Right. However, making $12k/annum does not place me in the "middle class" category. Still, what's more unpleasant: the beans and rice or the *lack* of the required medication? (BTW, our family has several variations on beans and rice, with sauces and spices, soups, etc. that make this hypothetical option far less bleak than it would appear.) If I was making $30k annually -- a laughable low-end of the plausible middle class income spectrum -- I could pay the $500/month and still eat a T-bone every night for dinner.
The whole premise of this sub-thread is that some dude complained about being "middle class" and not being able to handle an extra $500/month. Another dude called him on it, saying he was either *not* middle class or he couldn't handle his monthly cash flow. I opened my big mouth with a supporting opinion on the matter.
You seem to be projecting some value to the quality of life issues or morality to the costs of the drugs in questions. None of those factors are at work in this thread. Some of us are just calling b.s. when someone proclaims himself to be middle class and yet unable to allocate $500/month towards a (presumably needed) medicine. Unless I missed a post, this dude's income is unknown, so all of this is just pissing in the wind.:)
I guess is depends on how you look at it. I was paying more than 12% of my gross to various taxes each paycheck, and I tended to bitch about that. But like I said, my biggest expense was my truck, then my house, then maybe monthly bills (we had no unsecured credit payments), then food, then insurance. While seeing $500/month spent on anything unexpected stings, it's not like someone making that much money can't handle the payment, and quite easily given proper money management.
Look, I'm not saying that an extra $500/month doesn't suck, especially for something like medicine, which is essentially flushing the cash down the commode. I was merely backing up the other poster's (great grand parent post?) assertion that either the OP has no idea what "middle class" means or he can't manage his money. That's all.
I've trimmed down a lot since my peak of earning (the aforementioned $52k/yr) down to a hair over $1000/month gross income. Still married, still w/ 2 kids. I'm not saying it wouldn't totally suck ass, but even now I could rearrange the cash flow to piss away $500/month on medicine if one of my family members needed it. Sure, we'd be eating beans and rice for every meal (as opposed to maybe 2 times a week now) and Flintstones vitamins to take up the slack, but we'd pull through.
As nebulous a term as "middle class" is, anyone who is in that bracket should be able to find $500/month by a modest amount of sacrifice. If they can't, they're overextended in some way and that's nobody's fault but their own (unusual circumstances notwithstanding). This has nothing to do with the state of crookedness of Big Pharma Co and their over-priced drugs.
I think he has it right. When I was comfortably "middle class" making $52k/year, I was comfortably paying $600/month for a truck payment. This was with a wife and two kids, mind you. I could have absorbed $500/month for medicine, but if I couldn't, I could have ditched the truck for a beater paid in cash and been able to pay for the medicine. The typical "middle class" 9-to-5 working lifestyle -- if they're not over-extended -- includes many extraneous perks that, when shaved from the budget, could easily approach $500/month. This includes things like cell phone(s), cable/satellite, internet, that morning stop at Starbuck's, and that daily lunch with the guys. Hell, just changing your diet from the pre-fab processed shit that most people buy to basic staples, spices, and whole foods and actually cooking food yourself can slash the typical family's food budget (which is substantial) in half overnight.
$500/month for life-saving medicine is an indicator, in my opinion, of the messed up state of affairs in our money-centric society. The mode of delivery, be it private or socialized medicine, doesn't matter -- such goods and services just shouldn't be priced that high. However, that anyone in the "middle class" is bitching about an extra $500/month is also pretty messed up.
"There are people out there who think if they're being pursued by the police that by crossing into another county/state, that somehow they can't be arrested for whatever crime they committed or that the pursuing police have to stop pursuit."
You can't blame that generation for that misconception -- they grew up watching Dukes of Hazard and Porky's.
So you're saying that every company and organization should now use the big free email vendors for their email? Dude, what are you smoking? That's a fine solution for Grandma and even myself, but I'd never recommend that some organization rely on a 3rd party server for anything, especially for email. Spam vigilantes aren't random people who get offended by seeing Viagra spam, but most likely people who administer mail servers and know first-hand how insane the problem of spam is, in terms of management headaches and server resources proportionately consumed.
I maintain a mail server for a small software shop, and it gets *tons* of spam. Seriously -- I never *knew* what a "spam problem" was until I started doing work for this place. And this is with only a half-dozen actual user accounts. A few years ago, Spam Assassin was an okay approach, given the volume of spam. But these days, the volume is insane, and having a half-dozen bloated perl processes competing for CPU and RAM on the modest server was starting to be too much. I don't know if SA was getting worse at detecting the spam or the sheer spam volume was responsible for so many slipping through, but there were simply too many false negatives to deal with.
I deployed postgrey at the start of the new year, and it cut maybe 99% of the spam from getting through. I was simply stunned at how effective it was. SA and postfix hardly use any CPU time now, and the end-users immediately noticed and thanked me for the relief.
Greylisting should buy me a few more years before I need to layer yet another anti-spam method to the mail server. It was just *so* immediately effective that I was kicking myself for not implementing it much sooner.
Spammers (and the bots that enable them) are a scourge upon the net, and there's a very fine line between vigilantism and being a helpful participant on the internet. After I RTFA, I may have to try tar-pitting just out of principle. I plan to check out 'spamd' very soon.
That's just a silly concern. You *do* know that most (all?) browsers allow you to disable JavaScript altogether, right? And that some of the more minimal browsers (lynx, dillo, etc.) don't support it at all? Don't forget the "view source" option of browsers, and the functional equivalents of using wget, fetch, curl, or "lynx --dump --source". All of these things can allow you to peer into the site's "security" (obfuscation, is more like it) and manually input links to bypass stupid restrictions.
While I'm sure some asshat lawyers (or, to be less inflammatory, the asshat *clients* of some lawyers) would take some poor shmuck to court for using a browser add-on such as NoScript, we certainly shouldn't be afraid to use such tools because such cases are silly and would rarely happen.
Regardless of faulty legislation and misguided lawyers/judges, the stream of bytes that comes down *my* paid-for internet pipe, crosses *my* router/WAP/hub/etc. and into *my* PC is effectively mine to do with as I please. And that includes ignoring certain subsets of that byte-stream, such as JavaScript and advert banners.
Banning such tools would be as sane and effective as trying to ban home cooking or gardening.
Mercurachrome was one of the few things that didn't sting from my youth. Alcohol burned like hell, Bactine stung a bit, and even hydrogen peroxide was a little uncomfortable. In my college days, I'd play racquetball without socks, resulting in major blisters. I picked up a vial of Mercurachrome at the local drug store and it was one of the only things I could use that didn't result in extreme pain upon application. It stained like hell (bright orange spots on my socks where the blisters were), but it sure seemed to speed up healing as compared to when I didn't use it.
Wish I would have bought a large bottle and saved it -- that stuff lasts forever.
No, you must only "allow" for sites that don't work sufficiently with JavaScript disabled. There are plenty that render just fine w/o JavaScript. Then again, there are plenty of stinkers out there that use JavaScript to send you the page's CSS, which while horribly lame, is probably done to send a hacked page for IE and compliant CSS for most everyone else.
"Come on, how is that not intrusive. For every site you visit you have to take extra actions..."
I don't even whitelist Slashdot under NoScript, and it's perfectly usable (not to mention faster without that damned floating box on the left following me as as I scroll down the page). Certainly, NoScript will break 99% of all media-based sites (Youtube, Pandora, etc.). But when you're surfing for text content, defaulting to disabling JavaScript doesn't harm the experience at most sites.
I made the faulty assumption that most people use the web for gathering information, as opposed to multimedia entertainment.
Perhaps I was mis-informed about the events leading up to the ban. I attempted to find credible accounts of the ban's history, but I get wildly conflicting reports. It's not beyond the realm of possibility, though, that a company with as much at stake as DuPont would play dirty.
At my time at Purdue in the 90's, I chatted personally with the very clever engineer George Goble (he's got an entry on Wikipedia), who was working on a new refrigerant, which is supposedly superior to DuPont's R-134a. While you can now purchase the refrigerant from George's company, he had interesting tales of how he perceived the industry and regulatory bodies to be conspiring against him. Of course, he is a bit of an eccentric fellow, so him exaggerating events is not beyond belief, either.
To me, the whole R-12 ban seems very familiar to the ban on Mercurachrome: some hot-button health/environmental topic got enough groups and lawmakers, who lacked sound scientific data, whipped into a frenzy to ban a substance that was immensely useful yet had few conclusively-proven negatives. Somebody benefited greatly from the R-12 ban, and it certainly wasn't consumers.
Our society has a bad habit of declaring a thing to be evil after we don't need it any more.
Yup. Same thing with freon. After the patent expired, it became an evil environmental hazard here. Good thing Dow had a convenient replacement refrigerant!
How is NoScript instrusive? You set it to block by default, and if you hit a site that doesn't work correctly, test it with the "Temporarily allow..." option for all the relevant parts of the site, then you can whitelist it permanently if you wish. Kudos to your hosts file -- different strokes for different folks, and all that jazz. However, I just can't see how NoScript can be called intrusive by anyone.
This is indeed true. The stock gcc compiler in FreeBSD now is 4.2.1 (20070719, according to gcc --version), which is supposedly the last GPLv2 version. Of course, you can grab any number of older or newer versions from the ports collection. Nonetheless, it's a bit worrisome that the FreeBSD core is setting itself up to stagnate (somewhat) by sticking to an older compiler in the name of ideology. I'm not certain what the core developers are up to in this regard. Maybe they're waiting for clang (the LLVM front-end) to mature and ultimately usurp gcc?
My WM of choice, evilwm, is faster still!:-P Let's hear it for minimalism! If anyone can recommend a WM with a binary smaller than 30K, I'd love to hear about it.
If you have Netflix, stream the documentary "The Business of Being Born". Among other topics, it goes into some of the history of how a natural part of life has been usurped by MDs who think they know better than human nature and how it is now essentially being sold as an illness that needs "fixing". Personally, I think $5k for a uneventful birth is a fleecing upon society.
My wife went all natural with our 2nd (her 1st being too big to turn, resulting in a C-section). No drugs (pushed on us), no C-section (pushed), no epiziotomy (pushed), not even a circumcision for our son (gently pushed). We were insured at the time, but the costs were still mind-boggling, coming in around $5k. The doctor alone billed $1500 to "catch" (as my wife likes to say) the last 15 minutes of a 6-hour event. To add insult to injury, I didn't get a discount for cutting the damned cord myself! This didn't even include all the prenatal checkups/procedures, the costs of which elude me at the moment.
But birthing is just one example.
Other routine, low-risk, easy procedures cost an arm and a leg. I've had two extended family members get appendectomies over the last few year: $15k each. WTF is up with that?!?
My guess is that doctors/hospitals bill so much because they can, due to near-ubiquitous health insurance in our country. Most people don't pay bills like these directly, so it's like monopoly money to them. They don't care. So a doctor can -- and will -- charge the standard $1500 fee for a delivery, then pocket the $1000 insurer is willing to pay. However, if an uninsured person tried to pay $1000, they turn it over to collections. The US health care system is so completely fucked it hurts to think about it.
No. You see, the state already taxes the private enterprise. That is, the state's services have already been paid for. To ask companies to pay yet again is double-dipping of the worst kind.
Any idea how to get FF to *not* reset your settings when it does update? I have it notify me of updates, but whenever the updates are installed, I have to go an re-configure every bloody settings all over again.
Every. Single. Time.
It really pisses me off, yet I can't figure out how to prevent it from happening.
(This is the family XP machine -- FF3 is too buggy for me to run under FreeBSD, so I still use FF2.)
I'm with you on wanting proof. Except for Gutenberg's (somewhat debunked original paper), there is no credible evidence *anywhere* that such recovery techniques are even possible or have been used in the last 20 years for real data recovery. Of course, this applies only to current magnetic-media HD technologies. Who knows what can -- or cannot -- be done with newer SSD drives or other flash devices. But with the insane density found in modern hard drives, I would highly doubt that even a single pass of the same bit/byte pattern would be vulnerable to such recovery, never mind wiping with even half-assed random data (meaning not crypto-quality randomness).
I agree with the dude who has that standing challenge for such a feat. With enough donations, maybe he could throw real money at the contest -- say $500,000. There's got to be some point where these shops that allegedly perform such recovery would jump at the chance for big money and publicity that would guarantee them financial success in the future.
"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." -- Henry David Thoreau
Gotta love Thoreau! The best job I ever had was the first one I walked into the interview wearing my "Sunday best": jeans, sneakers, and an un-tucked button-down shirt. They said I was the first guy in weeks with any real in-depth UNIX experience -- the rest were stuffy MCSE mill graduates who didn't know squat about what they were applying for.
I'm curious... when lead was outlawed in US gasoline in the 80's, did the government give refunds or vouchers to people with older (but still useful) cars who needed lead additives to prevent engine damage? I'm not being snarky here, but I know from your posts here and K5 that you're old enough to clearly remember those times.;-) This is a serious question that I couldn't find a quick answer to.
In any case, the government sometimes does stuff in the name of progress and we're all SOL because of it. Doesn't mean we can't complain, but beating this particular horse seems pointless as a TV is very much a luxury item.
Yes, but since it relies on WINE, it will not be usable by those who run a FreeBSD/amd64 environment due to the fact that WINE itself doesn't run under such an environment.
I realize that this is a "fault" of FreeBSD, since WINE uses a certain system call that isn't available in 64-bit mode. (Or something like that.) All I know for sure is that 64-bit FreeBSD users have been clamoring for WINE for years, it's a well-known issue, and that a fix is nowhere in sight (probably because the FreeBSD developers -- rightfully so -- have better fish to fry).
Seems to be an add-on to WINE? This page tells you to install WINE. Then you install Bordeaux. No docs for FreeBSD, as far as I can tell.
Since it relies on WINE, I guess those of us who run a pure 64-bit environment are still screwed. If I wanted to pay money and be tied to i386, I'd drop my money on Win4BSD -- assuming it works as well as it did on Linux (Win4Lin) when I tried it a few years back.
It's a bit of a bummer, as FreeBSD's PC emulation options are limited. AFAIK, Qemu is the only viable option right now, but it has known issues with crashing under FreeBSD/amd64 with certain (most) Windows versions. Hopefully VirtualBox will be made to run under FreeBSD in the near future.
"So, why did this guy get convicted? Take a look at his mug shot [wikipedia.org] (which screams, "I'm going to rape your daughters" like nothing I've quite seen before), and the fact that the jury likely knew this was a parole violation for previous sex offenses, and you'll probably have your answer."
Damn, that's one weird lookin' dude. Where's his Baby Ruth and pirate hat?
Hey, maybe you can offer some advice for someone who's been out of the purchasing loop for a while. I'm too busy to bother buying components, and I want to order a half-decent system w/o an OS (I run FreeBSD) that's ready to go. I'm due for an upgrade this year and I think I'll have a decent enough tax return to make it happen.
Currently, I have a AMD64 3200+ (2.0GHz), 4GB, 320GB HD. I usually try to wait until I can quadruple my main specs for a reasonable outlay of cash, and I think the time may be right. I'm partial to AMD, so I'm hoping I can get a Phenom X4 quad 2.5GHz w/ 16GB and a pair of 1TB disks -- in a shuttle case, if that's even possible. Video is pretty much unimportant, as I can't get accelerated 3D in FreeBSD/amd64 anyway. I'm shooting for $1000, give or take a couple hundred. Is this close to the mark, or am I looking at a lot more?
Any pointers on decent vendors? I checked out Dell, and they seem to only do Intel (plus, I felt a bit dirty going to Dell, anyway). Are there any particular motherboards or chipsets to avoid? I have an Asus now, but they seem to be hit or miss with quality anymore (or so I've heard).
Sure, the worst of capitalism results in our exploitation of less developed nations. However, the worst of consumerism is why people in the US "need" the high salaries/wages/benefits that drive companies overseas for their labor. In then end, it comes down to the greed and gluttonly of everyone.
I support a family of four (myself, wife, plus two kids). This year, my year-end gross from my job: $9243. I work 2 hours a day, from home. A small real estate investment a few years ago grosses me about $1200/year, and that will be gone in maybe 5 years. In total, we live comfortably on under $12k/year.
How do we manage this? We live cheaply, humbly, and within our means.
I'm $1000 away from having our 1000-ft^2 fixer-upper (cost $40k) home paid off, which is the last of our debt. No consumer debt -- never again. Our single beater of a car is paid off, and it gets good mileage. We raise much of our own food, and hunt a little to supplement. Between the garden and livestock (meat, eggs, milk), we produced 90 days' worth of calories for the entire family this year. Not bad for 1/4 of an acre. Sure, there were some inputs (grains, hay, straw, etc.), but the cost of animal feed is far cheaper than people feed, plus you get a healthier, tastier product. What we do purchase, we buy staples in bulk and cook damned near everything from scratch. Store-bought white flour is "convenience food" in our house (yes, we grow and mill wheat for some of our flour needs). We use whole, unprocessed foods as much as possible. We don't indulge in health insurance, as there's no need -- we enjoy a very healthy diet and we never get sick.
We buy most clothing from second-hand stores. We haven't paid for broadcast TV in 8 years, opting to view select shows via Netflix or sites like Hulu. Related to the no TV stance, we avoid advertising, thus our kids (as well as ourselves) are not enticed to by useless crap, and we are quite happy with a few occasional luxuries (coffee, internet, movies, and PC games). We don't celebrate Christmas (the wife and I being atheist, and the kids not indoctrinated to any religious philosophy), so we don't buy anyone anything. For "the holidays" we treated each child to $20, and they get a few things from extended family. No cell phones. We cut our own hair (well, the kids -- the wife and I have long hair). Wife doesn't get her hair or nails done, and she doesn't wear makeup. I telecommute, and don't incur the costs of dressing nicely, commuting, and eating out for lunch every day. We home-school our kids, so we don't need to pay pointless school fees.
Our unavoidable (for now) monthlies are: $50 for landline+DSL, $25-to-$200 (depending on the season) for electricity, $20 for auto insurance (I hardly drive, so I get "pleasure" use rate, state minimum coverage), and $15 for county trash pick-up. At the worst of times (dead of winter), we spend $200/month for food and livestock feed. At the best of times, we spend almost nothing for food. Maybe $20/month for gas, even when it was $4/gallon.
I don't expect everyone in this country to go as hard-core with the simple living as we do. Somewhere, though, there should be a balance between the $12k/year I enjoy now vs the $55k/year at my earning peak (with all the expense, hassle and stress that lifestyle mandates) to support a family. If the majority of people lived without consuming so much, this world would be a far better place, and we'd all be able to live well without demanding so much in income. And if that happened, companies wouldn't need to outsource. Of course, if much of the population scaled back their living, companies would be forced to scale back what they would accept in profitability.
In summary, wage disparity between the typical US worker and the typical third world worker isn't always about exploitation. Some people -- like myself -- just live simpler lives. If a worker in another country has a roof over their heads, access to food and clean water, and isn't under duress to perform th
Slashdot Mirror
Right. However, making $12k/annum does not place me in the "middle class" category. Still, what's more unpleasant: the beans and rice or the *lack* of the required medication? (BTW, our family has several variations on beans and rice, with sauces and spices, soups, etc. that make this hypothetical option far less bleak than it would appear.) If I was making $30k annually -- a laughable low-end of the plausible middle class income spectrum -- I could pay the $500/month and still eat a T-bone every night for dinner.
The whole premise of this sub-thread is that some dude complained about being "middle class" and not being able to handle an extra $500/month. Another dude called him on it, saying he was either *not* middle class or he couldn't handle his monthly cash flow. I opened my big mouth with a supporting opinion on the matter.
You seem to be projecting some value to the quality of life issues or morality to the costs of the drugs in questions. None of those factors are at work in this thread. Some of us are just calling b.s. when someone proclaims himself to be middle class and yet unable to allocate $500/month towards a (presumably needed) medicine. Unless I missed a post, this dude's income is unknown, so all of this is just pissing in the wind. :)
I guess is depends on how you look at it. I was paying more than 12% of my gross to various taxes each paycheck, and I tended to bitch about that. But like I said, my biggest expense was my truck, then my house, then maybe monthly bills (we had no unsecured credit payments), then food, then insurance. While seeing $500/month spent on anything unexpected stings, it's not like someone making that much money can't handle the payment, and quite easily given proper money management.
Look, I'm not saying that an extra $500/month doesn't suck, especially for something like medicine, which is essentially flushing the cash down the commode. I was merely backing up the other poster's (great grand parent post?) assertion that either the OP has no idea what "middle class" means or he can't manage his money. That's all.
I've trimmed down a lot since my peak of earning (the aforementioned $52k/yr) down to a hair over $1000/month gross income. Still married, still w/ 2 kids. I'm not saying it wouldn't totally suck ass, but even now I could rearrange the cash flow to piss away $500/month on medicine if one of my family members needed it. Sure, we'd be eating beans and rice for every meal (as opposed to maybe 2 times a week now) and Flintstones vitamins to take up the slack, but we'd pull through.
As nebulous a term as "middle class" is, anyone who is in that bracket should be able to find $500/month by a modest amount of sacrifice. If they can't, they're overextended in some way and that's nobody's fault but their own (unusual circumstances notwithstanding). This has nothing to do with the state of crookedness of Big Pharma Co and their over-priced drugs.
I think he has it right. When I was comfortably "middle class" making $52k/year, I was comfortably paying $600/month for a truck payment. This was with a wife and two kids, mind you. I could have absorbed $500/month for medicine, but if I couldn't, I could have ditched the truck for a beater paid in cash and been able to pay for the medicine. The typical "middle class" 9-to-5 working lifestyle -- if they're not over-extended -- includes many extraneous perks that, when shaved from the budget, could easily approach $500/month. This includes things like cell phone(s), cable/satellite, internet, that morning stop at Starbuck's, and that daily lunch with the guys. Hell, just changing your diet from the pre-fab processed shit that most people buy to basic staples, spices, and whole foods and actually cooking food yourself can slash the typical family's food budget (which is substantial) in half overnight.
$500/month for life-saving medicine is an indicator, in my opinion, of the messed up state of affairs in our money-centric society. The mode of delivery, be it private or socialized medicine, doesn't matter -- such goods and services just shouldn't be priced that high. However, that anyone in the "middle class" is bitching about an extra $500/month is also pretty messed up.
"There are people out there who think if they're being pursued by the police that by crossing into another county/state, that somehow they can't be arrested for whatever crime they committed or that the pursuing police have to stop pursuit."
You can't blame that generation for that misconception -- they grew up watching Dukes of Hazard and Porky's.
So you're saying that every company and organization should now use the big free email vendors for their email? Dude, what are you smoking? That's a fine solution for Grandma and even myself, but I'd never recommend that some organization rely on a 3rd party server for anything, especially for email. Spam vigilantes aren't random people who get offended by seeing Viagra spam, but most likely people who administer mail servers and know first-hand how insane the problem of spam is, in terms of management headaches and server resources proportionately consumed.
I maintain a mail server for a small software shop, and it gets *tons* of spam. Seriously -- I never *knew* what a "spam problem" was until I started doing work for this place. And this is with only a half-dozen actual user accounts. A few years ago, Spam Assassin was an okay approach, given the volume of spam. But these days, the volume is insane, and having a half-dozen bloated perl processes competing for CPU and RAM on the modest server was starting to be too much. I don't know if SA was getting worse at detecting the spam or the sheer spam volume was responsible for so many slipping through, but there were simply too many false negatives to deal with.
I deployed postgrey at the start of the new year, and it cut maybe 99% of the spam from getting through. I was simply stunned at how effective it was. SA and postfix hardly use any CPU time now, and the end-users immediately noticed and thanked me for the relief.
Greylisting should buy me a few more years before I need to layer yet another anti-spam method to the mail server. It was just *so* immediately effective that I was kicking myself for not implementing it much sooner.
Spammers (and the bots that enable them) are a scourge upon the net, and there's a very fine line between vigilantism and being a helpful participant on the internet. After I RTFA, I may have to try tar-pitting just out of principle. I plan to check out 'spamd' very soon.
That's just a silly concern. You *do* know that most (all?) browsers allow you to disable JavaScript altogether, right? And that some of the more minimal browsers (lynx, dillo, etc.) don't support it at all? Don't forget the "view source" option of browsers, and the functional equivalents of using wget, fetch, curl, or "lynx --dump --source". All of these things can allow you to peer into the site's "security" (obfuscation, is more like it) and manually input links to bypass stupid restrictions.
While I'm sure some asshat lawyers (or, to be less inflammatory, the asshat *clients* of some lawyers) would take some poor shmuck to court for using a browser add-on such as NoScript, we certainly shouldn't be afraid to use such tools because such cases are silly and would rarely happen.
Regardless of faulty legislation and misguided lawyers/judges, the stream of bytes that comes down *my* paid-for internet pipe, crosses *my* router/WAP/hub/etc. and into *my* PC is effectively mine to do with as I please. And that includes ignoring certain subsets of that byte-stream, such as JavaScript and advert banners.
Banning such tools would be as sane and effective as trying to ban home cooking or gardening.
Mercurachrome was one of the few things that didn't sting from my youth. Alcohol burned like hell, Bactine stung a bit, and even hydrogen peroxide was a little uncomfortable. In my college days, I'd play racquetball without socks, resulting in major blisters. I picked up a vial of Mercurachrome at the local drug store and it was one of the only things I could use that didn't result in extreme pain upon application. It stained like hell (bright orange spots on my socks where the blisters were), but it sure seemed to speed up healing as compared to when I didn't use it.
Wish I would have bought a large bottle and saved it -- that stuff lasts forever.
No, you must only "allow" for sites that don't work sufficiently with JavaScript disabled. There are plenty that render just fine w/o JavaScript. Then again, there are plenty of stinkers out there that use JavaScript to send you the page's CSS, which while horribly lame, is probably done to send a hacked page for IE and compliant CSS for most everyone else.
"Come on, how is that not intrusive. For every site you visit you have to take extra actions..."
I don't even whitelist Slashdot under NoScript, and it's perfectly usable (not to mention faster without that damned floating box on the left following me as as I scroll down the page). Certainly, NoScript will break 99% of all media-based sites (Youtube, Pandora, etc.). But when you're surfing for text content, defaulting to disabling JavaScript doesn't harm the experience at most sites.
I made the faulty assumption that most people use the web for gathering information, as opposed to multimedia entertainment.
At my time at Purdue in the 90's, I chatted personally with the very clever engineer George Goble (he's got an entry on Wikipedia), who was working on a new refrigerant, which is supposedly superior to DuPont's R-134a. While you can now purchase the refrigerant from George's company, he had interesting tales of how he perceived the industry and regulatory bodies to be conspiring against him. Of course, he is a bit of an eccentric fellow, so him exaggerating events is not beyond belief, either.
To me, the whole R-12 ban seems very familiar to the ban on Mercurachrome: some hot-button health/environmental topic got enough groups and lawmakers, who lacked sound scientific data, whipped into a frenzy to ban a substance that was immensely useful yet had few conclusively-proven negatives. Somebody benefited greatly from the R-12 ban, and it certainly wasn't consumers.
Yup. Same thing with freon. After the patent expired, it became an evil environmental hazard here. Good thing Dow had a convenient replacement refrigerant!
How is NoScript instrusive? You set it to block by default, and if you hit a site that doesn't work correctly, test it with the "Temporarily allow..." option for all the relevant parts of the site, then you can whitelist it permanently if you wish. Kudos to your hosts file -- different strokes for different folks, and all that jazz. However, I just can't see how NoScript can be called intrusive by anyone.
This is indeed true. The stock gcc compiler in FreeBSD now is 4.2.1 (20070719, according to gcc --version), which is supposedly the last GPLv2 version. Of course, you can grab any number of older or newer versions from the ports collection. Nonetheless, it's a bit worrisome that the FreeBSD core is setting itself up to stagnate (somewhat) by sticking to an older compiler in the name of ideology. I'm not certain what the core developers are up to in this regard. Maybe they're waiting for clang (the LLVM front-end) to mature and ultimately usurp gcc?
My WM of choice, evilwm, is faster still! :-P Let's hear it for minimalism! If anyone can recommend a WM with a binary smaller than 30K, I'd love to hear about it.
If you have Netflix, stream the documentary "The Business of Being Born". Among other topics, it goes into some of the history of how a natural part of life has been usurped by MDs who think they know better than human nature and how it is now essentially being sold as an illness that needs "fixing". Personally, I think $5k for a uneventful birth is a fleecing upon society.
My wife went all natural with our 2nd (her 1st being too big to turn, resulting in a C-section). No drugs (pushed on us), no C-section (pushed), no epiziotomy (pushed), not even a circumcision for our son (gently pushed). We were insured at the time, but the costs were still mind-boggling, coming in around $5k. The doctor alone billed $1500 to "catch" (as my wife likes to say) the last 15 minutes of a 6-hour event. To add insult to injury, I didn't get a discount for cutting the damned cord myself! This didn't even include all the prenatal checkups/procedures, the costs of which elude me at the moment.
But birthing is just one example.
Other routine, low-risk, easy procedures cost an arm and a leg. I've had two extended family members get appendectomies over the last few year: $15k each. WTF is up with that?!?
My guess is that doctors/hospitals bill so much because they can, due to near-ubiquitous health insurance in our country. Most people don't pay bills like these directly, so it's like monopoly money to them. They don't care. So a doctor can -- and will -- charge the standard $1500 fee for a delivery, then pocket the $1000 insurer is willing to pay. However, if an uninsured person tried to pay $1000, they turn it over to collections. The US health care system is so completely fucked it hurts to think about it.
No. You see, the state already taxes the private enterprise. That is, the state's services have already been paid for. To ask companies to pay yet again is double-dipping of the worst kind.
Any idea how to get FF to *not* reset your settings when it does update? I have it notify me of updates, but whenever the updates are installed, I have to go an re-configure every bloody settings all over again.
Every. Single. Time.
It really pisses me off, yet I can't figure out how to prevent it from happening.
(This is the family XP machine -- FF3 is too buggy for me to run under FreeBSD, so I still use FF2.)
I'm with you on wanting proof. Except for Gutenberg's (somewhat debunked original paper), there is no credible evidence *anywhere* that such recovery techniques are even possible or have been used in the last 20 years for real data recovery. Of course, this applies only to current magnetic-media HD technologies. Who knows what can -- or cannot -- be done with newer SSD drives or other flash devices. But with the insane density found in modern hard drives, I would highly doubt that even a single pass of the same bit/byte pattern would be vulnerable to such recovery, never mind wiping with even half-assed random data (meaning not crypto-quality randomness).
I agree with the dude who has that standing challenge for such a feat. With enough donations, maybe he could throw real money at the contest -- say $500,000. There's got to be some point where these shops that allegedly perform such recovery would jump at the chance for big money and publicity that would guarantee them financial success in the future.
"Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes." -- Henry David Thoreau
Gotta love Thoreau! The best job I ever had was the first one I walked into the interview wearing my "Sunday best": jeans, sneakers, and an un-tucked button-down shirt. They said I was the first guy in weeks with any real in-depth UNIX experience -- the rest were stuffy MCSE mill graduates who didn't know squat about what they were applying for.
I'm curious... when lead was outlawed in US gasoline in the 80's, did the government give refunds or vouchers to people with older (but still useful) cars who needed lead additives to prevent engine damage? I'm not being snarky here, but I know from your posts here and K5 that you're old enough to clearly remember those times. ;-) This is a serious question that I couldn't find a quick answer to.
In any case, the government sometimes does stuff in the name of progress and we're all SOL because of it. Doesn't mean we can't complain, but beating this particular horse seems pointless as a TV is very much a luxury item.
Yes, but since it relies on WINE, it will not be usable by those who run a FreeBSD/amd64 environment due to the fact that WINE itself doesn't run under such an environment.
I realize that this is a "fault" of FreeBSD, since WINE uses a certain system call that isn't available in 64-bit mode. (Or something like that.) All I know for sure is that 64-bit FreeBSD users have been clamoring for WINE for years, it's a well-known issue, and that a fix is nowhere in sight (probably because the FreeBSD developers -- rightfully so -- have better fish to fry).
Since it relies on WINE, I guess those of us who run a pure 64-bit environment are still screwed. If I wanted to pay money and be tied to i386, I'd drop my money on Win4BSD -- assuming it works as well as it did on Linux (Win4Lin) when I tried it a few years back.
It's a bit of a bummer, as FreeBSD's PC emulation options are limited. AFAIK, Qemu is the only viable option right now, but it has known issues with crashing under FreeBSD/amd64 with certain (most) Windows versions. Hopefully VirtualBox will be made to run under FreeBSD in the near future.
"So, why did this guy get convicted? Take a look at his mug shot [wikipedia.org] (which screams, "I'm going to rape your daughters" like nothing I've quite seen before), and the fact that the jury likely knew this was a parole violation for previous sex offenses, and you'll probably have your answer." Damn, that's one weird lookin' dude. Where's his Baby Ruth and pirate hat?
Hey, maybe you can offer some advice for someone who's been out of the purchasing loop for a while. I'm too busy to bother buying components, and I want to order a half-decent system w/o an OS (I run FreeBSD) that's ready to go. I'm due for an upgrade this year and I think I'll have a decent enough tax return to make it happen.
Currently, I have a AMD64 3200+ (2.0GHz), 4GB, 320GB HD. I usually try to wait until I can quadruple my main specs for a reasonable outlay of cash, and I think the time may be right. I'm partial to AMD, so I'm hoping I can get a Phenom X4 quad 2.5GHz w/ 16GB and a pair of 1TB disks -- in a shuttle case, if that's even possible. Video is pretty much unimportant, as I can't get accelerated 3D in FreeBSD/amd64 anyway. I'm shooting for $1000, give or take a couple hundred. Is this close to the mark, or am I looking at a lot more?
Any pointers on decent vendors? I checked out Dell, and they seem to only do Intel (plus, I felt a bit dirty going to Dell, anyway). Are there any particular motherboards or chipsets to avoid? I have an Asus now, but they seem to be hit or miss with quality anymore (or so I've heard).
Sure, the worst of capitalism results in our exploitation of less developed nations. However, the worst of consumerism is why people in the US "need" the high salaries/wages/benefits that drive companies overseas for their labor. In then end, it comes down to the greed and gluttonly of everyone.
I support a family of four (myself, wife, plus two kids). This year, my year-end gross from my job: $9243. I work 2 hours a day, from home. A small real estate investment a few years ago grosses me about $1200/year, and that will be gone in maybe 5 years. In total, we live comfortably on under $12k/year.
How do we manage this? We live cheaply, humbly, and within our means.
I'm $1000 away from having our 1000-ft^2 fixer-upper (cost $40k) home paid off, which is the last of our debt. No consumer debt -- never again. Our single beater of a car is paid off, and it gets good mileage. We raise much of our own food, and hunt a little to supplement. Between the garden and livestock (meat, eggs, milk), we produced 90 days' worth of calories for the entire family this year. Not bad for 1/4 of an acre. Sure, there were some inputs (grains, hay, straw, etc.), but the cost of animal feed is far cheaper than people feed, plus you get a healthier, tastier product. What we do purchase, we buy staples in bulk and cook damned near everything from scratch. Store-bought white flour is "convenience food" in our house (yes, we grow and mill wheat for some of our flour needs). We use whole, unprocessed foods as much as possible. We don't indulge in health insurance, as there's no need -- we enjoy a very healthy diet and we never get sick.
We buy most clothing from second-hand stores. We haven't paid for broadcast TV in 8 years, opting to view select shows via Netflix or sites like Hulu. Related to the no TV stance, we avoid advertising, thus our kids (as well as ourselves) are not enticed to by useless crap, and we are quite happy with a few occasional luxuries (coffee, internet, movies, and PC games). We don't celebrate Christmas (the wife and I being atheist, and the kids not indoctrinated to any religious philosophy), so we don't buy anyone anything. For "the holidays" we treated each child to $20, and they get a few things from extended family. No cell phones. We cut our own hair (well, the kids -- the wife and I have long hair). Wife doesn't get her hair or nails done, and she doesn't wear makeup. I telecommute, and don't incur the costs of dressing nicely, commuting, and eating out for lunch every day. We home-school our kids, so we don't need to pay pointless school fees.
Our unavoidable (for now) monthlies are: $50 for landline+DSL, $25-to-$200 (depending on the season) for electricity, $20 for auto insurance (I hardly drive, so I get "pleasure" use rate, state minimum coverage), and $15 for county trash pick-up. At the worst of times (dead of winter), we spend $200/month for food and livestock feed. At the best of times, we spend almost nothing for food. Maybe $20/month for gas, even when it was $4/gallon.
I don't expect everyone in this country to go as hard-core with the simple living as we do. Somewhere, though, there should be a balance between the $12k/year I enjoy now vs the $55k/year at my earning peak (with all the expense, hassle and stress that lifestyle mandates) to support a family. If the majority of people lived without consuming so much, this world would be a far better place, and we'd all be able to live well without demanding so much in income. And if that happened, companies wouldn't need to outsource. Of course, if much of the population scaled back their living, companies would be forced to scale back what they would accept in profitability.
In summary, wage disparity between the typical US worker and the typical third world worker isn't always about exploitation. Some people -- like myself -- just live simpler lives. If a worker in another country has a roof over their heads, access to food and clean water, and isn't under duress to perform th