The idealist sees events as the result of grand strategies and grandmovements, while the realist sees events as the result of local,lower-level tactical decisions.

Most conspiracy theories are necessarily idealist. Theaphorism 'never attribute to malice that which is adequatelyexplained by stupidity' (sometimes called Hanlon's Razor ) is a realist position.

This says nothing about who is right; sometimes there are conspiracies,but sometimes there are not. (And sometimes there are both local tacticalreasons for things and grand plans;

We got asked this in email recently, so I am going to throwmy answer up here: the quick secret of making bootable USB keys is to know that USB keys are hard drives.

The person who asked the question described what they'd done as:

In short, I've copied the files from the isolinux directory on theinstallation CD to the USB drive, renamed isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg,erased isolinux.bin, unmounted the USB drive, and runsyslinux /dev/sda1

As computers (and disk space, and memory, and etc etc) get larger, thequantities that we deal with routinely get bigger too. And when they getbigger, fun things start happening.

Today's fun thing was that I doing some measurements of disk IO speed ona machine with 2 gigabytes of memory. My usual rule of thumb is to workon at least twice the amount of main memory to crush cache effects, whichmeant I was telling my benchmarking program to read and write 4 GB.