On-line Opinion Magazine…OK, it's a blog

In my meager attempt to support the SOPA Strike I won’t be posting anything tomorrow.

The House’s ‘Stop On-line Piracy Act’ won’t stop piracy, and the Senate’s ‘Protect Intellectual Property Act’ won’t protect intellectual property. What both will do is mandate that hosting companies and ISP become censors.

Google can’t possibly function if it is supposed to remove ‘suspected’ violators from the search results.

This is supposed to ‘protect American jobs’, but the six multinationals that control the media in the US couldn’t care less about American jobs, when the animation work all got shipped to Asia, and many of the TV shows are actually filmed in Canada, they care about their bottom line. That was behind their attempt to rip off the writers last year which resulted in a strike.

BlogSpot, WordPress, etc. are not going to be free if they are required to vet every blog post on their systems for ‘suspected’ copyright infringement.

I create intellectual property, I don’t see how either of these bills is going to help me maintain my rights. All is does is provide the six conglomerates with a lot of free labor.

I have a news flash for the US Congress – you can’t enforce US laws in other countries. The Internet is global and it can’t be controlled by the US. If you make the burden of operating from facilities in the United States a PITA, Internet companies will leave.

The BBC has been covering an on-going spat: Rupert Murdoch SOPA attack rebuffed by Google.

Murdoch is asking us to believe that there are thousands of sites created to illegally download Mission Impossible, and Google helps people find them.

I think that mental help professionals should be tracking anyone who wastes their time watching those products of News Corps, and set up a program to see if they can be returned to the human race.

Rupert must think that he has a great deal of credibility, as he has spent the last several months talking under oath before various governmental panels about the multiple crimes committed by his employees.

Here’s a clue – Google uses software ‘bots to search and index the ‘Net. The ‘bots don’t make moral judgments or render legal opinions, they simply copy down words and index them.

If Google does write an algorithm to ignore download sites, Rupert is going to have to set up his own search system to find them. That will be exceedingly expensive, and is easy to defeat.

BTW, the shut down day was switched to this Wednesday, the 18^th. The original day is the Chinese New Year [Tet, Spring Festival]

I’ve seen a number of people trying to lessen the impact of what private equity firms, like Bain Capital, do to the economy by classing them in with venture capitalist, and calling the results of their raids with the job losses as ‘creative destruction’. The two are just about polar opposites.

If you work in the tech industry you probably don’t like venture capitalists, but realistically they are essential to getting new ideas to market. If they are evil, they are a necessary evil.

By the time you have worked on a project and got it in shape for a real launch, you are normally out of money, and so is everyone you know who might lend you some. The last step is expensive, and the banks won’t go near you. This is when you turn to a venture capitalist to get the final money to finish your ‘dream’.

The important thing to remember is that venture capitalists, are real capitalists, i.e. they are going to risk ‘their money’ in hopes of turning a profit, and they need you to succeed to get their money back. It is a high risk/high reward environment, but it is based on a voluntary agreement between the company and venture capitalist. If the project is successful everyone makes money, and if it is a failure everyone loses.

If the new product is a significant improvement over existing products, the companies that make those products may be devastated, and that is the process called ‘creative destruction’. A recent example would be what has happened to the market for cathode ray tubes after flat LED screens dropped in price.

This is not what corporate raiders, like Bain Capital do. They don’t risk their capital, and they don’t share in any losses as a result of their take-overs. They use leveraged hostile take-overs to seize stable older companies who have low or no debt loads and have been making consistent profits for extended periods. The targets are not growing, they are simply maintaining a nice comfortable pace without any major swings in stock price or other indicators beloved by Wall Street analysts. These are companies that are designed to provide stability and a future, not instant returns. They look out for decades, not quarters.

The vulture capitalists seize control with borrowed money, and once in control loot the victim, and then mortgage it to the hilt. Their small investment is recovered almost instantly, with obscene interest, and they squeeze every possible dime out, before leaving the dessicated hulk to face bankruptcy on its own.

The destruction that occurs isn’t ‘creative’, it is simply destruction.

This comes to you via a connection slower than dial-up, if it makes it.

Now it is the DSL that doesn’t want to play.

Absolutely everything is timing out, so I’m only seeing text, even on this site.

SIGH!!!

The ABC reported on a recent decision of Israel’s highest court: Israeli court upholds controversial marriage law

But the court has ruled that human rights cannot override Israel’s security concerns, with one judge writing that: “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”

So they believe that The State is more important than mere people. The State apparently has the right to do whatever it wants to people as long as it claims to be for ‘security reasons’.

There is more than a little Roger Taney in these comments. It leaves unanswered the question of why people would belong to a state that had no regard for their rights?

You can’t tell the players without a program, so get your Super PACs program from the people at Open Secrets.

You need to know who ‘Restore Our Future’ is shilling for when they run their ads [Romney] and not confuse them with ‘Winning Our Future’ [Gingrinch].

There is no need to discuss the logic of the names, because there is none. The future is what happens – it can neither be ‘restored’ nor ‘won’; it just happens. I would note that it happens to be rather bleak at the moment, but nothing any of the Presidential candidates is talking about doing is going to change that. [Note that I am including Zero in that assessment.]

You can consider the situation in Europe as a preview of the US future under the Austerians.

Many thanks to Rorschach112 at Geeks To Go for pointing the way to ending the problem, and to the lads and/or lasses of Kaspersky for their TDSSKiller that took out the problem.

The machine was invested with a problem with many names: Win32/Olmarik, Rootkit.Win32.TDSS.u, Win32/Alureon.F, Backdoor.Tidserv!.inf. It installed itself in the boot area of the hard disk and communicated with various malware sites.

The clues that it was on the machine were the redirection of search engine results and an increase in boot time. Eliminating the stuff you could see would only last until you re-booted when it would relaunch and recreate what you deleted.

ESET warned about it and blocked the calls to the ‘mothership’, but it couldn’t remove it completely. Messing about in the boot sector is definitely a specialized field, and if you aren’t 100% confident about what you are doing, you could render the computer inert.

I don’t need the computer I cleaned up, now that I have the emulator working, but it is always good to have a back-up.

En Garde!

What was that?

[Editor: Lucrezia scans for trouble as she takes in the afternoon sun. When you have been as nasty as she is, this is a reasonable precaution.

Friday Ark

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

I provide more detail on my other site.

I finally have an ancient piece of software up and running on the laptop, which is very good news. My second machine is still infested with a rootkit worm, and that will be the next step.

This program started as a mailing list on a Kaypro CP/M at the dawn of microcomputers, running on one of the first popular wordprocessing programs, WordStar. It them progressed through dBASE II, dBASE III, dBASE III+, and finally its current compiled version with Clipper.

Most of the program was last changed in 1998 in anticipation of Y2K, but there are annual updates to certain of the printing modules. It is a custom accounting system for a very niche market, and produces output to run on several specialized devices.

For years I have been looking for ways of converting it to the Windows platform, but there is no current program that will enable a programmer to re-create all of the features. It is very frustrating because accounting was once the raison d’être for computers, and now it is relegated to a miniscule segment in the microcomputer world. People adapt their business to a couple of popular programs, rather than creating something that works the way they do.

C’est la vie …

Update: I forget to mention the minor hurdle imposed by the power company. They made a ‘courtesy call’ [a robocall by any other name is just as annoying] informing me that at an unspecified time probably in the next 7 days they would be swapping electric meters in the area, which means if I have to leave for a few minutes, I have to shut everything down.

They are installing ‘new, more efficient meters’, which translates as the auto-reporting type that will allow them to fire even more people and reduce their ‘costs’, but have no effect on mine, as the savings will go to higher profits, not lower bills.

I will rarely be around for the next few days as I have multiple computer issues on multiple computers that I have to clear up.

First, they changed the assignment of delegates from Iowa, with Romney getting 13 and Santorum getting 12, and the others getting stiffed. No explanation, just the new numbers.

New Hampshire normally has 23 delegates on offer, but they moved their primary date and the RNC dinged them 11 delegates, so this is a race for a dozen delegates. Just so you know how totally irrelevant all of this is, it takes 1144 delegates to win the nomination.

With 95% of the votes counted it’s Romney [40%], Paul [23%], Huntsman [17%], Gingrinch [10%], Santorum [9%], and Perry [1%].

Next up is South Carolina, which is a much bigger state, so it is totally ignored because all it has are delegates, not the ‘magic anointing properties’ of Iowa and New Hampshire. That’s where the ‘Newtron bomb’ targeting Romney is set to be used by Gingrinch’s superPAC that is in no way affiliated with the official campaign [nod, nod, wink, wink].

The FAA has finally come to its senses: Whooping cranes are cleared for takeoff after getting FAA exemption.

A group has been raising whooping cranes, and then releasing them into the wild to increase the tiny number of the endangered birds. Part of the process involves teaching them about their migration flight, and this is accomplished by having an ultra-light aircraft act as the lead bird to show the young birds where to go.

The FAA got its knickers in a bunch because the people who fly the aircraft are full-time employees of the non-profit that conducts the program, and the pilots are thus being paid. The license used for an ultra-light is highly restricted, and it can’t be used for commercial purposes. It has been difficult for the FAA to understand that the people flying the aircraft aren’t professional pilots, they are bird handlers who have volunteered to fly the aircraft, to act like an adult whooping crane.

The FAA finally decided to allow the flight to continue, and we can only hope it didn’t destroy the chances of the birds to survive.

As has become routine, TSA not only didn’t back down, but it doubled down: TSA defends cupcake confiscation.

That’s right, they confiscated cupcakes because the frosting was ‘gel-like’ and violated the rules about carrying gels on the aircraft. This was the same excuse they used when they confiscated my Mother’s chocolate pudding, despite being a sealed commercial container.

It is irrelevant that this stupid rule arose from a British incident, and the British have since discontinued it, because the hysteria about the possibility was shown to be totally in error – you can’t do what ‘the terrorists’ said they were going to do. It was a dumb rule, prompted by ignorance, and pathetically still in force in the US.

The only good part of the article is the reaction of the bakery that made the cupcake – they have changed the name from red velvet to ‘National [Security] Velvet’.

With 100% of the votes counted in Dixville Notch [the polls open at midnight and close when everyone is done] Huntsman and Romney are tied with two apiece while Paul and Gingrinch are tied for third with one apiece.

All media outlets are required to send someone to Dixville Notch for all elections and report on the results, no matter how meaningless they actually are. Without the Internet you would have to wait until morning to find out this crucial piece of information.

New Hampshire gets to go first because … well, it could be traditional … or not.

It is a hell of a way to select a candidate, and it’s all ours.

Full disclosure: yes, I knew this trivia was coming, and I’m as guilty as CNN for reporting it.