Sleeping late, and thoughts profound and not

I slept late, for the first time in a while.  No first-thing-in-the-morning doctor visit may have had something to do with it.

Some of you have emailed asking if it's true that Lenovo shipped particularly nasty spyware om their laptops.  It is.  I don't really have more of an analysis than that, but Rick Blaine (International Man of Mystery!) has a particularly good one:

What does this mean?  If you bought a Lenovo in the last 6 months it means all "your passwords are belong to us."  At this point I wouldn't touch Lenovo with a 100' pole, which is sad because they made pretty good hardware and does a fine job running linux - The issue is that I'm not about to support a company that even considered thinking  this might be a good idea.  I HATE bloatware but it's one of those things you just sort of have to live with unless you build your machine from scratch - which is difficult to do with laptops.  Virtually any computer you buy today will come with bloatware, some benign like Netflix, or the Kindle App, some malware - and now some like Superfish - pure evil.  I mean spying on which web sites you access is bad, but spying on your supposed SSL encrypted connection to your bank - that is evil, and possibly criminal.

He then posits a plausible fix to this:

Fortunately we're seeing some movement in the games industry that should make Linux a much more widely accepted platform with the announced introduction of GLNext (more info here).

If enough of the game-devs move off of DirectX to this next version of OpenGL (GLNext) we might start seeing some serious support for drivers thus making Linux perhaps the best gaming platform available - light, fast, open, free.

 The only thing I'd add is that the dynamics of razor thin profit margins is likely to drive this.  Steam explicitly embraced Linux to avoid the "Microsoft tax".  RTWT.

A northeasterner's view if Global Warming scientists:

From What Bubba Knows, clearly one of those beastly Deniers.

Found in the bathroom at work:

Why am I thinking of Uncle Jay and MSgt B right now?