And then there was 3.

Word is out that John Edwards is pulling his hat out of the ring.

That leaves Gravel, Clinton and Obama.

Read this and remember

You can not have security without privacy. It just can not happen.

Bruce Schneier on the government's view of security.

There is really nothing more I can add to this. Mr. Schneier hit all the relevant points.

The scariest part is when he points out, that the government wants you to entrust your privacy to the government and their hand picked companies. The very people who do not have your privacy in their best interest.

I take it back, the Protect America Act is going to die this week (most likely). It's part of the FISA bill. Call your Senators, call your Congress people. Tell them to not be afraid and give us back our privacy.

Current Standings

So Gravel says he's still in, but I haven't been following and from what I 'm told he hasn't been campaigning much. Hillery, I don't see her being any different than the republicans. Obama, starting to worry me. And Edwards.

The infighting between the Clintons and Obama show that they don't have the required maturity to run a nation. They want to be the one so bad they will act like children to get it.

Which leaves me with my third choice this year. Edwards. I don't like everything about him, but of the 4 left, I think he's the best choice.

Of course that means the corporate masters in the media don't like him, and he hasn't got a snowball's chance in the tropics.

I like Chris Dodd

I think he's got what it takes to be a leader. He was my second choice behind Kucinich for President, and my first choice as the person who should replace Harry Reid as the Majority Leader in the Senate. He's also my first choice for VP.

A great example of what I mean, besides the fight against the FISA bill last month, is the video link below.

In a nutshell the Republicans wanted to ignore the amendments to the Intelligce commite's FISA bill, and vote on it just as it was presented. Why? Because Bush WILL sign that version of the bill. It protects the corrupt corporations that broke the law.

This is part of what Dodd had to say on the topic.

The reading so far

So far, I'm 16 pages in, and have installed Xen on Fedora core 8. It's up and running dom0, but that's the extent of it. Next I'll learn how to install xen from source.

So far, I found one part that took me a second to realize what happened. They referred to system emulation on one page, and then referred to it again as hardware emulation after turning the page. Maybe a nitpick but I did file an errata on it.

Another thing, they're using FC6 in the book, I'm using FC8. When I did my yum install, yum install kernel-xen xen I got about 3 more packages than they said I would. I'm not complaining though. I figure it's a difference in the systems. The ifconfig screen capture left me scratching my head, I'm missing one of the interfaces they said I would see, and 2 of them are called something else. One command didn't work as advertised either. But again, that is probably a difference in the software vs when the book was written.

Corporate Media

They did it again. CNN this time. The corporate media disallowed one of the candidates. Two actually, but I haven't heard much from the Gravel camp, lately. The media is telling you who to vote for.

Now an interesting thing about Gravel. I just hit his website, he has a video up chastising Kucinich. Why, because K made a comment on Democracy Now about Obama being the only one to point out the exclusion of Kucinich from the Nevada debate. However when Gravel was blocked from a debate, Pennsylvania, Kucinich didn't make a comment. That's the point of the video Gravel's people put up.

I wonder Mr. Gravel, when you were locked out, what did you do? He had a little pep-rally, as evident from the video. He called it an alternate debate. But from what I can see, the difference between Gravel and Kucinich being blocked from the debates, is Gravel isn't trying to fight each one in Court. Dennis is. Now, would you mention someone being locked out of a debate, if that person himself isn't actively fighting to be put back in? I think most of the people take that as a sign that you're pulling out. But hey that's just my view point.

Why are the American people putting up with his... Oh yeah, I forgot, most get their data streams from Mainstream / Corporate Media. Which means they don't know whats going on.

It's not fair to tear apart a book before you read it, is it?

Ok, I'll be fair. I've only made it 5 pages in to the book so far. Basically the TOC and the Preface. The last page of the TOC fell out already... It's a brand new book, just arrived today. I know sometimes the binding doesn't take well.

The other thing I saw that bothers me, after just thumbing through it at random, is the Typesetting. There are large sections of pages where they didn't put anything. You think you're at the end of the chapter, only to turn the page and get a paragraph that was too large for the previous page. Instead of carrying over, they mid paragraph, they move the whole paragraph to the next page. Which of course used up more space. Otherwise the book would probably only be 100 pages. (Well maybe not).

Lots of screen shots, and they drag text from the paragraph with them too.

Minor annoyance, they mention customer support in the preface, but then leave out all ways of contacting said group. Unless of course they mean the Errata and question sections on the next page, after the large gap at the bottom of the Customer Support page. Probably about 1/5 of the page. (The section between the boarders). They are also trying to get more writers in the preface too.

An O'Reilly book, it's not. I'll do a more proper update later, after reading more of it.