A few days ago I heard an ad explaining how a particular jeweler had come up with a way to give your sweetheart both diamonds and chocolate. I knew where they were going, but I was thinking to myself, “Yes! Chocolate-covered diamonds! Pay for your sweetheart to have some new dental work, too!  But the look on her face when she finds them will be priceless!”

Fortunately the Linux program “gpart” seems to have the ability to scan a disk, find the probable locations of partitions, and build a new partition table.  gpart is included in the Fedora Core CDs (32-bit only?), which can be used in rescue mode.  I’m running the scan now.

Geez, what a nightmare.

Imagine if you took your automobile to the mechanic because it was backfiring several times a day, and the mechanic said that he couldn’t fix it, but that you should not wear a shirt while driving. You might ask “will that help?” When he replies, “no, but there isn’t a better plan”, will that convince you that you really should in fact take your shirt off while driving? Of course not! Yet the government is doing things that are just nonsensical, and claiming that they are justified by the war on terror.

In point of fact, a much better response to the threat of terrorism is to do absolutely nothing at all, rather than pointless actions that take away our civil liberties. Taking away our freedom by turning the US into a police state is in fact one of the objectives of the terrorists. Instead of doing that, if we go about our business as usual, we have not increased our risk of being harmed by terrorism (which is incredibly minute to being with), and may even have reduced that risk. If terrorist acts don’t advance the agenda of the terrorists in some way, eventually they will stop committing them. They may be crazy, but they’re not completely stupid.

Recommended reading: How to Fight Terrorism by Sam Hughes.

I am not opposed to security measures with a rational basis, such as strengthening cockpit doors and putting air marshals on planes. What I object to is the useless supposed security measures which take away our civil liberties without any increase in actual safety, such as:

1. wiretapping without warrants
2. requiring airline passengers to present photo ID
3. the no-fly list, which just prevented a U.S. Marine returning from eight month’s service in Iraq from flying from Los Angeles to Minneapolis
4. requiring passengers on city busses passing through federal government property to show picture ID, even though the IDs are neither recorded nor checked against any list, and the federal property in question is a non-military site that is open to the public

So if I tell the machine to reboot itself, or even just press the reset button, video goes away, and the monitor turns off. A few seconds later, the BIOS has reinitialized the video, and the monitor starts turning on. But by the time the monitor is on, the BIOS display that I need to see has already been replaced by something else. In this case, the startup display of the 3ware RAID BIOS.

If the monitors would just wait 15 seconds before turning themselves off, it would be much less aggravating.

Most LCD monitors are at least quicker to turn on, but I don’t want to have to take my own LCD monitor into the colo every time I need to see the BIOS startup.

Do not connect incompatible products.

Wow, it never would have occurred to me that incompatible products might be… well … uh… incompatible!

I’ve always been amused by the airbag warnings on car visors:

WARNING: Death or serious injury can occur!

This is generally followed by a direction to read the additional details on the other side of the v-isor. But I think juat that single sentence should suffice.

1. Who is to say that the purpose of economic growth is to combat poverty? If it happened to do that as a side benefit, that would be nice.
2. How do you account for a percentage of economic growth that goes to ending poverty? If you only count direct spending, the amount must surely be much less than 60%, but if you count indirect effects I’d expect it to be higher.
3. What is the alternative? If we don’t have a pound of economic growth, in what other way can we finance increasing poverty relief by 60p? Certainly economic contraction won’t help.
4. Not having seen the report, I’m not sure if it is really presented this way, but the reporter seemed to be insinuating that ecomonic growth is considered a bad thing because only 60% goes to combat poverty. What percentage would need to be spent combatting poverty in order to make economic growth qualify as “good”?

I suppose I expect somewhat of a socialist slant from the BBC, but this seemed worse than usual.

Update, 28-Jan-2006:

A previous search didn’t turn up the organization or its report, but now I’ve been able to find it. The New Economics Foundation has a news item on their site about the report, and you can download a PDF of the report itself, “Growth Isn’t Working: The Uneven Distribution of Benefits and Costs from Economic Growth“.

I have not yet had time to read the report, but I must have misheard the BBC reporter, as the claim is that there is only 60 cents of poverty relief for every HUNDRED dollars of economic growth. On that basis, I retract my second and fourth questions.