The billing bible DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) they use is populated by popular vote. Not by any scientific conclusions. No blood work, etc.

If you read the items in it you quickly get the idea they are simply trying to cover everything we do, which then makes it a cinch to say you need our services, which always means drugs. Which for them means a lot more money.

According to the DSM jet lag is a disorder. So is it to be anxious, even bitter over loosing your job.

How about oppositional defiant disorder, caffeine intoxication disorder, mathematics disorder, sibling relational problem, and frotteurism, the "intentional rubbing up against or touching of another, usually unsuspecting, person for the purpose of sexual arousal.

Based on the DSM psychiatrists declare that their drugs and other treatments work to improve mental illness, even though psychiatrists admit that they do not know how or why these drugs “work.”

Which could explain why the side effects are often worse than the symptoms they supposedly handle. Can't fall a sleep -- take this drug! It might give you kidney failure and in rare cases kill you. But we think it's a good idea to sell you dangerous drugs because it won't kill us.

In the end I really doubt that the excitement and joy of overcoming the challenges in a game is a mental disorder. Which is not to say that you could not end up spending more time in front of it than you should. Affecting school work, job, spouse etc. But that's not a disorder, simply wrong priorities in life. Teaching people to strive for balance in life would be far better and it does not have bad side effects.

Hmm... I bought my EVO within an hour of it being released and nothing is breaking on it. I get about a days worth of battery use out of it. Not to say that the battery life is impressive - it is not. I'm sure one can drain it in three hours. Fortunately there is after market battery that is plenty good which I plan to buy.
Breaking the ports by applying force to the plug is probably pretty easy given the leverage. But this is true for just about any plug. I would guess to say that is probably why the larger majority don't have broken phones.

There is little doubt there are misguided efforts to control what others do. On both sides.

On the one end some have navigated into a position of power where they slowly bleed creative people by paying very few well and the rest very meagerly.
Created the idea they were looking out for your best and you are Oh so lucky to be recognized!

On the other hand you have some who disagree with how things are. They hope to slowly bleed those who oppose the idea that you can, or should be able to do anything you want, and the favorite Oh I'm only collecting what's my birthright, but never received!

Both practice criminal activities where the idea is to fully operate on Everything for Nothing. I say criminal because ripping off people is criminal. Ditto knocking out web sites and similar activities.

Both are ignoring the other because they are "unreachable" and don't know how to, or want to talk to the other. Which makes for a beautiful never ending stream of not getting anywhere.

Honestly I find it harder to sympathize with those who have made it their business to rip of creative people and their fans, though they have the law on their side. Which brings us to the most likely to succeed attack angle, law.

The problem with that is when you don't at all understand the battle field you will fail. Law is obviously not an easy to understand battle field, but it is nevertheless where things are being accomplished. The others are 99% of the time not even noticed, maybe talked about by some, or even counter productive.

United Hackers Against the World is pretty much doomed as most hackers (unlike crackers or black hats) are not interested in criminal activities and it's consequences. In the long run I expect that organizations such as RIAA, MPAA and similar, will fail as very few are really happy with their operating basis.

So what does the common man do when he feels the system is against him?

If he wants to increase his odds to succeed, not just wreck havoc on others and use the situation as an excuse to do so, he organizes. Maybe puts up a website, as a group he can now express a very well thought out viewpoint, collect signatures, make press releases. In short use the system to his own advantage.

Civil disobedience must be non destructive and hit on the public nerve well enough that when you end up in front of the judge he will go with the public opinion as much as the law allows him to. Usually this is a really poor path to choose. Only some beaten down minority which has enough public sympathy is likely to have any success. And even then almost never...

However, figuring out how the system works, IS the way to go. It probably means a lot of hard work, long hours, fighting an uphill battle. But then most worthwhile causes are hard won. Most people are preoccupied and not interested in yet another problem.

Going to war to handle things such as slavery is not quite the same as fighting the RIAA and MPAA for their right to make money. (However unethical their business model might be.) They still have the law on their side. Public opinion is however not all for them. Their "think" is outmoded and was never about giving a good service, only how to line their own pockets, at the expense of the artist and customers. (Which makes it rather humorous when they pretend to stand up for the artist against the pirates, as they surely are the Mother of all pirates themselves.)

One should never try to rely on users to give any kind of report other than layman symptoms. The application should create proper error logs which is then used to debug the error. (OSDial is such an example. It is a dialer and to save time we only need an indication on where the problem is to save time on the debug.)

Of course this does not work unless you are the programmer, or have access to source. Windows is not particularly known for good logs.

That "solution" must be scored as funny, not interesting.

A month after the much discussed attack on Google, google.cn continues to censor search results, though it appears to be less than prior to this incident. Ref. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/google_china/

There is this minor point -- they built SUN in the first place. They made it go right and built up the company to the size it was. It's one thing having someone walk in, maybe like SCO's management did, and then run it into the ground even faster. But these guys provided jobs for, I forget how many thousand. They lost a lot of money and were still sold for Billions. I think when you have done the same, walked in their boots and so on...

I don't have the slightest idea what they did wrong and I was not even there to see how hard or easy it was during the rough time. When someone is considered that valuable that they can get a golden parachute in their employment contract that is guaranteeing large amounts of money, then you can talk about how right or wrong that is. Otherwise it just sounds like bitching for the sake of bitching, or jealousy over someone else's success.

Sure, it looks bad after the company looses ground and they are still paid a lot of money. But not one single one of them got it after it "crashed", they all got it when hired. And frankly, large companies are fighting for good talent and make these type of contract routinely. Nothing new here.

My set up has four monitors and ten virtual desktops, with specific functions/applications on each. For example, kmail is always on #10. On monitors 1 and 4 I have some key things, like IM and other things that I monitor. The content is visible on all virtual desktops (for those monitors). This allows me to switch desktops and always see the same content on monitor 1 and 4.

I have two video cards which supports two monitors each. Use KDE 4.2, nvidia binary drivers for 3D acceleration and Xinerama, where they are all separate X screens. When I maximize it stays on the monitor I am at. I can drag a window to any monitor, and resize across all.

nVidia's X Server Settings utility allows me to easily configure the set up, and I can save the result to xorg.conf.

When you save you need to save to your own directory since you as a user should not have write access to /etc/X11. Then copy the file manually and set root as the owner. Restart X and voila! Lots of desktop space and freedom to use it as you please.

Of course this is true of most countries. US certainly has it's faults but is pretty good when it comes to free speech and liberty. Few countries that level of activity in defending those liberties. Which also means protecting hate groups like the KKK. Now if that is not freedom of speech I don't know what is.

Agreed. My reason to switch to Linux, back in -95, was because I had no hope that things would get better with MS products. With windows you know that when a new SP comes out it will also break things but w Linux I've almost never had that happen. Just look how long it took to get MS to even admit to having bugs.

With Linux there is this desire to fix things. And when things break I'm not overly concerned as I expect it will be fixed, or if I really need to, I can get it done. As you said, it is technology driven.

If you support others, or they depend on your product, that is a huge advantage. The O/S is not fighting me, but contributing to what I'm trying to do.

Exactly!

The amazing amounts of "losses" that some theorists figures out are hilarious. Completely baseless and a waste of time and only riles someone up for what they think they have now lost.

Rather than getting people excited about, for example, books and reading. They scare people off from it. Take the SCO suit. It's not like they did not know that they have no valid claim in the first place. But I'm sure they lost a lot of business with that nonsense.

Agreed. Also some of the above posts are nothing but weak excuses for creating a problem. On top of it it's not the manufacturer who's at particular risk, it's all the users. One does the right thing regardless of the other party. Which should be a natural point of integrity for any person.

This kind of discussion is not useful without more specifics.

In Tampa, Clearwater, St Petersburg, for example, AT&T is much better than T-Mobile when it comes to coverage. Verizon and Sprint is probably pretty even with good coverage most everywhere. I don't know if AT&T is even with them.