I just read an article about how Asia (including China) prefers male children so much that demographically it's "missing" about 136 million women; that is to say there are WAY too many men and nowhere NEAR enough women for the society to grow in a normal fashion.

Couple this with the ghost cities phenomenon and you have to wonder how they're going to populate all this infrastructure they're building.

The thing about buildings is, you have to live in them, and maintain them, or they crumble into dust. Google Pripyat for some great pictures of this process at work.

I'm curious how this is all going to work out. I'm sure it'll be interesting, but I'm willing to bet you that China isn't going to be the world's greatest economy anytime soon.

Firefox is dropping the status bar in 4.0??? What???

But... But... WHY?

I see a status bar plugin in my future.

Thank you! I'll try that. Good suggestion...

Who said anything about sending MAC addresses to the internet? Every time you guys respond to me, you put words in my mouth. It's dirty pool to argue with my point by rephrasing it in a way suitable to you.

Anyway, why are you fixating on the MAC address thing? Who cares about it, it's just one part of my suggestion. My point, which I will reiterate, is that dodging from one piece of hardware to another and using public, anonymous access points in nearby towns will make it virtually impossible for anyone to definitively tie you to anything you say on the internet. It's not just the MAC address, it's making sure nothing recovered from the disk can trip you up, making sure they can't tie your hardware and OS to the comment somehow, etc, etc.

It wouldn't be difficult for a corporation to have someone figure out where you're posting from, then try to watch and log the traffic at that access point. Most internet forums don't use SSL. This one doesn't. If they want to log your MAC address while they're at it, it shouldn't be too hard. You're not using your imagination; you rely on your test prep book too much, CCNE-guy. You have to think of worst case scenarios, and see how they'd try to get you if they were annoyed enough to put some effort into it.

It doesn't matter what MOST do. It matters what some MIGHT do.

I like the idea suggested by another poster: rip the hard disk out, use a dongle and a live CD, and use a ramdisk as a temp disk. I can't think of anything wrong with that approach.

Guys like you are a trip. SO confident. SO sure of yourselves.

UPDATE: I tried Debian, and I'm sorry, but I don't know what's going on with that distro. First, the default background was some kind of space scene that looks like it was done by little kids, with whooshing kiddie rocket ships and simplistic drawings of a vaguely saturn-like planet. Horrible, just horrible. I thank GOD I didn't show that to my boss, he'd have laughed out loud and banned me from the server room.

I'm not going to pick on the Debian guys, but I was completely unhappy with Debian. It was terrible. I'm going back to Ubuntu; if the Gnome guys keep acting like idiots I'll switch to Kubuntu or install KDE like the other guy said.

Yeah, but I find myself drawn to Debian. In an age where everyone seems to be trying to dumb things down for the hoi polloi, the folks at Debian specifically keep power users and geeks like me in mind. They pay attention to us, and deliberately make it possible for us to do our thing our way.

I'm definitely switching to Debian and using KDE from here on in. I'm going to spend some money in their store too. I wonder what they've got available... At the least I'll buy a full DVD set.

Incidentally, I remember back in the old days, using Red Hat and Slackware, that I was able to do a lot more tuning of my GUI than I've been able to with Ubuntu. How I have missed that. I'm looking forward to what I can play with under Debian.

I am also i this category. It appears I will be switching back to KDE as well.

Since I've been using Ubuntu for a while, that means I'll be switching distros. I have decided to focus on Debian from now on, since it lets you choose which desktop you want to run. It seems better than Ubuntu anyway.

The people who build Gnome seem intent on forcing everyone to do things their way. I hope their system falls out of favor, and they are all relegated to the scrap-heap of history, like all tyrants.

Unkind.

Of course your disparaging opinion of me is invalidated by the fact that your ONLY complaint about my post is that people can spoof their MAC addresses. I'm afraid you have failed to impress me with this information (most of which you probably cut/pasted from the web, amirite?).

Not all network cards will allow you to spoof MAC addresses. Do you really trust your manufacturer? Better do some test posts locally and see... Many manufacturers build things in to help law enforcement, and these same things help corporate lawyers when they're annoyed at you.

I love the way you just ASSUME nobody keeps their logs... Ha ha ha... That's just precious.

I stand by my comments. They're better -- and more polite -- than yours.

That is an excellent idea... You wouldn't have to cycle the laptops then. Thanks!

Except that pesky network card in your laptop, which has a MAC address hard-coded into it, which is logged by the access point...

The point is to have a "clean" laptop whose MAC address can't be easily associated with you. If you buy a laptop in a store, someone could theoretically trace the laptop back to the store and see who bought it. MAC address -> Serial number of laptop from manufacturer -> store selling laptop -> YOU.

TOR, yes. Definitely.

But ALSO, if you're worried that a corporation is likely to try to identify you because you've criticized a product (for example), in addition to using TOR you will want to make sure you're not posting your opinions from your home.

Buy a cheap, hundred dollar laptop from someone on Craigslist. Wipe the disk and install Linux. Create an account called "privacy". Encrypt the home directory.

THEN, drive to one of your city's many publicly available WiFi hot spots, in a coffee shop or library perhaps, and submit your post from there, with Firefox in a private browsing session.

To be REALLY safe, periodically sell the laptop and get a new one off Craigslist.

You can never be too paranoid, thin, or rich.

Is she a motivational speaker?

It's not the house. Owning a house is good. The thing to do as a single guy in my opinion is to buy a small, non-family-friendly house, like a weird, spooky little two bedroom cottage with lots of spiders and house centipedes and a full basement you can turn into a mechanical lab. The nice thing about these houses is that they're usually cheap, like in the 50K range. Taxes are low too, and heat and electric is REALLY cheap.

Best of all, this type of house makes women who are husband hunting reject you outright. "Only two bedrooms???" It's yet another useful feature.

I suspect that the kind of women a man like me actually WANTS (i.e. mid-forties horny single women without kids) would really be into that sort of thing. It's "cozy", perfect for an older couple.

So it basically drives away the women I don't want and attracts the ones I do. Theoretically. Cottages for the win. Capes maybe. Or -- damn! A prefab Cabin! A cabin would be great, with an overhead sleeping loft...

Yeah, but then you'll end up divorced, living in a van, down by the river!

That's what I mean... The way I see it, if you don't get married and things later go badly, you can part ways with a handshake instead of getting lawyers involved.

I heard something funny today, elsewhere in this thread:

"50 percent of marriages end in divorce. The other 50 percent end in death! Rotten deal either way... "

I said this aloud at work, just kidding around, next to a married coworker. He was really quiet for a few minutes, and I felt quite guilty.