Arghhh! Maybe I’ll calm down and be able to blog about it.
RANT: Not a good day today!
Sunday, February 25, 2007
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Posted by reinkefj
TECHNOLOGY: Dealing with junk faxes
Sunday, February 25, 2007http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/
2007/02/23/BUGKCO9M0F1.DTL
*** Begin quote ***
Over the past few years, she estimates she’s received hundreds of junk faxes — each one costing her money by using up paper, ink and electricity. Weiss has tried repeatedly to opt out from receiving additional faxes.
*** end quote ***
Might I suggest either of two strategies to help the poor besieged fax receiver?
One, put a PC on the phone line and set it up to receive faxes. While it doesn’t prevent junk faxes (spam faxes might be called spaxes?), it would allow here to save paper and toner. For example, depending upon what software she was using, (I have a copy of WinFaxPro10 that I no longer use. She can have it. I moved to strategy #2), the PC would, give her a set of “files”, one each for transmission, that can be quickly “thumbed thru”. The good can be printed; the bad sent to the electronic bit bucket. Saves the paper and toner. Can dispose of the “trash” rather quickly. I even believe that it has “rules” that you can trigger from the ANI with the fax. (ANI is caller id in techie terms).
Two, she could use a service like eFax. Essentially it does the same thing, but she’d have to subscribe and change her number. (i think inbound is free?) It turns faxes into emails. The ANI is in the message subject line. Depending upon what email package she uses, again rules can send some of the junk to that bit bucket. Again, no wasted toner and paper,
If she was strapped for funds or not “into” computers , I’d use Strategy One. A technically literate friend can put this together rather easily. Even if she doesn’t have a computer, she doesn’t need much to do this. I bet the whole shebang would be under $500. Heck she have have one of my “toxic waste” computers (The one’s that when a relative out grows, they give it to me to “recycle”.) Might cost her more to get it from Jersey than buy something locally. As I said that can be put up on on almost any old one that works. Bet WalMart has something new for under 500$!
As a business person, if she’s computer literate, then I’d use Strategy Two. I think efax, and others of it’s ilk, have very modest fees last time I looked.
Either one might be cheaper and less exasperating for her. She can fax me at my free efax number 781-723-3746 if she wants some commiseration.
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Posted by reinkefj
MONEY: Alternative Minimum Tax to hit 23M taxpayers. Here’s one way to a flat tax.
Sunday, February 25, 2007http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009705
Bill Clinton’s AMT Bomb
Why millions in the middle class may see their tax bill explode.
Friday, February 23, 2007 12:01 a.m. ESTtitle
***Begin Quote***
As tax season nears, Democrats in Congress are discovering they have an urgent political bomb to defuse–the alternative minimum tax. The AMT already hits four million Americans, and without new legislation this year it will explode in the pocketbooks of 23 million taxpayers come April 15, 2008.
***End Quote***
What you don’t want to pay “your fair share” “for the children”?
We don’t need “tax reform”. The Fed will just inflate everyone into a straight no deductions one sizes fits all tax.
Shesh.
And, what part of “I don’t consent” does the gooferment gang of thugs not understand?
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Posted by reinkefj
GUNS: The 416 is … “best”; Army is sticking with the M4 and M16. Huh?
Sunday, February 25, 2007http://www.armytimes.com/news/2007/02/atCarbine070219/
Better than M4, but you can’t have one
By Matthew Cox – Staff writer
Posted : Friday Feb 23, 2007 5:27:44 EST
Delta Force worked with a gun maker to come up with a better weapon. The 416 is now considered in many circles to be the best carbine in the world, but the regular Army is sticking with the M4 and M16.
*** BEGIN QUOTE ***
March 4, 2002. An RPG tore into the right engine of an MH-47 Chinook helicopter loaded with a quick-reaction force of Rangers in the Shahikot Mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The Chinook crashed atop Takur Ghar, a 10,000-foot peak infested with al-Qaida fighters.
Enemy fire poured into the fuselage, killing Rangers even before they got off the aircraft. Capt. Nate Self crawled out.
*** AND ***
Once behind cover, Self tried to fire again, but his weapon jammed.
Instinctively, he tried to fix it with “immediate action,” a drill he’d practiced countless times.
“I pulled my charging handle back, and there was a round stuck in the chamber,” he recalled.
Like the rest of his men, Self always carried a cleaning rod zip-tied to the side of his weapon in case it failed to extract a round from the chamber.
“There was only one good way to get it out and that’s to ram it out with a cleaning rod,” he said. “I started to knock the round out by pushing the rod down the barrel, and it broke off. There was nothing I could do with it after that.”
*** AND ***
To Col. Robert Radcliffe, the man responsible for overseeing the Army’s needs for small arms, the M16 family is “pretty damn good.” It’s simply too expensive, he said, to replace it with anything less than a “significant leap in technology.”
Since 2000, that leap centered on development of the XM29 Objective Individual Combat Weapon — a dual system featuring a 5.56mm carbine on the bottom and a 25mm airburst weapon on top, capable of killing enemy behind cover at 1,000 meters.
Seven years and more than $100 million later, the 18-pound prototype — three times the weight of an M4 — is still too heavy and bulky for the battlefield.
“We think that somewhere around 2010, we should have enough insight into future technologies to take us in a direction we want to go for the next generation of small arms,” said Radcliffe, director of the Infantry Center’s Directorate of Combat Developments at Fort Benning, Ga.
“We will have M4s and M16s for years and years and years and years,” he said.“We are buying a bunch of M4s this year … and we are doing it for all the right reasons, by the way. It’s doing the job we need it to do.”
But many soldiers and military experts say this mind-set is off target now that soldiers are locked in a harsh desert war with no end in sight.
“We are not saying the [M4 and M16 are] bad,” said former Army vice chief of staff retired Gen. Jack Keane. “The issue for me is do our soldiers have the best rifle in their hands.”
*** END QUOTE ***
Well, General, (General, Gen Real, Generally Unreal), I’d say they were. I’d probably call them POS. That’s what they are. And, I’d like to hear what you’d say if you were in a fire fight and had the thing stop shootin on you! Betcha we could NOT print it here or put it on the tv news for the family! Ahh, yes, and we also have another good post office bureaucrat Colon-el (Head up his?) looking for the “perfect” answer. He’ll get it around 2010 when he retires to go work for a politically connected gun maker!?!
No, the issue isn’t to have the “best one”! It’s to have a “working one”!!
Is it any reason that the front line troops ALWAYS refer to the REMFs?
Hopefully, they can survive these idiots.
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Posted by reinkefj
WRITING: Weird dream
Sunday, February 25, 2007Woke up this morning with a weird dream. Almost a nightmare. Any interpretations?
I got a lucrative consulting contract in the city for which I needed a room like an extended stay. It was in Downtown. Around the corner from the Fiftieth Precient (which isn’t in downtown), where someone I know practices out of. And, I had to go give cash deposit (huh?). It was snowing. So I went in with an envelope stuffed with money and the application. AND after I had slipped it into the tiny slot. Some one came and told me it was a terrible place and I should look around. I didn’t care it was a lucrative contract. So to humor him I walked around the corner and realized it was a nursing home. With dogs and cats. So I left, wondering how I’d get my money back and what I’d tell people. After all it was a lucrative contract.
I woke up as I got back in the car. Thankfully.
Reinke Faces Life 