2. The government steps in and makes spam e-mail illegal because there's no viable solution for checking the age of an e-mail recipient before sending the message. Given how government generally operates, it should only be 3-5 years before snail-mail junk is outlawed also, leading to several hundreds (if not thousands) of lawsuits within a year. After that, probably another 2-3 years until someone comes up with the idea that since they don't approve of some e-mail or snail-mail they're getting, it's offensive and unwanted, therefore, must be spam... leading to more legislation defining the term "spam" and "unwanted commercial e-mail", eventually leading to the breakdown of even more of individual's basic human rights, especially Freedom of Speech, Press, and (although not specifically mentioned in the Constitution), Privacy.
No, we don't all share your prejudices about government.
Federal law passed in 1991 (known as the TCPA) makes it illegal to send any material transmitted via facsimile that advertises the commercial availability or quality of any property, goods, or services which is transmitted to any person without that person's prior express invitation or permission. If the fax was deliberately sent to you (as most junk faxes are), federal law entitles you to recover a minimum of $500 and, depending the judge's discretion, up to $1,500 for each such fax that you receive. Junk faxes are illegal (I just got a $500 settlement from a junk faxer) and that has not ended civilization as we've known it.
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3010 authorizes the Postal Service to keep a list of persons who do not wish to receive sexually oriented advertisements through the mail. You can add your name and address to the list by filling out a "Form 1500" and submitting it to any post office. When your name and address have been on the list more than 30 days, it is unlawful for anyone to mail you a sexually oriented advertisement. Mailers who violate your protected status make themselves subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government. You can also have any of your children under 19 years old who reside with you or are under your care, custody, or supervision included on the list. Has that law ended all forms of direct mail marketing? Has it resulted in the government suppressing free speech? Of course not.
Not all of us hold opinions about the government that are similar to those of Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, so please stop your anti-government rants. It's silly and gets in the way of considering whether legislation is part of the answer to the problem.
No. I never watched that. Nor have I watched Moesha, The Hughleys, Roc, or Family Matters. They are aimed at a different demographic than mine.
BTW I'm assuming you're female here, because, "I'm a published author," is the kind of false attempt to justify the sound of one's own whine that I usually only hear from women.
No, I am male. I've never been mistaken for a woman before. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?
P.S. When someone says "learn to read", replying "I'm a published author" is not a "justification" for anything. It's a reasonable counter to an obviously false implication.
If you can read why are you telling he person that there in no need for a VM or emulator? Are you claiming to know that the person isn't aware of FreeBSD being x86 native?
Unlike you, I don't pretend to know what random strangers on Slashdot know, don't know, or believe. For instance, I don't know if they've considered just creating a partition for it on their disc or not. I don't know if they've only heard of it in the context of it being the basis for Apple's PowerPC OS-X.
It's pretty obvious that they are asking a question about running FreeBSD under Linux, not about what architecture FreeBSD runs on.
So I volunteered information in a way that let me express my opinions on the efficacy of evaluating one OS by running it under another OS. I don't have to answer every post in the way that the writer desired. If that was how Slashdot worked, your replies to my posts would never have seen the light of day.
Why? Because I have more than one PC? You can get PCs for $200 at Walmart. Or you can build them out of spare parts. Or use an older system that you're retired from being your "main" system. If, by "the real world", you mean "an impoverished, inner-city, subsidized housing complex", then I guess I don't,
Your experience isn't the only experience
Did I claim that it was?
and your claims of being a published author mean nothing.
Being a published author is a pretty good indication that someone can read -- rather relevent since I was countering your "learn to read" comment.
The very existance of WMWare and it's success show that there is a market for emulators.
I never said that there was not a market for emulators. But emulators are normally used to enable one to use an application not available for their OS. For instance, one might run WINE so that they can run a particular Windows program, but not so that they can evaluate Windows itself.
It doesn't really make sense to describe an encoding or recording scheme lossy, since that is the nature of recording. Lossless encoding is identical to cloning.
All recording done in the analog domain loses quality through distortion and noise in every stage from the microphone onwards.
Once music is in the digital domain, it is possible to "clone" it by copying the file. One can also employ lossless compression (like FLAC, SHN, and Monkey's Audio aka APE) to copy the music while losing nothing. I can take a CD, rip a track off as an uncompressed WAV file. I can then convert it WAV --> FLAC --> WAV --> SHN --> WAV --> APE -- > WAV and then record the resultant WAV to CD. The result is an identical recording. No losses.
I was reacting (over-reacting, if you like) to the word "forces".
I probably should have said "obliges" since it clearly has not "forced" them to do anything.
it is their decision to use material that is released under a licence which requires this.
We are arguing semantics at this point. As we both know, whether they chose Linux, whether their vendor chose Linux, and whether they even knew about the choice is immaterial to their legal obligations.
Had the product been based on BSD, by choice or by chance, they would not be obliged to give away their source code. That's all.
I don't feel sorry for them. In fact, if they "outsourced" engineering jobs to overseas firms, I would be amused at their predicament. I hope that they get raked over the coals for violating the license, regardless of their intentions. I'd love there to be an open-source router. Actually, if they were smart, they would release the source code in a minute and then rake in the bucks selling the hardware to people who wanted to roll their own router.
If you're truly curious why I want to run it emulated, it's because I don't want or need a full FreeBSD machine.
Thanks for the reply and explanation.
I know that it doesn't solve the rebooting issue, but I have found that most modern machines can be set to boot from any of multiple drives in them. For example, I have DOS on my second drive and I use that for programming E/EE/P/ROMS/CPUs (on my chip programmer) or for flashing. You also might consider a keyboard/video/mouse switch box.
I've got too many PC sitting around here (a few laptops and five in this room alone), so I don't always have a sense of perspective when it comes to computers.
They want to sell routers, but you think that it's not their fault if their technology-supplier breached a licence?
No, I did not say that it was not their fault. I said that they may not have made a conscious choice.
Are you suggesting that an organization that buys technology without checking its provenance is deserving of sympathy or support?
No, I am not suggesting that at all. All that I am stating is that, had the product been based on BSD, they would not be in the legal mess that they are now. Is that true or not? That's all that I stated. I did not say that we should feel sorry for them.
As I stated, they are only obliged to distribute their source under the terms of the GPL, if they chose to use GPLed software.
And, as I stated, they may not have made a conscious choice to use GPL software. They may have purchased a product engineered in Asia, slapped it in their case, and then sold it, completely unaware that it contained GPL software. So they are obliged to distribute the source code, simply because the product contains GPL software. It has nothing to do with choice.
I think you meant to say, "if Linksys had taken the trouble to read the licence of the code they wanted to use, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess...".
No, that's not what I "meant to say." If Linksys routers were built around BSD, they would not be facing the legal mess -- regardless of whether they read the licenses or not.
The GPL doesn't force them to give away their code.
Good. They will be relieved to hear that.
The key thing is the choice that they made.
No, it probably is not a choice that they made. It's more likely that their routers were developed by some firm over in Asia (like SMC's are). The people at Linksys may have been completely unaware of the code in their routers. I know that I surprised SMC when I informed them that their routers were hard-coded to get time from a couple of educational institutions in Australia -- institutions that had to shut down their time servers because of the SMC traffic.
Too bad you aren't a very smart BSD supporter. Learn to read and realize how stupid your response was.
I read well (I am a published author). I read the original post and my response. My response seemed perfectly reasonable when we live in a world where 7,200rpm hard drives can be had for $64 or even less if you want to play the rebate game. Most people have a few older drives kicking around anyway, so move a data cable and a power supply cable and you can install FreeBSD on a spare drive.
Since you can evaluate hardware compatability, speed, or stability of an OS when it's running under an emulator, what would you learn by such an effort? That grep and tar work the same under FreeBSD as under Linux?
No, idiot. [s]he obviously wants to try out FreeBSD to see if it's worth switching to, without making the commitment of formatting their already-running system.
You are obviously the idiot if you don't realize that hard disks are cheap and that partitions can be resized without reformatting the entire hard disk. What kind of cheap bastard doesn't even have a spare hard disk around to try an OS on?
How the hell are you going to evaluate the speed or stability of an OS when you are running it under a virtual machine on another OS? What's next? Running Linux on a VM under Windows 98 and then declaring Linux to be slow and unstable?
Re:What a pointless announcement,
on
FreeBSD 5.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
How can the linux hardware support be so much better when freebsd is more stable?
Linux supports more varied hardware but FreeBSD crashes less. What's so complicated about that?
Windows 98 supports more hardware than Linux, so it must be more stable, right?
Yes, it does. How could anyone could be so stupid as to not get the "5.1" joke?
Meanwhile proper sound support, proper SMP support, proper thread support, etc. ad nauseum, has been available in Linux for fucking YEARS.
Why do you fucking poseurs continue thinking you're lee7 running FreeBSD on your Pentium 3? Someday hopefully you'll find yourself in the real world.
In the "real world", you will find many ISPs like UUNet, Compuserve, and Mindspring, running their servers on BSD variants. Yahoo! uses BSD. Hotmail used(uses?) BSD. Why? It outperforms Linux and has greater stability. In the "real world", you will find BSD variants in many embedded applications because it is not saddled with the hobbyist-oriented GPL license that forces companies to part with their intellectual property. If Linksys had built their routers around BSD, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess that might force them to give away their source code.
A loser is someone who gives a rat's ass about "karma points" on Slashdot. You think that karma points are a measure of intelligence? You are really a pathetic little geek. Every time I get negative karma points, I just remind myself that people like you get to moderate -- and then I laugh.
I am far more intelligent than you are -- as you so aptly proved in that post.
Humor is a great way to get over tragic events.
There is a big difference between using humor about the incident as a coping mechanism and just making dumb-assed jokes about nerf balls and styrofoam falling off of shelves.
It's neither patriotism nor a troll. What kind of sick bastard thinks it is a "troll" to ask that respect be shown for those who lost their lives in this tragedy?
Seven astronauts lost their lives in this tragedy and all of the posts I've seen are dumb-assed jokes. This isn't a story about Bill Gates being hit in the face with a pie or about someone building a computer case out of Legos. How about showing a little respect for the astronauts who lost their lives and the friends, family members, and loved ones that they left behind?
So basically we agree, which is always a good thing.
I agree, so that's another good thing. Sorry about the incoherent posting last time where I referred to each of two points as being my sole point for the posting. I was pretty wiped out from playing lumberjack after a big tree came down on my house (no injuries and the house suffered no structural damage).
Also, I should hope that I would know a little bit about optics, or these folks would have to take back my degree.
If only it were that simple. I've seen lots of people with degrees in fields where they were utterly incompetent. Fortunately, you're not one of those people.
Your records played on an LP 12 (at least a Valhalla'd one with an Ittok arm) shouldn't sound as bad as you describe.
Regardless of the arm, cartridge, table, etc., there are physical limitations to vinyl that manifest themselves in the music. CDs, while not perfect by any means, are far superior to vinyl in when it comes to distortion, noise, and dynamic range. LPs are also cut for the masses. Engineers can't cut an LP that can only be tracked by high-end audiophile equipment. It's not that LPs sound that bad, it's just that, by comparison, CDs sound far better.
The biggest advance, for me, in playing LPs has been the use of a vacuum record cleaning machine. Even on brand new records a wash and vacuum (of mold release agents - I think - in the case of new LPs) seems to audibly lower the noise floor allowing more detail in - interestingly - the mid-range. And, for pawn-shop finds (often the only way to get a particular LP) a record cleaning machine can be a disc-saver.
Agreed that they can work miracles, but I tend to stay away from used vinyl unless it's bought straight from a fellow audiophile. I don't want to find my precious stylus is slogging its way through some toxic waste that was not soap & water soluble.
Another big help in my system was putting the LP-12 on a table that is small, light, rigid and spiked to the floor.
The how-to-mount-it question is an interesting one. Conical spikes are very tightly coupled at the point, but at the large base, their coupling is limited by the square inch area of the base. If airborne vibrations are doing you in, coupling the turtable to the floor sounds like a great idea. If the vibrations causing you more grief come through the floor, then coupling to the floor is not a great idea. Have you tried putting the table on an extremely heavy table with Sorbothane feet? The heavier table will tend, due to mass, to be less susceptible to vibration and Sorbothane will dissipate vibration (as heat).
Slashdot Mirror
Why did you respond with comments about not needing emulators then?
So I could comment on how silly it was to evaluate an OS under an emulator.
You're being disengous[sic], they asked a specific question, you could've[sic] responed[sic] with further questions if you were unclear.
Why? I had points to make and their question gave me the opportunity to do so.
Your information didn't answer the question and was highly irrelevant.
I pointed out that FreeBSD could just be put on a partition and that running it emulated would result in it being slow.
So what have your postings contributed towards this discussion? Just what insightful comments have you made about FreeBSD in this thread?
2. The government steps in and makes spam e-mail illegal because there's no viable solution for checking the age of an e-mail recipient before sending the message. Given how government generally operates, it should only be 3-5 years before snail-mail junk is outlawed also, leading to several hundreds (if not thousands) of lawsuits within a year. After that, probably another 2-3 years until someone comes up with the idea that since they don't approve of some e-mail or snail-mail they're getting, it's offensive and unwanted, therefore, must be spam... leading to more legislation defining the term "spam" and "unwanted commercial e-mail", eventually leading to the breakdown of even more of individual's basic human rights, especially Freedom of Speech, Press, and (although not specifically mentioned in the Constitution), Privacy.
No, we don't all share your prejudices about government.
Federal law passed in 1991 (known as the TCPA) makes it illegal to send any material transmitted via facsimile that advertises the commercial availability or quality of any property, goods, or services which is transmitted to any person without that person's prior express invitation or permission. If the fax was deliberately sent to you (as most junk faxes are), federal law entitles you to recover a minimum of $500 and, depending the judge's discretion, up to $1,500 for each such fax that you receive. Junk faxes are illegal (I just got a $500 settlement from a junk faxer) and that has not ended civilization as we've known it.
Title 39, United States Code, Section 3010 authorizes the Postal Service to keep a list of persons who do not wish to receive sexually oriented advertisements through the mail. You can add your name and address to the list by filling out a "Form 1500" and submitting it to any post office. When your name and address have been on the list more than 30 days, it is unlawful for anyone to mail you a sexually oriented advertisement. Mailers who violate your protected status make themselves subject to court enforcement action by the United States Government. You can also have any of your children under 19 years old who reside with you or are under your care, custody, or supervision included on the list. Has that law ended all forms of direct mail marketing? Has it resulted in the government suppressing free speech? Of course not.
Not all of us hold opinions about the government that are similar to those of Ted Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph, so please stop your anti-government rants. It's silly and gets in the way of considering whether legislation is part of the answer to the problem.
Yeah, what kind of poor bastard doesn't have 5 laptops and 10 spare HDDs lying around.
Apparently, the same kind of poor bastard that doesn't have any spare question marks lying around.
What kind of cheap Scot doesn't have a spare fucking helicopter in the back yard in case the roads are a bit busy.
Used Helicopter: $150,000 and up (+ maintenance)
Used 3.2gig hard drive: $9
Yeah, that's a real fair analogy.
Remember Fresh Prince?
No. I never watched that. Nor have I watched Moesha, The Hughleys, Roc, or Family Matters. They are aimed at a different demographic than mine.
BTW I'm assuming you're female here, because, "I'm a published author," is the kind of false attempt to justify the sound of one's own whine that I usually only hear from women.
No, I am male. I've never been mistaken for a woman before. Have you ever been mistaken for a man?
P.S. When someone says "learn to read", replying "I'm a published author" is not a "justification" for anything. It's a reasonable counter to an obviously false implication.
If you can read why are you telling he person that there in no need for a VM or emulator? Are you claiming to know that the person isn't aware of FreeBSD being x86 native?
Unlike you, I don't pretend to know what random strangers on Slashdot know, don't know, or believe. For instance, I don't know if they've considered just creating a partition for it on their disc or not. I don't know if they've only heard of it in the context of it being the basis for Apple's PowerPC OS-X.
It's pretty obvious that they are asking a question about running FreeBSD under Linux, not about what architecture FreeBSD runs on.
So I volunteered information in a way that let me express my opinions on the efficacy of evaluating one OS by running it under another OS. I don't have to answer every post in the way that the writer desired. If that was how Slashdot worked, your replies to my posts would never have seen the light of day.
Wow an idoit like this gets +5 on slashdot.
If an idoit could get a +5 on lowercase-s-slashdot, your post would not still be at zero as I write this.
You don't live in the real world apparently.
Why? Because I have more than one PC? You can get PCs for $200 at Walmart. Or you can build them out of spare parts. Or use an older system that you're retired from being your "main" system. If, by "the real world", you mean "an impoverished, inner-city, subsidized housing complex", then I guess I don't,
Your experience isn't the only experience
Did I claim that it was?
and your claims of being a published author mean nothing.
Being a published author is a pretty good indication that someone can read -- rather relevent since I was countering your "learn to read" comment.
The very existance of WMWare and it's success show that there is a market for emulators.
I never said that there was not a market for emulators. But emulators are normally used to enable one to use an application not available for their OS. For instance, one might run WINE so that they can run a particular Windows program, but not so that they can evaluate Windows itself.
It doesn't really make sense to describe an encoding or recording scheme lossy, since that is the nature of recording. Lossless encoding is identical to cloning.
All recording done in the analog domain loses quality through distortion and noise in every stage from the microphone onwards.
Once music is in the digital domain, it is possible to "clone" it by copying the file. One can also employ lossless compression (like FLAC, SHN, and Monkey's Audio aka APE) to copy the music while losing nothing. I can take a CD, rip a track off as an uncompressed WAV file. I can then convert it WAV --> FLAC --> WAV --> SHN --> WAV --> APE -- > WAV and then record the resultant WAV to CD. The result is an identical recording. No losses.
I was reacting (over-reacting, if you like) to the word "forces".
I probably should have said "obliges" since it clearly has not "forced" them to do anything.
it is their decision to use material that is released under a licence which requires this.
We are arguing semantics at this point. As we both know, whether they chose Linux, whether their vendor chose Linux, and whether they even knew about the choice is immaterial to their legal obligations.
Had the product been based on BSD, by choice or by chance, they would not be obliged to give away their source code. That's all.
I don't feel sorry for them. In fact, if they "outsourced" engineering jobs to overseas firms, I would be amused at their predicament. I hope that they get raked over the coals for violating the license, regardless of their intentions. I'd love there to be an open-source router. Actually, if they were smart, they would release the source code in a minute and then rake in the bucks selling the hardware to people who wanted to roll their own router.
Peace.
As a *BSD user you make me sick. Get the fuck out of the OSS arena, your type isn't welcome.
Yes, my "type" is welcome. It's pussies who post anonymous tripe who are unwelcome.
Ah, you being a bit too aggressive.
You are right -- I usually am too aggressive.
If you're truly curious why I want to run it emulated, it's because I don't want or need a full FreeBSD machine.
Thanks for the reply and explanation.
I know that it doesn't solve the rebooting issue, but I have found that most modern machines can be set to boot from any of multiple drives in them. For example, I have DOS on my second drive and I use that for programming E/EE/P/ROMS/CPUs (on my chip programmer) or for flashing. You also might consider a keyboard/video/mouse switch box.
I've got too many PC sitting around here (a few laptops and five in this room alone), so I don't always have a sense of perspective when it comes to computers.
They want to sell routers, but you think that it's not their fault if their technology-supplier breached a licence?
No, I did not say that it was not their fault. I said that they may not have made a conscious choice.
Are you suggesting that an organization that buys technology without checking its provenance is deserving of sympathy or support?
No, I am not suggesting that at all. All that I am stating is that, had the product been based on BSD, they would not be in the legal mess that they are now. Is that true or not? That's all that I stated. I did not say that we should feel sorry for them.
As I stated, they are only obliged to distribute their source under the terms of the GPL, if they chose to use GPLed software.
And, as I stated, they may not have made a conscious choice to use GPL software. They may have purchased a product engineered in Asia, slapped it in their case, and then sold it, completely unaware that it contained GPL software. So they are obliged to distribute the source code, simply because the product contains GPL software. It has nothing to do with choice.
I think you meant to say, "if Linksys had taken the trouble to read the licence of the code they wanted to use, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess...".
No, that's not what I "meant to say." If Linksys routers were built around BSD, they would not be facing the legal mess -- regardless of whether they read the licenses or not.
The GPL doesn't force them to give away their code.
Good. They will be relieved to hear that.
The key thing is the choice that they made.
No, it probably is not a choice that they made. It's more likely that their routers were developed by some firm over in Asia (like SMC's are). The people at Linksys may have been completely unaware of the code in their routers. I know that I surprised SMC when I informed them that their routers were hard-coded to get time from a couple of educational institutions in Australia -- institutions that had to shut down their time servers because of the SMC traffic.
Too bad you aren't a very smart BSD supporter. Learn to read and realize how stupid your response was.
I read well (I am a published author). I read the original post and my response. My response seemed perfectly reasonable when we live in a world where 7,200rpm hard drives can be had for $64 or even less if you want to play the rebate game. Most people have a few older drives kicking around anyway, so move a data cable and a power supply cable and you can install FreeBSD on a spare drive.
Since you can evaluate hardware compatability, speed, or stability of an OS when it's running under an emulator, what would you learn by such an effort? That grep and tar work the same under FreeBSD as under Linux?
No, idiot. [s]he obviously wants to try out FreeBSD to see if it's worth switching to, without making the commitment of formatting their already-running system.
You are obviously the idiot if you don't realize that hard disks are cheap and that partitions can be resized without reformatting the entire hard disk. What kind of cheap bastard doesn't even have a spare hard disk around to try an OS on?
How the hell are you going to evaluate the speed or stability of an OS when you are running it under a virtual machine on another OS? What's next? Running Linux on a VM under Windows 98 and then declaring Linux to be slow and unstable?
How can the linux hardware support be so much better when freebsd is more stable?
Linux supports more varied hardware but FreeBSD crashes less. What's so complicated about that?
Windows 98 supports more hardware than Linux, so it must be more stable, right?
My fucking god. The mind boggles.
Yes, it does. How could anyone could be so stupid as to not get the "5.1" joke?
Meanwhile proper sound support, proper SMP support, proper thread support, etc. ad nauseum, has been available in Linux for fucking YEARS.
Why do you fucking poseurs continue thinking you're lee7 running FreeBSD on your Pentium 3? Someday hopefully you'll find yourself in the real world.
In the "real world", you will find many ISPs like UUNet, Compuserve, and Mindspring, running their servers on BSD variants. Yahoo! uses BSD. Hotmail used(uses?) BSD. Why? It outperforms Linux and has greater stability. In the "real world", you will find BSD variants in many embedded applications because it is not saddled with the hobbyist-oriented GPL license that forces companies to part with their intellectual property. If Linksys had built their routers around BSD, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess that might force them to give away their source code.
Which virtual machine/emulator is best for running BSD5 on a Linux host on x86?
FreeBSD runs in native mode on an x86. There is no need for a VM or emulator. Just install it on a drive partition and it boots and runs.
What's your goal here? Trying to slow down FreeBSD so that it doesn't make your Linux OS look bad?
LOL, yeah... and your post did so well...
What's the score???? -1????
HAHA, loser...
A loser is someone who gives a rat's ass about "karma points" on Slashdot. You think that karma points are a measure of intelligence? You are really a pathetic little geek. Every time I get negative karma points, I just remind myself that people like you get to moderate -- and then I laugh.
You moron...
I am far more intelligent than you are -- as you so aptly proved in that post.
Humor is a great way to get over tragic events.
There is a big difference between using humor about the incident as a coping mechanism and just making dumb-assed jokes about nerf balls and styrofoam falling off of shelves.
You damned troll.
Go squat-thrust a fire hydrant.
By the way, my cat died this morning.
Lesson for the day: Even someone as poorly endowed as you is too large to safely bugger a cat.
Excellent patriotic troll.
It's neither patriotism nor a troll. What kind of sick bastard thinks it is a "troll" to ask that respect be shown for those who lost their lives in this tragedy?
Seven astronauts lost their lives in this tragedy and all of the posts I've seen are dumb-assed jokes. This isn't a story about Bill Gates being hit in the face with a pie or about someone building a computer case out of Legos. How about showing a little respect for the astronauts who lost their lives and the friends, family members, and loved ones that they left behind?
So basically we agree, which is always a good thing.
I agree, so that's another good thing. Sorry about the incoherent posting last time where I referred to each of two points as being my sole point for the posting. I was pretty wiped out from playing lumberjack after a big tree came down on my house (no injuries and the house suffered no structural damage).
Also, I should hope that I would know a little bit about optics, or these folks would have to take back my degree.
If only it were that simple. I've seen lots of people with degrees in fields where they were utterly incompetent. Fortunately, you're not one of those people.
P.S. Loved your journal entry on "Bomb Iraq."
Your records played on an LP 12 (at least a Valhalla'd one with an Ittok arm) shouldn't sound as bad as you describe.
Regardless of the arm, cartridge, table, etc., there are physical limitations to vinyl that manifest themselves in the music. CDs, while not perfect by any means, are far superior to vinyl in when it comes to distortion, noise, and dynamic range. LPs are also cut for the masses. Engineers can't cut an LP that can only be tracked by high-end audiophile equipment. It's not that LPs sound that bad, it's just that, by comparison, CDs sound far better.
The biggest advance, for me, in playing LPs has been the use of a vacuum record cleaning machine. Even on brand new records a wash and vacuum (of mold release agents - I think - in the case of new LPs) seems to audibly lower the noise floor allowing more detail in - interestingly - the mid-range. And, for pawn-shop finds (often the only way to get a particular LP) a record cleaning machine can be a disc-saver.
Agreed that they can work miracles, but I tend to stay away from used vinyl unless it's bought straight from a fellow audiophile. I don't want to find my precious stylus is slogging its way through some toxic waste that was not soap & water soluble.
Another big help in my system was putting the LP-12 on a table that is small, light, rigid and spiked to the floor.
The how-to-mount-it question is an interesting one. Conical spikes are very tightly coupled at the point, but at the large base, their coupling is limited by the square inch area of the base. If airborne vibrations are doing you in, coupling the turtable to the floor sounds like a great idea. If the vibrations causing you more grief come through the floor, then coupling to the floor is not a great idea. Have you tried putting the table on an extremely heavy table with Sorbothane feet? The heavier table will tend, due to mass, to be less susceptible to vibration and Sorbothane will dissipate vibration (as heat).