Phillip McCleod
Phillip McCleod's JournalHow the Internet.. that means YOU.. saved me.
Pretty simple really.
..
This way I can find *real* people..
.. that means YOU ..
who care to discuss issues of dire importance to us all.
..
My friends.. that's what we're doing here.
edit.. ok yeh i might have drank a five pack, but i had a damn bad reason for it.
Femen protester stages mock suicide at Notre Dame cathedral (day after actual suicide there)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/22/femen-mock-suicide-notre-dame?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20main-3%20Main%20trailblock:Network%20front%20-%20main%20trailblock
osition10
Posing with a pistol in her mouth the woman, who had "May fascism rest in hell" written in black letters across her naked torso, was detained by security guards. She was then arrested by police outside the cathedral and taken to the nearby police station.
Femen claimed responsibility for the protest on its Facebook page writing: "Femen appealed for the death of facism at the exact same place extreme-right activist Dominique Venner committed suicide yesterday afternoon. Our activist was arrested by the police."
Inna Schevchenko, leader of the Femen movement, told journalists the protester was a French woman named Marguerite. "It is a message addressed to all those who support facism and those who have expressed sympathy for the extreme-right militant who killed himself in Notre Dame – namely Marine Le Pen."
Dominique Venner, 78, a far-right essayist and historian took his life in front of the altar at Notre Dame on Tuesday after writing a blog condemning France's recently passed law allowing same-sex marriage and adoption.
..
too soon? too much? .. or just right?
Do you want Julian Assange to be thrown in a CIA prison to be tortured?
Because, if you want him extradited to the U.S., that's what you're condoning.
Some liberal.
Downgrading Windows 8 to 7 is getting harder every day.
I've now done about 8 downgrades on various hardware.. 2 for us in the shop, and 6 for clients of the shop. So far it's been a snap. Just edit BIOS to boot with 'legacy BIOS' instead of 'UEFI', reformat the drive 1 partition NTFS with a GParted LiveCD, and reboot into the Windows 7 installation DVD.
On Dell hardware.. most of what we do as a 'Dell Partner'.. the rest is as easy as it gets. Reboot and 3/4 of the time the Driver Update Dance is a waste of time. It's all there and ready to go.. plug-n-play.
Two days ago, though, I got a commercial-grade HP ENVY dv6 (Core i7) and the owner hadn't used it at all because, well, Windows 8 is unusable. 'Let's do it,' he said, when I suggested a downgrade.
Turns out there's NO so-called 'Downgrade Path' for the latest line of HP computers. They have an exclusive contract with Microsoft and have practically hardwired their machines to *only* run Windows 8. They urge the world not to downgrade, even if they have Windows 8 Pro installed on them (for which Microsoft itself has provided a downgrade path).
Well, I don't use the Downgrade Path anyway. Linux is a Windows Tech's Best Friend. The specs said Legacy BIOS would boot Win7 on the HP ENVY dv6, so I forged ahead. I backed up the client's data and wiped the drive. 'Snap snap', I thought, as everything seemed to be going according to plan.
Then I tried to load Windows 7. A lot of our clients are professionals and retirees and they want their machines fixed, and we get some modicum of carte blanche to get things done. The Downgrade Path, I'm sorry.. it's for amateurs. What we do is purchase licenses on the fly, and we keep some handy for various versions and OEMs to speed things up. Basically, this means I can try several versions of Windows 7.. Home Edition, Pro, Ultimate.. using Trial Licenses to see which is going to work best with *that* hardware, and when I get it working, I pop in the Windows license #s and voila.. it's ready for a couple days worth of updates and driver tweaking and blahblahblah.
Failure on all three counts. Ultimate wouldn't install at all. Pro installed.. finally.. but for the *strangest* reason I could not fathom, I was unable to Activate it. Fuck. Our policy is not to waste time, so I stopped banging my head against the wall, rebooted into GParted, zeroed the drive overnight from the command line using 'mkntfs', and installed Home Edition in the morning.
Turns out that did the trick. There was a hidden reserved partition that HPs version of a Legacy BIOS kept.. I guess.. telling the Windows 7 installer to create, and as a result, even though I could load Win7, I couldn't license it!
Right about the time I was thinking, 'I guess Microsoft just doesn't want our money if we're only buying Windows 7' .. light appeared at the end of the tunnel.
I've whittled the list of missing drivers down to one PCI controller' and one SM Bus controller by using Windows 8 and HP Presario i7 Windows 7 drivers. Plus I went to Intel for the graphics chipset and updates. It's like the bad old days of installing XP on a Vista-made Toshiba.
Hard to make a profit this way, but it's a public service.
open source build your own ROCKET SHIP!! 1!
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/05/heat-1600-concept-development-the-manifestation-of-dreams-and-ambitions-for-download/Also, the Sapphire-1 – active guided rocket – was assembled today be the sapphire-team. Saturday May 19 we will perform an all-up rehearsal of the launch in the waters, outside Copenhagen.
Student faces backlash for seeking removal of Ten Commandments from classrooms
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/12/oklahoma-high-school-student-seeks-removal-of-ten-commandment-displays/Gage Pulliam of Muldrow told Patheos on Saturday that he wanted to remain anonymous, but decided to reveal his identity after other students were blamed for alerting the organization. He said his younger sister had faced verbal harassment over the issue and some students had threatened violence against him.
“I want people to know this isn’t me trying to attack religion,” he explained. “This is me trying to create an environment for kids where they can feel equal.”
After contacting the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the organization send a letter to Muldrow High School administrators warning that religious displays in public schools violated the U.S. Constitution.
“If the facts are as presented to us, and the Ten Commandments are on display throughout Muldrow Public Schools, the displays must be removed immediately,” FFRF attorney Patrick Elliott said.
If Dot-Coms had GANJA Smoking Rooms..
..America would *still* be #1.
Because only a society that permitted corporations to offer their employees rooms to get stoned in.. can ever win the future.
Just ask. Bob. Any of 'em.
Archbishop of San Francisco: Delaware marriage equality ‘a serious injustice’ to kids
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/09/archbishop-of-san-francisco-delaware-marriage-equality-a-serious-injustice-to-kids/“The claim of this bill to redefine marriage is in vain; marriage cannot be redefined, because its unique meaning lies in our very nature. It is also a serious injustice to the most vulnerable among us: children,” Cordileone, the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage, said.
He also said Rhode Island’s new same-sex marriage law was “a serious injustice” last Friday.
Delaware on Tuesday became the eleventh state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry. Same-sex couples in Delaware will be able to officially tie the knot starting on July 1.
..
the more the pope changes, the more the RCC stays exactly the same.
Arkansas school cancels entire graduation after being asked not to pray
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/09/arkansas-school-cancels-entire-graduation-after-being-asked-not-to-pray/According to KAIT, Riverside School district made the decision after being contacted by a parent and receiving a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union.
“As Christians and a mainly Christian town I think, there were a lot of people hurt that our rights were taken away,” Sixth grade parent Kelly Adams told the station. “My daughter graduated last year from 6th grade and my son is graduating this year from 6th grade, and we had a pastor open our ceremony and my daughter actually closed the ceremony in prayer.”
“We just went to take a stand for God because we felt like out rights were taken away,” she added. “I realize they have rights too but you can’t take rights away from one group and give it to another.”
emphasis added..
..
*sigh*
In the last two days I installed operating systems on 3 computers..
..one downgrade from Win8 to Win7 on a brand new Dell Inspiron i15. One upgrade from Vista to Win7 on a Dell i3 tower, Ispiron 220 i think. And one upgrade from XP to Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 32-bit on a decrepit Pentium M Toshiba Satellite.
Here's how it went for each, *not* including OS updates.
Dell Inspiron i15 laptop.. took a while. Had to set to Legacy BIOS for one instead of UEFI, and then 45 min later, Win7 was installed and running. Then began the Driver Dance. Since it wasn't the only job in the shop, it took more than a day to get the drivers right. I blame the fact that it's new hardware and I was doing a downgrade. Total time: ~3-5 hrs for an expert. On-Edit: for a competent user.. *not possible*.
Dell Inspiron 220 tower.. took a while, but less than the i15. Drivers loaded perfectly from a Dell OEM Windows 7 DVD.. no *dance* at all! Love it. Total time: 45 min. to an hour. On-edit: for competent not expert user.. 3-5 hrs.
Toshiba Satellite piece of shit laptop with the loose screen and dysfunctional DVD-ROM.. figuring out that the DVD drive was bad and figuring out how to boot from an external one took almost as long as installing Linux Mint Debian. Total time: 20 minutes. Tops. On-edit: for competent computer user with research.. probably days.
The hangup with Linux installs is always Gparted.. 'how to partition the hard drive'. Users aren't used to being given that power, and it's *scary*. Once you figure that out.. 20 minutes. tops.
..
BTW, that Toshiba runs the same version of Firefox as Windows 7, and almost as fast. 
Chew on that cud if you dare.
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayHometown: British Columbia
Home country: Canada
Current location: New Mexico, USA
Member since: Sat Oct 20, 2012, 11:12 AM
Number of posts: 1,837
