Bush Crony Big Government

So, they lied. WMDs. Everyone who in the least criticized was branded "terrorist" & "traitor".

May i remind you of something? The present Secretary of Defense is a Republican, in spite of the fact that we have a Democratic Executive. In fact, Secretary Robert Gates was the CIA Director for George Bush, Sr., as well as having been appointed Defense Secretary by Bush, Jr.

So why are we still having trouble with Osama Bin Laden?

Secretary Gates was incidentally also on the Board of Directors for VoteHere, which spent a great deal of money pushing electronic voting machines.

Is he needed because Republican cronies would fail to support the President otherwise?

Enough about that? Why is it that Osama Bin Laden seems to release video and audio just when the Republicans need a boost? For example, the 2004 Pre-Election tape.

To change the subject slightly, everyone remembers that the TARP legislation was also done by Bush, Jr.? And we remember that all of the money that was spent by that program was spent by Republicans? And that the $750 billion has been included in the current deficit?

i simply wonder that the Republicans, who are now confident enough to bring assault weapons to political gatherings, and are willing to "let them die" in regards to health care, are still considered in any fashion.

Soon enough, when the predictions of gun control, concentration camps, and a future indebtedness are rendered ridiculous by a healthy economy and the return of the budget surplus, the Republicans will look for some simpleminded pretense by which Bush Jr. will get the credit.

but i remember.

T9 sucks

i got stuck with a cell phone that has T9 predictive text entry. It sucks, for several reasons, and can't be shut off. Very rarely does it guess the word i am trying to use (so far, after two years, it has never guessed the first word correctly). Then, i have to use a keypress to change mode, and another to set the mode, then i have to push the delete key numerous times to delete the bad guess. Then i get to type my message the old fashioned way.

Every time i try to search for a way to remove T9, i get web pages that say i will love it when i get used to it. It is like the useless voice dialing system, which you have to train over and over again, and after which will still call the wrong person. If you are willing to teach your phone how to spell every word you use, you can do so by changing the entry mode, then changing it back again after you spell the word. Though you will still have to look away from the screen every time you type, and just hope that you are spelling it right.

Anyway, T9 sucks and i have been suffering from it for awhile. It makes it almost impossible to use the web on my phone, since it is the only input mode available, and it doesn't work.

It reminds me of the first tablet computers which failed. They relied upon handwriting technology that was similarly useless.

It would be nice if my phone didn't keep advertising this very frustrating interference to text messaging.

Addison Graves 'Joe' Wilson, liar

One of many egregious examples:

10/08/2004

As President Bush said yesterday, Saddam Hussein retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and intent to produce weapons of mass destruction; and he could have passed that knowledge on to our terrorist enemies.

Need any other examples? Ok. Here is what he said about Social Security.

04/17/2005

Personal retirement accounts would be similar to the Thrift Savings Plan, which currently is offered to members of Congress and federal employees. Participants would have the option of investing their 4 percent into long-term investments of bonds, treasury bills and stocks.

This about Hurricane Katrina.

10/07/2005

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were a sudden wake-up call for our Nation. As the Federal Government begins to pay for the costs of these devastating disasters, Congress must adhere to a responsible plan and a strict budget. If we do not use this opportunity to reform the spending habits of the Federal Government, our children and grandchildren will inherit tax increases and unimaginable deficits.

and this about George Bush and the Federal Marriage Amendment.

02/24/2004

"I am so proud of the President for standing up for the sanctity of marriage," said Congressman Wilson. "Throughout history, marriage has been defined as the union of a man and a woman."

and this about our economy.

03/03/2004

However, more work is needed which the President has outlined. We must make tax relief for all taxpayers permanent, reduce regulation, ensure affordable health care for families and small businesses, and enact a sound national energy policy.

Yahoo redesign unusable

It is a move that reminds me of Pathfinder.com. It was early in the internet years, 1994, and they had an internet portal that served as a news aggregator, similar to Google News and Huffington Post.

This was slightly before Yahoo started their original directory, and the year before they got the domain name yahoo.com. Although Pathfinder was a web hit, Time Warner considered web portals a failure, so it was converted into the present format, a link page to magazine websites. Traffic dropped off, and Time Warner eventually moved on to destroy the also-popular web portal America Online.

Well, that reminds me of Yahoo, which has recently changed its website to a frames-based system, which is a throwback to the late 90s, when frames were introduced. You still see the obviously dated remnants from the days when a top box contained static links, a side box more static links, and a tiny box for content.

Yup. They went back to the tiny box. Even worse, the browser reports the webpage "done" while scripts are still loading, and buttons have no visible effect. Eventually if you just wait, it might do what you want, but there is no way of knowing that in advance.

And for the 10% of internet users still on dial-up? Goodbye. Yahoo doesn't serve you anymore, unless you have an hour or so to update one of your contacts. What is it doing the rest of the time? Loading stuff back into the side box that doesn't change. The top frame doesn't do anything either, except reload content that would have been static in the old design. The tiny box is where you must expect your awaited content.

Ouch. Another good website dies from feature bloat, because someone didn't know enough about the internet to leave it alone. Those of us who remember, will miss you.

Debian what is using my bandwidth?

Seems like something is using the network, but you aren't sure what? If you are on dial-up it really sucks. For me, it was Tor, the privacy software; it loads a directory every time it starts, and the filesize is huge. Since I have debian, it was part of privoxy and happened in the background. Here is how I found it.

1. run wireshark to get the originating IP address.
2. run whois on the IP address

In my case it turned out to be a Tor server, so I removed tor. Now my network idles again.

_
b

system beeps after debian upgrade

you probably accepted the developer's modprobe.d to replace the custom one that blacklisted the beep. As superuser, edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add a line:

blacklist pcspkr