A while ago, some billionare brothers, who hardly pay any taxes and never give more than casual lip service to things like the plight of workers or environmental stewardship decided they needed a way to pay even less in taxes and care even less about the part of the world that is not insanely wealthy. They decided one way or another that the best way to meet this goal was to start their own political movement; which they ironically called the "tea party". This party promised uninformed voters the world.

The Tea Party rather bluntly declared itself to have objectives including avoiding taxes altogether and the destruction of the IRS. They made various claims of income taxes being unconstitutional and also statements of how good god-fearing Americans should do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, including not filling out tax claims at all. Then, in a rather strange twist this new political movement filed with the IRS for tax exempt status - rather than just simply avoiding taxes altogether in the way they had advocated for their followers to do.

And now, this group that has openly called for the end of the IRS and taxes, is crying foul that the IRS was investigating it.

When people left the country to avoid the military draft, they were shunned as outcasts, hippies, cowards, commies, and Un-American. But now we have a group that is openly opposing the government and we are being told - even by the supposed leftist media - that they should be greatly rewarded for their courage.

What the fuck happened to this country?

Does anything around here work anymore? I go to the zoo.pl page (uid changed to mine to protect the guilty) to try to change friend/foe/neutral status, and I get:

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80

I have to click in three different places to find the right link to let me do a JE.
I was gonna give a laundry list, but fuck it, it's just pissing in the wind. I figure Dice was able to buy it for, what, the price of one week of coffee at Starbucks?

If you use KDE like I do - you may be interested in this article I found linked on Reddit - Volume Change Percentages in KDE. The idea there is that by default Kmix will increment volume changes by 4% when you use your keyboard - but it's possible to change that value. You just need to make a change to kmixrc. But you can go read it if you are interested.

So over at Reddit there were some comments like "Thanks for pointing this out." and one question "Any way to do the same with veromix?"

Let me confess that my first thought was - "This is about kmix stupid." But then I thought more about it and realized that it may not be stupid and so I started to dig. I got the source for veromix and it took me a little while to find it - but I did find the file and line where the value is set that drives this behavior. I was able to change it in my system and now I have a 2% increment (veromix is set to 5%) and that makes me pretty stinking happy.

I've emailed the veromix author because I think it wouldn't be too hard to add this value as one of the setting options. I think I've got most of the work done for it. I don't have time today to try it but I will soon. I think that would be pretty sweet.

Open Source - this is an example of why I love it so much.

I think I've got it nailed down a bit. When I run the nVidia drivers it is not using OpenGL. The Google Talk plugin needs OpenGL to work. I can force OpenGL to run. The the talk plugin works but Firefox will not run. If I switch to the Nouveau drivers then OpenGL will work fine without any messing about but again Firefox is unhappy.

So for right now - with my GeForce card my choice is Google Hangouts or Firefox.

I don't do the Hangouts that often. I may try just switching over if I need to. I usually have my little Windows laptop at my desk. I don't use it unless I need to go to a meeting but I could hop over to it for video chats if I don't have time to switch my graphics over on the Linux box.

It's not the greatest situation but I do feel better now that I feel like I have a grasp of the situation at least.

What happens if I open Firefox on my Fedora 18 box and visit the Google Sites page that Sophie Schmidt made about her visit to North Korea? This happens. That's a screen shot of both my monitors. On the left is Firefox and on the right is Chrome which was open to the Journal Entry writing page here. And it got much worse once I closed Firefox. Plasma pretty much took a dump at that point and I had to log out/log in to get back to a usable desktop.
 
If I run with the nVidia drivers I don't have this issue with Firefox. And even if I don't run Firefox - little artifacts like those in the screen shot will build up over time with the Nouveau drivers. Pretty much immediately if I have any desktop effects enabled. So why don't I just use the nVidia drivers all the time? Well - because I figured out today that under the nVidia drivers using Google Hangouts crashes KDE completely. As in kicking me out and forcing me to log back in. And I need Hangouts for work.
 
Very frustrating. So I'm stuck back on the Nouveau drivers and playing around looking for some magical set of options that will bring some stability and maybe even the ability to use my beloved Firefox again. The only up side right now is that abrt wont be giving me crap about having a tainted kernel any more. I hate software that has to exhibit moral superiority.
 
On a side note - I guess I can't add tags to journal entries any more. I guess I never paid attention to them anyway. They don't show up in the je list and I just used titles to find stuff anyway.

Today I managed to get another front page article. I had one a week ago as well. Strange, since it was over 3 years (possibly more) since I last had an submission accepted. FWIW they were both accepted by Soulskill, on Friday afternoons - 4:04pm today, 1:01pm last week.

I'm pretty sure this is not slashdot anymore, if I was able to get two articles up. I'm not complaining about the change, but I got used to getting rejected - and even more used to seeing my submissions accepted a day or more later when submitted by other people.

As I doubt I will get two stories on the front page in a month (several years passed between my most recent accepted story and the one before it), I will mention here as well that the genome of the coelocanth has been sequenced and described. 3 billion bases described in a non-paywalled Nature paper. Sequenced by an international team including scientists from Uppsala (Sweden), MIT, and Harvard.

Galaxy Tab 2 is the poster child of Android tablets out there, right? Well, let's just say that I ain't impressed. Boyfriend of MiL got one, to read his newspaper. Well, we didn't manage to do that, partially, I think due to wort.lu screwing up. Partially, because the default browser just says "downloading" and that's it. What exactly happens after that is unclear and unless you know that a tiny download icon shows the download, and if you swiped away that, where to find the PDF... you ain't gonna go far. Apart from boyfriend of MiL not (wanting) to understand the difference between an app, a website and a PDF, it ended up being an exercise in frustration.

Unable to help on that front, he asked if he could read his email. Naively, I said, of course you can! So, I set up his (national, very standard) ISP email address. Well, I followed the wizard. Big mistake, I ended up on POP3, which of course is a standard that should have been banned years ago. Damn, I hope you didn't have important emails. I set it up again as IMAP. Works fine, really... Except it doesn't show any email. None... I specifically sent email to him. Shows nothing... I assure you, the settings are correct. I used the same as those, I used on his iPhone. Besides, they do show on his iPhone
No way to make it work. On a related note: the POP3 did not delete his email from server. At least that was good.

Then, I want to show him to install apps (Despite me hating the word). Choice between the Samsung App Store, which most likely works but you want the Google store. So, Google Play. Okay, do you have a Google account? No... Ah, no problem, let's set one up. I follow the wizard, up until it asks for a secondary email for "lost password" situations. I could type in whatever I wanted, but the "Next" button never got enabled, stopping me right in the track to create the account.
Yes, I know, I could just go to a computer, create him a Google account and be done with it. Still, isn't this simply a scandalous bug?

So, I try to help and end up having I to explain that tablet browsers are second-class internet citizens (a site he uses failed to work. How do you explain that to a non tech, eh? Nothing I did worked as expected and I'm supposed to know what I do.

Okay, I might simply have become obsolete and have become unable to troubleshoot modern devices. Perhaps it's a hint I should stay in my basement with my servers and "real" computers. I don't know... It must be me. Everyone loves their Android tablets....

I submitted a story this morning, and it is showing up "green" in the firehose. After having every single one of my submissions declined for years now - many of which were published a day or two later when submitted by someone else - I might finally get a story on the front page. That said, if it does make the front page it will be here on slashdot more than 6 hours after it was on google plus, but at least it will have made it.

Clearly, more guns will solve the problem:
Woman killed by 4-year-old in Tennessee cookout
Yes, you read that right. A woman was killed by a four year old boy who picked up a loaded handgun that some shit-for-brain left sitting around unattended, and shot and killed a woman. Being as the NRA wants us to believe that more guns somehow causes less death, it would stand to reason that they would also support having some random armed person then shoot and kill the 4 year old to prevent him from shooting anyone else.

Perhaps the most telling line though is towards the end

So some dumb fucker left his loaded gun sitting around and he has not faced any charges for the death that resulted from it. I would be shocked if he ever did, either.

And should the owner have really, really, really, known better? Hell yes. The owner of the gun is a sheriff's deputy. Somehow, this is supposed to make us feel better, I suppose?

Yes, I'm pissed off about this. I would have submitted it to the front page but since this is drudgedot and it makes the NRA look stupid it would never be accepted there. Hell, not that long ago when there was another case of a shithead leaving his gun out in the reach of a young child the kid shot themselves with it and this site called it "the wii suicide" (as if a toddler could harbor thoughts of suicide).

And a hearty Rot In Hell for Maggie.

Honestly, fuck all you fawning, simpering retards who've never set foot in Blighty. Except for a 5 minute period in 1982, a minimum of half the country has always hated her guts, and for good reason. So unbunch your panties already.

Oh, and, Trifecta is in play (only reason I posted this damn thing.)

The title has nothing to do with what I'll talk about - I just heard Perfect Strangers on the radio this morning and it got stuck in my head.

While it was playing I was thinking about something that happened a couple weeks ago when I was in Thailand.

I've been to Thailand quite a few times. My first visit was in the late 80's as a sailor and then I've been at least once a year or more in the last 4 - 5 years. I've been enough times that it's become quite routine. I know my way around the airport. I have a rough idea of what the markets will be like in whatever city I visit, etc. This time I flew into Bangkok and then had a 2.5 or 3 hour drive to where I was staying.

During the drive I was fighting to stay awake - but what kept jumping out at me over and over was, "Wow - there are so many pickup trucks here!"

I'm willing to bet that the number of pickup trucks hasn't recently surged in Thailand. My guess is that the reason I noticed it so much this time is that it was my fist visit after living in Hungary for a while. Going from the US to Thailand, the number of trucks I see on the road would not be noticeable. But compared to here - it was on my mind for the whole visit. And I realized something for the first time. I love stuff like that. I think it may be the biggest reason I love to travel. I quickly become used to the environment that I'm in and start to filter stuff out. I don't consciously notice a lot of things around me after a while. I don't know what the proper term is for this - I'm sure some of you do. It's that whole idea that fish are unaware of water. I use to have a snippet of a poem I kept taped to my desk,

I long for experiences that knock me out of this numbness to my surroundings. I love seeing cool and exceptional things too - but even moreso I think - I love to just get an awareness of what I take for granted. I'm the same way with people. I love to have friends and conversations that force me to look at things differently. I don't like for everything to feel obvious. There is of course a limit. I have a co-worker who thinks very differently from me. Enough so that dealing with him can be a real chore. The chasm is too much to cross. He's another American - which is kind of funny. Most of my friends and the people I hang out with here are not. Same idea - I like what my Hungarian, Romanian, Albanian, and so on, friends bring to the mix.

At some point I expect I'll end up living in the US again. Honestly I'm not too crazy about the idea. I've really taken to Europe, and this part of it in particular. If I had my druthers I'd retire to Slovenia. Maybe somewhere not far from the farm where my great grandmother was born. But at some point my kids will head home to go to university and I'll head back. Maybe it will be more interesting as I'll have been gone long enough to make America new.

My last visit back I'd only been here a little over a year. So it wasn't such a big deal going back. It was a little annoying but not so much more than it was before I left. The in your face over indulgence that permeates so much of everything in the USA gets to me sometimes. But it's not like it wasn't that way before I left. It's just that much more obvious now that I've had a bit of a break from it. The insulation from the rest of the world is also difficult - but again - I was already aware of that before I moved. It's just now I get to be around more people who live lives that are connected and aware of others outside their own single context. (And that part isn't a critique of the USA alone. I've met Hungarians who are largely the same in that regard. They are not really aware of a whole lot outside Hungary and even moreso outside Europe. And they aren't interested.)

So I'm a bit of a junkie for these new experiences/view points. Probably part of why I enjoy the books I do as well.

Well - nothing deep and I'm sure nothing new. Just a glimpse in my head from my morning commute. The one Google Now told me about before I left my house. That deserves its own JE.

Today the NRA unveiled its new plan for school safety. For reasons not clear, it has received quite a bit of fanfare. In particular, it includes:

Yet of course it does not offer a plan to pay for any of this. They also don't seem to have a grasp on the actual numbers (of guards and guns) required to fulfill this plan. Consider a few things:

• How many doors were at the schools you attended as a child? I can't think of a single school I went to that had only one door. The high school I went to likely had at least 7 different entrances which even a really fast runner would need over a minute to get between; my middle school probably had at least 4 and my elementary I would guess had at least three. Do you put a guard at each entrance?
• How do you prepare the guards for armed attacks? We have heard recently that the Newtown shooter was wearing a bullet-proof vest; the Batman shooter was wearing armor as well.
• What do you do if the teachers and staff don't want to carry weapons on campus? Don't they have the right to refuse?
• What if the community is opposed to guns in the school? Do you force them to fire teachers to hire armed guards anyways?
• Does it really make sense to arm most teachers? The same tenure system that conservatives seldom pass at the opportunity to bash means that many of our teachers are older; do you want to rely on someone in their 50s or 60s who took a few evening gun classes to defend our children?

In other words, the NRA plan is epically short-sighted (and that is being kind). They want to solve the violence problem by bringing in more lethal force. They seem to live in a world very different from the country I reside in. They apparently are so afraid of violence that they feel firing teachers to hire security guards is somehow a good move.

I bought by Galaxy S3 from T-Mobile, in the US last year. So it is the SGH-T999 model. I've been very happy with it. I've stuck to running it as stock for a couple reasons. The biggest is that I just didn't want to hassle with learning how to change the underlying software. Secondly, because I wanted to keep everything cool in terms of the warranty and what not. I even jumped through all their hoops to get my unlock code from them.

But I ran into an issue the other week that finally used up all my good will towards t-mobile. I went to use the phone as a hot spot and couldn't. It wanted me to pay for their tethering plan - which doesn't exist where I live.

I didn't have time right then to do anything but this week-end I did a little reading and today I installed Cyanagenmod on it. So far everything seems to be going very well. And I actually have control over the device that I paid (in my mind anyway) a pretty hefty sum to own. None of the steps were all that difficult and my biggest holdup was it would not flash the new rom until the battery was over 85% charged - which I thought was odd, but it worked out.

I'm getting all my stuff back to the way I like it and enjoying being on a newer version of Android than the one that Samsung and T-mobile officially supply for this phone right now. Which is idiotic.

So - moving forward I don't plan to purchase phones from t-mobile any more. I'll probably stick with Nexus phones from Google and avoid all this headache. I wont get another new phone for a while. I bought a new, high end phone so that it would last a while. But when I do I wont make the mistake of getting stuck depending on mobile phone companies.

Because of course, nobody would ever follow someone around with mod points to try to trash their karma or anything:

Certainly, their point of my comment in a discussion in my own journal entry being overrated must be accurate. And the fact that all four of these happened in a very short time is nothing but a coincidence. Nothing to see here...