The AP (Associated Press) is reporting that the Boston Police have turned off the cell phone system and infrastructure to prevent the use of cell phone signals from triggering another bomb. Something else to consider when the only means of communication you have left are cell phones and no land lines.

What union represents computer programmers? There were some weird fights here in La Jolla as to which union (or even whether any union at all) ought to represent the graduate-student-teachers (also known as TAs = graduate teaching assistants). The final result is at the UCSD website and is that the graduate students are members of the United Auto Workers union:

Graduate students appointed as teaching assistants, associates, readers or tutors (ASE'S) are represented by the Association of Student Employees/UAW under a collective bargaining agreement with the university. All salary payments under these titles are subject to a deduction of 1.15 percent for union membership dues or a 0.92 percent agency fee deduction for students who choose not to become members of the union. The university/UAW Agreement can be retrieved electronically at http://ogsr.ucsd.edu/ase.htm

re: I dont use disks you insensitive cloud.
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Mean insensitive cloud storage, bad cloud! I dont use disks either, just USB flash drives for me. I use knoppix as a live-boot distro from usb on a 16-GB stick with 4.2 GB used up for the main OS and about 3 GB used up for an "overlay" using the UnionFS Union File System used by knoppix to overlay the compressed "knoppix" disk image with the extra applications I downloaded like Octave and Blender and a few other small toys like pente and xgalaga. Then, data files and pdfs and code projects use up 3 GB more, leaving me about 5.8 GB free: so that's 36.5% free, 63.5% used with no disk shaped magnetic or optical storage involved.
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Everything gets backed up via rsync to a file share at home when I'm at school, especially if I download something cool to work on at home. No USB stick failures yet, but I keep my fingers crossed.

Thanks for the detailed reply. I'm fairly new to a lot of this, but still very interested in it. I'm also writing X11 code, using Xlib routines rather than an overlying window manager style thing. I'm not a masochist, I'm just trying to learn the details from some good X examples. I've written some OpenGL stuff also. And I'm interested in learning the details from the ground up and from the high-level abstractions down. Get the devil in the details squeezed from above and below, if I can. Again, thanks for outlining the layers.
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I was also trying to learn the kernel drivers for some frame-buffer stuff for intel, as my dad bought an el-cheapo notebook. I can get X running just fine with Knoppix 7.04 and 7.05 for the notebook itself (which has 1024x600 pixels), but when you also try to use the hdmi output, it doesn't work. You always get a 1024x600 window with noisy (nonblinking) trash pixels around it on the HDMI screen to the full extent of the HDMI screen's pixel dimensions. I tried to see if I could inject (poke values directly into the video-buffer ram) some pixels outside of the recognized screen area, and thus learn how the memory mapping of the screen is capable of throwing the extraneous pixels on the HDMI screen, but the Xorg X display driver is only putting the display's pixels on the truncated 1024x600 window on the upper left. It's frustrating. (it's a walmart special Acer netbook, with the intel chip and the integrated video chip, 97xx maybe I don't remember off of the top of my head.)

You can run Knoppix like this also, with everything stored in ram using the "to ram" command line option when booting up:

knoppix lang=us toram no3d

This works better for the CD-sized version of knoppix if you have only one-Gig of RAM, if you've got more than 6GB RAM, go ahead and use "toram" for the DVD-sized versions of Knoppix.

The L.A. Times has an article that points out that the new idiocy of the rude is flinging and hurling their cellphones in anger, and they call their article Anger issue: When phone goes from mobile to aerial, with an illustration to go with it demonstrating "How To Throw a Phone" like a baseball as a

(1) curve phone
(2) knuckle phone
(3) fast phone

rendered in a faux-retro style. It has also entered the Taylor Swift breakup-song stage:

Taylor Swift also discloses a phone-flinging episode in her song "Stay Stay Stay":
"...I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night.
... I threw my phone across the room at you. ..."
The object of her aggression/desire returns ready to talk, wearing a football helmet.

Considering how frequently the MS sales people seem to present a new option with lower licensing prices whenever a city or governmental agency is about to jump ship and get on board with Linux, isn't that sudden presentation of huge discounts almost like a bribe? Yes, i know that a bribe goes to a separate person in order for a transaction to go through, but when you've got to discount your prices that much for people to buy your stuff, that doesn't seem like a good sign!
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And before some idiot goes the other way and sez "gnu/linux must suck real bad since the only way they get people to take it is to give it away for free!", realize that the concept of Free software (with liberty) being free (of price and cost) is secondary to the freedom it gives to the end-user and the things that come back to the developer(s) with GNU-GPL-licensed software. The freedom is an inherent essence to free software. It's not priced at $zero because people don't want it. It's priced at $zero because the community of developers believes in giving away and sharing the fruits of their labor to the community of the world

re: I see hawks or eagles circling some highways nowadays
:>)
My understanding of why birds of prey are often seen circling highways is that they are taking advantage of thermals, rising columns of air heated by the asphalt/cement roadway surfaces, to power and maintain their gliding and flying. The fact that there's also an abundance of roadkill may have something to do with it also. See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wedge-tailed_Eagle#Behaviour_and_diet for how the eagles can observe thermals with their infrared vision.

Maybe it never really existed, that so-called "Do No Evil" phase of google, and it's all just a post-hoc remythologizing of what google used to be...
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but why couldn't they bring back the clean page search engine (they could keep the new search algorithms for pagerank, or revert back) that they used to be before they became the ad-sense and ad-word selling advertising behemoth? An actual search engine rather than a categorizer and tracker of all of our searches, and web-site travels, and telephone calls (sent or received), and emails (sent or received, even if you're not a gmail user, someone you send to may be a gmail user and bingo you're being tracked), and purchases, and travels and gps locations (hey all you andoid-phone users, that would pertain to you!), and soon-to-be everything-you-see-through your google glasses.
:>p
No thanks, I don't need an ever-present surveillance-corporation or an ever-present surveillance state.

I've got mail through one account that also automatically forwards to another account (not gmail or google, thanky god), so even if one provider loses my email dataset, the other still has a good copy. I also pop my mail in to my own machine, so I 've got a local archive. I wonder what the details of this canadian mishap really are... :>(