I believe you're asking how effective can the parity be when it's suspect to damage just as much as the original data?
That's a good question, but it's not really what I was getting at. I was more thinking about the fact that if you have a RAID5, for example, you can only lose 2 disks, no more. So if you were using parity with several files (the files standing in for the disks, so to speak), then you might only be able to handle errors in two files before the parity becomes useless for reconstructing the files.
I mean, exactly how much damage it can take depends on how much redundancy there is, and the technical implementation and such. I don't know that much about par2, so I can't talk too intelligently about it, but I have a hard time imagining how they would cheat the general rule. Surely there must be some limit to how much damage can be done to the files before the parity can't reconstruct the original?
Interesting post. One part seemed unclear to me (though maybe I'm being silly)
Store your media in a cool dry place, on it's side.
What side are we talking about? I would assume that CDs should be stored laid flat, assuming warping is a concern, but it seems to me that "on its side" could be interpreted to mean either laid flat or on its edge.
Well it's all about trade-offs, right? I'm not familiar with par2, but if it's storing parity information, I kind of assume that it aims for a balance between the size of the information and redundancy. I mean, the parity file would generally end up being bigger than an MD5 sum of a given file, right?
It seems like a parity file would be very space efficient if you were storing tons and tons of small files, but not so much if you're storing a couple very large files. On the other hand, the more files you store, the greater likelihood that two files will go corrupt at the same time, which would render the parity kind of useless.
Am I right? I'm just going based on what I know about parity in general, rather than specific knowledge about par2. But it seems like another solution could be to store multiple copies of the same backup with MD5 being used to detect corruption. If corruption occurs, you go to another backup and hope the same file isn't corrupt on the other backup. Depending on some statistics that I don't know (failure rates per CD or per file, how par2 works, etc), the solution using multiple copies and MD5sum might be safer.
Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them...
Yeah, I'm glad you raised this issue, because I think it's an interesting component of this whole thing: backwards compatibility. Apple does try to maintain backward compatibility to a certain extent-- continuing to support 32-bit and PPC versions of their software, but they've shown a much greater willingness to simply cut things off than MS. Linux is somewhat different, in that by being open source, the door is open for the backwards compatibility to be configured in as-needed. Therefore, if legacy code is slowing things down, there's the option of simply dropping it out for systems that don't need that legacy code anymore.
In that sense, it seems like OSX and Linux currently have an advantage over Windows when it comes to making quick progress. But it may be that the advantage is just now opening up, in that OSX is done transitioning to 64-bit x86 and Linux has finally caught up to Windows on the desktop (IMO), and so it's only now that the respective developers can really focus in on making advancements and fine-tuning everything.
I'm not sure whether the advantage is significant or real though. I guess time will tell.
and know that all the apps that come with Ubuntu would get a reasonably fair share of that money.
There's the problem. I doubt it would be too hard to Canonical to set up something where it could take in money which then flows out to a set number of people/groups, since that's a problem that lots of industries have dealt with in terms of royalties. The problem is always going to be who gets how much. Let's say you donate $50 and I donate $50, but each of us has totally different priorities. How does Canonical distribute my $50 to pay for my priorities while spending your $50 to pay for your priorities?
Honestly, I'd love for there to be a systematic method for easily supporting the FOSS that's important to you. It would be especially nice IMO if there was a clear-cut way to support not just the projects you like, but the building of features you want. Like, "I'd like to put $50 towards making Linux boot faster" and then anyone could work on that for money and bill against the account of everyone who has contributed for that feature.
But then you need someone trustworthy and skilled in administration to run that whole thing and keep it from being corrupt. Also, in the interest of being open, you wouldn't particularly want a single body to have complete control of how FOSS projects get funded, so you'd actually need multiple organizations doing this. Plus, lots of people in FOSS don't like the idea of bounties, because they think it corrupts the priorities of project from "what's best" to "what random people want".
So I don't know... I do think it's a weird problem that there may be people who would be willing to donate, but who aren't willing to take the time to figure out who to donate to. I've donated to projects before, but I'm sure I would donate more if I could be certain that (a) I was sure my donations were going to the right people; and (b) I felt confident that my donations were encouraging work on the things that I'd like to see improved.
I believe the devil secretly killed god and took over the holy land (unholy land). And now he tortures all the catholics that pass away. Of course allowing all the atheists to go free. I call it the fuck you pascal wager. In my philosophy class i was the only one to notice the horrible fault in logic, it was depressing (only 1 person in the class was even religious anyways).
Which horrible fault in logic? I'm not a fan of pascal's wager or anything, I'm just unsure what you're referring to.
Right, God always has the *ultimate* dodge available to him: if an omnipotent and omniscient deity doesn't want proof of him to exist, then any attempt to prove him will, by definition, fail. Even if it's by some miraculous direct intervention by said deity.
But I guess I never got the memo that explained why Acrobat Reader was doing anything more than reading plain/static PDFs in the first place. Didn't they do something in new versions to allow Flash and movies, or something?
The only reason I use PDFs is when I want to make a document with a very controlled layout, both in print and on a display, without any expectation of editing. Honestly I'm willing to pay money to Adobe to get Acrobat if it's going to help me do that in a way that's proven, robust, and configurable. I can also understand the desire for things like comments and digital signatures, but anything much more than that and I feel like it's just shoehorning extra bloat in the form of features that relatively few people will use, probably at the expense of security and possibly at the expense of sanity.
...with the privileges of a user running the Adobe Reader
application.
Which strongly implies that those affected will be
Windows users with Administrator access.
It seems fair to worry even if you aren't running as admin. If a trojan PDF can run arbitrary code with privileges of the user running Adobe Reader, that's still enough to screw with that user's documents even if the user isn't an admin.
Riches chose World of Warcraft over working a legit job
So he's suing because he'd prefer to play the game than have a legit job? There are tons of things I'd rather do than my job, and my job isn't even all that bad. But here at work, I'd rather be watching a movie than doing my job. Yet here I am, at work.
... posting on Slashdot. Can I sue Slashdot for being more interesting than my job?
No more sizable than on any platform that's remotely "open". If I can install and run unsigned apps, then trojans are a risk. If I can only run signed apps, then the risk is mitigated by exactly the same amount that the signing authority is trustworthy.
There are tons of stupid patents, and when you're running your business, it's not your job to proactively ensure that nothing you're doing is violating anyone's patents. Short of reading this news story, there isn't much chance anyone is going to know that this patent was granted. So it's sort of a non-issue.
To use you're analogy, it's not IBM pointing a gun to your head and telling you not to do something. It's IBM happening to have a gun, and it's unlikely that you even know IBM has a gun. It shouldn't really affect your decisions until IBM starts going out and shooting people.
You could argue that the cold war taught us that "mutually assured destruction" is an effective deterrent. Neither Russia nor the US used their nukes, did they?
Geeze, here we go again. Listen, patenting stupid crap isn't evil. *Suing* other people for your stupid crap patents is evil. Countersuing other people for violating your stupid crap patents after they've sued you for violating their stupid crap patents is simply a business reality these days.
Big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Novell have to patent any little thing that floats into their heads that the patent office will let them patent. They all do it, and the purpose is mostly for the sake of maintaining a defensive-patent war chest to keep the other big companies at bay with mutually assured destruction.
Start complaining about them being evil when they sue someone.
What many object to was the "spread the wealth around" statement, because they see it as tantamount to simple "here's your check" redistributionism.
Yeah, but I think it's a bit much to make out of that one quote. You may not believe me, and hell it's possible that I'm wrong, but I don't believe that Obama intended that sort of thing with his "spread the wealth around" quote".
I think what he was trying to comment on was the unfavorable distribution of wealth that currently exists in our country, where the rich keep getting richer, the poor stay poor, and the middle class gets poorer. I think Obama is really just saying that he intends to try to rectify that with a tax policy that's more fair by lowering the tax burden on the middle class, even if it means increasing the tax burden on the rich.
Now, you could argue that that plan is somehow "socialism" too, but again, I don't think it is. I think "spread the wealth around" was just an unfortunate choice of words.
Of course, it looks like we're going to find out in the next 4 years.
Well, one, the concept of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" isn't from Marx. The popularization of that formulation might have come from Marx, but you'll find the same spirit occurring far earlier in history - in early Christian communitarianism, for example.
I thought Jesus taught that capitalism and self-interest were the way to salvation. Didn't Jesus tell the story of the good Samaritan who left a man suffering by the side of the road because he had no money to pay for healthcare?
An ironic ending for a guy who was a VICTIM of this very kind of dirty politics in 2000.
Sometimes people learn the wrong lesson. For example, peoples response to abuse has a tendency to be "I'm bad" instead of "My abuser is bad". In turn, they often seek out relationships where they take the role of either the abuser or the abused.
You could make too much of the comparison, but my only real point here is that I think McCain learned the wrong lesson from the 2000 election. I think certain people managed to convince him that he lost because dirty politics are the only way to win, and so when it was his time to run again, he turned to dirty politics. He ditched his old advisors and instead sought out the same sort of people who were able to beat him last time.
Often enough, when you lose, it's good to analyze your opponent's performance and try to learn to take on your opponent's strengths. Unfortunately, you have to be careful when you do this to make sure that you're emulating your opponent's strengths and not his weaknesses.
I think the economic hasn't ruled out either free markets or regulated markets as reasonable or viable systems. At this point, I'm not absolutely positive which is better, but I tend to feel like some amount of governmental regulation, at least in terms of ethical business practices, is warranted.
I'd argue instead that the crisis has made it clear that the that many of the so-called "free market enthusiasts" (not including Paul or Schiff in this group) are really in favor of subsidies and corporate welfare, government intervention in favor of guaranteeing specific businesses and business models, and then would like to refuse the government the right to track the effects of their intervention.
Following that philosophy, you seem to end up getting the worst of both worlds. Companies don't get cleaned up by the market due to governmental protection, but they also don't get cleaned up by the government due to people insisting that "the market" will clean up the mess.
I'd love to see a universal HMO be established here, one that can't drop you like a hot potato if your get sick, or flat out refuse to let you in for "pre-existing conditions" if you change jobs.
That's the part that I truly can't see anyone thoughtfully disagreeing with. I've heard of insurance companies failing to cover things as "pre-existing conditions" in silly situations, e.g. you smoked when you were a teenager, were uncovered by insurance for 1 year in your 20s, and then get lung cancer in your 50s and they say, "Oops, it may have started in that 1 year in your 20s! Can't help you!" Whether that's exaggerated or not, I'm not sure.
But what I've experienced first hand is being very sick and being denied tests that multiple doctors said I needed, because my insurance felt they weren't necessary. That's a really bad situation, because sometimes it comes up when you're least in a position to fight it. Try arguing with your insurance company when you're so sick that you're basically having trouble staying conscious. Go ahead. See how fun that is.
Part of the problem is that protesters now have a tendency to just do what they're allowed. They go to an approved protest area, chant, and then leave.
What people sometimes fail to realize is that this completely misses the point. The point of lots of past protests to go where you're not supposed to go and do what you're not supposed to do, to challenge those your protesting against to act.
When Gandhi collected salt in the Salt Satyagraha, he was breaking the law. Martin Luther King supposedly chose where to protest based on where he thought his followers could elicit a violent reaction from his political enemies without being violent themselves.
The point is to force your enemies into a position where they have to either concede their position or act in a way that's publicly immoral toward you, without you acting immorally toward them. If you have a moral audience, the spectacle will turn the audience against against your enemies.
However, the whole thing is usually going to include some suffering on the part of the protestors. If you're protesting this way, you might get beaten or locked up or even killed. You might have to martyr yourself. Most people don't have it in them to do that. Most people just want to go out, have a picnic, chant for a little while, try to pick up hippie chicks, and then go home and sleep in a warm bed.
I remember someone saying (maybe it's a famous quote?) something like, "Being angery is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies." Or maybe it was hate instead of anger or something, but the basic idea is that when you are angry at someone, sometimes your anger is hurting you more than it hurts them.
I think anger and fear are useful emotions, but sometimes our reactions to them are not useful. It may be that you could argue the same thing about emotions like love and confidence. You can try too hard to hold on to the things you love, and you can get yourself into trouble by being over-confident, for example.
I may be getting too philosophical here. I guess I'm just saying that there are things that you should get angry about, and so I don't feel comfortable talking about it as a wholly negative emotion. I think the problem is when people don't know how to deal with that anger, especially when that anger is rooted in some other obscure emotional issue that results in misdirected anger.
And though it's true that acting angry may make you feel more angry, bottling it up or covering it with a smile won't necessarily help you deal with that anger. Ideally we'd all find the real source of our anger, deal with it properly, and figure out how to not get angry in the first place, but I wouldn't be on that utopia coming any time soon. In reality, sometimes finding an appropriate outlet may be helpful.
On the other hand, I'm not sure being an angry troll on the Internet is an appropriate outlet. It's probably better to go to the batting cage, or whatever kind of meditative physical exertion you prefer. (That's not something I actually do, but it seems like an obvious example: go hit shit with a baseball bat in a socially acceptable environment.)
Yeah, but I remember reading about a recent study that showed that people had something like a finite amount of self control. Like if you were put in a position of having to use willpower to keep yourself from doing something, you'd be more likely to succumb to your impulses if you'd been exercising your willpower on something else directly before.
Now I think the study was regarding addictive behavior specifically (I'm not going to actually go looking for the news story I read about it), but I think it explains why people are inclined to believe the "steam boiler" model. It may not be that letting out anger lessens the amount of anger you have, but rather that relaxing your will and succumbing to your anger allows you well of willpower to recharge a bit, therefore allowing you to reassert a level of self-control that wouldn't otherwise be available.
If that model is right, then it may be that the best solution is to work on removing the source of the anger, but that the second-best thing to do is still to "blow off steam" in healthier ways that allow you to maintain control. In other words, "bottling it up" might still result in an explosion, even if the "steam boiler" model is incorrect.
I've never actually implemented Jabber before, but it seems like the obvious answer. You should be able to set up your own server without paying any software costs, and use GAIM/Adium. I think encryption is supported, but it's slightly less of a concern if the traffic never leaves your own network.
Actually, depending on your requirements, you may not want clients to encrypt traffic, so that you can log and archive it.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you're asking how effective can the parity be when it's suspect to damage just as much as the original data?
That's a good question, but it's not really what I was getting at. I was more thinking about the fact that if you have a RAID5, for example, you can only lose 2 disks, no more. So if you were using parity with several files (the files standing in for the disks, so to speak), then you might only be able to handle errors in two files before the parity becomes useless for reconstructing the files.
I mean, exactly how much damage it can take depends on how much redundancy there is, and the technical implementation and such. I don't know that much about par2, so I can't talk too intelligently about it, but I have a hard time imagining how they would cheat the general rule. Surely there must be some limit to how much damage can be done to the files before the parity can't reconstruct the original?
Interesting post. One part seemed unclear to me (though maybe I'm being silly)
Store your media in a cool dry place, on it's side.
What side are we talking about? I would assume that CDs should be stored laid flat, assuming warping is a concern, but it seems to me that "on its side" could be interpreted to mean either laid flat or on its edge.
Well it's all about trade-offs, right? I'm not familiar with par2, but if it's storing parity information, I kind of assume that it aims for a balance between the size of the information and redundancy. I mean, the parity file would generally end up being bigger than an MD5 sum of a given file, right?
It seems like a parity file would be very space efficient if you were storing tons and tons of small files, but not so much if you're storing a couple very large files. On the other hand, the more files you store, the greater likelihood that two files will go corrupt at the same time, which would render the parity kind of useless.
Am I right? I'm just going based on what I know about parity in general, rather than specific knowledge about par2. But it seems like another solution could be to store multiple copies of the same backup with MD5 being used to detect corruption. If corruption occurs, you go to another backup and hope the same file isn't corrupt on the other backup. Depending on some statistics that I don't know (failure rates per CD or per file, how par2 works, etc), the solution using multiple copies and MD5sum might be safer.
Apple has figured out that since they can no longer hope to use differences in the CPU to differentiate themselves with generic Windows boxen, they will be using Microsoft's extreme backwards compatibility needs against them...
Yeah, I'm glad you raised this issue, because I think it's an interesting component of this whole thing: backwards compatibility. Apple does try to maintain backward compatibility to a certain extent-- continuing to support 32-bit and PPC versions of their software, but they've shown a much greater willingness to simply cut things off than MS. Linux is somewhat different, in that by being open source, the door is open for the backwards compatibility to be configured in as-needed. Therefore, if legacy code is slowing things down, there's the option of simply dropping it out for systems that don't need that legacy code anymore.
In that sense, it seems like OSX and Linux currently have an advantage over Windows when it comes to making quick progress. But it may be that the advantage is just now opening up, in that OSX is done transitioning to 64-bit x86 and Linux has finally caught up to Windows on the desktop (IMO), and so it's only now that the respective developers can really focus in on making advancements and fine-tuning everything.
I'm not sure whether the advantage is significant or real though. I guess time will tell.
and know that all the apps that come with Ubuntu would get a reasonably fair share of that money.
There's the problem. I doubt it would be too hard to Canonical to set up something where it could take in money which then flows out to a set number of people/groups, since that's a problem that lots of industries have dealt with in terms of royalties. The problem is always going to be who gets how much. Let's say you donate $50 and I donate $50, but each of us has totally different priorities. How does Canonical distribute my $50 to pay for my priorities while spending your $50 to pay for your priorities?
Honestly, I'd love for there to be a systematic method for easily supporting the FOSS that's important to you. It would be especially nice IMO if there was a clear-cut way to support not just the projects you like, but the building of features you want. Like, "I'd like to put $50 towards making Linux boot faster" and then anyone could work on that for money and bill against the account of everyone who has contributed for that feature.
But then you need someone trustworthy and skilled in administration to run that whole thing and keep it from being corrupt. Also, in the interest of being open, you wouldn't particularly want a single body to have complete control of how FOSS projects get funded, so you'd actually need multiple organizations doing this. Plus, lots of people in FOSS don't like the idea of bounties, because they think it corrupts the priorities of project from "what's best" to "what random people want".
So I don't know... I do think it's a weird problem that there may be people who would be willing to donate, but who aren't willing to take the time to figure out who to donate to. I've donated to projects before, but I'm sure I would donate more if I could be certain that (a) I was sure my donations were going to the right people; and (b) I felt confident that my donations were encouraging work on the things that I'd like to see improved.
I believe the devil secretly killed god and took over the holy land (unholy land). And now he tortures all the catholics that pass away. Of course allowing all the atheists to go free. I call it the fuck you pascal wager. In my philosophy class i was the only one to notice the horrible fault in logic, it was depressing (only 1 person in the class was even religious anyways).
Which horrible fault in logic? I'm not a fan of pascal's wager or anything, I'm just unsure what you're referring to.
Right, God always has the *ultimate* dodge available to him: if an omnipotent and omniscient deity doesn't want proof of him to exist, then any attempt to prove him will, by definition, fail. Even if it's by some miraculous direct intervention by said deity.
I said "taught", not "proved". You were talking about what was learned from the Cold War, not what the Cold War proved.
And it should also be the default mode, IMO.
But I guess I never got the memo that explained why Acrobat Reader was doing anything more than reading plain/static PDFs in the first place. Didn't they do something in new versions to allow Flash and movies, or something?
The only reason I use PDFs is when I want to make a document with a very controlled layout, both in print and on a display, without any expectation of editing. Honestly I'm willing to pay money to Adobe to get Acrobat if it's going to help me do that in a way that's proven, robust, and configurable. I can also understand the desire for things like comments and digital signatures, but anything much more than that and I feel like it's just shoehorning extra bloat in the form of features that relatively few people will use, probably at the expense of security and possibly at the expense of sanity.
...with the privileges of a user running the Adobe Reader application.
Which strongly implies that those affected will be Windows users with Administrator access.
It seems fair to worry even if you aren't running as admin. If a trojan PDF can run arbitrary code with privileges of the user running Adobe Reader, that's still enough to screw with that user's documents even if the user isn't an admin.
Riches chose World of Warcraft over working a legit job
So he's suing because he'd prefer to play the game than have a legit job? There are tons of things I'd rather do than my job, and my job isn't even all that bad. But here at work, I'd rather be watching a movie than doing my job. Yet here I am, at work.
... posting on Slashdot. Can I sue Slashdot for being more interesting than my job?
That's a sizable risk
No more sizable than on any platform that's remotely "open". If I can install and run unsigned apps, then trojans are a risk. If I can only run signed apps, then the risk is mitigated by exactly the same amount that the signing authority is trustworthy.
Trojan apps are just a risk.
There are tons of stupid patents, and when you're running your business, it's not your job to proactively ensure that nothing you're doing is violating anyone's patents. Short of reading this news story, there isn't much chance anyone is going to know that this patent was granted. So it's sort of a non-issue.
To use you're analogy, it's not IBM pointing a gun to your head and telling you not to do something. It's IBM happening to have a gun, and it's unlikely that you even know IBM has a gun. It shouldn't really affect your decisions until IBM starts going out and shooting people.
You could argue that the cold war taught us that "mutually assured destruction" is an effective deterrent. Neither Russia nor the US used their nukes, did they?
Geeze, here we go again. Listen, patenting stupid crap isn't evil. *Suing* other people for your stupid crap patents is evil. Countersuing other people for violating your stupid crap patents after they've sued you for violating their stupid crap patents is simply a business reality these days.
Big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Novell have to patent any little thing that floats into their heads that the patent office will let them patent. They all do it, and the purpose is mostly for the sake of maintaining a defensive-patent war chest to keep the other big companies at bay with mutually assured destruction.
Start complaining about them being evil when they sue someone.
What many object to was the "spread the wealth around" statement, because they see it as tantamount to simple "here's your check" redistributionism.
Yeah, but I think it's a bit much to make out of that one quote. You may not believe me, and hell it's possible that I'm wrong, but I don't believe that Obama intended that sort of thing with his "spread the wealth around" quote".
I think what he was trying to comment on was the unfavorable distribution of wealth that currently exists in our country, where the rich keep getting richer, the poor stay poor, and the middle class gets poorer. I think Obama is really just saying that he intends to try to rectify that with a tax policy that's more fair by lowering the tax burden on the middle class, even if it means increasing the tax burden on the rich.
Now, you could argue that that plan is somehow "socialism" too, but again, I don't think it is. I think "spread the wealth around" was just an unfortunate choice of words.
Of course, it looks like we're going to find out in the next 4 years.
Well, one, the concept of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" isn't from Marx. The popularization of that formulation might have come from Marx, but you'll find the same spirit occurring far earlier in history - in early Christian communitarianism, for example.
I thought Jesus taught that capitalism and self-interest were the way to salvation. Didn't Jesus tell the story of the good Samaritan who left a man suffering by the side of the road because he had no money to pay for healthcare?
An ironic ending for a guy who was a VICTIM of this very kind of dirty politics in 2000.
Sometimes people learn the wrong lesson. For example, peoples response to abuse has a tendency to be "I'm bad" instead of "My abuser is bad". In turn, they often seek out relationships where they take the role of either the abuser or the abused.
You could make too much of the comparison, but my only real point here is that I think McCain learned the wrong lesson from the 2000 election. I think certain people managed to convince him that he lost because dirty politics are the only way to win, and so when it was his time to run again, he turned to dirty politics. He ditched his old advisors and instead sought out the same sort of people who were able to beat him last time.
Often enough, when you lose, it's good to analyze your opponent's performance and try to learn to take on your opponent's strengths. Unfortunately, you have to be careful when you do this to make sure that you're emulating your opponent's strengths and not his weaknesses.
I think the economic hasn't ruled out either free markets or regulated markets as reasonable or viable systems. At this point, I'm not absolutely positive which is better, but I tend to feel like some amount of governmental regulation, at least in terms of ethical business practices, is warranted.
I'd argue instead that the crisis has made it clear that the that many of the so-called "free market enthusiasts" (not including Paul or Schiff in this group) are really in favor of subsidies and corporate welfare, government intervention in favor of guaranteeing specific businesses and business models, and then would like to refuse the government the right to track the effects of their intervention.
Following that philosophy, you seem to end up getting the worst of both worlds. Companies don't get cleaned up by the market due to governmental protection, but they also don't get cleaned up by the government due to people insisting that "the market" will clean up the mess.
I'd love to see a universal HMO be established here, one that can't drop you like a hot potato if your get sick, or flat out refuse to let you in for "pre-existing conditions" if you change jobs.
That's the part that I truly can't see anyone thoughtfully disagreeing with. I've heard of insurance companies failing to cover things as "pre-existing conditions" in silly situations, e.g. you smoked when you were a teenager, were uncovered by insurance for 1 year in your 20s, and then get lung cancer in your 50s and they say, "Oops, it may have started in that 1 year in your 20s! Can't help you!" Whether that's exaggerated or not, I'm not sure.
But what I've experienced first hand is being very sick and being denied tests that multiple doctors said I needed, because my insurance felt they weren't necessary. That's a really bad situation, because sometimes it comes up when you're least in a position to fight it. Try arguing with your insurance company when you're so sick that you're basically having trouble staying conscious. Go ahead. See how fun that is.
Part of the problem is that protesters now have a tendency to just do what they're allowed. They go to an approved protest area, chant, and then leave.
What people sometimes fail to realize is that this completely misses the point. The point of lots of past protests to go where you're not supposed to go and do what you're not supposed to do, to challenge those your protesting against to act.
When Gandhi collected salt in the Salt Satyagraha, he was breaking the law. Martin Luther King supposedly chose where to protest based on where he thought his followers could elicit a violent reaction from his political enemies without being violent themselves.
The point is to force your enemies into a position where they have to either concede their position or act in a way that's publicly immoral toward you, without you acting immorally toward them. If you have a moral audience, the spectacle will turn the audience against against your enemies.
However, the whole thing is usually going to include some suffering on the part of the protestors. If you're protesting this way, you might get beaten or locked up or even killed. You might have to martyr yourself. Most people don't have it in them to do that. Most people just want to go out, have a picnic, chant for a little while, try to pick up hippie chicks, and then go home and sleep in a warm bed.
I remember someone saying (maybe it's a famous quote?) something like, "Being angery is like taking poison and hoping the other guy dies." Or maybe it was hate instead of anger or something, but the basic idea is that when you are angry at someone, sometimes your anger is hurting you more than it hurts them.
I think anger and fear are useful emotions, but sometimes our reactions to them are not useful. It may be that you could argue the same thing about emotions like love and confidence. You can try too hard to hold on to the things you love, and you can get yourself into trouble by being over-confident, for example.
I may be getting too philosophical here. I guess I'm just saying that there are things that you should get angry about, and so I don't feel comfortable talking about it as a wholly negative emotion. I think the problem is when people don't know how to deal with that anger, especially when that anger is rooted in some other obscure emotional issue that results in misdirected anger.
And though it's true that acting angry may make you feel more angry, bottling it up or covering it with a smile won't necessarily help you deal with that anger. Ideally we'd all find the real source of our anger, deal with it properly, and figure out how to not get angry in the first place, but I wouldn't be on that utopia coming any time soon. In reality, sometimes finding an appropriate outlet may be helpful.
On the other hand, I'm not sure being an angry troll on the Internet is an appropriate outlet. It's probably better to go to the batting cage, or whatever kind of meditative physical exertion you prefer. (That's not something I actually do, but it seems like an obvious example: go hit shit with a baseball bat in a socially acceptable environment.)
Yeah, but I remember reading about a recent study that showed that people had something like a finite amount of self control. Like if you were put in a position of having to use willpower to keep yourself from doing something, you'd be more likely to succumb to your impulses if you'd been exercising your willpower on something else directly before.
Now I think the study was regarding addictive behavior specifically (I'm not going to actually go looking for the news story I read about it), but I think it explains why people are inclined to believe the "steam boiler" model. It may not be that letting out anger lessens the amount of anger you have, but rather that relaxing your will and succumbing to your anger allows you well of willpower to recharge a bit, therefore allowing you to reassert a level of self-control that wouldn't otherwise be available.
If that model is right, then it may be that the best solution is to work on removing the source of the anger, but that the second-best thing to do is still to "blow off steam" in healthier ways that allow you to maintain control. In other words, "bottling it up" might still result in an explosion, even if the "steam boiler" model is incorrect.
I really like ambivalent anger. But I also kind of hate it.
I've never actually implemented Jabber before, but it seems like the obvious answer. You should be able to set up your own server without paying any software costs, and use GAIM/Adium. I think encryption is supported, but it's slightly less of a concern if the traffic never leaves your own network.
Actually, depending on your requirements, you may not want clients to encrypt traffic, so that you can log and archive it.