Speaking as a former IV drug user (cocaine, methamphetamine, and heroin), I think this is a joke. A nasty one. Once you've removed someone's will to choose (and how long before this becomes court-ordered? Slippery slope there, esp. in America; read A Clockwork Orange if you want an interesting bit of fiction that deals with a similar sort of situation), you destroy their ability to make meaningful decisions with their life. Even though I went through hell, despite the moments of glory, and most especially because it was so goddamn hard to quit, that makes my life so much more meaningful today. I did it. And you know what they say about anything worthwhile being worth fighting for.
Because my strength has been tested, because I did it my damn self (with help from friends and family, but it's still ultimately my effort that paid off), I can look myself in the mirror and be justifiably proud. That's not to say that I won't have to take care not to slip for the rest of my life, but I feel that is the measure of a man/woman's strength and intellect. To face the world as you are, and if you fail, pick yourself back up again. I won't bring spirituality into it, because even though I have my own personal beliefs, not everyone shares them or needs them.
What really needs to change is the War On Drugs. Get rid of mandatory minimum sentences, offer treatment, legalize & tax, etc. That's the only thing that has been proven to work.
BTW, I have never had any physical addiction problems w/ cocaine or meth, nor has anyone I've known. It's a matter of adjusting to a different speed of living. If you're used to spinning off at 180mph for days or weeks on end, and then you have to slow down to a normal pace, without the stimulants you're used to, then of course you'll have to take some time to adjust. Try doing the same with coffee (I can stay up for about 3-4 days w/ nothing but coffee and adrenaline) and you'll find that you have some adjusting to do as well. As for psychological addiction, yeah, it's there. It took me a long time to "outgrow" my coke/meth phase, but you have to get to the point where you decide to quit and exercise your will. Until then, it's all a fucking joke.
If you can live w/ the cameras, that's your problem. I consider any police surveillance to be a violation of my privacy. And if you like being at the mercy of people around you, go for it. I guess, for you, a 50% less chance of being involved in a violent crime is worth a 100% less chance of being able to do anything about it. What your argument boils down to is cheerleading for the UK and talking shit about the US. Hardly a very mature stance, or grounds to tell me I sound like a three year-old. I'm willing to admit that both countries have problems. You, on the other hand, seem to just want to bash the US. It's okay, I understand that it's a lot easier to do now that Diebol^Wthe Amercican people re-elected that chimp-like Yankee candy-ass rhinestone-cowboy Bush. Probably makes you feel real important, too, so keep up the good work.
One thing I definitely agree with you about is that this is very pointless. Good day...
Oh, please. I'm either lying or ignorant? I've been to the UK (London and surrounding areas in particular) quite a few times, and there's cameras all over the damn place. Not to mention signs warning you that you're under surveillance. Hell, you even fingerprint schoolkids. Mind you, America is headed that way at the moment, but as long as some of us support certaingroups that protect our essential liberties, "this too shall pass".
As for your off-the-cuff, asinine comment about guns, we don't let everyone have a gun. For example, most convicted, serious criminals don't carry guns unless they are keen on going back to the pen. Felons, that is. And pretty much anything short of causing someone (unwarranted) physical harm, serious monetary loss, or repeatedly doing something very stupid is not a felony. But let me tell you something - I would rather have the freedom to defend myself, along with the very real possibility that I might have to do so, than the illusion of safety that you Brits have. Guns are a great social equilizer (the overthrowing-the-government bit is just a particularly sweet perk for me). I don't mind holding my own and risking my own life when it's just me (matter of fact, I love a good bar brawl), but when it comes to the safety of my wife, pets, and family, I'd rather have the assurance that a loaded.45 brings to the table. Or, lemme guess, you don't have any violent crime in the UK, do you?
As for convincing one another, I don't have to convince you of anything, nor do I really even give a shit whether you carry a gun or not. I don't give a flying fuck whether anyone other than myself, my family, and my friends carries a gun, as long as they don't infringe on my right to carry one. I noticed you said you consider an unarmed populace a benefit. Good, I hope you enjoy the shit out of living in the UK. As long as you keep it over there, and don't expect me to give a rat's ass what kind of resolutions the bitch-ass U.N. passes, I think we can get along just fine.
Having said that, I didn't see the rest of the thread because I was reading through at a relatively high threshold. I just couldn't bite my tongue when I see blatantly false crap posted. And I gotta love your bit about having been through all the arguments over firearms. What a cheapshit way to try to get the last word - "nope!heard it all before! not listening! got my fingers in my ears...nyah-nyah!".
Yes, a country where citizens cannot arm themselves, and are observed on every street by the police via surveillance cameras, is definitely better than the U.S., where we are armed, surveillance is the exception, not the norm, and we have a Bill of Rights that guarantees our freedom of speech and right to bear arms, etc.
Get a grip. The U.S. might be going through some quasi-fascist regime right now (like it has w/ McCarthy and other scares), but when I live in one of the most conservative states in the nation (Texas), and I can find very few people (other than corporate shills) who support the Bush regime, methinks that will be changing shortly.
It's taking a while for all the party loyalists in the Republicans to wake up and discover that they are being hijacked by corporate interests and religious extremism, but it is happening. When my father, whose family has been voting Republican for at least a hundred years, doesn't even bother to defend Bush & Co. when I mention their latest scheme, that's a pretty sure sign that the tide is changing. As soon as the Democrats shut up their loonier elements (like the Brady Bill Bunch), we can vote the neo-cons out of office, fix their fuckups, and start moving forward again, just like we have been for the past two hundred plus years.
Microsoft announced awhile back they want to work on supercomputing
They've been pimping it the last 2-3 years at their booth at the Supercomputing Conference - note that I'm not sure whether it's been released or not, because other than staring at the awesome projection units they use and laughing at the MS employees trying to boot up their systems ( nothing makes you realize how bad the windows guys have things until you watch them trying to reconfigure one of their systems and arbitrarily failing, though 2K/XP is an order or magnitude better than their previous attempts at an operating system ), I stay the hell away from that booth.
It's interesting to see your response vacillate between patronizing, psuedo-objectivity and some rather intelligent, rational statements. My original statement was that my experience and a lifetime of observation contradicted a comment in your original post, and I stand by it. Everything since just proves that, in addition to having no idea what opiate withdrawals feel like, you have also taken most of what I have said as a personal attack ( when what I have done primarily is state what I view to be an observable fact, and my experience and credentials for being able to make such statements w/ any credibility ), leading me to conclude that you are engaging in a bit of trolling for fun ( albeit, I think you've done an excellent job of it, and I agree with some of your statements, but you are going a bit too far out w/ the "Oh, my"'s and whatnot - if you're trying to pull someone's chain, it's best not to exhibit a sense of humor yourself ). It's okay, I understand that not everyone has a very fulfilling life outside of/., and I definitely don't mind a bit of dialogue/debate. Anyways, thanks for a bit of amusement, cheers...
I stand by my statements...career in nursing has involved work with...substance abuse clients Don't tell me about pain, honey.
Don't talk to me about pain, Virginia. I spent 17 years ingesting almost every chemical known to man, so I got to observe the effects firsthand, as well as dealing with more mundane pain ( stabbed twice, caught on fire twice, bodily hit by a motor vehicle twice, multiple falls from two story or higher buildings, gone head-first through two windshields in accidents that totalled all vehicles involved, etc. ). I've broken about half the bones in my body ( and yes, I know that there are hundreds of bones in the human body, I am unfortunately intimately familiar w/ human physiology due to my experiences and studies ), though thankfully I haven't done any serious damage to my spinal column. I've flatlined twice for periods longer than a minute. I know a couple things about pain. Note that I'm not whining, and I'm not saying that all pain is absolutely debilitating, I'm just stating that the human body experiences pain when injured or sick. How you choose to deal with that pain is up to you.
My statements about opiate withdrawals ( and pain ) are from first-hand experience. Methadone withdrawal is bad - all the lethargy, aches, insomnia, and whatnot of heroin withdrawal, plus blazing pain that makes you feel as if you are being given a low-voltage shock to your entire body. Heroin withdrawal is not quite as bad, but it still sucks a big one. For someone who is taking a large daily ( 2+ grams ) dose, it is bad enough that they can't function even at a minimal level ( enough to feed and bathe themselves effectively ). If you can reduce your habit to low enough level (.3g or less a day ), and then quit, it's not quite as bad, but you still get the flu effect I described, insomnia, dairraghea(sp?), vomiting, etc. I have never kicked a habit w/out going through some degree of hell.
I find it humorous that you seem to think that much of the pain of withdrawal is from emotional and mental issues related to how the user perceived their habit in relation to their life. Physical withdrawal is painful. Whether you choose to amplify the pain w/ dramatics about your life situation or blow it off and keep going is entirely up to the subject, but it doesn't change the base fact that the withdrawal is a physical pain.
Like most people in the health industry, you have no first-hand knowledge of the things you treat. You like to spout off a bunch of psudeo-objective statements about how the subject feels based on past observations ( more like based off your innate feelings of superiority over the addict ), but you lack any empathy for your subjects because you've never felt anything remotely like what they are undergoing. I have, and memories of days spent vomiting, tossing and turning, trying to hold down a little bit of food, clawing at the sheets while writhing in pain and absolute misery, while knowing that relief is just a fix away ( but w/ that relief comes resumption of the habit ), are still very fresh in my mind. I've also kicked a habit in jail, which is miserable beyond belief.
I sincerely hope, for the sake of your patients and yourself, that you pay a little bit more attention to what they are going through, and learn some empathy for your fellow human being. Of course, that's why a lot of places don't use anyone as a substance abuse counselor who isn't also a recovering addict - they know the truth of the experience, so they can call bullshit on what is really bullshit, and can also know when someone is truly suffering.
"make one feel grumpier and more irritable, and have some signs like a mild flu, and that's it"
Please - do a bit more reading or talk to someone that has gone through serious opiate withdrawals. Methadone ( and oxycontin, from what I hear ) withdrawals are excruciating, to the point of being very physically painful and the fatigue and insomnia are so bad you can't get comfortable laying down, don't have the energy to get up and do anything. I don't know anyone who's kicked methadone w/out going back on heroin or whatever their opiate of choice was.
Heroin withdrawals are bad, something like a major flu, but tolerable if you've managed to reduce your daily intake to a low enough level. Smoking pot or taking tranquilizers helps, especially w/ regards to the insomnia. Some people get them worse than others, but they're not pleasant for anyone. Some of the milder opiates, like hydrocodone and family ( what I call "housewife heroin" ) don't have much in the way of withdrawals other than insomnia.
Methadone is like giving someone rat poison to get them to quit smoking. Opiate addiction will kill you over time, but methadone does immediate, long-term damage even if only used for a short time. And methadone treatment programs are almost always geared towards a long-term maintenance method. It couldn't be because even with rent and staffing, methadone clinics are making money hand over fist, could it? ( Google for methadone+clinic+profit+margin )...
1) I seem to recall a slew of studies a few years back that indicated that people that had the physical characteristics that made them more likely to become drug addicts/heavy users ( there are people who can do hard drugs and still not become addicted ) shared some of the same genetic traits that made some medicines have ineffective or unpredictable effects on them.
2) I've had an incredibly high tolerance for some substances my entire life, long before I touched any mind-altering substances, legal or not. As a child, I often had to get a dozen or more shots of the cocaine-based local anaesthetics that dentists use to numb you prior to any serious dental work. As an adult, I just tell any new dentist I go to about this and they order some sort of "super anaesthetic" that is like eighty percent research grade cocaine. When I began using cocaine when I was about 13, I didn't get much of a rush from it unless I consumed insane amounts of it, and after I developed even more of a tolerance, it got to the point where I couldn't get more than a mild rush ( about the same as drinking 6 shots of espresso ) from snorting/smoking fairly large quantities of the drug. With the wisdom and foresight that only 17-year olds can know, I decided to go the route of intravenous injection, which produced the desired results w/out a chronically stuffed-up nose. Needless to say, today I stay well the fuck away from the stuff, but between that, speed ( before all this cheap anhydrous ammonia-based shit they call ice came around ) and heroin I lost quite a few dollars ( and my freedom at times ) between the age of seventeen and my mid-20's. I also have a similar tolerance for alcohol and opiates, but the opiate tolerance is an acquired tolerance, whereas the alcohol tolerance is a combination of German, Irish, and Cherokee genes...
3) Not all variations of opiate painkillers are as effective as others, regardless of what the pharmacists say. Vicodon, darvocet, and percocet are all useless to me, and were even before I engaged in heavy use of heroin. However, a few other opiates that are not as strong as those 4 ( can't remember their names for sure, but I think Loritab is one of them ) but are supposed to be in the same branch do okay on me for minor pains. For serious pain, morphine works fine, codeine doesn't do shit, demerol is okay in high doses, dilaudid works great, oxycontin is barely sufficient ( and has some very nasty addictive properties, worse than heroin - I've seen people in jail coming off of a oxy habit, and it makes even heroin habits look pretty in comparison ), but if I'm in any kind of really serious pain I have my wife go score something on the side ( generally heroin or Dilaudid ) and bring it to me. Surprisingly, valium and/or xanex are excellent for pain. While they don't relieve the pain itself, these two tranquilizers do relieve a lot of the anxiety associated with the pain. Kind of like what morphine does to me - I can still feel the pain, but the rest of me feels so good that I don't give a shit about it. Of course, another thing that sucks is that U.S. hospitals don't give you much painkillers when they do at all. I've had doctors try to give me ibuprofen for a broken bone before. What a fucking joke...
Anyways, TFA article isn't related much to what was posted, but I can tell you what I wish it was : an effective treatment for opiate addiction. The current methods available in the U.S. are a fucking joke. Methadone is fine is you want to be on something that destroys your bone marrow and liver for long-term maintenance, but it's useless for those of us who just want to get off opiates w/out going cold turkey ( which is almost impossible while working - try telling your boss that you're going to be gone somewhere between 7 and 12 days, especially since if you're a junkie you've probably used up a lot of your sick and vacation days due to being unable to cop and being sick at one point or another ). The only ot
1) What did you expect him to say? Regardless of what the/. community might think is right and fair, but at the end of the day, Redhat is a publicly traded company and they sign his paycheck. That right there is enough to influence someone to word things delicately. He was straightfoward and honest w/out saying anything that will get his ass fired, and while I don't like dealing w/ any kind of corporate BS, Redhat is an ethical and straight-up company, even by the standards of the FOSS community. I definitely didn't think his interview came off w/ a scumbag salesman attitude. Now, having said that, some of Redhat's junior sales people are morons and scumbags ( by the standards of the FOSS community; they're clean as a whistle compared to any other software company I can think of ), but this guy isn't.
2) I personally like Fedora Core much better than the old Redhat desktop releases ( which were great in and of themselves ). The sense of community around it is much stronger, there are many more packages available, and Redhat did the right thing ultimately w/ their desktop line ( even if they did screw the pooch on the transition ). They weren't making money ( which is what companies do ) by supporting it on the desktop, so rather than leaving users hanging or delivering a shitty product ( (cough)SU(cough)SE(cough) ), they turned their desktop line into a great strong community that they still devote resources to ( and thus reap the benefits from as well, but I don't think that's their prime motivation ). For my workstations, laptop, and clusters, I prefer Fedora ( w/ an occasional *BSD box ), and for enterprise machines I prefer RHEL. Some people might find it strange that I say Fedora for clusters as well, but bear in mind that the support for many diverse packages and updated libs is a plus in the HPC community, especially if you're testing out some bleeding-edge hardware prior to deployment. There were many hours spent by myself building RPMs of eight or ten different libraries to support one application under the old Redhat line ( as I refuse to install anything on a system that isn't packaged properly ). Of course, I like Ubuntu (/.'s current favorite son ) as well, but it's just not as near and dear to me as redhat/fedora is.
3) I think the stability depended on what you were doing w/ FC1. Running on my workstation, it was stable as a rock. Same w/ an Opteron cluster I designed for a client. My laptop? It was a bit buggy there until about a month had passed, but I've found that every distro is like that when you have brand-new hardware and a new distro in one go ( I had just gotten the latest and greatest IBM T series laptop when FC1 came out ). Every release since then has been progressibly much better. FC2 had a few bumps when it first came out on a cluster that I used it on, but that was in a non-core library that I doubt many people had a chance to test while it was in test releases ( not too many people in HPC install test releases unless they've got way too much time on their hands... ).
4) It is a myth. Deal with it. Fedora isn't the bastard stepchild of Redhat. It appears to me, as a long-time Redhat user and a Fedora user from day one, that the Redhat/Fedora relationship seems to a mutually beneficial relationship. The FOSS hackers get to work on stuff they love, selling the RHEL line to people that would otherwise be buying Solaris 10 or AIX, and giving Fedora ( and all of the source for RHEL, so you get distros like CENTOS and White Box Linux ) away to the community, along with numerous bugfixes and features. I don't know why you're so pissed at the situation, except for maybe the botched transition, but I doubt you or I could do a better job of juggling the expectations of management and shareholders while still keeping us ( the sometimes adoring, sometimes rabid ) community happy.
I hate to jump in w/ a "me-too" post, but you are so right it's not even funny. I laugh my ass off at all these taekwondo and karate guys. I've had training in 3 types of fighting : martial arts ( taekwondo, haikado(sp?), jujitsu ), street-fighting, and military. My martial arts training was interesting, because the place I studied was a little brick building in nasty neighborhood in New Orleans ( which is probably wiped off the map now... ), and the people going there as well as the instructors all actually used the stuff that they learned, so it was more like 1/2 street-fighting and 1/2 of the fancy-assed martial arts bullshit. We used to get students that came from other schools, and some black-belt would come in and get his ass wiped by a teenager with a yellow belt ( we had full-contact sparring ). My streetfighting experience came from, well, streetfighting. I've grown up in New Orleans and Houston, in everything from neighborhoods where gangs and violence were extremely prevalant to nice suburbs, and I've been in a lot of situations where I had to fight for my life, not just dignity or to be cool ( hell, I was stabbed in the 8th grade, and might have been killed if I hadn't beat the kid unconscious - I was 5'1 and 80 lbs. going to school w/ kids that were 17 ( and still in middle school, if that tells you anything ), 6'+, 200+ lbs. ). My military training I got from being sentenced ( by the courts ) to a boot camp run by ex-marines, where I learned hand-to-hand ( and knife, bayonet, and rifle ) combat from people that were killing people in Korea and Vietnam before I was born. I was on the PT team ( physical training, I could do 200 pushups w/out stopping when I was 14 ) as well as boxing and lifting weights.
Anyways, my point is that through all of this I learned a few things : (a) there's no substitute for a cool head and willingness to hurt someone (b) it ain't about trying to look cool ( I'll bit your fucking ear off or stick my thumb in your eye socket if that's what it takes ) and (c) always get the first blow in. (c) is very important. Don't get in people's faces, but take them down if they get in yours. When 2 people who are willing and able mix it up, most of the time it's the one who gets the first punch in that wins, because they then get in the second and third punch as well, and generally by that time they are stomping on the other guy's head.
And, yes, kicking someone's ass is a great way to get idiotic bullies to leave you alone. Oh, and another thing that got people to leave me the hell alone in high school was the fact that I was the only 16 year old w/ visible tattoos.
BTW, I forgot to thank you for the link you provided, it was an interesting read. However, if you think that could happen in America today, you're crazy. These citizens would be labeled as violent ( probably rascist, as that seems to be of the standard media whipping boys ) militia and probably slaughtered wholesale. Hell, the federal government slaughters people who might even be thinking about armed insurrection ( I seem to recall a certain town about 150 miles down the road from me, where they burned a compound to the ground with Bradley tanks - go watch footage from non-American news teams that show the truth, while American news stations said the Waco compound was burned by the occupants ). Another fine example would be Ruby Ridge. I know those are overused examples, but I'm too tired to go dig any more up ( gotta get back to work... ).
As much as it saddens me to say this, but I think America is too far gone down the road of madness and self-delusion for anything short of a violent revolution to fix this country. The right-wingers are happy to let corporations destroy the economy, the earth, and everything else as long as their fat cat buddies get rich, and the left-wingers are so wacko that they want to give my entire fucking paycheck to immigrants that can't even learn the language, let alone contribute to the society, or to gun-toting gangster wanna-bes with a bunch of gold teeth and crack babies. My children will probably have the dubious pleasure of watching this country disintegrate, a la Roman empire, or burn out in an orgiastic frenzy of fascist warfare, ala Germany.
Well, I obsessively wipe down any pistol I come into contact with, as does everyone I know. Especially if the firearm doesn't belong to me. And when I'm putting a firearm back together after cleaning, I take care to wear gloves of a material that isn't lilely to leave fibers in the gun ( generally disposable latex gloves ).
As for the federal records, let's just say that if I need a firearm that can't be traced to me, I can get one quite easily. I don't make it a policy of keeping illegal firearms in my possession, but were I to be in the situation that I described to you in my previous post that got my friend serious time, you can bet your ass that that piece would be in pieces, with the barrel filed down, buried in several spots way out in the country. And that dirtbag's body would never be found. I've learned to never trust police, the courts, or the society around me, because even if something isn't your fault, if they can stick it to you, you can bet your ass off they will.
Now, for justifications of using lethal force, the situation I mentioned was definitely one of those ( I don't know if I made it clear in my previous statement, but basically what happened was that he came home and some guy had beat the hell out of his wife and was still raping her when he walked in, and he put a full clip of bullets into the sick fucker, and then he called the police to report it. When the cops showed up, they realized the guy he had shot was a cop, and they arrested him. I'm not sure how the guy ended up there, he might have been an undercover that they knew ( this guy was an old biker ), or maybe just an acquaintance, but he didn't break into the house ) ). I'm not sure where you got the hunting people down thing from. Though I can promise you that if someone ever seriously hurt a member of my family, I would hunt them and theirs down without a second thought. Hell, I've beat the crap out of people before for bumping into my wife and being rude about it, so imagine my reaction if someone raped her. And, no, I don't think it's wrong. If everyone respects everyone else, the world would be a lot better place, and as far as I'm concerned, some people need their asses kicked.
As for assuming that the government is corrupt, I live in Houston, Texas, whose legal system and police could give a shit less about things like justice, human rights, and all those other inconvenient liberal ideas that stop them from making money right and left off arresting people too poor, desperate, or stupid to weasel their way out of things. Hell, I went to jail last year because I rented a hotel room for someone and they stole a lamp ( I think it was actually broken and they threw it away, hoping the staff wouldn't notice ). I was charged with felony theft ( a 3rd degree felony ) because the hotel owners claimed that everything was stolen out of the hotel ( fridge, TV, furniture, etc. ). Note that the DA had to know they were lying, because they told the officer who took the report that there was 170 bucks of stuff missing ( no details of what ), then called back days later and said it was 1700 dollars worth of stuff ( conveniently over the 1500 dollar limit necessary to be a felony ), then later on recanted and said that it was about 70 dollars of stuff. The DA still took the case, issued a warrant, I was arrested at the site of a traffic accident ( I had no idea why I was being arrested, and the cop couldn't tell me, except that I had a felony theft warrant ), and I was thrown in jail, with no bond. It took my lawyer a week to get a 40k bond set ( that's right, 40 fucking thousand dollars ), she actually had to threaten to file a writ of habeaus corpus ( that means that you can prove they are unlawfully denying you bail for no good reason ) with the Texas State Supreme Court in order to get this dipshit judge to issue me a bond. I lost my consulting job since I couldn't be at work, and when I finally got out of jail and started fighting the case, the district attorney wouldn't provide the evidence t
Are you kidding me? I have to call bullshit on you there, as everyone I know wipes down their entire pistol, inside and out, any time they come in contact with it.
Every time I clean any of my firearms, I wipe all prints off it. Any time I touch someone else's gun, I wipe all of my prints from it, as you never know what that person will do with it later. It's best to always have a clean firearm, anyways. You never know what will happen. Hell, if someone raped your wife, and you had a chance to kill him, wouldn't you? Of course, you say that's justifiable. Okay, what happens if you do it, and find out the motherfucker is a cop? Do you want to try your luck with the justice system in that case? And before you say it doesn't happen, I know someone who did 27 years for that exact same scenario. If it happened today, he would get the death penalty, but laws were a lot more lenient 30+ years ago ( at least when it came to things like that, if not for drug cases, especially since his wife was beat within an inch of her life by that cop, and it was provable in court, but he still did time since it was a cop ( they decided to prosecute because he used excessive force - meaning he emptied the clip into the bastard - but you know as well as I do that they wouldn't have prosecuted if it wasn't a cop ) ).
So it's entirely probable to have a pistol with no prints any where other than the grip. Shit, if they wanted to, they could put gloves on the suspect as well. Most DA don't give a shit about processing crooked cops, not does anyone in the public, who go around thinking that everyone the cops arrest must be the bad guys, that cops never lie, falsely arrest, etc. I've seen enough dirty cops ( hell, I've even sold dope to cops before, in my misspent youth ) to know that they're worse than 99% of the "criminals" they arrest ( most of whom are just dopefiends, make stupid mistakes, etc. ).
Hell, try getting arrested in Harris County, Texas, and then scratch your nose while the Sheriffs are strip-searching you at the county jail. I've seen a guy get half his face smashed in with a baton by a Sheriff for scratching his fucking nose!
GPFS
Take it from someone who's messed with nearly every storage product on the market, if you want something that works fairly simply, performs at approaching spindle speed ( meaning the file system is not the bottleneck - if you have 10 GB/sec. storage bandwidth, expect to see near that with proper tuning ), is very stable ( compared to most storage solutions on the market - bear in mind that most storage products are aimed at large-block sequential I/O, and fall down - either performance-wise or stability-wise - when you throw other I/O patterns or combinations of patterns at them ), and is portable across nearly any Linux distribution ( with varying amounts of difficulty, I have had to hack their kernel patches before when using a unsupported kernel ), GPFS is the one. Of course, the problem there is I believe it's pretty expensive to run on non-IBM hardware. But if you have IBM hardware ( even if it's not the hardware you're running the FS on ) or some sort of in with IBM, they'll let you have it for a song and a dance.
Having said that, Lustre is getting there. I'd say it's the equal of GPFS ( as a parallel filesystem - I believe it is even more flexible as a distributed filesystem ) in performance, probably scales roughly the same ( haven't played with it in a large installation, so can't tell you beyond looking at the architecture ), and is going to the be the biggest player on the market in the future. It's also free ( IIRC Cluster File Systems sells support, but the code is freely available ) and not tied to IBM and whatnot, like GPFS is. Of course, HP has a big connection with Lustre, but not ownership thereof.
Those are really the only two that I would consider for a serious high-performance storage project. If you don't need great performance, that's when you can start looking at things like GFS, ADIC's StorNext, Ibrix, etc.
Oh, Gautham Sastri ( of former Maximum Throughput fame ) has a newer company called Terrascale, I recall them putting on a presentation at the 2003 or 2004 ( can't remember ) Supercomputing conference ( SC2005 is coming up in a few weeks, yeah!!! ) which showed pretty good performance ( relative to the small system they were using ), not sure how they're coming along...
Anyways, good luck...and don't forget to use Iozone to benchmark the damn thing!
Firstly, I agree with one of the children of this poster - legalized abortion led to less crime. Can't prove it, but seems to be the most likely.
Now, on to the problem with this comment :/. needs a reality check. That middle-class neighborhood you grew up in, playing your games and having jocks pick on you? That's not where the violent crime is. Try going to where the violent crime is - neighborhoods where someone will kill you for looking at them. Then take a poll of how many people there play video games.
Not too fucking many. It blows my mind how naive some people are. But then again, what do you expect, when the media makes Columbine look like the crisis of the decade? Hell, more people get killed some nights in a single neighborhood than got killed in that bit. Shocking? Yes. The real problem? No.
Go live in the ghetto for a few years, and then get back to me. Then we'll talk about affirmative action, the war on drugs, and all this other feel-good bullshit that you get spoonfed through the TV.
What's worse most of them are blond haired blue eyed Aryan types
Pardon me? And there is something wrong with being white? Oh, yeah, I forgot, we need diversity! The major game markets in the world are Western ( US, Europe - might as well classify that as one region, as some of the countries are smaller than the county I live in ), Middle Eastern ( largely Muslim ), and Asian. We're not even going to include Africa, because as far as I'm concerned, you could nuke that continent to hell and back and the world would be a better place ( lower HIV/AIDS statistics, free diamonds, no more idiotic Ministers of Health ranting and raving about HIV/AIDS being a conspiracy between white people and aliens ). Probably don't have much time for video games anyways, between the raping and killing campaigns they seem to go on regularly.
So, let's go to Japan, China, or Korea and see what they have - gee, an entirely different culture and - hold onto your panties here, kids - game characters that embody the traits of their culture. I'm not sure if the Middle East has video games, nor do I give a fuck. They ( as a culture ) stopped advancing quite some time ago. If they didn't sit on oil, everyone would be happy to let them and the Jews get on with the business of killing each other. So guess what - Western ( I could use the terms white or Aryan, but not all Western culture is arguably white ( Greek, Spanish, etc. ), and even less of it is of Aryan descent ) culture has video games that embody the traits that we collectively value ( some games require N-depth problem-solving abilities - albeit there's few of these -, muscles, fantasy adventures, guns, cars, attractive women, etc. ). I admit that there might be a lack of games with a female main character that isn't a big-breasted gun-toting half-vampire or whatever badass. But you know what - it's not a goddamn crisis like everyone makes it out be. I get sick and tired of people whining about how this group or that group is repressed/under-represented or whatever. There's a reason why women aren't represented much in the gaming industry - they're currently a small portion of it. But if things like the Sims keep being such a big hit, they will see games tailored towards a more "female" audience. And then games oriented towards women will become a major segment of the market.
So, to close with the point I started with : you ( and others like you ) need to shut your politically correct mouths up. The rest of us, who just want to get on with our lives, have enough problems to worry about other than the fact that our culture and country bother people who live here, take our handouts, and then say we're oppressing them. If blacks/hispanics/asians/anyone are under-represented in our culture, start doing something noteworthy ( Asians have! ) to make a spot for yourself ( note : dealing crack doesn't count ) or shut the fuck up and die. Oh yeah, and please tell me exactly what fucking church Jesse Jackson is a reverend for?
there's just one problem here. You're assuming that it's not doable to have a system that is reliable to 99.999...% - it is. It's not that hard to have redundant routing into a site, across the net, and into the other site.
Shit, if we can keep porn sites up, we can keep a link that someone's life depends on up - in most cases. And you can most definitely have an on-staff physician ready to step in. That's the ultimate fail-over procedure.
And as far as people getting enraged, if you tell me that I have at least a betting chance on a procedure, and the staff do their best, I'm not going to be mad if I die ( not that I would have much to say anyways ). If I'm given a 10% chance to survive an operation, I'll just go home and drink whiskey, eat steak, and shoot heroin until I die. But if I elect to have an operation, and I die because some wanker couldn't design a redundant link, then I fully expect my children to exact a brutal vengeance on whoever is ultimately responsible.
Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery
Yeah, and engineers might be held responsible if the bridges they design and build fail under normal/expected operating conditions.
Oh, that's right, I believe they are.
If the country gets hit with a tactical nuke, I think it's understood that shit happens. If some underpaid joe in Bumfuck, Idaho drives a piece of heavy machinery through the fiber conduit, I expect you to have a near-transparent failover. That's what engineering is about. It's about having the knowledge and experience to design and test well. That's why some people have objections to MCSE or RHCE certs using the word "engineer".
If you're providing the network service for my remote robotic surgery, you goddamn well better have a fault-tolerant re-routable network in place. And an on-call heart surgeon who can be there in minutes. Because if your negligence messes me up, you better believe that myself or my children will pay you a visit personally. We'll have a little chat and it will involve a butane torch and a ball peen hammer. That's a personal message from me to you, mister golden-parachute budget-cutting book-cooking CEO.
I was actually talking about this a few dats agi with a co-worker. I'm hoping that by the time you can purchase tickets for this, I'll have the funds to do so. I plan on being the first man to consume hallucinogens in suborbit. Take a small syrette with some LSD along, hit it while preparing to depart, and enjoy the trip.
Not kidding you in the least. I'm technically a non-exempt employee, so when I'm not at work, I'm either working from home or drunk. Sometimes both.
I'm posting this while taking a break from updating my resume, as my team lead just told me that the higher-ups were thinking about canning me, because I'm not a 9 to 5 person. Despite the fact that I work 50, 60, sometimes 70 hour weeks in an under-staffed, under-paid department, take calls at 2am in the morning, occasionally work 2 days straight without sleep, etc. As much as I realize that it helps to be there at 8:30 in the morning, I can't help but feel a little bitter that all my hard work isn't appreciated more. That and I'm so fucking burnt out at this miserable company-
Okay, that's enough bitching, where's a goddamn beer...
I can write code without any sleep. I've worked 24+ hours straight without sleep. Bear in mind that writing code isn't the primary function of my job, but I still do a reasonable amount of scripting and programming.
I can code but I can't debug very well after I've been working for about 12+ hours. That goes for debugging code, debugging network problems, tuning a filesystem, etc., anything that requires high-level cognitive abilities. I can't even fucking drive right after pulling an all-nighter, let alone debug where I'm running off the end of an array or whatnot.
And for the people that make comments about getting high, yeah fucking right. Any of my above statements involving lack of sleep apply just as well if you're high ( be it speed, too much coffee, pot, whatever ). Very productive, but not able to think more than 3-5 layers deep into a problem ( and forget about juggling multiple complex problems ), and not all that creative either.
Slashdot Mirror
Because my strength has been tested, because I did it my damn self (with help from friends and family, but it's still ultimately my effort that paid off), I can look myself in the mirror and be justifiably proud. That's not to say that I won't have to take care not to slip for the rest of my life, but I feel that is the measure of a man/woman's strength and intellect. To face the world as you are, and if you fail, pick yourself back up again. I won't bring spirituality into it, because even though I have my own personal beliefs, not everyone shares them or needs them.
What really needs to change is the War On Drugs. Get rid of mandatory minimum sentences, offer treatment, legalize & tax, etc. That's the only thing that has been proven to work.
BTW, I have never had any physical addiction problems w/ cocaine or meth, nor has anyone I've known. It's a matter of adjusting to a different speed of living. If you're used to spinning off at 180mph for days or weeks on end, and then you have to slow down to a normal pace, without the stimulants you're used to, then of course you'll have to take some time to adjust. Try doing the same with coffee (I can stay up for about 3-4 days w/ nothing but coffee and adrenaline) and you'll find that you have some adjusting to do as well. As for psychological addiction, yeah, it's there. It took me a long time to "outgrow" my coke/meth phase, but you have to get to the point where you decide to quit and exercise your will. Until then, it's all a fucking joke.
If you can live w/ the cameras, that's your problem. I consider any police surveillance to be a violation of my privacy. And if you like being at the mercy of people around you, go for it. I guess, for you, a 50% less chance of being involved in a violent crime is worth a 100% less chance of being able to do anything about it. What your argument boils down to is cheerleading for the UK and talking shit about the US. Hardly a very mature stance, or grounds to tell me I sound like a three year-old. I'm willing to admit that both countries have problems. You, on the other hand, seem to just want to bash the US. It's okay, I understand that it's a lot easier to do now that Diebol^Wthe Amercican people re-elected that chimp-like Yankee candy-ass rhinestone-cowboy Bush. Probably makes you feel real important, too, so keep up the good work.
One thing I definitely agree with you about is that this is very pointless. Good day...
Oh, please. I'm either lying or ignorant? I've been to the UK (London and surrounding areas in particular) quite a few times, and there's cameras all over the damn place. Not to mention signs warning you that you're under surveillance. Hell, you even fingerprint schoolkids. Mind you, America is headed that way at the moment, but as long as some of us support certain groups that protect our essential liberties, "this too shall pass".
.45 brings to the table. Or, lemme guess, you don't have any violent crime in the UK, do you?
As for your off-the-cuff, asinine comment about guns, we don't let everyone have a gun. For example, most convicted, serious criminals don't carry guns unless they are keen on going back to the pen. Felons, that is. And pretty much anything short of causing someone (unwarranted) physical harm, serious monetary loss, or repeatedly doing something very stupid is not a felony. But let me tell you something - I would rather have the freedom to defend myself, along with the very real possibility that I might have to do so, than the illusion of safety that you Brits have. Guns are a great social equilizer (the overthrowing-the-government bit is just a particularly sweet perk for me). I don't mind holding my own and risking my own life when it's just me (matter of fact, I love a good bar brawl), but when it comes to the safety of my wife, pets, and family, I'd rather have the assurance that a loaded
As for convincing one another, I don't have to convince you of anything, nor do I really even give a shit whether you carry a gun or not. I don't give a flying fuck whether anyone other than myself, my family, and my friends carries a gun, as long as they don't infringe on my right to carry one. I noticed you said you consider an unarmed populace a benefit. Good, I hope you enjoy the shit out of living in the UK. As long as you keep it over there, and don't expect me to give a rat's ass what kind of resolutions the bitch-ass U.N. passes, I think we can get along just fine.
Having said that, I didn't see the rest of the thread because I was reading through at a relatively high threshold. I just couldn't bite my tongue when I see blatantly false crap posted. And I gotta love your bit about having been through all the arguments over firearms. What a cheapshit way to try to get the last word - "nope!heard it all before! not listening! got my fingers in my ears...nyah-nyah!".
...but I think it bears repeating :
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
-- Albert Einstein
or, if you need it in a handy reminder, there's a nice little poster that expresses approximately the same sentiment.
some Republican page asked for a job after serving a senator
Another thing we can blame on Mark Foley!
Get a grip. The U.S. might be going through some quasi-fascist regime right now (like it has w/ McCarthy and other scares), but when I live in one of the most conservative states in the nation (Texas), and I can find very few people (other than corporate shills) who support the Bush regime, methinks that will be changing shortly.
It's taking a while for all the party loyalists in the Republicans to wake up and discover that they are being hijacked by corporate interests and religious extremism, but it is happening. When my father, whose family has been voting Republican for at least a hundred years, doesn't even bother to defend Bush & Co. when I mention their latest scheme, that's a pretty sure sign that the tide is changing. As soon as the Democrats shut up their loonier elements (like the Brady Bill Bunch), we can vote the neo-cons out of office, fix their fuckups, and start moving forward again, just like we have been for the past two hundred plus years.
They've been pimping it the last 2-3 years at their booth at the Supercomputing Conference - note that I'm not sure whether it's been released or not, because other than staring at the awesome projection units they use and laughing at the MS employees trying to boot up their systems ( nothing makes you realize how bad the windows guys have things until you watch them trying to reconfigure one of their systems and arbitrarily failing, though 2K/XP is an order or magnitude better than their previous attempts at an operating system ), I stay the hell away from that booth.
It's interesting to see your response vacillate between patronizing, psuedo-objectivity and some rather intelligent, rational statements. My original statement was that my experience and a lifetime of observation contradicted a comment in your original post, and I stand by it. Everything since just proves that, in addition to having no idea what opiate withdrawals feel like, you have also taken most of what I have said as a personal attack ( when what I have done primarily is state what I view to be an observable fact, and my experience and credentials for being able to make such statements w/ any credibility ), leading me to conclude that you are engaging in a bit of trolling for fun ( albeit, I think you've done an excellent job of it, and I agree with some of your statements, but you are going a bit too far out w/ the "Oh, my"'s and whatnot - if you're trying to pull someone's chain, it's best not to exhibit a sense of humor yourself ). It's okay, I understand that not everyone has a very fulfilling life outside of /., and I definitely don't mind a bit of dialogue/debate. Anyways, thanks for a bit of amusement, cheers...
Don't tell me about pain, honey.
Don't talk to me about pain, Virginia. I spent 17 years ingesting almost every chemical known to man, so I got to observe the effects firsthand, as well as dealing with more mundane pain ( stabbed twice, caught on fire twice, bodily hit by a motor vehicle twice, multiple falls from two story or higher buildings, gone head-first through two windshields in accidents that totalled all vehicles involved, etc. ). I've broken about half the bones in my body ( and yes, I know that there are hundreds of bones in the human body, I am unfortunately intimately familiar w/ human physiology due to my experiences and studies ), though thankfully I haven't done any serious damage to my spinal column. I've flatlined twice for periods longer than a minute. I know a couple things about pain. Note that I'm not whining, and I'm not saying that all pain is absolutely debilitating, I'm just stating that the human body experiences pain when injured or sick. How you choose to deal with that pain is up to you.
My statements about opiate withdrawals ( and pain ) are from first-hand experience. Methadone withdrawal is bad - all the lethargy, aches, insomnia, and whatnot of heroin withdrawal, plus blazing pain that makes you feel as if you are being given a low-voltage shock to your entire body. Heroin withdrawal is not quite as bad, but it still sucks a big one. For someone who is taking a large daily ( 2+ grams ) dose, it is bad enough that they can't function even at a minimal level ( enough to feed and bathe themselves effectively ). If you can reduce your habit to low enough level (
I find it humorous that you seem to think that much of the pain of withdrawal is from emotional and mental issues related to how the user perceived their habit in relation to their life. Physical withdrawal is painful. Whether you choose to amplify the pain w/ dramatics about your life situation or blow it off and keep going is entirely up to the subject, but it doesn't change the base fact that the withdrawal is a physical pain.
Like most people in the health industry, you have no first-hand knowledge of the things you treat. You like to spout off a bunch of psudeo-objective statements about how the subject feels based on past observations ( more like based off your innate feelings of superiority over the addict ), but you lack any empathy for your subjects because you've never felt anything remotely like what they are undergoing. I have, and memories of days spent vomiting, tossing and turning, trying to hold down a little bit of food, clawing at the sheets while writhing in pain and absolute misery, while knowing that relief is just a fix away ( but w/ that relief comes resumption of the habit ), are still very fresh in my mind. I've also kicked a habit in jail, which is miserable beyond belief.
I sincerely hope, for the sake of your patients and yourself, that you pay a little bit more attention to what they are going through, and learn some empathy for your fellow human being. Of course, that's why a lot of places don't use anyone as a substance abuse counselor who isn't also a recovering addict - they know the truth of the experience, so they can call bullshit on what is really bullshit, and can also know when someone is truly suffering.
Please - do a bit more reading or talk to someone that has gone through serious opiate withdrawals. Methadone ( and oxycontin, from what I hear ) withdrawals are excruciating, to the point of being very physically painful and the fatigue and insomnia are so bad you can't get comfortable laying down, don't have the energy to get up and do anything. I don't know anyone who's kicked methadone w/out going back on heroin or whatever their opiate of choice was.
Heroin withdrawals are bad, something like a major flu, but tolerable if you've managed to reduce your daily intake to a low enough level. Smoking pot or taking tranquilizers helps, especially w/ regards to the insomnia. Some people get them worse than others, but they're not pleasant for anyone. Some of the milder opiates, like hydrocodone and family ( what I call "housewife heroin" ) don't have much in the way of withdrawals other than insomnia.
Methadone is like giving someone rat poison to get them to quit smoking. Opiate addiction will kill you over time, but methadone does immediate, long-term damage even if only used for a short time. And methadone treatment programs are almost always geared towards a long-term maintenance method. It couldn't be because even with rent and staffing, methadone clinics are making money hand over fist, could it? ( Google for methadone+clinic+profit+margin )...
1) I seem to recall a slew of studies a few years back that indicated that people that had the physical characteristics that made them more likely to become drug addicts/heavy users ( there are people who can do hard drugs and still not become addicted ) shared some of the same genetic traits that made some medicines have ineffective or unpredictable effects on them.
2) I've had an incredibly high tolerance for some substances my entire life, long before I touched any mind-altering substances, legal or not. As a child, I often had to get a dozen or more shots of the cocaine-based local anaesthetics that dentists use to numb you prior to any serious dental work. As an adult, I just tell any new dentist I go to about this and they order some sort of "super anaesthetic" that is like eighty percent research grade cocaine. When I began using cocaine when I was about 13, I didn't get much of a rush from it unless I consumed insane amounts of it, and after I developed even more of a tolerance, it got to the point where I couldn't get more than a mild rush ( about the same as drinking 6 shots of espresso ) from snorting/smoking fairly large quantities of the drug. With the wisdom and foresight that only 17-year olds can know, I decided to go the route of intravenous injection, which produced the desired results w/out a chronically stuffed-up nose. Needless to say, today I stay well the fuck away from the stuff, but between that, speed ( before all this cheap anhydrous ammonia-based shit they call ice came around ) and heroin I lost quite a few dollars ( and my freedom at times ) between the age of seventeen and my mid-20's. I also have a similar tolerance for alcohol and opiates, but the opiate tolerance is an acquired tolerance, whereas the alcohol tolerance is a combination of German, Irish, and Cherokee genes...
3) Not all variations of opiate painkillers are as effective as others, regardless of what the pharmacists say. Vicodon, darvocet, and percocet are all useless to me, and were even before I engaged in heavy use of heroin. However, a few other opiates that are not as strong as those 4 ( can't remember their names for sure, but I think Loritab is one of them ) but are supposed to be in the same branch do okay on me for minor pains. For serious pain, morphine works fine, codeine doesn't do shit, demerol is okay in high doses, dilaudid works great, oxycontin is barely sufficient ( and has some very nasty addictive properties, worse than heroin - I've seen people in jail coming off of a oxy habit, and it makes even heroin habits look pretty in comparison ), but if I'm in any kind of really serious pain I have my wife go score something on the side ( generally heroin or Dilaudid ) and bring it to me. Surprisingly, valium and/or xanex are excellent for pain. While they don't relieve the pain itself, these two tranquilizers do relieve a lot of the anxiety associated with the pain. Kind of like what morphine does to me - I can still feel the pain, but the rest of me feels so good that I don't give a shit about it. Of course, another thing that sucks is that U.S. hospitals don't give you much painkillers when they do at all. I've had doctors try to give me ibuprofen for a broken bone before. What a fucking joke...
Anyways, TFA article isn't related much to what was posted, but I can tell you what I wish it was : an effective treatment for opiate addiction. The current methods available in the U.S. are a fucking joke. Methadone is fine is you want to be on something that destroys your bone marrow and liver for long-term maintenance, but it's useless for those of us who just want to get off opiates w/out going cold turkey ( which is almost impossible while working - try telling your boss that you're going to be gone somewhere between 7 and 12 days, especially since if you're a junkie you've probably used up a lot of your sick and vacation days due to being unable to cop and being sick at one point or another ). The only ot
1) What did you expect him to say? Regardless of what the
2) I personally like Fedora Core much better than the old Redhat desktop releases ( which were great in and of themselves ). The sense of community around it is much stronger, there are many more packages available, and Redhat did the right thing ultimately w/ their desktop line ( even if they did screw the pooch on the transition ). They weren't making money ( which is what companies do ) by supporting it on the desktop, so rather than leaving users hanging or delivering a shitty product ( (cough)SU(cough)SE(cough) ), they turned their desktop line into a great strong community that they still devote resources to ( and thus reap the benefits from as well, but I don't think that's their prime motivation ). For my workstations, laptop, and clusters, I prefer Fedora ( w/ an occasional *BSD box ), and for enterprise machines I prefer RHEL. Some people might find it strange that I say Fedora for clusters as well, but bear in mind that the support for many diverse packages and updated libs is a plus in the HPC community, especially if you're testing out some bleeding-edge hardware prior to deployment. There were many hours spent by myself building RPMs of eight or ten different libraries to support one application under the old Redhat line ( as I refuse to install anything on a system that isn't packaged properly ). Of course, I like Ubuntu (
3) I think the stability depended on what you were doing w/ FC1. Running on my workstation, it was stable as a rock. Same w/ an Opteron cluster I designed for a client. My laptop? It was a bit buggy there until about a month had passed, but I've found that every distro is like that when you have brand-new hardware and a new distro in one go ( I had just gotten the latest and greatest IBM T series laptop when FC1 came out ). Every release since then has been progressibly much better. FC2 had a few bumps when it first came out on a cluster that I used it on, but that was in a non-core library that I doubt many people had a chance to test while it was in test releases ( not too many people in HPC install test releases unless they've got way too much time on their hands... ).
4) It is a myth. Deal with it. Fedora isn't the bastard stepchild of Redhat. It appears to me, as a long-time Redhat user and a Fedora user from day one, that the Redhat/Fedora relationship seems to a mutually beneficial relationship. The FOSS hackers get to work on stuff they love, selling the RHEL line to people that would otherwise be buying Solaris 10 or AIX, and giving Fedora ( and all of the source for RHEL, so you get distros like CENTOS and White Box Linux ) away to the community, along with numerous bugfixes and features. I don't know why you're so pissed at the situation, except for maybe the botched transition, but I doubt you or I could do a better job of juggling the expectations of management and shareholders while still keeping us ( the sometimes adoring, sometimes rabid ) community happy.
Anyways, my point is that through all of this I learned a few things : (a) there's no substitute for a cool head and willingness to hurt someone (b) it ain't about trying to look cool ( I'll bit your fucking ear off or stick my thumb in your eye socket if that's what it takes ) and (c) always get the first blow in. (c) is very important. Don't get in people's faces, but take them down if they get in yours. When 2 people who are willing and able mix it up, most of the time it's the one who gets the first punch in that wins, because they then get in the second and third punch as well, and generally by that time they are stomping on the other guy's head.
And, yes, kicking someone's ass is a great way to get idiotic bullies to leave you alone. Oh, and another thing that got people to leave me the hell alone in high school was the fact that I was the only 16 year old w/ visible tattoos.
As much as it saddens me to say this, but I think America is too far gone down the road of madness and self-delusion for anything short of a violent revolution to fix this country. The right-wingers are happy to let corporations destroy the economy, the earth, and everything else as long as their fat cat buddies get rich, and the left-wingers are so wacko that they want to give my entire fucking paycheck to immigrants that can't even learn the language, let alone contribute to the society, or to gun-toting gangster wanna-bes with a bunch of gold teeth and crack babies. My children will probably have the dubious pleasure of watching this country disintegrate, a la Roman empire, or burn out in an orgiastic frenzy of fascist warfare, ala Germany.
As for the federal records, let's just say that if I need a firearm that can't be traced to me, I can get one quite easily. I don't make it a policy of keeping illegal firearms in my possession, but were I to be in the situation that I described to you in my previous post that got my friend serious time, you can bet your ass that that piece would be in pieces, with the barrel filed down, buried in several spots way out in the country. And that dirtbag's body would never be found. I've learned to never trust police, the courts, or the society around me, because even if something isn't your fault, if they can stick it to you, you can bet your ass off they will.
Now, for justifications of using lethal force, the situation I mentioned was definitely one of those ( I don't know if I made it clear in my previous statement, but basically what happened was that he came home and some guy had beat the hell out of his wife and was still raping her when he walked in, and he put a full clip of bullets into the sick fucker, and then he called the police to report it. When the cops showed up, they realized the guy he had shot was a cop, and they arrested him. I'm not sure how the guy ended up there, he might have been an undercover that they knew ( this guy was an old biker ), or maybe just an acquaintance, but he didn't break into the house ) ). I'm not sure where you got the hunting people down thing from. Though I can promise you that if someone ever seriously hurt a member of my family, I would hunt them and theirs down without a second thought. Hell, I've beat the crap out of people before for bumping into my wife and being rude about it, so imagine my reaction if someone raped her. And, no, I don't think it's wrong. If everyone respects everyone else, the world would be a lot better place, and as far as I'm concerned, some people need their asses kicked.
As for assuming that the government is corrupt, I live in Houston, Texas, whose legal system and police could give a shit less about things like justice, human rights, and all those other inconvenient liberal ideas that stop them from making money right and left off arresting people too poor, desperate, or stupid to weasel their way out of things. Hell, I went to jail last year because I rented a hotel room for someone and they stole a lamp ( I think it was actually broken and they threw it away, hoping the staff wouldn't notice ). I was charged with felony theft ( a 3rd degree felony ) because the hotel owners claimed that everything was stolen out of the hotel ( fridge, TV, furniture, etc. ). Note that the DA had to know they were lying, because they told the officer who took the report that there was 170 bucks of stuff missing ( no details of what ), then called back days later and said it was 1700 dollars worth of stuff ( conveniently over the 1500 dollar limit necessary to be a felony ), then later on recanted and said that it was about 70 dollars of stuff. The DA still took the case, issued a warrant, I was arrested at the site of a traffic accident ( I had no idea why I was being arrested, and the cop couldn't tell me, except that I had a felony theft warrant ), and I was thrown in jail, with no bond. It took my lawyer a week to get a 40k bond set ( that's right, 40 fucking thousand dollars ), she actually had to threaten to file a writ of habeaus corpus ( that means that you can prove they are unlawfully denying you bail for no good reason ) with the Texas State Supreme Court in order to get this dipshit judge to issue me a bond. I lost my consulting job since I couldn't be at work, and when I finally got out of jail and started fighting the case, the district attorney wouldn't provide the evidence t
Every time I clean any of my firearms, I wipe all prints off it. Any time I touch someone else's gun, I wipe all of my prints from it, as you never know what that person will do with it later. It's best to always have a clean firearm, anyways. You never know what will happen. Hell, if someone raped your wife, and you had a chance to kill him, wouldn't you? Of course, you say that's justifiable. Okay, what happens if you do it, and find out the motherfucker is a cop? Do you want to try your luck with the justice system in that case? And before you say it doesn't happen, I know someone who did 27 years for that exact same scenario. If it happened today, he would get the death penalty, but laws were a lot more lenient 30+ years ago ( at least when it came to things like that, if not for drug cases, especially since his wife was beat within an inch of her life by that cop, and it was provable in court, but he still did time since it was a cop ( they decided to prosecute because he used excessive force - meaning he emptied the clip into the bastard - but you know as well as I do that they wouldn't have prosecuted if it wasn't a cop ) ).
So it's entirely probable to have a pistol with no prints any where other than the grip. Shit, if they wanted to, they could put gloves on the suspect as well. Most DA don't give a shit about processing crooked cops, not does anyone in the public, who go around thinking that everyone the cops arrest must be the bad guys, that cops never lie, falsely arrest, etc. I've seen enough dirty cops ( hell, I've even sold dope to cops before, in my misspent youth ) to know that they're worse than 99% of the "criminals" they arrest ( most of whom are just dopefiends, make stupid mistakes, etc. ).
Hell, try getting arrested in Harris County, Texas, and then scratch your nose while the Sheriffs are strip-searching you at the county jail. I've seen a guy get half his face smashed in with a baton by a Sheriff for scratching his fucking nose!
GPFS
Take it from someone who's messed with nearly every storage product on the market, if you want something that works fairly simply, performs at approaching spindle speed ( meaning the file system is not the bottleneck - if you have 10 GB/sec. storage bandwidth, expect to see near that with proper tuning ), is very stable ( compared to most storage solutions on the market - bear in mind that most storage products are aimed at large-block sequential I/O, and fall down - either performance-wise or stability-wise - when you throw other I/O patterns or combinations of patterns at them ), and is portable across nearly any Linux distribution ( with varying amounts of difficulty, I have had to hack their kernel patches before when using a unsupported kernel ), GPFS is the one. Of course, the problem there is I believe it's pretty expensive to run on non-IBM hardware. But if you have IBM hardware ( even if it's not the hardware you're running the FS on ) or some sort of in with IBM, they'll let you have it for a song and a dance.
Having said that, Lustre is getting there. I'd say it's the equal of GPFS ( as a parallel filesystem - I believe it is even more flexible as a distributed filesystem ) in performance, probably scales roughly the same ( haven't played with it in a large installation, so can't tell you beyond looking at the architecture ), and is going to the be the biggest player on the market in the future. It's also free ( IIRC Cluster File Systems sells support, but the code is freely available ) and not tied to IBM and whatnot, like GPFS is. Of course, HP has a big connection with Lustre, but not ownership thereof.
Those are really the only two that I would consider for a serious high-performance storage project. If you don't need great performance, that's when you can start looking at things like GFS, ADIC's StorNext, Ibrix, etc.
Oh, Gautham Sastri ( of former Maximum Throughput fame ) has a newer company called Terrascale, I recall them putting on a presentation at the 2003 or 2004 ( can't remember ) Supercomputing conference ( SC2005 is coming up in a few weeks, yeah!!! ) which showed pretty good performance ( relative to the small system they were using ), not sure how they're coming along...
Anyways, good luck...and don't forget to use Iozone to benchmark the damn thing!
Firstly, I agree with one of the children of this poster - legalized abortion led to less crime. Can't prove it, but seems to be the most likely.
/. needs a reality check. That middle-class neighborhood you grew up in, playing your games and having jocks pick on you? That's not where the violent crime is. Try going to where the violent crime is - neighborhoods where someone will kill you for looking at them. Then take a poll of how many people there play video games.
Now, on to the problem with this comment :
Not too fucking many. It blows my mind how naive some people are. But then again, what do you expect, when the media makes Columbine look like the crisis of the decade? Hell, more people get killed some nights in a single neighborhood than got killed in that bit. Shocking? Yes. The real problem? No.
Go live in the ghetto for a few years, and then get back to me. Then we'll talk about affirmative action, the war on drugs, and all this other feel-good bullshit that you get spoonfed through the TV.
What's worse most of them are blond haired blue eyed Aryan types
Pardon me? And there is something wrong with being white? Oh, yeah, I forgot, we need diversity! The major game markets in the world are Western ( US, Europe - might as well classify that as one region, as some of the countries are smaller than the county I live in ), Middle Eastern ( largely Muslim ), and Asian. We're not even going to include Africa, because as far as I'm concerned, you could nuke that continent to hell and back and the world would be a better place ( lower HIV/AIDS statistics, free diamonds, no more idiotic Ministers of Health ranting and raving about HIV/AIDS being a conspiracy between white people and aliens ). Probably don't have much time for video games anyways, between the raping and killing campaigns they seem to go on regularly.
So, let's go to Japan, China, or Korea and see what they have - gee, an entirely different culture and - hold onto your panties here, kids - game characters that embody the traits of their culture. I'm not sure if the Middle East has video games, nor do I give a fuck. They ( as a culture ) stopped advancing quite some time ago. If they didn't sit on oil, everyone would be happy to let them and the Jews get on with the business of killing each other. So guess what - Western ( I could use the terms white or Aryan, but not all Western culture is arguably white ( Greek, Spanish, etc. ), and even less of it is of Aryan descent ) culture has video games that embody the traits that we collectively value ( some games require N-depth problem-solving abilities - albeit there's few of these -, muscles, fantasy adventures, guns, cars, attractive women, etc. ). I admit that there might be a lack of games with a female main character that isn't a big-breasted gun-toting half-vampire or whatever badass. But you know what - it's not a goddamn crisis like everyone makes it out be. I get sick and tired of people whining about how this group or that group is repressed/under-represented or whatever. There's a reason why women aren't represented much in the gaming industry - they're currently a small portion of it. But if things like the Sims keep being such a big hit, they will see games tailored towards a more "female" audience. And then games oriented towards women will become a major segment of the market.
So, to close with the point I started with : you ( and others like you ) need to shut your politically correct mouths up. The rest of us, who just want to get on with our lives, have enough problems to worry about other than the fact that our culture and country bother people who live here, take our handouts, and then say we're oppressing them. If blacks/hispanics/asians/anyone are under-represented in our culture, start doing something noteworthy ( Asians have! ) to make a spot for yourself ( note : dealing crack doesn't count ) or shut the fuck up and die. Oh yeah, and please tell me exactly what fucking church Jesse Jackson is a reverend for?
there's just one problem here. You're assuming that it's not doable to have a system that is reliable to 99.999...% - it is. It's not that hard to have redundant routing into a site, across the net, and into the other site.
Shit, if we can keep porn sites up, we can keep a link that someone's life depends on up - in most cases. And you can most definitely have an on-staff physician ready to step in. That's the ultimate fail-over procedure.
And as far as people getting enraged, if you tell me that I have at least a betting chance on a procedure, and the staff do their best, I'm not going to be mad if I die ( not that I would have much to say anyways ). If I'm given a 10% chance to survive an operation, I'll just go home and drink whiskey, eat steak, and shoot heroin until I die. But if I elect to have an operation, and I die because some wanker couldn't design a redundant link, then I fully expect my children to exact a brutal vengeance on whoever is ultimately responsible.
Next thing you know, telecoms will be liable for medical malpractice if the network connections fail during remote robotic surgery
Yeah, and engineers might be held responsible if the bridges they design and build fail under normal/expected operating conditions.
Oh, that's right, I believe they are.
If the country gets hit with a tactical nuke, I think it's understood that shit happens. If some underpaid joe in Bumfuck, Idaho drives a piece of heavy machinery through the fiber conduit, I expect you to have a near-transparent failover. That's what engineering is about. It's about having the knowledge and experience to design and test well. That's why some people have objections to MCSE or RHCE certs using the word "engineer".
If you're providing the network service for my remote robotic surgery, you goddamn well better have a fault-tolerant re-routable network in place. And an on-call heart surgeon who can be there in minutes. Because if your negligence messes me up, you better believe that myself or my children will pay you a visit personally. We'll have a little chat and it will involve a butane torch and a ball peen hammer. That's a personal message from me to you, mister golden-parachute budget-cutting book-cooking CEO.
I was actually talking about this a few dats agi with a co-worker. I'm hoping that by the time you can purchase tickets for this, I'll have the funds to do so. I plan on being the first man to consume hallucinogens in suborbit. Take a small syrette with some LSD along, hit it while preparing to depart, and enjoy the trip.
And, yes, I know I'm weird. Thanks for calling.
Not kidding you in the least. I'm technically a non-exempt employee, so when I'm not at work, I'm either working from home or drunk. Sometimes both.
I'm posting this while taking a break from updating my resume, as my team lead just told me that the higher-ups were thinking about canning me, because I'm not a 9 to 5 person. Despite the fact that I work 50, 60, sometimes 70 hour weeks in an under-staffed, under-paid department, take calls at 2am in the morning, occasionally work 2 days straight without sleep, etc. As much as I realize that it helps to be there at 8:30 in the morning, I can't help but feel a little bitter that all my hard work isn't appreciated more. That and I'm so fucking burnt out at this miserable company-
Okay, that's enough bitching, where's a goddamn beer...
when's my fucking turn to share?
I can write code without any sleep. I've worked 24+ hours straight without sleep. Bear in mind that writing code isn't the primary function of my job, but I still do a reasonable amount of scripting and programming.
I can code but I can't debug very well after I've been working for about 12+ hours. That goes for debugging code, debugging network problems, tuning a filesystem, etc., anything that requires high-level cognitive abilities. I can't even fucking drive right after pulling an all-nighter, let alone debug where I'm running off the end of an array or whatnot.
And for the people that make comments about getting high, yeah fucking right. Any of my above statements involving lack of sleep apply just as well if you're high ( be it speed, too much coffee, pot, whatever ). Very productive, but not able to think more than 3-5 layers deep into a problem ( and forget about juggling multiple complex problems ), and not all that creative either.