The only point of the two parties is to make it so that the politicians have a reason to suck up to the corporations. If you're a Republican, in the contested electorates, you have a motive to suck up to the corporation lest the Democrat (who is also being funded by the same people) get all the campaign funds and win. Otherwise the two parties are nearly identical on the issues that matter (to the corporations).
This is Slashdot, try not to make it obvious that you're making up an anecdote....But in case you're serious: Since both you and your girlfriend are cool with it, mind sending her over here for a bit?
OH NO YOU DINNT!!!
And can I join? Cue porno music: *boom chikka wauu wauu*
When it comes to justice, even a show court is still better then a head shot and a body tossed into the sea. I don't think anyone can seriously argue with this point.
I could not agree more. But you know, they got Hitler II. Let's rejoice and beat our fists against our chests and get drunk and be proud to be an American. That's how we're supposed to react.
It's sad how many people have died globally under the pretext of 9/11. And now even the death of Bin Laden doesn't get most people to question the US's actions. It has the opposite effect in that people react viscerally to it.
It's just completely ok and we are awesome that we got him and it's great and YEAH! AMERICAAAAAAAA!
A lot of people have died as you have pointed out and it's sad. Bin Laden's death doesn't bring them back. I just wish violence would end and not a single additional person would die because of all of this.:(
I don't think it changed anything real, to be honest. It's symbolic though. I often resort to mafia analogies when trying to understand these things.
For example, using the mafia don model: You can make an argument that when the mafia don (US) has an enemy, and they finally get him, it "sends a message".
Also, politically it makes Obama look good because it gives the impression he gets stuff done competently. He might be able to point to it in the next presidential campaign.
What you're saying is true. We should organize to change things.
But in practice it's extremely difficult. There are some extremely wealthy corporations you have to contend with and they have a lot of power and sway over politics and who gets elected and what they do once in office.
But yes, it's true, if we ban together and get involved it's possible to change things.
Bin laden was never trained or funded by the US in the 80's.
That's pretty much not true. Bin Laden, while he did use his own funds as well, was a Mujahadeen leader and it's pretty well established that the Mujahadeen were given vast sums of money and arms to fight the Russians (indirectly via Pakistan).
Google around to see that lots of people agree Bin Laden was a CIA asset at one point. That fact is politically embarrassing but plainly true.
Also, I stand by my definition that the weapon of the US government is terrorism. It's just not called that when they do it. They sometimes call it liberation or exporting democracy. (which is pretty ridiculous but what's more ridiculous is that the population buys it).
The giant was not sleeping. What reality are you living in? Or do you like to cling to this fantasy because it helps you think that you are on the side of right and justice? It's pretty convenient to believe that because it avoids a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The reality is more like the giant was hard at work sticking its thumbs in everyone else's pie. An example would be the very fact that Bin Laden was armed and trained by the USA back in the 80s when Bin Laden was a good guy because he was fighting the russkies for us. That's just 1 pie. There are probably 50 others you can use as an example for that period or after.
Nope, the giant's been pretty busy at work being an imperialist bastard.
The only difference between "terror" and justice or liberation or whatever misleading labels the propaganda industry uses on death and killing is who is committing it. When we do it, it's "liberation" or "intervention" or whatever and when they do it, it's terror.
NASA's JPL says they custom-designed the processors on the two spacecraft and they were manufactured by General Electric (according to JPL specs).
This makes sense, actually, because if you are designing a spacecraft in the 1970s, you have very specific electrical, environmental and other requirements as compared to common off-the-shelf components which are designed with different (terrestrial) criteria in mind.
No, you can't. As of the time of this posting no unlocks exist for newer iPhone 4 models. No holes have been found to do the unlocks on anything other than 01.59.00 baseband. It is unknown whether they will ever be found and any unlock will ever again be available.
Sure. I can do that. But I'm an iPhone developer. I need to have my iPhone. I can't be running around iPhone-less because it costs me business and clients. And yes, I need to have the phone working on a network for some of my testing.
So I can either buy an unlocked iPhone and spend an additional $700 or more -- or do some illegal stuff like violate the DMCA and unlock my phone using Utrasn0w. That is, if I am lucky enough to have a specific model of iPhone (01.59.00 firmware) that actually is unlockable.
I wish what Apple is doing were deemed illegal. It feels like it ought to be.
You're always free to pay the full price for the phone and not lock into a contract.
No, you aren't. You can't even GET an unlocked iPhone for full price in the USA. It's a shame, really. You can go to France or Canada though, and get one. Land of the free!
$199 sounds like a great price but you get locked in to AT&T. I travel a lot and AT&T's international roaming fees are highway robbery. I'm in Romania right now and when I can be spending something like 5 Euros for 3000 minutes on a pre-paid card on Vodafone, why would I pay AT&T $0.29/minute or whatever they want to charge me for the privilege of being an American in Europe?
It's too bad you can't legally obtain an unlocked iPhone in the USA. You have to go to CANADA to do that. Land of the free indeed.
... and it's nealy impossible to find an unencrypted network. Everyone knows that they need to encrypt or their internet connection will be hyper-abused by strangers.
Even the "free wireless" cybercafes have a daily changing password to prevent abuse from the people living above the shop, etc.
So yeah, in NYC people are definitely smarter about it than in the sticks..
Umm.. you can already run OSX on PC hardware *without* no stinkin' dongle!
Well, that is, if you don't mind pirating software. There are several hacked copies of the OSX Tiger and Leopard install DVDs floating about that allow you to install OSX on any reasonably modern PC. Google around for 'leo4all' or 'ideneb'. YMMV.
There are also some VMWare 'appliances' -- that is -- virtual machines with OSX already pre-installed on the vmdk files. You just dl them and use vmplayer or vmware workstation and you got yourself OSX inside a VM.
People have been runing OSX on PC hardware for a while now. So, given that -- how is this exciting at all? It isn't even any more legal than just dling pirated/hacked OSX install DVDs. The way I see it -- there is no advantage to paying $150 to break the law with a stinkin' dongle, when you can download a 4GB DVD torrent and get OSX for free. Both are equally illegal and violate Apple's EULA or whatever.
So how is this new/newsworthy/even mildly exciting?
There is some nonzero chance that it will land on or near enough to a rock so as to not be properly operational. If it lands on a rock it can roll off of it and end up upside-down. Or even if it's not on a rock, but just next to one, it can't deploy its solar panels.
There is little that can be done about this practically. It's just they hope it won't happen. They chose a landing site that has few if any large rocks, and they are just hoping for the best -- but there still is a nonzero probability they will get horribly unlucky and land on a rock.
This is one example of something beyond anyone's control and that isn't an obvious failure.
Stop being a dick. There's a lot that isn't under their control. They are landing a pre-programmed (not even remote-controlled) spacecraft on another freakin' planet!
Cut them some slack! Most of us slashdot readers have trouble getting an Apache install right the first time through. These guys are doing nearly the impossible and they don't get much of a chance to fix any mistakes.
There are like THOUSANDS of possible things that could go wrong with the landing that DON'T because the engineers did their job. If you have ever engineered anything, you know how much you have to think ahead. They sat really hard and long and tried to perfect the landing process.
But it's darned hard. Mars is really really really far away. The data transfer speed to the lander is like 16KB/s on a good day. You can't send realtime flight data and have a pilot fly the thing with a joystick (because of the latency and the bandwidth is just too limited). You just have to build smart control logic into the thing and hope for the best.
And -- what can ruin the whole thins is -- just one largish rock in the wrong place and the whole mission is a failure. Historically, only 5 out of 13 landers made it to the surface operational!
So, stop being a douche and start appreciating how hard this all is. And it isn't just NASA -- the Brits also tried and failed. It's hard. NASA is doing a great job. Let's see you send 100LBS of spacecraft millions of miles away and have it get there safely. It's pretty amazing it ever worked at all!
Oh and what "corporate committes"? Last I checked NASA was a government agency.
Stop thinking like a corporate douch and start thinking like a scientist. These guys are smarter than you or I and give them some respect.
The helical antenna and a monopole UHF antenna, also mounted on the deck, will be used for relayt elecommunications during the months of operation after landing. The lander can send data at rates of 8,000 bits per second, 32,000 bits per second or 128,000 bits per second.
Wow, that isn't a fast transfer rate. That's about 1KB/s, 4KB/s, and 16KB/s, respectively. I guess you don't need too much more -- but still, I bet it's slower than they would like. The high resolution camera alone probably produces images that are a few megabytes in size. Let's say the images are like 4MB -- Transferring 4 MB at 1KB/s takes about an hour!
Given the slow xfer speeds and limited hardware they probably use -- I think it would be fun to be a programmer for NASA. That's one of the few applications where efficiency of communications, small memory footprint and efficient CPU usage probably still count for something.. I bet you everything they do when it comes to the software running on the lander tries to be as efficient as possible (especially communications-wise).
Also, isn't there something like an few minutes of latency for light to reach us from Mars? You can't even really do any really realtime interaction with the onboard computer on the Phoenix lander.. Imagine typing into a shell and waiting a minute for your characters to appear! Ouch! So I bet you they have to premeditate a lot of the changes they make to the software or operating environment way a head of time -- they probably just upload scripts of commands when updating the software or filesystem, etc.
I wonder how much freedom they give the people communicating with the lander. Do they triple-check every command sent to it to make sure noone does the inadvertent 'rm -fr/'?
Researchers have been running models to simulate brain structures for years now. Not that impressive. Most of the models make lots of assumptions that may or may not hold true in the actual biology.
This type of research is cool, but neuroscientists generally aren't impressed until results can be reproduced in a living system.
God I hate Java. It's so ugly. Really. Somehow C++, even though it's very similar, isn't as ugly.
You don't end up with super-abstract craziness like this in C++, even though you CAN. It's just that C++ programmers tend to be more practical, or something.
I hate Java and how some Java programmers stroke their dicks with this type of coding. Yuck.
Well you are 1000 times less likely to catch it through if you are male and engage in heterosexual vaginal sex with a woman than you are to catch it if you are engaging in anal sex.
This is something people don't realize.
Also it is beginning to seem to be just about impossible to get HIV through unprotected oral sex at all.
I am not saying everyone should go out and not use condoms -- but I think people are too paranoid about HIV and it ruins their sex lives and their sexual "comfort".
God I wish HIV didn't exist. It ruined so much fun...
Wow. I don't think I can ever get to that stage. Or if I do it means my life is pretty fun. Actually the smoking helped me to relax enough to be ABLE to enjoy those things. You sound like a normal guy. I am not -- I struggle with depression all the time and am pretty unstable emotionally. I am what you might call "fucked up" in some ways. Smoking helped to normalize me and helped me to function enough so I could get the hot girl or enjoy a laugh and not be so tense and paranoid all the time.
You are normal -- god bless you. I know I am now and well it sucks.
It was worry about premature death -- I don't want to get cancer. But yeah -- you are right I probably should have not quit. It has caused me a great deal of harm to have quit mentally.:/
The first 36 hours are actually easier in some ways than 6-12 months from now. This is the second time I have quit. Last time I made it 12 months.
Right now, I am into the 6th month and it is even more miserable now in some ways than the first week.
I actually think the first few months are easier in some ways because you at least have some positive body changes that keep you motivated -- you notice your lung capacity and energy level increase and you also notice improvements in lessening cravings every day -- so you feel like you are making progress.
But 6 months into it the cravings are flat -- they still come once in a while but their frequency seems constant and nagging. No sense of progress exists.
All slong, you have this haunting ghost of a memory -- you remember once that you used to really really enjoy relaxing with a cigarette. You remember conversations you had, or places you'd been as a smoker. Maybe you had sex with that hot woman and she was a smoker too, and you remember sitting there naked sharing an ashtray with her and talking.
Or whatever positive memory you had as a smoker -- and you miss it. And somehow as a non-smoker it isn't the same. But you move on.. you try. But once in a while a smoker comes by -- and he or she is smoking and that familiar smell wafts into your nostrils and it drives you bat-shit mad.
Really it's so fucking hard to quit.
Trust me you are all vigor and vim about quitting -- 36 hours into it is easy in some ways. You are so motivated.
Try 6 months into it -- the desire to smoke is there still, in the background.. wearing away at you.. slowly.. gnawing at your leg like some relentless rottweiler...
You know, I quit smoking about 6 months ago. Ever since then I have been really unhappy. I have been largely dysfunctional as a human being. I just can't find equilibrium.
About a month ago I stopped going to work. The checks stopped arriving last week.
I am completely miserable. I remember I was a very unhappy and unstable teen (before discovering cigarettes). I then learned to smoke when I was 22 (late in life, I know) and it changed my life. I was able to finish college and hold down a job and function in society.
I think I get my poor mental health from my mother.
My mother has been diagnosed as a borderline personality and has been in and out of mental hospitals and I think I also have some of her mood disorders now that I am 30.
I think I may go back to smoking -- it was form of self-medication for me. I am psychologically not normal, but nicotine really helped me to cope and to become almost normal.
It sucks man. It really does. I have to choose between possible cancer and impotence with smoking or poor mental health without it. I feel by smoking I am buying normalcy now and I will pay for it in old age. I am fucked either way. It fucking sucks.
I tried nicotine gum, or patches, or whatever. But all of those things just make it easier to pick up a cigarette.
I have been nicotine free for 6 months and am really really unhappy. I can't function in society without nicotine. My poor mood and lack of motivation keep me just in my own shell -- I stay home all day and play computer games.
I am miserable! Really smoking helped me and I think now I know what to tell people when they bitch to me and tell me to stop smoking -- when I go back to smoking I will tell them how I am mentally unhealthy and they can shove it.
Slashdot Mirror
The only point of the two parties is to make it so that the politicians have a reason to suck up to the corporations. If you're a Republican, in the contested electorates, you have a motive to suck up to the corporation lest the Democrat (who is also being funded by the same people) get all the campaign funds and win. Otherwise the two parties are nearly identical on the issues that matter (to the corporations).
Yeah, same here.
This is Slashdot, try not to make it obvious that you're making up an anecdote. ...But in case you're serious: Since both you and your girlfriend are cool with it, mind sending her over here for a bit?
OH NO YOU DINNT!!!
And can I join? Cue porno music: *boom chikka wauu wauu*
When it comes to justice, even a show court is still better then a head shot and a body tossed into the sea. I don't think anyone can seriously argue with this point.
I could not agree more. But you know, they got Hitler II. Let's rejoice and beat our fists against our chests and get drunk and be proud to be an American. That's how we're supposed to react.
It's sad how many people have died globally under the pretext of 9/11. And now even the death of Bin Laden doesn't get most people to question the US's actions. It has the opposite effect in that people react viscerally to it.
It's just completely ok and we are awesome that we got him and it's great and YEAH! AMERICAAAAAAAA!
A lot of people have died as you have pointed out and it's sad. Bin Laden's death doesn't bring them back. I just wish violence would end and not a single additional person would die because of all of this. :(
I don't think it changed anything real, to be honest. It's symbolic though. I often resort to mafia analogies when trying to understand these things.
For example, using the mafia don model: You can make an argument that when the mafia don (US) has an enemy, and they finally get him, it "sends a message".
Also, politically it makes Obama look good because it gives the impression he gets stuff done competently. He might be able to point to it in the next presidential campaign.
What you're saying is true. We should organize to change things.
But in practice it's extremely difficult. There are some extremely wealthy corporations you have to contend with and they have a lot of power and sway over politics and who gets elected and what they do once in office.
But yes, it's true, if we ban together and get involved it's possible to change things.
In the meantime I'm all in favor of Wikileaks.
Bin laden was never trained or funded by the US in the 80's.
That's pretty much not true. Bin Laden, while he did use his own funds as well, was a Mujahadeen leader and it's pretty well established that the Mujahadeen were given vast sums of money and arms to fight the Russians (indirectly via Pakistan).
Google around to see that lots of people agree Bin Laden was a CIA asset at one point. That fact is politically embarrassing but plainly true.
Also, I stand by my definition that the weapon of the US government is terrorism. It's just not called that when they do it. They sometimes call it liberation or exporting democracy. (which is pretty ridiculous but what's more ridiculous is that the population buys it).
The giant was not sleeping. What reality are you living in? Or do you like to cling to this fantasy because it helps you think that you are on the side of right and justice? It's pretty convenient to believe that because it avoids a lot of cognitive dissonance.
The reality is more like the giant was hard at work sticking its thumbs in everyone else's pie. An example would be the very fact that Bin Laden was armed and trained by the USA back in the 80s when Bin Laden was a good guy because he was fighting the russkies for us. That's just 1 pie. There are probably 50 others you can use as an example for that period or after.
Nope, the giant's been pretty busy at work being an imperialist bastard.
The only difference between "terror" and justice or liberation or whatever misleading labels the propaganda industry uses on death and killing is who is committing it. When we do it, it's "liberation" or "intervention" or whatever and when they do it, it's terror.
Nope, not true. Voyagers 1 & 2 are not powered by the RCA CDP1802, as is popularly believed.
The Voyager FAQ explains this, about halfway down the page:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html
NASA's JPL says they custom-designed the processors on the two spacecraft and they were manufactured by General Electric (according to JPL specs).
This makes sense, actually, because if you are designing a spacecraft in the 1970s, you have very specific electrical, environmental and other requirements as compared to common off-the-shelf components which are designed with different (terrestrial) criteria in mind.
No, you can't. As of the time of this posting no unlocks exist for newer iPhone 4 models. No holes have been found to do the unlocks on anything other than 01.59.00 baseband. It is unknown whether they will ever be found and any unlock will ever again be available.
Sure. I can do that. But I'm an iPhone developer. I need to have my iPhone. I can't be running around iPhone-less because it costs me business and clients. And yes, I need to have the phone working on a network for some of my testing.
So I can either buy an unlocked iPhone and spend an additional $700 or more -- or do some illegal stuff like violate the DMCA and unlock my phone using Utrasn0w. That is, if I am lucky enough to have a specific model of iPhone (01.59.00 firmware) that actually is unlockable.
I wish what Apple is doing were deemed illegal. It feels like it ought to be.
You're always free to pay the full price for the phone and not lock into a contract.
No, you aren't. You can't even GET an unlocked iPhone for full price in the USA. It's a shame, really. You can go to France or Canada though, and get one. Land of the free!
$199 sounds like a great price but you get locked in to AT&T. I travel a lot and AT&T's international roaming fees are highway robbery. I'm in Romania right now and when I can be spending something like 5 Euros for 3000 minutes on a pre-paid card on Vodafone, why would I pay AT&T $0.29/minute or whatever they want to charge me for the privilege of being an American in Europe?
It's too bad you can't legally obtain an unlocked iPhone in the USA. You have to go to CANADA to do that. Land of the free indeed.
... and it's nealy impossible to find an unencrypted network. Everyone knows that they need to encrypt or their internet connection will be hyper-abused by strangers.
Even the "free wireless" cybercafes have a daily changing password to prevent abuse from the people living above the shop, etc.
So yeah, in NYC people are definitely smarter about it than in the sticks..
Umm.. you can already run OSX on PC hardware *without* no stinkin' dongle!
Well, that is, if you don't mind pirating software. There are several hacked copies of the OSX Tiger and Leopard install DVDs floating about that allow you to install OSX on any reasonably modern PC. Google around for 'leo4all' or 'ideneb'. YMMV.
Also: http://www.osx86project.org/ has tons of resources on how to run a 'hackintosh'.
There are also some VMWare 'appliances' -- that is -- virtual machines with OSX already pre-installed on the vmdk files. You just dl them and use vmplayer or vmware workstation and you got yourself OSX inside a VM.
People have been runing OSX on PC hardware for a while now. So, given that -- how is this exciting at all? It isn't even any more legal than just dling pirated/hacked OSX install DVDs. The way I see it -- there is no advantage to paying $150 to break the law with a stinkin' dongle, when you can download a 4GB DVD torrent and get OSX for free. Both are equally illegal and violate Apple's EULA or whatever.
So how is this new/newsworthy/even mildly exciting?
There is some nonzero chance that it will land on or near enough to a rock so as to not be properly operational. If it lands on a rock it can roll off of it and end up upside-down. Or even if it's not on a rock, but just next to one, it can't deploy its solar panels.
There is little that can be done about this practically. It's just they hope it won't happen. They chose a landing site that has few if any large rocks, and they are just hoping for the best -- but there still is a nonzero probability they will get horribly unlucky and land on a rock.
This is one example of something beyond anyone's control and that isn't an obvious failure.
Cut them some slack! Most of us slashdot readers have trouble getting an Apache install right the first time through. These guys are doing nearly the impossible and they don't get much of a chance to fix any mistakes.
There are like THOUSANDS of possible things that could go wrong with the landing that DON'T because the engineers did their job. If you have ever engineered anything, you know how much you have to think ahead. They sat really hard and long and tried to perfect the landing process.
But it's darned hard. Mars is really really really far away. The data transfer speed to the lander is like 16KB/s on a good day. You can't send realtime flight data and have a pilot fly the thing with a joystick (because of the latency and the bandwidth is just too limited). You just have to build smart control logic into the thing and hope for the best.
And -- what can ruin the whole thins is -- just one largish rock in the wrong place and the whole mission is a failure. Historically, only 5 out of 13 landers made it to the surface operational!
So, stop being a douche and start appreciating how hard this all is. And it isn't just NASA -- the Brits also tried and failed. It's hard. NASA is doing a great job. Let's see you send 100LBS of spacecraft millions of miles away and have it get there safely. It's pretty amazing it ever worked at all!
Oh and what "corporate committes"? Last I checked NASA was a government agency.
Stop thinking like a corporate douch and start thinking like a scientist. These guys are smarter than you or I and give them some respect.
Wow, that isn't a fast transfer rate. That's about 1KB/s, 4KB/s, and 16KB/s, respectively. I guess you don't need too much more -- but still, I bet it's slower than they would like. The high resolution camera alone probably produces images that are a few megabytes in size. Let's say the images are like 4MB -- Transferring 4 MB at 1KB/s takes about an hour!
Given the slow xfer speeds and limited hardware they probably use -- I think it would be fun to be a programmer for NASA. That's one of the few applications where efficiency of communications, small memory footprint and efficient CPU usage probably still count for something.. I bet you everything they do when it comes to the software running on the lander tries to be as efficient as possible (especially communications-wise).
Also, isn't there something like an few minutes of latency for light to reach us from Mars? You can't even really do any really realtime interaction with the onboard computer on the Phoenix lander.. Imagine typing into a shell and waiting a minute for your characters to appear! Ouch! So I bet you they have to premeditate a lot of the changes they make to the software or operating environment way a head of time -- they probably just upload scripts of commands when updating the software or filesystem, etc.
I wonder how much freedom they give the people communicating with the lander. Do they triple-check every command sent to it to make sure noone does the inadvertent 'rm -fr
Researchers have been running models to simulate brain structures for years now. Not that impressive. Most of the models make lots of assumptions that may or may not hold true in the actual biology.
This type of research is cool, but neuroscientists generally aren't impressed until results can be reproduced in a living system.
God I hate Java. It's so ugly. Really. Somehow C++, even though it's very similar, isn't as ugly.
You don't end up with super-abstract craziness like this in C++, even though you CAN. It's just that C++ programmers tend to be more practical, or something.
I hate Java and how some Java programmers stroke their dicks with this type of coding. Yuck.
Well you are 1000 times less likely to catch it through if you are male and engage in heterosexual vaginal sex with a woman than you are to catch it if you are engaging in anal sex.
This is something people don't realize.
Also it is beginning to seem to be just about impossible to get HIV through unprotected oral sex at all.
I am not saying everyone should go out and not use condoms -- but I think people are too paranoid about HIV and it ruins their sex lives and their sexual "comfort".
God I wish HIV didn't exist. It ruined so much fun...
Wow. I don't think I can ever get to that stage. Or if I do it means my life is pretty fun. Actually the smoking helped me to relax enough to be ABLE to enjoy those things. You sound like a normal guy. I am not -- I struggle with depression all the time and am pretty unstable emotionally. I am what you might call "fucked up" in some ways. Smoking helped to normalize me and helped me to function enough so I could get the hot girl or enjoy a laugh and not be so tense and paranoid all the time.
You are normal -- god bless you. I know I am now and well it sucks.
It was worry about premature death -- I don't want to get cancer. But yeah -- you are right I probably should have not quit. It has caused me a great deal of harm to have quit mentally. :/
The first 36 hours are actually easier in some ways than 6-12 months from now. This is the second time I have quit. Last time I made it 12 months.
Right now, I am into the 6th month and it is even more miserable now in some ways than the first week.
I actually think the first few months are easier in some ways because you at least have some positive body changes that keep you motivated -- you notice your lung capacity and energy level increase and you also notice improvements in lessening cravings every day -- so you feel like you are making progress.
But 6 months into it the cravings are flat -- they still come once in a while but their frequency seems constant and nagging. No sense of progress exists.
All slong, you have this haunting ghost of a memory -- you remember once that you used to really really enjoy relaxing with a cigarette. You remember conversations you had, or places you'd been as a smoker. Maybe you had sex with that hot woman and she was a smoker too, and you remember sitting there naked sharing an ashtray with her and talking.
Or whatever positive memory you had as a smoker -- and you miss it. And somehow as a non-smoker it isn't the same. But you move on.. you try. But once in a while a smoker comes by -- and he or she is smoking and that familiar smell wafts into your nostrils and it drives you bat-shit mad.
Really it's so fucking hard to quit.
Trust me you are all vigor and vim about quitting -- 36 hours into it is easy in some ways. You are so motivated.
Try 6 months into it -- the desire to smoke is there still, in the background.. wearing away at you.. slowly.. gnawing at your leg like some relentless rottweiler...
It's misery.
You know, I quit smoking about 6 months ago. Ever since then I have been really unhappy. I have been largely dysfunctional as a human being. I just can't find equilibrium.
About a month ago I stopped going to work. The checks stopped arriving last week.
I am completely miserable. I remember I was a very unhappy and unstable teen (before discovering cigarettes). I then learned to smoke when I was 22 (late in life, I know) and it changed my life. I was able to finish college and hold down a job and function in society.
I think I get my poor mental health from my mother.
My mother has been diagnosed as a borderline personality and has been in and out of mental hospitals and I think I also have some of her mood disorders now that I am 30.
I think I may go back to smoking -- it was form of self-medication for me. I am psychologically not normal, but nicotine really helped me to cope and to become almost normal.
It sucks man. It really does. I have to choose between possible cancer and impotence with smoking or poor mental health without it. I feel by smoking I am buying normalcy now and I will pay for it in old age. I am fucked either way. It fucking sucks.
I tried nicotine gum, or patches, or whatever. But all of those things just make it easier to pick up a cigarette.
I have been nicotine free for 6 months and am really really unhappy. I can't function in society without nicotine. My poor mood and lack of motivation keep me just in my own shell -- I stay home all day and play computer games.
I am miserable! Really smoking helped me and I think now I know what to tell people when they bitch to me and tell me to stop smoking -- when I go back to smoking I will tell them how I am mentally unhealthy and they can shove it.