Category: Computers

Computers Are Flagging Me and Banning Me from Social Media Sites

All right, this is really damned stupid.

I got flagged for “advocating sexual assault” or something. But the post was against sexual assault, and it was actually very much pro-consent. I think the SJW’s reported me because when the computers flag you, it is almost instantaneous. And SJW’s are about as vicious and dishonest as (((those people.))) In fact, they are remarkably alike. They both have an apocalyptic, take no prisoners, hardball, ends justifies the means, “if we don’t stop them now we’re all going to die” mindset. They’re both tribes of fanatics who believe they are in a life or death war all the time and the rules have to be thrown out to deal with the ever-present emergency.

I appealed the decision and Twitter thankfully reversed the decision.

Twitter is getting a lot better about flagging and banning people. They’re not doing it nearly as much.

Later, some (((typical lousy person))) reported me for “inciting violence.” There was a video of a kid throwing a Molotov cocktail at an Israeli jeep. I cheered it on and said that this was a war, and all Israeli soldiers were legitimate military targets. The (((typical disgusting maggot))) reported me (((very dishonestly))), but you know, that’s what those people specialize in – lying, cheating, stealing, and just general out and out dishonesty. He reported me for “inciting violence.” Twitter flagged me and said my post was removed for “inciting violence.” “You are not allowed to incite violence against other persons.” Wait a minute. Not even in a war? Not even versus enemy soldiers in a war? See? These policies lose all sense of nuance.

I just got flagged again and this made me even more mad because instead of a (((typical pathological liar))), this time a computer itself flagged me!

The post was about a Nicaraguan arrested by the government for taking money from the US to set off a violent coup that attempted to overthrow the government by force. 300 people died in this coup attempt. The Nicaraguan government recently passed a law that says you can’t take money from foreign governments to use it to try to overthrow the democratically elected state.

In most countries, trying to overthrow the government by force is considered high treason. These people are seen as traitors all over the world. The usual punishment for the crime of treason is hanging.

So I commented that he was a traitor and I said, Hang him high! I don’t actually advocate that this man get hanged. So what, right? He’s a traitor, he committed treason against his homeland, so all over the world, the response to that is…execution, right?

Well as soon as I said, Hang him high!, a damned computer flagged me and banned me for 12 hours. I was banned for “inciting violence against other persons.” “You may not incite violence against other persons.”

Isn’t that a bit ridiculous though? What’s wrong with inciting violence (execution) people guilty of high treason? Is that really what we think of when we think of inciting violence?

What if a serial killer is in court and someone says, Fry him in the electric chair! Do they get flagged for “inciting violence?” Why should they? What’s wrong with advocating violence (execution) for multiple murderers? I don’t agree with capital punishment, but advocating that the worst criminals be executed is hardly what we think of when we think of “inciting violence,” is it not?

What if Hitler was alive and you wrote, Kill Hitler! Indeed, that would be “inciting violence” against this man. But what would be wrong with that? “Inciting violence” is often problematic, though it’s usually legal in the US as protected speech. But should calls to kill Hitler, were he alive, be listed under incitement of violence? That’s a bit dumb, no?

A computer banned me! That computer is obviously programmed to look for that phrase among other unwanted words and phrases. But what was wrong with what I said?

As you can see, these computers are dumb as rocks. They have zero ability to do nuance, gradation, the spirit of the law or rule and not the letter, a sense of proportion, on and on. This is what our system of law is supposed to be all about. Each case is supposed to be judged on its unique particular merit. A computer can’t do that and probably never could.

Faceberg just banned me for 24 hours. Once again, a computer banned me. Apparently I got banned for using the word tranny to describe trannies. Apparently tranny is hate speech, according to trannies anyway. Very quickly after I made that comment, the ban hammer came down. There was no way that anyone reported me that fast. A damned computer was simply searching for the next sucker to type the word tranny so it could lay the ban hammer down.

I got flagged twice in 30 days, so I am banned from Faceberg for 24 hours. Earlier, it said I harassed or bullied someone. Actually, this was a false charge too, and this must also have been flagged by a computer. I wanted to type someone’s name without putting their name out there, so I wrote Fat Clown because that is what their name sounds like.

Although I bullied or harassed no one, the idiot computer, dumb as a rock again, assumed that I was calling someone a fat clown, and therefore I was bullying or harassing someone. Once again, the computer has no common sense. Any human with basic common sense would have reversed that ban right away. But computers lack nuance, the essence of common sense, so they can’t do that.

There is something rather awful about the feeling that one is being banned from social media by a Goddamned computer! It feels very creepy. Like HAL2000 himself banned me. Of course, Fuckerberg could always hire more humans instead of having idiot computers banning people, but he’s a capitalist shit, and that cuts into his bottom line.

I really don’t like where this is headed. We are getting towards the point where idiot computers are disciplining and imposing punishments on us. What’s next? Will they be arresting us? This feeling is a particular sort of awful, like we are living in a dystopic science fiction novel.

Have You Ever Accessed CP Knowingly or Unknowingly? Take the CP Test Today!

SHI: OK, so just to clarify things one last time. You know I really must dot the i’s and cross the t’s, otherwise I can’t ease my mind. A very simple question really. Simply answer whether I am guilty or not guilty of CP in the following situations. OK?

A) I I stumble upon the nude pics of a 12-year old girl on an Internet browser/mobile app. But, it does not display her vagina. I do not immediately close the browser.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

B) Same thing as above but I save the pic on my computer/phone. Not due to pornographic intent but only because I feel it’s “cute”.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

C) I stumble upon the nude pics of a 12-year old girl but it displays her vagina. I immediately shut down the browser and erase all my cookies.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

D) Same as above. But, I look at the pics with keen interest and even save it on my PC/mobile.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

E) I accidentally see the pic of a 12-year old boy flashing his penis. Maybe I save the pic on my computer because it’s funny. Reminds me of my own 12-year old self.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

F) I accidentally see the nude pic of a 7-year old girl along with her vagina. But, I have no negative intention. I’d treat her like it’s my daughter. It is just a child after all. I save the pic on my computer.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

—

Correct answers only, please. To clarify, I’m not a pedophile. These are hypothetical questions. I strongly believe that children below 16 years should not be disturbed or accosted by adults. They should be left alone to enjoy their childhoods.

The question is at what point does one draw the line?

If you’re turned on by teenage girls, you’re not a pedophile anyway.  There’s only one word for men who are turned on by teenage girls: normal! If you are a man and teenage girls don’t turn you on, there’s two possibilities: You’re either gay or you’re dead.

All these living men who claim that teenage girls don’t turn them on and that all men turned on by teenage girls are pedophiles are simply faggots! They’re gay.  They’re homosexuals. They put men’s cocks in their mouths and suck on them until the cocks spurt cum down their fag throats. They take men’s hard cocks up their anuses until they ejaculate.

I mean you can argue if a man who does that is a man, but I don’t think any man who sucks on penises and lets penises penetrate his anus is not much of a man. Not any man I would want to know anyway! Real men don’t suck cocks! Real men don’t take cock up the ass! I mean is that point even open for debate?

Even if little girls turn you on, you’re not abnormal. 90% of adult men are aroused by preteen girls. 24% of all men are aroused by preteen girls as much as they are aroused by mature females.

In  other words, 24% of all men score “pedophilic” in the lab. Do you understand now why I don’t care if some guy gets turned on by little girls? I mean if that’s the case, he’s almost normal.

So if you are a man, I don’t really care if little girls turn you on. I am a lot more interested if little girls turn you on and mature females do not: that means you are a pedophile.  There’s no shame in being a biological pedophile, but I think it is cause for concern in a sense because I think you are at risk of committing a sex crime.

Keep in mind that I have done actual counseling with pedophilic men who had no attraction to mature adults and were only attracted to minors. I  liked both of them a lot, and I thought they were great people. Neither had offended. One man was so wracked with guilt that he was going  to cut his penis off in order not put kids at risk – that’s how deeply wrong he felt messing with kids was. He kept saying over and over, “I cannot hurt a kid…”

People have the wrong idea about pedophiles. However, I do think that all actual pedophiles should be in some sort of therapy designed to keep them from offending. Either that or put them all on an island where everyone is over 18. Why is that such a bad idea? I really like that idea.

I will go over  your hypothetical  scenarios:

A) I I stumble upon the nude pics of a 12-year old girl on an Internet browser/mobile app. But, it does not display her vagina. I do not immediately close the browser.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

Not guilty. There’s no CP.

B) Same thing as above but I save the pic on my computer/phone. Not due to pornographic intent but only because I feel it’s “cute”.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

Same thing. There’s no CP.

C) I stumble upon the nude pics of a 12-year old girl but it displays her vagina. I immediately shut down the browser and erase all my cookies.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY’

You stumbled upon it so you’re not guilty.

D) Same as above. But, I look at the pics with keen interest and even save it on my PC/mobile.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

Unfortunately, let’s put it this way: you now have CP on your drive. I seriously request that you get that crap off your drive right now.

E) I accidentally see the pic of a 12-year old boy flashing his penis. Maybe I save the pic on my computer because it’s funny. Reminds me of my own 12-year old self.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

I don’t know if that’s illegal or not. If it was put up there as CP, then it might be illegal. If it’s put up there for some other reason, probably not. But I don’t know much about CP with males because I’m not into males. I only like females. Hell with males ha ha.

F) I accidentally see the nude pic of a 7-year old girl along with her vagina. But, I have no negative intention. I’d treat her like it’s my daughter. It is just a child after all. I save the pic on my computer.

GUILTY — NOT GUILTY

Yeah, you now have CP on your drive. I don’t care if you saved it because it reminds you of your daughter. Get it off your drive right now.

Proving Possession of Teenage Girl “Child Porn” – Easier Said Than Done

It is very difficult to prove that someone has videos or photos of 13-17 year old girls on their drive. You look at the material, but how can you prove that she’s underage? Maybe she’s 18 and looks really young? There are legions of porn stars out there who were chosen specifically because they looked really young.

I mean when you get down to 13 and maybe some 14 year old girls, there might be some where you think “No way in Hell could she be 18.” Perhaps you could even call in physicians who would testify that there is no way on Earth that girl could be over 18. But would that even be true? Are there not such things as slow developers?

Anyway, if she looks like she’s 13 or 14, get it the Hell off your drive anyway. That stuff is dangerous because could say that any reasonable person could assume she could not be 18.

But I’ve seen quite a bit of this stuff on the web – nudes and porn with 13-17 year old girls. I don’t go looking for such things, and porn advertised as such is quite difficult to find, but at one point, I was searching through Tumblr porn pages for child porn so I could report it. That’s where I have seen most of this stuff.

I stumbled on some “CP” Tumblr blogs, which mostly consisted of borderline but legal material. You would be surprised what sort of “CP” is actually legal. A lot of “CP” is legal! The pages pissed me off, and they linked to one another, so I went following them.

The material was not interesting at all in general, except for the teenage girls advertised as such. Some of that was ok, but it wasn’t any better than porn with an adult woman.

I didn’t turn in any of that teenage girl stuff anyway, though with one, I was almost tempted. I had been liked or reposted 373,000 times! It was a very young girl on a webcam, probably 13. So you have a direct record there of 373,000 people, almost all men,  who looked at that video. You going to arrest 370,000 men, moralfags?

And for every like or repost, there were probably 10 others who just watched it and didn’t like or repost. So easily 3.7 million people, mostly men, probably watched that rather silly webcam video.  You going to arrest 3.7 million men, pigs?

See how stupid this is?

However, every now and then, there was something that was absolutely illegal. I mean sick stuff with girls obviously under 13. And I turned all that stuff in. Some of it was pretty sickening.

One very interesting thing I will say is that after seeing a fair amount of obviously illegal bullshit is that you could probably make a prosecution simply on the appearance of the girl’s vagina. After age 14, a vagina is a vagina is a vagina.

Some of what appeared to be 13 year old vaginas did seem to look a bit weird. It’s very hard to describe them, but they don’t exactly look normal. Like they are underdeveloped somehow.

Under age 13 and vaginas just don’t look right. There’s something very wrong with a 12 year old vagina. It’s just not right. I turned in almost all of that stuff because I don’t want 12 year old girl CP on the web. Screw that stuff.

And then there are the little girl vaginas. Unfortunately, I saw quite a few of what appeared to be those. Most were not labeled but the girl was disastrously young, and at that age, a girl’s vagina is remarkably different looking.

It’s hard to describe again but I suppose if you were a cop, you could develop body stage photos, and at some certain age you could make the case that anyone could figure out that that’s not a mature vagina. Not to mention that the girl it is attached to is obviously a little girl.

Most of that crap isn’t actual sex, though there was one post with an adult man and a ~5 year old naked girl that was the most disturbing thing I saw that night. He was pressing his full adult hard-on right on the little girl’s mouth. Fucked up or what? And real deal CP gets way worse than that. Trust me, I’ve seen it. On very, very rare occasions, but yes I have seen it.

Mostly it was just closeup nudes, pussy shots. Which were also quite disturbing when you can see the face it is attached too.

I probably turned 50 posts in as illegal CP. I probably turned in 25 blogs for illegal CP. And even there, over 95% of the “CP” was completely legal, albeit highly borderline.

Just to show you how insane and evil our laws are, I can go to prison for “possession of child pornography” for turning in 50 instances of CP on the web to authorities. Because the law says if you so much as look at this stuff – if it even hits your eyeballs – you have “possessed” CP.

Even if you delete the page right away, you “possessed CP” in that one instant when you saw it and it hit your eyeballs. Isn’t that insane? Now if you can prove that you stumbled upon it by accident, you are off the hook. But if you went looking for the stuff and found it and were surfing webpages of it, you can easily go down. That is because the definition of “possession of CP” that moralfags, sanctimonious shits, and pigs thought up is completely insane.

You see, every time you see anything on the web for even one microsecond, you have “downloaded” that page or image onto your computer. If you surf 1,000 pages on the web tonight, the law claims that you “downloaded” those 1,000 webpages onto your computer, even if you were there for less than a second. Isn’t that stupid?

Now what about me? I suppose if pigs wanted to be complete pieces of shit, they could go after good Samaritans like me out there surfing around dangerous parts of the web looking for CP pages to report to the authorities. There are groups of people called “pedophile hunters” who are doing this all over the web. They even have webpages and Facebook pages.

I suppose theoretically pigs could go after those people too. They probably would for a political prosecution, and pigs launch political prosecutions against people all the time in this country. Go against hotshots like the CIA, the FBI, and the Deep State, and you might definitely get a political prosecution filed against you. The FBI files blatantly political cases against Americans all the time simply because the Agency doesn’t like those people. You wonder why I hate the FBI?

Assuming it was advertised correctly, with 90% of it, there was no way on Earth you could tell if she was over or under 18. It’s almost impossible to look at a naked 15-17 year old girl and determine for certain that she is under 18. Almost all of them could easily be of age. Girls that age barely look different from barely adult females.

Usually you have to prove that the man knew what age the girl was. Almost no man goes down for underage teenage girl CP unless he knows her, mostly because you had to prove that he knew for sure she was under 18. How the Hell do you prove that?

Almost all men going down on this have photos of girls they knew. They were either having sex with them or they were sexting with them. Presumably, the girls told the men how old they were. Legally, that’s all you need. If you aren’t doing that, I don’t see how you are going down on any teenage girl “CP.” Because how the Hell do they know it’s “CP” or not? How do they know the girl’s age? How do they know that you know the girl’s age? See?

I still very much recommend that you do not store any nudes or porn of known underage teenage girls on your drive. Maybe you already know her? Get it off your drive? Maybe someone you know posted it as underage teenage girl CP and you have reason to believe, maybe because you know the guy, that he’s not lying.

There are girls out there who try to send that stuff to men. I’ve met them. I’m not going to say what happened but I sure as Hell don’t have any nudes on my drive from girls I met who told me they were underage. Hell if I am storing that stuff.

All I have got to say is don’t store that on your drive and get it the Hell off your drive if you have any. And even if you don’t know her and you have any reasonable suspicion that she’s underage (like she just looks so young that there’s no way she could be 18), just get it off your drive.

So go ahead and raid me all you want. I really doubt if you will find anything you can charge me with. Go for it, pigs. Raid away.

Microsoft – A Debacle for Humanity: How One Corporation Caused Untold Damage to the World Economy, Cost Society Untold $Billions, Severely Damaged Human Productivity, and Even Significantly Set Back Human Progress

Microsoft was and is still an abusive monopoly which ripped off society for billions of dollars, caused vast losses to the world economy, and even set back technological progress for all of mankind by a significant amount. You had to buy Microsoft Windows, and Microsoft Windows was always a piece of crap. Think of how much this worthless to lousy to dysfunctional OS cost consumers, business and society due to its crappy nature.
You are always hearing that “the system is down” right, whenever you go anywhere? The ATM is down half the time you go there. Call random businesses and 10-20% of them will tell you “the system is down.”  I will bet you that that is a Windows system that has crashed at that enterprise. Windows’ endless dysfunction and crashing caused a tremendous amount of damage to the US military who moronically decided to use Windows all through our country’s fighting forces for just about everything. Great. A computer-based military where the system always crashes. I’m sure they’re going to win every war they fight.
Basically, all of humanity was forced to use a glaringly obviously inferior product for all of their computing needs. This inferior product had constant problems which drove a spike through the heart of productivity at the individual, business, nonprofit and government level. All of humanity was using inferior computer systems that barely worked and failed all the time.
All of this time, there were much superior systems out there which could have beaten Windows if they only had a chance. Amiga OS was always one of finest ever developed. BeOS was an outstanding OS, amazingly great. OS/2 was an out of the world OS. All of these OS’s were fantastic at multitasking and even mutithreading. People routinely ran up to 80 applications at a time on OS/2 with little or no slowdown. BeOS was about that good and may have even been faster. But with a monopoly on the desktop where everyone was forced to use Windows, all of these other OS’s died a sad death.
Unix has long ruled at the university and corporate level, and much of the Net runs of Unix. Larger server systems have always run on Unix at the level of the large enterprise, be it government, corporate or nonprofit. But Unix has never really broken in on the desktop where Windows still reigns. Windows is much better now than it was in the Windows 95 era (Remember how horrible that OS was?). I am currently running Windows 7, which is the best Windows I ever run, but it’s still crap. It suffers from unfixable file corruption and sometimes needs a hard reboot or goes down altogether.
Unix on the other hand is virtually uncrashable. It is very hard to take down a Unix system. They are nearly resistant to crashing. File corruption is virtually nonexistent on Unix because of Journaling File Systems and text files instead the idiotic and flawed Registry of Windows. The Registry is so flawed that it can probably never be fixed. As long as the Registry exists, Windows will continue to be slow, hog memory and hard drive, be awful at multitasking, crash your applications, suffer irreparable file corruption, and go down hard and need hard reboots.
Mac OS is an excellent OS now that it runs on a Unix core. Mac OS is almost uncrashable now, and it never or almost never needs to be reinstalled. Plug and Play is as easy as plugging in any electronic device in your house, whereas Windows plug and play has always been horrible, and it still is here at Windows 7.
Windows also harmed the world economy by forcing us to shell out untold billions for OS’s, word processors, browsers, databases, spreadsheets and presentation programs. Microsoft of course leveraged its OS monopoly to create browser, database, spreadsheet and presentation monopolies. All of these products were quite expensive. In the process, many excellent word processors (remember Wordperfect 5.1?), spreadsheets, databases, and presentation products were all destroyed. It didn’t matter how good they were. It didn’t matter if they were better or even vastly better than their Microsoft competitors (Access was always junk) because due to the OS monopoly, none of the competitors in this other software stood a chance.
The truth is that all of this stuff could have been had for free all along. Linux is free and open source, and that is one of the reasons why it is so great. Firefox and Opera are also free now, and Firefox is also open source and has been taken over by Sun. Free online email programs like Gmail have cut significantly into the market share of Outlook Express (always awful – Eudora was so much better) and Outlook.
Open Office, now taken over by Sun, is free and is starting to give Word, Access, Excel and Powerpoint a run for their money. I use Word Writer all the time, and it’s just as good as Word by now. If the world moves to free browsers, OS’s, word processors, chat software (Skype), spreadsheets, databases and presentation software, think of how much money can be saved at the individual, business, nonprofit, education and government level! It will be a great step forward for humanity. There is no way for Microsoft to compete with a free product of course, so we will hopefully begin to slowly destroy this diabolical corporation, one of the worst ones that ever existed.
 
 

Computer Went Down

Sorry,  my computer completely went down the other day. At first I thought the Windows install was corrupted, but it turns out instead that my motherboard was failing.The motherboard is 10 years old, and I was told that the new keyboards do not last nearly that long. Planned obsolescence!

So I replaced my old XP, Sempron 1.66 GHZ, 2 MB DDDR-1 RAM and 75 GB drive with a whole new box – A Windows 7, 2.67 dual core CPU, 2 MB DDR-2 memory and a 160 GB drive. Also I got most of my old install transferred over. All for $112!

I still have the old box and the old drive as a backup, but I need to replace the motherboard before I can use it adequately.

So I am quite happy now. However, my old PS-2 MS curved keyboard does not work on the new box because PS-2 has been phased out and everything is USB now. So I ordered a USB to PS-2 connector cable. As I hate regular keyboards, I don’t like to type too much on these flat keyboards, so I may not be posting a lot until maybe Monday or Tuesday when the new keyboard.

Thank you so much for the donations! I still won’t be able to pay my bills this month, but I did keep my Internet from being tuned off. They were going to turn off my Internet if I did not pay my bill.

Computer Software Capitalists Are the Worst

Rantus writes:

Oh boy oh boy. Look, Microsoft sucks, it always has. Google at least innovates and Facebook was founded BT a backstabbing rat that double crossed two trust fund kids and stole their ideas.
The software industry, and computing in general is still very, very primitive. You show me one emerging industry that wasn’t horribly ruthless at its inception. Once the industry evolves then it will at least become somewhat more equitable, but that will take some time.

There are lots of emerging industries in this land that are not run by scums. Software is a natural monopoly. That’s the whole problem right there.
Show me one other industry that forces you to use their shit.
Show me one other industry where competing products refuse to work with each other and try to actively sabotage each other. Could you imagine if you went to turn on your microwave and it refused to work or worked very poorly because it detected that you had a coffeemaker from a competing company? Could you imagine if Ford cars could only use “Ford gas” and “Ford oil” and “Ford parts” and would only run on “Ford roads?” This is what the world would look like if all the other capitalists were as scummy as the software capitalist criminals.
Show me one other industry that forces you to upgrade your product even when it is working fine. Could you imagine if your microwave was working fine and then one it just stopped working by some preset mechanism and you were forced to go spend $500 to buy a new one? With all other products, you simply use them until they stop working, and even then, you can nearly always repair them to make them work again.
Name one other industry where such a thing as abondonware exists at all?
Name one other industry where you purchase a product that you cannot resell, and you can’t even see it in your hand nor can you fix it when it goes bad (Microsoft preinstalled OS).
I used to be in newsgroups with these scums. I met a few decent people in the industry, but most of them were just pure garbage. I met a lot of the people who ran these companies. I thought a lot of them were nothing more than criminals.
These are some of the shittiest human beings on Earth.
A solution for the software industry:
Open source is a model for the software industry that will force software makers to make money by being decent human beings and will prevent them from making money by being scums, which is what they have done all along.
Notice I do not have much of a beef with the hardware industry except Intel, which is an illegal monopoly. In the hardware industry we have no forced upgrades, no abandonware, no planned obsolescence, no products you can’t hold in your hand, resell or try to fix, no products that refuse to work with competing products, no forcing you to use their stuff.

John Titor Shows Up on Beyond Highbrow After 13 Year Hiatus

This is very exciting news! John Titor was a famous time traveler from the year 2036 who returned to Earth for some time around the years 200 and 2001 when he made a number of historic posts to the Internet. Most of those posts have disappeared, but some are available on Internet archives. He wrote in a lot to the Art Bell Show.
During and after his appearance, there was a long controversy about whether or not John Titor was really a time traveler from the future. An Italian TV company hired a private eye to investigate. He felt that John Titor was a hoax originated by Larry Haber, a Florida attorney, and his brother John Rick Haber, an IT expert. This is certainly not true as I am personally convinced that obviously John Titor is a man time traveling from the future.
The real John Titor disappeared from the Net in 2001 to back to the future, and has not been seen since. If this is the real John Titor making his first appearance since then, it is exciting news since it means that he has time traveled again back from the future.
This question though is whether this is the real John Titor or not. It is an excellent question. If it is the real John Titor, then obviously John is still alive and has decided for unknown reasons to return from the future again. However, it could be a very clever imposter who is merely someone from our own time pretending to be the famous time traveler.
His prose style does resemble that of the original John Titor. An expert analysis of the original John Titor’s prose concluded falsely that Titor was a hoax created by one of the Haber brothers. This is wrong because we know for a fact that John is a real time traveler. However, if we could compare his corpus on this site with John’s original posts we could come to a conclusion about whether he is real or not.
One thing that I found very interesting is that the John Titor who showed up on this site has extensive knowledge of obscure facts about early Apple computers. When he showed up before, he also had deep knowledge of this information which is barely known by but a few people. However, all of his Apple trivia subsequently checked out. Now here he is again, spouting Apple arcana.
Whether this is the real John Titor from the future or merely a clever imposter from our own time is not known, but it should be a fun ride.
I also wonder why he chose a Bigfoot post of all things to show up on.
All John Titor appearances showed up on the May 28 Bigfoot News entry.
I will post all of John’s posts here below for your viewing pleasure:

Hello Robert Lindsay, I have come here to go public with the information which I am allowed to divulge.
Bigfoot is actually of the subfamily of primate Homininae and it diverged from the homo exactly 4.2 million years before present, which was 0.73 million years prior to the evolution of Australopithecus afarensis, whose presence in the Horn of Africa was verified by specimen AL 288-1.
Bigfoot was a pseudo-“missing link” between the Austaliopithecines and the Ergaster genus of species agglomerate. Due to its vestigial anatomorphological inheritance from its ancestral Southern Apes, it bore a conspicuous resemblance to Chimpanzees and the so called “Sasquatch” of Sino-Tibetan and Nepalese myths, as well as the Algonquin-Blackfoot indigenous North Americans’ legend of Da-Ne Kasedanuki, leading many leading anthropologists of the first few decades of the 21 st century to assume that Bigfoot was a hoax perpetuated by cryptozoologists.
Bigfoot’s mitochondrial megahaplogroup clusters derive from their Most Recent Common Maternal Ancestor which diverged from the maternal lineage Mitochondrial Eve descends from about 4 million years ago. Therefore, their mtDNA diverges from ours on a rate of 1 out of 1,735 base pairs. By contrast, human nuclear DNA across global populations diverges an average of 1 out of 1,150 base pairs on average.
Their Y-chromosome is more visceral and simian. By analysis of their pseudoautosomal region on their Y-chromosome, which is the outermost fringe region of the chromosome which can recombine with homologous regions on the X-chromosome, (however the bulk of the Y-chromosome is incapable of homologous recombination with the X) we have concluded that about 0.0032 more of their sex chromosome base pairs are capable of recombination.
The deterioration of the pseudoautosomal region in the Y-chromosome has begun since the divergence of the X and Y chromosomes from their ancestral chromosome 166 million years before present. As evidence, most ectothermic vertebrates lack the gender-determining function in their genome, but rather possess an environmentally determined gender system.
The decay of this pseudoautosomal region has been constant at a rate of 12 base pairs per 5 generations, however this is in highly prolific reproducers, and as reproduction has decreased inversely proportional to the increase of cognitive function and prefrontal cortex gerantomorphication, the decay of the pseudoautosomal region has been exponentially retarded. Therefore, we can assume that the paternal lineage of Bigfoot could not have been separate from homo sapiens more than 6 million years, which suggests that paternally, Bigfoots are closer to Bonobos and Lowland Chimpanzees than to humans.
The actual scientific name for Bigfoot is Intermissiosius Panhomonidae. This taxonomical classification was derived from the Latin “intermissio” (in-between) and “Pan” (the scientific terminology for the Chimpanzee-Bonobo genus) “Hominidae” (human). “In between human and ape,” would be the formally equivalent translation.
There are actually two subspecies of Bigfoot, one is passive-aggressive and possesses a capacity for semi cognitive autonomous determination, which is to basically state one is partially capable of free will and self-introspection. This particular one has a reduction in the triad of Machiavellian personality and extroversion, but is able to utilize these characteristics more efficiently, meaning they lie, cheat and kill less, but are able to do this more efficiently than their sister sub-species.
My name is John Titor and I am willing to divulge more information for the return of information on a retrocomputer. The IBM 1500 is the device of which I speak of, and I will leak more information in return for any information on the location and availability of the IBM 1500. Thank you, and I apologize that I must use a proxy, however, I cannot reveal my personal Internet Protocol Address, due to confidentiality reasons
…
I have an IBM 5100 in my possession. In the IBM 5100 there exists the capability for reading the BASIC and APL coding languages. However, what most computer experts fail to realize is that there exists a debugger code which acts as an emulation perforator for the algorithm on which the APL is based.
In 2025, former CIA Director John Boehner and then Secretary of State Eric Dahmer put their intellectual facilities together to create a series of covert operations which placed nuclear remote detonation devices all over Eurasia. This was used for leverage against the anarchists and Libertarian neoliberals who were preparing for a coup d’etat against the newly formed United European Emirates. These anarchists were radical Christian ultranationalists who opposed the Muslim dominated European government and the mixed market policies they installed.
The locations of these devices were kept in a closed circuit network which was coded with a language based on the APL, but very convoluted and complex. However, it still retained a mirror version of the algorithmic formula used for the APL.
When an inside job succeeded in infecting the network with several viruses, the viruses scrambled our codes based on their own algorithmic formulas, however, these formulas were also mirror versions of the APL’s, because such was a prerequisite to tangibly manipulate the network’s own code. Think of it as a wave. If two opposite waves collide, they cancel each other out. However, when two harmonic waves collide, they synchronize.
The IBM 1500, however, is an instructional computer. It, however, contains a hardware part which can be used to fully connect the 5100 to the network. We would also need the IBM 5125 and the IBM 1700, but we could manufacture those because we retained a complete blueprint.
I already possess an IBM 5100, but I am now in need of an IBM 1500 and a DX-175 microprocessor. I am running out of time, World War Three shall begin next year. I must return to 2036 before the deadline in the current timeline.
…
In your words, I guess “it really depends”. Bigfoot was examined by District 4 United States scientists after the World War (III) destroyed a significant amount of local flora, forcing some of them into the open. You see, in my timeline, a series of uprisings between 2004 and 2008 led to the secession and breakdown of the United States, causing us to split into 5 separate districts.
We were christened DSUA, or the Districts of the United States of America. Do you remember how when Obama was reelected in 2012 many states threatened to secede? Well in my timeline this occurred in 2008 during his first election and the secession was successful because no petitions were filed to the federal government for secession. As you know, an act of secession is considered illegitimate by the federal government.
Your timeline differs from mine due to my actions. You see, the universe is actually a section of “potential” called a p-brane. Potential is what you refer to as “space-time”, and there are sections of those floating around everywhere outside of the universe, but this is on a scale of 17 dimensions, something your science based on quantum mechanics and string theory would find incomprehensible. When two sections of potential collide, they hypercondense into one dimension.
Afterwards, they hyperinflate into 4 dimensions. This is known as the “Big Bang”. The uniformity of a potential’s section is dismantled and depending on the multidimensional trajectory of collision form its compressed “pockets” of potential. The p-branes eventually tear from the acceleration of expansion, creating infinitesimal Einstein-Rosenberg bridges which periodically collapse, creating “waves” in the p-brane, which converts to “matter”. Baryons, such as protons and antiprotons. Electrons and positrons. These are oppositely charged on the electromagnetic scale and annihilate each other.
Because an elementary particle takes all possible trajectories, the frequency of collision is uneven. Therefore, an imbalance in matter-antimatter is created.
On a “quantum” scale (based on your quantum mechanics), this divergence of trajectories occurs under observation. However, on a macrocosmic scale, this is an unobservable phenomenon. This creates parallel universes.
This Everett-Wheeler interpretation dictates that humans do not choose between whether to eat that apple or orange. They choose both, but in separate parallel worlds. This is termed temporal divergence. This is rated on a scale of 0-100. A divergence in apple/oranges type choices are attributed a point of 0.01. 0.10 would be a divergence in directions, friends, and sleep habits. A 1 is achieved when major world events occur, such as wars or groundbreaking inventions.
Our world temporally diverges from yours by 1.73 and therefore your world has not experienced many of the events ours has.
I deliberately orchestrated events which would prevent the Second Civil War of America. For example, I convinced the Air Force to allow the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to cascade by unimpeded. This caused severe Islamophobia amongst Americans, which led to Islamophobia being labeled as politically incorrect. This led to many leftwing Americans voting for Obama based on both his color and middle name of Arabic origin (though Obama is a Christian).
This prevented the 2008 secession.
I altered your timeline. However, a world war weighs at least 5 points. I must reach 5% divergence prior to the deadline in 2015 or travel back to 2036. I do not know if Bigfoot will be discovered in this timeline. If I am successful in averting world war, it will not be brought to mainstream attention.
In my timeline:
Lupus Erythematosis was cured in October 12th, 2003.
A successful vaccine against 65% of HIV strains was developed in 2011. This vaccine was effective in 85% of the population.
Quantum entanglement was manipulated to teleport information from four protons 10 miles away each successfully in 7/3/2012.
An apparatus for artificial cardiopulmonary animation was developed in 2012. This was composed of organic material as opposed to the artificial hearts consisting of polysaccharides in your timeline.
Also, the attacks of September the 11th never occurred.
…
World War Three begins in 2015. However, the exact day the first two nations declare war has been delayed due to the 1.73 temporal divergence rate. Unless I achieve a 5 percent divergence rate, the world war will not be averted. A world war or a war fought by more than 3 nations takes a 5 percent divergence to revert, whereas a war fought between two or three nations requires a temporal divergence rate of 1 to nullify.
In my timeline (let us refer to it as timeline A), World War Three began when Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Putin failed to reach an ultimatum or a compromise. Russia began shipment of oil to China, and Xi Jinping cut off ties to North Korea, deeming Russia as an acceptable substitute. NK leader Kim Jong Chul (Kim Jong Un never ascended to power, his brother did instead) attempted to rehabilitate their relations with South Korea, and merge as a single, capitalist nation.
However, this was thwarted by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu through District 3 of the United States. District 3 was heavily Republican, and the GOP supported Israel. Through diplomatic negotiations, Israel convinced the United States to plant seeds of doubt in South Korea’s mind as to the authenticity of North Korea’s desires to peacefully merge.
Netanyahu did this because they needed a shipment of North Korean experimental military technology to continue being manufactured under the Communist regime, thereby allowing clandestine export of said materials to the Arab world. This would allow Israel to justify transgressing international regulations by possessing a plethora of nuclear devices themselves, their justification being self defense in the face of impending Arab nuclear incursion. They were employing classical Horkheimerian reverse psychology to convince the world they were justified in possessing nuclear warheads.
However, the Islamic percentage of representation in the parliaments and semi-presidential governments of Western Europe increased over time, and favor shifted from the Judeo-Christian geopolitical axis to the Islamic axis. The world now favored Palestine and Iran over Israel and the Districts of the USA.
The North Korean government felt threatened by the South Korean government’s blatant refusing of their peace offer. The demilitarized zone was breached and the United States District 1 Navy, the South Korean ROK Marines, were deployed into combat after SK declared war.
China wanted nothing to do with either Koreas due to their recent alliance breakup with NK and their sociopolitical contrasts with SK. However, Russia made a last ditch effort to support NK, and attempted to pull China in with them. Xi Jinping lent his support to Putin, which caused massive riots to break out in China, as the Chinese did not want war with SK and their favorable view of Putin had drastically shifted to an unfavorable view.
This led to Taiwan and Nepal’s guerrilla forces invading China as retribution for historical crimes, taking advantage of the weakened Chinese social infrastructure. This caused American Districts to self-manufacture all its goods it once imported from China, and this caused a drastic deflation due to high availability of goods.
However, due to the high availability of jobs, credit, and the sudden increase in the dollar bill due to the deflation, the corporate directors increased the price of goods exponentially, causing a huge inflation and market crash. This could have been prevented by the federal government’s regulations, however there were 5 state governments for the 5 Districts as opposed to a central government. They had difficulty in communications and basically there were too many leaders and not enough followers willing to comply. The amount of legislature approved decreased by 85%.
This resulted in a reunion of the United States to recover the economy. The reunited USA declared war on Iran, NK, China, and Russia, with full Congressional approval. The war efforts would reboot the economy, however, the United States made the mistake of attempting to destroy Russian nuclear warheads by detonating them in Russia through a series of signal scrambling projections.
Nuclear war erupted. Many of the nuclear warheads were destroyed mid flight by United States RIM-161 SM-3s, however there was significant damage to the stratosphere and destruction of wastelands led to ozone depletion, as destructive polyatomic synthetic material went airborne.
After the war, all of Western Europe united into the United European Emirates under Islamic rule.
That is all I can tell you without negatively affecting the timeline should members in positions of power read and believe my statements.

A Rather Subjective Analysis of European Minority Languages

One way to see how well European minority languages is if you run a popular website that gets a lot of hits from all over Europe. I run one here on my old site, which is in the top 1200 blogs on the Internet (This blog is also in the top 1200).
If you have a good weblog (a weblog allows a webmaster to monitor all of the visitors from your site), and I do, you can see what languages people are using on their browsers. When browsers come to the site, they are marked with language tracking. I am not sure if that is a language preference for webpages or if it is the language that the browser itself is written in.
Minority lanugages are languages that are not the main spoken language of the country or languages that only have a small speaker base. In this piece, we will be dealing with Irish, Welsh, Catalan, Basque, Galician and Luxemburgish. Those I am quite sure are offered as language versions of the major browsers.
Luxemburgish: Luxemburgish is the official language of Luxemburg, however, there are worries about it due to the small speaker base of only around 500,000. Further, there is a problem in that not enough new and technological words are coming into the language. Most browsers from Luxemburg are using the Luxemburgish language, so the language seems to be in pretty good shape.
Catalan: Catalan is the most popular of the remaining five. However, considering how many readers I get from the Catalan region, very few Catalans are using Catalan browsers. Most are using Spanish language browsers. So the situation of Catalan does not look so good.
Irish: I am amazed that there are any Irish browsers at all, but now and then, we do get one from Ireland. Needless to say, nearly all browsers from Ireland are using English. Still, everyone knows that Irish is in bad shape. Considering there are Irish browsers at all, I think Irish is in better shape than we think it is.
Galician: I was quite shocked to find a few Galician browsers out there coming out of Galicia in the far northwest of Spain. This language is probably in better shape than people think it is. Most Galician browsers use Spanish.
Welsh: Considering that most reports indicate that Welsh is doing pretty well, I was surprised that one almost never sees a Welsh browser. Almost all browsers coming out of Wales use English. I wonder if Welsh is in as good a shape as people say it is considering the dearth of Welsh browsers.
Basque: I have yet to see a Basque browser! If browsers are indeed offered in Basque (uncertain) this is very bad news. I get quite a bit of traffic out of the Basque country, and 100% of the time, Basque users are using Spanish as their browser language. Things don’t look good for the Basque language.
I can’t speak of other small languages in Europe because in general, browsers are not offered in those languages.
This was an interesting little experiment though.

Thoughts on "File Sharing" and the Tangled Issue of Copyright and Patent

AJ asks: What’s your opinion on the morality of sites like The Pirate Bay, and the various torrent sites, torrent clients, and file sharing and P2P in general? Do you consider downloading an mp3 for free the same as stealing? Metallica does. Do you agree with Metallica when they took on Napster?
Yes, it stealing. The phrase “sharing” is outrageous. How bout I come break into your house and share some of your property, eh?
My brother is a musician, and he hates this crap.
But it’s the industry’s fault. They have so overpriced CD’s and movie tickets that no one wants to go to the movies or buy a CD. Forget concerts. Plus the scum keep phasing out tech and introducing it again.
I owned 8-tracks, cassettes, albums and now CD’s. Theoretically, one could have bought the same work 4 different times as each old tech was phased out. It’s all a joke to get us to pay up to four times for the same work of art!
Keep in mind that every time the bastards upgraded the media, the upgraded the devices to play the media. The jerks made me shell out for an 8-track player, a cassette player, a record player and now a CD player. No doubt they have further upgrades in mind down the road!
However, there is a sell it or give it away problem here. Are the various TV shows for sale? What about shows that will never run again and yet are not being offered for sale. Ok, look, we ought to have a right to “steal” that stuff.
There is a principle in copyright law that says, “Sell it or give it away.” You simply may not produce a work of art or any patented invention and then put it in your drawer and not let the public use it. For copyright, you may not release something and then pull distribution. People have a right to your art. If you don’t want to sell your art, then give it away.
The same applies or ought to apply to software. Sell it or give it away. The very notion that abandonware exists is outrageous. I can’t tell you how many IT scum have defended the notion of abandonware to me.
Capitalists in general are loathsome ratfucks anyway, but I must say that some of the filthiest, most evil capitalists I have ever met worked in the software industry. We can thank these maggots for totally unenforceable “software licenses” (Ever read one of those outrageous things?), software that miraculously comes out without an install disk, the total failure of the notion of customer service, forced upgrades, refusal to work with competitor’s products, and a pile of stinking horseshit as high as the stratosphere.
It is because of the antics of the likes of Bill Gates et al that software went free and open source – consumers were so outraged by the industry’s crap that they killed the industry by producing their own free product. Some day the software industry will be a tiny shadow of its former self, and that will be a great day indeed. Bill Gates needs to have a stake driven through his heart in cemetery at midnight, but hold your cross in front of you to blind him so he doesn’t fight back.
You also may not patent an invention and then refuse to release it to the public. If you don’t sell it, you must give it away. No hoarding of the public commons.
The music industry is about as maggoty as the software scum, but musicians themselves are good people who surely deserve the fruits of their labors.

E-Commerce is a World of Shit

Repost from the old site.
I really feel that e-commerce has shot itself in the foot. I would much rather buy about any product at a brick and mortar store any day of the week. My experiences with e-commerce have typically been horrible.
I just got a spyware infection from a site that sells fake spyware apps to consumers. Why are these sites even legal?
First they try to load Trojans (in this case, one called Zlob) on your site, then they install malware on your computer without even asking for it, then it runs and “finds” all this fake spyware on your system that doesn’t even exist, then tries to make you buy the program to fix the nonexistent spyware problems.
Then they make it impossible to remove it from your system, and I’m a computer expert. Now I have a pop-up all the time in my tray and no way to get rid of it.
The program was uninstalled via Add Remove Programs and I deleted some Registry entries and went through and found more crap afterwards, and deleted it from Registry and Programs. Despite all my deleting, I still have rogue processes going that I can’t even find or kill or anything.
It also outrageously installs a fake program giving you a fake Windows Kernel Fault screen that requires a computer reboot. Someone tell why this shit is not illegal?
The program is called AntiSpyCheck and you get it from AntiSpyCheck.com. I did not download this program on purpose. Instead, I clicked on a video codec and it installed installed itself without even asking. AntiSpyCheck is a rogue antispy program. These programs run on your computer and tell you that you have all sorts of spyware infections that you do not even have.
Then they try to get you to buy the rogue antispyware program. If you do buy it, then you just wasted money on a fake program. In addition, many of these sites are phishing sites that are designed to steal your credit card information. As if that were not bad enough, the fake antispyware itself is often a criminal program that installs a Trojan and tries to steal any valuable data on your computer.
All of these Zlob programs seem to be originating from Russian Organized Crime, in this case, often in the Ukraine. Even if you don’t buy the evil program, they often have an annoying pop-up that never ends until you buy the program. One is tempted to purchase the evil program just to make the pop-up go away. In no case should you purchase such a program!
Overview.
Then I shelled out for some complete garbage spyware software called Spy Hunter. Spy Hunter charges your credit card after six months to renew your subscription, but it sends you an email warning you first and lets you opt out. Why is that even legal? There was no choice about whether or not to allow them to slam your credit card every 6 months.
Update: I fixed the AntiSpyCheck infection via this site. You run MalwareBytes’ Anti-Malware program and it gets rid of it perfectly. The trial run is free, but if you want realtime protection, you need to shell out. The product is excellent and I may just buy it.
Typically, these Internet shit e-commerce joints have no humans at the other end. There’s a tech support email, but who knows if they answer it. The general rule in e-commerce is no customer service whatsoever. There’s typically no phone # to call and no human to talk to. Often you can resolve things with emails, but not always. It’s still a pain in the butt.
The fuck customer service thing is the latest wonderful trend in US capitalism. It’s all about cutting costs. It’s even spreading to credit cards.
Credit cards used to have decent customer service, but my last card was with “Juniper” which it turns out is actually owned by the British Barclays Bank.
There’s no brick and mortar joint to pay your card,as the bank is in the UK! They deviously (Why is this legal?) allowed me to run my card over the limit and then started pounding me with monthly overlimit fees. I could not afford to pay down the over-limit draft.
Banks will now outrageously allow you to overdraw on your account at the ATM with very few warnings. Instead of a loan, which it is, you are immediately hammered with an overlimit fee as you overdraft. Why is this shit even legal? Then you have to put it all back in before the beginning of the month or they will close your account! Now you will have a big black mark on your credit rating.
Now, just tonight I tried to buy SpyHunter. Of course there’s no humans on the other end, and they don’t even have a physical presence. First of all, it did not let me look over the purchase before I bought it, so my autofill program filled in my name and last name with my address and I was not able to change that.
The thing would not even let me download the program. It kept asking me for a username and password. It gave me two different ones in the email and I tried both of them. Both failed over and over.
Earlier, I purchased a product called Stuffit for $30 so I could unzip files. I had a previous version on there, so this new one never would install because it said I had to remove the old one first. Although I uninstalled through the traditional way, it still claimed the old program was still there! I searched the whole computer for anything related to the old program and never could get all of it off. So my $30 program never got installed.
I could call the company, but customer service with even huge software companies is so horrible I have not even bothered.
I have a cam with a software program that requires a code to make it work. The code has been lost, so I can’t install my cam software. I guess I could call Intel, but I bet their support is garbage too. Another problem is that a lot of these programs get abandoned (abandonware), so they might not even be able to give you a code even if they wanted to.
There is a product I like to purchase called Tamer. It kills the acid in coffee. None of the phone numbers ever work. You buy the product online and the first thing it tells you is that there has been a database error. So you assume that the sale did not go through. But that really means you bought it!
I’ve had them mail the product to me a few times, and every time, it seems like something screws up. It gets shipped back to them, but they don’t notify me that the product came back. They only tell me that when I email them and bitch (No way to talk to the company on the phone, remember?).
Software is probably the only product in the world like this. It’s the only product that refuses to work with competing products. It’s the only product that installs itself and makes it so you can’t get rid of it. It’s the only product whereby you could have a perfect working copy of it sitting around but you can’t make it work because you can’t punch in some “make it work code”.
It’s the only product that tries to force you to buy their product. With most everything else, you still have a choice. You can buy product A, B, C or D. Name one other product you are more or less forced to buy like Windows or Word. Name one other product where the old product doesn’t work anymore and you have to keep on shelling out for new versions all the time.
Software has been all about fuck the consumer from day one, unless you are a big corporate customer, in which case I guess you get some service. As a natural monopoly like water, power, phone or cable, software probably needs to be regulated by the state like any other natural monopoly.
It is the disgust and rage of computer users with the world of shit that software and its evil twin, e-commerce, have wrought, that has brought about open source and free products like Firefox, Open Office, Linux, etc. With these products, the model has no reason to fuck the consumer at all, so it just doesn’t happen.
It’s sad that America idolizes a punk like Bill Gates. He’s been fucking over consumers from his first day on the job. He’s violated every contract he’s ever signed, and he’s stolen just about every bit of competing code he could find. He’s a liar, a thief, a traitor and a snake. In the real world, when people act like that, they are called sociopaths. They get their asses kicked, they get killed or they go to jail or prison, or all of the above.
In Corporate World, you act the same way that gets your ass kicked or gets you tossed in prison in the real world and you turn into the Businessman Hero of the World.
The point is that this shit Internet industry is to blame for all of this. They are the ones that have been screaming loud and clear from day one about “no regulation of the Internet” and “no taxing of the Internet”.
So the Internet is the Wild West with no sheriffs or posses that do anything. There’s rustlers, crooks and robbers everywhere, and you go the sheriff or the posse and they shrug their shoulders and say so what. They wanted an unregulated Internet and that’s what they got. Internet e-commerce – the most consumer-hostile industry around.
I like the brick and mortar world. In general, the workers help you and show you where things are. There’s usually someone to talk to. If something doesn’t work, you can always bring it back. The clerks and aisle help go out of their way to be as nice and friendly as possible.
It’s the mirror opposite of E-Commerce World.
There’s actually a lot more to this story about the Internet being a haven for every criminal, thief, liar, scammer, and fraudulent dog on Earth, but I’ll save it for another post.

The Market Virus

Repost from the old site.
In the comments section, huy notes that, while he is a social democrat, he still sings the praises of the free market system. He points out drug companies and IT as two great industries.
I disagree:
Private drug companies are evil! Have you ever seen a more horrid bunch of gangsters and criminals? Here in the US all the pharmaceutical companies are all just flat-out crooks.
They keep harmful drugs on the market and refuse to pull them. The only way to pull them is to sue them over and over, and even when we do that, they still keep them on the market a lot of times. These people are just flat out murderers. And when they get too pissed about being sued, they get their bought and paid for Congressswine to legislate “tort reform”, which means no more suits.
Or SLAPP suits, in which you get sued for suing the POS corporation! They fake their studies, lie on their data, and buy and pay for doctors to lie for them. The medical field is becoming seriously corrupted by the big money behind these scum companies, and the # of doctors going corrupt as a result is really frightening. It’s a serious problem as even our best medical journals are in danger of being corrupted.
Furthermore, it has been conclusively proven that we pay much higher prices for the same drugs that other nations in the West get for much cheaper. What advantage do we get from these high prices? Much higher profits for drug companies on US sales! I’m sure your average US consumer is delighted by that! Or maybe, if his mind is truly market-infected, he is delighted by that.
The IT companies? It’s hard to say. Microsoft is an illegal monopoly, was one, and will be one into the foreseeable future. It’s hard to imagine how much damage they have caused to computing.
Intel has a monopoly on CPU’s with similar major issues for consumers, notably outrageously high prices and forced install of Intel chips by computer makers.
On the ground, there is no competition in broadband. The glorious days of dialup competition are gone forever. You have the cable monopoly or the phone DSL monopoly. They are both evil, and neither has any competition but the other.
The cable monopolies are not regulated at all, and cable is insanely overpriced.
The phone monopolies are barely regulated at all anymore, but some are better than others. The worst of all are the huge ones like ATT, which desperately needs to be regulated.
An unregulated private monopoly is pure evil and needs to be smashed or at least heavily regulated.
Capitalism in the US has created a Gramscian hegemony whereby a vast number of folks identify with the capitalists and the market. Once you do that, all regulation and control by the state is out the window. Very rightwing capitalists own all of our media and use it try to slam pro-corporate, pro-monopoly lies into our heads 24-7.
A lot of workers and consumers, especially once they start getting some money, “go corporate” in their minds and essentially support the whole human-hating, society-hating, worker-hating and consumer-hating agenda of the corporations.
Our lack of government involvement in broadband and cell phones has meant that we spend outrageously high prices for junk service.
Other nations have involved the state heavily in their cellular and broadband systems. They pay dramatically lower prices than we do and get dramatically faster speeds and more features.
We’re sitting here in the US getting ruined because we worship these corporate pigs who are reaming us. Why? Because the ideology of “the market” has infected every aspect of American life. Even the people who should be protesting getting hammered by these corporations are singing their praises even while they are getting reamed.
Their minds have been colonized by a virus. The market virus.

The Decline of Modern Capitalism’s Traditional Advantages

Repost from the old site.

Modern capitalism seems to be losing a lot of the advantages that it had over Soviet style Communism, and the Net and computers seem to be at the root of this decay.

It’s as if the capitalists don’t care anymore. They don’t care if their product works or not, they don’t care if they rip you off or not, they won’t give you a refund, they sometimes won’t even give you the product after you buy it, they have eliminated customer service, and, most insane of all, sometimes they even make it almost impossible to even buy their product.

They said the Net and computers were going to make our lives better, but I don’t see how they have. If it has anything to do with the Net, it seems like it sucks. What has the Net done for workers? Nothing. It’s allowed people in India, the Philippines and Eastern Europe to compete with Americans by outsourcing work. Great!

Some examples:

There’s plenty of work out there writing junk copy for websites that only exist to somehow make money (not sure how). You’re just writing filler. A lot of it is in porn. I got approached by someone the other day about writing this junk copy, but the pay was $10/hour, so I said forget it. That’s junk for writing prose on the Net. I told him to walk.

Turned out I was competing with writers of “English” from Eastern Europe, India and the Philippines. They were mostly working for $5/hour or even less. So even writers now are getting screwed down in a race for the bottom. Who’s next?

There’s a lot more ways the Net has helped create World O’ Crap. Look at how many ways a brick and mortar store is better than e-commerce. The main problem with e-commerce is that it sucks.

E-commerce merchants have a right to bitch about it, but they have created this Shitworld of e-commerce. In their mad insistence that the Net not be regulated, the world of e-commerce is full of more sleazeballs and slimers than you could count for the rest of your life.

It’s so easy to rip people off over the Net. I have purchased several things off the Net, including website memberships, that were total ripoffs. Quite a few software programs sold over the Net are absolute crap.

There are more problems. In a good number of cases, you try to buy something off the Net and the e-commerce site fucks it up. It will only let you order 3 packages, not 10. After you order, it gives you a database failure page implying the transaction failed, then sends you a mail congratulating you on the sale.

I bought a spyware killer program that it turned out I did not even need from a ripoff website. They quickly took my $30, but then they tried to bill it to my address as my name – for instance, “Thank you for your purchase, Mr. 35889 West Jones Street.” There was no way to go back and change my name from my street address to Robert Lindsay. No way would that happen in a brick and mortar.

Then I could not even download the program. I kept trying over and over for two days, and they kept sending me links that didn’t work.

Can you imagine that happening in a brick and mortar? First they take your money, then they tell you to come back in an hour to pick up the product. You come back in an hour and it’s not there. They give you a new address to pick it up at. You go there and it’s not there. This goes on for two days, you running all over town to pick up your product, but it’s never there.

One great thing about brick and mortars is I can always get a refund. And I can always speak to a human being. Try getting a refund off the Net via e-commerce. Almost impossible. The worst thing about e-commerce is that they have managed to get rid of human beings altogether.

A lot of times, online stores do let you order by phone, but when you dial the number, no one is ever there. When you can’t deal with humans via phone, it’s hard to get anything done. They do often end up emailing you back and forth, but that doesn’t work very well.

I bought a software program from a large company that refused to install on my system. I’m so discouraged by this Shit E-Commerce World that I haven’t even bothered to call the company up to complain. I just wasted the $30. At a brick and mortar, if something doesn’t work or its a rip-off, you just take it back. I’ve never had a problem yet.

Customer service is just one more thing that has been destroyed by the Internet and computers.

A lot of website memberships are just ripoffs. Quite a few software programs just don’t work. One more thing wrecked by computers and the Net – product quality.

Capitalists at least used to be able to say that customer service was pretty good under their system. Customer service was often bad under Soviet style Communism. You went into a restaurant in Russia, and the help was rude. If you complained, you got a shrugging shoulder. There was no way to fire anyone.

Now capitalism, along with all its other disadvantages, increasingly has customer service as shitty or nonexistent as it was under Communism.

One more thing you could always say about capitalism was that product quality was often good. If not, if you had the money, you could buy something worthwhile. There was cheap crap, but for a bit more money, you could get something decent.

Under Soviet style Communism, it is true that there were often crappy products. Now it seems that capitalism is even losing this advantage. Product quality is declining under capitalism to where we cannot anymore say that capitalism at least produces good products.

Another advantage of capitalism is that the products are always available. No lines, no shortages, plenty of stuff on the shelves. Shortages and lines have long been the bane of Soviet-style Communism. But under capitalism now, at least on the Internet, there are quite a few e-commerce sites whose stores are so broken it is almost impossible to buy their product. I never thought that I would see that under capitalism.

As we can see, in addition to all of the negatives that capitalism has in relation to socialism (read any socialist critique of capitalism to learn what those are), modern capitalism is even starting to lose some systemic advantages that it has often had recently.

And computers and the Net are at the core of a lot of this system decay in the quality of the modern capitalist system.

Firefox 3.5 Review

I usually do not review software, but I am a computer buff, so I may as well. Firefox is the free browser made by the Mozilla Foundation based on the old Netscape browser.

It is now starting to seriously rival Microsoft’s Internet Exploder, especially in Northern and Eastern Europe. Finland and the Baltic states have gone over in a big way. Internet Exploiter is still huge in China and Korea, with over 95% penetration in both places. In China, there are many IE clones which are widely used, complicating matters further for Firefox.

I upgraded from 3.0.1x a while back, and the early 3.5 was really terrible, so I’ve been avoiding it ever since. Nevertheless, someone put it on the other computer I use, and I noticed the other day that it was quite nice. So I finally got up the nerve to put it on this one.

What a surprise! It’s not often that a browser upgrade really slaps you across the face with its sudden and dramatic improvement.

One annoyance about earlier Firefox was the extremely bad use of resources such that the browser quickly pigs out and is sucking a good GB or so of RAM and on this box, I’m then into virtual memory territory, which on Windows just sucks. Also many webpages, especially this WordPress, are slow as mud in the Colorado River. I always figured it was the sucky WordPress platform, but whatever’s causing it, the new 3.5 makes WordPress positively snappy.

The browser loads very quickly, even with 2 windows and 17 tabs open as I am wont to do. It’s still pretty piggy, but the browser seems to retain snappiness and stability even as it gorges on your RAM, which is nice. I’m waiting to see how it acts in VM territory, but nothing on Windows is stable in VM, so I’m not optimistic.

The earlier stability problems are completely gone now.

If you have not done so already, upgrade to 3.5 right now!

Text To Speech Application on the Net

This is pretty weird!
This avatar babe (or avatar guy) will say anything you tell her to! Just like all women should be! Haha. Anyway, just type in the words you want her to say, and she says them. Better than a parrot or a myna bird. If you don’t like the way she says it, you can use effects.
So far, being a degenerate, I’m making her say all sorts of dirty things to me, since lately not enough real women do that to me. When you make her talk dirty, the “slow down” and “longer” effects work better to stretch out her robot-like speech. You can also make the avatars speak other languages, or speak English with an accent, whatever you like.
Ladies, I don’t know what you want to tell this young lassie to do. Maybe make her say something like, “Sure I’ll clean your house for free!”, or “How would you like your dinner, Ma’m, rare or well done?” Or maybe you can make the avatar dude say whatever you wish and thereby command him to.
Too bad this chick is just an avatar on the Net. I want my own full-blown personal android babe with this special effect, damn it.
You know what else I want? I want a handheld remote control for humans, just like the one you have for your TV. So next time someone is yelling at me or blabbing on about something stupid, I will just point the remote at them and hit “Mute.” That means their mouth will keep moving, but I won’t be able to hear them anymore. Anyone else that cares to will still be able to hear them. That would be so cool. I would be such a millionaire if I could invent that thing.

Mouse Test

Check your mouse, please.
Click this gif to enlarge and test your mouse. I think there is something wrong with it.

Test. Click the gif. Move your hand away from your mouse and don’t touch it. If you the cursor stays still, then your mouse is fine. If the cursor is moving all over the place, your mouse is out of control and needs to be replaced.
Great test, huh?

Firefox 3.5

The long-awaited Firefox 3.5 was released a few days ago, on June 30, 2009. I just “upgraded” yesterday. Big mistake. Many of my extensions didn’t work, and Firefox was seriously hogging the CPU on a regular basis. It was so bad, frankly, FF 3.5 was simply unusable.
My specs: Windows 2000
1 GB memory
1.66 MHZ AMD CPU
Fast graphics card with 128 MB memory
The system works quite well, and frankly, Windows 2000 uses resources much better than that Godawful system pig called Windows XP. Firefox also works much better on Windows 2000 than on XP. On XP, FF rapidly eats up the entire 1 GB of available memory. On Windows 2000, it takes a number of days to do that, possibly over a week.
Also I have found that Windows 2000 is more stable than XP. It is nearly impossible to bring this Win 2K box down. I think I have hard-rebooted it maybe once. Every rare while, you might want to reboot for system performance. You need to reboot XP quite a bit more often. Actually, most of my Win 2K reboots are done just to check for new applications, since a lot of apps only check for new stuff on a reboot.
True, Win 2K does not have System Restore, but I so horribly mangled my XP box with System Restore a while back, that I wonder what good it even is.
On Firefox, I reverted back to Firefox 3.0.10 within a day. You can get old FF versions here and here. I could not find Firefox 3.0.13 available anywhere. But those two sites only go up to 3.0.11.
How to revert to an older version of Firefox? Just go and get the old version manually and install it on top of the new one. You might have a problem with bookmarks though.