fiat currencies, just printed up paper being used as money? You can't find any examples? This is "money 101" territory here
Stocks.. how many people do you know who were sitting on what they thought was a "ton o money" in their dotcom stock portfolio, then it vaporized on them? If it was a representation of a tangible produced product, it would be sitting in a warehouse someplace, but it wasn't, it isn't, that's why it can disappear. And be created at will.
All representations of money are subject to poofing, being inflated, devalued, etc *until* they are turned into a tangible product or have been exchanged for a sevice completed. Even gold and silver coin have had inflationary pressures and been counterfeited by being diluted with base metals, had their edges trimmed, etc. That's why most coins evolved with ridges around the circumference, it was an attempt to slow down the practice of filing off around them, making the coins marginally smaller and using the filings elsewheres.
The US dollar (a debt based private bank "note" which has a legal definition, look it up) is a great example why using fiat currencies backed by nothing doesn't work in the long run, it's easy to see. I used to be able to get X amount of product for a dollar, I will give an exact example, I have purchased 5 lbs of hamburger for a single dollar before, back in the olden daze.. Now in a lot of cases, the same product costsd x larger amount, last I got a deal on any it was around a buck 50 a lb. this is called inflation, over the years, the central banks artifically create more money than what is represented by accumulated produced wealth, this is why you can't go to the store and still get 5 lbs chiopped meat for a buck. And this despite the technology for producing, packaging, shipping, retailing has undergone very good changes with regards to efficiency, it's still way more expensive than it used to be. Other examples abound, famous case was in ww2, the german reichsmark. What can you buy with them today, and how fast did it go from a "piece of valuable money" that people used for day to day whatever, to fireplace kindling? How about the iraqi dinar, before the war, now after the war? it was used as money there, now it's not, theyhave "new and improved money", but it's the same old printed up stuff, just now we control it.(and manipulate it)
We have a phrase from our own past, "not worth a continental". Continentals were fiat money, printed up, backed by nothing, used to attempt to pay for our government when we were at war in the early days. They were worth nothing, people didn't use them much and their production ceased when it became obvious they were worthless.
Any "money" that isn't the end user product or service itself is a fictitous representation of "wealth". Precious metals coin were an attempt to even that out, at least the representation was a tangible of universal recognized worth, and still is around the world. It's still a representation though.
Wealth cannot be borrowed into existence,not really except as part of long standing official banking con games, wealth has to be grown, mined/extracted, or manufactured using the above materials. that's it, everyhting else is a fictitous srepresentations of wealth, and it pays to always keep the two terms separate.
Wealth may be serviced, but a service itself is not a measure of produced wealth, although it's current worth may be represented with the currency du juor. A service for a tangible is a re arrangement of produced wealth, but it is not wealth creating.
Stocks in a portfolio are just another representation of "wealth",and as such are a form of tradeable "currency",(the common slang term for them is poker chips) but until they are traded in, sold in other words to another sucker.. I mean "investor", through as many layers as you want to use, for a product or service, they are vaporware. they are a form of money that can be classed as "electronic promises to pay". They are usually even more highly infl
Dang, I had some good ones, had a stack of the spidermans, from issue one. Just that one issue got to be worth serious clams now.. I am thinking now, converting lawn mowing (50 cent a yard), farm work(around 9$ a day in the summer) and snow shoveling (50 cent a driveway, with a shovel) hours of labor, into ten cent comics, what a return on investment that was, err, could have been.
Of course, I could have saved all my real silver coin, too..sheesh....
My dad had comics from his childhood, pulp fiction looking things, I can't remember most of them, the weirdest ones were obvious propoganda pieces released during world war two. He went in out of high school during that war, so his collection came to a halt then, but it caught the first coupla years of the war while he was still in school. I can't remember the names of them now, no idea if he still has them. I do remember some of them had stickers you collected and pasted into the comics. They were pretty jingoistic and racist from what I recall, as to be expected then I suppose.
Never saw the first spiderman movie, but I only really buy well marked down used movies now, and not very many of them. I even have a copy of the matrix here I got somehow used, never watched it yet, just not a big movie person any more. Used to love them, now they are mostly tedious to me. Still like reading though, always have, taught myself (mostly) the basics before I went to school around age 4, reading newspapers and coordinating what I read in them with what was on the news on the 9 inch philco.. the first TV in da 'hood. First word I remember learning was "Ike". Picture association -> word. The rest came easier after nouns were adequate.
... and run linux myself. I just have a lot of friends who are still running windows (most of them by far) and I wanted to offer more precise and comprehensible instructions to them to avoid the nasties. I will admit I haven't been too effective in "evangelizing" switching OSs, because most of my friends are netfriends, so I can't just go over to their house and help them through first install and getting it all setup, etc.. Most people struggle by with patches, firewalls etc and have grown very familiar with their systems and honestly seem to not want to change, just fix it. It's inertia mostly. I think most people are still running 98 for instance. I asked on another article last week or so but didn't get any replies, asking if any web masters who run non technical non geek sites, just regular old sites would confirm that or not. heck, I know several people still running 95, because it still surfs good enough with their old machines, and they see no reason to purchase an expensive new machine. True facts there.
I have been advising people to switch browsers, etc for a long time, some have, that's about the best I can do. It takes actual physical interaction with people and direct help for them to see that they have viable alternatives. MS comes on their boxes, their kids play MS games, etc, they aren't in any rush to switch. This will not change until people buy a new computer with an alternative OS installed on it from the git-go, and that OS better work for them full GUI with no command line tweaking, and I've said that for years now.
...surprised. I know I went out of my way covertly, using contacts inside "the establishment" to see what da man has on people, ie, me in particular. It's a lot, I think people would be shocked if it became public knowledge what is already in government databases.
...been trolled, I neglected originally to mention I live in georgia. There hasn't been a republican governor here since the reconstruction (after the scorched earth destruction) era after the civil war. Sorry to have not been more clear.
note, I can't PROVE that the 2000 national or my 2002 state vote were hijacked, but it looks suspicious as all get out to me.
I go vote, but voting constitution party or libertarian or whatever, I am used to my vote always being in a minority, but to answer critics who saw a vote for anyone who isn't in the D or R party is "wasted", I say the only wasted vote is one not cast, generally speaking. Since I have no desire to see either a D or R in the presidency, for example, it matters little to me which of the two bozos gets in, the country continues to get borked further. So my vote isn't a "spoiler" vote. Very generally speaking, the Libertarians usually snag some votes from the Rs, the green party candidate from the Ds, reform party hit both about equally, etc,etc,so I don't see that as being any sort of spoiler effect, it balances out.
The few times we have had third party candidates (at the national level) get any media coverage of note, there has always been a surge in people actually investigating and voting for an alternative candidate. I will note this going way back. This goes way back,it is just a bit of verifiable data that is true, so what the media does now is NO COVERAGE as a default. they give a very slight minimum coverage, that's it.. The media is top to bottom owned by connected globalist people who have R's and Ds in their pockets, so they have no desire to publicise any third party or it's candidate, it might upset too many carefully blackmailed and bribed political/economic/power apple carts that have been established over the years. Having bought and paid for political control at all levels of government is much too lucrative for them to adjust, this is why you will barely even see a mention of alternative candidates or partys, they always push the globalists candidates to give people the illusion there is "choice". This is just SO obvious.
About the only place an individual can still make a difference is in the most basic local elections. At county level or above, nope, it's the carved in stone One-party-with-two-names "system", it is little different from blatantly open "one" party systems, such as in Mainland China.
The Free State project is the best attempt I have seen to break this criminal system, it is an astounding idea, and I wish them well, but I have no desire to relocate to New Hampshire. If they had chosen either Vermont, Maine or Idaho (various reasons not relevant to this discussion)I might have considered it.
the apprentice is one of the few shows I watch, so I saw the trailer. all of a sudden I jump up and yell HEY, THAT'S DOC OCT!!! Startled GF and we both laughed over it
heh heh, hadn't even thought about it since the 60's when my dad MADE ME give away my collection when we moved because he didn't want to pay shipping on it with the full sized tractor trailer that moved all our other crap... uh huh, full collection going way back to the 50's, marvel and DC and Mads.. geez....
that collection would be worth.. a freeking lot right now, that's how much! I would guess well into five maybe even six figures
..you can "still have your real time voting stats" and such, does not make it so, not in my state of georgia. Just because it is possible, or that the source code could be examined, doesn'rt fly, it isn't, and chances are it won't be. We are now stuck with insecure, extremely easy to manipulate voting "results". This is a very serious issue, a critical issue, and ad lib casual dismissive quips do not fix the problem.
Technically, previous we had a more verifiable and easy to use system, that was paid for and working. Lockable wooden box, opened in the morning, open for inspection to see it was empty, locked at night. any dispute was easy to resove. costs zero money, those voting boxes were long paid for. I voted in both extremely dense population districts,and in very rural, but the vote always went through and was human countable. Pencil, fill in the circle. Worked well, really, and anyone with a set of eyeballs could verify the count right at the precinct level.
I agree on the no practical differences between Ds and Rs now, especially at the upper levels, I rarely vote for one now, I vote third party,some named independent, or write in, etc. Politically, I am a strict constitutionalist, vote accordingly. There are a few D's or Rs that I *might* vote for, were I in their districts, examples, ron paul or tom tancredo.
I started working politics as a young lad in the goldwater campaign, and learned some serious lessons then, especially how the R party got hijacked by the rockefeller/globalist (basically the NWO faction) wing back then and sabotaged their own candidate. Wheels within wheels. Switched back and forth, always found out the system with the entrenched partys itself is corrupt, either party, so....
I think the florida vote was an abomination, there were exploits and illegalities taken from all partys involved in that fiasco. They should have re run it, started from scratch, with poll workers telling everyone there to vote correctly, and a default of malformed ballots being tossed with no ananlysis of what they "might indicate".
I still don't think we have all the answers there, but I think there were conflicting high level efforts to hijack it, both parties in other words.
I have long stated publically my wish for a grand jury investigation of both the RNC and the DNC to look for violations leading to indictments and prosecutions, starting with the RICO act. I believe the combination of those two parties, along with their corporate sponsors, most notably the higher levels of public media, has lead to a full takeover- a coup- of what should be the people's government. There are no checks and balances when all the judges that are appointed are handpicked/vetted members of one or the other of those parties.
"going crazy" over observations that the vote is being hijacked is not so crazy if there is serious credible evidence that *this is so*.
If you advise people to delete the registry key, what are the ramifications for them during normal browsing?
The article says it may effect other browsers, but I am wondering if that is entirely true, are there any other windows browsers that people can run that won't suffer from the exploit?
The reason is, if you tell windows friends about this, point them to the advisory, you will get eyeballs rolling back. There needs to be a normal non guru level english description and howto deal with this.
I am reluctant to tell someone to *delete* a functioning registry key in particular, but seeing as how this involves merely clicking on an html page, the main deal with normal surfing.. well, what do you tell people? All the different "switch from this user level to that, unless you need this app, no wait, only for that one and..." and delete this and whatnot are just going to mostly result in *no action* being taken by most people if they even hear of this.
If someone can point to a better written (for normal users) synopsis and mitigation path than what is on certs site (technically accurate but rather convulted and arcane),I'd appreciaste it
80,000 feet before first burn! that's thinking! I thought it might be a good idea! Thanks for the URL!
There used to be some big start up space company that wanted to use expended fuel sections from other launches, link them together, and make cheap orbital platforms out of them. I think they were going to be supported by Hilton hotels, but I haven't followed it. I like off the wall thinking, turning expendable/waste stuff into useful products.
... I can probably answer this myself but I'd rather get some credible experts opinions... failing that, slashdot is right handy....
umm, can they do a coordinated analysis of their logs at the moment of capture, then work backwards and determine the sequence of what I will term "lucky breaks" that lead to the capture, allowing them to throw away all the blind leads, so that in future attempts they can cut to the chase quicker? All the non-lucky breaks should be easy (that's the real question I don't know) to ID now and discard,leaving the one true path, or is this whack?
...contemplating using a helium balloon as the "first stage" of a launch? Or is this allowed? Starting at 50-60 thou feet or above before it lights might be a nice edge....
total aside, grew up watching "man in space". It's been nice, was sad to see them abandon the X series , then go back to it years later, badly...lost opportunity there.. anyway, as a kidm I, along with several million other people got stunned, and went outside and tried to see sputnik (didn't)(tell you, it weirded people out, scared them), although I did see ECHO later on. Chemical rockets ar... old news,I'm just not impressed or juiced over it any longer, except for this thing, but....... really... I'm holding out for a last minute dark-horse entry that sweeps the tourney, from some physics nerds, the release of the "civvie version" electrogravitic distortion propulsion craft.
one can hope... I got ten clams that "da man" already got one, or several..
... that I read in the various posts about sun making a bad move and sliding downhill,there might be an opportunity or three out there for getting nice surplus at throw away prices, so which of their old (?) boxes would be the *best deal* to look for if one wanted a real cheap but still good enough multi processor sun box, say 4 CPUs? Would it require solaris only? Figure they should be at least roughly pen II class equivalent in speed, etc, which is still "good enough" for my purposes, which are basically "fooling around with neat stuff". And what other pitfalls should you be aware of in such a purchase? I have zee-ro experience with anything other than commodity low end PCs and entry level macs. I've looked on ebay, but not familiar enough with the models and the quirks of same, etc. Or should it be a Sun, how about an IBM mid level machine? Or what? Ideally, it should be able to run either the OS that come on it, or linux/bsd whatever. Thanks in advance to anyone who has any tips!
it's a fascinating subject, but in my opinion, and some other smart peoples opinions, the computerised voting that is being pushed onto the US people is for one purpose, to completely eliminate chance when it comes to voting for "the annointed ones" who think it is their born right to "rule" over everyone else. I 100% believe that, and I have zero doubts. Google around for votescam,diebold, voting irregularites, etc and spend an evening reading the empirical and anecdotal out there. You can watch at how vote scamming grew from simple ballot box stuffing to the industry it is today, one step at a time, and how these voting machines have been literrally crammed down our throats. Check out the history of the "voter news service" scams. See what connection rep hastert has to computerised voting and his election perhaps. Do that, you'll be convinced that it's a conspiracy, it's to control power inside the US, it'sworking, and it'sworth trillions of dollars. whoever controls the reins of political power in the US gets granted near-king status now. Ask yourself, is it worth it to try, given that as the reward for suceeding? I think these "rulers" think it is, especially when they can make it illegal to question them or their machines. That's called "shooting fish in a barrel".
Anyway, good luck reading, it's an incredible eye opener. I still vote, but it's from inertia mostly. I used to be suspicious of it, now I'm sure, I'd wager a years pay plus on it. Incidently,last time, I had some write-ins, they don't show up in the results. Guess my vote doesn't count anyway...
soapbox, still here, restrictions increasing rapidly, zero privacy any longer, government has the "right" to 0wnz you
ballotbox, see discussion, probably corrupt and irrevelant
jurybox, judges and DAs disqualify or hold in contempt people who are aware of and try to exercise their rights as jurors, ie, you can rule as a juror on the legality of the law in question,along with the individual case'es defendent, numerous examples out there
ammobox, still available,but rapidly being restricted out of existence in piece-meal manner, and no longer is it legal to have parity with the king's troops or agents, the one single vital *thing* that made our nation even possible, "parity" as the ultimate check and balance against despotic abuse.
Hmm, looking at the list we are almost totally en screwed. Won't be long now.
Too bad I was right when I saw this coming like 4 decades ago, got hip enough and smart enough to spot obvious trends. Sucks. It's gonna get worse, much worse. We are in the tail end of the good old days, enjoy them.
.... making that 50 clams the largest contribution anyone can make to a candidate or party (cumulative during any two year election cycle), and making it illegal ( a serious federal felony ) for any corporation or organization to donate a single penny.
That would sort out a lot of this political BS in short order.
I got nothing against campaign finance reform, it's not a free speech issue, it's a "remove the so-called right to pay bribes" issue.
Another way to open the political process is to have 24 hour voting days.
And yet anothert would be and to disallow ANY over the air broadcaster, who has been granted a peoples license to have a monopoly on a channel or frequency, from sponsoring any political "debate" that DIDN'T include all the candidates who had qualified to be on the ballot, and make that qualification equal in all the states. To have any debates, you have to have all the printed on the ballot candidates. To do less is perpetuating a lie and a scam, and to do it on the peoples airwaves -those broadcasters do NOT own those airwaves- is a pure act of fraud and theft.
The "two party and only those two parties for evah and evah" carved in stone "system" is incredibly broken, and it's a national disgrace, IMO.
... I don't know you tell me. In the last general elections, we were the first state to go all computerised voting, diebold machines. We had all the normal pre elction poll numbers. We also had the real time election day poll numbers. What we got was an "upset" election that defied all the poll numbers, and put an R in the governors seat for the -> first time since the civil war -, along with some other interesting race "upsets". In the morning,election day, there were a boatload of news flashes about people reporting irregularities with the machines, by mid afternoon most of those stories not only stopped coming, they disappeared from places that were initially reporting them, drudge report being one of them, because I know I checked his page before leaving to vote, when I got back around an hour later, it was gone, and that just do not happen on his page all too often. At least I never saw it happen before, they scroll away, but don't get actually removed. Local news on the TV downplayed the heck out of it, and by the next day it wasn't talked about. The term is "spiked" the stories got spiked.
coincidence?
The ramifications are, they can be programmed to give any results they want, and you can't tell. They can be reprogrammed on the spot with a card, or done over a modem. You tell me if you think they are secure, accurate and unbiased, because there's no way anyone who doesn't work for diebold can tell. Before, we had paper ballots, you could eyeball the results, anyone who could see and count could verify a result at the end of the day, now... the machine spits out whatever, there is zero, repeat zero way to verify what the real numbers are. And tell ya, it only takes alteration of a few numbers to REALLY change things.
but it's NEW and SHINY, so it must be better, right?
Tell me, what is the worth, in dollars, a guess, of CONTROLLING a state office like a governorship or a national office like a Rep, Senator or a Presidency? Really, what's the worth, then think on what people do for much, much, much less potential "reward", how far human beings will go for just a few thou? Criminals do a very poor risk/reward ratio when they do a crime. But, what are the risks of getting caught if BY LAW AND DESIGN only a few people really know what's going on with some black box, when your naked eyeballs aren't enough to verify a tally, when no paper trail exists, when the black box has several ways to access it, and when the potential rewards for any criminality can run into sums of figures that are planet earth mind boggling large? When the power that can be accrued by skewing a tally includes literally the getting handed the power of life or death over entire other nations? What is the risk/potential reward ratio then?
Lotta questions, so far the only answers we have point to A-serious incompetence or delibarate malfeasance with voting computers, and B the people involved are connected to extremely radical elements in the political military industrial complex within a single political party, an extreme faction of that party.
... microsoft and that joke fine they got, where they could print their own money-vouchers.
Uh huh, they were "punished"
I got me a WHOLE ROLL that says reynolds on it, and I tell ya, MS cut a deal with the feds/spooks, there's back doors to the back doors in their stuff, and will be, for many moons...
... at least on classic mac OS, they always were apple-scriptable, built in. that's typing crap to do stuff, near as I can see. I always liked mine, never got a single cootieth. They existed, but I ran the net for many many years with classic, did what I wanted, never got owned or lost data, no firewall, no nuthin. Biggest problem I could consistently count on was netscape freezes. Dang I'll give that to anyone, it for-sure happened. If one learned to allocate correct memory to apps though, then there was no problem multi tasking with anything else. Switched to iCab when it came out, got rid of that browser borking the system syndrome, plus speeded up surfing considerable. Heck, I put iCab on an old quadra and that thing is a surfin machine, put it on a 280c, works great. iCab was years ahead of other browsers, IMO,for most features, so was soundjam, still my favorite tunes/streams player, always worked well, low foot print.. Installing apps, I mean, about as dang easy as it can get short of thought control. Still got my PB 1400, love it.
I mean, what is wrong with the concept of "just works"? I think it's a decent idea meself. Stuff SHOULD just work right from the git go the day you bring it home, then be customizable from there.
No idea on OSX, can't afford it, and switched to open source/free because after I was turned on to the philosophy of it,how cooperation makes better stuff, many hands make light work, etc, it made sense to me.
too bad apple never released classic as open source, just gave it away.
There needs to be more emphasis on a laptop as a true portable device, rather than a desktop replacement. Very low watt passive cooled only chip, perhaps just a solid state drive(s), lower power but still decent CPU, and etc. Basically PDA with screen and ability to accept USB, firewire stuff easily. No surround sound dvd players in other words. Maybe even running embedded OS . Nothing that takes lotsa juice. I'm sure it's doable, too. Built from the ground up somehow with low electrical needs as the primary engineering aspect, so that dual batteries+ crank/spring + built in somewhat relocatable solar panel will be more than adequate for a full 8+ hour workday.. Something along those lines. Niche market now, might be the solution to the "short batt life" syndrome, that OR the "manly man" laptop I outlined, triple batteries, heck with the weight, a 8 lb beast like we used to have.
... take a chance on broadcasting something that I am sure is not even remotely legal in a public space, it's gonna be something that will make consumer products RFID tags scan as 2CENTS no matter what you plop on the checkout counter. Nice stroll around chinamart, TWO CENTS the whole store. heh heh heh Enough people do that, they might think thrice about that stuff.....
How about toll road smart cards? Make everyone pay 1000$, they'd get rid of that, too. How about replacing TV signals, say, during "the big game" or "secret days of our stormy lives" a signal appears YOU IDJIT, AIN'T YA GOT ANYTHING IMPORTANT TO DO? LOOK AROUND, STUFF IS MESSED UP, POLITICIANS AND MEGACORPS ARE BRAINWASHIN YA AND RIPPIN YA OFF!!
or EVERYBODY WALKS DAY, broadcast a signal that shuts down all the new whizzbang cars with computer controled everything, including NeoConStar. ZAP, it's WALK day!
Back to the phones, don't shut them off, just replace any call with YOU ARE SERIOUSLY ANNOYING, TURN THE DANG PHONE OFF FOR AWHILE AND ENJOY SOME LIFE!
electronic activism, gotta luv it!
of course, I would never do anything like that...
err.. where's the URL for the sourceforge project for this device, umm, just for "educational and research purposes".
I admit to becoming a curmudgeon as I have gotten older. I really don't listen to much music or watch movies or professional sports or play video games. I have really oputgrown all that stuff, not that what I think is right or wrong for anyone else, just that's "me" that's all. I find bread and circuses to be the biggest distraction that the globalist crooks use to rip people off and keep them oppressed, they go WAY out their way to have young children get addicted to those "pursuits", but I concentrate on other issues, and for entertainments I do stuff like gardening (fun plus practical), work on my antique computers, chase the old lady around (hell ya heh), play with the dogs, build stuff,carpenty, cob job mod my various old lawn tractors and small engine stuff, etc. I like researching and posting on politics & economics and energy issues on the net and on survival/preparedness topics as well, I do it a lot,a fun, somewhat useful hobby.I like some music when I hear it, mostly old rock, but I don't go out of my way to purchase/listen much anymore. The music and movie industry made untold thousands off of me when I was younger, I have supported artists and their retinue quite extensively in the past, but that's enough. I've worked a few large name brand bands as a rigger/steel climber, seen that aspect of the industry, and frankly, those people -the "artistes"- aren't worth the megabucks they get paid, IMO. I might occassionaly go see a local band at some club, I get antsy and want to go dancing once in awhile, so that's about it. I certainly don't download mp3s or movies, etc. I really ain't got a dog in this dispute, just I think all the parties should get together and agree that the tech advances in the past ten years have made the old business of "art" completely changed,it's NOT EVAH gonna change back, so they need to deal with it ratioanly, but rational thought appears to not be an aspect of music/movie freeloaders, nor the "industry". They are both a little..disingenous to be polite about it..
I see good arguments on both sides, but neither side is willing to give an inch, my bet is on technology winning, which means copies need to be legally cheap cheap cheap free or cheap or it's gonna be like alky prohibition, vioating the double nickle, etc, ie, no one pays any mind to it. Simple as that.
what I said. I said US central bankers were stupider. that's it. And they are. They failed to hold some cards, they threw away any backup "economy", they over extended how far they could push other nations to keep taking petrodollars, and they exported too many jobs too fast. japan was a little slower to do it, that's all. I said nothing about japans central bankers except they are trying to distance themselves from the buck, as are any number of other nations, that is just data, use google news search for the info, alot has been happening this year..
If you ask me, the only smart bankers now are in the islamic nations, where they have kicked off the adoption of the gold dinar to settle national debts between the islamic nations, and at some time, these nations will expand that to insisting on gold or partially gold backed currencies for their oil, or use direct swaps, oil for manufactured goods, and guess who will be in the drivers seat then with A the need for oil, and B-manufactured goods to swap. big hint, it ain't japan or the US. Starts with a "C". That is also one of the reasons that the shrub crime gang invaded iraq, he was about to insist on getting paid in euros for oil, not in fed reserve notes. They wanted to establish a beachhead with troops on the ground to help counter chinas obvious moves into the mideast, beyond what they are doing already. Venezuela is close to that now, too, BTW, sewriously thinking about not using dollars for their oil.
The days of the debt based counterfeit money are numbered, that includes the yen and the dollar. The euro will take longer to slide, but it will too, even though it's up nicely lately.
ALL the big industrialised nations are in trouble regarding currencies,debt, and the obvious inability to fund their populations "retirements". Ain't happening. Because basically, the entire concept on debt based currency is insane, it's a scam, a con game. Japan went along with it too, yes they have been struggling, they are more aware of it's deficiencies than anyone posting on slashdot, including me of course. They just have the same amount of political crooks and banker crooks as "leaders" as we do, and no way will those guys admit what a full ripoff it is, how truly corrupt a system like that becomes... so they have to keep trying to plug the flooding dike, and it's almost impossible.
There's no easy fix for it when you are running on debt as a benchmark as opposed to honestly quantified produced wealth. You cannot "borrow" wealth into existence, but you can easily borrow "debt" into existence. Calling it wealth does not make it so. Do that long enough and extensively enough, ya gets your problems..Japan has 'em, we got 'em, and etc...
In the short and medium term, historically speaking, it can be used to create the illusion of wealth production, obviously it works,congames usually work, but in the long run, the historical track record of any fiat or debt based currency ever tried in man's history has always failed and collapsed in the end. It always BSOD in practical terms. All shiny and flashy, everyone is happy, everyone is rich, blather yada yada, exactly like the dotcom boom when people thought that that fiat currency,their "portfolios" which showed these totally unrealistic "worth values" that they were pre spending in their minds,the inflated debt based projections represented by stock "value" collapsed, and collapsed hard once reality set in. Those inflated values are an exact analogy to a fiat currency such as exists in japan, the us, and elsewheres. Works for awhile, then kaboom. the only variable is in the timing. No exceptions yet in man's history. It usually causes tremendous social change, conflicts, wars, whatnot.
Japan is trying to deal with as problem that is basically un-fixable, the best they can hope for is a mitigation of the problems, not a full complete fix. They've already adjusted insane real estate prices, and they had to adjust their internal economy by outsourcing, something they never really w
we'll get more tech that way! think of how fast modchips will show up, and advances in optics so you can capture the output right off the screen into another optical device/camera that isn't borked.
In the olden daze, this was the only way we sci fi nerds could get a copy of TV shows, set up a super 8 on a tripod and record whoever had the clearest screen and signal. It was tedious, clunky, gave medium dismal results, but at parties we could actually watch old twilight zones,the prisoner, outer limits, one step beyond, etc.
It will also hurt the economy, as people just will not be fast to trade in their old vcrs and tvs as long as there is an over the air signal to catch and something to record. It might even make people ditch the dish and the cable, and increase the demand over the net, perhaps from foreign servers.
Same deal as now with cds and music, but once you fork with joe sixpack and his ability to record nascar and football and his old lady's soaps to watch when he/she gets home from work, it will make todays "pirating" look like a lemonade stand stick up.
... take it with you when you move. Lot of decent low energy fridges out there. Last place I lived (as an estate cartaker) we used mostly solar, the owners of the place got a sunfrost fridge and a freezer that I used. Significantly better than what was in the house when they bought it. I'm sure there are others, the slickest ones I think are both low energy AND dual fuel, usually an option like electric/propane or electric/kerosene. Helps when the power goes out...... The one in my RV camper is electric/propane, works well, doesn't even have a compressor, uses that ammonia absorption stuff.
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fiat currencies, just printed up paper being used as money? You can't find any examples? This is "money 101" territory here
Stocks.. how many people do you know who were sitting on what they thought was a "ton o money" in their dotcom stock portfolio, then it vaporized on them? If it was a representation of a tangible produced product, it would be sitting in a warehouse someplace, but it wasn't, it isn't, that's why it can disappear. And be created at will.
All representations of money are subject to poofing, being inflated, devalued, etc *until* they are turned into a tangible product or have been exchanged for a sevice completed. Even gold and silver coin have had inflationary pressures and been counterfeited by being diluted with base metals, had their edges trimmed, etc. That's why most coins evolved with ridges around the circumference, it was an attempt to slow down the practice of filing off around them, making the coins marginally smaller and using the filings elsewheres.
The US dollar (a debt based private bank "note" which has a legal definition, look it up) is a great example why using fiat currencies backed by nothing doesn't work in the long run, it's easy to see. I used to be able to get X amount of product for a dollar, I will give an exact example, I have purchased 5 lbs of hamburger for a single dollar before, back in the olden daze.. Now in a lot of cases, the same product costsd x larger amount, last I got a deal on any it was around a buck 50 a lb. this is called inflation, over the years, the central banks artifically create more money than what is represented by accumulated produced wealth, this is why you can't go to the store and still get 5 lbs chiopped meat for a buck. And this despite the technology for producing, packaging, shipping, retailing has undergone very good changes with regards to efficiency, it's still way more expensive than it used to be. Other examples abound, famous case was in ww2, the german reichsmark. What can you buy with them today, and how fast did it go from a "piece of valuable money" that people used for day to day whatever, to fireplace kindling? How about the iraqi dinar, before the war, now after the war? it was used as money there, now it's not, theyhave "new and improved money", but it's the same old printed up stuff, just now we control it.(and manipulate it)
We have a phrase from our own past, "not worth a continental". Continentals were fiat money, printed up, backed by nothing, used to attempt to pay for our government when we were at war in the early days. They were worth nothing, people didn't use them much and their production ceased when it became obvious they were worthless.
Any "money" that isn't the end user product or service itself is a fictitous representation of "wealth". Precious metals coin were an attempt to even that out, at least the representation was a tangible of universal recognized worth, and still is around the world. It's still a representation though.
Wealth cannot be borrowed into existence,not really except as part of long standing official banking con games, wealth has to be grown, mined/extracted, or manufactured using the above materials. that's it, everyhting else is a fictitous srepresentations of wealth, and it pays to always keep the two terms separate.
Wealth may be serviced, but a service itself is not a measure of produced wealth, although it's current worth may be represented with the currency du juor. A service for a tangible is a re arrangement of produced wealth, but it is not wealth creating.
Stocks in a portfolio are just another representation of "wealth",and as such are a form of tradeable "currency",(the common slang term for them is poker chips) but until they are traded in, sold in other words to another sucker.. I mean "investor", through as many layers as you want to use, for a product or service, they are vaporware. they are a form of money that can be classed as "electronic promises to pay". They are usually even more highly infl
... you.. you internet flamer, you! HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Dang, I had some good ones, had a stack of the spidermans, from issue one. Just that one issue got to be worth serious clams now.. I am thinking now, converting lawn mowing (50 cent a yard), farm work(around 9$ a day in the summer) and snow shoveling (50 cent a driveway, with a shovel) hours of labor, into ten cent comics, what a return on investment that was, err, could have been.
Of course, I could have saved all my real silver coin, too..sheesh....
My dad had comics from his childhood, pulp fiction looking things, I can't remember most of them, the weirdest ones were obvious propoganda pieces released during world war two. He went in out of high school during that war, so his collection came to a halt then, but it caught the first coupla years of the war while he was still in school. I can't remember the names of them now, no idea if he still has them. I do remember some of them had stickers you collected and pasted into the comics. They were pretty jingoistic and racist from what I recall, as to be expected then I suppose.
Never saw the first spiderman movie, but I only really buy well marked down used movies now, and not very many of them. I even have a copy of the matrix here I got somehow used, never watched it yet, just not a big movie person any more. Used to love them, now they are mostly tedious to me. Still like reading though, always have, taught myself (mostly) the basics before I went to school around age 4, reading newspapers and coordinating what I read in them with what was on the news on the 9 inch philco.. the first TV in da 'hood. First word I remember learning was "Ike". Picture association -> word. The rest came easier after nouns were adequate.
still kant speul wirth nuthin tho
... and run linux myself. I just have a lot of friends who are still running windows (most of them by far) and I wanted to offer more precise and comprehensible instructions to them to avoid the nasties. I will admit I haven't been too effective in "evangelizing" switching OSs, because most of my friends are netfriends, so I can't just go over to their house and help them through first install and getting it all setup, etc.. Most people struggle by with patches, firewalls etc and have grown very familiar with their systems and honestly seem to not want to change, just fix it. It's inertia mostly. I think most people are still running 98 for instance. I asked on another article last week or so but didn't get any replies, asking if any web masters who run non technical non geek sites, just regular old sites would confirm that or not. heck, I know several people still running 95, because it still surfs good enough with their old machines, and they see no reason to purchase an expensive new machine. True facts there.
I have been advising people to switch browsers, etc for a long time, some have, that's about the best I can do. It takes actual physical interaction with people and direct help for them to see that they have viable alternatives. MS comes on their boxes, their kids play MS games, etc, they aren't in any rush to switch. This will not change until people buy a new computer with an alternative OS installed on it from the git-go, and that OS better work for them full GUI with no command line tweaking, and I've said that for years now.
...surprised. I know I went out of my way covertly, using contacts inside "the establishment" to see what da man has on people, ie, me in particular. It's a lot, I think people would be shocked if it became public knowledge what is already in government databases.
...been trolled, I neglected originally to mention I live in georgia. There hasn't been a republican governor here since the reconstruction (after the scorched earth destruction) era after the civil war. Sorry to have not been more clear.
note, I can't PROVE that the 2000 national or my 2002 state vote were hijacked, but it looks suspicious as all get out to me.
I go vote, but voting constitution party or libertarian or whatever, I am used to my vote always being in a minority, but to answer critics who saw a vote for anyone who isn't in the D or R party is "wasted", I say the only wasted vote is one not cast, generally speaking. Since I have no desire to see either a D or R in the presidency, for example, it matters little to me which of the two bozos gets in, the country continues to get borked further. So my vote isn't a "spoiler" vote. Very generally speaking, the Libertarians usually snag some votes from the Rs, the green party candidate from the Ds, reform party hit both about equally, etc,etc,so I don't see that as being any sort of spoiler effect, it balances out.
The few times we have had third party candidates (at the national level) get any media coverage of note, there has always been a surge in people actually investigating and voting for an alternative candidate. I will note this going way back. This goes way back,it is just a bit of verifiable data that is true, so what the media does now is NO COVERAGE as a default. they give a very slight minimum coverage, that's it.. The media is top to bottom owned by connected globalist people who have R's and Ds in their pockets, so they have no desire to publicise any third party or it's candidate, it might upset too many carefully blackmailed and bribed political/economic/power apple carts that have been established over the years. Having bought and paid for political control at all levels of government is much too lucrative for them to adjust, this is why you will barely even see a mention of alternative candidates or partys, they always push the globalists candidates to give people the illusion there is "choice". This is just SO obvious.
About the only place an individual can still make a difference is in the most basic local elections. At county level or above, nope, it's the carved in stone One-party-with-two-names "system", it is little different from blatantly open "one" party systems, such as in Mainland China.
The Free State project is the best attempt I have seen to break this criminal system, it is an astounding idea, and I wish them well, but I have no desire to relocate to New Hampshire. If they had chosen either Vermont, Maine or Idaho (various reasons not relevant to this discussion)I might have considered it.
the apprentice is one of the few shows I watch, so I saw the trailer. all of a sudden I jump up and yell HEY, THAT'S DOC OCT!!! Startled GF and we both laughed over it
heh heh, hadn't even thought about it since the 60's when my dad MADE ME give away my collection when we moved because he didn't want to pay shipping on it with the full sized tractor trailer that moved all our other crap... uh huh, full collection going way back to the 50's, marvel and DC and Mads.. geez....
that collection would be worth.. a freeking lot right now, that's how much! I would guess well into five maybe even six figures
..you can "still have your real time voting stats" and such, does not make it so, not in my state of georgia. Just because it is possible, or that the source code could be examined, doesn'rt fly, it isn't, and chances are it won't be. We are now stuck with insecure, extremely easy to manipulate voting "results". This is a very serious issue, a critical issue, and ad lib casual dismissive quips do not fix the problem.
Technically, previous we had a more verifiable and easy to use system, that was paid for and working. Lockable wooden box, opened in the morning, open for inspection to see it was empty, locked at night. any dispute was easy to resove. costs zero money, those voting boxes were long paid for. I voted in both extremely dense population districts,and in very rural, but the vote always went through and was human countable. Pencil, fill in the circle. Worked well, really, and anyone with a set of eyeballs could verify the count right at the precinct level.
I agree on the no practical differences between Ds and Rs now, especially at the upper levels, I rarely vote for one now, I vote third party,some named independent, or write in, etc. Politically, I am a strict constitutionalist, vote accordingly. There are a few D's or Rs that I *might* vote for, were I in their districts, examples, ron paul or tom tancredo.
I started working politics as a young lad in the goldwater campaign, and learned some serious lessons then, especially how the R party got hijacked by the rockefeller/globalist (basically the NWO faction) wing back then and sabotaged their own candidate. Wheels within wheels. Switched back and forth, always found out the system with the entrenched partys itself is corrupt, either party, so....
I think the florida vote was an abomination, there were exploits and illegalities taken from all partys involved in that fiasco. They should have re run it, started from scratch, with poll workers telling everyone there to vote correctly, and a default of malformed ballots being tossed with no ananlysis of what they "might indicate".
I still don't think we have all the answers there, but I think there were conflicting high level efforts to hijack it, both parties in other words.
I have long stated publically my wish for a grand jury investigation of both the RNC and the DNC to look for violations leading to indictments and prosecutions, starting with the RICO act. I believe the combination of those two parties, along with their corporate sponsors, most notably the higher levels of public media, has lead to a full takeover- a coup- of what should be the people's government. There are no checks and balances when all the judges that are appointed are handpicked/vetted members of one or the other of those parties.
"going crazy" over observations that the vote is being hijacked is not so crazy if there is serious credible evidence that *this is so*.
I have some questions
If you advise people to delete the registry key, what are the ramifications for them during normal browsing?
The article says it may effect other browsers, but I am wondering if that is entirely true, are there any other windows browsers that people can run that won't suffer from the exploit?
The reason is, if you tell windows friends about this, point them to the advisory, you will get eyeballs rolling back. There needs to be a normal non guru level english description and howto deal with this.
I am reluctant to tell someone to *delete* a functioning registry key in particular, but seeing as how this involves merely clicking on an html page, the main deal with normal surfing.. well, what do you tell people? All the different "switch from this user level to that, unless you need this app, no wait, only for that one and..." and delete this and whatnot are just going to mostly result in *no action* being taken by most people if they even hear of this.
If someone can point to a better written (for normal users) synopsis and mitigation path than what is on certs site (technically accurate but rather convulted and arcane),I'd appreciaste it
they should be making all their own.
80,000 feet before first burn! that's thinking! I thought it might be a good idea! Thanks for the URL!
There used to be some big start up space company that wanted to use expended fuel sections from other launches, link them together, and make cheap orbital platforms out of them. I think they were going to be supported by Hilton hotels, but I haven't followed it. I like off the wall thinking, turning expendable/waste stuff into useful products.
... I can probably answer this myself but I'd rather get some credible experts opinions... failing that, slashdot is right handy....
umm, can they do a coordinated analysis of their logs at the moment of capture, then work backwards and determine the sequence of what I will term "lucky breaks" that lead to the capture, allowing them to throw away all the blind leads, so that in future attempts they can cut to the chase quicker? All the non-lucky breaks should be easy (that's the real question I don't know) to ID now and discard,leaving the one true path, or is this whack?
...contemplating using a helium balloon as the "first stage" of a launch? Or is this allowed? Starting at 50-60 thou feet or above before it lights might be a nice edge....
total aside, grew up watching "man in space". It's been nice, was sad to see them abandon the X series , then go back to it years later, badly...lost opportunity there.. anyway, as a kidm I, along with several million other people got stunned, and went outside and tried to see sputnik (didn't)(tell you, it weirded people out, scared them), although I did see ECHO later on. Chemical rockets ar... old news,I'm just not impressed or juiced over it any longer, except for this thing, but....... really... I'm holding out for a last minute dark-horse entry that sweeps the tourney, from some physics nerds, the release of the "civvie version" electrogravitic distortion propulsion craft.
one can hope... I got ten clams that "da man" already got one, or several..
... that I read in the various posts about sun making a bad move and sliding downhill,there might be an opportunity or three out there for getting nice surplus at throw away prices, so which of their old (?) boxes would be the *best deal* to look for if one wanted a real cheap but still good enough multi processor sun box, say 4 CPUs? Would it require solaris only? Figure they should be at least roughly pen II class equivalent in speed, etc, which is still "good enough" for my purposes, which are basically "fooling around with neat stuff". And what other pitfalls should you be aware of in such a purchase? I have zee-ro experience with anything other than commodity low end PCs and entry level macs. I've looked on ebay, but not familiar enough with the models and the quirks of same, etc. Or should it be a Sun, how about an IBM mid level machine? Or what? Ideally, it should be able to run either the OS that come on it, or linux/bsd whatever. Thanks in advance to anyone who has any tips!
it's a fascinating subject, but in my opinion, and some other smart peoples opinions, the computerised voting that is being pushed onto the US people is for one purpose, to completely eliminate chance when it comes to voting for "the annointed ones" who think it is their born right to "rule" over everyone else. I 100% believe that, and I have zero doubts. Google around for votescam,diebold, voting irregularites, etc and spend an evening reading the empirical and anecdotal out there. You can watch at how vote scamming grew from simple ballot box stuffing to the industry it is today, one step at a time, and how these voting machines have been literrally crammed down our throats. Check out the history of the "voter news service" scams. See what connection rep hastert has to computerised voting and his election perhaps. Do that, you'll be convinced that it's a conspiracy, it's to control power inside the US, it'sworking, and it'sworth trillions of dollars. whoever controls the reins of political power in the US gets granted near-king status now. Ask yourself, is it worth it to try, given that as the reward for suceeding? I think these "rulers" think it is, especially when they can make it illegal to question them or their machines. That's called "shooting fish in a barrel".
Anyway, good luck reading, it's an incredible eye opener. I still vote, but it's from inertia mostly. I used to be suspicious of it, now I'm sure, I'd wager a years pay plus on it. Incidently,last time, I had some write-ins, they don't show up in the results. Guess my vote doesn't count anyway...
soapbox, still here, restrictions increasing rapidly, zero privacy any longer, government has the "right" to 0wnz you
ballotbox, see discussion, probably corrupt and irrevelant
jurybox, judges and DAs disqualify or hold in contempt people who are aware of and try to exercise their rights as jurors, ie, you can rule as a juror on the legality of the law in question,along with the individual case'es defendent, numerous examples out there
ammobox, still available,but rapidly being restricted out of existence in piece-meal manner, and no longer is it legal to have parity with the king's troops or agents, the one single vital *thing* that made our nation even possible, "parity" as the ultimate check and balance against despotic abuse.
Hmm, looking at the list we are almost totally en screwed. Won't be long now.
Too bad I was right when I saw this coming like 4 decades ago, got hip enough and smart enough to spot obvious trends. Sucks. It's gonna get worse, much worse. We are in the tail end of the good old days, enjoy them.
.... making that 50 clams the largest contribution anyone can make to a candidate or party (cumulative during any two year election cycle), and making it illegal ( a serious federal felony ) for any corporation or organization to donate a single penny.
That would sort out a lot of this political BS in short order.
I got nothing against campaign finance reform, it's not a free speech issue, it's a "remove the so-called right to pay bribes" issue.
Another way to open the political process is to have 24 hour voting days.
And yet anothert would be and to disallow ANY over the air broadcaster, who has been granted a peoples license to have a monopoly on a channel or frequency, from sponsoring any political "debate" that DIDN'T include all the candidates who had qualified to be on the ballot, and make that qualification equal in all the states. To have any debates, you have to have all the printed on the ballot candidates. To do less is perpetuating a lie and a scam, and to do it on the peoples airwaves -those broadcasters do NOT own those airwaves- is a pure act of fraud and theft.
The "two party and only those two parties for evah and evah" carved in stone "system" is incredibly broken, and it's a national disgrace, IMO.
... I don't know you tell me. In the last general elections, we were the first state to go all computerised voting, diebold machines. We had all the normal pre elction poll numbers. We also had the real time election day poll numbers. What we got was an "upset" election that defied all the poll numbers, and put an R in the governors seat for the -> first time since the civil war -, along with some other interesting race "upsets". In the morning,election day, there were a boatload of news flashes about people reporting irregularities with the machines, by mid afternoon most of those stories not only stopped coming, they disappeared from places that were initially reporting them, drudge report being one of them, because I know I checked his page before leaving to vote, when I got back around an hour later, it was gone, and that just do not happen on his page all too often. At least I never saw it happen before, they scroll away, but don't get actually removed. Local news on the TV downplayed the heck out of it, and by the next day it wasn't talked about. The term is "spiked" the stories got spiked.
coincidence?
The ramifications are, they can be programmed to give any results they want, and you can't tell. They can be reprogrammed on the spot with a card, or done over a modem. You tell me if you think they are secure, accurate and unbiased, because there's no way anyone who doesn't work for diebold can tell. Before, we had paper ballots, you could eyeball the results, anyone who could see and count could verify a result at the end of the day, now... the machine spits out whatever, there is zero, repeat zero way to verify what the real numbers are. And tell ya, it only takes alteration of a few numbers to REALLY change things.
but it's NEW and SHINY, so it must be better, right?
Tell me, what is the worth, in dollars, a guess, of CONTROLLING a state office like a governorship or a national office like a Rep, Senator or a Presidency? Really, what's the worth, then think on what people do for much, much, much less potential "reward", how far human beings will go for just a few thou? Criminals do a very poor risk/reward ratio when they do a crime. But, what are the risks of getting caught if BY LAW AND DESIGN only a few people really know what's going on with some black box, when your naked eyeballs aren't enough to verify a tally, when no paper trail exists, when the black box has several ways to access it, and when the potential rewards for any criminality can run into sums of figures that are planet earth mind boggling large? When the power that can be accrued by skewing a tally includes literally the getting handed the power of life or death over entire other nations? What is the risk/potential reward ratio then?
Lotta questions, so far the only answers we have point to A-serious incompetence or delibarate malfeasance with voting computers, and B the people involved are connected to extremely radical elements in the political military industrial complex within a single political party, an extreme faction of that party.
I know what my analysis of that tells me
... microsoft and that joke fine they got, where they could print their own money-vouchers.
Uh huh, they were "punished"
I got me a WHOLE ROLL that says reynolds on it, and I tell ya, MS cut a deal with the feds/spooks, there's back doors to the back doors in their stuff, and will be, for many moons...
bet a voucher on it...
... at least on classic mac OS, they always were apple-scriptable, built in. that's typing crap to do stuff, near as I can see. I always liked mine, never got a single cootieth. They existed, but I ran the net for many many years with classic, did what I wanted, never got owned or lost data, no firewall, no nuthin. Biggest problem I could consistently count on was netscape freezes. Dang I'll give that to anyone, it for-sure happened. If one learned to allocate correct memory to apps though, then there was no problem multi tasking with anything else. Switched to iCab when it came out, got rid of that browser borking the system syndrome, plus speeded up surfing considerable. Heck, I put iCab on an old quadra and that thing is a surfin machine, put it on a 280c, works great. iCab was years ahead of other browsers, IMO,for most features, so was soundjam, still my favorite tunes/streams player, always worked well, low foot print.. Installing apps, I mean, about as dang easy as it can get short of thought control. Still got my PB 1400, love it.
I mean, what is wrong with the concept of "just works"? I think it's a decent idea meself. Stuff SHOULD just work right from the git go the day you bring it home, then be customizable from there.
No idea on OSX, can't afford it, and switched to open source/free because after I was turned on to the philosophy of it,how cooperation makes better stuff, many hands make light work, etc, it made sense to me.
too bad apple never released classic as open source, just gave it away.
my addiction is just writing and posting. You could drop me onto the ladies auxiliary knitting forum and I could come up with an opinion......
There needs to be more emphasis on a laptop as a true portable device, rather than a desktop replacement. Very low watt passive cooled only chip, perhaps just a solid state drive(s), lower power but still decent CPU, and etc. Basically PDA with screen and ability to accept USB, firewire stuff easily. No surround sound dvd players in other words. Maybe even running embedded OS . Nothing that takes lotsa juice. I'm sure it's doable, too. Built from the ground up somehow with low electrical needs as the primary engineering aspect, so that dual batteries+ crank/spring + built in somewhat relocatable solar panel will be more than adequate for a full 8+ hour workday.. Something along those lines. Niche market now, might be the solution to the "short batt life" syndrome, that OR the "manly man" laptop I outlined, triple batteries, heck with the weight, a 8 lb beast like we used to have.
... take a chance on broadcasting something that I am sure is not even remotely legal in a public space, it's gonna be something that will make consumer products RFID tags scan as 2CENTS no matter what you plop on the checkout counter. Nice stroll around chinamart, TWO CENTS the whole store. heh heh heh Enough people do that, they might think thrice about that stuff.....
How about toll road smart cards? Make everyone pay 1000$, they'd get rid of that, too. How about replacing TV signals, say, during "the big game" or "secret days of our stormy lives" a signal appears YOU IDJIT, AIN'T YA GOT ANYTHING IMPORTANT TO DO? LOOK AROUND, STUFF IS MESSED UP, POLITICIANS AND MEGACORPS ARE BRAINWASHIN YA AND RIPPIN YA OFF!!
or EVERYBODY WALKS DAY, broadcast a signal that shuts down all the new whizzbang cars with computer controled everything, including NeoConStar. ZAP, it's WALK day!
Back to the phones, don't shut them off, just replace any call with YOU ARE SERIOUSLY ANNOYING, TURN THE DANG PHONE OFF FOR AWHILE AND ENJOY SOME LIFE!
electronic activism, gotta luv it!
of course, I would never do anything like that...
err.. where's the URL for the sourceforge project for this device, umm, just for "educational and research purposes".
I admit to becoming a curmudgeon as I have gotten older. I really don't listen to much music or watch movies or professional sports or play video games. I have really oputgrown all that stuff, not that what I think is right or wrong for anyone else, just that's "me" that's all. I find bread and circuses to be the biggest distraction that the globalist crooks use to rip people off and keep them oppressed, they go WAY out their way to have young children get addicted to those "pursuits", but I concentrate on other issues, and for entertainments I do stuff like gardening (fun plus practical), work on my antique computers, chase the old lady around (hell ya heh), play with the dogs, build stuff,carpenty, cob job mod my various old lawn tractors and small engine stuff, etc. I like researching and posting on politics & economics and energy issues on the net and on survival/preparedness topics as well, I do it a lot,a fun, somewhat useful hobby.I like some music when I hear it, mostly old rock, but I don't go out of my way to purchase/listen much anymore. The music and movie industry made untold thousands off of me when I was younger, I have supported artists and their retinue quite extensively in the past, but that's enough. I've worked a few large name brand bands as a rigger/steel climber, seen that aspect of the industry, and frankly, those people -the "artistes"- aren't worth the megabucks they get paid, IMO. I might occassionaly go see a local band at some club, I get antsy and want to go dancing once in awhile, so that's about it. I certainly don't download mp3s or movies, etc. I really ain't got a dog in this dispute, just I think all the parties should get together and agree that the tech advances in the past ten years have made the old business of "art" completely changed,it's NOT EVAH gonna change back, so they need to deal with it ratioanly, but rational thought appears to not be an aspect of music/movie freeloaders, nor the "industry". They are both a little ..disingenous to be polite about it..
I see good arguments on both sides, but neither side is willing to give an inch, my bet is on technology winning, which means copies need to be legally cheap cheap cheap free or cheap or it's gonna be like alky prohibition, vioating the double nickle, etc, ie, no one pays any mind to it. Simple as that.
what I said. I said US central bankers were stupider. that's it. And they are. They failed to hold some cards, they threw away any backup "economy", they over extended how far they could push other nations to keep taking petrodollars, and they exported too many jobs too fast. japan was a little slower to do it, that's all. I said nothing about japans central bankers except they are trying to distance themselves from the buck, as are any number of other nations, that is just data, use google news search for the info, alot has been happening this year..
If you ask me, the only smart bankers now are in the islamic nations, where they have kicked off the adoption of the gold dinar to settle national debts between the islamic nations, and at some time, these nations will expand that to insisting on gold or partially gold backed currencies for their oil, or use direct swaps, oil for manufactured goods, and guess who will be in the drivers seat then with A the need for oil, and B-manufactured goods to swap. big hint, it ain't japan or the US. Starts with a "C". That is also one of the reasons that the shrub crime gang invaded iraq, he was about to insist on getting paid in euros for oil, not in fed reserve notes. They wanted to establish a beachhead with troops on the ground to help counter chinas obvious moves into the mideast, beyond what they are doing already. Venezuela is close to that now, too, BTW, sewriously thinking about not using dollars for their oil.
The days of the debt based counterfeit money are numbered, that includes the yen and the dollar. The euro will take longer to slide, but it will too, even though it's up nicely lately.
ALL the big industrialised nations are in trouble regarding currencies,debt, and the obvious inability to fund their populations "retirements". Ain't happening. Because basically, the entire concept on debt based currency is insane, it's a scam, a con game. Japan went along with it too, yes they have been struggling, they are more aware of it's deficiencies than anyone posting on slashdot, including me of course. They just have the same amount of political crooks and banker crooks as "leaders" as we do, and no way will those guys admit what a full ripoff it is, how truly corrupt a system like that becomes... so they have to keep trying to plug the flooding dike, and it's almost impossible.
There's no easy fix for it when you are running on debt as a benchmark as opposed to honestly quantified produced wealth. You cannot "borrow" wealth into existence, but you can easily borrow "debt" into existence. Calling it wealth does not make it so. Do that long enough and extensively enough, ya gets your problems..Japan has 'em, we got 'em, and etc...
In the short and medium term, historically speaking, it can be used to create the illusion of wealth production, obviously it works,congames usually work, but in the long run, the historical track record of any fiat or debt based currency ever tried in man's history has always failed and collapsed in the end. It always BSOD in practical terms. All shiny and flashy, everyone is happy, everyone is rich, blather yada yada, exactly like the dotcom boom when people thought that that fiat currency,their "portfolios" which showed these totally unrealistic "worth values" that they were pre spending in their minds,the inflated debt based projections represented by stock "value" collapsed, and collapsed hard once reality set in. Those inflated values are an exact analogy to a fiat currency such as exists in japan, the us, and elsewheres. Works for awhile, then kaboom. the only variable is in the timing. No exceptions yet in man's history. It usually causes tremendous social change, conflicts, wars, whatnot.
Japan is trying to deal with as problem that is basically un-fixable, the best they can hope for is a mitigation of the problems, not a full complete fix. They've already adjusted insane real estate prices, and they had to adjust their internal economy by outsourcing, something they never really w
we'll get more tech that way! think of how fast modchips will show up, and advances in optics so you can capture the output right off the screen into another optical device/camera that isn't borked.
In the olden daze, this was the only way we sci fi nerds could get a copy of TV shows, set up a super 8 on a tripod and record whoever had the clearest screen and signal. It was tedious, clunky, gave medium dismal results, but at parties we could actually watch old twilight zones,the prisoner, outer limits, one step beyond, etc.
It will also hurt the economy, as people just will not be fast to trade in their old vcrs and tvs as long as there is an over the air signal to catch and something to record. It might even make people ditch the dish and the cable, and increase the demand over the net, perhaps from foreign servers.
Same deal as now with cds and music, but once you fork with joe sixpack and his ability to record nascar and football and his old lady's soaps to watch when he/she gets home from work, it will make todays "pirating" look like a lemonade stand stick up.
... take it with you when you move. Lot of decent low energy fridges out there. Last place I lived (as an estate cartaker) we used mostly solar, the owners of the place got a sunfrost fridge and a freezer that I used. Significantly better than what was in the house when they bought it. I'm sure there are others, the slickest ones I think are both low energy AND dual fuel, usually an option like electric/propane or electric/kerosene. Helps when the power goes out...... The one in my RV camper is electric/propane, works well, doesn't even have a compressor, uses that ammonia absorption stuff.