Crime and punishment

Do you think punsihments in the USA fit the crimes? I'm sure that could be debated for months and months. However, here's a crime that was supposedly punished. This article states that:

The punishment was consistent with the California Education Code, officials said. They did not give further details because of legal and privacy issues.

Hmm. I agree with the writer, Michelle Malkin when she asks:

What are the odds that the guilty student and his/her collaborators are here illegally?

I'm wondering why the punishment doesn't include hanging the perpetrator(s) upside down on a flagpole for at least the same amount of time the US flag spent in that fashion?

Democrats cause major economic downturn

Don't you feel like stepping out on a limb sometimes? There's excitement and auxhilaration! Then again, there's no limb to this. I'm on solid ground. Yes I truly believe the liberal democrats cause economic sorrow at every turn. (It's so they can boost their stupid communist hand out programs, if you were wondering.)

Anyway, what led me to write this? Read this article. It's about Microsoft and the EU fighting over the fines the dorks in the EU keep leveling at M$.

If for some odd reason, you've read any of my other rants, you'll notice that I do my share of picking on M$. I think for good reason. They blew their own horn and touted all these wonderful products, yet we still have serious problems with software that isn't stable, OS's that aren't stable, much less secure. So, in my opinion, they've earned some of the bad press they get.

However, there's a point where you begin to wonder about what is happening. Put yourself in a different pair of shoes for a moment and look at this 3rd person. I mean from the view that you aren't either a M$ shareholder or more likely, a desktop user.

M$ is only a business. Mind you a BIG one, but just a business. It's the American dream for a few people that started it out and one guy in particular. I don't have a problem with that. I think it's great that a kid had the idea to do this and look what it turned into. You can't hardly go anywhere or do anything any more without M$ being involved in one fashion or another.

What's the big deal? Those shareholders are making some good ROI. (Yay for ROI!) My problem here is not that they're making money, it's the way it hurts my job, my income and ultimately my life. Because M$ is in so much of our lives, anything that happens to them almost directly affects me monitarily.

You don't believe me? Read that article again and think about exactly who is paying those fines. It's not the shareholders, it's the customer base. Every company I know always passes their costs along to their customers in the form of sales price increases. M$ is not different.

Their cash cows are Windows and Office. That's where the fine money comes from. We're the ones paying that.

I bought a new laptop the other day and Dell wanted to put office on there for me. The problem was they didn't have the exact version I wanted available as an OEM install, so I had to buy another corporate one thru SA. I'm now buying office 2003 licenses, but we still run v2k. I won't switch until it won't install on whatever OS the machines come with. But I can legally run this copy under that license.

I admit there was a version offered that had the particular suite of programs we use, but it had other stuff I won't support, so I won't install it. The confusing part is the OEM one with more programs costs less than 300$, but the SA version was 550$. (No wonder people bootleg this stuff.) That's also another reason I won't upgrade until I absolutely have to. I have to keep buying the software over and over and over.

I bought a pkg one time called Aldus Pagemaker 1.0. It came with the windows 1.0 runtime. I got my next upgrade to pagemaker and it came with windows runtime 2.0. Then the next upgrade came out and it required windows 3.o, but they didn't include it any more because I had to buy the pkg. I had to pay 25$ for each pagemaker upgrade, then at the 3rd one, I had to shell out 50$ for windows. I thought that was a little extreme, but I paid it because of the new options offered in pagemaker.

Since then, every friggin upgrade of windows has cost more. 3.1 was higher, 95 was higher, 98 was higher and on and on. Not counting my work budget, but what I've personally paid for M$ products over the years could buy me a nice mid size sedan now or maybe a nice room addition onto my house.

This is all the liberal democrats fault. Laugh if you wanna, but it is. Janet Reno and Bill Clinton started it and showed the EU how to do it, so they did it too.

Sppssst. Pass it on. Here's a big cash cow of a business that provide a bigger cash cow for under the table campaign contributions and other budget adjustments. Because of this, I stay in a house longer and drive a car longer than I might normally do because of the stupid way successful businesses get punished today. And if I remember Econ101, that hurts the economy.

Do your part and vote them out of office.

Please.

Politically correct football

God help us. Can we forgo some rules and start imprisoning the policitally correct? This is getting way out of hand.

Yes, I pick on the Bengals because they've had a topsy turvy performance record most all of my life. But that aside, I'm still a fan.

And, what, pray tell class, do the fans do for professional football?

Why, don't they pay the bills? We buy the tickets and the products advertised in the commercials so I'd say we pay the bills. So stop being stupid. It's an article about the rules committee is going to change them again to keep players from celebrating in the endzone.

"We feel the individual celebration is on the verge of getting out of hand," Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher said in a briefing on changes the committee will propose to ownership during the annual meeting.

Getting out of hand? Jeez, commercials are already out of hand, but I don't see you stopping that. Getting out of hand would be the player that just scored the touchdown spiking the ball in the referee's groin. It's just a stupid ball game. Get a life.

Take a hike, will ya?

Still vacationing it up here in Charleston, SC. If you've never been here, well, you're missing out. Seriously, they have some great restuarants and tons of places to go shopping/spending. Tons of great places to get great pictures and if you're into history, this has over a week of historical things to see and do. My hat is off to these guys. We've had a wonderful time here.

Oakley the wonder dog has been doing well too. We try to get him out of the car to walk around as much as possible so he doesn't start eating the seat cushions. One particular location today was the battery park on the southern tip of the old town Charleston peninsula. It's a really big park with big guns. Yeah!

Anyway, going for a walk in the park with your favorite person is actually kind of fun if she's in a good mood. Lots of things to see, especially here where most all of the flowers, trees and bushes are in bloom. Well it's different when the dog goes. He helps to find all the things you miss. You know, all the little things.

Like other dog poop. Chewing gum, of the abc variety. Shucks, today we found a box of half eaten chicken wings and a barbeque'd piece of pork still on the leg bone. Good eatin' by the dog's standard. Although, I thought it smelled a little. ( I didn't taste it, I left that to the dog.)

Oh and here in Charleston, they have lots of horse and donkey drawn carriages. It was cool to see and hear the large critters clip clopping down the narrow streets. (Yep, made for a few traffic congestive areas.) Well, Oakley the wonder dog doesn't seem to like large critters. Or at least he vocally objects to them. A lot. When he's standing on the seat trying to see out my window and then barks as though the window is down, it hurts my ears. Anyway, I thing at any given time, there were at least six of them circling the park. Every time Oak seen one, he had to inform everyone in the park he seen them.

Oh, and then he found the little grey squirrels that had overpopulated the park. Those little guys had a superhighway of tree limbs to crawl over and one of them could practically cover the whole park in a minute or 2, but they had to climb down to the ground for something or other. Then Oak would try to find what they were up to. Along with my arm.

I've got one of those auto retracting leashes with about a 15 or 20 food cord on it. It has this great autobreaking system on it to keep Oak from outrunning his tie-up. My arm/shoulder socket. He can produce some serious pull for a 47 pound dog.

Vacation is fun!

Took a driving trip with the Mrs. and Oakley the wonder dog. Bub (my nickname for the dog) has done really well, being cooped up in the car for the last 3 days while we drive around. Obviously, he gets spoiled a lot. He makes himself at home pretty much anywhere we've went to far.

But that isn't what I wanted to whine about. I wanted to whine about showers...more to the point, shower design. Every motel/hotel we've stayed at has a similar problem. Mainly, the soap holder. Why the heck did some Einstein figure the proper placement of the soap dish is always directly in the water path?

It's impossible to be nice and let the wife go first and get to use soap that doesn't feel like bad jello. Not to mention, that little teeny bottle of shampoo doesn't have anywhere to set so you can apply it to your hair and not get it spashed out of your palm while setting the bottle down.

So far in the last 2 years, I have only found 2 bathrooms in rooms where the shower drain actually works real time. Don't these places have plumbers?

Oh well. Guess I'd better get back to vacationing....

Didn't the price of postage just go up?

I just read another article on paying for email. If you're not familiar with this new idea, it's not the stupid email that circulates the internet every year or so asking you to tell your congressman to vote no on some non-existant bill about to be voted on.

This is a serious attempt at squeezing more money from your pocket, nothing more. There is going to be more and more hype about it, but it's just a get richer quicker scheme.

I can understand why entities such as yahoo, google, and hotmail would support this, but AOL? These jerks already charge way more than their service is worth. (Hence my non-use of their intrusive products and subsequent ban of said products on my network). I guess that way they get to double dip your wallet.

We'll all pay for this service whether we want to or not. Reason being that part of the process supposedly will authenticate the sender a 2nd time before transmitting the email to it's destination, then at the destination it will go around the receptor's spam scanner.

Hmmm. How do you suppose that will happen? Maybe it might take some more equipment and/or software that has to be what? PURCHASED! That's what. Where does the cash for that purchase come from? Your subscription dollars, that's where.

I've said all along since the first time I found out that yahoo had free email that somewhere along the line that email will be paid for somehow besides the stupid banner adds that pollutes the screen and my disk drive.

But all this opinion of mine can be changed, if Ephraim Schwartz is willing to pay my bill for email. (Gotta read the link)

A new meaning

This news article from Santa Clara, CA is another in a series of total idiocy being pushed on this nation. No more junk food at school, unless you bring your own. And no sharing either. Sheesh.

I can see the headlines 10 years from now.

Teen prision records expunged for repeated offenses of trafficking.

"Twinkie traffickers", as they're known, have been repeatedly busted for bringing cases of HoHo's, Ding Dongs, and other assorted goodies to school to share with their buddies who can't even dredge up the cash for a measley pkg of life savers. School officials couldn't be reached for comment however, as they were all in the teacher's lounge eating the evidence.

Those who choose to ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

I've always thought that was an insightful comment. It's got you covered. I've always had my own saying similar to that. If you keep doing the same thing and keep getting the same result are you doing it right? Especially when you don't like the outcome?

Well, that's kind of how I'd describe some of the book I just read, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History by Thomas Woods. Ever wonder how government got so big and unweildy? It's in there. Ever wonder why you hear a few people complain about state's rights and wonder what in the world are they talking about? That's in there. Ever wonder why politicians can seem so unscrupulous compared to the old days? That's in there too, but then again politicians haven't changed much in our history for that matter. (Read it and you'll see what I mean)

Some things I learned, but should have known beforehand:

• The civil war was not about slavery.
  
• Woodrow Wilson was a one world government nut and a warmonger.
  
• FDR was itching to give that day of infamy speech because he too was a warmonger. He betrayed almost every eastern block European nation during WWII. He was in love with communism. He bought his re-election with the "new deal".
• Truman forced Russians back home to their death after WWII by drugging them.
  
• JFK's dad bought his election for him with mob money.
• LBJ bought his election to the senate via a local judge, who actually admitted it after LBJ croaked.
• Nixon was a bigger liberal than everyone gives him credit for.
• I think everyone knows just how much of a disgrace Jimmy Carter was to the USA.
• Clinton bombed the Sudan back to the stoneage by destroying their main medicinal production facility in order to take attention away from his out of wedlock affairs and lawsuits. He also enabled radical islam to become prevalent in Europe by bombing the serbs into submission under the faulty rumor of them killing off the islam idiots.

There is much more, but these high points stuck in my mind as I read it. There's some fascinating discourse on the events leading to the civil war. This book should be required reading for high school students and college students, especially those enrolled in colleges with liberal professors who work really hard at re-writing history to their ideals.

Enjoy and have a great day!

The wind is still blowing...

Hurricane Katrina may be wreaking havoc on the record books, not just lives in the southern USA. There's been more negative press surrounding this natural event than I can remember. Seems to me like the last natural event with this much coverage was Mt. St. Helens.

I guess Bush derangement syndrome is affecting the media's ability to even come close to being fair and balanced about reporting natural events. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, as they think hurricanes are from global warming. (I wonder what caused hurricanes before the iron age?)

I just read an interesting post on newsbusters. It's a review of Popular Mechanics magazine's article on myths of Katrina. Well worth the read if you wonder what the regular media has been skipping over.

I wish they could just start doing their job seriously. I guess Karl Marx was right about if you repeat a lie long enough people will believe it as truth. Stupid commies.