"only ~380Mb"!!!
Heh, that makes it only 270 times bigger than my window manager, EvilWM. After 9 hours of running, with some 50 open windows (Firefox, Audacious, xterms etc.) on 8 virtual desktops, EvilWM's resident size is 1424 kilobytes. Top claims it uses 0.0 % of my CPU.
How low can you go...

Strange. From what I have read of Xiph's attitudes (avoid patented methods at all costs and code around any you bump into), I can only see an SCO-like court case ahead. And if that happens, Xiph will get donations from me. Because I am an artist creating public domain works with free tools. So I dislike people who try to outlaw my tools. And obviously, publishing free art is simply impossible with the specter of licensing costs hanging above it. Yes, there is that "non-commercial" loophole. For now. Do I want my creativity to be at the mercy of a consortium?

The bodycount in those expendable countries (someone really should come and waterboard you every day for those words) will never be clear, since cause and effect are difficult to establish. 1.5 million Cambodians, as US policies in Vietnam allowed Pol Pot into power (the CIA actually funded and protected Pol Pot after his fall)? Decades of civil war in Angola using weapons supplied by the US and USSR? 200,000 communists massacred in Indonesia as CIA sponsored dictator takes over? Bloody repression in dozens of US client dictatorships all over the world? We could be talking about millions of dead. And there are still some hundred thousand American landmines in Angolan soil, so it's not over yet.

So the US army has been in Iraq for seven years now and still sees no need to learn addressing the locals in their native language? That is utterly barbarian (and stupid) in itself. Your grandfathers invading Germany, Italy and Japan did not just have fluent speakers in every troop, but nearly all of them came back with a smattering of the local language (which is how words like pajamas and honcho entered your language). Now, for some reason those invasions worked out a lot better than the ones in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, didn't they?

You might want to read up on the Algerian war of independence. The French army fought the insurgency with all the brutality needed to win. And they did win. The insurgency was crushed. But by that time their methods had antagonized the whole population of Algeria to such an extent that they rose up and drove every single Frenchman out of the country.
Every time any American in Iraq does something that is patently wrong and unjust, he creates another enemy. Those children in the van had relatives who are right now unlikely to piss on any American if he's on fire. Can you win a war against an exponentially growing enemy?
American leaders keep talking about hearts and minds, but they are not walking the walk. Until they do, this will be drag on and cause ever more deaths on all sides. Which, BTW, I'm not happy about. I rather like most Americans. Because you're funny.

I have a few game addicts in my friend list. Who try every bleeding game they come across. Still, today, after hitting literally hundreds of ignore buttons, my news feed is usually fluff free. Boy, do I feel stupid for not using the greasemonkey script to spare me all that work...

I wish someone would finally notice that the Flash player is a closed, commercial product, so the fact that its Linux version sucks hardly reflects on the quality of free software or its development model. Strangely enough, the only piece of software on my computer that truly sucks dump trucks through a straw is that Flash plug-in. It also happens to be the only bit of non-free software here...

Mind, by that logic the porn industry would be entitled to a much bigger share. I buy a hundred CDs a year, underground music, though, and I do not download non-free music. I would be pretty pissed off at a RIAA tax on my net connection - especially as none of the independent musicians I listen to would get a dime of that.

The NSA tapping American phones? I would feel really bad about that, if I did not just recall that I'm European and that the NSA requires no warrant or reason to invade my privacy. It was expressly created for that. Do not expect me to feel sympathy when a Chinese agency snoops on your communications. You never gave it a thought whether indiscriminate spying on 'them danged furriners', i.e. me, was ethically justified.

I would like to point out that I'm male.
And thanks for the mention. First time anyone has considered me an authoritative source for anything.

Yours truly,

Rene "random ranting blogger" Kita