RANT: Someone finally has to face facts and admit defeat

Thursday, November 30, 2006

http://www.d-n-i.net/lind/lind_11_30_06.htm

On War #194
November 29, 2006

More Troops?
William S. Lind,
expressing his own personal opinion, is
Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism
for the Free Congress Foundation.

*** begin quote ***

The fact that Washington is seriously considering sending more American troops to Iraq illustrates a common phenomenon in war. As the certainty of defeat looms ever more clearly, the scrabbling about for a miracle cure, a deus ex machina, becomes ever more desperate – and more silly. Cavalry charges, Zeppelins, V-2 missiles, kamikazes, the list is endless. In the end, someone finally has to face facts and admit defeat. The sooner someone in Washington is willing to do that, the sooner the troops we already have in Iraq will come home – alive.

*** end quote ***

How many good people will have their lives ended or ruined with this failed policy?

Iraqis, for better or worse, will have to figure it out for themselves.

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Posted by reinkefj

RANT: The difference between “LAWS” and “laws”.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

I see the “Law of Gravity” as having more gravitas than the Federal, State, and Local “Laws”.

Never mind all the other rules, regulations, and diktats that gubamint issues. Let’s just focus on “Laws” for a moment.

I like the “Law of Gravity” and its many cousins like the “Law of Supply and Demand” or the “Law of the Conservation of Momentum”. They are universally fair and non-discriminatory. So, I don’t refer to what the criminal gangs do in their various dens of iniquity do as “making laws”.

We need to recapture the high ground.

When they neuter our language they give themselves more power. Imagine considering anything done by politicians as a “law”! Absurd! If you must refer to their “laws”, (I’m thinking of that Crocodile Dundee line “that’s not a knife. this is a knife” by crikey), then “we” should always preface it with “Federal Law”, “State Law”, or even “Weenie Law”. Add some diminutive to differentiate it from the big hairy natural LAWS. Their weak lame efforts to make laws should be called something like “law-lettes”, “wannabe laws”, or “pathetic attempts at law”.

P.S.: Remember when we get people laughing at them, their influence and power shrinks. Look how fast the cellphone tax disappeared. Almost overnight. When the media picked up that the people were calling it “The Spanish American War tax”. Like the Wizard of Oz, they can’t let themselves be be laughed at because then we will see how pathetic they are!

Best wishes from behind the lines
in the Pepuls Repulik of Nu Jerzee

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Posted by reinkefj

TECHNOLOGY: Carbonite / PC Online Automatic Backup Service

Thursday, November 30, 2006

http://www.carbonite.com/

Carbonite
PC Backup Software and Online Automatic Backup Service

***Begin Quote***

# Unlimited storage capacity for your PC backups
# Automatically finds all your data files —
photos, documents, music, emails, everything
# Always on – just connect to the Internet
# Set and forget – just start Carbonite and relax
# Instantly detects and backs up changed files
# Never slows down your computer or Internet
# Exclude files you don’t want to back up
# Strong encryption for super security
# Backs up approximately 2GB per day
over DSL or Cable

***End Quote***

For 5 bucks a day?

I recently fired XDrive. I’m now trialing Carbonite.

My first impressions are very positive.

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Posted by reinkefj

FUN: Bumper cars .. for real!

Thursday, November 30, 2006

http://fuvoo.com/FuvooPermaLink.aspx?PostID=134

There is something very wrong with this tunnel
posted by DrunkDonkey – Wednesday, November 29, 2006 @ 8:06:59 AM

There is a river running over it, and water leaks at some points. When the temperature reaches -38 degrees, like it did this winter, the road freezes and the result is the attached video taken during a single day.

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Posted by reinkefj

TECHNOLOGY: My “luddite” friend doesn’t understand …

Thursday, November 30, 2006

From his email about my blog post.

***Begin Quote***

Wow…a “luddite” solution to a tech problem…”long
quill pen”….hmmm. :-) You are beginning to see
the light, my brother!

***End Quote***

Now this is amusing from the fellow who can’t figure out how to comment on a blog.

But, I’m easy to do business with.

Now, I’m a belt and suspenders kindda IT guy. I like multiple diverse routes. Multiple diverse backups.

I KNOW they screwed with my data silently because I have EVERYTHING backed up and cross filed. And, off sited!

At least ever since that monumental screw up by the Merrill Lynch PC Support group. That’s where backups were running but nothing was being backed up. And, in those days, I backed up to to a different disk and a zip drive. A power surge nuked by primary and backup. When I went to restore my personal backup, the Zip disk was eaten by the drive. So I went to the corporate resource and they had swat! co my four levels of backup failed me.

That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on technology. It just means I am very protective of MY data. When I give it to Plaxo or LinkedIn, it’s still “MINE”. And they shouldn’t mess with it.

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Posted by reinkefj

LIBERTY: Forget the Hollow Woman standing on what used to be Bedloe’s Island

Thursday, November 30, 2006

http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2006/
tle395-20061126-07.html

http://tinyurl.com/y42nzo

Back to Basics
by L. Neil Smith

***Begin Quote***

The key to a libertarian future is the libertarian future itself. Forget the Hollow Woman standing on what used to be Bedloe’s Island offering false promises of liberty and welcome. Let us adopt the future itself—some unmistakable aspect of the future—as our logo.

***End Quote***

How about the Gasden flag?

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Posted by reinkefj

TECHNOLOGY: NOT RECOMMENDED scanschell2000n

Thursday, November 30, 2006

http://www.card-reader.com/hardware_scanshell2000n.htm

ScanShell 2000N / 2000NR

***Begin Quote***

Check our portable duplex scanner ScanShell 3000DN

The ScanShell 2000N is now the ScanShell 2000NR with a USB 2.0 HighSpeed interface.

It is a portable, 600 DPI high-resolution A4, Twain compliant color scanner, which offers high quality image capture. Supporting Windows operating system, the Scanshell 2000R works with any standard USB port and requires no external power supply.

***End Quote***

DON’T YOU DARE!

Don’t buy anything from these guys. Or if you do, don’t complain to me.

Once again this productivity tool frustrates me. What should be a neat little gadget doesn’t work reliably.

My expectation is that a useful tool should be like a hammer, screwdriver, or axe. Pick it up use it and don’t worry. When like my snow blower, it doesn’t. OR, requires me to have the strength of Arnold. OR, the genius of Einstein. OR, the attention to detail of a tax accountant. Well, I lose my patience.

This particular POS required a reinstall and, a fresh download of drivers, (Figure that out? I checked the checksums and file dates, identical!) Finally, XP installed it. Or, at least stopped whining about it.

But, it doesn’t scan the one lousy picture I want it to scan.

Arghhh!

So, don’t buy this “solution”.

(I did a web search on Google and Yahoo before I did. But didn’t find any gripes. Else I wouldn’t have either.)

So much for productivity thru technology. This is in my personal technology Hall of Shame just a notch below IBM’s ViaVoice and just above that Toro Snow Blower!

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Posted by reinkefj

MONEY: The implications of not having “honest money”

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/
2006/11/29/cndollar29.xml

http://tinyurl.com/y7ur7w

US setbacks see dollar plunge to near 15-year low
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Last Updated: 12:41pm GMT 29/11/2006

***Begin Quote***

The dollar tumbled to a near 15-year low against sterling yesterday on fresh signs of economic trouble in the United States.

An 8.3pc crash in US industrial orders and an admission by the Federal Reserve chairman that Washington does not know how bad housing really is set off another day of wild gyrations on the currency markets.

***End Quote***

Maybe if we had “honest money”, (i.e., backed by something other than the full faith and credit of a dishonest government) then we might not need to be overly concerned. When the printing press runs at the “Treasury Department”, (as if there was anything of value kept there), then everyone who holds a Federal Reserve banknote is taxed by inflation.

No vote in Congress. Nothing signed by the President. No politicians has to “do” anything. The politicians think the market is stupid.

No, even without the government’s M3 number being published any more, the market “knows” exactly how many extra green pieces of paper that the FRB prints. It takes a little time. But eventually there are more FRBies chasing the same amount of goods, so prices rise.

It’s like a great calculating engine; probably the Intelligent Designer’s greatest gift to us.

No election. No counting of “votes”. No so called “laws”.

Just the free exchange of things between people. Eventually everything in the marketplace satisfies everyone. The real economists have all sorts of labels for it. But eventually every need is satisfied. Prices evaluate how much you really need or want something. As something gets “bid up”, people decide that they don’t want it as bad as the next person.

It’s the universal calculating engine, called the marketplace, that decides where scarce resources are allocated.

But, when there is counterfeiting going on, when the money is unbacked, when the standard measure is no longer standard, then the arithmetic is skewed.

And, the people are impoverished.

How are you preparing for the problems that the Federal Reserve is brewing up?

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Posted by reinkefj

LIBERTY: Milton Friedman deserves scorn for inventing withholding.

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

http://channel-surfing.blogspot.com/2006/
11/tonic-from-left.html

http://tinyurl.com/yxaaul

Monday, November 27, 2006
Tonic from the left

***Begin Quote***

Milton Friedman was, no doubt, a great thinker. But his approach to economics has wrought serious damage to our economy and the classes of Americans who fail in his winner-take-all world. Leave it to William Greider to remind us of this when much of the press in the wake of Friedman’s death has been so laudatory.

***End Quote***

Milton Friedman deserves scorn for inventing withholding. He deserves praise for challenging the gubamint reeducation propaganda camps, mistakenly called “publik skool”, with a voucher system. He was wrong, because it didn’t strike at the root of the evil. The gubamint shouldn’t be teaching citizen’s children anything. And, people who have the children should be responsible for educating them. Taxes are theft! He deserved scorn for failing to debunk Greenspan, who was a gold bug hard money guy but turned to the “dark side” of fiat currency, when he got the cushy job. So, he was human and made mistakes.

P.S.: That article you cited requires a subscription.

Interesting that the liberal media never takes a pro-freedom pro-liberty pro-people stance. Whine, whine, and whine. More gubamint. More taxes. More rules.

Arghhh!

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Posted by reinkefj

PRODUCTIVITY: Plaxo nukes some of “my” data and I’m miffed!

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

An interesting thing happened today. I was doing my birthday greetings. And, one of my fellow alums record was basically null. It was missing an email address. That’s plaxo’s key. All other fields had NA in them. There may be as many as four other records in the same shape.

Now, the counter party can do what ever they want to their data. But not to mine. I know that there was contact information in those fields that I input. Plaxo has no right to nuke that data.

I usually keep a copy of the source record (i.e., web page, email. or whatever initiated or updated my interest). That was gone to.

LinkedIn does something similar when it “silently” disconnects a LinkedIn contact. Presumably that is at the counterparty’s request, but how do you know it’s not an error by some clerk.

This rattles my confidence in other people controlling my data or access to it. When I create a record, I don’t want it changed. Perhaps, it’s time for me to get out my quill pen and put everything in long hand.

At the very least, maybe my old system of text files wasn’t so bad.

Neither of these two services Plaxo or LinkedIn, nor Corex Cardscan, nor Outlook itself ages the contacts so I’m not happy with any of the technology solutions.

Leave a Comment » | Productivity | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj

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