Nokia e61's software certificate system

There is only one thing to say about this "security" feature the e61 has. It blows cock. It blows enormous 16 inch porn star cock. See, if the date on the certificate is too far behind what your phones date is, the app won't install. So I guess whoever wrote the program is supposed to keep updating the certificate, even if he changes nothing else in the program. Then if you need to reinstall it, you are supposed to download the new version, which is the same as the old version, except for the certificate being updated. Total bullshit. There is, of course, a workaround. Since there is no way to see the date of the certificate, you have to play musical dates with the phone settings. When you guess the right year, HURRAAHH, your app installs!! JOY JOY!!! I don't know how this is supposed to make your phone more "secure", are you only supposed to install new/updated apps? Programmers are usually pretty bright guys, but whoever came up with this system rode the short bus to school.

Online Ordering

 There are two main places I order online from. Amazon, and Newegg(computer parts). The reason is two fold. They have decent deals, and to me even more important my orders get processed without difficulty. Once in a while I can't find what I want on Amazon or Newegg. That's when the fun begins. Because some places have incredibly picky and/or buggy credit card processing software. You can't just input your address that the card is under, no, no, no!!! It has to be fucking EXACTLY as the bank has it!!! This means if the bank has your addy as say APT 56, you have to make damn sure you type out APT 56, and not Apt. 56, Apt# 56, or any other variation thereof. Also, if the bank has the address all on one line, it has to be filled out that way too, none of this:
STREET NO
APT 56
allowed NO NO NO!!! Now here is where it get's real cute. What you don't know is you are playing wheel of fortune because after so many tries, usually three, the fucking credit card goes into lockdown. A phone call won't fix this, you have to shlep to the bank to get it unlocked again. I had this shit happen to me so many times I went to the bank in a rage and had them print out exactly what they had on their computer. And you know what. I fucking STILL had a problem today, because even though the bank has the zip code in long form, and most places take that, paypal no longer does as the first time I tried to push an order through it got rejected. Fortunetely I DO still have the credit card user address exactly as the bank has it, so I was able to avoid the wheel of fortune shutdown, as everything else was spot on, the only thing I could think to do was change the zip from long form to short form which worked.
I fucking KNOW this picky ass rejection shit is not coming from the banks end, as I have been able to order from newegg and Amazon without an exact format duplicate of what the bank has, as long as the address matches, orders from them go through.

Bailouts and Stimulus

In 2008, Banks and insurance companies perpetrated the greatest scam ever upon the American people. They essentially took America hostage and held a gun to it's head, boldly stating: "give us the money or we'll go bankrupt and kill the economy." Their mouthpiece was Henry Paulson, the U.S. Treasury secretary who "coincidentally" just happened to be an ex partner for Goldman Sachs, a bank holding company that stood to receive a nice, large chunk of any bailout money given out. This puke had the audacity to go down on one knee and beg Nancy Pelosi not to "blow it up" as he mistakenly feared the Democrats would do the right thing and send him packing. The cost in taxpayer money for this abomination was US$700 billion.

There is an easy way to smell out sleaze, either government or corporate; it's lack of public accountability. The Securities and Exchange Commission has denied a recent Freedom of Information request, seeking more information about the federal government’s bailout of American International Group.
Why is this secret? We are not talking about plans for the next nuclear sub, this a bailout of a private company with taxpayer funds, there is NO excuse for any secrecy.

Not surprisingly the bailout recipients have also been closemouthed, as the following quotes from this article point out.
From USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/banking/2008-12-22-bailout-money-where_N.htm

"After receiving billions in aid from taxpayers, the USA's largest banks say they can't track exactly how they're spending it. Some won't even talk about it. "We're choosing not to disclose that," said Kevin Heine, spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon (BK), which received $3 billion."
Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase (JPM), which received $25 billion in bailout money, said that while some of it was lent, some was not, and the bank won't say exactly how the money is being used. "We have not disclosed that to the public. We're declining to," he said."

The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings? And what's the plan for the rest? None of the banks provided specific answers.

"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking," said Barry Koling, a spokesman for SunTrust Banks (STI), which got $3.5 billion."

How can these companies get away with taking taxpayer money, and then refuse any accountability for what they are doing with it? The answer is simple, the government gave out 700 billion dollars with almost no conditions attached. This, if nothing else, should show this scam for what it is, the biggest cash giveaway to giant corporations in American history. Think on that the next time some asshole politician tells you to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps".

Of course the argument from the other side was that these companies were "too big to fail". Let me play devils advocate and for the moment assume that is true. If they are too big to fail, then they are just too big and it's time to bust the trusts. If public money had to have been spent, any company receiving it should have had the CEO fired and been broken up into smaller companies. Furthermore strict public accountability provisions should have been attached to any funds disbursed.

Government cash giveaway part 2, the "stimulus".

I guess the U.S. really isn't running a deficit, as now we have government giveaway part two, this time to the tune of $787 Billion dollars. Unlike the bailout before it, the dispersion of funds from this are far more diverse. There doesn't seem to be the same level of secrecy with this as there has been with the bank/insurance company bailout, but the sheer scope of this makes tracing where all the money goes somewhat difficult. It's not all bad, but it does look like, as usual small business is getting the short end of the stick in favor of large corporations.

From: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lloyd-chapman/obama-stimulus-plan-fails_b_349235.html

Firms with 20 or fewer employees are responsible for over 97 percent of all net new jobs, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data. http://www.inc.com/news/articles/200708/data.html To date the Obama Administration has awarded less than one percent of all funds allocated under the stimulus to those firms.

I'll end this with a simple question; "what's next?" With no accountability required of them, what happens when the banks and insurance companies run through the bailout money? Are they going to come back for another 700 billion?
The economy is continuing to remain sour, what happens if in spite of the stimulus plan it gets worse?

References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Paulson#U.S._government_economic_bailout_of_2008
http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2008/09/26/what-was-paulson-begging-for/
http://www.businessweek.com/investing/wall_street_news_blog/archives/2009/02/bailout_secrecy.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimulus_plan

The digital revolution - the other end

Everyone knows that digital music distribution is a way to cut out the
middlemen, you don't need to have a record company contract in order
to disseminate music to fans, thanks to mp3's and the internet. The
other end of this, not really discussed much, is the production end.
To produce decent sounding songs suitable for radio play it used to be
musicians had to go to a recording studio, which was not cheap. That,
in addition to distribution, gave the recording industry a
stranglehold on musicians. An essential part of any record deal was an
advance, which was a loan to the musicians to pay for the studio time.
It was a gamble for the record companies, as a band who's album didn't
sell could not afford to pay back the advance but considering the
money recording companies have brought in throughout the years it has
worked well for them. Home studio's became available for musicians, in
the form of 4 track cassette recorders by Fostex and TASCAM. The
quality of these was not very good(I had one), so musicians still
needed to go to a recording studio if they wanted a high quality
recording. Fast forward to 2009, and now you have high quality,
affordable digital multitrack recorders, as well as software you can
run on your computer to turn it into a multitrack recording machine. A
home recording studio capable of producing professional sounding
recordings has now become affordable, for less than it would cost to
go into a professional studio musicians can now buy their own. What
this means is that not only don't musicians need the recording
industry for distribution, unless they require some really fancy(and
expensive) sound effects, they don't need them for music production
either.

Room Mates

Room mates suck. No ands ifs or buts about it. Let's start off with a couple I had. I'll refer to them as Asshole and Fuckboy. Of the two, Fuckboy was definitely the lesser of two evils. He was a self centered Casanova type. Living in the room next to his was like being next to a porno shoot, and no that is NOT fun when it goes on day after day at 3:00AM work nights. The other room mate was a more than decent guy, so the situation was annoying but tolerable. Then, of the two of them of COURSE the decent room mate moved out, and Asshole moved in.

I had met Asshole once before, as he was a friend of the home owner, when he bragged about how much he LOVED to stomp on people heads once he got them on the ground. I suspected he would not be a fun room mate to have around, but the homeowner wanted him in, and at first he seemed decent. Then Fuckboy asked him to do something really minor, like leave the shower curtain closed so it would dry better. Assholes response was "fuck you", and that was his response to anything asked of him, no matter how reasonable it was.

Asshole loved the cold, and he made sure everyone got to share that love by jacking open every window in the house even when it was in the 30's. As everyone had to share the bathroom, this really sucked. Close the windows and Asshole would be jacking them open again 10 seconds later. Asshole could do anything he wanted and not care, but if anyone did anything HE didn't like, there was immediate and harsh retaliation. If Fuckboy shaved and didn't rinse out the sink, Asshole would shave his pubic hairs and throw them in the sink. One of Fuckboy's girlfriends made Asshole late for work one morning by hogging the shower, so Asshole pissed in Fuckboy's trash, which was in the hallway. Asshole could do whatever HE wanted to do, but the reverse was not the same.

Complaining to the home owner was useless, when the homeowner finally forced Asshole to stop jacking the windows up when it was freezing outside, he started playing rap at rock concert volume at 5:00AM every morning. When he was told to stop doing that he started writing nasty notes on the condensation of the windows. The homeowner LOVED Asshole, so he was never going to get kicked out no matter what he did. I made damn sure to rent a self contained studio with a private bathroom when I moved out, which was not long after Asshole's latest escapade.

I've had some friends and they have had sour experiences with room mates too. Eric was living with a Joe Hardballs type even more unreasonable than Asshole. Joe Hardballs threw Eric out, and then wouldn't even let him back in to collect his things. Eric had to call the cops. The cop showed up and told Eric he had 10 min to clear his stuff out. It wasn't enough time so Eric wound up losing his guitar and a few other things to Joe Hardballs.

My other friend Kevin had a fun room mate too. He was recommended by a friend of Kevin's, so Kevin thought he was OK. As it turns out, the roomie had a habit. A crack habit. Kevin came back from a days work and all the walls were covered in whipped cream, because his room mate thought that would be fun after smoking crack. The problem was self repairing, as the crackhead paid his dealer but not his share of the rent, so they both got evicted and Kevin was living on the street.

My co-worker has room mates where he lives. They are nowhere near as malicious as the ones I described, but they still suck. They are vegetarians with 0 disease resistance, they are always getting sick. Then my co worker gets sick, then I get sick. So even without living with any, room mates are still sucking for me.

Cars

  Everyone loves cars right? Going to the beach on a hot summer day, cruising down the road, fun fun fun till daddy takes the T bird away. The truth is, cars suck, for multiple reasons. I'm not even going into the environmental aspect, that's been well covered. Cars are expen$ive, really expensive. If you want a halfway decent one, you need to shell out 7 - 12k, and that is for a used car. Then, if you live in a tax hungry state like Massachusetts, you not only have to pay sales tax, but a yearly excise tax as well. Then you have registration fee, drivers license fee, and auto inspection fee. Massachusetts has mandatory auto insurance, and it's EXPENSIVE! The insurance companies have you by the balls and know it, as no insurance = no driving. The fun doesn't end there. Lets say you are late for work, so you drive a little too fast. Get pinched by a cop, and not only are you assessed a fine based off how much over the speed limit you were, but your insurance get's jacked up for years, as they rate you as a "risk". Now you can even get pulled over for not wearing a seat belt, as this is a moving offense your insurance gets jacked up for that too. Think your done shitting out $$$ yet? Think again. Cars break down, and the new ones are extremely complicated. So now you are forced to go to the auto mechanic, who is not cheap. If you are lucky you know an honest mechanic, if you don't then it becomes a crap shoot. The car business is LOADED with sleazeballs, from new and used car salesmen to dishonest, scum bag mechanics. Even after ripping you off for thousands of dollars your car can STILL come back not fixed right. Then you have the fun of going back and forth arguing with thug greasemonkeys. The joys of car ownership just never end.

Valve

http://www.valvesoftware.com/

These guys have made some great games, and they have also made it very easy to host multiplayer games online, no router config bullshit required. Having said that, I do have a beef with them. As they have grown larger they seem to be far less friendly to modders than they used to. This is unfortunate, especially since a mod called Counterstrike help to make them huge. If you take an old game, say Day of Defeat, that game had TONS of different mods. Cigarette bazookas, RC cola grenades, custom player models like Jesus, Hitler, Daffy Duck, a flamethrower, the hook, it just goes on and on. You could also get bots for it, which was great for unpopular maps or playing it off line. Then they came out with DOD Source. Better graphics, but far less modder friendly. Not to mention, every time steam updates, it fucks up the few mods people have made for it. It also has no bots, as they coded it so it's almost impossible for anyone to make bots for it. For a while they were working with someone on a tfc2 bot, but suddenly stopped speaking with that person and now just say "we don't think bots are good for multiplayer games". Pardon me, but that's just arrogant. Why won't Valve let the modders and gamers decide that? Gamers won't play on servers they don't like, so bot servers would be rare if everyone hated them. In addition to that, you can configure the server so that bots get kicked as real players join in. So when you get a decent amount of players, there are no longer any bots on that server. If the server clears out, the bots come back, so if just one guy wants to play on that server, he can. Please, someone tell me why this is a BAD thing? Just a pipe dream, but I wish Valve would remember their roots.

Health Scare

Have you heard the latest health care news? The politicians went from having a public option, meaning cheap insurance from the government, to x-ing that out, and instead now they want to fine people 3- 4K a year if they don't have health insurance. So now some shmo making $5.00 an hour is supposed to come up with the money for his health insurance if the employer doesn't put into it. With the economy sucking, gas and food having gone way up, rents having gone up, and no cheap government insurance option, where is this dude supposed to come up with the money? This sounds like another plan from people who have always had money and don't have a clue what a low budget is. Their idea of thrift is they bought a Bentley instead of a Rolls. Not to mention the politicians have the very best health and retirement benefits, financed on the backs of the taxpayers of course. How about we start off any "reform", by making the politicians buy their own health care, with no cost of living increase in their salaries to pay for it. They should just leave the system as it is if all they can do is try to strongarm working poor people into buying expensive private health insurance.

Case Logic

 OK, so you want an uber cool gaming case. So you of course get the clear plastic side panel, or ever BETTER an all plastic case. Then in addition to your components, you fill it up with LOTS of blinky lights. BAKA!! (Japanese for idiot ) All those components inside the computer generate heat. Then the funky blinking lights that look so pretty add even MORE heat. In addition to strength, steel and aluminum are good heat sinks. Plastic has no such quality. So to compensate for the loss of heat sinking from the plastic, and the additional heat from the cool looking blinky lights, you now need to add more case fans to deal with the excess heat build up. Of course the fans themselves add more heat too. Your new, pimpin' machine is truly a monument to inefficiency and stupidity.

Anti Nuclear Manifesto

Let me give you my anti nuclear manifesto. The problem with nuclear power is two fold. First, no one has EVER given a reasonable answer as to what to do with the waste that lasts forever, and no, burying it in rusty steel barrels is NOT acceptable. The other problem is people. Nuclear power will always be inherently unsafe because people have an unerring propensity to fuck up. When designing a nuke plant, there is not a lot of room for design mistakes. I have worked with engineers, they make mistakes all the time. Lets assume that the engineers come up with the perfect design(unlikely). That is just the first phase of the atomic circus. Now it is time to actually build it. Of course the engineers have specified the very best quality grade A+ concrete and steel. Who is going to build this, Haliburton? Look at the big dig, can you picture those assholes building a nuke plant? No matter how much legit profit is being made you can guarantee the construction douche bags will cheat on materials to fatten the profit margin, where grade A+ cement is called for they will use grade D, the same with the steel and other materials. You will wind up with a plant that is safe on paper, and would have been OK if built the way it was supposed to be that is a time bomb. Wait, last but not least, now it is built and it is time to actually run it.
So now you have the possibility of design defects, the absolute surety of shoddy construction and Homer Simpson shows up for work. Of course Homer isn't scared, didn't they show him how safe the plant was? I have never seen a situation where people failed to fuck up whenever the opportunity presented itself, what makes matters much worse is that Homer Simpson thinks the safety margin is much higher than it actually is, as grade A+ steel and cement can take a lot more abuse than the shitty grade D materials the construction assholes used. So there you have it, the three stooges, the Engineers, the construction company, and the people running the plant.

Fire Alarms

 Fire alarm, whaaaat? You must think I'm fucking insane to do a rant about fire alarms. Fire alarms are good, right? They save lives, right? Who wouldn't want the friendly firemen to show up when their house is burning? For the most part fire alarms ARE a good thing, but sometimes there are exceptions. The exception is when the fire alarm is either designed and/or installed by complete fucking idiots.

Let's take, say, the fire alarm where I work. Some new sensors were installed,
and they must be VERY sensitive indeed, as the alarm now goes off every day. This isn't your daddy's fire alarm either, it's ear piercing, rock concert loud, guaranteed by it's maker to give hearing damage every time it goes off, which recently, did I mention this already, is every fucking day. This is not just useless, it is actually harmful. Ever hear the story of the little boy who cried wolf? Just in case you were born under a rock and haven't heard this one it goes like this. There was a little boy who LOVED attention, which he would get by yelling "WOLF, WOLF, WOLF" at which all the villagers would run out looking for the wolf, who was not there as the boy was lying. Well one day, who shows up but the big, bad wolf himself, and he has little boy on his dinner menu. Apon seeing him the little boy cries out "WOLF, WOLF, WOLF", but by this time the villagers have had more than enough of his bullshit and ignore him. At the end of this sad but cautionary tale, the only thing left of the little boy who cried wolf is a giant, stinking turd, left by the big bad wolf as a good bye memento for the villagers.
 What has all this to do with a defective fire alarm you say? Think about it, if that alarm continues to go off when there is no fire, the firemen may have to show up, but their enthusiasm, and rush to get to the office is going to diminish. Lets just say that if this keeps up, and there is ever a real fire, response time may be on the slow side.

Guitar Techs

 Ever have to deal with repair people? You know, like the auto mechanic, or maybe computer techs? Was it good for you? It hasn't always been fun for me. Especially regarding guitar techs. It's always the same thing. Me: "my guitar has fret buzz, can you get rid of it?" Guitar tech: "Sure, no problem." A week to over a month later the guitar comes back and still has fret buzz. If I'm lucky it's been reduced somewhat, I've had guys make it worse. What the fuck is it with those guys anyway; I didn't ask to have fret buzz reduced, I asked to have it GONE!! Sure, I can hand it back, and have my guitar gone for another week to month, but if they couldn't get it right the first time, I just don't have any confidence a second try will give me better results. I've played guitars with no fret buzz, my Schecter C1 Classic doesn't have it so I KNOW it's possible to set up a guitar to eliminate it. I have a theory on this. There are essentially two types of guitar techs. Mediocre, and highly competent but busy. The mediocre guys just don't have the skills to get rid of fret buzz, at least on some guitars. The highly skilled guys can, but they tend to be backed up with work, so if your name isn't Joe Perry from Aerosmith or Eddie Van Halen, they are not going to take the time to do it right. With these guys the fret buzz will be reduced, but not eliminated. I suppose if you hound them you can get the job done right, but these are the guys that typically have a month turn around, so good luck there. I've heard of people who have had good experiences with guitar techs, but I never have and I'm sick of them.

Immigration

It seems to me this is not the single issue it's often presented as, but a multi-faceted one. I'm going to attempt to break it up a bit.

• Illegal vs Legal immigration
  
  An argument I hear a lot is "we have to pass amnesty, because we need more people for low pay, menial jobs". This country already has a green card system allowing legal immigrant residency. If we truly need to have more people here to pick fruit or do other manual labor it seems to me it would make a lot more sense to issue out more green cards to people who are obeying the law and waiting to enter the U.S., than giving amnesty to people who have broken U.S. immigration law to get here. Those people should NOT be getting work preference over people waiting for green cards, and amnesty allowing them to stay here would do just that.
  


• Illegal Alien Felons
  
  I don't understand why there is even a debate about this. Illegal aliens convicted of a felony need to be GONE the second their jail sentence is served. Their feet should not even hit the pavement outside of the jail, they should be placed on a bus and deported back to their home country, or taken to the airport and flown out if they come from overseas. Even if we instituted an amnesty program, illegal alien felons should not be eligible for it. The same goes for any so called "sanctuary cities", if they are found to be harboring illegal alien felons federal funding should be cut off until the policy of sheltering them is halted. It needs to be made clear to them they are banned from re entry in the U.S., and any attempts to return will be rewarded by a mandatory prison sentence. The U.S. has more than it's fair share of native crooks, it doesn't need to import any.
  

Port Forwarding Sucks

Nothing pisses me off faster when trying to get something to work online than to read "you have to configure your router's port forwarding". This has to be done with bittorrent clients, and some games if you want to run a game server. Note I said SOME games as every Valve game I've ever played has NOT required this! To all the douche bag game programmers who code games that require this - NOT EVERYONE HAS ROUTER ACCESS!!!!! That's right you fucking nerds, people living in apartments and college dorms don't have router access, and the admins there aren't going to custom configure the router for one persons game play. If you program games that require port forwarding for net play please do me and everyone else who doesn't have router access a favor and get a job bagging groceries.