Gov't and Linux Crap
Hunting season is upon us once again, and so X gets the idea of obtaining a license with no intention of actually using the damn thing. X is "informed" that this is illegal. So off to the Ohio Wildlife site to check it out. If that's what it actually said, all that would mean is going through the motions: it's definitely not illegal to be a bad hunter, now is it?
Here's a screenie:
WHAT! THE! FUCK!
"Shall be killed immediately". Now, correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I always thought that the whole reason to "harvest" (don't you just love the euphemisms?) fur-bearers was to, you know, get the fur. Amirite?
So why can't I kill it at my leisure? How about this: I trap it without marring the exterior. I take it home, put it in an airtight aquarium and N2 is pumped in one end while the air is pulled from the other. The critter feels pretty euphoric for about 30 seconds, then passes out and the lights go out forever. There! No unsightly bullet holes, powder burns, or gashes in the pelt, and the meat is not contaminated, since N2 is not toxic like CO or HCN, so you can still eat it. You can serve it to your friends and family without having to worry about anyone's breaking a tooth on a stray pellet. Bringing this mini-Birkenau into the field isn't exactly a practical proposition, is it?
"Reduced to the person's possession": what the fuck does that mean? This is absolute gibberish.
What if I wanted to make a pet out of it? What fucking difference does it make?! The whole excuse for this is "population regulation" (and these "reintroduction" programs deliberately over populate from the get-go) even if killing animals to "conserve" them is identical to destroying villages to save them, isn't it still out of the environment? Isn't that what they want in the first place?
How about this: "Foothold traps set on land must be covered"
They don't exactly work right when hidden in plain sight, now do they?
This is gov't we're talking about, and nothing the gov't ever does is ever intelligent, or makes any sense. Your best bet is to ignore it, do what you damn well please, and keep a very low profile about it. That means keeping your business off the damn 'Net. Like a junkyard dog, it's mean and nasty, but it's also really, really stupid.
Linux Crap
Here is my review of the latest Debian. Its general fucked-upness is migrating into the derived distros, like "N00buntu". A lot of complaints about things that aren't working are beginning to show up on the Linux forums and message boards. No sutprises there, after all, N00buntu, like all the Debbies, uses aptget, and what it brings in are all the fucked up Debian packages.
I still had that problem: slack 13.37 was definitely getting long in the tooth, and I began getting errors about outdated versions of YASM. Couldn't compile libx264 that way, and not compiling it with YASM means its utility is greatly impaired. New apps began exiting with SEGFAULT errors since these were compiled under more recent versions of the libraries. It's a helluvalot easier to simply download an ISO, burn a DVD, and install the latest version rather than trying to recompile GlibC and the new kernel that runs it. I've done it before, and it's a real bitch. Just blow everything away, and get the latest kernel and support libs. It's NBD.
The latest version of Slack works as well as any previous iteration. There was but one minor annoyance: 13.37 put USB devices under: /media/unknown-1. Now, they're back under /media/disk, as they were before 13.37.
Just tell the installer to not format the /home part, and to mount it as /home. Nothing lost. Once installed, get the latest Enlightenment, do an "installpkg", and you're good to go. As with most of the latest Slack distros, the window manager configure program lists E as E. It hasn't been necessary to rename E's xinitrc file to fool it into believing it was selecting GNOME or one of the other proffered window managers for a long time now. I also found a really nice "theme" for Enlightenment.
That's when the problems began: whole sections of menus missing. They'd show up in "Run Everything", but not under the actual submenus. This was random, and sometimes restarting E fixed it, and sometimes it wouldn't. Then there was the gibberish that would appear on the terminal when you logged out. The console would still work, but showed utter gibberish. Sometimes, X would exit, but lock out the entire console.
WHAT! THE! FUCK!
I tried a new theme, and... no problem! Whatever that theme was doing, it was screwing up everything. There is no excuse for this! How can anyone release the fucked up packages I've seen coming from the Deb archives? How does anyone release a tarball that contains a lib that won't compile due to compiler errors? (This happened just one time, but once is once too many: I shouldn't have to fix their broken code). How could anyone release a theme for E that breaks E? Doesn't anyone check their crap before uploading it?
If Linux developers don't get their shit together and do it soon, we're all gonna be stuck with Winders forever.