I'm a white guy, but I have enough Cherokee in me to be classified as Native American if the tribes would accept me. Which they won't. My girlfriend is mostly Native American, and her tribe won't even recognize her.

But, I look really white. Cracker white. Drywall white. I can tan like the dickens, but then it just turns back to pale honkey white as fast as the day is short.

The life on reservations is no picnic. My gf's nephews and her sister-in-law live on a Canadian reservation, and it's abject poverty. It's not that they don't have money, it's that they tend to value education as a lower priority and alcoholism and drug abuse is rampant. Theft is huge up there, too. None of her nephews can have nice things without them being stolen. Also, with the alcoholism and drug use there's a decent amount of violence. Also, the Canadians around the reservations tend to treat the Native Americans as lesser beings. My gf, who is American and part white and black and East Indian and everything else under the sun (but mostly Native American), experienced the Canadian racism first hand. Most of the local white vendors would be extremely rude to her because they assumed she was from the local tribe.

Now comes the part where I put my Libertarian hat on and sound like a complete racist. I disagree with reparations or any special funding given to the Native Americans by tax dollars. Hey, at least I'm consistent. The reason I believe this is because none of the people paying into the taxes are responsible for running the Natives off their land. It would make as much sense as us holding the entire Democratic party responsible for paying reparations because their party founder signed the Indian Removal Act which lead to the Trail of Tears (fact!). NetRunner had nothing to do with his party's racist founder, so it wouldn't be fair to blame NetRunner, right?

In order to make amends the people directly victimized and the people directly responsible for victimizing them would need to be held accountable. But, they're all dead. Now, let the comment downvotes begin.

^ deathcow: I've been running 7 RC as my work machine for the past 4 months and I'm running x64 at home now for a couple of weeks. I have yet to see a blue screen at all.

The issue could be that VirtualBox still isn't working 100% with 7 (I'm guessing you're running the machine as a Vista type), but I've had the RC on VBox before I decided to trample my XP work computer with it, and it worked fine for me.

As for the quirks, I suppose I'm used to them by now, which was the main reason I installed the RC to begin with - to get used to this new experience, though I work in IT support, so I need to know this system to be able to support it.

The official public release is in a month, and most hardware vendors will have official drivers out by then (Toshiba still have Beta-labeled drivers only, which makes my Toshiba-laptop crowd wary of upgrading), but I haven't had a driver problem with any of the older machines I have it running on by now, so at least on that category, it > Vista

>> ^rougy:
>> ^blankfist:
No one ever criticizes the little guy for stacking the system so he can have a free lunch.

Hey, he's just following the precepts of the free market.
He's just being selfish, and selfishness is good, right?
This piece of shit country will never change.
People can't afford preventative medicine, that's why so many people don't go and see a doctor until it's too late.
Most bankruptcies are due to medical events, and most of those people were insured. Yeah, great fucking country. The free market wins again.
But let's bitch and moan about preventative care. Ron Paul would be proud.
Eat the rich.


Epic fucking fail, rougy. People have been trying to teach you this point countless times on this website. Libertarians draw a major distinction between wanting to do something with what you own, and wanting to do something with what someone else owns against their will. That's why a constitution and courts to enforce it is necessary, and ours ultimately failed. Everybody knows that true democracy is just people trying to vote themselves other people's shit, even shit that doesn't even exist yet. One generation could borrow from Chinese savers at interest well in excess of productive capacity and leave future generations holding the interest burden. That is THEFT. And unless you can somehow vendor finance trillion dollar deficits in perpetuity at 1% interest rates, we are going to have to raise interest rates to 30% or devalue the living shit out of the dollar and inflate the debt away.

You should be kissing Ron Paul's ass. Here's a fucking guy who has wasted 30 years trying to keep SPENDING in this dipshit country constrained to what it could PRODUCE by tying the dollar to something which always takes labor and material to produce. Instead, we now have a currency whose scarcity can be diminished at will by its issuer and is given a government-mandated monopoly. Instead, we went from the richest creditor nation to the world's largest debtor nation because we allowed the government to sell us the idea that it needs no discipline. If it wasn't for brainwashed foreigners too scared to stop giving us money to buy their products, and a dickless American populace willing to go along with anything to keep the party going, we wouldn't have deferred the inevitable collapse again last year.

Well, they do manage to keep me employed fixing these things. Just about every week I get a machine from a friend that requires attention for the low price of free... at least they hope.

The combination we use these days for free stuff is malwarebytes/super antispyware/avira anti-virus together, and that usually clears up most things.

Personally I have had the misfortune of getting conficker on a laptop, however it is pretty easy to remove (and spot) apart from having the nasty habit of attempting to infect usb flash drives placing a binary autorun.inf on the things.

Unfortunately, this will likely never end as most malware is developed outside the US and its exceptionally easy to hide ones tracks these days with botnets that are traded like commodities.

I often wonder if some of the anti-virus vendors cook up some of this crap since there is the occasional "BEWARE OF (virus/malware)" scare and it always is fronted by companies who want you to buy their software, which likely would not protect you againt most of this crap anyways. There is no software that can fix PEBKAC.

These days I solve "questionable website" problems by visiting them in a VM. You would be amazed at how much you can fuck one up and then when you reboot you snapshot it back to how it was before. VirtualBox is free and *really* good these days and with 1TB disks becoming the norm one can easily afford the 10-20GB of a virtual install of XP.

I can't stand the Sea Shepherd Society/Paul Watson and I hate Whale Wars. Why? Because the Sea Shepherd Society is actually hurting their own cause and Whale Wars is glorifying it.

Let me explain. I lived in Japan for eight years and I saw that every time the Japanese whaling fleet was attacked by the Paul Watson's group sales of whale meat went up in Japan and the resolve to continue hunting strengthened. The sales of whale meat has been falling for years in Japan, to the point now where there is over 1000 tons of frozen whale meat, some of it going back 12 years, in government freezers. The government can't give it away, but they try. If this trend continues it just won't be financially viable for Japan to continue whaling.

I taught at a university in Japan and I would ask my students if they eat and/or like whale meat. The vast majority of my students (90%+) said they didn't eat whale meat (however almost all of them had eaten whale meat at some point, usually served to them in their elementary school lunches, of course provided by the government). Almost the same number said they didn't like whale meat. Then I would usually give them the above statistic and ask if Japan should continue whaling, again a big majority would say "No". However, when stories about the Sea Shepherd Society attacking Japanese whalers hit the news (and it hit BIG TIME), attitudes would change. Then most of my students would say Japan should continue whaling. This was not just found in a university setting either. Editorials and opinion letters to newspapers would echo the same feelings.

In direct response to the Sea Shepherd's attacks on Japanese whaling ships supermarkets, restaurants, street vendors, etc. would suddenly begin carrying whale meat. More schools would serve it in their lunches (kids don't get a choice of what they can eat at school, one meal for everyone), and a restaurant in Osaka made headline news when they began to sell 'whale burgers'. There was a line around the block for those burgers and many of the people in the line made it clear that they were there as a giant 'fuck you' to the Sea Shepherd Society for attacking the Japanese whaling fleet.

As I said above Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society are hurting their own cause. What they need to do is put more effort into better information campaigns within Japan. Record and photograph what's going on then use Japanese bloggers and YouTube to get the info out there. This worked very well when the Sea Shepherd Society and others documented the Taiji Dolphin Hunt:
http://www.seashepherd.org.uk/taiji/taiji_sscs_in_taiji.html
http://www.savejapandolphins.org/

Many people in Japan were shocked to find out that Dolphins were being hunted by Japanese, and the hunt now gets regular news coverage in Japan which has led to Japanese themselves protesting.

Pacifism has been so ingrained in the Japanese people since the end of WWII that using even mild violence to get what you want will assuredly turn the average Japanese person against you and whatever cause you are promoting, even if the cause is a 'good' one.

This fight will be won only if the Japanese people can be turned against whaling and make it too expensive for the Japanese government to continue to fund the whaling fleets, it won't be won by using the tactics of the Sea Shepherd Society.

Sorry for the long rant, but you can probably tell that I feel strongly about it.

I really don't know much. One day I read he got a 40 year sentence, months later the sentence gets changed, and then later on, it changed again until I lost track. Last I heard, the sentence was 52 years. I do know that he is in a maximum security prison and has tried to take his life several times, cut off his arms, smash his head against the walls, etc.

He is completely isolated from the rest of the prisoners, and is also receiving a lot of psychological treatment. He also converted to some sort of Christian cult and every week he is allowed to receive a visit from the members of the cult. I don't know the extent of self harm he has done, but for some reason (I guess to try to calm him down) he is now able to talk on the phone 4 to 6 hours a day and he is allowed to paint and write things from some club he is in.

In reply to this comment by inflatablevagina:
holy shit! I havent ever heard about this guy. Did he get set free?

In reply to this comment by mauz15:
"Not much else to explain here..."

I beg to differ, before the subtitles start the reporters say that this man, has been given only 40+ years in jail but that he MAY get out in 3 years. Why? well because Colombia's justice system is fucked beyond belief. I know because I am Colombian. But then again, this case is quite old so perhaps they have re examined the case and given a proper sentence.

His name is Luis Alfredo Garavito, and he not only killed 140 children but he also raped and mutilated them. Most were homeless kids or kids that were street vendors. He would trick them by giving them money, or dressed as a monk, or even pretended to be a street vendor like them. Anything to gain their trust.

He is an alcoholic who was raped as child, and consequently entered a state of depression. I suppose this is when Hitler's life and words as well as Satanic ideas influenced him. So labeling this with the 'religion' tag is kind of misleading, since this person experienced other things of psychological nature BEFORE his obsession with Hitler and Satanism. The title of this makes it seem as if this guy picked a Hitler book and a satanic bible one afternoon and *poof* just like magic he became a murderer.

The authorities found a massive grave of about 40 corpses in a Colombian town, that is when a full investigation across the nation to find the murderer began and a couple more graves were found thereafter.

btw, he confessed to 140 murders but as far as I know he has been linked to about 190

holy shit! I havent ever heard about this guy. Did he get set free?

In reply to this comment by mauz15:
"Not much else to explain here..."

I beg to differ, before the subtitles start the reporters say that this man, has been given only 40+ years in jail but that he MAY get out in 3 years. Why? well because Colombia's justice system is fucked beyond belief. I know because I am Colombian. But then again, this case is quite old so perhaps they have re examined the case and given a proper sentence.

His name is Luis Alfredo Garavito, and he not only killed 140 children but he also raped and mutilated them. Most were homeless kids or kids that were street vendors. He would trick them by giving them money, or dressed as a monk, or even pretended to be a street vendor like them. Anything to gain their trust.

He is an alcoholic who was raped as child, and consequently entered a state of depression. I suppose this is when Hitler's life and words as well as Satanic ideas influenced him. So labeling this with the 'religion' tag is kind of misleading, since this person experienced other things of psychological nature BEFORE his obsession with Hitler and Satanism. The title of this makes it seem as if this guy picked a Hitler book and a satanic bible one afternoon and *poof* just like magic he became a murderer.

The authorities found a massive grave of about 40 corpses in a Colombian town, that is when a full investigation across the nation to find the murderer began and a couple more graves were found thereafter.

btw, he confessed to 140 murders but as far as I know he has been linked to about 190

I took a two week course in Greece and Turkey last summer. In Istanbul, one of the girls went to get an ice cream and the vendor stuck a cone down her shirt. Some of the students that were there pulled her away before the guy could actually start scooping the ice cream, and then left without saying a word.

Were they pissed? Yes. Did they retaliate in any way? No. They understood that they were in a place that played by their own rules. And they respected that.

Same thing applies here. I'm not defending this guy's behavior- it's backwards as fuck. It's just something that this chick should have gritted her teeth over, though. None of that "I'm an AMUHRICAN and THIS is how we do it" shit.

...Assuming this all sparked from the alleged confrontation with a hot dog she hints at in the first few seconds, that is.

entr0py, you just blew my mind.

Although people being stupid shouldn't surprise me anymore. There is no valid use for A to A cables. I cannot understand why anyone would make it. This is from the FAQ at www.usb.org:

Q6: You mean I can't make a direct cable connection like a null modem?
A6: Correct. In fact, if you try this with an illegal A to A USB cable, you'll short the two PCs' power supplies together, possibly destroying one or both machines or causing a fire hazard. Even there were no danger to the machines from the problem with two power supplies, there still wouldn't be any way to get the two PCs talking to each other, since USB doesn't support that particular kind of communication. A reasonably priced solution to handle this need is the USB bridge.

Q7: So why do people make A to A cables, anyway? What kinds of cables do I need to connect USB devices together?
A7: A number of cable vendors seem to have reached the conclusion that USB is like a PC's serial port, only faster, so you need all sorts of special hardware to create the USB connection you need to make. This is completely incorrect. The only kind of cables you'll ever need to connect normal USB products are A to B cables, A to mini B cables or mini A to mini B cables of various lengths.

Thanks for showing that to me though. It's crazy that it exists.

Imstellar, you are so dead on. It's as if anyone who opposes something the government has done is instantly painted as evil in the eyes of NetRunner. I think the partisan koolaid has robbed our friend of insight and reason, I'm afraid.

That evil newspaper shaming the public into helping that poor man out. LOL! What a ridiculous claim.


>> ^NetRunner:
^ I doubt, if the streets were privately owned, that the private owner would allow a street vendor to operate on his property without paying a fee (or sleep there in a cardboard box, for that matter).

Why do you fear your common man so much? You have no faith in your neighbor even though 98% of people tend to be good and desire strongly to coexist. But you paint everyone with a broad brush of disdain; lumping them in with those in the minority that have no desire to coexist and help their neighbor. People are better than you think. Won't you give them a chance?

Also, your broad generalization against private owners is ridiculous, because private owners of businesses do in fact take care of the poor and homeless. Private citizens also donate generously to homeless shelters.


>> ^NetRunner:
^Somewhere in there it does talk about seeking the maximum individual freedom, which you seem to think you have the right to redefine as "freedom from taxes" and not "freedom from poverty".

Because that's the point of liberty, isn't it? Being individual, not collective. There's more to it than "freedom from taxes", it's freedom to own your own labor, your own life and to not to have others own you and your labor. That's what you mean to say, right? Because that's being a good Jeffersonian liberal.

^ Actually, the government came out to help afterward too. Funny how neither the private citizens nor government employees thought what happened to him was their problem, until a newspaper published an article to shame people into helping him.

I doubt, if the streets were privately owned, that the private owner would allow a street vendor to operate on his property without paying a fee (or sleep there in a cardboard box, for that matter).

This guy was lucky a reporter, who seems to have a chip on his shoulder about government, decided to use him to try to smear the city government. I wonder how many other homeless people there are out there he's gonna help, or if tomorrow he'll be bitching about wasteful "entitlement" programs that might've helped this guy out much sooner.

BTW, liberal has lots of meanings, like "generous" and "open-minded". Somewhere in there it does talk about seeking the maximum individual freedom, which you seem to think you have the right to redefine as "freedom from taxes" and not "freedom from poverty".

Me, being a liberal, am happy to share the word with people who view individual freedom differently.

You seem to want to try to possess the word and deny it to me. That's not very liberal of you.

I bought an ipod a couple of years ago and from the very start it was fucked up. It would not play more than 15-20 seconds of a song if I was using it with headphones, yet worked just fine in my car charger/FM transmitter. It's an issue with the "pause if the headphones come out feature"? Yeah, nope. Even when it's playing and I pull the cord out, it keeps playing. Besides, why the fuck do you really need that feature? It's just one more thing to go wrong. Will it really be the end of the world if you accidentally pull the cord out and you miss three seconds of audio on your song or movie?

So anyway, I called customer "service" to get it fixed, and they tell me that it's out of the warranty period. WTF? I just bought it. Well, apparently vendors are supposed to pull units off the shelf that are a certain age and send them back, so apple automatically assumed this one was too old to be covered. Well fuck you, apple. I just didn't care enough to follow through with it because it worked fine in my car, which is really the only reason I got it.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Oh comeon - FUD? Really? I wouldn't say Apple is a FUD producer. Certainly not on the scale of MS.

You could say that Apple is limiting innovation- but you could also say they are enabling it. The API for accessing the different bits of functionality in the iPhone is unprecedented and certainly robust and supportive of external developers. You can't say that Apple hasn't enabled good development on the iPhone. Compare that to how other smartphone vendors are handling external Apps - and Apple comes out smelling pretty good.

@ ponceleon:

Honestly I don't know what Manomio was thinking when they submitted this emulator to the App store. They knew it would be rejected. Apple is being very iron-fisted about this policy because it protects their revenue stream.

Only at the risk of killing a revenue stream will Apple ever lift this policy. About the only way that will likely happen is if other vendors remain open to the point where they become more attractive options to customers.

The closed nature of Apple is why I refuse to purchase their products. I don't evangelize my choice, though... people should buy what's works best for them. For me, that would be Windows Mobile for the most part... but that platform has become stale as far as the UI is concerned. I'm really hoping that Windows Mobile 7 is a big enough change to make it worthwhile again.

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