FreeBSD/amd64 8.1-PRERELEASE with firefox-3.6.3,1. Uptime 2.75 days, with the browsing being open almost as long without shutdown. At this moment, I have 11 tabs split across 2 windows (one fullscreened on 2 different virtual desktops). Virtual: 1252M. Resident: 1100M. It starts fresh at between 200 and 400MB, then continues to climb. By the end of the week, it'll be pushing 2GB resident. Glad I have 8GB to throw around.

Plugins: WikiLook, Web Developer, User Agent Switcher, Screengrab, Noscript, Linkchecker, HTTPS Everywhere, Ghostery, Font Finder, Firebug, Download Helper, Adblock Plus, and Customize Google.

The data from the near-universal grounding of US airspace the days following the 9/11/01 attacks shows pretty conclusively that air traffic has a non-trivial affect on weather patterns. Or at least that's what's I recall from the time.

For one thing, it helps Mormons to baptize the dead that haven't been saved yet. Whether this wretched practice is "practical" I leave as an exercise to the reader.

As for the Census, I only answered the 1st question (number of household members) and sent it in. A head count is all that's required for population-based allocation of representatives. Anything more is fodder for gerrymandering, and I won't be a party to such.

> A spreadsheet app is also substantially larger than a PDF reader.

This *is* Adobe we're talking about here. For grins, I just installed Adobe Reader 9.2 and Gnumeric 1.9.16 on a XP VM, and for the informal survey of the "Program Files" directory, Adobe (203MB) weighs in at almost twice that of Gnumeric (106MB).

I vote for using the best app for the job. In the case of this thread, I wholeheartedly think the spreadsheet is that tool.

That's because there's an assload of taxes lost/avoided in Utah due to tithing (10% off the bat), LDS churches and stake houses *everywhere* occupying prime otherwise-taxable real estate, and the fact that the chain of Deseret Industries thrift stores counts as a double whammy (no sales tax on the goods *and* a way for people to deduct "donations" by offloading their garbage). Never mind the above average family size, which means more kids and thus more child credits and deductions.

More power to the state of Utah for trying to get its fair share in taxes.

Personally, I opt for the "estimated" use tax option when filing. Since it's based on a percentage of income, I likely come out ahead since my income is low but I buy a huge amount online (even food). Besides, I don't keep records of much of anything, so it's not like I could come up with the actual numbers anyway.

A telecommuter I hope?

The term "incommunicado" came into being for *some* reason. Hmmmm.... I wonder what it could have been. "Impossible" my ass. My family hasn't had a cell phone for 3 years, and it's great. If we're not home, we're, you know, not reachable. It's great! We even have kids, and when the wife and I go out for lunch or a dinner and we leave the kids home, we can't even be reached by them. ZOMG! I know, I know... having the neighbor's and restaurant's phone number on a refrigerator post-it note is *so* archaic.

They'll get you, one way of the other.

I'm too lazy to find links, but there was a case a while back of some minor who was accused of accessing child porn from one of Yahoo's services. By all accounts I've read, the defense correctly used the high probability of malware infection to introduce doubt that he actually downloaded the CP himself. Facing a harsh, drawn-out legal battle (as most defendants in these cases do), the family took a plea. The boy plead to a count of (something like) corruption of a minor. His "crime"? He apparently gave (or displayed -- can't recall) some adult magazine to one of his fellow under-aged buddies.

That's right, folks, some kid ended up with a criminal record and a listing on his local sex offender list for looking at nude pin-ups with a friend, something countless curious teen boys have done since nude centerfolds have been around.

Won't somebody think of the children?!?

Ugh... my credit union takes not only my login/password, but displays a picture and phrase that I picked out of a list, *and* asks me a question. Kinda inconvenient, but I'm pretty sure I won't be logging into a bogus server in the near future.

I'm running Flash on FreeBSD/amd64, by way of the Linux emulation layer. It's documented in the handbook, and it's pretty easy to get going. As much as I despise Flash's abused ubiquity, I've found it worthwhile to have it installed for guilty pleasures like Pandora, Hulu, and RagDoll Cannon. In fact, it runs more smoothly on my machine than natively on the OpenSUSE box in the living room.

"For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life -- I wrote this some years ago -- that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest."

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

PCLinuxOS is a pretty good KDE-based distro.

What's your definition of success? Mine is pretty much not ending up in jail or on the street homeless. If people didn't feel the need for the lavish "middle class" lifestyle we all seem to think we are entitled to by merely drawing breath, then they could get buy with a GED or less. The propagation of this "get a college education or you'll die a crack whore on the street" boogeyman seems to lead to a lot of needless stress and suffering.

Concerning the hypothetical you've pulled out of your ass, the intelligent parent would simply call the school's office and have them notify the student. You know, the way it used to work for the 50 years or so before cell phones were the norm.

Seriously, folks, why make this such an intractable problem?

Many a person's grandfather took a rifle or shotgun to high school, either for ROTC practice or fragging some dinner on the walk home. I sharpened pencils in the hallways of my high school with the Swiss army knife I've been carrying daily for 25 years now. Somewhere along the way, we decided those utilitarian devices were more of a problem than a benefit in schools, and even suspicion of having one will get you patted down by a cop today. The cell phone has apparently become a disruptive device in the school environment, so let's accept it and move on with educating the kids.

Did parents cry foul when told their kids couldn't take boom boxes to school? ZOMG! Little Johnny won't be able to tune into the emergency broadcast system if there's a Russian attack! Of course not, that's a silly bullshit excuse, just like all the ones we're hearing now. If it wasn't a necessity before it became ubiquitous, then it's not a *need* now.

Don't like it? Pull your kids out of school and teach them yourselves. That's what I did.

And I only use cash.