[oblig]: Handy fact: "miles-per-gallon" (Imperial gallons mind you) is equivalent to "furlongs-per-pint" :)

I'll get my coat ...

I have a workstation at home sporting a Phenom II X4 3.2GHz CPU and 8Gb 1333MHz RAM, running a Linux host OS using LUKS to provide FDE. This host OS is running VirtualBox to provide various VMs (Windows, Linux) and the performance of all VMs is pretty much instantaneous on all UI requests, and pretty damn zippy at workloads such as compiling.

The WinXP VMs (I give them 2Gb of "RAM" and 1 CPU core) are faster than any WinXP I've ever experienced on Real Hardware; boot to logon prompt takes 10 seconds, & shutdown from being logged in takes 8 seconds. I use one of those WinXP VMs for all my Youtube and DVD video watching needs, without any stutter of any kind. I run KDE4 in several of the Linux VMs, and it's very fast. I don't have any Win7, but a Win8 Preview VM takes 12 seconds to boot, and about 3 to shutdown [once you've figured out how to request shutdown that is :)]

Whatever the performance hit of the FDE is, I'm really not aware of it.

It's the least we can do to make up for the lousy moderation he's quite rightly complaining about.

I'm a physicist by education & training, and I'm anything but anti-science (I'm all in favour of the space programme, never mind the cost, because we need that off-world colony asap) - but the idea of fiddling with the oh-so subtle machinery of a species' DNA, which has taken at least 2 billion years to evolve (I'm not a flat-Earther Creationist) makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck. There is no way we can possibly safely understand the full implications of inserting a fish gene into a tomato to improve shelf-life.

My objections to GE (and those of many others) have nothing to do with imagining that the resulting food will be in some way "unsafe to eat" or "bad for me" - that's just the way the anti crowd are painted with pitchfork'n'torches hysteria by the GE companies' PR teams. Protein is protein is protein. No, for me it's all about the rash folly of fiddling with that double helix and messing it up. It's a very clever molecule.

That conventionally-bred gene manipulation you mention, while resulting in similarly granular effects to that of the GE, has the benefit of using mechanisms and pathways which have stood the test of those 2 billion years without resulting in catastrophic species loss or damage - *that's* why it gets a free pass .... in my book, anyway.

I hesitate to invoke Hawking style religiosity but I will: Genetic Engineering is "playing God" (no, I'm anything but Christian) when IMHO there is no way we are anywhere near competent yet to exercise such ability. We need to exercise more humility instead. This beautiful planet is the only one we have, or are likely to have for some considerable time to come, and it should be treated with kid gloves.

NB: I'm not dogmatic about this - I'm deadly serious, and I'm always willing to be educated, so teach me if you will - that's the scientific way :-)

[sigh] ... this is very simple: nuclear fission produces absolutely foul and disgustingly dangerous waste that we have no idea how to dispose of. That is far and away the most dangerous thing about it ... I'm sure the reactors themselves are operated in a reasonably safe manner these days (apart from at Fukushima of course :), but the waste by-product is a shocking legacy that we bestow on generations to come for tens of thousands of years. I for one am not willing to be party to that.

Nuclear *fusion*, on the other hand, produces no dangerous waste at all ... I'm prepared to wait till we've got all the wrinkles ironed out of that - it being slightly embarassing that we currently have to feed the fusion reaction with more energy than we get out of it :)

I feel exactly the same - I have no idea what an activity is, what it's for, or how to use it. But I have figured out (I think) that you have to edit activity settings in order to change the wallpaper or screensaver ..... wait a minute, was that KDE 4.4, or KDE 4.8 ? Confused I am, quite a bit.

Still, at least in 4.8 you can now edit the window decoration theme for the KDM login dialog without having to know the arcane binary name of the 'System Settings' utility to run via KDESU.

One of the key missing components in current KDE is some good documentation about many of the features. Maybe I need to get off my ass, learn, and then contribute docs back ...

Without getting deep into subtleties of their lawsuit against Google which I don't understand, what Oracle has effectively done is scare the pants off anyone who was contemplating using Java for any purpose ever again.

Perhaps that was their purpose .... maybe they just want to be rid of the burden of maintaining something they have to give away for the public good, without prospect of making megabucks from it. If that's the case, I just don't understand why they can't just hand the source to the community, and declare themselves to be no longer involved.

Imagine ... if Grace Hopper and the CODASYL Committee, or John Backus and colleagues at IBM, or Peter Naur, Donald Knuth and the ACM had been as pathetically venal and moronic as Oracle Corporation ... what kind of sadly crippled and fractured industry we'd be working in now.

Perhaps it's bye-bye-Java time. Sigh. What a bunch of slimy creeps there must be at Oracle Corp ... Whassamatter Larry ? Need a new yacht ?

Totally agree. SP3 bumped the requirement up to 1Gb for any real use case. WinXP on its own may start up reasonably in 512Mb, but as soon as you open a word processor, or a handful of tabs in any modern browser (and I include FF 3.6 in that) you're in a world of hourglass.

I've solved "my PC's started running really slowly" for a number of friends now by simply upgrading their WinXP machines from 256Mb or 512Mb to 1Gb (yes, that's after checking for malware first).

This handy fact may help when comparing the sizes of heathen litres to USofA liters :

miles-per-gallon are equivalent to furlongs-per-pint

Strangely (...) this works for both USofA gallons and Ye Olde British Imperial gallons (even though they have slightly different volumes), which just goes to show how very very wise The Ancients were when they dreamed up their weird, unpronounceable and difficult-to-manipulate-arithmetically system of units.

Of course this depends on American furlongs being the same length as Imperial furlongs ..... a British cricket pitch is one chain long, and as we all know, 10 chains make a furlong .... how many chains long is a baseball pitch ? :)

Why yes .. thanks very much ... I will have a drink for my trouble - I'll have 1/6th of a gill of your American sippin whisky tipped over an acre of ice please ;)

I think it's about time reference was made in this discussion to the statement of need made by Uncle Phil Zimmerman at the beginning of his original PGP 2.x User Manual :

Why Do You Need PGP ?

• Privacy is as apple-pie as the Constitution.

  Perhaps you think your E-mail is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? You must be a subversive or a drug dealer if you hide your mail inside envelopes. Or maybe a paranoid nut. Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their E-mail?

  What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If some brave soul tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their E-mail, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their E-mail privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.

And much much more, of course. It all sounded like a very sane stance when I first read that, so I tried to do exactly what he recommended. Of course, almost nobody else tooled up to deal with my highly secure bar crawl plans, so it was a waste of time. PGP tools for email back then were very primitive, but they're a lot better now ... it shouldn't be beyond us all.