...of freedom? Hat tip to Luke727.

Am I missing something here? How can it be "free as in speech" software if you're explicitly revoking the right of certain people to use it?

This is why open source will fail as a "movement". Major open source projects have great software to offer - the BSDs, Apache, PostgreSQL. But people like Stalin and Eric "Arrogant Gas Baron" Raymond are working ever so hard to destroy it.

Of course, unlike Raymond, at least Stalin has actually contributed software, not just spittle-laced rants and facist visions of an "idyllic" American life.

Prior to Eric Raymond's hijacking of the Jargon File, there was the Hacker's Dictionary:

http://www.gh-sts.com/HOWTO/original-jargon-file.htm

This is not the original original, but it's from before ESR went on his one-man rampage and altered it to fit his own political and religious views.

Not really I'm not, but I'm tired of yelling at you and everyone else. I know you all mean well, but you still piss me off (actually, sometimes you piss me off BECAUSE you mean well). Also, there's really only so many ways that you can say that Bush is a meatslamming polerider before you just run out of new ways to abuse the English language.

Anyway, the next HOWTO will be up shortly. It's the HOWTO on running a FreeBSD router with a simple firewall and a DNS cache for the rest of the network. I'm not going to do the QMail portion because Bernstein already has good documentation on cr.yp.to about replacing sendmail with qmail.

After I get this one up, I'll expand it to include running syslogd effectively.

I have decided to begin a set of HOWTO documents documenting how I did stuff. This will include the common and obscure tasks of day to life, from computing to car repair to cooking (which maybe I should avoid, but...).

So far I have completed two HOWTOs:

HOWTO: Make a Patch Cable
HOWTO: Remove and Replace an H-Pipe on A 1999-2002 Ford Mustang GT

Some of these things, such as the latter, will be done when I learn something new. Others will be done as I complete tasks I already knew how to do but don't do commonly, such as the former.

In the works:

HOWTO: Repair clothing tears with needle and thread
HOWTO: Build a FreeBSD Router w/Firewall, DNS Caching and Qmail
HOWTO: Run multiple sites on localhost with one Apache instance

These will be located at http://www.gh-sts.com/HOWTO in the form of a series of text files. I will also include links to other, specialized lists of HOWTOs.

No guarantees on how long this project will interest me though.

Um. Let's see.

George Bush skated through school with Cs, failed to meet the expectations of a National Guard unit - twice - during the Vietnam war, worked for three failed companies in some sort of high-level leadership role, completed illegal stock trades several times, turned the Texas public education system into one of the most dysfunctional school system's in the country, won the presidency after a majority of voting Americans said they DIDN'T want him to be president, choked on a pretzel, fell off his Segway, started a war on completely false information, and showed such poor leadership in one of the nation's worst natural disasters that it would have probably been better if he'd have just stayed in Crawford since he not only came off like he didn't care, he came off like he was using the situation for a publicity stunt.

I really took the wrong approach to my life. I think if Bush has taught us anything, it's that an alcoholic underachiever with a seriously diminished capacity for intelligent thought and measured decision-making is worth a whole hell of a lot more than some stupid sucker who actually believes that the best way to make it in America is to work hard.

Ahoy matey's, first order of business in the "Be Like Bush" campaign is to down a bottle of Scotch for breakfast and, since I don't have any shareholders to rob, maybe rob a bank.

I'll keep you posted on how that works out for me.

I think if you decide you want to be the leader of the free world, it's not unfair in the least that you forfeit the privilege of regular vacations.

I think it should be illegal to cherry pick friendly crowds when you're not just holding rallies for re-election. Either that, or there should be a clear disclaimer on every audio, visual, and print quote, image, etc. that comes out of it that clearly states it was all staged. Why is it that you can't sell a vaccuum cleaner on TV without making it clear that you're not using impartial, unscripted customers, but you can sell a nationwide public health plan that will affect everyone that way?

I think if you have strong objections to things like the Kyoto protocol then you shouldn't sign them even if it makes you unpopular, but I also think that "China doesn't have to" isn't a valid complaint about it if you're supposedly the world's policy leader.

I think if you yell "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, and 50 people die in a stampede, and if you yell "Nukes!" in an international theatre and tens of thousands of people die in a war, and both times it wasn't true and you couldn't have proven it was true when you did it, then the only difference is a matter of scale and either way you're culpable for each death.

I think if you have a strong history with the oil industry, and you approve an energy policy that gives tax dollars to that industry at a time when it's reaping windfall profits, then people have every right to wonder where your loyalty lies.

I think if you do something stupid like cut levee funding to a threatened area, and a lot of people drown a few months later, it's probably not your fault they drowned, per se, but I also think it's not unfair that people frown on you for it since the only thing that made it clearly not your fault was the timeframe.

I think if public officials move 25,000 people to a shelter during a hurricane, and you can't tell me that they did that more than 24 hours after they did it, even though it was all over every major media outlet in the world, and people die because you didn't know that and it was your job to be informed, you should be brought up on charges of gross criminal negligence.

I think if one of your defining acts as a public servant was creating the term "freedom fries" you should be stripped of everything you own and mailed via parcel post to the Yukon territory.

I think if you don't drive at least 1/3 of your SUV/Truck mileage either hauling more than 3 people, towing something for work or recreation, or in poor road conditions, and you don't have a job of some sort where it's crucial you're available 24/7/365 (doctor, firefighter, etc.), you should have to pay a Stupidity Tax of 30% of your gross income every year, and that the money should be used to pay for everyone else's increased gas prices.

I think people who believe that building more refineries is a good idea for solving an energy crunch probably just don't have any good ideas.

I think that if you're so obsessed with your vehicle that you actually put it up in your photo gallery with your family, you shouldn't be allowed to have access to a camera.

I think that people that actually respond to spam are just trolling the rest of us.

I think that if you believe that nobody ever needs welfare because there are always enough jobs in society to go around, and that they're always accessible to the people who need them, you might as well have just dropped out of school because you probably weren't paying any attention anyway since you're so proud of yourself for being average and think you really "made it" on your own.

I think too many conservatives tend toward being willfully undereducated and have very myopic views of the world as a result.

I think too many liberals spend too much time assuming that everybody wants to be as open-minded as them, or that it's a good thing that they're so open-minded, and forget that sometimes people have to step back and fend for themselves at the expense of others.

I think too many conservatives don't know the difference between taking things from other people for survival and simply exploiting them because they're greedy.

I think too many liberals don't know the difference between helping someone get back on their feet and dragging them along in a little red wagon because they just don't want to walk beside you.

I think too many conservatives and liberals try too hard to make everybody else be like them.

• Didn't plan where to evacuate people to who had nowhere else to go.
• Didn't begin to move food, water, and medicine toward the afflicted area for DAYS after the event.
• Didn't put a significant number of National Guardsmen on notice to create a rapid response to the crisis.

Don't worry, I have it on good authority from the Slashdot Humanitarian crowd here that it's entirely the niggers' faults for not evacuating. Also, I assume its entirely the fault of all those critically ill patients who were literally dying in the hallways of hospitals that they didn't get up and march 45 miles to Slidell like some people apparently think they should have done.

Oh, and don't worry. Bush has "zero tolerance" for dying looters, so hopefully we'll just shoot those animals dead who are so crass that they would rob an abandoned Wal Mart to survive.

Yay America.

Don't worry, though. It's not like our the federal and LA state governments have been COMPLETELY inoperative. They DID:

• Thank Bush a whole lot, presumably for playing banjo (or whatever) and eating birthday cake while the city died. Like father like son, I suppose. Bush I was just as big a bastard in Andrew.
• Pat each other on the back for evac'ing the city into a death trap that much better resembles a concentration camp than a shelter.
• Make a lot of excuses (especially FEMA directory Brown) for dragging their feet and CAUSING people, women, children, men, the elderly, to die.

Fuck them.

Railgunner: It's not Bush's fault, It's not Bush's fault!

Bethanie, Ellem, HokieSeas, HBI, etc: It's the people's fault for not leaving, it's the people's fault for not leaving!

My response to each of them: Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I wish cancer AND AIDS on your whole families. If the magnitude of this catastrophe starts and stops for you with defending your chosen political candidates or pointing fingers, you can suck my flaccid cock while I take the luxury of shitting in a working toilet.

Go fuck yourselves. And if you cockblockers have soemthing to say about it, I have a non-obfuscated email address on this account, so bring it the fuck on.

I am seriously considering trading it in on the purchase of an econobox such as a Corolla, Civic, or Lancer. It would be less money per month on the loan, less on insurance, and less on gas. :(

Fucking republicans.

When we're talking about an a/c compressor, and we talk about a "blown seal" that's leaking oil back onto the engine block, is that the same seal we're talking about when we're talking about a "shaft seal kit"? Or, is the "compressor shaft seal" a different beast from the "compressor seal"?

Thank you in advance, good folk. If this kit can alleviate the problem, we should be able to repair my fiancee's overheating issue and recharge the A/C for under one hundred bucks.

If you're interested in this type of thing, here's the full story:

She complained on Tuesday about the car overheating while idling on her way home. After work, I drove it around awhile but could only get it to get unnaturally warm when it idled AND the a/c was running. We already knew it was low on refrigerant, so I charged it last night and it seemed that while the system was sucking the cans dry it was good, but it also seemed like the oil and refrigerant were coming right back out. This was confirmed when the whole things started billowing smoke. I suspect the compressor seal is blown on it, or at least just plain damaged, but getting to the a/c is a serious pita so I can't get in there to see if the seal from the kit is the same as what's actually leaking, and I don't know anything specific about a/c compressors other than how to charge them and that they're really annoying, failure-prone pieces of equipment.

And what really pisses me off is that $1.95 of every gallon is probably flowing into some fat rich fuck's fat fucking wallet that he sits his fat ass down on while he gorges his fat face with $75 sirloin and $250 bottles of wine.

But what pisses me off even more than that is the fact that this bullshit excuse for a president had his minions ship off an energy bill that gives these cockcheese-licking bitches MY fucking tax dollars to "invest in renewable energy resources".

CLUESTICK YOU FUCKING FRAUD: these pieces of human shit are gouging taxpayers at the pump on a daily basis and reaping huge, windfall profits in the process. So what's your fucking plan? Do you do something for, you know, the people you pretend like you represent and set forward mid and long range plans to reduce oil dependance while encouraging sensible use and moderation in the short term?

No, your cock is so lubed up from their greasy fingertips that you hand them my goddamn wallet while your lying little bike-riding ass pays some sort of bullshit lipservice to pie-in-the-sky "renewable" resources like that mystical hydrogen-powered vehicle that doesn't actually exist outside of two lousy fucking prototypes.

I fucking hate republicans. Jesus Christ what a bunch of two-faced little dogcum-sucking dick jugglers.

And the democrats are fucking morons. Dip into the strategic oil reserve? Let's crunch some numbers, dipshits:

SOR contains 700m barrels
U.S. consumption is about 21m barrels per day
U.S. production is down about 1/4

700/(21*.25) = 133 days of oil

So if we tapped the whole fucking thing out, we'd give ourselves about 4.5 months.

If we could refine it.

Oh, gee, there's where your "plan" falls to shit you dumb cunts. While you would buck up the somewhat limited impact Katrina had on shipping lanes, you wouldn't have one bit of impact on all those refineries that still have to be brought back up.

You want to have an impact on this bullshit situation? Here's what you do. First of all, you raise both middle fingers to George Bush, his oil buddies that are felating him 24/7, and all those dipshit democrats who wouldn't know a plan if Hillary Clinton stapled it to their nut sack. The easiest way to do that is to print this out and mail it to the president, your congressMEN and congressWOMEN, because congressPERSON is what sandal-wearing hopheads say.

Why? What possible impact could that have, mailing something like this to elected officials?

None. Just like everything else you could do that involved actually trying to get their attention, because nobody in this fucking government gives a shit about anyone that's not slipping them cash on the campaign trail. So you print this out as a big "fuck you" because you know they're useless and they're not on your side.

Then, you take a few simple steps:

1. You ditch the unncessary SUV and your "bad boy" image of yourself. You just look like a flat-chested soccer mom anyway in it.

2. You learn how to fucking drive. This means not driving 85 fucking miles an hour to and from work. Not squeeling your tires and racing from one red light to the next.

Basically, it means quit being a dick and grow up.

3. You carpool. Or take the bus. Or the train. Quit being such a snippy little bitch. You'll save money, and maybe if you walked to the bus stop instead of just into your heated garage you fatasses that are making this country so obese would slim the fuck down and you could start going to movies again.

4. You vote these motherfuckers out.

See, this is an important one that nobody ever gets. None of these people are on "your side". They're not on "your team" or in "your party". They're their because some special interest greased the wheels and put them there so they could rake you over the coals and steal your money via the government. Okay? Got that? ALL OF THEM. Just vote them all the fuck out. I don't give a shit if you write in Gumby for president, no president at all would be a fuck lot better than any alternative we're going to be getting in '08, and forget those cocksuckers in Congress. They're just a bunch of self-interested pricks and if you don't know that, you have a serious problem.

Fuck this, I'm going to bed.

So I have this FreeBSD system functioning as a router. I have Intarweb access from the router (which is where I'm typing from via lynx) and I can have one machine hooked up to share the connection at a time.

Alas, you cannot have multiple NICs with different IPs on the same subnet in FreeBSD, and I cannot figure out how I might go about this.

Basically, I'm trying to avoid Forking out $40 for a hub. I have two other NICs, and if I could find some way to relegate them to a different subnet as if they were different physical machines, I could treat those two as a hub, and the other two as inward and outward facing gateways.

Alas, I do not know how to do this. I'm envisioning some static routes, but they're not working out.

Help me slashdot! I'm a cheapass bitch and I don't want to buy a hub!

... 20 years in Vietnam... BUT... I wonder.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/08/28/iraq.journalists.reut/index.html

Okay, so in 10% of the time we've matched 100% of the fatalities.

1. How many journalists are in Iraq vs. in Vietnam.

2. What is the average distance of a journalist from the front line (given that the whole country is the "front line" thanks to our idiot government's absolute failure to plan for the inevitable collapse of the country's already strained defenses, we'll consider the "front line" anywhere not in the Green Zone).

3. How many died in accidents vs. friendly fire incident vs. enemy fire incididents in each war?

4. What is the ratio of journalists killed to American troop strength over those 20 years? Bear in mind that the buildup in Iraq was immediate while the 20 years in Vietnam includes a stint where we didn't even technically have "ground troops" fighting.

I hate it when organizations publish this kind of thing. Yes, the Iraq war is total bullshit. Yes, Bush and his administration have created a situation where everyone involved is in an excessive amount of danger. Yes, identifying the countless layers of bullshit and peeling them away is important.

However, if you're going to release this type of statistic, you need to make sure that you provide all of the contextual data and you need to make sure the media has it in sound bites they can feed to the moronic, attention-deficit-afflicted public. This is the type of thing that makes the valid concerns of the liberals look like the screaming stupidity of the neo-cons. This type of nonsense is no better than when those idiot Rove-humpers invent some new slogan like "up or down vote" to conceal their own duplicity and lack of any actual valid position.

Liberals have every reason to be concerned about the misdirection of this country and have countless ways to highlight it. This does not do that.

So don't fucking publish it.

I quit playing the last time.

Don't get me wrong, Diablo II is a fun game for what it is. It's an enjoyable experience, watching your character level up, gain all sorts of new equpiment and skills.... die at the hands of a horde of three foot munchkins with kitchen knives...

And that really sums up the D2 experience. You get this big, beefy hero slinging arrows and swords and magic and then you turn a corner and BAM YOU'RE DEAD.

Why? Because you were ill-prepared for the journey ahead? Because you lacked the necessary skill to negotiate the new terrain?

No, because Blizzard's idea of making the game harder starts and ends with cramming as many of the most annoying, hard-to-reach enemies as they can into one tiny spot where there's no room to fight, run, or think. How many times my Barbarian turned a corner only to face eight or nine of those stupid skeleton mages, all slinging cold blasts that froze him and prevented him from responding or running, I couldn't tell you. And you can't just prepare for that kind of thing unless you maintain four different sets of equipment because Blizzard's brilliant programming team set the game up so that in any one area, one level will be completely packed with cold-equipped enemies, the next with poison, the next with lightening, and the last with fire. If it's not that, you'll be bombarded by a hundred of some stupid little thing that will stand around at a distance shooting arrows or darts or something else at you and then run when you get close, meaning your only option is to either try and lose them or figure out a way to hit them with a ranged weapon which probably won't do enough damage to kill them anyway because of how fast they heal.

Which brings me to the next subject: monster, dungeon, and item creation. Blizzard says these things are done "randomly". This is apparently a code word for "mindlessly" because I encountered one of those wonderful nearly invincible enemies today while playing the game.

It was a ghost type unique creature. It had Stone Skin and it was regenerating so fast that every hit of my 15-36 life-stealing Crystal Sword was healed before I could hit him again. Ultimately, I was fortunate enough to be carrying a bad ass short bow that does 20 poison damage over 2 seconds, and after - I shit you not - 13 minutes of running backwards through the level and shooting this motherfucker I managed to kill it.

I got a worthless jewel, a healing potion, and a mana potion. Nice. Thanks for the reward for defeating such a difficult creature.

And, you know, for a game that's most complex maneuver involves holding the Shift key and clicking a mouse button, Blizzard sure fucked up the controls.

I always love when I'm trying to run from the enemy and my Barbarian instead goes barreling forward right into the face of two dozen angry liches and kicks open a jug as his final, heroic action. Way to go, meathead, that one will be chiseled right into your tombstone with all the reverance it deserves.

I mean, christ almighty, is it really that difficult to develop a way to clearly shoot a bow and arrow at a certain angle? I mean, since the most complicated tactic in this game involves shooting blind down hallways so some batch of dung beetles shooting out electric charges doesn't rip you apart, it would be nice if there were some way to control that activity.

Again, don't get me wrong, Diablo II can be fun in all its simplicity. I just think Blizzard banked a little too much on people being interested solely in that simplicity and overlooked some critical gameplay elements.

Like any actual gameplay.

We will briefly deconstruct the recent LGF troll so as to explain why the "classical" troll is not necessarily a destructive force bent on destroying otherwise intelligent conversation.

"Trolling", in the classic sense, is posting an opinion or statement which you either do not necessarily believe, or have greatly exaggerated for the purpose of creating a certain level of noise.

When posted to an otherwise thoughtful, intelligent thread of discussion, a troll is typically ignored. In some cases, however, if the victims are not terribly savvy, they will mistake the troll for a valid opinion and go into a hysterical fit over it.

However, when a troll of this type is posted to an idiotic, mundane, typified discussion thread that already has little or no value, there's nothing to lose, and the discourse that can result from the massive confusion can actually turn out to be more valid than what the thread was originally aiming for.

Take, for instance, the LGF troll.

Note how in my AIM transcript with CyranoVR I mentioned that I was intentionally trolling for racists on LGF. LGF is full of psuedo-violent racist windbags who honestly believe that genocide, forced sterilization, and discrimination against Arabs is a good idea.

Further, note how once Charles posted his story about the troll to the site, a few LGFers actually sat up and started talking about the fact that LGF does, in fact, shelter some rather grotesque racism.

In addition, the story hit LGF Watch after the blogger took notice of the comments chastising LGF and Charles for ignoring the racism in the comments rather than confronting them and distancing the site from them.

In the end, the troll did create some noise, yes. But it created noise in a place who's most impressive feat to date was getting a long-standing news anchor out of work after he broadcast a story he didn't write. Even if the troll had created ONLY noise it wouldn't have made any difference.

Instead, in the end, it created some honest discourse on a serious problem with the site and forced a few people to actually address the fact that, yes, LGF has a strong contingent of people who are bigoted against Arabs and it and Charles do nothing to indicate that they feel these comments are invalid or that LGF should distance itself from them. To the contrary, Charles has made statements and taken actions to indicate that he SUPPORTS these types of comments (note that while people Bigel were NOT banned for making ultra-racist, violent, and potentially illegal remarks, I was banned for posting a single troll that eventually generated valid discussion despite attempts by the site's maintainer to ensure that didn't happen).

Trolling is not about crapflooding or general harrassment. Trolling is about trying to bring about a change in discussion by flagrantly calling out stupendously moronic comments and stirring up stagnant subjects. Injecting a properly crafted troll into a stagnant discussion can be like injecting caffiene. Although many of the direct replies will likely be flamebait and assinine discourse, it helps to identify the truly clueless while providing bases for more intelligent, informed discussion to develop.

The next time you see a good troll, just sit back and have a chuckle at the expense of the biters. Odds are pretty good, if you think about it, that the troller is just having some fun, and the only people who are really hurt by it deserved to be hurt anyway.