You know when I saw this story for a second there - just for a tiny second - I thought it was April 1st and CmdrTaco was running a story about Slashdot's most prolific puppet master.
Then I squinted and saw it was about the web site. So I piped down, took off my asbestos suit and continued my Friday manicure.
I just went to the Apple store and spec'ed a Mac Mini (you know, because everything else starts at $1,100). A 2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB of RAM and an enourmous 160GB drive brought me to $949. That's without a monitor.
Then I went to the Dell website and spec'ed an Inspiron 530s with the same processor and RAM. I accepted all the defaults, except that I added an ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 256MB video card. Price is $659, with the little difference that I get a 500GB HDD and a 19-inch monitor.
Sorry, but your math just doesn't do it for me. Maybe a refurbished Mac would cut it, but who knows.
I've had to replace 3 mobos and 2 hdds in the first year of owning a new PC.
I don't know what or where you're buying, but I've had only one catastrophic mobo failure in about 15 years. And HDDs fail, that's just a fact of life. I have ten-year old 540MB Maxtor drives that are still ticking, and 400GB SATA deals from Seagate that fail after a year (or not).
It's basically common knowledge, what GP is saying.
No, it's not "common knowledge" at all. My company did a HIPAA-compliant solution for a large provider in 2004-2006 (think Kaiser Permanente-level scale). I wasn't in charge of the client side (which were rich client apps) but I know the developers had a hell of a time trying to get everything to work because the terminals were so locked down. For starters, they didn't have a connection to the internet, and IE wasn't even available. The login provider was replaced by a custom GINA DLL and the desktop was basically the company logo. The start menu had nothing but links to the URLs that pointed to the provider applications. Ctrl+Alt+Del did nothing, you couldn't run a task or bring up a console, nothing. The terminals themselves had a BIOS-level on boot encryption password from PGP (even though no data was stored on them) and they had no floppy, CD-ROM or USB ports. The keyboards had an integrated trackball and the cable essentially went into the chassis so it could not be disconnected, so no PS2 ports either.
And you should have seen the process for getting data backups offsite to Iron Mountain. It involved an Arthur Andersen auditor, a security box, witnesses, signed statements and an armored car.
If your healthcare provider is browsing their Facebook account in IE while fiddling with your medical records, I suggest you report them.
twitter here is doing the usual "Windoze" thing with his sockpuppets because he feels that Microsoft are to blame for the irresponsibility of companies who use their operating system for things like HIPAA-compliant systems. Not like it's rocket science to secure a Windows box by pushing a piddly policy script off of a domain controller.
But what is trolling, exactly? I mean beyond the crapflooders, "Linux is teh suxxorz" and GNAA posts, what defines it? Take this thread for example. It has six posts (as of now), four of which are from him with three different accounts. What possible value can something like that have? You worry about the signal to noise ratio? Maybe you could just foe him. Oh wait, he'll just create another account.
I posted about this a while ago so I don't want to repeat myself. Maybe Slashdot needs a new (-1, Sockpuppet) moderation if what he's doing is not clearly "trolling" per se, but I don't think it should be allowed, never mind rewarded.
I agree that the whole "OMG it's twitter" thing gets even older than his usual "M$ is TEh SUXX" rants, but I would argue that it's all his doing, especially when he is moderated up when shilling his own posts. I don't see asking if an account is a sockpuppet (which is what started this particular one) is less or more "bad" than using five or six accounts to blatantly hump up my own posts.
twitter is clearly a dishonest person, and he's actively gaming the system for whatever reason. Some people like you could care less, others would like to know if they're being ganged up on by the same sad joe pretending to be seven different people. I don't think your position is more valid than theirs.
My "pay per click blog"? You mean a website with ads? How unique is that dipshit?
Oh nothing, except that yours is driven primarily by half-truths, badly researched tripe and fabrications. I suppose that's no different than Slashdot, so it's not like you invented a new business model or anything.
Shoving your tongue up the [censored] of Digg
My man, I don't even read Digg. I just got wind of your little drama with them through another channel a while ago. I love that you blame everything on "Windows Enthusiasts" though, as if people just being sick and tired of your crap and your attempts to game their system wasn't enough.
Your efforts at censorship don't matter.
Are you sure you're not a twitter sockpuppet as well? You seem to have that sad "if you disagree with me you must hate me" attitude as well.
Heh. I have to say in fairness that full credit for spotting most of twitter's sockpuppets goes to Macthorpe. I just took the opening twitter gave me:)
I can't believe he would actually post a link to that, never mind doing it with one of his other accounts (in the third person, no less). I would have deleted it in embarrassment a long time ago. Well, I wouldn't have written it to begin with.
I'll take my offtopic moderation now
The usual YOU CANNOT TALK ABOUT TWITTER EVEN IF HE'S REPLYING TO HIMSELF WITH FIVE ACCOUNTS ON THIS THREAD moderation aside, I'd have to say you're on topic. After all, he's the one that posted the link to his lame journal entry, and that's what you commented on. And this whole thing is about Apple.
There's a duck outside the window, BTW <-- I MENTIONED FOWL SO MOD ME OFFTOPIC NOW OR SLASHDOT WILL BE RUINED
A sub-$1,000 Mac is quite frankly useless. That's probably why Apple now has 66% of the market over that price range. On the other hand, I can buy a pretty good Wintel box for under $1000 just about anywhere. Even cheaper than that if I want to install Linux on it.
You're going to tell my friend he needs to plop $1,300 for a Mac instead of a $600 Gateway PC to do essentially the same thing? Remember, we're talking about people who would like to own a Mac but don't really need one since their PCs are doing what they need just fine.
Actually twitter, this last December I got the chance to go to an Apple store for the first time while on a trip to San Francisco. My sister was looking for educational games for her three kids to run on her Mac, so I said what the heck and went with her.
As far as the retail experience goes, coming from the gritty do-it-yourself-BestBuy-or-bust PC white/beige box world where I see computers as tools rather than post-modernist plastic sculptures to gawk at, I have to say I was rather pleasantly surprised. I half expected these guys (Geniuses?) to be no better than the ignorant, pushy pimply teenagers at BestBuy or the Gateway Country Stores (R.I.P.), but that was certainly not the case. I mean I didn't walk out of there with a hard on or anything like that, but Apple certainly has the "don't worry about anything, just give us your money and you'll be OK" approach completely figured out.
The thing that got my attention was the number of kids playing with the Macs on display, and the number of older people browsing around. I'm not sure what gives, but it's like the store atmosphere sort of encourages people to sit down, try things out and ask lots of questions. Inevitably I suppose this takes care of the other thing, which is to sell the boxes.
I can't say that I'm anything other than a die-hard Windows (with sprinklings of BSD and Linux) user, and I really wouldn't want or know what to do with a Mac. But at the expense of sounding a little fanboyish, the Apple store is very cool.
I think anyone with just a few working brain cells can figure out the real reasons for your lame little account of the terrible things suffered at the hands of these evil people. If I happened to be in the shoes of that ogre of a manager that "screamed" at you, I would have taken your picture and put up a website with an account of what really happened (one can only imagine your demeanor and shudder), along with a recommendation of how not to "evangelize" free software.
As always, you end up doing more harm than good - sockpuppets or not.
Well, I guess I understand the whole clone thing. It is disingenuous to call them that. I still remember the old Motorola clones that ran MacOS 7 (gah...)
Still, I think my point about the time savings is valid. If I were actually inclined to play with one of these things, the time not spent trying to figure out how to hack OS X would probably be worth it, not to mention the actual monetary savings over a real Mac. I honestly don't find the platform appealing at all, but I do know people who would love to own a Mac and can't afford them (or justify the cost over a cheap PC). Assuming this whole thing is not a scam, it would be a good alternative for them.
These "intelligent posts" include yours, I gather? I ask because you seem to spend all your time posting astoundingly amazing FUD about Microsoft on Slashdot and your lame pay-per-click blog. So surely you are not referring to yourself, and you are sure as hell not talking about twitter, either. I'm having trouble trying to understand what is intelligent or interesting about someone who posts with twelve (or however many there are now) accounts. It doesn't matter what he's saying, he's just gaming the moderation system. Well, that and "sticking it" to Microsoft, since he's convinced they are part of a massive conspiracy to keep him from saying all these allegedly intelligent things that quite frankly would make even the old die-hard COLA zealots wince in pain and collective embarrassment.
So no, I don't think people who have the temerity of pointing out that twitter is shilling his own posts with nine different accounts a particular drop in the signal to noise ratio. I mean, what could be worse that those tepid "I agree with you, impressive stranger" shill replies to his own posts?
those who can't recognize obvious reality for themselves?
Seems there are still lots and lots of people who can't recognize obvious reality by themselves. How else could we explain your popularity?
How's the whole Digg thing working out for you, by the way?
If it's cheaper and runs OS X, then why not? At least it saves you the trouble of hacking the box to install the operating system. Who cares about fan problems? Hell, I'll even put in better fans on my dime if I saved a thousand bucks on the thing to begin with. It would be fun to play with without forking over a month's salary over to Apple just for the shiny plastic cover.
Then again, I thought this was some sort of scam? Didn't someone try to find their "headquarters" and figured out the address was a meat packing plant* or something like that?
Very good. Now go back to the case's email archive (or any other source you prefer) and show us how they made ACPI specific to Windows, or what patents they hold that prevent people from using it in other operating systems.
You can make the case that you've managed to prove alleged intent (you haven't, but we'll roll with it). Now prove they actually did what is implied on that email.
Many years ago Bruce Perens posted on USENET something about how ESR had allegedly threatened to kill him over some stupid disagreement. If I post that in a discussion about open source, everyone's first reaction would be to claim that it is irrelevant, since Perens is still alive and Raymond is not in jail, wouldn't it?
For this (which gets trotted out every other week) to be meaningful you need to also show that they did indeed do something evil, not just that they were talking about it.
There are a lot of bad things you can lay at Microsoft's feet. This is not one of them (unless you're twitter and you think repetition somehow engenders truth). Concentrate on those, and stop making crap up.
I know it would be an issue with any distro. I know that there is hardware that works and hardware that doesn't. That's true even for Windows.
My comment was really aimed at the GP's assertion that anyone who doesn't fill out bug reports is an asshat, and is therefore leeching the valuable work of others. You either give away your valuable work and face the fact that not everyone is going to know or even want to file your bug reports, or you freaking charge for it. Either way, calling potential users "asshats" is not exactly the smartest thing to do. The first time I did it nine years ago with RH 5.x when I couldn't get it to work with an Ultra ATA controller. I found something that started along the lines of "if you were stupid enough to connect your CD-ROM to the controller..." Unfortunately things have not changed much in the intervening years. And this was a document recommended by the RH website. I've never seen a Microsoft KB article or an IBM reference doc that calls me stupid.
Is this common or widespread? No. But it shouldn't even exist.
The communities that form around the large distros are extremely helpful. They are also afflicted by asshats who are convinced everyone should be as clever and hard-working as they are. This attitude does absolutely nothing for the acceptance of Linux among normal consumers.
In the end, the user does not care if the source of the problem is RedHat, Samsung or the troll under the bridge. They just want their hardware to work.
So what you're saying is that this OS is essentially worthless for normal users. Correct? And I suppose that's fine. Let's just not pretend Joe Windows can install this and be on his way, like he would with something like Ubuntu or Xandros.
So what exactly is the point of Fedora then? To serve as a corporate desktop for companies that also use RHEL? As a toy for techies? Some sort of test bed for new RedHat technologies?
I'm using hate in the "cancer", "communist", "unamerican
No, you're using hate exactly the way it's mean to be used, as an emotional argument that you think will rally people to think the way you do. You are using it because you are intellectually incapable of looking at those issues as what they really are. Or you simply don't care to, because it's inconvenient to the jihad.
You don't care about software freedom
And have you stopped beating your wife?
so you are either here to harass someone you think is twitter
Haha, good one.
or you are here to defend Microsoft
From lies and fabrications? I'd defend Symantec, IBM, Canonical, RedHat and the easter bunny. Especially the easter bunny.
What a waste of my time.
I was thinking the same thing, but from a slightly different angle, which involves sockpuppets and apparently copious amounts of free time, or some sort of reward. Not going too well, that sockpuppet thing is it?
waste time talking to Microsoft about something they hate
twitter, why do you insist on attaching emotional labels to something that is a simple business matter to a corporation? You seem to use "hate" the same way the neocons use it, as in "they attack us because they hate our freedom". Do you really believe you're furthering your cause when you do this?
The article is more fluff than substance (surprise), but is there a particular problem with running a simple script on these machines to adjust the group policy (or push ot from a domain controller like sane people do) and remove their admin privileges? They can happily access the internet and email/browse/IM without them. Are the laptops owned by the soldiers or the Pentagon (in which case I assume they're on a milnet)? If the latter then I fail to see what big problem is - seems more like a lack of will by the military to do things correctly. If the former, then who gives a crap?
Smells like just another Slashdot hack job, with the usual shades of "Windows sucks". But that's what pays CmdrTaco's bills.
Yes I do, thus my point that you don't, and you're just exaggerating, because on the internets no one can hear me scream.
Less importantly, why do you hate Twitter so much?
Hate is an emotional affliction I normally associate with disenfranchised teenagers and the intellectually challenged. I would recommend not letting it consume you, but you're beyond that, obviously.
All he's ever done is stand up for people's rights?
Lying is not "standing up" for anything, except your own agenda.
Wait a minute "gnutoo", why do you care what I think about twitter?
Why yes, this very thread confirms your theory. After all, "Futurepower(R)" got promptly modded down for criticizing Microsoft, like he always does with LOTS OF CAPS and made-up "facts".
Everything you own can be confiscated for suspicion of "making available" crappy RIAA music that can be found on any radio station. Your email, web browsing, phone conversations and church can all be monitored without a warrent [etc]
You know twitter, my dad and his brothers lived through Argentina's "Dirty War". I didn't really understand what they went through until I was a little older and he asked me to play (and pay attention to) one of his old LP records. It's amazing how a simple song will open our eyes to things you can't grasp when they are explained in other ways. If you ever have a chance to listen to "Yo Te Nombro" (would translate roughly to "I Say Your Name") by Nacha Guevara, do take the opportunity to do so. It's a powerful statement of all the things you lose (the most important of which is your own humanity) in an environment of total and complete repression.
I doubt you will ever stop humping the "I hate M$" horse, but maybe what you need is to have some sense of measure when you talk about what a horrible place the US has become now that the RIAA can search your computer, just so you can make a point about your racially-charged dislike of China, which I assume is no different from the one you've displayed in the past towards India and other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Then I squinted and saw it was about the web site. So I piped down, took off my asbestos suit and continued my Friday manicure.
Then I went to the Dell website and spec'ed an Inspiron 530s with the same processor and RAM. I accepted all the defaults, except that I added an ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO 256MB video card. Price is $659, with the little difference that I get a 500GB HDD and a 19-inch monitor.
Sorry, but your math just doesn't do it for me. Maybe a refurbished Mac would cut it, but who knows.
I don't know what or where you're buying, but I've had only one catastrophic mobo failure in about 15 years. And HDDs fail, that's just a fact of life. I have ten-year old 540MB Maxtor drives that are still ticking, and 400GB SATA deals from Seagate that fail after a year (or not).
No, it's not "common knowledge" at all. My company did a HIPAA-compliant solution for a large provider in 2004-2006 (think Kaiser Permanente-level scale). I wasn't in charge of the client side (which were rich client apps) but I know the developers had a hell of a time trying to get everything to work because the terminals were so locked down. For starters, they didn't have a connection to the internet, and IE wasn't even available. The login provider was replaced by a custom GINA DLL and the desktop was basically the company logo. The start menu had nothing but links to the URLs that pointed to the provider applications. Ctrl+Alt+Del did nothing, you couldn't run a task or bring up a console, nothing. The terminals themselves had a BIOS-level on boot encryption password from PGP (even though no data was stored on them) and they had no floppy, CD-ROM or USB ports. The keyboards had an integrated trackball and the cable essentially went into the chassis so it could not be disconnected, so no PS2 ports either.
And you should have seen the process for getting data backups offsite to Iron Mountain. It involved an Arthur Andersen auditor, a security box, witnesses, signed statements and an armored car.
If your healthcare provider is browsing their Facebook account in IE while fiddling with your medical records, I suggest you report them.
twitter here is doing the usual "Windoze" thing with his sockpuppets because he feels that Microsoft are to blame for the irresponsibility of companies who use their operating system for things like HIPAA-compliant systems. Not like it's rocket science to secure a Windows box by pushing a piddly policy script off of a domain controller.
twitter will create a few more sockpuppets and bring this rig to its rack-mounted knees.
No, he's not. But you meant Markov Engine, right?
That's a really cool project, BTW. Unfortunately it has a EULA the size of Texas that scared the bleep out of me when I first saw it.
Oh um, Apple stores are shiny. <-- THIS GETS ME ON TOPIC KTHXBAI
I posted about this a while ago so I don't want to repeat myself. Maybe Slashdot needs a new (-1, Sockpuppet) moderation if what he's doing is not clearly "trolling" per se, but I don't think it should be allowed, never mind rewarded.
I agree that the whole "OMG it's twitter" thing gets even older than his usual "M$ is TEh SUXX" rants, but I would argue that it's all his doing, especially when he is moderated up when shilling his own posts. I don't see asking if an account is a sockpuppet (which is what started this particular one) is less or more "bad" than using five or six accounts to blatantly hump up my own posts.
twitter is clearly a dishonest person, and he's actively gaming the system for whatever reason. Some people like you could care less, others would like to know if they're being ganged up on by the same sad joe pretending to be seven different people. I don't think your position is more valid than theirs.
Oh nothing, except that yours is driven primarily by half-truths, badly researched tripe and fabrications. I suppose that's no different than Slashdot, so it's not like you invented a new business model or anything.
My man, I don't even read Digg. I just got wind of your little drama with them through another channel a while ago. I love that you blame everything on "Windows Enthusiasts" though, as if people just being sick and tired of your crap and your attempts to game their system wasn't enough.
Are you sure you're not a twitter sockpuppet as well? You seem to have that sad "if you disagree with me you must hate me" attitude as well.
Heh. I have to say in fairness that full credit for spotting most of twitter's sockpuppets goes to Macthorpe. I just took the opening twitter gave me :)
I can't believe he would actually post a link to that, never mind doing it with one of his other accounts (in the third person, no less). I would have deleted it in embarrassment a long time ago. Well, I wouldn't have written it to begin with.
The usual YOU CANNOT TALK ABOUT TWITTER EVEN IF HE'S REPLYING TO HIMSELF WITH FIVE ACCOUNTS ON THIS THREAD moderation aside, I'd have to say you're on topic. After all, he's the one that posted the link to his lame journal entry, and that's what you commented on. And this whole thing is about Apple.
There's a duck outside the window, BTW <-- I MENTIONED FOWL SO MOD ME OFFTOPIC NOW OR SLASHDOT WILL BE RUINED
You're going to tell my friend he needs to plop $1,300 for a Mac instead of a $600 Gateway PC to do essentially the same thing? Remember, we're talking about people who would like to own a Mac but don't really need one since their PCs are doing what they need just fine.
As far as the retail experience goes, coming from the gritty do-it-yourself-BestBuy-or-bust PC white/beige box world where I see computers as tools rather than post-modernist plastic sculptures to gawk at, I have to say I was rather pleasantly surprised. I half expected these guys (Geniuses?) to be no better than the ignorant, pushy pimply teenagers at BestBuy or the Gateway Country Stores (R.I.P.), but that was certainly not the case. I mean I didn't walk out of there with a hard on or anything like that, but Apple certainly has the "don't worry about anything, just give us your money and you'll be OK" approach completely figured out.
The thing that got my attention was the number of kids playing with the Macs on display, and the number of older people browsing around. I'm not sure what gives, but it's like the store atmosphere sort of encourages people to sit down, try things out and ask lots of questions. Inevitably I suppose this takes care of the other thing, which is to sell the boxes.
I can't say that I'm anything other than a die-hard Windows (with sprinklings of BSD and Linux) user, and I really wouldn't want or know what to do with a Mac. But at the expense of sounding a little fanboyish, the Apple store is very cool.
I think anyone with just a few working brain cells can figure out the real reasons for your lame little account of the terrible things suffered at the hands of these evil people. If I happened to be in the shoes of that ogre of a manager that "screamed" at you, I would have taken your picture and put up a website with an account of what really happened (one can only imagine your demeanor and shudder), along with a recommendation of how not to "evangelize" free software.
As always, you end up doing more harm than good - sockpuppets or not.
Still, I think my point about the time savings is valid. If I were actually inclined to play with one of these things, the time not spent trying to figure out how to hack OS X would probably be worth it, not to mention the actual monetary savings over a real Mac. I honestly don't find the platform appealing at all, but I do know people who would love to own a Mac and can't afford them (or justify the cost over a cheap PC). Assuming this whole thing is not a scam, it would be a good alternative for them.
So no, I don't think people who have the temerity of pointing out that twitter is shilling his own posts with nine different accounts a particular drop in the signal to noise ratio. I mean, what could be worse that those tepid "I agree with you, impressive stranger" shill replies to his own posts?
Seems there are still lots and lots of people who can't recognize obvious reality by themselves. How else could we explain your popularity?
How's the whole Digg thing working out for you, by the way?
Then again, I thought this was some sort of scam? Didn't someone try to find their "headquarters" and figured out the address was a meat packing plant* or something like that?
* [insert joke here]
We call this hedging your bets.
Blender already runs on Windows, so I fail to see how this is even relevant.
Sweet Jesus, what does this even mean?
You can make the case that you've managed to prove alleged intent (you haven't, but we'll roll with it). Now prove they actually did what is implied on that email.
Many years ago Bruce Perens posted on USENET something about how ESR had allegedly threatened to kill him over some stupid disagreement. If I post that in a discussion about open source, everyone's first reaction would be to claim that it is irrelevant, since Perens is still alive and Raymond is not in jail, wouldn't it?
For this (which gets trotted out every other week) to be meaningful you need to also show that they did indeed do something evil, not just that they were talking about it.
There are a lot of bad things you can lay at Microsoft's feet. This is not one of them (unless you're twitter and you think repetition somehow engenders truth). Concentrate on those, and stop making crap up.
My comment was really aimed at the GP's assertion that anyone who doesn't fill out bug reports is an asshat, and is therefore leeching the valuable work of others. You either give away your valuable work and face the fact that not everyone is going to know or even want to file your bug reports, or you freaking charge for it. Either way, calling potential users "asshats" is not exactly the smartest thing to do. The first time I did it nine years ago with RH 5.x when I couldn't get it to work with an Ultra ATA controller. I found something that started along the lines of "if you were stupid enough to connect your CD-ROM to the controller..." Unfortunately things have not changed much in the intervening years. And this was a document recommended by the RH website. I've never seen a Microsoft KB article or an IBM reference doc that calls me stupid.
Is this common or widespread? No. But it shouldn't even exist.
The communities that form around the large distros are extremely helpful. They are also afflicted by asshats who are convinced everyone should be as clever and hard-working as they are. This attitude does absolutely nothing for the acceptance of Linux among normal consumers.
In the end, the user does not care if the source of the problem is RedHat, Samsung or the troll under the bridge. They just want their hardware to work.
So what exactly is the point of Fedora then? To serve as a corporate desktop for companies that also use RHEL? As a toy for techies? Some sort of test bed for new RedHat technologies?
No, you're using hate exactly the way it's mean to be used, as an emotional argument that you think will rally people to think the way you do. You are using it because you are intellectually incapable of looking at those issues as what they really are. Or you simply don't care to, because it's inconvenient to the jihad.
And have you stopped beating your wife?
Haha, good one.
From lies and fabrications? I'd defend Symantec, IBM, Canonical, RedHat and the easter bunny. Especially the easter bunny.
I was thinking the same thing, but from a slightly different angle, which involves sockpuppets and apparently copious amounts of free time, or some sort of reward. Not going too well, that sockpuppet thing is it?
twitter, why do you insist on attaching emotional labels to something that is a simple business matter to a corporation? You seem to use "hate" the same way the neocons use it, as in "they attack us because they hate our freedom". Do you really believe you're furthering your cause when you do this?
Smells like just another Slashdot hack job, with the usual shades of "Windows sucks". But that's what pays CmdrTaco's bills.
Clearly you have not met our friend, the US telecomm industry.
Yes I do, thus my point that you don't, and you're just exaggerating, because on the internets no one can hear me scream.
Hate is an emotional affliction I normally associate with disenfranchised teenagers and the intellectually challenged. I would recommend not letting it consume you, but you're beyond that, obviously.
Lying is not "standing up" for anything, except your own agenda.
Wait a minute "gnutoo", why do you care what I think about twitter?
Oh wait.
You know twitter, my dad and his brothers lived through Argentina's "Dirty War". I didn't really understand what they went through until I was a little older and he asked me to play (and pay attention to) one of his old LP records. It's amazing how a simple song will open our eyes to things you can't grasp when they are explained in other ways. If you ever have a chance to listen to "Yo Te Nombro" (would translate roughly to "I Say Your Name") by Nacha Guevara, do take the opportunity to do so. It's a powerful statement of all the things you lose (the most important of which is your own humanity) in an environment of total and complete repression.
I doubt you will ever stop humping the "I hate M$" horse, but maybe what you need is to have some sense of measure when you talk about what a horrible place the US has become now that the RIAA can search your computer, just so you can make a point about your racially-charged dislike of China, which I assume is no different from the one you've displayed in the past towards India and other countries.