BitTorrent Inc. expands movie, TV show downloads for new service

Article

LOS ANGELES (AP) - BitTorrent Inc., developer of a popular online file-sharing tool, said Tuesday it has reached licensing deals that will boost the number of movies and TV shows it can offer as part of a video download service launching next year.


The company has yet to disclose a pricing scheme but has said individual TV shows could be priced as low as US$1, and movies will be sold for about the price of a DVD.

TV shows and most films can be purchased and burned on a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to buy the original and not on standard DVD players.

Some films will only be available for viewing a limited number of times.


Ummm... ok. I can download a movie and pay full price for it , after waiting 2 hours for it to download, burn it to a cd , and it will play only on one device in my house. Six months later, when that device breaks and I have to replace it, ALL the movies I bought from the download service, I have to throw out because I will never be able to view them again anywhere on any device ever.

So.. we have user piracy , and now we have an example of company piracy.

Pardon me , but if it's gonna cost as much as a DVD , maybe I'll just by a DVD , that will last for many years, and play on every device in the world , and not bother with the whole download experiance thingy ?

You wanna run a download service ? here's what you do. YOu load special s/w on the users computer that downloads a movie and writes it to a cd or writable dvd. You give them a discount on the price because they used their own equipment to make the copy thus saving you money, and maybe you mark the cd somehow so that it cannot itself be copied.

do that , and it becomes a discount cd / dvd store. Anything short of that, any weird copy schemes play only 3 times , copy twice and then you're toast etc schemes ... better off hitting the store and buying a copy there than fiddling with the online stuff.

The Death of TiVo

TiVo ads at the end of programs


The Beauty of TiVo. It used to be a service down in the states where you could record shows and skip television commericals. A google search now adays on WHAT IS TIVO no longer even mentions the part about skipping commericals.


They said there were going to be ads when you paused programs, ads above the timeline when you're fastforwarding through a program and now ads when you're deleting a program.
Is anyone signing up for these?


Ah , how a beautiful concept dies an ugly death. Reduced to little more than a digital video recorder that deliberately inserts ads on you while you operate it. The dream is dead.

Who will pay for the higher costs of high-def TV?

Article


As Canada's broadcasters pursue the expensive transition from analog to digital broadcasting, the country's broadcast regulator is hearing ideas on how to pay for the added costs of high-definition.

At CRTC hearings this week, the broadcast networks are arguing for permission to charge fees to cable and satellite providers for programming they now provide for free. Some broadcasters are also asking the CRTC to allow more advertising minutes per hour and to allow alternate advertising arrangements like product placement.


Let me answer this question for you more fully and succinctly.

No one will pay for the higher costs.

Why ?
Because TV is a dying animal. Everyone is moving to the internet. If you choose to retain any illusion of hope that TV will somehow survive in some form or another, your best move is to lower the price of television. Not raise it.

Raising the price or increaseing the number of commericals per hour will merely hasten the demise of this dinosaur.

Who's responsible for this mess ? (Palistine / Israel)

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Who's right , who's wrong , what was the series of events that created this mess, things like that. And I think I've figured it out.

1.. The muslims must bear part responsibility. Sorry , but you're running around with a holy book in hand that calls the jews pigs and monkeys and generally encouraging people to kill every jew in the world. There's no escaping this.

2.. The World War II allies. Why ? Because at the end of world war II , after the nazi's were defeated , they divided up the middle east , which at that time had no formal nations, and created the current set of nations. One can immagine the generals, in this highly racist time, arguing about what to do with the jews. I dont' want them in MY COUNTRY ! Nor mine either ! I know ... lets dump them back in the desert in historical Israel ! Yeah ! Surrounded by muslims who want to kill them all ! yeah , thats a great idea !

3.. The jews. For going along with the new isreal , cut from the lands of the muslims. It is true that 1400 years ago the muslims drove the jews out (killing any that refused to leave or convert to islam) of that land , but then , it is true that if you go back 1400 years for any nation or group of people you're going to find that they did something really horrible probably a whole bunch of things that are really horrible , so you really should let bye gones be by gones and not go digging too far. No nation on earth is going to permit you to take a slice of their land , no matter how they got it , and give it to their hated enemies. They were stupid for going along with such a plan. Stupid , and greedy. One can imagine the jubilation. WE'RE GETTING OUR OLD COUNTRY BACK HURRAY ! You're old country is surrounded by muslims who want to kill you . Oopsie .

4... The United States. You're buying oil off of the muslims , making them rich , and thus funding their attacks on Israel. Then , you're lending troops and equipment to israel to defend itself. It's insane , you're actually funding both sides of this conflict. Something not obvious to the average american , but true enough just the same ! Can't you just pick one side and crush the other ? Any side ? It doesn't really matter, as long as the fighting stops.

5... Modern Technology. The Global Village etc. Guess what ? A plane trip from Iraq to USA is what , 8 hours ? 10 hours ? And all I need is a couple of box cutters to hijack the pilot and crash the plane into something provocative ? My only question is how come it hasn't happened sooner. "over there on the other side of the world" isn't really very far away anymore. Distance is no longer any protection from people who hate you. (A search on cheapoair.com shows boston to beruit is 922$US 14hrs 35min including 4 hours waiting for a connecting flight, exspensive for a private individual like you and me , cheap for any well funded terrorist. )

Conclusions
- Muslim oil runs out in 20 or 30 years, and research has already begun on fusion reactors as a replacement energy source for oil. Once the muslims run out of oil, the only thing they got is opium (used to make cocaine) and thats just not going to work out too well. My guess is that the muslim war machine will simply run out of steam at that point. They'll still hate everyone, but they won't be able to do much about it.
- Oh yeah , who is responsible for this mess ? Pretty much everyone has a hand in it , it seems. Pretty much everyone.

Sleeping on the Job

Another Doctors appointment , this one to see if I had Sleep Apnea. Call two weeks in advance to confirm I knew about it (no one answered had to leave a message). That didn't bother me much , I was told they were very busy and I was lucky to get in with less than a 9 month wait.

show up on the day ... Saturday (yesterday)...
Doors locked. No one around. Security came by and I got them to peek inside and make sure they weren't on coffee break.
Nope. No one showed up for my appointment.

I want my 50$ ! They charge you 50$ if you fail to show for an appointment , I want 50$ when I show up and it's the staff that sleeps in or calls in sick or whatever ! I had a one hour bus trip across town to get there and I made it on time , where were they ?
I think the part that the resperologist that booked me into that appointment doesn't have a phone number and I'd been trying to reach him for a week before giving up was the worst. I had no one to complain to or protest. Tick me right off.

13,000 Palestinian security forces maintain cease-fire

Article


Hamas' militant wing and the Islamic Jihad militant group claimed responsibility for firing several rockets into Israel after the cease-fire took effect at 6 a.m. (11 p.m. ET Sunday).


Welcome to the standard Islamic Cease fire. The Israeli's stop firing and retreat. The Terrorists keep on firing and killing Israeli's.

I give it a week at most before the Israeli's get tired of being "peacefully" shot at , go back in , and the Hamas blame them for violating the so called cease fire (in which they failed to ...cease firing ... oddly enough).

But ... this is a new thing.
Oh it's happened many times before , with the terrorists continuing to provoke isreal and another war starting, that part is old hat.

The new part is that I was watching CNN on the telly, and they actually bothered to mention that the Hamas was still shooting at the Israeli's. Instead of the usual white wash of it all being the fault of the Jews and the poor innocent palistinians are so picked upon , they're actually giving it something akin to balanced coverage.

That will not change the Islamic actions or attitudes a witt, but it does mean the west will react differently to this kind of nonsense from now on. It will be interesting to see what happens next , since in this post 9/11 era tolerance for islamic extremism seems to have gone down hill.

Computer User Rights

Cell phone owners getting new rights

NEW YORK (AP) -- Cell phone owners will be allowed to break software locks on their handsets in order to use them with competing carriers under new copyright rules announced Wednesday...

When do computer users get new rights ?

When do I get the right to say "I bought this computer brand new , I don't want that bundled 90 day crap THAT WILL NOT UNINSTALL on my machine. And that crud keeps demanding my credit card and treating me like a criminal and I jsut want to get rid of it !!!!" (mcafee security on my new dell comes to mind... word perfect office is also up there... same computer oddly enough)

When Do I get to say "I don't want my brand new machine, that I PAID FOR " to be loaded up with junk trying to sell me stuff. When do I get to decide I don't want my computer to be a salesman working for every computer company in the world , I want to be just my computer and nothing else ?



When do I get to say "I don't want windows on my machine , I want something else " without being told "Nothing runs on anything but windows. you HAVE to have windows or you can't do anything"

When do I get to say "I dont' want to buy a word processer every 3 years , the old one works fine, why can't I simply bring it along to my new computer ?"

When can I install a new program , and NOT have 5 different advertising icons apear on my desk top all trying to sell me junk apear ?

When did printer drivers need 50 megs of space to install, and it turns out 48 megs of that is trial software , have your credit card ready to upgrade. When do I get to have that stop from happening ?

When did everyone and the dog start demanding my email address so they can send me junk mail , and denying me a warrenty if I refuse to give one ?

When did it become ok for me to buy an online game , like Matrix online, and all the sign posts inside the game contain real advertising. And there's no way to turn off the ads ? I'M PAYING FOR THE GAME, THE COMPUTER, THE CONNECTION ! I should be able to turn off those ads !!!!

When did it become ok for complete strangers to send me emails to try and sell me stuff ?

When did the only response to all of these questions become "Everyone does it. Too bad live with it , those who don't we run out of business so you're stuck !"

When did my computer ,which I paid for , stop being my computer , and start being everyone elses property ?

Israeli troops advance into Gaza towns

Article

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza (AP) -- Israeli ground troops, tanks and armored vehicles advanced on two northern Gaza towns Wednesday in pursuit of Palestinian rocket squads, besieging a well-known Hamas lawmaker's house and engaging militants in ferocious gunbattles, Palestinian officials said.

They're "beseiging" an ordinary house, with tanks ? Your story doesn't add up. One tank would
roll over a house, not beseige it.

Militants, undeterred by Israel's military might, pressed ahead with their rocket attacks on southern Israel, at one point hitting a school just before pupils arrived.

Well...thanks for admitting you're shooting at civilians. So much for whining about how Israeli's occasinally hit your civilians by accident, you're targettig them on purpose.

Snipers were also staked out on the roof of a Hamas lawmaker who earlier this month helped to organize a women's demonstration that permitted dozens of Hamas militants to escape an Israeli siege on a Beit Hanoun mosque, Palestinian security officials said.


They locked lawmaker Jamila Shanti and her family inside the house in Jebaliya, and built a sand embankment around the house to protect soldiers from Hamas gunfire, Palestinian security officials said. Troops fired nine rocket-propelled grenades at Shanti's two-story house, which was hit earlier this month in another offensive on Jebaliya, they said.

make up your mind. Are they beseiging the place , or are they already inside being beseiged by the Hamas ? And what the heck are the Hamas doing attacking their own Law maker in the first place ? You guys can't even make up decent propaganda.



"We advise the occupation to spare itself the effort of invading Gaza, because this is not going to stop rockets" said Hamas military wing spokesman Abu Obeidah. "It's going to escalate rocket fire."

Losely translated : We hate you , we're going to keep on shooting. don't bother trying to stop us.

Late Tuesday, an Israeli man wounded by Palestinian rocket fire earlier in the day died of his injuries.

"No government would tolerate such attacks, and neither will Israel," said Israeli government official David Baker, after the second rocket fatality within a week.

Separately, a rocket fired from Gaza hit the entrance of a school in southern Israel shortly before pupils arrived Wednesday morning. No one was hurt.

Another rocket fell nearby and a third rocket hit a farm close to the Israel-Gaza border fence, damaging a chicken coop but causing no casualties, the army said.

I'm caught between your insane psychotic cruelty with these rockets and your amazingly poor aim. You coudln't even hit the chicken ?


Israel has been boycotting the Hamas-led government, which took power in March, because it has refused to recognize Israel and renounce violence.

Losely translated : They're still shooting at us !

I was robbed !

I bought NWN2 the other day (Never Winter Nights 2) .
It doesn't run on my system. Or either of my systems.
2 ghz clock speed min ? 3 recommended ? 128m video card, yuck !

Put it on the shelf. Perhaps in a year or two.

Then I began to think. The last never winter nights had exactly the same problem. It would barely run on the system I had at the time , but a year later I upgraded and it ran perfectly.

I began to wonder if they were doing that deliberately. Release a new game , even an online game , with high system requirements. The first players are the eager first adopters wtih high end computers and money to spend. Later on, a year or two later when all the cheap buggers like me get around to it , our upgraded or new systems can finally run the game , and we form the second wave of players for that game.

They're doing it on purpose ? I was robbed !

I hate that.

On the other hand , Matrix Online, and StarWars Galaxy's and EQ2 are just coming in reach for my computer, so I have a selection of , albeit older games , to play on now.

Still , the notion that I'll never play cutting edge games I'll always be waiting a year or two until I upgrade , is really annoying.

Oh yeah , EQ2 (ever quest 2) sucks... after level 10 you run out of quests and you're just wacking random monsters hoping to gain levels. There's some lip service to finding a group and doing group quests ... but you can never find one , or they're all idiots who think dying over and over and over is an ok thing ...

Havn't tried StarWars Galaxy's yet, Matrix online is ok. Let you now how that goes, though I suspect as a second generation player any verdict I render will be moot as the first generation players will have written all about it long ago.

Corrupt Iraq Cops

Article


The Interior Ministry has ordered the arrests and interrogations of several high-ranking police officers over their handling of security in the area


I keep hearing this on the tv , but never seeing it written , until now. It seems many of the Iraqi police also belong to the local militia's that are fighting each other.

There are many police blockades , reported as "fake" blockades to kidnap and kill people, but I wonder now how many of the fake cops are in fact real cops ? The iraqi civilian prime minister seems to have allowed the wolves into the house and is doing nothing to stop it.

Rather like only now are they starting to complain about Iran and Syria backing various militia inside Iraq. Why ? Because they might have to do something about it if they talk too loudly about it. And they're always complaining they're short on resources. (I know our canadian military is demanding more money from parliment to cover deployment expenses)

there was even one journalist who reported that the cops set up a road block on the soldiers payday to fleece them on the way home.

*sigh* They gotta do something about the cops. If you can't trust the cops on the street of a country , you've pretty much had it. A program of snap inspections and corruption entrapment investigations is required here. Catch them in the act and publically punish them , that sort of thing.

Palestinian militant rockets kill Israeli woman

Article


JERUSALEM (CNN) -- In a deadly attack from northern Gaza, Palestinian militants hit the Israeli town of Sderot with four Qassam rockets Wednesday morning, killing one woman and wounding a man, Israeli police and medical sources said.


But thats ok. Killing innocent civilians is just fine as long as they're jewish civilians.


Two militant groups, the Islamic Jihad and the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement faxed to the Ramattan News Agency, based in Gaza City.


In fact , the terrorists boast of their activites.

But they really shouldn't.

It took you four rockets to kill two random people ? Has anyone ever told you your aim sucks ? I mean , really .... you lauched a similar attack a few days ago and hit no one , so it's more like costing you 4 rockets to kill one random civilian. Thats very pricy. Very inefficient.

The Plumber Fails To Speak

Two weeks ago , I run around with all this stupid insurance paper work , get it to where it has to go , pay my doctor $10 bucks , the whole nine yards. All done.
wait for money.

Today the insurance company takes the greatest of pleasure in calling me up. It seems my Doctor , that self styled "Call me The Plumber" kind of guy , checked off that I was capable of returning to work.

Which , while I might argue might not be the case, certainly I would argue HE SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME !

Two weeks sitting on my butt waiting for insurance money and he knew it wasnt' coming , and he didn't tell me a dang thing.

And he charged me 10$ for that piece of paper on top of it all.

I WANT MY MONEY BACK !!!!!

Excuse me, I have to start putting stuff together , it seems I have to go to work this friday.

Quebec bar owners take smoking ban to court

Article


A group representing bar owners will ask Quebec Superior Court on Monday to strike down the province's strict anti-smoking law.

The law, which took effect earlier this year, bans smoking in bars, restaurants and other public places.

Peter Sergakis says Quebec bars are hurting because of a provincial smoking ban.

Bar owners say the ban is driving customers away and hurting their bottom line.


Yes yes, our bottom line , our profit margin is all important here. We don't care if our customers and employees all catch lung cancer and die , thats not important. Only money is important. The health of everyone in the nearby vicinity can go take a flying leap off a ...

People like this remind me why business interests simply cannot be trusted with anything.

Arab groups say Tories refuse to meet with them

Artical

I cannot explain to you how filled with apathy I am at that headline.


Some of Canada's largest Arab organizations say they are being frozen out by the Conservative government.

Although the Tories have run an active outreach campaign to several ethnic communities — including the Hindu, Sikh, and Chinese communities — Arab groups say the party appears to have made a decision to write off the Arab vote.


I suppose I'm supposed to care that a minority is getting the shaft ...


Both Prime Minister Stephen Harper — who earlier angered some Arabs over his support for Israel during the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict...


this doesn't help. The fact that the minority in question is activly working to promote racisim against another minority (Jews) only deepens my apathy.

What does a country with strong hate laws do , how does such a country deal , with a minority that actively promotes hate ?

Staying low , staying quiet , and avoiding them seems to be the current tactic. Certainly anyone saynig "Yeah we think you arabs are right , we really should kill all the jews" is going to get in trouble deep.

What do you do ?

Palestinians: Israelis kill 19 in Gaza

Article


"The cowardly act of Zionists (Israelis) requires a legitimate Palestinian action. "We have big trust in our military wings, which will reply on this aggression and resist occupation and retaliate for those victims."

The bloodshed occurred early Wednesday with Israeli tanks poised just outside the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. The tanks fired 10 artillery rounds into the town's center and killed 19 people, the medical sources said.

Among the dead was a 13-member family which included seven children, the sources said. The other six killed were also civilians, they said.

Hmmm... rather than post the rest of the article , let me finish it for CNN.

(My insert , not the articles) Of course , since all of the "sources" inside Palestine are under control of Hamas gunmen and other terrorists , it is likely that this story is a complete fabrication of a group of people in the middle of fighting a war against Israel. We just print this garbage, that we pretty much know to be false, because we hate our current president Bush , and anything to make him or his allies look bad , no matter how false, is fine by us. and we can always say "The palistinians lied, it wasn't us !" should it turn out to be false. Which we know it is already.


For CNN this is Two Faced Tony , happy to pass along enemy propaganda.

A model for Internet Security

I've been watching this whole hacker / spammer / denial of service attack thing for years, and I've been thinking, there's a solution for this , a fairly easy one.

The world should be broken up into zones, say one zone for each continent, maybe one zone for each country or for a small group of countries.

When a user signs onto the internet he signs onto his own zone only. He may choose to sign onto a single other zone at a time , say to chat with his uncle in the UK, free of charge of course.

Point being , if you're not in the zone , you cannot send / receive data from the zone.

This has no effect on email , of course , because most email goes through your isp's mail server, and your isp is going to be signed on to every zone in existance , of coure.

But most "zombie nets" , that is to say users who's computers have unknowningly been hijacked by a virus or trojen, are signed into only one zone. If they got a virus by email from yugoslovia , and they're in New York , guess what ? That trojen cannot receive command and control signils from most computer's in new york, because only a few new yorkers will sign into yugoslovia to chat with their relatives. Most are not from there, they're from a dozen other different countries and zones, and they'll be signed into those zones instead.

This works the otherway too. Your new york cannot launch a denial of service attack on Amazon.ca (the canadian site) because it's in a different country. A different zone. You have to span three zones to do that , and you only have two to work with (Yugoslovia for receiving orders from the hacker, new york where the penetrated computer lives, and canada where the target lives)

The basic theory of all of this is simply that the world is too large a ball to play with. You must break it down into pieces. Smaller pieces mean smaller bot nets. Smaller pieces means that off shore hacker STAYS off shore, only a very very limited number of people go to that zone and are therefore potentially susceptable to being hacked by him. And guess what ? 10 or 20 computers being remote controlled from yugoslovia isn't going to cut it. Thats not a bot net. You need 20 thousand if you're going to bring down one of the big boys, twenty thousand suckers with low or no security happy to leave their connection on all the time ,AND connected to yugoslovia. And even then , they can only attack new york or yugoslovia , no where else.

It's all a game of numbers. And you must think in numbers to win it. The inconvenience of a user having to go through a free sign in is nothing next to the extra security it provides.

My email

Trying to send an email to my aunt and uncle. Keep being told the address doesn't exist.

Try google's email. Works like a charm.

I cannot help but notice that my isp is rogers, and my aunt's is Sympatico. Rogers and Sympatico are rivals in my area , they're always trying to out do each other.

Hmmm... it would seem that I cannot send email to anywhere in the world , as advertised. Heck I'm not even trying to send email out of the country, those two are living canada.

Even worse, I didn't get an error message indicating the system was somehow down and would be back soon. I got one saying that email address didn't exist.

The internet is still full of deceptive business practices I see. It isn't ready for prime time. Funny enough , it is on prime time though.

Iran says will reply swiftly to any Israeli attack

Iran and its Revolutionary Guards would respond swiftly if
Israel attacked the Islamic state over its disputed nuclear program, an official said on Sunday



And so we dance the grim fandango.

Iran is set on it's course, it's religious leaders cannot change their path, it is a matter of faith and they will not give it up. Their religion calls for the eradication of the Israeli state, one need only look up on the internet an english translation of the Koran and go to the chapter marked Children of Israel to see how trapped they are. (Yes, their holy book actually mentions the Israeli's BY NAME and requires they be wiped out)

Israel , who has been dealing with these religious air heads for more than fifty years now , knows this , and knows their only option is to bomb that plant out of existance after it gets too far along. The only difficulty is determining exactly when it's almost ready to produce nuclear materials, in this way you get the Iranians to invest the maximum amount of effort into it , and then wipe all that effort out in a single shot with a borrowed US war plane.


But Israel bombed
Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 to prevent then-President
Saddam Hussein from assembling atomic weapons, and some analysts have speculated that Israel could consider similar action against Iran if it felt threatened.


Ah ah. Do they have a choice ?


Experts say knocking out Iran's nuclear facilities would be a far tougher prospect than it was in Iraq, partly because Iranian sites are spread out and heavily defended.

"If Israel takes such a stupid step and attacks, the answer of Iran and its Revolutionary Guard will be rapid, firm and destructive and it will be given in a few seconds," Hosseini told a news conference.

The Guards are an ideologically driven wing of Iran's military with a command structure separate from regular units.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be "wiped off the map" but also that Iran is no threat. Iran refuses to recognize the Jewish state.


Ah ah. Honest , we're not making nukes ! But we will wipe you off the map in mere seconds if you attack us. How ? Well... nukes would do that job , wouldn't they ? I thought you said you didn't have any ?

Lol. Funny people.


Israel is widely believed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, though it has never said it possesses such weapons. Iran often complains about Western double standards in failing to confront Israel about its nuclear capability.


You're going to try and nuke someone who already has nukes ? LOL ... really funny people.

As I was saying.

Iran will build it's plant (or plants , looks like they're spreading out into a few heavily defended ones)

The Isreali's will bomb them out of existance (even if they have to borrow a few high tech just off the assembly line american war planes of some kind or another to do it.

Iran will now be stuck with a lot of hot air , a lot of angry words in their mouth , and not much they can do about it. Lauch a normal attack against a nuclear nation ? Send your conscript milita against highly trained soldiers who've been fighting more or less continuously against you guys for decades now and pretty much count as elite troopers at this point ?

Israel will hand you your butt, is what is going to happen. They just gotta do it before you actually produce any significant radioactive material. Don't need that stuff floating all over the continent now do we ?

The Islamics may not care about their own people, but it's odd how the westerner's like Israel and the US do. Almost sounds like time for a regime change, to me.

Weak Kneed American Democrats

The American Democrats seem to be causing bush all sorts of problems on Iraq, and thats just amusing.

Amusing because I'm up here in Canada , and I'm not the one about to shoot myself in the foot.

Amusing because the Democrats have for a long time demanded a pull out of troops from Iraq.

He's the situation.

Pull out troops from Iraq, and Iraq will collapse. And the terrorist swill CHASE you back to america , and try for another 9/11 . These people arnt' satisfied with half measures, they want to rule the world. You're in their way , you're target number one.

Don't pull out troops from Iraq, and now you have egg on your face. You spent all that time demanding it , electioneering on it , and now that you're in power, you gotta say "oops ...we didn't REALLY mean that"

I HOPE they have the guts to leave the troops in iraq , rather than some kind of futile withdraw , get hit by terrorists , go and conquer Iraq again dance, but these are politicians , and I really wouldn't want to bet on that.

Do you remember the philipino dance ?
It's the same deal. No one aquieces to kidnappers because when you get your kidnap victem back the kidnappers will just go get someone else and do it again.
Truck driver got kidnapped in Iraq.
Big outrage at home in Philippines.
Government caves in , pays ransom.
Truck driver released and goes home.
Next day kidnappers pick up another philipino.
(true event)

Love that dance. Apparently so do the democrats.

Junk Mail

I am an old man , with grey hair , and I remember many things.

Do you remember Junk Mail ? It came every sunday in your mail box, and no matter how many signs you put up saying "No Junk Mail" "No Advertising" "No Flyers" etc , it just kept coming in. Most of it was from the local grocery stores or pizza shops or other places.

I remember working one summer for a distributer , we got paid 1 cent for every piece we delivered ( I was just a kid , it was summer holidays , it got me a soda pop and a chocolate bar at the end of the day).

Do you remember that you didn't care that it came from the local grocery store, it was still JUNK MAIL ?

Now we have the online version of it , called SPAM. Guess what ? I still don't care if it came from the grocery store, or the electronics store, or my own ISP, I'm not interested.

But of course these people have a different idea of what is , and isn't spam, and money to back up that idea. Whether it be through bribing ISP's to let their mail through the spam filters , or disembowling government anti-spam legislation, or even paying hackers to shut down a web site that actually provides a working anti-spam service (true story) , there's always a way.

I have to ask. When did it become ok for MY COMPUTER to spy on me ? When did it become ok for it to keep track of what sites I surf so they can determine what kind of advertising would most effectively work on me ? When did subverting MY PROPERTY , my own personal property , so someone else could make a buck , become an ok thing ?
When did the option to opt out vanish ? When did the argument "everyone else does it, so we have to do to stay competitive" become acceptable ?
When did it become ok for me to buy and pay for a video game (matrix online) and play it on my computer , and find out it's filled with real world advertisements ? Something I bought and paid for outright , computer , game , and monthly fee, and there's no opt-out button for the ads ?

When did stupid advertising tricks become more important than inventing a good product people actual want or need ?

And just like putting up those futile NO JUNKMAIL signs on your old mail box, the new signs (anti-spam software) are just as futile.

The more things change, the more they don't.

Hamas leader calls off Israel cease-fire

Article


BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip - Hamas' exiled leader on Wednesday called off a cease-fire with
Israel and militants threatened to attack Americans after 18 members of a family, including eight children, were killed in an Israeli artillery barrage on a densely populated Gaza neighborhood.


You had a cease fire with Israel ? Weren't you just shooting rockets at them yesterday ?


In Damascus,
Syria, Khaled Mashaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, said the group would no longer honor a February 2005 truce and called for renewed attacks on Israel. He urged other militant groups to join the struggle.


2005 ? A whole year ? OOps, it's november, a year and 8 months , thats quite a cease fire . Especially since I seem to recall you had A WHOLE WAR with Israel that lasted 30 days during this cease fire, kidnapped soldiers , and fired rockets galore at Israel during this ceasefire .


"The armed struggle is free to resume, and the resistance is dictated by local circumstances," he told a news conference.

The armed struggle never stopped. You raped that cease fire silly and got your knuckles rapped for it.

Hamas would be taking a gamble by resuming large-scale violence. The group won legislative elections this year and has been struggling to win international legitimacy. Already boycotted by the U.S., Europe and Israel, Hamas would risk further international isolation.

Oh gee, let me think. We won the election on the platform of "we hate americans , and jews, and want to kill them all. " and we wonder why the americans and jews are ticked at them ? What did you expect ? They'd fall all over themselves to give you money ?


In Gaza, Abbas said the killings jeopardized peace prospects. "We tell the Israelis, you are not seeking peace at all, but are destroying all chances for peace. You must therefore bear all the consequences of these crimes," he told Palestine TV.


Yeah yeah ! They should stand there and take it like a man when you fire rockets and kidnap people and try to kill them ! Fighting back is not at all forwarding chances for peace ! fighting back is a CRIME !

apparently , so is truth , as far as the Hamas are concearned.

Windows for Banks

I was out and about today , and I happened to pass by a bank machine (actually , I was trying to get money out of said bank machine) when I noticed it was out of order.

It did not say "Out of Order." Nor "Offline" nor anyone of a dozen other useful messages.

It said , in a nice big window , a WINDOWS style window I might add "One or more services did not start ..." yadda yadda yadda , a standard windows operating system message.

How does it feel to know your money is being managed by the most penetrated, the most virus prone , operating system in the world ? One they've apparently been working on since 1995 (win95) and still havn't gotten it right yet (it's 2006 as of writing this article , 11 years later).

How secure is your bank password or pin number ? Check for odd transactions lately ? strange charges on your account ?

Just wondering , just wondering ?

Bad Boy ISP's (internet service providers)

Article

The below pretty much says it all.


Examples of alleged discrimination by some ISPs:

February 2006 - Some customers of Cox Cable in the U.S. are unable to access Craig's List because of a so-called software bug in the Authentium personal firewall distributed by Cox Cable to improve customers' security. The group Save the Internet calls it an intentional act on the part of Cox Cable to protect classified ad services offered by its partners. The issue is resolved by correction of the software as well as a change in the network configuration used by Craig's List. The site's founder Craig Newmark acknowledges it was not an intentional act on Cox's part.

March 2006 - Alberta's Shaw Cable offers a "quality of service" upgrade for their own VoIP service. Vonage complains to the CRTC about Shaw's $10 surcharge on Vonage users, calling it a hidden Vonage tax.

April 2006 - Time Warner's AOL blocks all e-mails that mention www.dearaol.com, an advocacy campaign opposing the company's pay-to-send e-mail scheme. An AOL spokesman calls the issue an unintentional "glitch."

July 2006 - Canadian telephone giant Telus blocks access to voices-for-change.ca, a website supporting the company's labour union during a labour dispute, as well as over 600 other websites, for about 16 hours.

Source: Save the Internet (savetheinternet.com).



Hmmm...I'm ABC(for example) internet provider (ISP) and I'm putting up a new voip (internet phone) ... I think i'll make all the other voip's flowing through my network stop working ... ! yeah , thats a great idea !

Saddam, co-defendants sentenced to hang

Article

*sniff*

I'm gonna miss that guy. The beard, the attitude , the constant telling of the judges where you can go and what you can do with yourself when you get there, it all had a certain attractiveness to it.

Of course he has to die, he's a dictator who's murdered more of his own people than we will possibly know.

Of course it was a Kangaroo court. He WAS the law in old Iraq and there is no getting around that. He did as he pleased and yes , it was LEGAL. Not very nice, but legal.

And of course he's a threat to middle east stability. He invaded his own neibours after all (Kuwait comes to mind).

And of course there were no weapons of mass destruction. But did there really need to be ? Hasn't he done enough without them to deserve the noose ?

Still...they could have dragged it out a bit longer.

Gonna miss that old rascal.

Election Booby Trap

So , I was thinking, if I was prime minister Harper , and I pretty much knew that I had six months in office before getting the boot, and I pretty much knew that the Liberals were coming back ... how could I booby trap things for them ?

At this point , the television blares something about our doomed Kyoto Accord, and I look at it , and I have an epiphany.

He did't actually break the Kyoto Accord did he ? He just got the opposition , INCLUDING the Liberals, saying how awful he was and how Canada really should abide by the accord.


Can't you just see it ? Six months from now , there's been an election, the Liberals are now in power, and now they're the ones Big Business is bribing money to to get out of it.
And Harpers conservatives sweetly come along with this big list of quotes , "You said this on this date about Kyoto , you said that on that date about Kyoto ... what do you mean you suddenly want to pull out ?"

If you wanted to try and lock the Liberals on course for Kyoto , and you know your minority government could never do much about it ... this would be a good attempt.

This would be a good booby trap to leave behind. Hang them with their own words.

CSR Sun life Insurance

CSR = Customer Service Representative.

I met a friend from work the other day in my favorite coffee shop , we're both CSR's , but while I stayed in technical support fixing computers, he moved on. To Sun Life Insurance, which is who's paying out my short term disability. He's a CSR there too, answering the phone, talking to yahoo's like me.

I asked him about all the paper work and forms and stuff I have to fill out, and the answer was not really what i expected.

It's his job to keep us sick people running around. Go here, go there. Hoping we'll get depressed and give it up. Because if we don't fill out those forms , they don't have to pay us. It's all a game he said, and you'd be surprised how much they save just by insisting on one or two extra sheets of paper, one extra trip to the doctor to sign one more document...how many people just give it up as a bad job...

Made a special trip today to get my latest piece of paper signed from that company. That conversation echoing in my mind. Totally unfair, they know I'm not going to get better in just a few weeks. But at least now I know how this game is played.

8 dog night

Ah the beauty of an unfettered parliment.

apparently the forien affairs minister leaned over to a friend and whispered that his ex girlfriend , now a member of the opposition and a minister of parliment , was something of a dog.

Apparently , 8 keen eared opposition ministers heard this whisper, though the near by microphones sitting at EVERYONE'S desks did not , and signed affidavids to that effect.

Which is increadably stupid.

Why ?

Do you honestly immagine 8 opposition ministers, 8 people known to hate our current government , are sitting there like vultures within two or feet of the minsiter , listening to his every whisper ?

The very fact that there are 8 such affidavids merely confirms that politicians will tell any lie, and sign any peice of paper. Come on , 8 people listening in would look like a football huddle ! Hard to miss !

It's an 8 dog night that day in parliment , when the Liberals don't hesitate to tell even the most ridiculous and unbelievable lies. And these people are likely to win the next election ?

Sheesh !