New Immigration proposal. This is seems like a good compromise. It splits the illegals into three groups based on how long they have been here. If you have been here less than two years then you need to leave and get back in line for a legal visa. If you have been here 2-5 years you can get a temporary visa at the border. If you have been here more than 5 years then you don’t have to leave. If you are applying to for citizenship then you will need to provide evidence that you have paid all the taxes owed. This still bed the question how to do you prove how much they earned but that is something the US Tax system deals with on a daily basis. It also forces people to report how many years they have been in the country so that solves the problem of someone saying they have only been here a year in order to avoid more taxes.

The next problem is how to do this with out screwing all the people who have been here legally and applying for a green card. Few few of the reports mention anything about the people who have spent thousands of dollars in order to stay in the US legally.

Geek night last night. I installed the Adaptec ANA-62044 4 port ethernet card I bought on ebay in my firewall. The intention is to split up the dmz and wireless traffic into separate zones. This also gives me an excuse to by a gigabit switch.

I also decided to try resolving my issues with my EPIA M motherboard. The machine has been sitting on a shelf unused for year or more because the box hangs after a period of time. The variables of the problem, bad motherboard, bad OS, bad memory, bad hard disk, bad power supply. At the top of my list was a bad power supply/overheating. The board sat in a small form factor box so I thought that was a real possibility. I have a spare case that isn’t being used. I was happy to find out that a mini itx board fits perfectly in the box after moving a couple mounting points. So the motherboard now has a proper 200W power supply to run on and a large amount of air to cool in. It has an old 6 gig hard disk that appears to be fine and a 256 Meg sick of ram.

I got up this morning and the box was frozen so it seems it is not related to the powersupply/case.

The next thing to try is disabling the longhaul (cpu freq throttling) module in linux. It is currently running and has been for 2 hours.

I think this machine is going to be call fugly while i testing it. Since it looks F… Ugly

I finally got vista build 5342 installed.
I start off trying to us vmware server and it would blue screen before entering the serial number.
I then borrowed the only dvd drive on the floor which is in my computer to perform an install on an old dell GX150. This got me as far as entering the serial number and selecting the disk but it kept coming back saying no suitable disk was found. I ran through the various hard disk in my cube and tested them, out of the 3 I found a 120 gig drive that hadn’t been pulled out due to a failure. I dropped this into a slightly newer compaq desktop and the boot hung before getting to the serial prompt. After letting the disk boot I realised it came out of a box that had a BSD install. After using an XP install cd to nuke the BSD partition and recreate it as an NTFS partition I now have vista running and joined to a test domain. I don’t see any huge differences in the core OS. It does have a large number of new apps IE7, a callendar app, Windows Collaboration, Windows DVD Maker, Windows Photo Gallery, windows defender and media center. So it looks like there are taking a lot of pointers from OSX

An interesting view on illegal immigration from National Review Assuming the statistics are correct illegal immigrants cost federal and local government money and converting them to a legal status will cost the country more money since they will be able to claim more benefits. The interesting part is that you are only able to claim benefits if you are permanents resident. If you are on a non immigrant visa then you can’t claim things like unemployment benefits food stamps etc.

So I wonder if anyone on the hill has done the math on how much it will cost to legalize the illegals.