The exploits and backdoors on Android devices are put in there by the manufacturers themselves, usually for monetary compensation and / or risk of harm from the agencies doing the threatening. There's no way around them.
If you're in the U.S. Dwolla is the *only* alternative you'd ever need, probably. With their flat fee of $0.10 per transaction, it's trivially easy to send money straight from your bank account.
Use Paypal to send money to 3rd party merchants. Refuse to accept money for goods from Paypal if at all possible, and instead, tell them about Dwolla instead. They'll thank you for it, with their $0.10 flat fees.
It only has $0.10 transaction fees, flat. It's *incredible*. It has totally supplanted Paypal for interpersonal payments, such as to my contractors and such.
Research Elliot Wave Theory. It applies to human creativity cycles just like it does to weather patterns, climate changes, and the stock market. It's a fundamental fact of nature.
To be fair, I was first allowed to vote in 2000 and have voted in every election, major and minor.
I can tell you that not a single person I've ever voted for president has won (and several times, I voted for one of the two big guys) and very rarely do I get the Senator I would like. But, I've had much more success getting my local house rep. elected. (I actively campaigned against Tom Delay for several elections and he's been out for several sessions now).
I'd like to note that I avoided a wreck, so I was traveling at a safe distance.
I just didn't anticipate a cop to skip in front of me, believing I would (or even could) stop within mere feet of him when I was going +45 mph... He was roughly 1/2 a block from the intersection I was already preparing to stop at.
I was currently attending the University of Arizona, where I permanently lived for the better part of 2 years, but at this moment I was visiting my family in a suburb of south Houston (Pearland).
I decided to go to my old church. Surprise, they had moved in the last year that I had been there. In the age before Google Maps, mapquest often got directions horribly wrong, particularly for newly moved businesses. When I tried finding my church, I realized the directions were wrong and made a U-Turn when there were no other cars on a 4 lane street about 2 blocks from the intersection.
Then I started seeing all these cop cars. They were just everywhere. Then one of them turned on his lights and pulled me over. He said I had illegally made a U-Turn and asked to see my drivers' license. I gave it to him and he gave me a ticket. I was upset, but o well, right? I already knew we lived in a tyranical system since 9/11/2001 just about 9 months previously (I was pretty much one of the first Truthers; I hosted loosechange911.com for Dylan Avery from 2004-2006, for instance).
When I got home, I realized, oh my gosh, my Arizona drivers license is missing. Working on a hunch, I called the police station of the small town of ~1,500 i had gotten the ticket.
"Oh! Mister [redacted]! Officer Martinez said that he accidentally took your license. He says just come on by anytime tomorrow [Monday] and get it."
OK, so I was a 20 year-old naive kid. I drove by myself to the police station to, you know, get my license. This drive took about 30 minutes.
In the parking lot of the police station / courthouse / jail of the tiny town, I had JUST turned off the ignition of my Xterra when...
--Knock knock knoc-- on my window.
Startled, I *jumped* and saw Officer Martinez knocking on my car window. He had been waiting for me and had rushed outside. I thought, man, he must really want to give me my driver's license!
"GET OUT OF THE CAR, PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!"
Um, what?! My consciousness went into near panic. WHAT COULD I HAVE POSSIBLY DONE?! I was a good Christian-ish boy (really a scientific spiritualist who didn't believe in Jesus, but you get the point), who had never done drugs, or even gotten drunk or even tasted alcohol (I was still 21). I had never done ANYTHING except a few MP3 downloads illegal.
I got out.
"[my full name] You are under arrest for driving with a suspended Texas drivers license."
I turned to Officer Martinez and said, "Well, it's great for you to tell me to drive here. Very convenient. And of course my Texas license expired, I've been living in Arizona for the last two years."
"Take it to the judge!" he bellowed, and marched me inside for processing.
An eternity later (my first time in jail), I was marched in front of the DA and the judge. I had been allowed to make one phone call. I knew my parents' were in California on a vacation so I called my brother but he didn't answer so I left a message about my situation, and that's all they'd let me do. I was not allowed to contact an attorney, they said they'd provide one...later.
I explained myself to a seemingly nice judge in his mid-70s, who really seemed to listen to my side of the story and give me the benefit of the doubt:
1. I was a full-time student in Arizona, where I lived and worked continuously. 2. I was visiting my birth city in Texas and had only been there 5 days and was leaving in about another week. 3. I had a Texas license, but it expired one year ago and I didn't renew becuase, well, I had a perfectly valid Arizona license that didn't expire until 2036, so why renew my texas, right?
The judge seemed very confused. He called over the District Attorney and repeated verbatim what I had said. He then asked the DA, outright:
"If he has a perfectly valid Arizona license and no warrants for his arrest, how can we hold him for an invalid Texas license? The Arizona DM
The year was 2006. I was driving along the feeder of an interstate highway I-45 northbound in Houston, TX, near Alemeda, going 55 mph and slowing, having just exited a 65 mph highway (going ~68).
I saw the truck in front of me slam on his brakes. There was a cop car parked on the side of the road at the light, the cop was standing outside his car, pointing a speed scanner at cars.
The speed limit was 45.
I swerved into the next lane (the middle lane) to avoid crunching into the truck (who'd gone from ~60 mph to maybe 30 in an instant).
Next thing I know, the cop is *skipping* sideways, facing me, right into my lane in 3 big skips, his burly arms outstretched, pointed at me in a "STOP" motion.
I'm telling you, he was only ~25 feet away when he started these antics and within a second or two, I was nearly upon him.
I *SLAMMED* on my brakes and quickly jerked the wheel to the open left lane. In my periphreal vision, I saw the cop dodge out of the lane, cuz he was scared, too. I immediately applied the brakes hard and stopped ~20 feet from the red light white stop line.
The cop *RUSHED* over to my window and banged it FURIOUSLY with his black club. In shock, it took me about 10 seconds to manage to roll down the window.
"YOU ALMOST KILLED ME!!! YOU PUT MY LIFE IN GREAT PERSONAL RISK!!!" the cop frantically barked at me in his thick, husky voice. "GET OUT OF THE CAR, PUT YOUR HANDs BehIND YOUR BACK!"
I did this. He put handcuffs on me, arms behind my back and said I was under arrest for driving erratically, wrecklessly, and endangering the life of a peace officer. He ended up writing me a total of SEVEN offenses: 1) expired tax sticker, 2) going 55 in a 45, 3) no proper turn signal [trying to avoid hitting the truck], 4) improper lane change [trying to avoid hitting the officer!], 5) failure to yield to an officer [felony, lowest], 6) endangering an officer of the law [since he literally skipped over right in front of me!], and 7) reckless driving.
I knew enough to not say a word. He kept asking me over and over to tell him why I tried to hit him, and I just kept my mouth shut. He got really violent and was screaming at me WHY DID I TRY TO KILL HIM!?! I thought if I uttered any word he could testify something like "This criminal tried to run me over and when I asked him, 'why?' he brazenly said I was mistaken and had put my own life at risk." You know?
When backup arrived 5 minutes later, both of them started in on me, saying things like they were going to leave me on the sidewalk in the 105 F 100% humidity summer heat to rot if I didn't confess. I then started mouthing toward the backup's cop car (incase of a dash cam) "I demand an attorney, I demand an attorney, I demand an attorney."
Freaks dragged me down to the station, processed me, I got bail set at $1,000 and I was out in like 12 hours. Court was the next month. The DA came up to my attorney and said something like, "Yeah... we want to settle this out of court for just speeding, reckless driving, and the expired sticker." Attorney advised me not to, so we went to the judge.
The judge sort of smirked when the cop explained his side of things nad my attorney explained my side of things. The attorney showed them the deal they tried to just get us to agree to, and showed the dash cam that showed the guy clearly skipping into oncoming traffic and me nearly hitting him, cuz he brazenly came so close so fast.
The judge threw out all of them except the sticker, then added that the sticker would be thrown out, too, plus no court fees. Woohoo! All I ended up paying was a few hundred (~$500) for the attorney.
But look, the attorney said and I think that if I had mouthed off to the cop, or really said anything, like "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! ARE YOU CRAZY?!" that i could have been beaten up and had the book thrown at me. The two felonies had punishments of up to 5 years each and the misdermeanors would have totalled a potential 15 months each. Thats like 7 years.
All because an asshole cop decided to play god and skip in front of two oncoming cars on a slow Summer Thursday at around 2 PM.
Being a politician should be a **involuntary, random, volunteer job** (just like a jury) where for 2 years you give up your life. You have to go to basic political school for, say, a month or three to learn the basics, then you get thrown into a huge group with a bunch of other neophyte politicians.
Wages should be good, to minimize the damage of having to give up one's life and/or move (if you don't already live in the capital you're assigned). There would be assigned houses for each position, just like the White House, so that relocation will be cheaply provided.
Oh! And their houses, cars, and political staterooms will all be recorded and broadcast for the entire world to see. Most of it will be livecasted on the Internet. I think every single room should be recorded, some rooms / sessions can be encrypted with a time of expiry 1 day after the existing politicians will have their tenure end. This will ensure proper law enforcement against every politician, as well as keeping them completely ethical.
Then you'd only really have to worry about malfeasants rigging the election, but they'd have to have a huge pool, since consecutive terms won't be allowed.
This is the solution to almost all of every democratic republic's political ills.
Except he sent encrypted thumb drives to undisclosed number of journalists by personal courier all over the world.
If he dies or gets disabled or locked up and can't convincingly communicate with any number of other undisclosed fail safes, these people will all contact the journalists or otherwise publicly publish the encryption keys.
Any country that gets sanctioned over Snowden (as *if* that weren't just a massive bully bluff!!) should immediately stop using USDs for any form of commerce, commercial, public, or private. They should outlaw possession and even conversion of USDs to every person and entity in their dominion, outside of a brief redemption grace period (of say 3 months).
That would BTFD on the entire Petrodollar hegemonic complex!!!
Well, the war with the Lunatics is going quite well, actually.
The secretive UNSM (United Nations Space Marines) under the guise of a NASA "experiment" even destroyed one of their biggest cities when it bombed Luna on 9 October 2009.
[/sarcasm meter for those with seriously malfunctioning ones who think I'm serious; for true believers, you *KNOW* I am just copting out to get the skeptics to watch the evidence;]
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The exploits and backdoors on Android devices are put in there by the manufacturers themselves, usually for monetary compensation and / or risk of harm from the agencies doing the threatening. There's no way around them.
Hell, the aliens have been inserting nanobots to pwn all of our electronics since they first gave us the tech to fabricate microprocessors!!
And we now know that such "toy" helicopters make an effective anti-zombie munition!!
If you're in the U.S. Dwolla is the *only* alternative you'd ever need, probably. With their flat fee of $0.10 per transaction, it's trivially easy to send money straight from your bank account.
Use Paypal to send money to 3rd party merchants. Refuse to accept money for goods from Paypal if at all possible, and instead, tell them about Dwolla instead. They'll thank you for it, with their $0.10 flat fees.
You really need to check out Dwolla !
It only has $0.10 transaction fees, flat. It's *incredible*. It has totally supplanted Paypal for interpersonal payments, such as to my contractors and such.
It's as free to use as Metallica's music, as it stands now.
It's 100% proprietary with full source disclosure, but that hardly makes it open source.
Research Elliot Wave Theory. It applies to human creativity cycles just like it does to weather patterns, climate changes, and the stock market. It's a fundamental fact of nature.
To be fair, I was first allowed to vote in 2000 and have voted in every election, major and minor.
I can tell you that not a single person I've ever voted for president has won (and several times, I voted for one of the two big guys) and very rarely do I get the Senator I would like. But, I've had much more success getting my local house rep. elected. (I actively campaigned against Tom Delay for several elections and he's been out for several sessions now).
I thought it was "fa-kade" ;-/ (joking, joking!)
Maybe he NEVER reads the comments?
What's a decent alternative? FreeBSD?
Ahhh! Battle.Net!
+1 Oh, how I wish I had mod points!!
I permamarked it best I could.
http://www.permamarks.net/grabbed_urls/OQhBYg/webcache.googleusercontent.com_357.htmlz
I was driving an 7+ yr-old Ford Explorer Sport, not a car. I was about 50-70 feet behind it when it slammed on its brakes.
I'd like to note that I avoided a wreck, so I was traveling at a safe distance.
I just didn't anticipate a cop to skip in front of me, believing I would (or even could) stop within mere feet of him when I was going +45 mph... He was roughly 1/2 a block from the intersection I was already preparing to stop at.
The year was 2002, in June.
I was currently attending the University of Arizona, where I permanently lived for the better part of 2 years, but at this moment I was visiting my family in a suburb of south Houston (Pearland).
I decided to go to my old church. Surprise, they had moved in the last year that I had been there. In the age before Google Maps, mapquest often got directions horribly wrong, particularly for newly moved businesses. When I tried finding my church, I realized the directions were wrong and made a U-Turn when there were no other cars on a 4 lane street about 2 blocks from the intersection.
Then I started seeing all these cop cars. They were just everywhere. Then one of them turned on his lights and pulled me over. He said I had illegally made a U-Turn and asked to see my drivers' license. I gave it to him and he gave me a ticket. I was upset, but o well, right? I already knew we lived in a tyranical system since 9/11/2001 just about 9 months previously (I was pretty much one of the first Truthers; I hosted loosechange911.com for Dylan Avery from 2004-2006, for instance).
When I got home, I realized, oh my gosh, my Arizona drivers license is missing. Working on a hunch, I called the police station of the small town of ~1,500 i had gotten the ticket.
"Oh! Mister [redacted]! Officer Martinez said that he accidentally took your license. He says just come on by anytime tomorrow [Monday] and get it."
OK, so I was a 20 year-old naive kid. I drove by myself to the police station to, you know, get my license. This drive took about 30 minutes.
In the parking lot of the police station / courthouse / jail of the tiny town, I had JUST turned off the ignition of my Xterra when ...
--Knock knock knoc-- on my window.
Startled, I *jumped* and saw Officer Martinez knocking on my car window. He had been waiting for me and had rushed outside. I thought, man, he must really want to give me my driver's license!
"GET OUT OF THE CAR, PUT YOUR HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK! YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!"
Um, what?! My consciousness went into near panic. WHAT COULD I HAVE POSSIBLY DONE?! I was a good Christian-ish boy (really a scientific spiritualist who didn't believe in Jesus, but you get the point), who had never done drugs, or even gotten drunk or even tasted alcohol (I was still 21). I had never done ANYTHING except a few MP3 downloads illegal.
I got out.
"[my full name] You are under arrest for driving with a suspended Texas drivers license."
I turned to Officer Martinez and said, "Well, it's great for you to tell me to drive here. Very convenient. And of course my Texas license expired, I've been living in Arizona for the last two years."
"Take it to the judge!" he bellowed, and marched me inside for processing.
An eternity later (my first time in jail), I was marched in front of the DA and the judge. I had been allowed to make one phone call. I knew my parents' were in California on a vacation so I called my brother but he didn't answer so I left a message about my situation, and that's all they'd let me do. I was not allowed to contact an attorney, they said they'd provide one...later.
I explained myself to a seemingly nice judge in his mid-70s, who really seemed to listen to my side of the story and give me the benefit of the doubt:
1. I was a full-time student in Arizona, where I lived and worked continuously.
2. I was visiting my birth city in Texas and had only been there 5 days and was leaving in about another week.
3. I had a Texas license, but it expired one year ago and I didn't renew becuase, well, I had a perfectly valid Arizona license that didn't expire until 2036, so why renew my texas, right?
The judge seemed very confused. He called over the District Attorney and repeated verbatim what I had said. He then asked the DA, outright:
"If he has a perfectly valid Arizona license and no warrants for his arrest, how can we hold him for an invalid Texas license? The Arizona DM
The year was 2006. I was driving along the feeder of an interstate highway I-45 northbound in Houston, TX, near Alemeda, going 55 mph and slowing, having just exited a 65 mph highway (going ~68).
I saw the truck in front of me slam on his brakes. There was a cop car parked on the side of the road at the light, the cop was standing outside his car, pointing a speed scanner at cars.
The speed limit was 45.
I swerved into the next lane (the middle lane) to avoid crunching into the truck (who'd gone from ~60 mph to maybe 30 in an instant).
Next thing I know, the cop is *skipping* sideways, facing me, right into my lane in 3 big skips, his burly arms outstretched, pointed at me in a "STOP" motion.
I'm telling you, he was only ~25 feet away when he started these antics and within a second or two, I was nearly upon him.
I *SLAMMED* on my brakes and quickly jerked the wheel to the open left lane. In my periphreal vision, I saw the cop dodge out of the lane, cuz he was scared, too. I immediately applied the brakes hard and stopped ~20 feet from the red light white stop line.
The cop *RUSHED* over to my window and banged it FURIOUSLY with his black club. In shock, it took me about 10 seconds to manage to roll down the window.
"YOU ALMOST KILLED ME!!! YOU PUT MY LIFE IN GREAT PERSONAL RISK!!!" the cop frantically barked at me in his thick, husky voice. "GET OUT OF THE CAR, PUT YOUR HANDs BehIND YOUR BACK!"
I did this. He put handcuffs on me, arms behind my back and said I was under arrest for driving erratically, wrecklessly, and endangering the life of a peace officer. He ended up writing me a total of SEVEN offenses: 1) expired tax sticker, 2) going 55 in a 45, 3) no proper turn signal [trying to avoid hitting the truck], 4) improper lane change [trying to avoid hitting the officer!], 5) failure to yield to an officer [felony, lowest], 6) endangering an officer of the law [since he literally skipped over right in front of me!], and 7) reckless driving.
I knew enough to not say a word. He kept asking me over and over to tell him why I tried to hit him, and I just kept my mouth shut. He got really violent and was screaming at me WHY DID I TRY TO KILL HIM!?! I thought if I uttered any word he could testify something like "This criminal tried to run me over and when I asked him, 'why?' he brazenly said I was mistaken and had put my own life at risk." You know?
When backup arrived 5 minutes later, both of them started in on me, saying things like they were going to leave me on the sidewalk in the 105 F 100% humidity summer heat to rot if I didn't confess. I then started mouthing toward the backup's cop car (incase of a dash cam) "I demand an attorney, I demand an attorney, I demand an attorney."
Freaks dragged me down to the station, processed me, I got bail set at $1,000 and I was out in like 12 hours. Court was the next month. The DA came up to my attorney and said something like, "Yeah... we want to settle this out of court for just speeding, reckless driving, and the expired sticker." Attorney advised me not to, so we went to the judge.
The judge sort of smirked when the cop explained his side of things nad my attorney explained my side of things. The attorney showed them the deal they tried to just get us to agree to, and showed the dash cam that showed the guy clearly skipping into oncoming traffic and me nearly hitting him, cuz he brazenly came so close so fast.
The judge threw out all of them except the sticker, then added that the sticker would be thrown out, too, plus no court fees. Woohoo! All I ended up paying was a few hundred (~$500) for the attorney.
But look, the attorney said and I think that if I had mouthed off to the cop, or really said anything, like "WHY DID YOU DO THAT?! ARE YOU CRAZY?!" that i could have been beaten up and had the book thrown at me. The two felonies had punishments of up to 5 years each and the misdermeanors would have totalled a potential 15 months each. Thats like 7 years.
All because an asshole cop decided to play god and skip in front of two oncoming cars on a slow Summer Thursday at around 2 PM.
I *totally* agree with this!
Being a politician should be a **involuntary, random, volunteer job** (just like a jury) where for 2 years you give up your life. You have to go to basic political school for, say, a month or three to learn the basics, then you get thrown into a huge group with a bunch of other neophyte politicians.
Wages should be good, to minimize the damage of having to give up one's life and/or move (if you don't already live in the capital you're assigned). There would be assigned houses for each position, just like the White House, so that relocation will be cheaply provided.
Oh! And their houses, cars, and political staterooms will all be recorded and broadcast for the entire world to see. Most of it will be livecasted on the Internet. I think every single room should be recorded, some rooms / sessions can be encrypted with a time of expiry 1 day after the existing politicians will have their tenure end. This will ensure proper law enforcement against every politician, as well as keeping them completely ethical.
Then you'd only really have to worry about malfeasants rigging the election, but they'd have to have a huge pool, since consecutive terms won't be allowed.
This is the solution to almost all of every democratic republic's political ills.
If sanctions hit, the ENTIRE ASIAN BLOCK should IMMEDIATELY dump the petrodollar.
Just ban it outright and make ownership a felony like gold ownership was in the 1930-1970s in America.
That will bring the fucker down!! Americans will be **CLAMORING** to be paid fully in Bitcoins within a few months!
And without American hegemony fueled by the Petrodollar symplex, the world would be a MUCH better place in 2015!
Except he sent encrypted thumb drives to undisclosed number of journalists by personal courier all over the world.
If he dies or gets disabled or locked up and can't convincingly communicate with any number of other undisclosed fail safes, these people will all contact the journalists or otherwise publicly publish the encryption keys.
Then all hell breaks loose.
Any country that gets sanctioned over Snowden (as *if* that weren't just a massive bully bluff!!) should immediately stop using USDs for any form of commerce, commercial, public, or private. They should outlaw possession and even conversion of USDs to every person and entity in their dominion, outside of a brief redemption grace period (of say 3 months).
That would BTFD on the entire Petrodollar hegemonic complex!!!
Well, the war with the Lunatics is going quite well, actually.
The secretive UNSM (United Nations Space Marines) under the guise of a NASA "experiment" even destroyed one of their biggest cities when it bombed Luna on 9 October 2009.
See http://humansarefree.com/2012/09/why-is-nasa-bombing-moon.html
[/sarcasm meter for those with seriously malfunctioning ones who think I'm serious; for true believers, you *KNOW* I am just copting out to get the skeptics to watch the evidence ;]
A most fascinating read! Thank you!