Vox Popoli

Reader FZ agrees that Linux is not yet ready for the casual computer user and writes:

“OK, I decided that I needed a way to easily copy files between Windows XP and Red Hat 9 for the occasions when I couldn’t do something on Linux. My WinXP was partitioned as FAT32. Should be easy, right? Solution was simple, given 2.5 hours of head scratching. However, it was not documented in any of the books. None of the books documents the User-accessable System Tools–>Disk Management tool that would allow me to mount/unmount the Windows C: disk partition from my non-admin (in other words, not the root) account. None of the books documented the syntax of the command that I would have to add to the /etc/fstab file.

OK, since I have a little experience, I could puzzle this all out. Now, as a non-admin (non-root) user, I can go to the Disk Management GUI, select the “/dev/hda1 /mnt/c_disk” choice, click the mount button, and have a new clickable “c_disk” icon show on my desktop. Double-click on it and the Nautilus file manager lets me read/write to my WinXP C: disk. Something that you really need when you are migrating, right? Should be simple, right?

Sigh…Here’s the change I had to make –Following stanza was added to etc/fstab to allow user mounting/umounting of the Windows C: Disk to permit interchange of files from Win to Lin and vice-versa:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/c_disk vfat noauto,user 0 0

Right – the Disk Management program that shows up on the Start (Red Hat)/System Tools menu is useless. What you have to do is edit the text file fstab, which is found in the /etc directory. To do this:

1. Run System Tools/Terminal. Type “su”. Then type in your password.

2. Type “gedit /etc/fstab”

3. Add the line beginning /dev/hda…. Use one of the examples below, depending on whether your Windows file system is NTFS or VFAT. You should know which you’ve got from having run the Disk Druid partitioning program during your installation.

4. Restart. There may be a better way to run fstab, but I don’t know how.

5. /mnt/windows (assuming you went with the /dev/hda2 approach below) will be where your old drive C is found.

I have three partitions, since my Windows disk was originally formatted as NTFS – unlike VFAT, you can only read the files there, you can’t write/save onto it from Linux – which looks as follows:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/winntfs ntfs ro,users,exec,uid=500,iocharset=iso8859-1 0 0

/dev/hda2 /mnt/windows vfat auto,umask=0 0 0

Really bloody intuitive, isn’t it! Notice that I’ve got my hard drives mounting automatically, whereas FZ does not. Mounting means that they’re available for Linux to read from and write to, unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t mount all possible hard drives, CD-Rom drives and floppy drives unless you tell it to do so. It’s not hard, but you do have to know two things. First that you have to do it, and second, how to go about doing it.

Another thing that people may find useful, in case you’re upgrading your Linux kernel, is learning how to get rid of the old one. Or, in my case, the new one, since I’m switching over to Fedora this weekend.

Run “rpm –erase kernel-2.[kernel # here]” while logged in as the “root” user. This will remove the unwanted kernel as well as eliminating it from the boot options.

I’ve been predicting for some time now that the USA will eventually find it necessary to go to war with the European Union one day. The remarkable Mark Steyn now says that we are already in a Cold War of sorts with them. I assumed that the war would be on the basis of the Eurocrats neofascism, but it’s possible that it will have more to do with the fact that Europe is transforming quickly into Europastan.

Of course, the two factors may well be combined. One reason for the Eurocrats increasingly urgent move towards non-participatory government could be the fact that they expect to have a Muslim majority in countries such as Holland, Denmark and France in the next fifty years.

Devvy Kidd writes a devastating column pointing out how the fraudulent “Notices of Levy” quote Title 26 section 6331, but conveniently leave out 6331(a) – beginning instead with 6331(b). What they are leaving out:

(a) Authority of Secretary. If any person liable to pay any tax neglects or refuses to pay the same within 10 days after notice and demand, it shall be lawful for the Secretary to collect such tax (and such further sum as shall be sufficient to cover the expenses of the levy) by levy upon all property and rights to property (except such property as is exempt under section 6334) belonging to such person or on which there is a lien provided in this chapter for the payment of such tax.

Levy may be made upon the accrued salary or wages of any officer, employee, or elected official, of the United States, the District of Columbia, or any agency or instrumentality of the United States or the District of Columbia, by serving a notice of levy on the employer (as defined in section 3401(d)) of such officer, employee, or elected official). If the Secretary makes a finding that the collection of such tax is in jeopardy, notice and demand for immediate payment of such tax may be made by the Secretary and, upon failure or refusal to pay such tax, collection thereof by levy shall be lawful without regard to the 10-day period provided in this section.

This is why they always send a Notice of Levy, but can’t ever point to the actual Levy itself. It doesn’t exist. They do exactly the same thing with the Notice of Lien, which is why if you do a search with your local Secretary of State, you’ll almost always find that the lien to which the Notice of Lien is supposedly being provided does not exist.

The IRS is a law-breaking fraud.

Considering that CNN views itself as a champion of free speech and the first amendment, and no doubt has a few reporters and anchors who have worked very hard to get where they are today, it seems strange that they should object to a parody of CNN’s health coverage.

Joan Kroc–the widow of the founder of McDonald’s–has bequeathed $200 million to National Public Radio. It’s being called “the largest monetary gift ever received by an American cultural institution.”

Attention conservative elderly billionaires. Do NOT leave all your money to a) a foundation; or b) your liberal wife. This is why they invented trust funds. I hope, for the sake of the peace of the late Mr. Kroc’s neighbors in the cemetery, that he was a left-liberal himself. Oherwise, you know the poor guy is spinning in his grave.

An American cultural institution. When did government-funded propaganda become cultural?

“Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean told a Tallahassee audience today that southerners have to quit basing their votes on ‘race, guns, God and gays.'”

Of course, isn’t that what democracy is all about? Obviously, everyone should determine their vote based on what Howard Dean tells you to determine it on. If you didn’t think he was unelectable before, this should suffice to change your mind.

I’m busy downloading. http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/1/i386/iso/

I would have linked to this post directly, except I couldn’t, so I made do with pasting a fair bit of it here. I came across it while doing some research for an upcoming column, and it highlights a) Neal Stephenson’s description of Apple: “so frail, yet so vicious” as well as b) why I don’t consider them a viable philosophical alternative to Microsoft. It’s from As the Apple Turns and contains some acidic thoughts with regards to how Apple’s new iTunes nukes the MusicMatch software that previously was used to interface with their iPod. Apparently, Apple feels that if you’re willing to let Microsoft control your computer, there’s no reason for you to object to them doing a bit of the same.

To re-enable iPod syncing in MusicMatch, just follow the following eleventy-seventy simple steps! (This is verbatim from the email, mind you.)

Disconnect the iPod from your computer if it is still connected.

Double click on ‘My Computer’

Double click on ‘Control Panel’

Open “Add or Remove Programs’

Select and uninstall ‘iTunes’

Select and uninstall the ‘iPod for Windows’ item

Select and uninstall the ‘Musicmatch iPod Plugin’ item

Select and uninstall the ‘iPod System Software Update’ or any other iPod related items that might be listed

Select and uninstall ‘Musicmatch Jukebox’

Close the “Add or Remove Programs” control panel

Restart your computer

Navigate to the ‘Program FilesiPod’ directory

Delete the contents of the iPod directory by dragging the files to the Recycle Bin and then emptying the Recycle Bin

Navigate to the ‘program filesMusicmatch Musicmatch Jukebox’ folder

Delete the files, but not the folder, in the Musicmatch Jukebox folder

Reinstall Musicmatch Jukebox from the installation CD that came with your iPod or download the iPod software from the following URL: http://newsletter.musicmatch.com/rdr/ ?Rn187230301,1872303,38861847,287230301

When finished, reboot your computer

When the computer finishes rebooting, connect the iPod to your system

Open Musicmatch Jukebox

Could it possibly be any easier? Where’s the challenge? Indeed, we’re a little disappointed there are only two restarts involved– surely it could have been at least four, with a little more effort thrown in. Which is, of course, why we love Windows so much in the first place.

So, yeah, it does seem a little slimy that installing iTunes de-iPodifies MusicMatch, doesn’t it? Especially if Apple’s installer doesn’t warn you about it beforehand, and we’ve seen no indication that it does. Granted, you’d have to be one seriously twisted iPod owner to try iTunes and then decide that MusicMatch is a better companion for your little white-‘n’-silver buddy, but who knows what goes through the minds of Wintellians? Maybe they’re always walking around in Bad Fish Shock. It would explain a lot.

And before you start lambasting Apple for pulling a stunt like this, c’mon… the people affected by this are Windows users– they’re used to this kind of treatment. Obviously they thrive on it, or they’d have ditched Microsoft years ago. Heck, crippling a competing product was probably the only way Apple could have gotten an ounce of respect from these folks in the first place. In fact, we think Apple probably missed a golden opportunity to win some serious admiration from the Windows community; instead of simply removing MusicMatch’s ability to sync with the iPod, iTunes should also have deleted MusicMatch entirely, installed spyware, inexplicably disabled a random piece of system hardware, reformatted any writable volumes not containing iTunes itself, and then emailed itself to everyone in the user’s Outlook address book. Oh, and it should have cost thirty bucks. More, with technical support.

Those last three sentences nearly caused me to wet my pants. Now that’s technical commentary!

I always suspected Yitzhak Rabin was more show than substance – after all, what kind of master strategist would have conceived, much less championed, the Oslo Accords, as they were a suicidal loser’s gamble from the very start. Ben Shapiro does an excellent job of exploding the myth, which, as he points out, must be done if Israel is ever going to face up to the need to defend herself.

And yet the Israli peace camp is still calling for Oslo II. The self-destructive naivete that appears to be the curse of the Jewish people can be summed up in just one example. Whereas Americans put up fences to secure backyard swimming pools, Israelis are still debating over whether to put one up in order to keep out snipers and suicide bombers.

QUESTION

Currently, the Federal Government includes executive level departments that advise the President. The heads of these departments are collectively known as the Cabinet. Could you please name as many departments as you can that are part of the current United States Cabinet? (Note: This question was open-ended and multiple responses were accepted, meaning, all respondents were invited to name as few or as many departments as they could. If a respondent provided the specific name of a cabinet secretary or administrator, e.g., “Colin Powell,� they were credited with a correct response.)

Most Americans are unable to identify even a single department in the United States Cabinet, according to a recent national poll of 800 adults. Specifically, the survey found that a majority (58%) could not provide any department names whatsoever…. Hispanics (79%), African Americans (75%), 18-34 year olds (70%), women (68%), and Pacific coast residents are among the groups most likely to say “I don’t knowâ€� when asked to name at least one department within the current United States Cabinet.

While I believe that every individual has unalienable rights, I don’t think that voting is, or should be, one of them. The collective wisdom of a group of ignorant people is no wiser than the sum total of their ignorance, which is why the Founding Fathers limited the right to vote to around 20 percent of the populace. Once you prove that you are capable of being a responsible, self-sufficient member of society, then you can vote. Until then, forget it. Democracy is not compatible with human liberty.

It’s at times like these that I have a certain amount of sympathy for the Platonist elitists who believe they have not only a right but a responsibility to rule over the masses. As Chris Rock once said of OJ: “I’m not saying he was right – but I understand.”