, you'd have to break more than a dozen CFLs to have the household exposure that pretty much every house in the nation had each time a child playing with a thermometer dropped it a few decades back.
That, as we know, ended civilization. It was precisely like the lead pipes to the Romans.
a person can experience their own will as being "free" or not depending on how they model their own thought process.
That's a claim I've never seen before. (And I've published and refereed journal articles on free will.) Are we off topic, or does your claim have a quantum angle? Can you provide instructions on how to model my thought processes so as to not experience my will as free? Or does that require some psychological state - say paranoid delusional - which requires more than just a change in modeling assumptions to realize?
Where does this notion that whatever became the design trend yesterday is always the best come from? Being cool means you don't spend hours each day in front of the mirror trying to dress and posture like the supposed "cool kids." That approach is exactly why pop music sucks worse than ever, on the whole, while nearly everything else (say, architecture) is also largely in decline. It's why Wall Street went head-over-heals for "financial products" invented yesterday, instead of staying focused on the very-profitable products that were invented centuries ago.
The new that's truly new - there's a place for that. Pop music, for instance, once had a lot more truly new stuff in the mix. But the "new" that's merely imitating someone else's trendy details - totally bogus. Good UI's persist, they aren't disposable trash. Trends have little to do with that.
Consider: Academics have long had full access to journals, books, great libraries, and even peers in their departments. But still we go to conferences, and can be tremendously stimulated by them. Why is that? We've read the books and papers of the more interesting presenters already. We've even corresponded with a few. Despite all this, the right conference is uniquely valuable to focusing and improving our craft.
It's the human factor - the full experience of the character of those who are having the best success. There's a contagion that happens in the presence of good minds. Some of that happens through papers, books, correspondence. But there's far more that comes across only in the presence of the person.
We can recognize that and still expect that many mediocre professors may well be replaced by online coursework. A brilliant book is often better than a drudge at a podium. But the great professors, in person, will never be supplanted - not before telepresence has advanced to where it qualifies as "in person" too.
Which means this won't work, since what I see in the logs (at least in the last go-round with this stuff) is one attempt per remote IP, yet a coordinated distributed dictionary attack. What we need is a ruleset that properly spots this attack pattern, then locks down port 22 entirely except for defined, fixed-IP administrative exceptions, just if there is any pattern of failed attempts over a longer period.
In a slightly-different recent case, I saw someone get ahold of an ftp login. The uses of that login were one-off per remote IP. The IPs were in Ukraine, Russia, China, Texas... with hours between successive attacks. From what was attempted on the logins, it was obviously a generic attack, not well-directed at the particular server. Quite likely an infected client system divulged the login to the botnet that infected it, and the botnet then focused the distributed attack. As with ftp, so with ssh. They don't want you to even notice it in the logs. Each IP will be used for one transaction attempt with you, spaced hours apart.
We need tools to spot these slow-moving distributed attacks. The single bad login attempt needs to be correlated with others from completely different IPs, over a span of days, not just minutes.
Ubuntu's been paying good attention to tuning for netbooks. The downside of using Ubuntu is a user community that's not as clued as, say Gentoo or even the Red Hat variants. The upside of using Ubuntu is Canonical's concentrating on putting out something for a user community that's not as clued. I enjoy the clue hunt as much as the next geek, on occasion. But it's nice when the occasion's not constant.
If you have segregated networks, all the spy needs to do is find a single place to tap into your "secure" one, and you're toast. You thought it was secure, so you didn't lock it down properly. And somebody, somewhere left a way in, an unguarded terminal, or cheated and put a cross-connect to the public net for his own convenience, thinking it would never be found.
If it's all on the public net, but thoroughly locked down with good security and encryption protocols, and tight firewalls, you may be in better shape. You know it's dangerous to let your guard down. And we're also pretty confident we have protocols which, when applied to spec, are truly cryptographically strong, and so forth.
Plus it's a lot cheaper than building out a whole nother net, including access for your critical engineer who's off at a conference somewhere when the unpredicted crisis with the unique system in your plant that she's the genius about requires immediate attention. Sometimes making sure the right people have solid access from anywhere they are is also essential to security. The public net - with the right protocols - does that.
You do realize that if we went to hang all those who I agree with you should be hanged for treason, that they have a reserve army of some well-armed millions who are just waiting for the signal to try to bring the government down? Going down the path of strict justice here, we'd end up with so many traitors to hang that the world's rope production capacity would be tested.
Meanwhile the buggers would have shot a lot of us, or blown us up along with various federal buildings, or done gods know what else they've gotten ready for. Bringing Republicans to Constitutional justice will do wonders for promoting domestic terrorism. Do we really want that battle? What would victory in it look like?
Very good point. That the government under prior administration did something illegal doesn't mean that they didn't use highly secret means that the current administration should want to preserve for future, legal uses that require that these methods and devices remain secret.
Also, the government wants to get cooperation when it asks, from AT&T and other major corporations, for future stuff that's within the law. That means that the government doesn't want AT&T making up its own mind with each request as to whether there is legal liability in cooperating with what, on their face, are legal government requests. And that means not letting AT&T get burned for past cooperation with what the prior government assured it at the time was a legal request.
The people to go after were those who were within the government violating our constitution, not corporations which in general we should want to cooperate with our government against real terrorist threats. It wasn't within AT&T's core expertise to diagnose the reality of terrorist threats nor the constitutionality of installing particular government-provided tech in its network.
One way to contemplate the value the network adds to each transaction is to imagine the network being shut off and what the additional transactions' costs or loss would be.
So if one network were shut off, and another network turned on, and the second network was more efficient, then the value of the first network would be negative, since shutting it off ended up decreasing transaction costs? Or consider the value of my wife. If I shut her down, but a new, more efficient wife were immediately available, did my former wife have negative value?
Now, you might say that there's not a replacement network immediately available. But surely there are replacement wives available. So is the value of my wife in the positive things that I get from her currently, or is it only relative to the potential value of other wives, or of the freedom of having no wife at all?
Also, is an elegant wife or an elegant network of more value than an inelegant one, regardless of any direct effect of that elegance on transaction costs? Should we prefer an ugly wife or network merely because transaction costs are less?
Beckstrom's approach gets at something, just as most simple-minded reductions have some grain of truth in them. But it's also, in the large picture, mostly wrong.
The Conservatives in Britain often make better noise on privacy issues. They are also, in complete contrast to the US, the responsible party about the climate change threat. But where are they really coming down on this incipient fascism?
Not if they're blacklisting. Only if they're redirecting. And if they were redirecting they'd presumably already have fake site mirrors set up, including these images, so the test would have never worked.
In finance, companies routinely send questionnaires to each other to ascertain whether security standards are being enforced. The problem is, the questions are often disconnected from the actual tasks and practices - one-size-fits all queries. Since the questions are generally more-than-half bullshit, you can imagine how the answers come out. The buzzword compliance ratio runs high. Measures that promote or enforce actual security - not so much.
Having more law from the government for this will accomplish one thing: greater standardization of these questionnaires. This will contribute to an illusion of security, and give companies greater CYA capability, based on their show of compliance with the legislated standard. Greater CYA capability leads to lowered concern with actually being secure, since meeting the standard becomes prioritized over actual results.
Ah, but the certification industry will prosper, as each firm shells out thousands for workshops so they can get someone on staff into full buzzword compliance.
Not quite. The leaky window lowers the temperature of the surface next to the leak inside the window. That's where the condensation forms. Further, the continued flow of moisture-laden warm air out through the leak keeps the condensation building up - right on the part of the window closest to the leak.
What windows are leaky? Older ones - either old wooden windows (also often with lead painted sashes), or older vinyl windows (the cheaper ones warp after a few years, and so leak). I have old wood, older vinyl, and new wood/vinyl windows in my house. There's a lot of condensation on the old wood windows (right by where they leak), moderate condensation on the older vinyl windows (immediately next to where they leak), and virtually none on the new wood/vinyl windows (but what little is there is - you guessed it - right at the part of the glass closest to the almost imperceptible leak where the two sashes meet).
Condensation on windows doesn't imply bad ventilation, as the study authors suggest. Condensation happens when windows leak, so that the cold air coming through the leak chills the warmer air inside next to the window, lowering its dewpoint. So condensation on windows implies more air exchange between inside and out, not less. Air exchange of course is ventilation.
Now, leaky windows with condensation tend to be older windows. Might they be older vinyl windows? Might they be older, wooden, lead painted windows? I don't know what's typical of windows in Sweden.
It's a question of the odds. A major electrical storm occurred within the last couple of centuries. A major asteroid impact - of the sort that would do worse damage to a wide area (not just knock down some trees in Russia) - haven't seen one probably since we dropped down from the trees.
Whether you're losing sleep over it is one thing. whether we, when awake in the daytime, should be hardening our electrical grid against surges from space - well, that's a real question. Prudence doesn't mean just acting when you get scared enough that you can't sleep at night.
When you say you "pissed away" your 20s, were you doing something where you got to know part of the world that kids who went straight through college in IT generally are ignorant of? Years ago, I could say "I work with computers" and it meant something. Now, to say "I work with computers" merely means you have a job. They're in everything. For most businesses, computers are not an end, they're a tool. Nobody hires somebody for their degree in hammers. But if you've learned a special sort of carpentry, and can demonstrate your ability, it will be assumed you know how to swing a hammer well. That's not to say you don't want to study the tools, even get the degree in them. But focus on the craft, on what you'd love to build, because that's what people really get hired for, not their tool collection. Not except for truly hack work.
Anyway, if you've gotten to know some part of the world well while pissing away those years, can you leverage it? Have you seen some aspects of life that can be improved with the right computer tech? If so, start studying how to do that. Make your own niche. Take advantage of where you already uniquely are. It can be your strength.
The Sharp Zaurus ARM clamshells have been running all the standard Linux apps happily for years. The tricks to cross-compiling for ARM are easily mastered.
While the device support requirements are a bit different from the old 701 I'm running to the more recent Eee's, all will run Ubuntu's variants fine if you install with the customized kernel from array.org. I'm very happy with Xubuntu. Keep in mind that if you boot with a stock kernel, you won't have wireless working - so at a cat5 cable ready if you get stuck at that stage before the array.org kernel's installed.
There are various enhancements out there for particular models that will give you better support and displays for the function keys, that you can find by checking at eeeuser.com. But you should have a usable system with a stock Ubuntu + array.org kernel.
The core of American thought is pragmatic. The libertarians hold positions on individual freedom that are close to old American traditions, but they hold to them idealistically - as matters of "purified" ideology - rather than pragmatically. So, for instance, they want the government to back off from any control, but because they want the "pure" form of this, they don't even want government to restrain corporations which themselves are similar in power and wealth to many of the national governments elsewhere on this planet.
A pragmatic approach to liberty is to play the power centers off against each other, so that the individual has some chance of slipping between them. But the idealistic approach of the American libertarians merely hobbles government powers - which coincidentally explains why major funding for the libertarian institutions such as Cato comes from large corporations and those who control them.
Libertarianism in short is the ultimate scam, a coordinated attempt at the theft of individual liberty on behalf of large corporate powers - the same powers which then turn around and control much of the very government their libertarian front groups are pretending to help us protect ourselves from. This isn't to slight individual libertarians. Many of them are bright and well-meaning. But, like Madoff investors, they're dupes.
What side their bread is buttered on? Governments are by-and-large owned by corporations. Those corporations by-and-large benefit by keeping the business models they grew up with in place. Those business models include little regard for externalities like carbon output. Thus we see both the massive spending on public relations efforts to discredit global warming by those organizations, and their lobbying of the governments which fund the scientists. Those scientists know that governments are generally controlled by corporations, and that those corporations would generally like climate change to be ignored.
Those supposed "hundreds" of "climate scientists" who have "signed on to papers with adverse positions" - most are not scientists at all, most who are are not climate scientists, and those "papers" are Web-based petitions and newspapers advertisements - both generally being organized and funded by astroturf organizations funded by the likes of ExxonMobile.
Unfortunately climate data and predictions are apparently more motivated by political beliefs and biases than hard facts.
That's an empty assertion, apparently motivated by the conflict between the conclusions from overwhelming climate data and the writer's ideology.
Where is the sociological data to support it? All these claims about "political beliefs and biases" among climate scientists are working backwards from a desire to reject the conclusions of science to ad hominem attacks on the scientists themselves - attacks which make presumptions about the politics of scientists which are naive in the extreme. A great many - perhaps most - scientists are not political at all. They're too busy with their science to worry about politics outside of their own university departments, and anyway consider most politicians and commentators a bit too stupid to concern themselves with one way or the other.
So where's your data on "political beliefs and biases" among climate scientists? As most of them are funded by governments, can you show an example from any scientific community of a pronounced pattern of biting the hand that feeds it? Consider the scientists funded by drug companies. Do their results cut against their funders?
If you finance with debt, and spend the money borrowed on something that makes you markedly more productive, in the end it can be far cheaper than never going into debt at all. Let's say I'm selling firewood. If I borrow to buy a chain saw and a mechanized log splitter I'm going to be able to produce 20 times the firewood in the same amount of time, with the same amount of labor. That log splitter pays for itself in the first year. Smart debt is like that.
The whole point of "capitalism" is capital - specifically borrowing it through various mechanisms so it can be employed to produce efficiencies that more-than-pay-it-back. A system without such mechanisms of debt isn't capitalist at all. Not all uses of debt work out; but when they do it's the very genius of the capitalist system.
Slashdot Mirror
Used cars? Have you noticed how the prices have gone up? That's because so few get traded in with new car sales down. Buying a used car from a dealer is absolutely a sucker's bet. Buying from the owner, maybe you get a car where they actually, you know, changed the oil once or twice. But generally to get something in the affordable range it already has most of 100,000 miles on it. And I'm sorry even well-made cars start to require expensive fixes once past 100,000 miles.
The only way to get a car to 200,000 miles is to buy it new and really follow the maintenance schedule religiously. Most people, more than half, pay little attention to maintenance. Those are the used cars on the market, since the well maintained ones the owners are proud of and keep.
If you're a kid with an aptitude for wrench work, something used can be worth while (if you get something old enough you don't need an expensive specialized computer to tune it). For anyone else, get a gas-efficient new car, and maintain the sucker.
Yup, when I was in my 40s living in Brooklyn insuring a very old Toyota that only went about 3,000 miles a year cost more than $110 a month - with insurance that was about at the legal minimum. Now I have two much better cars in Vermont, the same (clean) driving record I had in New York, with much more insurance on them, driving 'em a lot more miles, and it comes to less than $70 a month for the two of them.
The reason for the difference? Mostly that Brooklyn juries routinely grant large awards to people running insurance scams. Insurance gets very expensive where people are greedy and dishonest. I know, who would have thought you'd find folks like that within a few miles of Manhattan?
If you're older, like me, you can remember breaking one or more mercury thermometers as a child. Thermometers have 50 mg to 3 g. So as toxic as mercury may be, you'd have to break more than a dozen CFLs to have the household exposure that pretty much every house in the nation had each time a child playing with a thermometer dropped it a few decades back.
That, as we know, ended civilization. It was precisely like the lead pipes to the Romans.
That's a claim I've never seen before. (And I've published and refereed journal articles on free will.) Are we off topic, or does your claim have a quantum angle? Can you provide instructions on how to model my thought processes so as to not experience my will as free? Or does that require some psychological state - say paranoid delusional - which requires more than just a change in modeling assumptions to realize?
Where does this notion that whatever became the design trend yesterday is always the best come from? Being cool means you don't spend hours each day in front of the mirror trying to dress and posture like the supposed "cool kids." That approach is exactly why pop music sucks worse than ever, on the whole, while nearly everything else (say, architecture) is also largely in decline. It's why Wall Street went head-over-heals for "financial products" invented yesterday, instead of staying focused on the very-profitable products that were invented centuries ago.
The new that's truly new - there's a place for that. Pop music, for instance, once had a lot more truly new stuff in the mix. But the "new" that's merely imitating someone else's trendy details - totally bogus. Good UI's persist, they aren't disposable trash. Trends have little to do with that.
Consider: Academics have long had full access to journals, books, great libraries, and even peers in their departments. But still we go to conferences, and can be tremendously stimulated by them. Why is that? We've read the books and papers of the more interesting presenters already. We've even corresponded with a few. Despite all this, the right conference is uniquely valuable to focusing and improving our craft.
It's the human factor - the full experience of the character of those who are having the best success. There's a contagion that happens in the presence of good minds. Some of that happens through papers, books, correspondence. But there's far more that comes across only in the presence of the person.
We can recognize that and still expect that many mediocre professors may well be replaced by online coursework. A brilliant book is often better than a drudge at a podium. But the great professors, in person, will never be supplanted - not before telepresence has advanced to where it qualifies as "in person" too.
Which means this won't work, since what I see in the logs (at least in the last go-round with this stuff) is one attempt per remote IP, yet a coordinated distributed dictionary attack. What we need is a ruleset that properly spots this attack pattern, then locks down port 22 entirely except for defined, fixed-IP administrative exceptions, just if there is any pattern of failed attempts over a longer period.
In a slightly-different recent case, I saw someone get ahold of an ftp login. The uses of that login were one-off per remote IP. The IPs were in Ukraine, Russia, China, Texas ... with hours between successive attacks. From what was attempted on the logins, it was obviously a generic attack, not well-directed at the particular server. Quite likely an infected client system divulged the login to the botnet that infected it, and the botnet then focused the distributed attack. As with ftp, so with ssh. They don't want you to even notice it in the logs. Each IP will be used for one transaction attempt with you, spaced hours apart.
We need tools to spot these slow-moving distributed attacks. The single bad login attempt needs to be correlated with others from completely different IPs, over a span of days, not just minutes.
Ubuntu's been paying good attention to tuning for netbooks. The downside of using Ubuntu is a user community that's not as clued as, say Gentoo or even the Red Hat variants. The upside of using Ubuntu is Canonical's concentrating on putting out something for a user community that's not as clued. I enjoy the clue hunt as much as the next geek, on occasion. But it's nice when the occasion's not constant.
If you have segregated networks, all the spy needs to do is find a single place to tap into your "secure" one, and you're toast. You thought it was secure, so you didn't lock it down properly. And somebody, somewhere left a way in, an unguarded terminal, or cheated and put a cross-connect to the public net for his own convenience, thinking it would never be found.
If it's all on the public net, but thoroughly locked down with good security and encryption protocols, and tight firewalls, you may be in better shape. You know it's dangerous to let your guard down. And we're also pretty confident we have protocols which, when applied to spec, are truly cryptographically strong, and so forth.
Plus it's a lot cheaper than building out a whole nother net, including access for your critical engineer who's off at a conference somewhere when the unpredicted crisis with the unique system in your plant that she's the genius about requires immediate attention. Sometimes making sure the right people have solid access from anywhere they are is also essential to security. The public net - with the right protocols - does that.
You do realize that if we went to hang all those who I agree with you should be hanged for treason, that they have a reserve army of some well-armed millions who are just waiting for the signal to try to bring the government down? Going down the path of strict justice here, we'd end up with so many traitors to hang that the world's rope production capacity would be tested.
Meanwhile the buggers would have shot a lot of us, or blown us up along with various federal buildings, or done gods know what else they've gotten ready for. Bringing Republicans to Constitutional justice will do wonders for promoting domestic terrorism. Do we really want that battle? What would victory in it look like?
Very good point. That the government under prior administration did something illegal doesn't mean that they didn't use highly secret means that the current administration should want to preserve for future, legal uses that require that these methods and devices remain secret.
Also, the government wants to get cooperation when it asks, from AT&T and other major corporations, for future stuff that's within the law. That means that the government doesn't want AT&T making up its own mind with each request as to whether there is legal liability in cooperating with what, on their face, are legal government requests. And that means not letting AT&T get burned for past cooperation with what the prior government assured it at the time was a legal request.
The people to go after were those who were within the government violating our constitution, not corporations which in general we should want to cooperate with our government against real terrorist threats. It wasn't within AT&T's core expertise to diagnose the reality of terrorist threats nor the constitutionality of installing particular government-provided tech in its network.
So if one network were shut off, and another network turned on, and the second network was more efficient, then the value of the first network would be negative, since shutting it off ended up decreasing transaction costs? Or consider the value of my wife. If I shut her down, but a new, more efficient wife were immediately available, did my former wife have negative value?
Now, you might say that there's not a replacement network immediately available. But surely there are replacement wives available. So is the value of my wife in the positive things that I get from her currently, or is it only relative to the potential value of other wives, or of the freedom of having no wife at all?
Also, is an elegant wife or an elegant network of more value than an inelegant one, regardless of any direct effect of that elegance on transaction costs? Should we prefer an ugly wife or network merely because transaction costs are less?
Beckstrom's approach gets at something, just as most simple-minded reductions have some grain of truth in them. But it's also, in the large picture, mostly wrong.
The Conservatives in Britain often make better noise on privacy issues. They are also, in complete contrast to the US, the responsible party about the climate change threat. But where are they really coming down on this incipient fascism?
Not if they're blacklisting. Only if they're redirecting. And if they were redirecting they'd presumably already have fake site mirrors set up, including these images, so the test would have never worked.
In finance, companies routinely send questionnaires to each other to ascertain whether security standards are being enforced. The problem is, the questions are often disconnected from the actual tasks and practices - one-size-fits all queries. Since the questions are generally more-than-half bullshit, you can imagine how the answers come out. The buzzword compliance ratio runs high. Measures that promote or enforce actual security - not so much.
Having more law from the government for this will accomplish one thing: greater standardization of these questionnaires. This will contribute to an illusion of security, and give companies greater CYA capability, based on their show of compliance with the legislated standard. Greater CYA capability leads to lowered concern with actually being secure, since meeting the standard becomes prioritized over actual results.
Ah, but the certification industry will prosper, as each firm shells out thousands for workshops so they can get someone on staff into full buzzword compliance.
Not quite. The leaky window lowers the temperature of the surface next to the leak inside the window. That's where the condensation forms. Further, the continued flow of moisture-laden warm air out through the leak keeps the condensation building up - right on the part of the window closest to the leak.
What windows are leaky? Older ones - either old wooden windows (also often with lead painted sashes), or older vinyl windows (the cheaper ones warp after a few years, and so leak). I have old wood, older vinyl, and new wood/vinyl windows in my house. There's a lot of condensation on the old wood windows (right by where they leak), moderate condensation on the older vinyl windows (immediately next to where they leak), and virtually none on the new wood/vinyl windows (but what little is there is - you guessed it - right at the part of the glass closest to the almost imperceptible leak where the two sashes meet).
Condensation on windows doesn't imply bad ventilation, as the study authors suggest. Condensation happens when windows leak, so that the cold air coming through the leak chills the warmer air inside next to the window, lowering its dewpoint. So condensation on windows implies more air exchange between inside and out, not less. Air exchange of course is ventilation.
Now, leaky windows with condensation tend to be older windows. Might they be older vinyl windows? Might they be older, wooden, lead painted windows? I don't know what's typical of windows in Sweden.
It's a question of the odds. A major electrical storm occurred within the last couple of centuries. A major asteroid impact - of the sort that would do worse damage to a wide area (not just knock down some trees in Russia) - haven't seen one probably since we dropped down from the trees.
Whether you're losing sleep over it is one thing. whether we, when awake in the daytime, should be hardening our electrical grid against surges from space - well, that's a real question. Prudence doesn't mean just acting when you get scared enough that you can't sleep at night.
When you say you "pissed away" your 20s, were you doing something where you got to know part of the world that kids who went straight through college in IT generally are ignorant of? Years ago, I could say "I work with computers" and it meant something. Now, to say "I work with computers" merely means you have a job. They're in everything. For most businesses, computers are not an end, they're a tool. Nobody hires somebody for their degree in hammers. But if you've learned a special sort of carpentry, and can demonstrate your ability, it will be assumed you know how to swing a hammer well. That's not to say you don't want to study the tools, even get the degree in them. But focus on the craft, on what you'd love to build, because that's what people really get hired for, not their tool collection. Not except for truly hack work.
Anyway, if you've gotten to know some part of the world well while pissing away those years, can you leverage it? Have you seen some aspects of life that can be improved with the right computer tech? If so, start studying how to do that. Make your own niche. Take advantage of where you already uniquely are. It can be your strength.
The Sharp Zaurus ARM clamshells have been running all the standard Linux apps happily for years. The tricks to cross-compiling for ARM are easily mastered.
While the device support requirements are a bit different from the old 701 I'm running to the more recent Eee's, all will run Ubuntu's variants fine if you install with the customized kernel from array.org. I'm very happy with Xubuntu. Keep in mind that if you boot with a stock kernel, you won't have wireless working - so at a cat5 cable ready if you get stuck at that stage before the array.org kernel's installed.
There are various enhancements out there for particular models that will give you better support and displays for the function keys, that you can find by checking at eeeuser.com. But you should have a usable system with a stock Ubuntu + array.org kernel.
The core of American thought is pragmatic. The libertarians hold positions on individual freedom that are close to old American traditions, but they hold to them idealistically - as matters of "purified" ideology - rather than pragmatically. So, for instance, they want the government to back off from any control, but because they want the "pure" form of this, they don't even want government to restrain corporations which themselves are similar in power and wealth to many of the national governments elsewhere on this planet.
A pragmatic approach to liberty is to play the power centers off against each other, so that the individual has some chance of slipping between them. But the idealistic approach of the American libertarians merely hobbles government powers - which coincidentally explains why major funding for the libertarian institutions such as Cato comes from large corporations and those who control them.
Libertarianism in short is the ultimate scam, a coordinated attempt at the theft of individual liberty on behalf of large corporate powers - the same powers which then turn around and control much of the very government their libertarian front groups are pretending to help us protect ourselves from. This isn't to slight individual libertarians. Many of them are bright and well-meaning. But, like Madoff investors, they're dupes.
What side their bread is buttered on? Governments are by-and-large owned by corporations. Those corporations by-and-large benefit by keeping the business models they grew up with in place. Those business models include little regard for externalities like carbon output. Thus we see both the massive spending on public relations efforts to discredit global warming by those organizations, and their lobbying of the governments which fund the scientists. Those scientists know that governments are generally controlled by corporations, and that those corporations would generally like climate change to be ignored.
Those supposed "hundreds" of "climate scientists" who have "signed on to papers with adverse positions" - most are not scientists at all, most who are are not climate scientists, and those "papers" are Web-based petitions and newspapers advertisements - both generally being organized and funded by astroturf organizations funded by the likes of ExxonMobile.
That's an empty assertion, apparently motivated by the conflict between the conclusions from overwhelming climate data and the writer's ideology.
Where is the sociological data to support it? All these claims about "political beliefs and biases" among climate scientists are working backwards from a desire to reject the conclusions of science to ad hominem attacks on the scientists themselves - attacks which make presumptions about the politics of scientists which are naive in the extreme. A great many - perhaps most - scientists are not political at all. They're too busy with their science to worry about politics outside of their own university departments, and anyway consider most politicians and commentators a bit too stupid to concern themselves with one way or the other.
So where's your data on "political beliefs and biases" among climate scientists? As most of them are funded by governments, can you show an example from any scientific community of a pronounced pattern of biting the hand that feeds it? Consider the scientists funded by drug companies. Do their results cut against their funders?
If you finance with debt, and spend the money borrowed on something that makes you markedly more productive, in the end it can be far cheaper than never going into debt at all. Let's say I'm selling firewood. If I borrow to buy a chain saw and a mechanized log splitter I'm going to be able to produce 20 times the firewood in the same amount of time, with the same amount of labor. That log splitter pays for itself in the first year. Smart debt is like that.
The whole point of "capitalism" is capital - specifically borrowing it through various mechanisms so it can be employed to produce efficiencies that more-than-pay-it-back. A system without such mechanisms of debt isn't capitalist at all. Not all uses of debt work out; but when they do it's the very genius of the capitalist system.