For years we here how hard Stallman is to deal with, supposedly. How it is all about him and he is egotistical etc.
Wikipedia is the crown jewel of GFDL. But - GFDL was really originally written to deal with technical documentation to accompany GPL software, not to deal with content on wikis etc. But it seemed like a good license when Wikipedia started so they used it. There is also a lot of Creative Commons content out there that Wikipedia wants to work with, and the GFDL provisions made working everything together difficult.
So what does Stallman do? He magnaminously allows the crown jewel of using GFDL to move towards the CC world, if Wikipedia wants. Can we imagine Microsoft, or SCO or proprietary licensed software companies doing this? No. And it is helping the digital commons community, although from now on Stallman and the FSF will not being getting kudos for the license for Wikipedia content from now on, because Stallman was so gracious about it.
There is a difference between holding to your principles, and being stubborn just for the sake of ego or whatever. Stallman has always held to his principles regarding freedom. But here is an example of him working with others, and being flexible, to help the greater cause of the digital commons. I have to read for years about how inflexible Stallman supposedly is, here is an example to the contrary. Because Stallman is flexible, he is only inflexible about his principles and about freedom.
Well I can't blame them that much aside from an initial fatal architectural decision, namely to build Twitter on Ruby-on-Rails. Its clear which one went by the wayside in the Fast, Cheap, Good equation with that.
What about the army's organized response in Los Angeles in 1992?
What about the army's organized response into Detroit in 1967?
I can't even count how many times the US army has marched against its own poor, working poor and working class citizens through its history. Starting with George Washington marching what would become the US army to Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion right up until 1992.
Um, three years after Tiananmen Square, the US army rolled Abrams tanks into Los Angeles, because people there were protesting government injustice.
Of course, the Chinese students were all docile angels who just wanted democracy from their tyrannical government, and the people in LA's poor communities are just dirty rioters against the already perfect US government of freedom and liberty. So its obviously completely different.
Americans are so propagandized that people who protest US government violence (like against Rodney King or Cambodia) are rioters who deserved to be killed (like in Kent State or in LA), while people protesting against countries in competition with the US (China) are all docile, non-violent people who want democracy, that exposition beyond a point is futile. From experience, I know it is mostly futile in trying to explain to a working class American religious fundamentalist, of which there are many, that people die when they get old, and don't fly away to some paradise in the clouds; that some Jewish carpenter 2000 years ago did not walk on water, raise people from the dead, magically create loaves and fish, turn water into wine and the like; that there is not some bearded man in the clouds watching everything they do and so forth. Likewise, more white collar Americans who are more socially liberal generally have a very warped view of the world outside the United States, which they tend to know very little of.
In contrast, after Kent State, millions of college students across the US protested with no significant interference from the government.
Except those two students at Jackson State that were killed. Or the hundreds of students who were beaten, injured and hospitalized. Other than that, no significant interference from the government.
Philip Agee was a CIA case officer whose conscience troubled him so much with regards to his involvement in supporting dictatorships in Latin America and putting down popular worker movements, that he exposed what the CIA up to. The CIA did everything it could to try to prevent publication. In 1979, his passport was revoked. In 1982 Congress passed a law in an attempt to prosecute him ( a law which tripped up Scooter Libby in the Bush administration incidentally - but Bush commuted his prison sentence - the law exists to ensnare only the left, not the right, obviously).
You don't see the difference between a protest getting out of hand and the siege of a city by an army?
You mean like when the Marines and Army marched into Los Angeles in 1992? But of course it wasn't like they were protesting government injustice and brutality in LA in 1992, right?
You know that the day after the Kent State shootings, 8 million college kids protested? How many people protested the day after Tienanmen Square?
Yes, students protested at Jackson State and elsewhere - 2 of the Jackson state students shot dead. Shot dead because they were protesting that the US army invaded a neutral country - Cambodia. People all over China protested in the days after Tienanmen Square.
You know that Kent State was in no way a peaceful protest, but a full-on riot? Fires, property damage, people attacking fire fighters and later the national guard. Contrast this with people peacefully assembled in a square
One of the students killed at Kent State was William Schroeder - he was 120 yards from the National Guard, was holding a folder full of school papers when shot - in the back. He was also not involved in the protest in any way, not that the government should kill people protesting invasion of a neutral country anyhow. As a matter of fact, he was in ROTC. Your contrasts are laughable. More of a full-scale riot was going on in Beijing when the army came in than ever happened at Kent State. Yes - fires, property damage, officials being attacked in Beijing. In fact, the Chinese government was much more conciliatory than the US ever was. A member of the Politburo went to the square to try to negotiate with the students, but the students took a hard-line. All the Kent State students ever saw in response to their protests were bullets. You're spreading a propaganda meme more than that you would probably accuse the Chinese government of. Beijing was a land of all pacifistic, docile protesters for democracy, while Kent State (and presumably LA) were all rioters who deserved to be killed. Things are not as clear-cut as you claim for them to be. I couldn't IMAGINE a high government official going to somewhere like Kent State and attempting to negotiate with people protesting the US invading a neutral country - of course they're only going to get batons and bullets - but we're the land of freedom, not the land of Chicom tyranny, of course.
When I print in Chrome, I get page header and footer information (date and time, web page URL etc.), and I can't get rid of them. I print out shipping labels from USPS.com and Paypal.com, and I don't want to see that there - Firefox and IE handle this easily, Chrome doesn't handle it easily or at all. Whenever I know I am going to be printing a label out I switch to Firefox for a while - for every tab I have open, since having Firefox and Chrome both open uses up too much resources.
Also for reasons others mention - no Linux version. On Firefox, if a NSFW image pops up for some reason, I can right click, go to "Block images from whatever.com" and avoid a lot of problems. I find it very convenient.
OTOH, there are things I like. I like that newly opened tabs open near the calling tab instead of as the last tab. I like that one crashing Youtube video doesn't bring all my tabs and the browser down. I like how most browsed pages and the like appear automatically for me.
I respect experts in the physical sciences like physics, chemistry, mathematics and so forth. Especially since most of them are ready to drop everything they know if a better theory comes along (relativity, natural selection and common descent etc.)
However, the social scientists are filled with people who are often just part of a propaganda system. Would you trust an Iranian college professor who taught the modern history of the United States and Europe? Then why would you trust an American college professor teaching the modern history of Iran? The experts on God and Jesus are priests and theologians - do you trust their expertise on Jesus's supposed miraculous powers? Who is an expert on abortion?
One of the big problems with Wikipedia as I see it is there is a portion of Wikipedia that expertise works (natural sciences - with the exception of people like Gene "TimeCube guy" Ray and other cranks). Then there is a portion where expertise does not work (articles about the West Bank, Sarah Palin, abortion etc.) Magazines doing a retrospective on something sometimes have a left-wing and right-wing person write a page on the topic. With Wikipedia, and Knol, you have one source, an "expert". Bakunin said it best over a century ago -
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others."
I applied for a job where I was placed at a Fortune 100 financial company. I had to urinate in a cup so they could see if I smoked weed in the past few months. I had to get fingerprinted, with my fingerprints sent to the FBI. I had to line up references from former managers and friends, which is a favor I would prefer not to ask for from my friends and former co-workers and managers. And I also had to go through a technical interview. Of all those things, the technical interview was the least taxing for me.
That aside, I don't disagree that the hiring process, work environment and so forth could use improvement. The only way to do that is some kind of organization. For low level help desk people maybe a union. For higher end people, maybe a professional association like (as you said) doctors and lawyers have. Or a "guild". Or whatever.
I should also point out that people who were interested in this have pointed out deficiencies and strengths of the old line groups such as IEEE-USA, the ACM and all of those groups. Organization and education (among ourselves - about working conditions, not just technical matters) are what is needed. I have spent time on this in the past, and am still willing to spend time, and even some money, regarding this, even if it looks like a lot of the effort could be wasted or futile. A lot of effort on these things is never completely wasted, a group of people who put a lot of time and energy into this always have some effect, the only question is how much they think it is worth it, and I think it is worth some effort. Also, some things are more of a waste than others - you have to pick the right organizational structure - what will work - a union? A professional association like the ABA or AMA? Groups interested in this learn by doing, odds are the first year or so will have a lot of wasted effort, until somewhere down the road you have a clear idea of what and can not be done.
When I print something out, it has all that usual crap of the page number, page title and all of that junk. Which would be fine if I could turn that header and footer stuff off - but I can't, or at least not as easily as I can with Firefox, or even Explorer. I guess I could go into the source code and futz with it, but it is easier for me to just use Firefox when I'm doing work. It is not just an aesthetic thing for myself, I'm printing out things like shipping labels and business related letters that can't have that stuff on them.
In February 2002, the World Economic Forum was held in New York City, and I planned to (and did) protest it. The alter-globalization movement had been protesting these things for years. New York newspaper headlines screamed that "anarchists" had better not come to NYC and cause trouble with the WTC still smoking and all of the claptrap. What made it even more nonsensical is it hadn't been planned for an NYC meeting, Giuliani had convinced them to move the meeting to NYC after 9/11/01, despite knowing the WEF always brought out massive demonstrations since evil types like Bill Gates always hobnobbed at such events. So working to bring a demonstration magnet to NYC after 9/11, and then decrying that there demonstrators would bother New Yorkers still grieving from 9/11 sounded a little hollow.
Anyhow, a friend of mine suggested we go to a building in New York called ABC No Rio. They are a "progressive community space" type of place they have art shows there, live bands, a progressive/zine library, a feed the poor group Food Not Bombs and that type of thing. Anyhow we went in and they were organizing a demonstration. I should point out I had never been there and my friend had rarely been there, we were just nearby and at the spur of the moment he wanted to see if a friend of his was there.
I should also point out that of all the progressive demonstrations in the US in the past twenty years, I can't recall an instance of physical violence against someone. There may have been one or more cases, but I can't think of any. A handful of way-out folks smashed windows in Seattle, burned down some new unoccupied houses in a new housing development somewhere out west and the like, and in the case of the latter a massive federal investigation sent some of those people to jail. So one has to question the need for a massive federal "monitoring" of progressive groups is needed for. Especially considering the history of these things - Nixon had a bunch of burglars break into the Democratic Party election headquarters, the FBI used these extraordinary powers granted to it to interfere in the political sphere - stating as a goal the need to stop a "black messiah" from arising, which including bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and leaking tapes they made of him to the press, particularly extra-marital affairs. When Warsaw Pact secret police did such things in their countries, it was decried as tyranny here - when our secret police work to dismantle organization of African-American and progressive people (as the FBI did, Google COINTELPRO), it is soon forgotten and you hear the need for the PATRIOT Act and the like giving power to the same people who abused it for political purposes before.
Anyhow me and my friend leave ABC No Rio. We hail a taxi and go about half a mile to Greenwich Village. My friend wants to go to a bar he went to a few months before, but can't find it. Anyhow, he realizes we are headed in the exact opposite direction than we should be, so we both do a 180 degree turn and start walking the way we had been coming. A man in his late 40s who looks very out of place for Greenwich Village on a Friday night was about 10 meters behind us. He sees us loop around and then has a look in his eye for a second, and then he also spins around and walks the other way. All things considered, especially his facial reaction when we both did a sudden 180 and began walking towards him, I know as sure as the sky is blue that he was following us, and that he was following us because we had gone into ABC No Rio. ACLU lawsuits and that type of thing after the WEF protests, and after the Republican National Convention talked about the extent of the surveillance, and fortified in my mind what I already instinctively knew was true. What scared me was the extent of the surveillance. I would dislike, but would not be as alarmed by them monitoring who went in and out of that building (where nothing was even happening! Except for planning a legal political demonstration that even the AFL-CIO was protesting in). But to follow two guys across New York City, through cab rides, on foot, who had very little to do with even organizing the demonstration much less doing anything violent during it, spooked me.
Well, I think the question can be answered with a question - why not just use Microsoft Vista? I'd have less to worry about than Ubuntu.
I like Gnewsense because it is free as in freedom, as opposed to free as in beer. I have no need of the binary blobs and such that Ubuntu has. Using Gnewsense makes me aware of what is free and not free. There still is no full-fledged free Java right now (although Sun says they're releasing a free version of Java). Yes there are free clones, but not a full-fledged one like Sun's. This is something I didn't know until I began using an OS in the Debian family (previously I used Debian, now I use Gnewsense). It also makes me aware of the freeness of stuff like Flash on sites like Youtube. I use gnash, which has problems, and I haven't even fully hooked it into Firefox yet - I grab the Youtube URL and run videos on the command line. It also makes me aware of free Flash alternatives like SVG.
I use Gnewsense as my home desktop. I have been happy with it. Really it is just Ubuntu with the binary blobs ripped out. When I have a problem with something, I search the web for with the error message and Ubuntu instead of Gnewsense, since there are more Ubuntu users.
I have been a UNIX systems administrator for over a decade. The only messing around in C language I have ever done on the job is in trying to get a program I downloaded to compile on my particular platform. With packaging of applications becoming more dominant, I do this less now. Messing around with the kernel is also rather limited, other than say changing the semaphore and shared memory segments on a Solaris because it will be running Oracle.
As far as an engineering/architecture group, few places I have worked have had one. The Fortune 1000 company I work for currently had a UNIX systems architect/engineer, but then we were decentralized so that position no longer exists. That position was really just full-time project work, something I'd done in the past, although perhaps the projects were a little longer term. Not much C language or kernel messing.
I worked for a Fortune 100 company that had a lot of IT centralized, and had a real UNIX engineering team. Most of the engineers were split up by function - one was in charge of backups, one was in charge of SANs and so forth. Most of what they did was evaluate different solutions and then work with different products - Veritas Netbackup, Brocade switches etc.
There are positions where you really get to dig into the system, but there are not a lot of them out there, relatively.
My shop has several hundred Red Hat boxes. What do we do with the money we pay Red Hat? Primarily it is to have access to their web site and get the ISOs for different Red Hat versions, as well as individual packages if needed. Or we use up2date/yum on the machine itself to grab packages.
One thing I can say in favor of Red Hat. I used to use Debian at home (now I use Gnewsense, a knockoff of Ubuntu, which is a knockoff of Debian). For many months, the "search the contents of a package" feature was disabled on Debian's website. So if I wanted the program "sftp" but didn't know it was in package openssh-client, I could search there and discover that. But Debian just decided to take it down for a few months. Red Hat would not do that for so long, if at all, and if they did I could call and complain.
One problem with Red Hat versus Sun is if a kernel panics or whatever with Solaris, I can send the core dump to Sun and that's it - the control the OS, they control the architecture (except for Host Bus Adapters and the like), and that not only makes core dumps easier (netdump seems to be preferred on Red Hat, which I think blows), but makes them easier to diagnose - it is all coming from one source. With Red Hat you don't know if is Red Hat that did something, or your hardware vendor (Dell/HP/etc.) Which means they can point fingers at one another, with Sun can not do as it is all coming from one source. OS and hardware all from one source has its advantages. Also, the usual answer from Red Hat and the hardware vendors is we should have everything patched to the latest version, which we never do, so reporting it is pointless. Even if we had everything patched, since unlike Solaris it won't be dumping core to a local disk, we would have to go through the effort of a project where all machines could netdump somewhere. As we only have a few systems go out a year, and do not have the resources to keep all machines up to the latest patch levels, system crashes are often a mystery, which irks me, but due to our limited resources and the shortcomings of the Red Hat model, is just how it is.
The altruistic comments mentioned are silly I think. My boss is not going to shell out money to Red Hat because it goes to "the greater good". If I could get my company to send money somewhere, it would be to the Free Software Foundation.
One thought that occurred to me is companies like Red Hat might be transitional in some ways. Companies wanting to move to something open want hand holding at first. I can think of many examples like this in my career. I worked at a company where we hired Java developers and started using a professional Java application server, which we became unhappy with and then began using Tomcat. The developers said their confidence with being able to develop for the professional server is what let them try Tomcat, which worked out very well for us. The move from Solaris to Red Hat to free as in beer Linux is another example. I see another example with MySQL recently - looking to save money, a division is going to use MySQL for a new project as opposed to Oracle, which they traditionally use. After a few years, might the DBAs drop professional MySQL and go with a non-supported MySQL? Who knows?
I think the companies like Red Hat and MySQL, if they are adaptive and fine tune their business strategies, can survive this transitional stuff. The more traditional companies, the Microsofts and Oracles and Suns are who should be worried.
You speak of free contracts between labor and companies, but you don't speak of the laws business has put on the books. Such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. It allows states to forbid companies and unions to agree to contracts that a union will exclusively provide labor to a company. So a private company can sign an exclusive agreement with another company, but a union can't. A union can't have a secondary boycott - meaning they can't refuse to say handle packages delivered to businesses still doing business with a targeted business. A union has to give a 60 day notice before a strike, and the president of the US can force workers back to work if there is a "national emergency", with the definition of that begin very vague - Bush made West Coast dockworkers back to work because he said there was a "national emergency", and so have other presidents.
There are tons of laws passed due to the lobbying of big business that prevent workers from working when they want, working with who they want, or coming to a free contract between themselves and a company. These laws stay on the books, yet the only laws you seem to have a problem with are those to the advantage of people who work - the laws which protect lazy heirs like Paris Hilton collecting their dividend checks you seem to have no problem with.
I think this is best explainable by analogy. The nematode (C. elegans) is a worm that is about 1 millimeter in length. It has 302 neurons and about 7000 synapses. These are mapped out, its genome is known, it is a very easy species to study. Yet its brain is barely understood in practical terms, e.g. why it would move left as opposed to right.
Now look at the human brain, which has, we believe 100 billion neurons, and even more synapses connecting those neurons together.
If we don't understand the nematode with its 302 neurons, why are we going to understand the complexity of the human brain with its 100 billion neurons? Especially since some scientists believe evolution has help design the brains architecture so that it is getting a large amount of efficiency from those neurons?
Aside from pre-installed Windows on PCs I buy (which I usually wipe), I rarely pay for software - in the past few years the only thing I bought was World of Warcraft. I run Gnewsense on my desktop at home and always look for libre software first.
Last year I began looking for some business accounting software (or maybe even ERP). One important thing for me to point out is I know next-to-nothing about accounting. So all those wizards and helpful hints and documentation are a must for me. So I took a look at what was out there, and what people said about their experience with the open stuff out there - Postbooks, Pbooks, OpenERP, Phreebooks. I also took a look at it. Some of these have some of their program as open source, but for it to be actually functional you need to buy non-open components from them. And for the open stuff, the stuff that I could put together just didn't do it for me. I had downloaded a free (with very limited capability) Quickbooks, and it had all the wizards and help menus and all of that for someone like me who knows little about accounting. It was also very easy to import files from my bank and so forth into Quickbooks.
Accounting is a must for any small business, and Peachtree, Quicken and Microsoft all have accounting packages for small business which a non-accountant can figure out how to use, and a non-technician can figure out how to install. They all also have upgrade paths if the business grows and people want more functionality or ERP integration. There is nothing approaching Quickbooks in the libre software world currently.
Athens was a democratic society, and Socrates preached against democracy, he was for dictatorship. His followers were mostly wealthy young men, like Critias and Alcibiades, who preferred Sparta to Athens, some of whom sided with Sparta over Athens, destroyed Athens democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship and so on. Socrates was executed for poisoning young minds, which he certainly did.
With regards to "being an introvert, I'm not enamored of the idea of exercising in full view". An out of shape person walking into a gym alone for the first time (and the second time) can be a little intimidating. There can be a lot of young, muscular guys full of testosterone walking around, especially around the free weights, who are already buff while you are not yet. Also the bench press machine is right in front of the treadmill, and it can be embarrassing to initially struggle with 8 repetitions of 50 pounds in front of some cute, fit girls jogging when the last guy just bench pressed his own weight. My suggestions, one, go with a friend. I used to go with my friend but then I moved. My friend here was going to go with me but he can't now for various reasons. I'd rather go with a friend, but plenty of people come in do do cardio or muscle work by themselves. Another suggestion is see what the gym is like at different times of the day. The old gym I used to go to and the gym I go to now both have busy times and times when the gym is almost empty. You sound like you'd prefer to work out in a near empty gym. When it is really busy it is a pain - you have to wait for a machine, and then when you get on it someone is hovering over you wanting to use it next. Thirdly, go to gyms around where you live and/or work and see what they are like. I go to night school at college as I'm going for a degree currently. So lots of professors and grad students and that type are there - they have pens and memo pads (or even PDAs) where they write down what their routine was that day, which is kind of a dorky thing you would have never seen at the last gym I was at which was more macho. Also, the last gym I was in had a separate free weight and Nautilus area, so the built, macho young guys were usually in the free weight room and the Nautilus and cardio area was more yuppie.
Then there is cardio exercise. Legs are the best thing to get cardio exercise from - jogging or walking fast, stair climbing, cycling. They are the best because the blood goes from your heart to your leg, a longer distance than say rowing a boat, where the blood is only going from your heart to your arms, a shorter distance. You should do cardiovascular exercise about 3 times a week, for about an hour each time (or 30 minutes minimum at the very least). Make sure to warm up for at least 5 minutes before the exercise, and also wind down for about five minutes at the end. It is more about time spent then effort exerted - you want your heart beating at about 65% of its maximum capacity. More is not necessarily better - if you are really going at it and your heart is 80% of maximum, you are burning more calories per minute but they are not fat calories being burned. With a cardio workout, 3 hours a week of a decent workout is better than 2 hours of a super-intense workout of climbing a fast-moving stair-climbing machine. Stair-climbing machines are for people who have been getting plenty of cardio exercise for months and who are in good shape. You can read more about cardio and your heart rate and so forth elsewhere.
Stretches are good to do as well. They give you more flexibility. You should do stretches during or after your workout, not before it. I stretch my calves, hamstrings, lower back and rotator cuff muscles. Just like everything else, do not overdo it, stretch for 30 seconds (less if you're new to it) and just until it's stretched, don't stretch until you're in pain. If you're busy some day you can skip stretching, but you should do it when you can.
Then there's diet. Find out how many calories someone your height and age should be eating a day. Then keep track of it. It is not hard to do. Try to cut down on fat, especially saturated fat. Fat has more calories per gram than protein or a carbohydrate. After fat, it is good to cut down on sugar as you probably get way more than enough of it, it is putting weight on you, rots your teeth etc. Eat nutritious food, you probably get more than enough protein but get
For me the biggest problem is time for cardiovascular exercise (jogging, bicycling etc.) You are supposed to do many hours a week and I don't have the time. I try to do as much as I can though. I ride my bike to the gym, so I get some extra cardio exercise on the way there and back.
As you are probably the analytical sort, you can definitely have a very efficient routine. One thing is everything helps each other - a good diet of food lets you maintain or even lose weight, while still having plenty of carbohydrates to burn during cardiovascular exercise and protein to build muscles in the day or two you take to recover from muscular exercise. Muscular exercise builds muscles which helps burn fat when you do cardiovascular exercise (bigger muscles actually cause a weight gain, but this is a good thing - while people talk about losing weight, what you're really trying to do is lower your BMI - body mass index so that you go from obese/overweight to the normal BMI range).
Most muscle groups have an "opposite" - quadriceps have hamstrings, hip adductors have hip abductors and so forth. You should begin workout routines with your largest muscles and go down to the smallest ones - from largest to smallest it is quadriceps, hamstrings, hip adductors, hip abductors, pectoralis major, latissmus dorsi, deltoids, biceps, triceps, lower back, abdominals and neck. This is because quadriceps are large and need a lot of energy, but abdominals are smaller and don't so you'll have energy to do them.
If you have not done muscle exercises for many weeks (or months, or years) - do not exercise one muscle. Do not exercise just your biceps. Do exercises that use more than one muscle groups. Chest press uses the pecs, the triceps and the deltoids (the anterior deltoid). Leg press uses the hamstrings and the quadriceps. So beginners should begin with exercises that use several muscle groups. Once you've built your muscles up a little (in a few months), you can start concentrating on just your biceps, or just your pecs etc. Also don't kill yourself. You build muscles by TEARING your muscles. You do not want a giant tear, that is an injury. You want small tears that protein will rebuild and which in 2-3 days you can work on (and tear, slightly) again.
You can build a muscle with only 16 exercises a week. And it does not have to be all-out exertion - just 75% of what your body is capable of. More than 100 exercises of a muscle (at 75%+ capablity) a week is unneeded and may even be counterproductive. Meaning only 16-100 repetitions (at 75% maximum capability) are needed a week to build it. The best thing to do is look on the web or in an exercise book for how much a person your age should be able to do for each exercise (chest press, hip adductor, row, leg press etc.) Then get on the machine and do one or two repetitions with 0 pounds (or very little), just to warm up your muscles. Make sure the seat and everything is adjusted to your height. If you're supposed to be able to do an exercise at 50 lbs., start at 30 lbs. or so. See if you can do 8 repetitions of it, with each repetition being 6 seconds - 2 seconds positive (pushing out or up or whatever) and 4 seconds negative (a smooth move of 4 seconds of the weight coming back down, with some muscle resistance against the weight). Eight 6 second repetitions of 1 or more muscles and you are doing muscular exercise. If you can't do 8, start with less weight. If you can do eight keep going. Up to twelve 6 second repetitions is still muscular exercise. If you are able to do 12, then increase the weight in the next set of exercises. Wait a minute or two (or more) between sets to relax your muscles. Form is very important, if you are doing it in a jerky and uneven manner you are not getting a benefit. You usually get more muscle from the 4 second negative/resistance phase of the muscle exercise since pushing out or up is inherently prone to be done in a non-smooth or jerky manner. Usually what I do is do 8-12 reps of the maximum I am able to do 8-1
We might like free software because it is free as in speech, but most companies tend to like it because it is free as in beer. Except for our Oracle databases and a few legacy systems in the process of being migrated, all of our systems have been migrated from Solaris to Red Hat. We are mostly on Jboss, with our proprietary Java application servers being legacy ones being migrated off of. We are mostly migrated from Vignette to Alfresco.
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Tight budgets are the time when management is more willing to "take a chance" on an x86-64 Red Hat server over a more expensive Sun server. Or a free software application, with support from a company like MySQL, JBoss etc. rather than Oracle, or one of the many java app. server products. Management has been happy with the changes thusfar.
I am a seller on eBay. In January of this year I decided to really go all out (in terms of the time and capital I can spend). I called up a reseller and asked for a good price for a large order and sold $1500-2000 a month mostly of an item which sells in the $40 range. Then they jacked their fees up and there was a sellers strike for a week, which I participated in. Then buying seemed to slack off (not just for me but my competitors). Then all my suppliers began raising their fees - USPS, Uline (which sells shipping supplies like boxes) and finally my reseller, who supposedly had the manufacturer jack up their fees so my item costs went up. Then eBay announced you would not get a discount break if even a small handful of your customers thought you charged too much for shipping, which is fine, but they did it retroactively. I jacked up my price and lowered shipping, which means eBay gets the rest of my money. I am doing this after work with a small amount of capital, large companies who do this thing on a regular basis are able to charge lower prices. I can't compete with them, in this area anyhow.
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I can't complain that I didn't expect this to happen. Things tend towards monopoly. One definition of a monopoly is rates can be raised unilaterally and the company will not suffer ill effects. eBay just did this, did they suffer ill effects for this? The big sellers will crowd out the small sellers, this is capitalism. Anyone who isn't expecting this or thinks it is unfair - go to your local evangelical church and hook up with some Amway/Quixtar MLM nonsense about being your own boss. I work, at night I work on my degree, and I do this side business as a lark. I have had a positive partnership relationship with some people, and have some tricks up my sleeve in things I have been doing with the one edge I have - my computer (programming/system) skills.
This doesn't mean I don't think unfair things are happening - rich people, many of whom inherited and didn't earn a dime of their money, are screwing over everyone else in a multitude of ways. But I have to laugh at people who whine about how big companies competing with them or not wanting to deal with them are killing their dream of running their own business and being independent, or even more laughably, rich. You sound as deluded as those people at evangelical churches who go in for that MLM "be your own boss" nonsense. You will become a servant to capital sooner or later, in one way or another, whether it's at a W-2 job, or you begging banks or suppliers to give you a credit line, or begging for angel, VC and IPO money. Otherwise you might as well pick up a red flag and go around like Che Guevara. Serviam or non serviam.
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Wikipedia is the crown jewel of GFDL. But - GFDL was really originally written to deal with technical documentation to accompany GPL software, not to deal with content on wikis etc. But it seemed like a good license when Wikipedia started so they used it. There is also a lot of Creative Commons content out there that Wikipedia wants to work with, and the GFDL provisions made working everything together difficult.
So what does Stallman do? He magnaminously allows the crown jewel of using GFDL to move towards the CC world, if Wikipedia wants. Can we imagine Microsoft, or SCO or proprietary licensed software companies doing this? No. And it is helping the digital commons community, although from now on Stallman and the FSF will not being getting kudos for the license for Wikipedia content from now on, because Stallman was so gracious about it.
There is a difference between holding to your principles, and being stubborn just for the sake of ego or whatever. Stallman has always held to his principles regarding freedom. But here is an example of him working with others, and being flexible, to help the greater cause of the digital commons. I have to read for years about how inflexible Stallman supposedly is, here is an example to the contrary. Because Stallman is flexible, he is only inflexible about his principles and about freedom.
Twitter a crash prone, non-scaling application
Well I can't blame them that much aside from an initial fatal architectural decision, namely to build Twitter on Ruby-on-Rails. Its clear which one went by the wayside in the Fast, Cheap, Good equation with that.
What about the army's organized response into Detroit in 1967?
I can't even count how many times the US army has marched against its own poor, working poor and working class citizens through its history. Starting with George Washington marching what would become the US army to Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion right up until 1992.
Of course, the Chinese students were all docile angels who just wanted democracy from their tyrannical government, and the people in LA's poor communities are just dirty rioters against the already perfect US government of freedom and liberty. So its obviously completely different.
Americans are so propagandized that people who protest US government violence (like against Rodney King or Cambodia) are rioters who deserved to be killed (like in Kent State or in LA), while people protesting against countries in competition with the US (China) are all docile, non-violent people who want democracy, that exposition beyond a point is futile. From experience, I know it is mostly futile in trying to explain to a working class American religious fundamentalist, of which there are many, that people die when they get old, and don't fly away to some paradise in the clouds; that some Jewish carpenter 2000 years ago did not walk on water, raise people from the dead, magically create loaves and fish, turn water into wine and the like; that there is not some bearded man in the clouds watching everything they do and so forth. Likewise, more white collar Americans who are more socially liberal generally have a very warped view of the world outside the United States, which they tend to know very little of.
Except those two students at Jackson State that were killed. Or the hundreds of students who were beaten, injured and hospitalized. Other than that, no significant interference from the government.
Philip Agee was a CIA case officer whose conscience troubled him so much with regards to his involvement in supporting dictatorships in Latin America and putting down popular worker movements, that he exposed what the CIA up to. The CIA did everything it could to try to prevent publication. In 1979, his passport was revoked. In 1982 Congress passed a law in an attempt to prosecute him ( a law which tripped up Scooter Libby in the Bush administration incidentally - but Bush commuted his prison sentence - the law exists to ensnare only the left, not the right, obviously).
You mean like when the Marines and Army marched into Los Angeles in 1992? But of course it wasn't like they were protesting government injustice and brutality in LA in 1992, right?
Yes, students protested at Jackson State and elsewhere - 2 of the Jackson state students shot dead. Shot dead because they were protesting that the US army invaded a neutral country - Cambodia. People all over China protested in the days after Tienanmen Square.
One of the students killed at Kent State was William Schroeder - he was 120 yards from the National Guard, was holding a folder full of school papers when shot - in the back. He was also not involved in the protest in any way, not that the government should kill people protesting invasion of a neutral country anyhow. As a matter of fact, he was in ROTC. Your contrasts are laughable. More of a full-scale riot was going on in Beijing when the army came in than ever happened at Kent State. Yes - fires, property damage, officials being attacked in Beijing. In fact, the Chinese government was much more conciliatory than the US ever was. A member of the Politburo went to the square to try to negotiate with the students, but the students took a hard-line. All the Kent State students ever saw in response to their protests were bullets. You're spreading a propaganda meme more than that you would probably accuse the Chinese government of. Beijing was a land of all pacifistic, docile protesters for democracy, while Kent State (and presumably LA) were all rioters who deserved to be killed. Things are not as clear-cut as you claim for them to be. I couldn't IMAGINE a high government official going to somewhere like Kent State and attempting to negotiate with people protesting the US invading a neutral country - of course they're only going to get batons and bullets - but we're the land of freedom, not the land of Chicom tyranny, of course.
When I print in Chrome, I get page header and footer information (date and time, web page URL etc.), and I can't get rid of them. I print out shipping labels from USPS.com and Paypal.com, and I don't want to see that there - Firefox and IE handle this easily, Chrome doesn't handle it easily or at all. Whenever I know I am going to be printing a label out I switch to Firefox for a while - for every tab I have open, since having Firefox and Chrome both open uses up too much resources. Also for reasons others mention - no Linux version. On Firefox, if a NSFW image pops up for some reason, I can right click, go to "Block images from whatever.com" and avoid a lot of problems. I find it very convenient. OTOH, there are things I like. I like that newly opened tabs open near the calling tab instead of as the last tab. I like that one crashing Youtube video doesn't bring all my tabs and the browser down. I like how most browsed pages and the like appear automatically for me.
I respect experts in the physical sciences like physics, chemistry, mathematics and so forth. Especially since most of them are ready to drop everything they know if a better theory comes along (relativity, natural selection and common descent etc.)
However, the social scientists are filled with people who are often just part of a propaganda system. Would you trust an Iranian college professor who taught the modern history of the United States and Europe? Then why would you trust an American college professor teaching the modern history of Iran? The experts on God and Jesus are priests and theologians - do you trust their expertise on Jesus's supposed miraculous powers? Who is an expert on abortion?
One of the big problems with Wikipedia as I see it is there is a portion of Wikipedia that expertise works (natural sciences - with the exception of people like Gene "TimeCube guy" Ray and other cranks). Then there is a portion where expertise does not work (articles about the West Bank, Sarah Palin, abortion etc.) Magazines doing a retrospective on something sometimes have a left-wing and right-wing person write a page on the topic. With Wikipedia, and Knol, you have one source, an "expert". Bakunin said it best over a century ago -
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others."
I applied for a job where I was placed at a Fortune 100 financial company. I had to urinate in a cup so they could see if I smoked weed in the past few months. I had to get fingerprinted, with my fingerprints sent to the FBI. I had to line up references from former managers and friends, which is a favor I would prefer not to ask for from my friends and former co-workers and managers. And I also had to go through a technical interview. Of all those things, the technical interview was the least taxing for me.
That aside, I don't disagree that the hiring process, work environment and so forth could use improvement. The only way to do that is some kind of organization. For low level help desk people maybe a union. For higher end people, maybe a professional association like (as you said) doctors and lawyers have. Or a "guild". Or whatever.
I should also point out that people who were interested in this have pointed out deficiencies and strengths of the old line groups such as IEEE-USA, the ACM and all of those groups. Organization and education (among ourselves - about working conditions, not just technical matters) are what is needed. I have spent time on this in the past, and am still willing to spend time, and even some money, regarding this, even if it looks like a lot of the effort could be wasted or futile. A lot of effort on these things is never completely wasted, a group of people who put a lot of time and energy into this always have some effect, the only question is how much they think it is worth it, and I think it is worth some effort. Also, some things are more of a waste than others - you have to pick the right organizational structure - what will work - a union? A professional association like the ABA or AMA? Groups interested in this learn by doing, odds are the first year or so will have a lot of wasted effort, until somewhere down the road you have a clear idea of what and can not be done.
When I print something out, it has all that usual crap of the page number, page title and all of that junk. Which would be fine if I could turn that header and footer stuff off - but I can't, or at least not as easily as I can with Firefox, or even Explorer. I guess I could go into the source code and futz with it, but it is easier for me to just use Firefox when I'm doing work. It is not just an aesthetic thing for myself, I'm printing out things like shipping labels and business related letters that can't have that stuff on them.
In February 2002, the World Economic Forum was held in New York City, and I planned to (and did) protest it. The alter-globalization movement had been protesting these things for years. New York newspaper headlines screamed that "anarchists" had better not come to NYC and cause trouble with the WTC still smoking and all of the claptrap. What made it even more nonsensical is it hadn't been planned for an NYC meeting, Giuliani had convinced them to move the meeting to NYC after 9/11/01, despite knowing the WEF always brought out massive demonstrations since evil types like Bill Gates always hobnobbed at such events. So working to bring a demonstration magnet to NYC after 9/11, and then decrying that there demonstrators would bother New Yorkers still grieving from 9/11 sounded a little hollow.
Anyhow, a friend of mine suggested we go to a building in New York called ABC No Rio. They are a "progressive community space" type of place they have art shows there, live bands, a progressive/zine library, a feed the poor group Food Not Bombs and that type of thing. Anyhow we went in and they were organizing a demonstration. I should point out I had never been there and my friend had rarely been there, we were just nearby and at the spur of the moment he wanted to see if a friend of his was there.
I should also point out that of all the progressive demonstrations in the US in the past twenty years, I can't recall an instance of physical violence against someone. There may have been one or more cases, but I can't think of any. A handful of way-out folks smashed windows in Seattle, burned down some new unoccupied houses in a new housing development somewhere out west and the like, and in the case of the latter a massive federal investigation sent some of those people to jail. So one has to question the need for a massive federal "monitoring" of progressive groups is needed for. Especially considering the history of these things - Nixon had a bunch of burglars break into the Democratic Party election headquarters, the FBI used these extraordinary powers granted to it to interfere in the political sphere - stating as a goal the need to stop a "black messiah" from arising, which including bugging Martin Luther King Jr. and leaking tapes they made of him to the press, particularly extra-marital affairs. When Warsaw Pact secret police did such things in their countries, it was decried as tyranny here - when our secret police work to dismantle organization of African-American and progressive people (as the FBI did, Google COINTELPRO), it is soon forgotten and you hear the need for the PATRIOT Act and the like giving power to the same people who abused it for political purposes before.
Anyhow me and my friend leave ABC No Rio. We hail a taxi and go about half a mile to Greenwich Village. My friend wants to go to a bar he went to a few months before, but can't find it. Anyhow, he realizes we are headed in the exact opposite direction than we should be, so we both do a 180 degree turn and start walking the way we had been coming. A man in his late 40s who looks very out of place for Greenwich Village on a Friday night was about 10 meters behind us. He sees us loop around and then has a look in his eye for a second, and then he also spins around and walks the other way. All things considered, especially his facial reaction when we both did a sudden 180 and began walking towards him, I know as sure as the sky is blue that he was following us, and that he was following us because we had gone into ABC No Rio. ACLU lawsuits and that type of thing after the WEF protests, and after the Republican National Convention talked about the extent of the surveillance, and fortified in my mind what I already instinctively knew was true. What scared me was the extent of the surveillance. I would dislike, but would not be as alarmed by them monitoring who went in and out of that building (where nothing was even happening! Except for planning a legal political demonstration that even the AFL-CIO was protesting in). But to follow two guys across New York City, through cab rides, on foot, who had very little to do with even organizing the demonstration much less doing anything violent during it, spooked me.
Well, I think the question can be answered with a question - why not just use Microsoft Vista? I'd have less to worry about than Ubuntu.
I like Gnewsense because it is free as in freedom, as opposed to free as in beer. I have no need of the binary blobs and such that Ubuntu has. Using Gnewsense makes me aware of what is free and not free. There still is no full-fledged free Java right now (although Sun says they're releasing a free version of Java). Yes there are free clones, but not a full-fledged one like Sun's. This is something I didn't know until I began using an OS in the Debian family (previously I used Debian, now I use Gnewsense). It also makes me aware of the freeness of stuff like Flash on sites like Youtube. I use gnash, which has problems, and I haven't even fully hooked it into Firefox yet - I grab the Youtube URL and run videos on the command line. It also makes me aware of free Flash alternatives like SVG.
I use Gnewsense as my home desktop. I have been happy with it. Really it is just Ubuntu with the binary blobs ripped out. When I have a problem with something, I search the web for with the error message and Ubuntu instead of Gnewsense, since there are more Ubuntu users.
I have been a UNIX systems administrator for over a decade. The only messing around in C language I have ever done on the job is in trying to get a program I downloaded to compile on my particular platform. With packaging of applications becoming more dominant, I do this less now. Messing around with the kernel is also rather limited, other than say changing the semaphore and shared memory segments on a Solaris because it will be running Oracle.
As far as an engineering/architecture group, few places I have worked have had one. The Fortune 1000 company I work for currently had a UNIX systems architect/engineer, but then we were decentralized so that position no longer exists. That position was really just full-time project work, something I'd done in the past, although perhaps the projects were a little longer term. Not much C language or kernel messing.
I worked for a Fortune 100 company that had a lot of IT centralized, and had a real UNIX engineering team. Most of the engineers were split up by function - one was in charge of backups, one was in charge of SANs and so forth. Most of what they did was evaluate different solutions and then work with different products - Veritas Netbackup, Brocade switches etc.
There are positions where you really get to dig into the system, but there are not a lot of them out there, relatively.
My shop has several hundred Red Hat boxes. What do we do with the money we pay Red Hat? Primarily it is to have access to their web site and get the ISOs for different Red Hat versions, as well as individual packages if needed. Or we use up2date/yum on the machine itself to grab packages.
One thing I can say in favor of Red Hat. I used to use Debian at home (now I use Gnewsense, a knockoff of Ubuntu, which is a knockoff of Debian). For many months, the "search the contents of a package" feature was disabled on Debian's website. So if I wanted the program "sftp" but didn't know it was in package openssh-client, I could search there and discover that. But Debian just decided to take it down for a few months. Red Hat would not do that for so long, if at all, and if they did I could call and complain.
One problem with Red Hat versus Sun is if a kernel panics or whatever with Solaris, I can send the core dump to Sun and that's it - the control the OS, they control the architecture (except for Host Bus Adapters and the like), and that not only makes core dumps easier (netdump seems to be preferred on Red Hat, which I think blows), but makes them easier to diagnose - it is all coming from one source. With Red Hat you don't know if is Red Hat that did something, or your hardware vendor (Dell/HP/etc.) Which means they can point fingers at one another, with Sun can not do as it is all coming from one source. OS and hardware all from one source has its advantages. Also, the usual answer from Red Hat and the hardware vendors is we should have everything patched to the latest version, which we never do, so reporting it is pointless. Even if we had everything patched, since unlike Solaris it won't be dumping core to a local disk, we would have to go through the effort of a project where all machines could netdump somewhere. As we only have a few systems go out a year, and do not have the resources to keep all machines up to the latest patch levels, system crashes are often a mystery, which irks me, but due to our limited resources and the shortcomings of the Red Hat model, is just how it is.
The altruistic comments mentioned are silly I think. My boss is not going to shell out money to Red Hat because it goes to "the greater good". If I could get my company to send money somewhere, it would be to the Free Software Foundation.
One thought that occurred to me is companies like Red Hat might be transitional in some ways. Companies wanting to move to something open want hand holding at first. I can think of many examples like this in my career. I worked at a company where we hired Java developers and started using a professional Java application server, which we became unhappy with and then began using Tomcat. The developers said their confidence with being able to develop for the professional server is what let them try Tomcat, which worked out very well for us. The move from Solaris to Red Hat to free as in beer Linux is another example. I see another example with MySQL recently - looking to save money, a division is going to use MySQL for a new project as opposed to Oracle, which they traditionally use. After a few years, might the DBAs drop professional MySQL and go with a non-supported MySQL? Who knows?
I think the companies like Red Hat and MySQL, if they are adaptive and fine tune their business strategies, can survive this transitional stuff. The more traditional companies, the Microsofts and Oracles and Suns are who should be worried.
You speak of free contracts between labor and companies, but you don't speak of the laws business has put on the books. Such as the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. It allows states to forbid companies and unions to agree to contracts that a union will exclusively provide labor to a company. So a private company can sign an exclusive agreement with another company, but a union can't. A union can't have a secondary boycott - meaning they can't refuse to say handle packages delivered to businesses still doing business with a targeted business. A union has to give a 60 day notice before a strike, and the president of the US can force workers back to work if there is a "national emergency", with the definition of that begin very vague - Bush made West Coast dockworkers back to work because he said there was a "national emergency", and so have other presidents.
There are tons of laws passed due to the lobbying of big business that prevent workers from working when they want, working with who they want, or coming to a free contract between themselves and a company. These laws stay on the books, yet the only laws you seem to have a problem with are those to the advantage of people who work - the laws which protect lazy heirs like Paris Hilton collecting their dividend checks you seem to have no problem with.
I think this is best explainable by analogy. The nematode (C. elegans) is a worm that is about 1 millimeter in length. It has 302 neurons and about 7000 synapses. These are mapped out, its genome is known, it is a very easy species to study. Yet its brain is barely understood in practical terms, e.g. why it would move left as opposed to right.
Now look at the human brain, which has, we believe 100 billion neurons, and even more synapses connecting those neurons together.
If we don't understand the nematode with its 302 neurons, why are we going to understand the complexity of the human brain with its 100 billion neurons? Especially since some scientists believe evolution has help design the brains architecture so that it is getting a large amount of efficiency from those neurons?
Aside from pre-installed Windows on PCs I buy (which I usually wipe), I rarely pay for software - in the past few years the only thing I bought was World of Warcraft. I run Gnewsense on my desktop at home and always look for libre software first.
Last year I began looking for some business accounting software (or maybe even ERP). One important thing for me to point out is I know next-to-nothing about accounting. So all those wizards and helpful hints and documentation are a must for me. So I took a look at what was out there, and what people said about their experience with the open stuff out there - Postbooks, Pbooks, OpenERP, Phreebooks. I also took a look at it. Some of these have some of their program as open source, but for it to be actually functional you need to buy non-open components from them. And for the open stuff, the stuff that I could put together just didn't do it for me. I had downloaded a free (with very limited capability) Quickbooks, and it had all the wizards and help menus and all of that for someone like me who knows little about accounting. It was also very easy to import files from my bank and so forth into Quickbooks.
Accounting is a must for any small business, and Peachtree, Quicken and Microsoft all have accounting packages for small business which a non-accountant can figure out how to use, and a non-technician can figure out how to install. They all also have upgrade paths if the business grows and people want more functionality or ERP integration. There is nothing approaching Quickbooks in the libre software world currently.
Athens was a democratic society, and Socrates preached against democracy, he was for dictatorship. His followers were mostly wealthy young men, like Critias and Alcibiades, who preferred Sparta to Athens, some of whom sided with Sparta over Athens, destroyed Athens democracy and replaced it with a dictatorship and so on. Socrates was executed for poisoning young minds, which he certainly did.
Then there is cardio exercise. Legs are the best thing to get cardio exercise from - jogging or walking fast, stair climbing, cycling. They are the best because the blood goes from your heart to your leg, a longer distance than say rowing a boat, where the blood is only going from your heart to your arms, a shorter distance. You should do cardiovascular exercise about 3 times a week, for about an hour each time (or 30 minutes minimum at the very least). Make sure to warm up for at least 5 minutes before the exercise, and also wind down for about five minutes at the end. It is more about time spent then effort exerted - you want your heart beating at about 65% of its maximum capacity. More is not necessarily better - if you are really going at it and your heart is 80% of maximum, you are burning more calories per minute but they are not fat calories being burned. With a cardio workout, 3 hours a week of a decent workout is better than 2 hours of a super-intense workout of climbing a fast-moving stair-climbing machine. Stair-climbing machines are for people who have been getting plenty of cardio exercise for months and who are in good shape. You can read more about cardio and your heart rate and so forth elsewhere.
Stretches are good to do as well. They give you more flexibility. You should do stretches during or after your workout, not before it. I stretch my calves, hamstrings, lower back and rotator cuff muscles. Just like everything else, do not overdo it, stretch for 30 seconds (less if you're new to it) and just until it's stretched, don't stretch until you're in pain. If you're busy some day you can skip stretching, but you should do it when you can.
Then there's diet. Find out how many calories someone your height and age should be eating a day. Then keep track of it. It is not hard to do. Try to cut down on fat, especially saturated fat. Fat has more calories per gram than protein or a carbohydrate. After fat, it is good to cut down on sugar as you probably get way more than enough of it, it is putting weight on you, rots your teeth etc. Eat nutritious food, you probably get more than enough protein but get
As you are probably the analytical sort, you can definitely have a very efficient routine. One thing is everything helps each other - a good diet of food lets you maintain or even lose weight, while still having plenty of carbohydrates to burn during cardiovascular exercise and protein to build muscles in the day or two you take to recover from muscular exercise. Muscular exercise builds muscles which helps burn fat when you do cardiovascular exercise (bigger muscles actually cause a weight gain, but this is a good thing - while people talk about losing weight, what you're really trying to do is lower your BMI - body mass index so that you go from obese/overweight to the normal BMI range).
Most muscle groups have an "opposite" - quadriceps have hamstrings, hip adductors have hip abductors and so forth. You should begin workout routines with your largest muscles and go down to the smallest ones - from largest to smallest it is quadriceps, hamstrings, hip adductors, hip abductors, pectoralis major, latissmus dorsi, deltoids, biceps, triceps, lower back, abdominals and neck. This is because quadriceps are large and need a lot of energy, but abdominals are smaller and don't so you'll have energy to do them.
If you have not done muscle exercises for many weeks (or months, or years) - do not exercise one muscle. Do not exercise just your biceps. Do exercises that use more than one muscle groups. Chest press uses the pecs, the triceps and the deltoids (the anterior deltoid). Leg press uses the hamstrings and the quadriceps. So beginners should begin with exercises that use several muscle groups. Once you've built your muscles up a little (in a few months), you can start concentrating on just your biceps, or just your pecs etc. Also don't kill yourself. You build muscles by TEARING your muscles. You do not want a giant tear, that is an injury. You want small tears that protein will rebuild and which in 2-3 days you can work on (and tear, slightly) again.
You can build a muscle with only 16 exercises a week. And it does not have to be all-out exertion - just 75% of what your body is capable of. More than 100 exercises of a muscle (at 75%+ capablity) a week is unneeded and may even be counterproductive. Meaning only 16-100 repetitions (at 75% maximum capability) are needed a week to build it. The best thing to do is look on the web or in an exercise book for how much a person your age should be able to do for each exercise (chest press, hip adductor, row, leg press etc.) Then get on the machine and do one or two repetitions with 0 pounds (or very little), just to warm up your muscles. Make sure the seat and everything is adjusted to your height. If you're supposed to be able to do an exercise at 50 lbs., start at 30 lbs. or so. See if you can do 8 repetitions of it, with each repetition being 6 seconds - 2 seconds positive (pushing out or up or whatever) and 4 seconds negative (a smooth move of 4 seconds of the weight coming back down, with some muscle resistance against the weight). Eight 6 second repetitions of 1 or more muscles and you are doing muscular exercise. If you can't do 8, start with less weight. If you can do eight keep going. Up to twelve 6 second repetitions is still muscular exercise. If you are able to do 12, then increase the weight in the next set of exercises. Wait a minute or two (or more) between sets to relax your muscles. Form is very important, if you are doing it in a jerky and uneven manner you are not getting a benefit. You usually get more muscle from the 4 second negative/resistance phase of the muscle exercise since pushing out or up is inherently prone to be done in a non-smooth or jerky manner. Usually what I do is do 8-12 reps of the maximum I am able to do 8-1
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Tight budgets are the time when management is more willing to "take a chance" on an x86-64 Red Hat server over a more expensive Sun server. Or a free software application, with support from a company like MySQL, JBoss etc. rather than Oracle, or one of the many java app. server products. Management has been happy with the changes thusfar.
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I can't complain that I didn't expect this to happen. Things tend towards monopoly. One definition of a monopoly is rates can be raised unilaterally and the company will not suffer ill effects. eBay just did this, did they suffer ill effects for this? The big sellers will crowd out the small sellers, this is capitalism. Anyone who isn't expecting this or thinks it is unfair - go to your local evangelical church and hook up with some Amway/Quixtar MLM nonsense about being your own boss. I work, at night I work on my degree, and I do this side business as a lark. I have had a positive partnership relationship with some people, and have some tricks up my sleeve in things I have been doing with the one edge I have - my computer (programming/system) skills.
This doesn't mean I don't think unfair things are happening - rich people, many of whom inherited and didn't earn a dime of their money, are screwing over everyone else in a multitude of ways. But I have to laugh at people who whine about how big companies competing with them or not wanting to deal with them are killing their dream of running their own business and being independent, or even more laughably, rich. You sound as deluded as those people at evangelical churches who go in for that MLM "be your own boss" nonsense. You will become a servant to capital sooner or later, in one way or another, whether it's at a W-2 job, or you begging banks or suppliers to give you a credit line, or begging for angel, VC and IPO money. Otherwise you might as well pick up a red flag and go around like Che Guevara. Serviam or non serviam.