According to Internet security software company McAffe, Inc., the number of spam emails, trojan horses and botnets being unleashed onto computers worldwide skyrocketed in the last quarter despite higher awareness levels among users. While Congress is spending trillions of dollars trying to jumpstart our flagging economy (to no avail I might add), the Internet’s bad guys are running rampant.

If the guys and gals in Washington would spend just a fraction of the time and expense fighting the folks who produce and distribute malware that they are spending wrecking the economy, something truly positive would get done. We live in an Internet world today, and a huge chunk of our economy and national security capabilities depend upon a safe and stable Internet infrastructure.

There is simply no reason why these spammers and crooks should be able to get away with crippling thousands of computers every month and stealing our personal information for their personal gain. Congress needs to act NOW to pass tough and effective legislation to deal with these people the same way we deal with terrorists. After all, that’s really what they are if you think long and hard about it.

Has the world gone crazy? Read on and decide for yourself…
 
The primary function of a state’s Supreme Court is to ensure that all laws approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor are “legal” under the state Constitution (which must also be in accordance with the U.S. Constitution). In other words, all new laws must be “constitutional”, and if in the minds of the Supreme Court justices they are not, they can, and should be struck down. But for the first time ever, a state Supreme Court is actually going to consider striking down an amendment to its state constitution itself!
 
Last November the voters in California overwhelmingly approved Proposition 8 which will amend the California State Constitution to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman only. Several radical groups sued to have Prop 8 overturned however, insisting that such a limit on marriage is unconstitutional. Well here’s a newsflash for those folks: A constitutional amendment cannot be unconstitutional – it’s part of the constitution!
 
But as obvious as this would seem to be, the California Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case anyway, taking judicial activism to an entirely new level. Hopefully, if the state’s Supreme Court rules that the state constitution is itself unconstitutional, common sense will prevail in the end and the U.S. Supreme Court will right this most egregious of wrongs.

In a recent post I ranted about the way the printer manufacturers have “instructed” their printers to stop working and demand that a new ink cartridge be installed before the old one even runs out of ink. Well, the new issue of PC World Magazine details the results of an independent test that indicates that the scandal is even worse than I had imagined.

The study found that as much as 60% – well over half – of the ink in a cartridge is wasted when some printers lie and tell you the ink well has run dry when it really hasn’t. That amount of wasted ink is outrageous, especially given the exorbitant prices consumers are charged for them in the first place. Here is the link to the page detailing the results of the study.

Several months ago I wrote a post about the exorbitant cost of inkjet printer cartridges, and now I’m here to rant about a related issue: Printers that force you to change a cartridge before it actually runs out of ink.
 
Cheria has been working on a cookbook featuring the favorite recipes of all the members of her large family, and every few pages her printer simply stops working and tells her that she will have to change one of the ink cartridges before she can resume printing. In the old days, you simply kept printing until the colors began to fade or the printing stopped altogether. But the printer manufacturers have now designed their printers to tell you a cartridge is empty before it actually runs dry. What an ingenious way to separate their customers from even more of their hard-earned money!
 
A friendly warning that the ink level is running low would be much appreciated, but what really gets my goat is the fact that the printer simply stops working when IT decides that it’s time to replace an ink cartridge! Just imagine driving down the road in your car when all of a sudden the engine stops running and a light comes on telling you you’re out of gas when you know you have at least a gallon or two left…and before you can continue on your journey you have to fill up the tank. You would never be able to use up that last gallon or two of gas!
 
Memo to printer manufacturers: I appreciate receiving a heads-up that I’m about to run out of ink, but I’m perfectly capable of determining when the ink actually runs out without your assistance. When a photo of green grass waving in a gentle breeze prints out in yellow, I’ll replace the cartridge. Rant over.

If you travel on occasion you have probably had more than one experience that went something like this:

You’re driving down the interstate and “nature” begins calling so you begin looking for a good place to stop and use the restroom, gas up, and maybe even pick up a quick snack or two to get you through the rest of your trip. A few miles down the road you spot a sign for a gas station (we used to call them “service stations”, but these days the “service” has been all but eliminated). You take the exit and pull into the gas station parking lot thinking just how wonderful it is to find a “convenience store” just when you need it most.

To save time you go ahead and gas up before heading inside, and by the time your tank is full and the pump has spit out your receipt, nature is no longer just calling – she’s absolutely screaming…so you practically run inside the store and begin looking for the restroom. You walk all the way around the place several times frantically searching for those beautiful doors with the little “Men” and “Women” symbols on them, but try as you might you can’t find them. Thinking they must be somewhere in the back, you approach the counter and politely inquire of the cashier as to the whereabouts of the facilities. He/she simply smiles and gives you that dreaded, but by now quite expected reply: “We don’t have a ‘public’ restroom”.

Let me tell you, this scenario just gets my goat. You have just spent upwards of a week’s pay to fill your tank with their gasoline and you’re prepared to spend several dollars more on their junk food, yet they cannot allow you to use their restroom? Well, at least this particular cashier didn’t outright lie and say they didn’t have a restroom at all – he/she just said they have no “public” restrooms. The ones that lie to your face and tell you they have no restroom at all are the worst of the worst in my book. After all, it’s a rare individual indeed who can go an entire shift without answering nature’s call at least once himself so you know there is surely a restroom lurking somewhere in virtually every convenience store.

Of course there are reasons why some store managers choose to keep the restrooms off-limits to customers, and they are indeed somewhat valid. Customers will often trash the place by leaving toilet paper and paper towels (and worse) all over the floor. They’ll leave the water running in the sink or cause the toilet to overflow. And yes, they’ll even use the restroom as the perfect hiding place for concealing the items they plan to steal. But in my humble opinion…

All of those reasons together don’t outweigh the fact that most customers won’t make a mess, leave the water running, cause the toilet to overflow or steal you blind. Most customers are good people who are worthy of at least a basic level of trust and respect. They deserve an opportunity to use your restroom in exchange for giving you their business and their hard-earned money.

But, Mr. Convenience Store Manager, if you do decide to deny them that privilege, at least have the courtesy to place a sign on your entrance door stating “No Public Restrooms”. At least that way they can take their business to a merchant who actually appreciates it without wasting their time and money in yours.

One of my greatest pet peeves is the diabolical scheme that the software companies have devised to keep separating their loyal customers from their dollars: the strategy of planning for the eventual obsolescence of their own products.

If you’re like me you have no doubt noticed how there seems to be a new version of your favorite program available on a regular basis, often within mere months of the release of the previous version. Of course these “upgrades” promise (and usually deliver) more features and easier day-to-day use, but these enhancements always come at a price that is way too high in my opinion for an upgrade to a product that you have already bought and paid for.

It wouldn’t be so bad if upgrading was always purely an option, but it isn’t. As many of us discovered when we bought a new PC with Windows Vista pre-installed, a number of our tried-and-true software programs that had worked just fine for years suddenly went belly-up. Now the only way to use them with Vista is to upgrade to the latest version. Argh!!!!

This of course brings me to the biggest offender of all: Microsoft. The boys in Redmond have fine-tuned the “upgrade process” until it’s nothing short of a virtual mint. But along with every new version of Windows also comes a plethora of new bugs and annoyances. Even worse, after a short while upgrading becomes mandatory because they “sunset” the older versions (stop supporting and releasing security updates for them).

Microsoft has been wanting to move their software business from a purchase model to a subscription model for quite some time now. For example, instead of paying a higher price up front for a full version of Windows Vista, you would pay a smaller fee once a month – say $15. All of a sudden the privilege of using that huge compilation of bugs and aggravation will set you back $180 each and every year instead of roughly that same amount once!

The fact of the matter is, Windows has already been sold on a virtual subscription basis for many years via the “upgrade process”. What Microsoft hopes to do is simply shorten the interval between payments from every few years to once a month – and make them truly mandatory each and every month. Miss a payment and your PC stops booting up. How do you like those apples?

Along with most software upgrades come real and tangible benefits that at least give you something in return for having to lay out the extra money. New features, easier ways to complete routine tasks, and enhanced program stability are the norm with the upgrades released by most companies, but not Microsoft’s.

Sure, as they did with Vista they’ll make some changes and add a few new features (which have usually been available from other companies for years), but the same old bugs will still be around along with a few new “friends” they picked up along the way. Add in a never-ending supply of new security holes and you soon realize you would have been better off sticking with XP (the only operating system they ever managed to “get right”). Oh wait, you can’t stick with XP – not for much longer anyway. It’s going to “sunset” before you know it! Argh!!!

I’m sorry that this post has turned out to be mostly about Microsoft, but they truly are the biggest offender, and by a whopping margin. Hey guys, how about putting a bit more of your R&D budget into security and stability and a little less into developing buggy versions of new “features” that can be found elsewhere for a lot less and with fewer problems? After all, Windows is an operating system, not an application.

Here’s a novel idea for you: How about concentrating your efforts on providing our PC’s with a safe and stable platform to run on and leave the development of useful programs to the guys who know how to do it best?

In their amazing wisdom, the founding fathers of our great nation understood the dangers of allowing too much power to be gained by a single entity. They had seen first-hand what life was like under a dictator (a long line of British kings and queens), and they were determined to avoid even the possibility of their new country ever slipping beneath the iron fist of one. To that end, they developed a form of government where the power is shared equally among three entities: The Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches.

The Congress (the Legislative branch) writes laws which govern how we live our lives, and the role of the Supreme Court (the Judicial branch) is to make sure those laws don’t violate any of the provisions of the Constitution. If they do, they strike them down. It’s then up to Congress to either rewrite the law to conform to the Constitution or propose a Constitutional Amendment which, if passed via the process set up to do so, would change the Constitution itself to make the proposed law “legal”.

The President (Executive branch) has a role in enacting or striking down laws as well. He can either sign a Congressional bill into law if he thinks it’s a good idea, or he can veto it if he doesn’t. But a veto isn’t the end of the road for a bill. Congress can (and often does) vote to override a President’s veto, making a bill become the law of the land even if the President doesn’t like it.

This system of government guarantees a “balance of power” under which no branch can take it upon itself to run the country as it sees fit by ignoring the will of the people and/or the other two branches. There are hard to achieve, but realistic provisions in place to override the decisions made by all three branches of government. The same “balance of power” structure exists at the state level as well, and laws enacted by the state legislatures can be struck down or affirmed by the state’s judiciary, and/or ultimately by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that the 2nd Amendment does in fact guarantee the rights of individuals (and not just militias) to bear arms has the liberals among us so upset that they are actually expressing an open desire for the Supreme Court to overstep it bounds and “make law” when they have no Constitutional authority to do so (that authority belongs exclusively to the Legislative branch).

Check out these statements made by a couple of ill-informed, yet very prominent Mayors:

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley: “It’s a very frightening decision. We believe every mayor will be outraged by this.”

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom: “This ruling just flies in the face of reality. You just wish the Supreme Court could spend a week in public housing and then come out with this decision. It’s very easy and comfortable to stand there with security guards and metal detectors and make these decisions.”

No, Your Honor. This ruling is exactly what was called for under the Constitution which you have taken an oath to honor and uphold. So you don’t like the 2nd Amendment? That’s fine, because you’re certainly entitled to your opinion. You and your like-minded counterparts are perfectly free to do whatever you can to seek a Constitutional Amendment which would negate the second one.

You are NOT free however to expect the Supreme Court to circumvent that process by legislating from the bench and rendering our most precious government document meaningless. There is a well-defined process available for changing any perceived wrongs in the U.S. Constitution, and it has already been used successfully 27 times. Within certain limitations, individual citizens clearly have a Constitutionally guaranteed right to own and use a firearm in their own defense, and unless and until that hallowed document is amended to change that you’ll just have to deal with it.

When it comes to our Constitution and the validity thereof, there is absolutely no perceived wrong egregious enough to warrant circumventing the process that has been set in place to amend it when required. Otherwise, we’ll quickly find ourselves headed down that slippery slope towards a dictatorship.

Yep, like the title says, before long I’ll be rolling in the dough! I received an email this morning from the distinguished attorney for the estate of my late uncle Mogumbu Rouse. I never knew Uncle Mogumbu personally, but according to the email he was a rather wealthy prince in my ancestral homeland of Nigeria (and all these years I thought my ancestors on both sides were European). Anyway, he passed away recently, and as luck would have it I’m the sole beneficiary of his $18 million estate!

Of course as a show of good faith, I’ll be required to immediately wire $5,000 U.S. dollars into a Nigerian trust account and provide my bank account information so that the trustee of the estate can deposit my load of cash into it. But I can surely jump through their hoops if I’m going to inherit a fortune, right? Well, gotta go for now – I have to hurry on over to the bank…

Actually, I receive several emails like this each and every day, and my guess is you do as well. They’re really nothing more than extremely poorly disguised phishing scams, with the scammer hoping to entice one or two really greedy (and really gullible) individuals into parting with a pile of their hard-earned money. And you know what? It occasionally works!

Why anyone would fall for such a thinly veiled scam is beyond comprehension, but every so often I hear in the news where someone has done just that, always with very expensive consequences. I guess with human nature being what it is, there will always be scammers around and just enough people who end up falling for their schemes to make their efforts worthwhile.

Phishing has apparently replaced the Ponzi scheme as the scam of choice in the Internet age, and all of those annoyingly stupid emails clogging my inbox are beginning to get just a bit tiresome. Oh well, such is life in the 21st century I suppose.

Have you ever noticed how some things that should be simple are often quite difficult? Take for instance the routine task of putting a new belt on our vacuum cleaner. You would think that after all these years the vacuum cleaner manufacturers would have devised a quick and easy way to change the belt, but apparently they have not…
 
We have one of those stand-up “bagless” vacuums, and the belt broke this afternoon while Cheria was cleaning up the perpetual mess of dog hair that Houdini loves to create. She pulled out a spare belt and we got to work replacing the broken one, and what should be a fast, easy task turned into a long, drawn out event.
 
First, I had to figure out exactly which screws to remove from the bottom of the unit – then I had to remove them. Next, I had to pull the roller off and cut about 20 pounds of dog hair that had become wrapped around it.
 
Now came the hard part: Cheria had to hold the vacuum upside down while I struggled with all my might to first squeeze the belt under the drive shaft that was located deep within the bowels of the contraption, and then I had to pull hard on the roller in order to stretch the new belt enough to maneuver the roller supports into their slots. Talk about an ordeal!
 
I’m not a mechanical engineer mind you, but it seems to me that the process should go something like this:
 
1 – Stand vacuum on its “head”.
 
2 – Turn locking lever to allow the trap door covering the roller and belt assembly to pop open.
 
3 – Turn another lever to release the roller from its mount.
 
4 – Slip the new belt over the easily accessible drive shaft and the other end over the roller.
 
5 – Place the roller back in the mount and reverse the lever to tighten the belt.
 
6 – Close the trap door.
 
Pretty simple, huh? Of course the devil is in the details as they say, but surely one of Royal’s highly paid engineers can come up with a plan that works a lot faster and easier than the one they have right now. In the meantime, I’ll just say “Houdini, enough already with the shedding!”

“Gate Ajar” — That’s what our 2005 Chevy Malibu Maxx tells us just about every time we start the engine now. That message means that the “trunk” lid is open, but of course it never is. I suppose it’s just the car’s electronic “brain” showing the effects of “old age” since we’re closing in on 100,00 miles.
 
But the car thinks the trunk is open nonetheless, and it simply refuses to stop its incessant beeping and nagging until one of us gets out of the vehicle, pops the trunk, and then closes it again. Never mind the fact that it’s my car, and if I wish to drive around with the trunk lid open I’ll do it, thank you very much.
 
Memo to the Malibu: I don’t need or want you nagging at me over something as trivial as a perceived open trunk lid! Now if the oil level is critically low, nag away. After all, that’s a serious situation that would require a quick resolution in order to prevent major engine damage. And if the gas tank is about to run dry, by all means tell me – I hate walking to the nearest gas station! But just because YOU think I have accidentally left the trunk lid open, that in no way constitutes an emergency.
 
Sometimes I long for the good ole days before cars came equipped with computers and Microsoft Windows, but nowadays they do so I guess I’ll just have to get used to all the nagging. Memo to the younger guys out there: You might as well just dispense with the notion of finding a wife and marry your car! After all, why burden yourself with two sources of nagging when you can get by with just one? (Just kidding, Honey…)