Ever been pulled over by a cop for a dumb reason (example: loud music), then repeatedly questioned and attempted to be tricked into a lie with incriminating statements, pulled over for a full 20-30 minutes, before finally being let go--with no other charges the cop tried to lure you into other than the original one that could have been given and ticketed in five minutes? It happened to me.

Too bad my friend and I both had our seatbelts on, I obeyed all traffic laws, had all working lights and signals, and did not fall for his attempts to catch me in some incriminating statement which he attempted to force out for a good 25 minutes or so. Poor guy, only got to give the original loud music ticket he originally pulled me over for, and wasted about 25 minutes on me that he could have actually been spending pulling people over who were actually doing something wrong that is actually worthy of an arrest or something. Like people disobeying traffic laws, driving wrecklessly, or something... you know... actually potentially harmful to other drivers on the road.

Ah well.. he probably felt that it was some sort of minor accomplishment, because his notes mentioned the name of the band that I was listening to and that there was some cussing, which the judge brought up in the court room and actually started laughing and joking about.

Officer: "May I see your driver's license and registration?"
Driver: "Yes, here it is."
Officer: "I noticed that your middle interior brake light is out and a little bit back you swerved."
Driver: "Yes, I know the light is out, I just haven't had the time and money to get it fixed. And I swerved because a saw a small rabbit hop toward the road on the other side of a tree."
Police Dog: "Bark! Bark! Bark bark! Bark!"
Officer: "Alright, so have you done any drugs?"
Driver: "No."
Officer: "Do you have any drugs in the car?"
Driver: "No, I told you I don't do any drugs."
Officer: "Well my dog smells something suspecious, so I have the probable cause required by law to search your car."
*officer opens glove compartment; dog gets excited"
Officer: [saying quietly under his breath:] "Shit, it's just a fuse box."
Officer: "Looks [smells?] like you've got a burnt fuse there, buddy. You might want to get that fixed."
Driver: "I know. It's been blown for about two weeks. My interior lighting doesn't work."
Officer: [silently thinking to himself:] "I guess I'm going to have to find some other way to nab this guy or work on finding someone else to nail. I need to meet my quota for this month."

For some reason, I *totally* imagine that or a similar situation occuring, and probably more than a few times in the future...

And that alternative is selling "Steam Machines" with a Microsoft tax? Fuck Dell/Alienware. Note to self: Time to blacklist Alienware and NEVER buy a Steam Machine from them.

Where the fuck are your mod points when you need them? Someone mod this guy funny...
Ironically, on the other hand, I always have mod points when I feel no need to use them. Such a dumb setup.

I've had nothing but trouble with Firefox on my older machines (a 2001-era 1.7GHz P4 w/ 256MB RAM that was retired as a regular desktop several years ago; a POS Dell with AMD64 dual-core and 2GB RAM).

On the other hand... I have to say, since getting my new laptop, at least on the Linux side... no memory issues whatsoever. It has been upgraded from 4GB to 16GB and the couple megabytes it used to swap to disk on occasion after long periods of use is no more, and the Windows side (although buggy as all hell), at least when it runs, actually runs nicely. The only trouble with Windows 8.1 is trying to get the damn thing to boot up without locking up. Oh, and the borked Start screen, which for some reason got all fucked up in one of the updates. Currently using just over 800MB RAM; i3 window manager on openSUSE 13.1, two xterm windows (one running wget), Geany text editor with a bunch of tabs, Dolphin file manager, and Firefox with five tabs. Seems to hover around 700-800MB regularly, usually only breaks a gig when I start a virtual machine.

To be fair, with this being a laptop instead of a desktop, I do tend to use it differently (though I almost always have it hooked up to my external monitor/mouse/keyboard and use it as a desktop). I shut it down every day and put it in its carrying case; the desktop was left on 24/7 and ready to go, set up as an SSH server for when I'm away. For this reason I often only have maybe a couple handfuls of tabs open in Firefox at any given time, instead of the dozens or hundred-plus that I used to have open on the old desktop. It should be interesting when I get a proper, modern desktop machine to replace that old one and use it in a way that is more "typical" to my previous usage patterns, but until then I'm stuck with what I have. Still, recall instant and horrendous swapping just by visiting gmail.com, no other tabs open, which is gone on this system; it might just bring it to close to a gig of RAM used.

I admit... I miss my always-on, always-ready, always-serving machine... the portability of the laptop is not quite making up for it. If I had to live with only one for the long term... desktop it is. Yet the laptop has its advantages, which I wouldn't want to do without either. I honestly don't see how people can get by with only a laptop, yet I hear people say it all the time.

Who would have guessed that a drug-induced coma, a chemical that literally knocks you the fuck out, would have any kind of long-term effect whatsoever on the brain? Is this seriously news? Did anyone seriously not just kind of figure that such strong drugs for the purpose of suspending the brain would have, you know, mental effects?

I was just about to type something along the lines of what you did, but since you already did, it seems I can save myself the typing.

The way I see it: Desktop keyboards, Dvorak or Colemak; cell phones and tablet computers, MessagEase. Use the right tool for the job, and ironically, QWERTY is never the right tool (and this is especially true on a touchscreen "keyboard").

No... the real solution is, quit fucking putting such high-tech god damn road signs on the highways. Since when the fuck did the traditional pure metal signs go out of style? The roadsides don't need such expensive hackable junk. In fact, if they're electronic, programmable and have giant screens of some sort, I'd have a hard time even calling them "signs" in the first place. Just go back to the basics. How hard is it to figure out?

What's there to learn? That the U.S. government has grown out of control into a corrupt state of bullshit, lies and deceit, where not even the basic guarantees of its own Constitution and human rights of its citizens are upheld? Where you are automatically a criminal until proven innocent (assuming you're even granted a "speedy and fair trial" to pull that one off in the first place)?

The only thing to learn here is just what the extent of this country's corruption is. And that is the only thing I've consistently noticed: that it only goes one way... and that is, it only gets worse.

I started with Windows, played around with KDE3 a bit in my early days of Linux, settled on Xfce and GNOME 2 as my preferred environments and once GNOME 3 happened and KDE 4 stopped sucking as bad, I used it for a little while. I've also briefly used OpenBox, in the form of CrunchBang and LXDE.

Eventually, it became clear that I was going to be getting a laptop at some point, so I decided to learn about tiling window managers and try several of them out. Having to use a touchpad or drag out a mouse every time I wanted to get on my laptop didn't exactly sound exciting (or acceptable) to me. Out of a long list I tried out, some of the most memorable and my favorites included dwm, xmonad, spectrwm/scrotwm (boo to the developers for the name change... pussies!), notion, and i3. A few others a had some fun with were euclid-wm and herbstluftwm.

In the end, I have decided to settle on i3, and that is what I am using now. I love it--I have been using it since before I even got my laptop, and it's still my primary choice (even as a desktop window manager). Avoiding the mouse by using tiling window managers has improved my wrist... fewer aches and other odd feelings. Well worth the learning experience and effort to switch. As an added bonus, I get much, much better use of my screen, with next to no effort on my part, and absolutely no overlapping windows.

Two words: Alternative Firmware.

Beats the hell out of the stock junk that companies put on their hardware.

I think you're somehow blaming hardware companies' incompetence with software on Linux itself, which makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

Depends on how you look at it, but last I checked the NT kernel had the absolute largest number of users on home and business desktops compared to any other operating system kernel out there...

Of course, if you add routers, phones and numerous other specialized systems into the mix, then Linux spanks the shit out of it.

Any halfway-decent program will put an asterisk, brackets or some other character(s) in the window's title to let you distinguish between a file that is identical to the copy saved on disk and a file that has been modified since last saving. If your program doesn't even append something as simple as "(modified)" to the title of the window containing your file, then your program sucks and it'd probably be a good idea to switch to something that at least supports such a basic feature.

Oh, great. Next thing you know, you'll be paying extra for absolutely worthless components added to appliances, just so it can sell you more junk. You'll end up buying a refrigerator with built-in temperature and humidity sensors. Why? Just so your fridge can tell you you need to buy a humidifier every winter, and try to get you to buy a central air conditioner every summer day you walk into the kitchen. Temp sensor go bad? Oh, don't worry--if you don't fix it, it'll just bug you that you need to get a new furnace every winter day until you get it fixed.

Google, fuck you. And no thanks, you keep your ads away from my fucking appliances.

That brings me back to the second sentence in my post.

Did you even read the post at all? Obviously, you are talking about administering a system. But I can guarantee that I am not administering a system while I sit here wasting time posting crap on Slashdot, and I have this funny feeling you're not either.