Canada is a first-world country with on-the-ball law enforcement that is relatively difficult to bribe (compared to, say, Central America) and a very firm extradition relationship with the US. If you're hiding from the law, you may as well stay in the US as go to Canada.

Just tell him email is very easy to forge. That's it.

You don't have to explain the technical details of exactly how it is forged, what headers are, how SMTP works, how malware mines personal data, or any of that. If he cared about the technical details, he'd read up on them, and then he wouldn't need you.

Keep it simple: "email is very easy to forge."

Something about Russian culture makes long periods of isolation more tolerable for them somehow (or perhaps their society is more accepting of the mental irregularities that result from overdoing it, which I guess ultimately amounts to basically the same thing). Their Antarctic teams routinely winter-over at Vostok two years in a row; whereas, the Americans at Amundsen-Scott have to cycle out every summer.

> Just FYI, I seen this guy bitching about it MONTHS ago.

Furthermore, the rant just posted on Slashdot is a verbatim copy of the one I read months ago (or, at least, the part that I re-read today is verbatim; I declined to re-read the whole thing, on the grounds that I remember it pretty well).

We have excellent cheese in America.

We also have some of the _worst_ cheese in the world, granted. If it comes in a spray can or as individually wrapped slices, you should AVOID it. Also, if it doesn't say what _kind_ of cheese it is, you should avoid it. Also, Velveeta is not something that you should eat directly. It's meant to be used together with other cheeses in baking (e.g., in macaroni and cheese), to facilitate creaminess. Good cheese comes from behind a deli counter (which can be in a grocery store) and is priced by the pound. You tell the person behind the counter that you want half a pound of this or that kind of cheese, and they ask you how thick you want it sliced, and you say "thick", "medium", or "thin". (You can also just buy a big chunk, if you're not making sandwiches.)

You can also get shredded cheese in the frozen foods section, which is alright for baking, but the number of varieties available this way is more limited -- typically just mozzarella, a couple of kinds of cheddar, and maybe "pizza cheese" (which is mostly mozzarella with a few shreds of something else mixed in, e.g, smoked provolone).

> Are there any excellent and widely available varieties?

My personal favorite is colby. Other good ones that are readily available everywhere (or at least throughout the Midwest) include mozzarella (particularly good for pasta), provolone (good on turkey sandwiches), several varieties of cheddar (mild, sharp, extra-sharp, white), monterrey jack and its various derivatives (cojack, pepper jack, jalapeno jack, lightning jack), swiss, baby swiss, muenster, brick, longhorn, and grated parmesan. Other good cheeses are available regionally, e.g., here in Galion I can easily get havarti, either with or without embedded dill. If I wanted to drive over to Holmes County (about an hour east of here) I could get all kinds of specialty cheeses. The community where I went to college, about three hours west of here, has a couple of good Latin-American cheeses readily available. When I lived in western Michigan for three years, the grocery stores there always had grated romano.

Note too that the light yellow-orange stuff you'll see that's specifically labeled "American cheese" (assuming you get the real stuff) isn't _bad_ so much as _bland_, which is actually useful in certain situations. Among other things, it's great for feeding to gradeschool children, who often don't like strong flavors yet. Admittedly, it's not what I generally want on MY sandwich, and if Europeans get this stuff imported and think it's the main kind of cheese we have in America, that would explain their low opinion of our cheeses.

If you want to visit a place that doesn't have good cheeses, try Korea. I think cheese may actually be against the law or a violation of popular religious beliefs there, or something.

That's what I was going to ask. I'm not even much of a gamer (err, unless you count NetHack...), but I thought 60fps was an annoyingly bare minimum low-end framerate. I'd vote for 85 or higher, assuming the hardware can handle displaying the frames that fast without jerking to a latency peak every few seconds.

People *prefer* 24? Is that like people who prefer to play vinyl records on a vacuum-tube-based turntable because they "sound warmer" and/or "lighter" that way and have a "better-attenuated", "less granular", "more energy-infused" "quantum noise flux distribution" with "just a hint of a spring breeze" and allow the listener to "feel the moisture in the singer's throat"?

I don't own a TV, and I haven't logged into Facebook in months. Also, one of my goals in life is to someday live in a house with no telephones at all.

But I still don't want to hang out with you. Sorry.

Yeah, the phrase "due process clause" was obviously a brain fart on someone's part. They probably meant the "excessive fines" clause, except that amendment, to the best of my understanding, is specific to criminal law.

In theory any reasonable person should understand why the no-excessive-penalties concept _ought_ in principle to apply to civil law too, but to the best of my knowledge there's no direct wording in the constitution for that, so to make this argument fly in court you'd have to rely on legislation or, more likely, case law. Not being a lawyer, I cannot provide references to any specific legislation or case law that would be relevant, though I imagine there probably is some somewhere. (Of course, the plaintiff will be digging up such things to support their side as well, and they can probably afford more thorough lawyers...)

North Korea might actually be *more* likely to do something if they thought it would upset the UN.

Setting that to one side, however, I am not convinced that they have the subtlety required to disguise an ICBM test as an almost-successful satellite launch. It would be much more in character for them to try to launch a satellite (which, if successful, would theoretically demonstrate a grasp of technology similar to the Soviet Union in 1957, except for the fact that in just about every other area they rather obviously aren't quite there) and just not quite get it right.

Remember, this is an _extremely_ isolationist country. They make the Tokugawa shogunate look like free-trade enthusiasts. Where are they going to get competent engineers? When their previous leader decided he wanted to make movies, they had to kidnap a movie director from another country and force him to work for them, because there's no way anybody living in North Korea could learn how to do something like that.

> Lots of them blame the Western world for their problems.

For those living in the capital city, it would be dangerous to do otherwise.

(Outside the capital city the concept of a "power outage" is essentially redundant.)

This is North Korea we're talking about. The level of incompetence they have displayed, repeatedly and publicly, is difficult to overstate. Quite frankly, botching their first attempt at a satellite launch (something the Soviet Union got right on their first try in 1957) is small potatoes compared to some of their other attempted shenanigans.

Among other things, the tallest structure in the country (a would-be hotel in the capital) was started in 1987, was originally intended to be completed by mid 1989 for some locally important event or another, and at this time is still not ready for use. They're currently hoping to _partially_ open the still-incomplete building in 2013, although one wonders where they think they're going to find enough tourists to fill a hundred-story hotel, even if they do ever finish it.

(Lonely Planet's writeup of the country is interestingly clever, particularly the way it manages to put excessive positive spin on things and yet still not make the country sound like an even remotely interesting tourist destination. The only landmark attraction they specifically mention is a mountain, which they call "one of the most stunning sights in North Korea", although they do also claim that the capital city has "a few sites worth visiting".)

Nobody in the Dilbert comic strip has ever approached North Korea's level of incompetence.

The traditional way this is stated is this:

Freedom of the press means that anyone who owns a press can use it to print whatever opinions he likes. It does *not* mean that somebody _else_ has to print whatever _you_ want on _their_ press.

If you write a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, who decides whether to print it or not? Presumably, traditionally, it was the editor. If you write a comment on a blog, who decides whether it gets published or not? The people who run the blog are the first line, but ultimately it's the people who own the web server that publishes the blog. For example, if I used Blogger to set up my blog, and you make a comment on one of my posts, I can nuke your comment because it's my blog, but also Google can nuke your comment because it's their blogging service. If I don't like that, I can go set up my own server (and buy bandwidth...) and cut Google out of the loop by not using their service. If *you* (the commenter) don't like how the what-to-print decisions are made on my blog, you can jolly well go get your own blog.

So yeah, the SMS spammer is asking for a "freedom" that has never existed. If he wants guaranteed freedom to transmit his advertisements via a cellular network and display them on a phone, he can jolly well go get his own cellular network and phone. Otherwise, the people who own the network and the phone do, in fact, have some say in the matter. Deal with it.

Now, I'm willing to bet that if he did set up his own cellular network and offer people free use of it provided they accept all of his advertisements unfiltered as part of the deal, he'd probably get some takers. (I don't know that it would necessarily be easy to run such a service in a manner that resulted in advertising revenue adequate to pay all the operating costs and turn a profit, but that's his problem to solve as the entrepreneur. If running a profitable business were easy, just about everyone would do it.)

It depends.

On the one hand, an Associates Degree by itself is about as useful as a solar panel in northeastern Ohio. It doesn't qualify you for anything that you weren't already qualified for with a high school diploma.

On the other hand, many schools will accept a larger number of (undergrad) credits in transfer if you have an Associates Degree than otherwise. That is, after all, the main purpose of an Associates: to bundle up the two years' worth of gen ed courses you've already taken, from a school that doesn't offer the major you want, so that the school where you want to complete your four-year degree will take most of those credits, allowing you to finish in another two years.

Of course, even with an Associates, the credits you transfer in are still only worthwhile if they count toward any of the requirements for your four-year degree. Many schools are willing to be a little bit flexible with this, though there are usually limits. For example, maybe the school normally requires Western Civ and US History plus one other social studies course, but if you're transferring in an Associates they may decide to accept any eight credits of history and four additional credits of social studies that you happen to have taken.

So an Associates can be useful, e.g. if you live near a community college that offers a halfway decent Associates program. You can knock out a lot of your gen ed *before* going to the better, more expensive four-year college where you intend to complete your degree.

All of this assumes that you are a returning adult student (e.g., someone who went out after high school and got a job to "save up" for college; after several years you have now saved up just about enough to cover your textbooks and maybe the occasional dorm sweatshirt). Anyone who just graduated from high school, with even remotely acceptable grades, is likely to be better off, financially, going straight to the four-year school the very next fall. You can often get a LOT more financial aid that way, and it's typically all renewable, so it will take you through all four years (assuming you keep your grades up and meet whatever extracurricular requirements the school has). Admittedly, this depends somewhat on the school, but your total debt for four years this way can potentially be less than what you would have paid just for the last two years, not even counting anything you had to spend to get the Associates in the first place -- because, transferring in from a community college with an associates, the financial aid department in most cases will basically tell you to see Uncle Stafford and Cousin Perkins. If you're fresh out of high school with reasonable grades, they're far more likely to hand you a package that includes grants and maybe the odd minor scholarship plus a work study option in addition to Stafford loans.

He means Linux distributions don't generally include an RDP server in their repository. Which is true, as far as it goes. (It's also obviously irrelevant to anyone with a few dozen hours of Linux administration experience, but it's true nonetheless.)

What he actually needs is an ssh client for his Windows desktop. (Or a VNC server on the server and a VNC client on the client, but if his network connection has much latency at all the ssh option is going to have overwhelmingly superior performance.) But Windows users often don't know about ssh because, like almost everything else, Windows doesn't come with it.

The server is running Linux. The client desktop is Windows.

So what he actually wants is probably putty (or *possibly* VNC, if he's one of those mouse-only users, completely allergic to typing for some arcane reason), but being a Windows user he doesn't know the terminology needed to do a web search for it.

(Theoretically, there _is_ also an RDP server for Linux, but it's a niche thing, and so the hassle of trying to set it up is not recommended for someone who is new to Linux. It's much better for him to go with something on the server side that's in the standard repository. Installing Putty on the client side should be no big deal, since the client side is an OS with which he's already experienced.)