I got an older version of this: http://www.amazon.com/Cables-Unlimited-USB-2545-Eco-Friendly-Battery-Free/dp/B001EBJ9XS/ref=pd_sim_sbs_pc_1 (but without the idiotic double scroll wheel). Best thing I ever bought. No batteries to charge or replace.

Communities make laws that represent the majority in their community. They also commonly erect statues that represent something about their community. We don't throw out laws when one person's views are represented. How is it that a conservative community can't display a symbol with historical significance which represents the majority view? It isn't being "forced" on anyone (unlike a law). If you don't like the statue, don't look at it. There might be a case if tax payer dollars were used, but they weren't. If at some point the majority in the community no longer feels represented by the statue, then they can elect council members who will tear it down.

Wake me up when they have created the world's smallest graphene violin!

Each year it is a national joke some of the idiotic studies that get federal grants. If the federal government is paying for it, then it makes perfect sense that the grantee should justify why the research will benefit the country.

We should be intercepting the commie birds with lasers!

The passwords are very breakable as they used the same IV's and keys for every password. Thus any two same plain texts have the same cipher text. A little, simple statistical analysis will get you the keystream and allow you to get all the plain text passwords.

Bitmessage: P2P, encrypted, anonymous. The project is pretty new, but other than a couple scalability issues, I think this project has major potential. http://bitmessage.org/

I left Ubuntu back when they started making their own UI and doing it terribly.

I'd never go back, even if they had fixed all their flaws because of the inability to easily upgrade with each version.

These days I run Debian Testing with XFCE. Mostly painless, rolling upgrades.

See BlackPignouf's response for an example of why I think Ruby sucks. I never said it should be restrictive. There should simply be one right way to do something, not a hundred ways. Python, which is not perfect by any means, is pretty good about this. It is a very flexible language with lots of libraries, but there is a very limited way of doing any one thing. There is also plenty of guidance on the "Pythonic" way of doing any particular task.

A good programming language is not one that is full of fucking "whimsy". A good programming language has a clear, concise set of commands which are self documenting. It should be difficult to write the same, simple function in multiple ways. Ruby fails on all accounts. The wording is inconsistent, there are about 45million different ways to write any given function which also means it is hardly self documenting.

I've rarely met a Ruby developer who was employable in another field because they simply don't know what constitutes good, clean, concise code.

I've got karma to burn...

Um...Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE)???

One of the most successful companies of all time, which is still doing billions in business, and everyone can't wait to tell them how they are fucking it up...

Why don't all these brilliant analysts go make billions if they are so smart?

Universities have no incentive to lower prices for a couple reasons:

1) Government Intervention. Government loans mean that anyone with any type of credit can get loans to cover most of their tuition. Therefore it is "affordable" to pay ridiculous amounts of money for education.
2) Society has pushed the myth that one MUST be college educated no matter where they are headed in life to have any real career. This is patently false, especially in the trade industry.
3) Higher priced education is considered "better" by society, by and large.
4) People buying the crap that you need to be "well rounded" in your college education, which is an excuse for Universities to make students take all kinds of worthless courses (thus paying more) for their degree.


To fix the problem, government needs to start weening out their involvement, so that Universities have to charge less or face a lack of business. Students need to start considering whether they really need 4-5 years of education to go into tribal drumming music. Alternate trade schools need to pop up which give people only the education they need for their career choice. Finally, and this is already happening to a large extent, businesses need to stop putting so much stock in big name universities, and university degrees in general. There would also be pressure for educators to put together shorter, better degree tracts if the loan rates one could get were directly tied to ones likelihood of getting a paying career (and thus being able to pay back the loan in a reasonable time)...you know, the way loans work in most other parts of the market.

If you need PDF forms, then you just about have to live with the whole "dynamic content" package which is the security problem in the first place.

Check out Sumatrapdf http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/free-pdf-reader.html. It's super fast and does not support javascript or actionscript in PDF's. I use it exclusively now.