It balances things out if every man votes for what *he* wants. Reason doesn't need to enter into it. If the system is fair (and admittedly it isn't in America, but that doesn't take away from the concept), then just like free market economics, rational self-interest is great.

We already admitted that Europe isn't the center of the world.

Wait, what?

Really? If it's illegal to capture resources and use them against the owner, we can throw out half the rulebook of military strategy. If I understand you correctly, it must be a new rule, because every conflict I've read about up to the Falklands had instances of this kind of thing, typically fuel and guns.

One word will fix your problems; BarTab. I was in the same boat as you, I should know.

BarTab with SessionManager and TabKit (for vertical, hierarchical tabs) has completely transformed my online experience. I now save sessions of research, trip planning, work, in fact almost all online browsing, into hierarchical sessions in my SessionManager categories. Then when I need them later I pull them up, lightning-fast thanks to BarTab. I probably still have 10 windows open but very few active tabs, so my RAM usage isn't high either (not that I care, but it's snappy, and that's what I care about).

Seriously, if you think of switching to Chrome for speed but would miss your extensions, give BarTab (and perhaps SessionManager and TabKit) a try. Treat yourself, you'll be amazed.

And not just apparently, but really. It's well-known that young people have a higher rate of suicide, and the pressures of college (after a relatively cosseted existence) can be an unusual burden at an unusually vulnerable time.

In Foxconn's case, we are talking about a middle-aged working urban population, which has a far lower rate of suicide all over the world than teens and students. Their suicide rate may be lower, but it's still higher than what would be expected for such a group in the rest of the world, and possibly even China (though I don't think there are statistics on the latter question).

Outsell everything on the market? The smartphones that can actually do those things, from RIM or Nokia, have a far greater marketshare than Apple, and even Android is growing faster than the iPhone. Nokia sells more phones per quarter than Apple have ever sold. Silicon Valley is not the world.

FYI, you can tell. All those people doing stupid things -- they were in full possession of all their faculties, they just lost some inhibitions. In other words, they knew they were doing what you call inadvisable things, they temporarily just didn't care. But that's just because it didn't really matter to them -- the only reason they didn't do those things before was shame, fear, etc. A man secure in his principles has nothing to fear from alcohol and in fact will not act differently under its influence, just feel differently.

What fun. I saw that episode (from my DVD collection) just a few months ago. Terry Nation was brilliant.

How interesting that your username is dprovine -- wasn't Provine one of the Federation leaders in the episode where Avon is rescuing the planet from a self-destruct device at one of the ice-capped poles?

At any rate, terrific series, thanks for reminding me of it...

pacman may be nice, but if the underlying package maintainers (Arch) screw around with dependencies like they did a while back, it's not much use. I ran Arch 0.7 and the next few versions for a few months and I can remember several pacman system upgrades breaking the system in various ways (one time pacman itself got removed, that was funny).

Even if they've fixed it, I know I can trust the Debian maintainers...

Just to add a point: I don't like tinkering around in /etc or whatever, mostly because I'd rather not waste my time on that but also because I'm sure if I do that it'll break with some upgrade down the line -- just let the maintainers do their job.

That said, I've tried desktop Ubuntu a few times, it's been a bit hit and miss, sometimes it worked great, sometimes not and it got in my way. Debian (which is what I mostly run on my desktops) never gets in my way, and support just monotonically gets better. My current desktop is a macbook and whilst it took some tinkering to get Lenny running, I thought that a fair price and it would have been about the same on Ubuntu (I read their two wikis) becaue of Linux support for macbooks isn't quite where it is on PC laptops. The one area from the wikis where it seemed Ubuntu might be better is suspend support, as they have a newer hardware subsystem. Everything else worked out of the box, except I replaced networkmanager with wicd (both Debian and Ubuntu ship with networkmanager, which just gets in your hair).

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the "everything just works out of the box" stuff on Debian is really good these days, probably just as good as Ubuntu for a normal machine. The days when Ubuntu had a huge edge in that are in the past. And Debian has easier upgrades, more packages (older in the stable version than Ubuntu's though) and it personally gets in my way less on the desktop.

And given a proper mouse app and a proper keyboard app for any given job, the keyboard app still wins hands down for any task apart from image/video/audio editing and possibly spreadsheets (hard to tell, that: there aren't any modern keyboard-driven spreadsheet apps).

FYI, I'm an H1B, legal fees for my very straightforward application ran to over $3k. Bay Area prices, mind.

Oh, and I was a legal immigrant and paid 3 and a half times the resident tuition at the university I attended, where low-income students got a guaranteed scholarship. I, of course, wasn't even eligible for scholarships. And yes, I would have had to leave the country if I hadn't found my H1B job.

Just backing up your points from personal experience, really. All the stories I hear about the benefits for illegal immigrants (none of which EVER apply to the legal ones) really make me bitter.

Don't oversleep. If you go to sleep when you're too tired to stay up, you'll fall asleep no trouble.

If you insist on pissing away your time on more sleep than is good for you, at least rise and lie at regular times; that'll help you both fall asleep and wake up quickly.