Unity isn't just unusable for someone coming from a Windows background. It's unusable for someone coming from a Linux background (I've been using Linux for over 10 years; started on Red Hat, then TurboLinux, then back to Red Hat, then to Debian, currently on Ubuntu). Unity has me casting around for where to go next. Back to Debian is the most likely direction. Mint is a possibility, so long as it remains Unity-free.
Since '07 I've also been using Macs a lot and in a nod to that I make my Linux machines somewhat Mac-like (Avant Window Navigator, move the window buttons to the left side and put them in Mac order, single-click to do things where possible) and I think Ubuntu is utterly missing the target if they want to be Mac-like. Apple has a really great UI for most people (even most highly experienced/professional users). Sure, forcing a one-size-fits-all on everyone is not optimal for some people, but at least that one size fits pretty well. Unity is a one-size-fits-none piece of crap, and it's fugly, too.
Beyond that, releases of Ubuntu have become so flaky that I only use LTS releases on bare metal. I can only trust regular releases in a VM and never put anything important in them. It seems that Ubuntu has become perpetually not ready for prime time. You nailed it when you said they've lost touch with their user base and Ubuntu has became an experiment to find out how much change people will tolerate. It's now more than I will tolerate. Even my kids, who are in 3rd and 4th grades and have Linux and Mac experience, tried out Unity and said it was horrible. I had to replace it with AWN and Gnome on their netbooks.
Odds of being struck by lightning in an 80 year lifetime: 1 in 10,000 Odds of being struck by lightning in a given year: 1 in 775,000 (http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/medical.htm)
Odds of dying in a terrorist attack on an aircraft: 1 in 25,000,000 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html)
So, even if the terrorist number is too big and we lower it all the way down to 1 in 1,000,000 arbitrarily, I guess it's still safe to disband the TSA now, or at least drastically alter it.
Come on, we all (well, most of us) get in a car and drive to work or school every day. About 30,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents, yet we buckle up and off we go without a thought. Every day in the United States, road rage incidents (some involving shooting) take place, yet off we go in our cars. And yet we want ever more scrutiny by the TSA and ever more invasive approaches. They seem to have forgotten (as all the government has) that this is a democracy, and We, The People, call the shots.
Oh. That's what I thought. The Democrats are just as much about government control of every aspect of your life as (some) Republicans are, and then some.
If you don't like big government/corporatist Republicans and big government Democrats (the only kind there are, pretty much), vote Tea Party. What we're about is simple: small government, fiscal responsibility, personal liberty. Neither the RINOs nor the Democrats support any of those things, most especially liberty.
I kind of agree with you, but have to comment (as someone who has actually lived and worked in a communist country) that if they had a TSA there (they don't) there would be no public comment period and people would indeed put up with it. They would have no choice in the matter.
That said, I'd like to see Occupy Wall Street get an Occupy DC branch going. The big difference (IMO) between OWS and the Tea Party (other than that we don't defecate in public and encourage and participate in violence,while some OWS members do) is that they look at corporations as the biggest problem, while the we (who are often wrongly accused of being corporatist) correctly perceive government as a far greater threat to liberty than any corporation could possibly dream of. Corporations just want profit. They couldn't really care any less what your other activities are; they just want you to buy from them so they can make money. Do some of them do underhanded things to make money? Absolutely.
Government is much worse. It wants your money too, and unlike corporations, can and will just take it. But that's not all government wants, or even the main thing. Government wants to control you. No amount of control is ever enough. We have reached the stage where we are not all that far from tyranny. And the supporters of more and more government call the Tea Party fascists for wanting less government, which doesn't even make sense. Fascists are big-government types, too. The most prominent fascists of the 20th century - Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini - weren't exactly running on a "small government/power to the people" platform, as you may recall. They were very much like those other big government dictators, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin.
Anyone who doubts the above need look no further than the TSA for proof, although that proof is pretty much everywhere you look in government, especially at the federal level. Think very carefully about that when you vote. If you don't, the day when you vote will mean about as much as it does in a communist country isn't all that far off.
This is the approach most likely to be usable by people who are not computer experts (OP does not mention the skill level of those to whom this information is to be passed on; it's probably safe to assume that none are experts and many are computer-illiterate).
One other thing I'd do for this kind of setup is regularly backup and encrypt KeePass/Lastpass/whatever is being used and leave clear instructions on how to decrypt it.
The monthly password change is also something worth rethinking. I don't do it, but I do use hard passwords. Always use the longest and most complex a site will allow (my standard is 32 random characters, mixed case, with plenty of numerals and special characters). I keep those in a password management tool, and my wife has the password to that. Her passwords are kept in the same management tool.
My dad uses a simpler system. He keeps his passwords written down on a piece of paper. And do you know what? The chief security flaw I see in this approach is if his house burns down. The fact is that people don't break into houses looking for passwords. It's too risky and the people who break into houses are the ones who are too dumb to break into computers remotely and steal passwords. Even if they found his password sheet, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They'd steal his laptop (used only for IM, really) and maybe his monitor, leaving his Linux desktop box behind under the desk. They'd take the TV and maybe the DVD player. That scribbly piece of paper on the desk would go unnoticed and untouched.
After all, if you're so important that criminals are targeting you in particular or the government is targeting your passwords, none of these ordinary measures may be sufficient anyway. Most particularly, if (say) the NSA wants your passwords, they *are* going to get them and you almost certainly aren't going to know they did it until/unless they want you to know.
I'd keep mine on paper too, but my wife would kill me if I told her she had to manually type in random 32-character passwords:-)
Those children who were claimed to have gone from normal to autistic were all in the same faked up research that caused Wakefield to lose his license, and had not in fact made that change, were they not?
And even if that were not the case, there's no evidence that it was the thiomersal and not something else.
Moreover, even if that were true, that would mean that those vaccines exceed five nines of safety, whereas not getting vaccinated comes nowhere near five nines of safety against death or serious injury from illness.
Two of my kids were born in one of the countries where thiomersal-containing vaccines are used and they received them. The large and proven risk of dangerous disease if vaccinations are not given greatly exceeds any tiny (and non-proven) risk from the vaccine.
That's the way to go. My kids were in the same boat - one is gifted in reading and was several years ahead of her peers (she's even better than I was, and I had a college reading level in sixth grade), she was the top student in her class. The other is a very good reader and is pretty good at math - not quite the academic star her sister is, but in the top 10% of her class and with a lot more common sense/street smarts than her sister.
After we moved last summer and found the curriculum in our new school district much less rigorous and interesting, such that they were both getting lazy and bored, we moved them into a private school. The curriculum is more challenging even than their old school (a California Distinguished School with an API over 900) and the teachers are top notch. Between the harder homework in greater volumes and the large number of other smart kids in the school, they find themselves working pretty hard just to stay in the middle of the pack. We're still working hard to undo all the bad study habits and laziness they picked up last year in our local public school. Once we get there, I think they'll both return to being above-average students.
There is a school in our district that has a T&G program, but I opted for the private school instead, for the same reasons you're not putting your kids into T&G: it's better for their emotional development to be in "general population" and to have some peers who are smarter than they are.
I'm not nearly as smart as you and don't come from a family with money, either, so after high school I worked and saved for 10 years until I could afford to go to college. Then I quit my job and went to a community college for two years with almost straight As (I got two Bs) and transferred to UCSD, where I fell just short of graduating cum laude.
My younger brother did more or less the same thing. He joined the army when he was 19, served for 8 years, got out, went to the same community college I did, then transferred to UCSD and graduated magna cum laude, in a harder major than mine. He's smarter and harder working than I am.
If we could do that, despite being neither prodigies nor geniuses - just a couple of lower middle-class guys with good work ethics - I fail to see why you can't find a way to do the same.
Oh, wait. You said you're lazy. If you stop being lazy, I think you'll find those other obstacles all become surmountable. If I were lazy, or if my brother was, neither of us would have been able to work to put aside money to go to college, or get into UCSD, or manage to not only graduate but do so with good grades. So stop being lazy and get to work.
Who knows? After 10 years of work you may have found something you're so good at that you really no longer see the need for college and will be making a great living without college. College isn't for everybody. Some aren't smart enough to go, some are too smart to go. If not, well, you'll have saved the money to be able to afford it and you'll get far more out of it than if you had gone straight into university at 18.
As the only nation in the world with "America" in its title, we'll call ourselves "Americans" if we want to. Most people in the world agree with that usage. If you don't like it, you can shove it up your ass. If you really don't like it, go ahead and declare war. We'll get around to wiping out your piss-ant country eventually. You'll be dead and we'll still be calling ourselves "Americans."
This is terrible advice. If you do this, many/most (maybe all) of your managers and colleagues will view this as extortion, and the new company will view it as your having played them in order to wring a raise out of your current employer. Either take the job, or don't.
Now, with respect to the loyalty angle, I understand how you feel. Most of us would feel the same, I think. Certainly, I would. However, I also know that I've survived two rounds of layoffs in the past three years, and I'm sure the people laid off were all loyal employees, as I am. Should the economy double-dip and force us into another round of layoffs, I may or may not make the cut a third time. My loyalty would count for nothing, that's for sure. I'm not looking around because I'm happy with my job, my employer, my pay, and my work location is a very short commute from my house. However, if I were looking around - whether it was simply a matter of money, or whether it was other issues - I would suppress my loyalty and do what I had to do. While my employer is "loyal" to its employees, those who were laid off have at least themselves to support, and many have families to support as well. The company's loyalty does not extend to keeping them on just because they need to support themselves; the company will do what it believes it needs to do in order to further what it perceives as its best interests/survival.
So should you.
Be a loyal employee while you work there, but if you feel its time to move on and the opportunity to do so is in front of you, then make the decision that you believe is in your own best interests. Loyal employees do this all the time.
This is just great. Given that many extension devs already apparently find it hard to keep up with the FF release pace, this means that soon *none* of my extensions will work. If only NoScript worked in Chrome I'd chuck FF right now.
My window manager/DE journey, going back to the late nineties, is: FVWM 95, Afterstep, Window Maker, Enlightenment, GNOME 1.x (first with Enlightenment, then GNOME switched to Sawfish), KDE 3 (blew GNOME away) from 3.0 up to the last one, KDE 4, and then GNOME 2, which I am still on.
Between GNOME 2 and KDE 4, I couldn't really give either of them the edge for being better than the other, but since I really wanted to use a Mac-style dock and Avant Window Navigator works a lot better in a GNOME environment than in a KDE environment and at the time I switched, KDE could not properly support dual monitors through the Free nvidia driver but GNOME had no trouble with it, I switched.
I boot a KDE live CD once in a while just to try it, but at this point I have no plans of going back, and I sure have no plans of going to GNOME 3; I dislike it at least as much as Linus does, maybe more.
Not sure what I'll do when GNOME 2 should become unsupported, but either LXDE or XFCE might be candidates. I don't care for either as much as GNOME 2 except from a speed angle. Maybe I'll go retro; Afterstep is still alive:)
Just to cite a single data point about sea levels, there is an aquifer-fed lake (Lake Merced) in San Franciso. Lake Merced is very near the beach, maybe 300 or 400 yards. At the lake, there is a sign describing the history of the lake, and the most interesting point for me was that long ago (during the last ice age, IIRC; haven't been to Merced in a long time) the coastline was about 20 *miles* west of where it is today. The Golden Gate was a dry-land canyon through which the Sacrament-San Joaquin rivers drained to the sea. According to Wikipedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay) the sea rose 91 meters when the ice melted.
If we look back millions of years, most of what is now the western United States was covered by a warm, shallow sea. Sea levels can fluctuate tremendously, so it behooves us to get the location of nuclear waste storage dumps as right as we can on the first try. Take-overs are hard, since any problem that threatens one would need to be predictable decades in advance in order to build a new dump and relocate the waste, unless there were a large number of dumps with a lot of capacity. Even then, moving the waste (assuming it could be moved) could take years.
I have three, if you count the built-in on my laptop. If I did not have two company-provided external monitors (a 22 and a 24) I'd probably pay for the extra external out of my own pocket. For some months last year, I worked from home due to an injury and upgraded my home office with a $600 monitor and a $1000 chair (yes, I do have a chair and monitor like that it work) so that I could have a home office that was equal to my office office. Yes, a second monitor is that helpful.
Between the 2 external monitors, I'm also running 20 virtual desktops. Going back to a single monitor would be almost as hard as giving up virtual desktops, and an OS that doesn't have native virt desktops is fundamentally broken (I'm looking at you, Microsoft).
For any computer that is important (my desktop at work, for example, and any server) I use only LTS releases.
Natty is pretty good, with a couple of exceptions (that fugly Unity interface and the crippling of Gnome session manager), but if you're happy with Lucid or Maverick, then no, it offers no compelling reason to upgrade. I did it on a machine that needed a reinstall due to a hardware failure, and another that was just sitting around doing nothing (old MacBook Pro from 2006) and I'll keep it, but I don't plan to put it on any machine that is fine running Lucid or Maverick.
Yes, it's a radical departure. If there has ever been a more fugly or less usable IU in the history of computing, I haven't encountered it. I used to use systems based on Motif, so when I say "fuglies" I'm not messing around. If the standard GNOME UI were not available from the GDM screen, my use of Ubuntu (which dates to their first public beta, when I moved over from Debian Sid) would have come to and end. The Unity interface is so awful that even my kids, who are in grade school, couldn't stand it, and they don't have the long history with "traditional" UIs that I have.
One odd thing I need to dig into is I installed from beta 1 onto a desktop machine a few weeks ago and it had the global menu applet working out of the box, even in Firefox and Thunderbird. The only place it didn't work is Synaptic. Today, I just installed beta 2 onto a MacBook Pro 2.2 (late 2006 vintage) and no global menu. Still updating packages, but that gives me something to dig into today. I want my global menus back.
Oh, and here's another body buried in 11.4: they removed the ability of Gnome Session Manager to save the session. The "logic" from a developer thread was that since it isn't perfect (where perfect = can perfectly restore the state of every app, every open document, etc.), it should be removed entirely. A classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the great and the good. I'm on a mission to replace the session manager with a non-crippled one.
Whoever the PM was who is responsible for the UI and session manager decisions should be fired. I hope Ubuntu takes a pasting over this and comes to their senses.
Neither the GOP nor the Democratic party encourage, endorse, or suggest political violence as a means of solving our problems. Some of both of their supporters do so, however, and it's mostly on the left. The far left espouses violence so much because that's generally the only way it can either gain or keep power. How ofter does a country vote in communism? Even more importantly, how ofter does a country vote out communism? The first thing a communist government does is make any other political or economic system illegal. The few that are left have mostly had to back off some on the economic front (both China and Viet Nam are de facto capitalist countries today, even if their governments are still communist).
Those who favor liberty do not favor political violence; even the American Revolution was a means of last resort, when everything else had failed. The left does not favor liberty, it favors control and conformance, and that makes it much more comfortable with political violence, because violence supports that goal and walks hand in hand with putting people in jail for "political crimes." There are no political crimes in free countries, but many in non-free countries. We have not yet seen the day when a person can be put in prison in the United States merely for saying that which is not politically correct, but there are many on the left who see such a thing as desirable, and who will work to bring it about.
Uhh, who exactly is being condescending here? My wife neither knows nor wants to know anything about computers or security. That's my job. Heck, it's one of the reasons she went out with me in the first place. Dating a sysadmin meant she didn't have to worry about that crap anymore. Keeping her computer secure and working is my responsibility, including letting her no what to watch out for. If you're really an old sysop, as you claim, you know perfectly well that people are the weakest link and need to be warned. Most especially if they are clueless about security.
She's a brilliant and accomplished entrepreneur who made her family rich is probably a fuck of a lot smarter and better looking than you (and did I mention less condescending?). But computers? No, that ain't her thing. She said "Thanks for the heads-up."
None whatsoever, of course, except to let you know to be more vigilant than usual because your PII got pwned on their watch.
I work in anti-phishing. The weeks ahead should be interesting. Our bank was on the list of those pwned. Gotta warn my wife to be especially vigilant of phishing.
It was a spirit of some sort. Possibly a "ghost" for lack of a better term, quite possibly something bad.
Many people believe in ghosts, for some value of the word "ghost" - which is OK, because for some value of the word. they do exist. God, and the spirit world, are quite real. I'm baffled how so many people who are so smart in other areas can be at the same time so foolish in that one. Hawking is simultaneously the smartest man in the world and one of the stupidest. He understands things about physics that I could never hope to comprehend, and yet doesn't even believe in the author and creator of physics.
As far as ghosts go, I have more than once encountered the spirit of a person who I knew for a fact to be dead. I would not call that a ghost, but something more like a spiritual visit. So sure, I believe in ghosts, too, for some value of that word, because I have not only met one, but had it reach out its hands and touch me, and I could feel it.
That doesn't mean ghost hunters aren't frauds, though, for varying degrees of fraud. I would be rather surprised if an instrument could be built that could detect the presence of a spirit, let alone determine that it was in fact a spirit. I would be even more surprised if the stuff that ghost hunters carry around could do that. Not all ghost hunters are intentional frauds, of course. I think some of them know perfectly well that they are just putting on theater for money, while some others probably really believe you can detect ghosts with that stuff. Of course, most of them take money for doing it, too.
Messing around with stuff like ouija boards can get people in trouble precisely because you don't really know what is making that stuff happen. I suspect that it's for more likely than not to be something malevolent.
As cwtrex may have figured out about the black shadows, it's really best not to mess with that stuff. Whatever exactly they may be, it's not likely to be something good.
I'm older than you and Catholic and have only ever read the term "Holy Ghost" in writings (far) older than me. It has been "Holy Spirit" for a very long time. The only spoken (well, sung) reference I've ever heard for "Holy Ghost" is in the song, American Pie. WRT the previous translation (and its use was not limited to Catholics and IDK might still be used by some Protestants or post-Protestant non-Catholic Christians), both "Ghost" and "Spirit" are translated from the same word. The current usage is just considered to be more accurate in context.
More competent than you, it seems. And certainly a lot politer.
There's no point in fixing a machine in an environment where:
1) They won't remove any of the offending software 2) Never back up anything 3) Refuse to learn anything about how to maintain a computer
Even if I were in the habit of carrying recovery tools with me on vacation, there would have been no point in using them. I don't even take a laptop on vacation. I make lots of money taking care of very expensive systems. I don't touch computers when I'm on PTO. Not even my own.
OK, screw the politeness. It ain't my job to fix computers for people who won't even try to keep them fixed. It ain't my job to fix computers when I'm on vacation. It ain't my job to fix computers for free. And nothing I told her was wrong. There was absolutely nothing I could do for that machine with what was at hand (a vendor recovery disk, and nothing else). So go fuck yourself.
Wow, imagine it. *You* calling anyone else an elitist prick douchebag. Been near a mirror lately? Man, I feel sorry for your kid, having a dad like you.
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Unity isn't just unusable for someone coming from a Windows background. It's unusable for someone coming from a Linux background (I've been using Linux for over 10 years; started on Red Hat, then TurboLinux, then back to Red Hat, then to Debian, currently on Ubuntu). Unity has me casting around for where to go next. Back to Debian is the most likely direction. Mint is a possibility, so long as it remains Unity-free.
Since '07 I've also been using Macs a lot and in a nod to that I make my Linux machines somewhat Mac-like (Avant Window Navigator, move the window buttons to the left side and put them in Mac order, single-click to do things where possible) and I think Ubuntu is utterly missing the target if they want to be Mac-like. Apple has a really great UI for most people (even most highly experienced/professional users). Sure, forcing a one-size-fits-all on everyone is not optimal for some people, but at least that one size fits pretty well. Unity is a one-size-fits-none piece of crap, and it's fugly, too.
Beyond that, releases of Ubuntu have become so flaky that I only use LTS releases on bare metal. I can only trust regular releases in a VM and never put anything important in them. It seems that Ubuntu has become perpetually not ready for prime time. You nailed it when you said they've lost touch with their user base and Ubuntu has became an experiment to find out how much change people will tolerate. It's now more than I will tolerate. Even my kids, who are in 3rd and 4th grades and have Linux and Mac experience, tried out Unity and said it was horrible. I had to replace it with AWN and Gnome on their netbooks.
Odds of being struck by lightning in an 80 year lifetime: 1 in 10,000
Odds of being struck by lightning in a given year: 1 in 775,000
(http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/medical.htm)
Odds of dying in a terrorist attack on an aircraft: 1 in 25,000,000
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html)
So, even if the terrorist number is too big and we lower it all the way down to 1 in 1,000,000 arbitrarily, I guess it's still safe to disband the TSA now, or at least drastically alter it.
Come on, we all (well, most of us) get in a car and drive to work or school every day. About 30,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents, yet we buckle up and off we go without a thought. Every day in the United States, road rage incidents (some involving shooting) take place, yet off we go in our cars. And yet we want ever more scrutiny by the TSA and ever more invasive approaches. They seem to have forgotten (as all the government has) that this is a democracy, and We, The People, call the shots.
So Obama is working to reign in the TSA, then?
What's that? He isn't?
Oh. That's what I thought. The Democrats are just as much about government control of every aspect of your life as (some) Republicans are, and then some.
If you don't like big government/corporatist Republicans and big government Democrats (the only kind there are, pretty much), vote Tea Party. What we're about is simple: small government, fiscal responsibility, personal liberty. Neither the RINOs nor the Democrats support any of those things, most especially liberty.
I kind of agree with you, but have to comment (as someone who has actually lived and worked in a communist country) that if they had a TSA there (they don't) there would be no public comment period and people would indeed put up with it. They would have no choice in the matter.
That said, I'd like to see Occupy Wall Street get an Occupy DC branch going. The big difference (IMO) between OWS and the Tea Party (other than that we don't defecate in public and encourage and participate in violence,while some OWS members do) is that they look at corporations as the biggest problem, while the we (who are often wrongly accused of being corporatist) correctly perceive government as a far greater threat to liberty than any corporation could possibly dream of. Corporations just want profit. They couldn't really care any less what your other activities are; they just want you to buy from them so they can make money. Do some of them do underhanded things to make money? Absolutely.
Government is much worse. It wants your money too, and unlike corporations, can and will just take it. But that's not all government wants, or even the main thing. Government wants to control you. No amount of control is ever enough. We have reached the stage where we are not all that far from tyranny. And the supporters of more and more government call the Tea Party fascists for wanting less government, which doesn't even make sense. Fascists are big-government types, too. The most prominent fascists of the 20th century - Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini - weren't exactly running on a "small government/power to the people" platform, as you may recall. They were very much like those other big government dictators, Lenin, Mao, and Stalin.
Anyone who doubts the above need look no further than the TSA for proof, although that proof is pretty much everywhere you look in government, especially at the federal level. Think very carefully about that when you vote. If you don't, the day when you vote will mean about as much as it does in a communist country isn't all that far off.
This is the approach most likely to be usable by people who are not computer experts (OP does not mention the skill level of those to whom this information is to be passed on; it's probably safe to assume that none are experts and many are computer-illiterate).
One other thing I'd do for this kind of setup is regularly backup and encrypt KeePass/Lastpass/whatever is being used and leave clear instructions on how to decrypt it.
The monthly password change is also something worth rethinking. I don't do it, but I do use hard passwords. Always use the longest and most complex a site will allow (my standard is 32 random characters, mixed case, with plenty of numerals and special characters). I keep those in a password management tool, and my wife has the password to that. Her passwords are kept in the same management tool.
My dad uses a simpler system. He keeps his passwords written down on a piece of paper. And do you know what? The chief security flaw I see in this approach is if his house burns down. The fact is that people don't break into houses looking for passwords. It's too risky and the people who break into houses are the ones who are too dumb to break into computers remotely and steal passwords. Even if they found his password sheet, they wouldn't know what to do with it. They'd steal his laptop (used only for IM, really) and maybe his monitor, leaving his Linux desktop box behind under the desk. They'd take the TV and maybe the DVD player. That scribbly piece of paper on the desk would go unnoticed and untouched.
After all, if you're so important that criminals are targeting you in particular or the government is targeting your passwords, none of these ordinary measures may be sufficient anyway. Most particularly, if (say) the NSA wants your passwords, they *are* going to get them and you almost certainly aren't going to know they did it until/unless they want you to know.
I'd keep mine on paper too, but my wife would kill me if I told her she had to manually type in random 32-character passwords :-)
We already have way too many people who understand government running it. That's the problem, in a nutshell.
Those children who were claimed to have gone from normal to autistic were all in the same faked up research that caused Wakefield to lose his license, and had not in fact made that change, were they not?
And even if that were not the case, there's no evidence that it was the thiomersal and not something else.
Moreover, even if that were true, that would mean that those vaccines exceed five nines of safety, whereas not getting vaccinated comes nowhere near five nines of safety against death or serious injury from illness.
Two of my kids were born in one of the countries where thiomersal-containing vaccines are used and they received them. The large and proven risk of dangerous disease if vaccinations are not given greatly exceeds any tiny (and non-proven) risk from the vaccine.
That's the way to go. My kids were in the same boat - one is gifted in reading and was several years ahead of her peers (she's even better than I was, and I had a college reading level in sixth grade), she was the top student in her class. The other is a very good reader and is pretty good at math - not quite the academic star her sister is, but in the top 10% of her class and with a lot more common sense/street smarts than her sister.
After we moved last summer and found the curriculum in our new school district much less rigorous and interesting, such that they were both getting lazy and bored, we moved them into a private school. The curriculum is more challenging even than their old school (a California Distinguished School with an API over 900) and the teachers are top notch. Between the harder homework in greater volumes and the large number of other smart kids in the school, they find themselves working pretty hard just to stay in the middle of the pack. We're still working hard to undo all the bad study habits and laziness they picked up last year in our local public school. Once we get there, I think they'll both return to being above-average students.
There is a school in our district that has a T&G program, but I opted for the private school instead, for the same reasons you're not putting your kids into T&G: it's better for their emotional development to be in "general population" and to have some peers who are smarter than they are.
I'm not trolling or flaming you, so bear with me.
I'm not nearly as smart as you and don't come from a family with money, either, so after high school I worked and saved for 10 years until I could afford to go to college. Then I quit my job and went to a community college for two years with almost straight As (I got two Bs) and transferred to UCSD, where I fell just short of graduating cum laude.
My younger brother did more or less the same thing. He joined the army when he was 19, served for 8 years, got out, went to the same community college I did, then transferred to UCSD and graduated magna cum laude, in a harder major than mine. He's smarter and harder working than I am.
If we could do that, despite being neither prodigies nor geniuses - just a couple of lower middle-class guys with good work ethics - I fail to see why you can't find a way to do the same.
Oh, wait. You said you're lazy. If you stop being lazy, I think you'll find those other obstacles all become surmountable. If I were lazy, or if my brother was, neither of us would have been able to work to put aside money to go to college, or get into UCSD, or manage to not only graduate but do so with good grades. So stop being lazy and get to work.
Who knows? After 10 years of work you may have found something you're so good at that you really no longer see the need for college and will be making a great living without college. College isn't for everybody. Some aren't smart enough to go, some are too smart to go. If not, well, you'll have saved the money to be able to afford it and you'll get far more out of it than if you had gone straight into university at 18.
As the only nation in the world with "America" in its title, we'll call ourselves "Americans" if we want to. Most people in the world agree with that usage. If you don't like it, you can shove it up your ass. If you really don't like it, go ahead and declare war. We'll get around to wiping out your piss-ant country eventually. You'll be dead and we'll still be calling ourselves "Americans."
HAND
This is terrible advice. If you do this, many/most (maybe all) of your managers and colleagues will view this as extortion, and the new company will view it as your having played them in order to wring a raise out of your current employer. Either take the job, or don't.
Now, with respect to the loyalty angle, I understand how you feel. Most of us would feel the same, I think. Certainly, I would. However, I also know that I've survived two rounds of layoffs in the past three years, and I'm sure the people laid off were all loyal employees, as I am. Should the economy double-dip and force us into another round of layoffs, I may or may not make the cut a third time. My loyalty would count for nothing, that's for sure. I'm not looking around because I'm happy with my job, my employer, my pay, and my work location is a very short commute from my house. However, if I were looking around - whether it was simply a matter of money, or whether it was other issues - I would suppress my loyalty and do what I had to do. While my employer is "loyal" to its employees, those who were laid off have at least themselves to support, and many have families to support as well. The company's loyalty does not extend to keeping them on just because they need to support themselves; the company will do what it believes it needs to do in order to further what it perceives as its best interests/survival.
So should you.
Be a loyal employee while you work there, but if you feel its time to move on and the opportunity to do so is in front of you, then make the decision that you believe is in your own best interests. Loyal employees do this all the time.
This is just great. Given that many extension devs already apparently find it hard to keep up with the FF release pace, this means that soon *none* of my extensions will work. If only NoScript worked in Chrome I'd chuck FF right now.
Pr0n.
My window manager/DE journey, going back to the late nineties, is: FVWM 95, Afterstep, Window Maker, Enlightenment, GNOME 1.x (first with Enlightenment, then GNOME switched to Sawfish), KDE 3 (blew GNOME away) from 3.0 up to the last one, KDE 4, and then GNOME 2, which I am still on.
Between GNOME 2 and KDE 4, I couldn't really give either of them the edge for being better than the other, but since I really wanted to use a Mac-style dock and Avant Window Navigator works a lot better in a GNOME environment than in a KDE environment and at the time I switched, KDE could not properly support dual monitors through the Free nvidia driver but GNOME had no trouble with it, I switched.
I boot a KDE live CD once in a while just to try it, but at this point I have no plans of going back, and I sure have no plans of going to GNOME 3; I dislike it at least as much as Linus does, maybe more.
Not sure what I'll do when GNOME 2 should become unsupported, but either LXDE or XFCE might be candidates. I don't care for either as much as GNOME 2 except from a speed angle. Maybe I'll go retro; Afterstep is still alive :)
Just to cite a single data point about sea levels, there is an aquifer-fed lake (Lake Merced) in San Franciso. Lake Merced is very near the beach, maybe 300 or 400 yards. At the lake, there is a sign describing the history of the lake, and the most interesting point for me was that long ago (during the last ice age, IIRC; haven't been to Merced in a long time) the coastline was about 20 *miles* west of where it is today. The Golden Gate was a dry-land canyon through which the Sacrament-San Joaquin rivers drained to the sea. According to Wikipedia (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay) the sea rose 91 meters when the ice melted.
If we look back millions of years, most of what is now the western United States was covered by a warm, shallow sea. Sea levels can fluctuate tremendously, so it behooves us to get the location of nuclear waste storage dumps as right as we can on the first try. Take-overs are hard, since any problem that threatens one would need to be predictable decades in advance in order to build a new dump and relocate the waste, unless there were a large number of dumps with a lot of capacity. Even then, moving the waste (assuming it could be moved) could take years.
I have three, if you count the built-in on my laptop. If I did not have two company-provided external monitors (a 22 and a 24) I'd probably pay for the extra external out of my own pocket. For some months last year, I worked from home due to an injury and upgraded my home office with a $600 monitor and a $1000 chair (yes, I do have a chair and monitor like that it work) so that I could have a home office that was equal to my office office. Yes, a second monitor is that helpful.
Between the 2 external monitors, I'm also running 20 virtual desktops. Going back to a single monitor would be almost as hard as giving up virtual desktops, and an OS that doesn't have native virt desktops is fundamentally broken (I'm looking at you, Microsoft).
For any computer that is important (my desktop at work, for example, and any server) I use only LTS releases.
Natty is pretty good, with a couple of exceptions (that fugly Unity interface and the crippling of Gnome session manager), but if you're happy with Lucid or Maverick, then no, it offers no compelling reason to upgrade. I did it on a machine that needed a reinstall due to a hardware failure, and another that was just sitting around doing nothing (old MacBook Pro from 2006) and I'll keep it, but I don't plan to put it on any machine that is fine running Lucid or Maverick.
Yes, it's a radical departure. If there has ever been a more fugly or less usable IU in the history of computing, I haven't encountered it. I used to use systems based on Motif, so when I say "fuglies" I'm not messing around. If the standard GNOME UI were not available from the GDM screen, my use of Ubuntu (which dates to their first public beta, when I moved over from Debian Sid) would have come to and end. The Unity interface is so awful that even my kids, who are in grade school, couldn't stand it, and they don't have the long history with "traditional" UIs that I have.
One odd thing I need to dig into is I installed from beta 1 onto a desktop machine a few weeks ago and it had the global menu applet working out of the box, even in Firefox and Thunderbird. The only place it didn't work is Synaptic. Today, I just installed beta 2 onto a MacBook Pro 2.2 (late 2006 vintage) and no global menu. Still updating packages, but that gives me something to dig into today. I want my global menus back.
Oh, and here's another body buried in 11.4: they removed the ability of Gnome Session Manager to save the session. The "logic" from a developer thread was that since it isn't perfect (where perfect = can perfectly restore the state of every app, every open document, etc.), it should be removed entirely. A classic case of the perfect being the enemy of the great and the good. I'm on a mission to replace the session manager with a non-crippled one.
Whoever the PM was who is responsible for the UI and session manager decisions should be fired. I hope Ubuntu takes a pasting over this and comes to their senses.
A motion-sensing lid, huh? And I think it's hard to keep my two-year old from playing with the toilet *now*
Neither the GOP nor the Democratic party encourage, endorse, or suggest political violence as a means of solving our problems. Some of both of their supporters do so, however, and it's mostly on the left. The far left espouses violence so much because that's generally the only way it can either gain or keep power. How ofter does a country vote in communism? Even more importantly, how ofter does a country vote out communism? The first thing a communist government does is make any other political or economic system illegal. The few that are left have mostly had to back off some on the economic front (both China and Viet Nam are de facto capitalist countries today, even if their governments are still communist).
Those who favor liberty do not favor political violence; even the American Revolution was a means of last resort, when everything else had failed. The left does not favor liberty, it favors control and conformance, and that makes it much more comfortable with political violence, because violence supports that goal and walks hand in hand with putting people in jail for "political crimes." There are no political crimes in free countries, but many in non-free countries. We have not yet seen the day when a person can be put in prison in the United States merely for saying that which is not politically correct, but there are many on the left who see such a thing as desirable, and who will work to bring it about.
Uhh, who exactly is being condescending here? My wife neither knows nor wants to know anything about computers or security. That's my job. Heck, it's one of the reasons she went out with me in the first place. Dating a sysadmin meant she didn't have to worry about that crap anymore. Keeping her computer secure and working is my responsibility, including letting her no what to watch out for. If you're really an old sysop, as you claim, you know perfectly well that people are the weakest link and need to be warned. Most especially if they are clueless about security.
She's a brilliant and accomplished entrepreneur who made her family rich is probably a fuck of a lot smarter and better looking than you (and did I mention less condescending?). But computers? No, that ain't her thing. She said "Thanks for the heads-up."
Condescendingly yours.
None whatsoever, of course, except to let you know to be more vigilant than usual because your PII got pwned on their watch.
I work in anti-phishing. The weeks ahead should be interesting. Our bank was on the list of those pwned. Gotta warn my wife to be especially vigilant of phishing.
It was a spirit of some sort. Possibly a "ghost" for lack of a better term, quite possibly something bad.
Many people believe in ghosts, for some value of the word "ghost" - which is OK, because for some value of the word. they do exist. God, and the spirit world, are quite real. I'm baffled how so many people who are so smart in other areas can be at the same time so foolish in that one. Hawking is simultaneously the smartest man in the world and one of the stupidest. He understands things about physics that I could never hope to comprehend, and yet doesn't even believe in the author and creator of physics.
As far as ghosts go, I have more than once encountered the spirit of a person who I knew for a fact to be dead. I would not call that a ghost, but something more like a spiritual visit. So sure, I believe in ghosts, too, for some value of that word, because I have not only met one, but had it reach out its hands and touch me, and I could feel it.
That doesn't mean ghost hunters aren't frauds, though, for varying degrees of fraud. I would be rather surprised if an instrument could be built that could detect the presence of a spirit, let alone determine that it was in fact a spirit. I would be even more surprised if the stuff that ghost hunters carry around could do that. Not all ghost hunters are intentional frauds, of course. I think some of them know perfectly well that they are just putting on theater for money, while some others probably really believe you can detect ghosts with that stuff. Of course, most of them take money for doing it, too.
Messing around with stuff like ouija boards can get people in trouble precisely because you don't really know what is making that stuff happen. I suspect that it's for more likely than not to be something malevolent.
As cwtrex may have figured out about the black shadows, it's really best not to mess with that stuff. Whatever exactly they may be, it's not likely to be something good.
I'm older than you and Catholic and have only ever read the term "Holy Ghost" in writings (far) older than me. It has been "Holy Spirit" for a very long time. The only spoken (well, sung) reference I've ever heard for "Holy Ghost" is in the song, American Pie. WRT the previous translation (and its use was not limited to Catholics and IDK might still be used by some Protestants or post-Protestant non-Catholic Christians), both "Ghost" and "Spirit" are translated from the same word. The current usage is just considered to be more accurate in context.
More competent than you, it seems. And certainly a lot politer.
There's no point in fixing a machine in an environment where:
1) They won't remove any of the offending software
2) Never back up anything
3) Refuse to learn anything about how to maintain a computer
Even if I were in the habit of carrying recovery tools with me on vacation, there would have been no point in using them. I don't even take a laptop on vacation. I make lots of money taking care of very expensive systems. I don't touch computers when I'm on PTO. Not even my own.
OK, screw the politeness. It ain't my job to fix computers for people who won't even try to keep them fixed. It ain't my job to fix computers when I'm on vacation. It ain't my job to fix computers for free. And nothing I told her was wrong. There was absolutely nothing I could do for that machine with what was at hand (a vendor recovery disk, and nothing else). So go fuck yourself.
Wow, imagine it. *You* calling anyone else an elitist prick douchebag. Been near a mirror lately? Man, I feel sorry for your kid, having a dad like you.