Yeah, screw liberty and justice .... and freedom

Someday, you'll have to explain what the "Founding Fathers" 240 years ago have to do with "liberty, justice...and freedom".

Freedom for whom?

Why do you lie on the internet when anyone can make five keystrokes and find out how full of shit you are? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Look at the date on your citation. It's 2007.

which is why Obama's administration has been doing the best they can to make firearms and ammunition as difficult to acquire as possible.

No, they talk about making firearms and ammunition as difficult to acquire as possible. They haven't done one thing in eight years to actually make it so. In your mind, is the same guy who's so diabolical and tyrannical as to force gay marriage and health care down your throat really that impotent when it comes to guns? He can wave his arms and change the Constitution and "fundamentally transform America", but he can't tighten one single gun law?

The entire gun "debate" is a sideshow to keep the yokels busy. They really think they're arming against the government.

And that's why he moved to Silicon Valley? The model place for affordable housing?? Really?

Yes, really: SV prices are downright affordable compared to Vancouver's. In Vancouver, an actual crack house will cost you over $1M.

Athens is credited as the birthplace of democracy even though only racially privileged landowners even had a vote. Guess what.

AFAICT the cutoff for same-day service for most contracts is around two hours' travel. If it takes longer than that, you're just going on the calendar. If the item in question is extremely valuable, then that's not true at all, but we're just talking about PCs here, right? However fancy-pants.

If that daemon isn't a script, WTF. Because you could definitely do that with a very small shell script.

This is more or less what I mostly came to say — how's that for convoluted. But to wit: Who cares whose approach to swap is "better"? Swap is crap. Most of us don't need any. We've beat this horse well beyond death here on Slashdot repeatedly. RAM is stupid cheap now. There are a few things that people do with their PCs now that take more than 8GB of RAM, like high-res video streaming from the same PC on which they're gaming or doing live video stream manipulation or whatever it is they're doing, and no amount of swap will help you do those things. All swap does it make your system thrash before it crashes.

With that said, the way windows handles paging is crap. It only lets you make one swapfile per drive, and you can't swap directly to a partition; mkswap is a lot faster than mkfs, or even an ntfs quick format, let alone the real thing. If you want more paging on the same volume with linux, you just create another swapfile and swapon to it at a lower priority than your primary file. When you no longer need more paging, you swapoff the file and you can delete it. If you let Windows manage the length of the paging file, then if that ever actually happens, you just wind up with fragmentation and that will impact system performance while swapping, for real. It will also impact your ability to defrag, since the paging file can't be moved while it's in use. You have to remove it, reboot, defrag, enable it, and reboot, since pagedefrag doesn't work after Windows XP.

TL;DR: the best way to manage paging on Windows is to disable it for all volumes. The best way to manage paging on Linux is to not create a swap partition or file. It's better to crash sooner and reboot than to crash later and reboot... later.

They've also completely failed to consider that just as quickly a one website may rise to prominence, another may equally quickly supplant it. Look at Facebook replacing MySpace for example.

Wouldn't a more relevant example of this be Reddit replacing Digg?

Which would make for a pretty big generic kernel if it has to handle every possible bus through which bootable storage can be accessed, and through which the decryption password can be entered, on every PC since the Pentium II.

I was sort of referring to tablets and tablet-laptops, which are likely to come with an internal SSD as small as 16 to 32 GB, or to bootable USB flash drives.

The drivers for which system? Or are you referring to abandoning the concept of a binary "generic kernel" in favor of recompiling the kernel for each machine on which it will be used, every time it is installed or updated?

I cannot let a story about supermassive black holes go by without posting this:

https://youtu.be/pta-gf6JaHQ

I'm not someone you would normally think would be a big fan of this music, but a few years ago, I was looking for some music to play in the background when I was playing open world racing video games, like NFS: Most Wanted, etc. One of my students game me a CD/mp3 mix with a bunch of Muse, My Chemical Romance, Meshuggah, some Finnish Dark Metal bands, and some other groups. This led me to make a 2000-song racing playlist on Spotify that I still play in the background to this day when I play The Crew. I've added in some early Stooges, Ramones, GenX, etc, as well as a smattering of rockabilly, Wu Tang and punjabi rap. There's nothing like being in the last lap of a race and having "Survival" playing in the background. It's like some cross between Queen's "We Are the Champions" and Leni Riefenstahl.

OK, carry on.

No, but I see the fleets of black hire cars rolling around. Usually driving like asshats.

Bluetooth headphones seem to either be wicked uncomfortable (plantronic backbeats) or exquisitely sensitive to sweat (Motorola). So it's nice being able to listen to music over corded headphones, and still have the smartphone available to do whatever in between sets.

I don't know about your phone, but every decent smartphone I've ever seen has a standard 1/4" headphone jack. It doesn't keep you from doing other things with the phone.

Also the mp3 player just fucking 'works' on demand. Spotify seems to crash about 50% of the time and requires a reboot of the phone.

Every decent phone I've seen lets you just put MP3s on it (or even Oggs with Android phones) and play them directly.

Also having the headphone jack come out, then having my phone broadcast my horrible taste of music over its speaker after accidentally touching the screen/volume buttons -- was embarrassing enough to ensure it happened just once :)

Ok now this is definitely something I don't know how to fix on a smartphone...

It might not be about the electronics, but the things you talk about sound like really low-value products. The special thing about electronics is that they're high-value; maybe not as much as in the 80s when a VCR cost $1000 (a large fraction of the price of a car back then), but still usually a lot more than a stick of deodorant.

And TV shows don't get canceled because of lack of popularity, but because of idiotic network executives. It's not like they actually poll viewers to see what's popular (how many Nielsen families do you know?), especially in an age when people use DVRs, Hulu, and Netflix.

Most code written anywhere is crap.

I suspect you probably moved for very different reasons than Greek developers. In your case, it was probably because the housing costs in Vancouver (Canada) are insane.