Here's the problem.

It may not be in the accelerator code. It could be someplace completely different.

It's likely a buffer overrun someplace else in the code.

Here's how it works.

Let's pretend you've got some code to warn that your turn signals are on too long. You set aside a variable to store the count of the clicks. You're short for space, so you use a variable type that only stores a maximum of 255. It's supposed to reset every time somebody turns off the turn signals. Somebody else decided the whole thing was a stupid idea and took out most of the code (including the reset) but forgot the counter. So now, every 255th' time you use your turn signals flash, a number of a larger data type gets put into this memory space, leaking into the memory allocation next door, changing that number in unexpected ways. It could be something simple like the area where the speed for the cruise control is stored, so it now decides it wants to go 200 instead of 70. It could be the register for "what do I do next?" so instead of checking the fuel-air mixture, it decides now would be a good idea to accelerate. It could be something like it only occurs if you're right turn signal has been used 256 times on a rainy day in a month ending in "y" and your radio station is tuned to a station whose digits add up to 11.

It could be any of the code anywhere in the system, reportedly millions of lines of code. Buffer ovsrruns are notoriously hard to spot.

Good luck finding it without a complete top-to-bottom code review.

Primarily, "the end justifies the means", straight out of Maciavelli.

They have been taught not to think, that thinking is evil.

A few years ago I got hauled onto the carpet in the principal's office because one of the "Christian" parents complained about the core textbook we were using in Language Arts class, the great Christian apologist C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. There was a little complaint form she had filled out. The final question is in big black letters at the bottom of the page. HAVE YOU READ THE BOOK? Of course, she ticked "no".

TrogL: How can you criticize a book you haven't read?
Parent: Why would I want to read evil?
TrogL: You are aware that the author is a well-known Christian writer.
Parent: He's Catholic, not Christian.
TrogL: The witch is the villian...
Parent: My child shouldn't be reading about witches.
TrogL: The Lion is a Christ allegory...
Parent: My child should be reading about angels. Why don't you have a book about angels?

A few weeks later, we were trying to talk about viewpoint. Her son (yes, he stayed in the class, she went to the school board and they laughed at her) simply wasn't getting it. I had him come to my office.

TrogL: There's a chair and a desk in my office. (closes the door) What's in my office?
Son: I don't know.
TrogL: (opens door) Now what's in my office.
Son: Table, chair, garbage can ... (lists everything in the office)
TrogL: (closes door) So name something that's in my office.
Son: I don't know.
TrogL: If, I were to go in my office and close the door, what would I see.
Son: You wouldn't be able to see.

His mother can see angels. The son can't visualize what's behind a closed door the second after it's closed. Something wrong there.

He follows a "realistic" style, yet many of his paintings belong in a science fiction/fantasy gallery because they defy the laws of physics or even common sense.



Nobody in their right mind would put a house that close to a stream. As you can see it's still winter and the flooding has already started. Give it another month and that little cottage will either be under two feet of water or fifty miles downstream.



Same problem. As you can see, the river has already started to eat away at the foundation and the gazebo has a distinctive lean. Another year and it'll be the leaning tower of Kinkade.



Notice that the tugs won't fit through the openings in the bridge? There's even one turning around to go back.



Why does a cottage with barely enough room to swing a dead cat need TWO huge fireplaces? And what's up with the winding road up to the side? If a logging truck comes down there he's gonna flip his load right on top of that flowerbed and probably take out the cottage as well.



OK, I guess he's given up putting fireplaces on the ends and now they're smack-dab in the middle of the room. Now you can't swing a dead cat at all.



I'm betting that's supposed to be a sawmill or other water-powered device. You need running water to power that, not a placid lake even if it is canted on a 25 degree angle.



OK, so what's up with his fixation about putting logging trucks through cottages? And he still hasn't made up his mind about the fireplaces - now he's got one of each.



No, the lighthouse goes on the promitary where it can actually be seen, not buried behind a bunch of trees. You also keep the house well away from the lighthouse. I'm also a little dubious about the condition of the cliff, given all the rock at the bottom.

I couldn't find my favourite, which appeared on a previous Kinkade thread. It was one of his typical "houses in snow" scene, all done up for Christmas with two horses parked out front. The problem - you never, ever leave horses saddled standing around in the cold. They'll get sores.

I wish I still had my original copy of the file (rob-georgia.zip) from back in 2000 showing how that election was fixed. I never was able to crack it and I'm sure it's got some juicy stuff in it.

Diebold still hasn't apologized for forcing angelfire to take down my website.

There's a really simple, straightforward, absolutely secure methodology for voting.

Paper ballots cast under the watchful eye(1) of scrutineers from accredited members of political Parties.

If you absolutely insist upon doing it electronically, there's another methodology. (not necessarily in sequence)

1. The software itself is developed in an open-source environment for all to see (eg. on sourceforge). It makes use of industry standard encryption (eg. AES). Once everybody agrees, there's a code lock and an MD5 key generated on the source code. A master copy is posted to a publically available site. The software includes a "dashboard" display confirming it's working correctly(2).

2. A hardware platform is agreed upon, likely intel. Sorry Sun, IBM, etc. - nice chipsets but we need to keep the cost down. Certain caveats are allowed, such as no on-board wireless or cameras (which pretty much eliminates most laptops). Mirrored hard drives are worth a thought. Don't forget a heavy-duty UPS with automatic shutdown capability (so the software can shut down gracefully).

3. A secure, open-source, non-proprietary operating system is agreed upon. Sorry Microsoft. Think OpenSolaris, OpenBSD, some linux variant.

4. A compiler is chosen, likely some version of gcc. The source code is provided at the public site.

5. A database platform is selected (if necessary). Likely MySQL assuming Sun/ORACLE can keep an arms-length away. The source code is provided at the public site.

6. File comparison utilities are agreed upon (eg. diff, cmp) and source code provided etc.

7. Scanning and printing hardware is selected (if necessary). Access is provided (either at a location or by purchase/rent) to developers. Source code for drivers is provided at the public site.

8. A methodology is determined for "hardening" the system by removing all extraneous applications, drivers, code libraries, utilities.

9. A disk-wipe methodology is agreed upon and developed. It will run from cd.

10. Early on election day (eg 4 a.m.), election officials and Party scrutineers gather in the secured voting area (a quorum must always be present) and follow a set procedure:

1. equipment is uncrated and inspected to confirm it matches the specifications
   
2. diagnostics is run on the equipment to confirm it is functioning correctly and to specifications
   
3. the operating system of choice is installed from media confirmed to be "official" (checksums etc.)
   
4. the operating system is "hardened" (first pass) to provide only the functionality required below
   
5. the source code for the compiler, file comparers, drivers, database and election software is placed on the machine and confirmed (checksums, diffs to the original, hand-inspection)
   
6. the compiler is compiled and confirmed to be functioning correctly
   
7. the file comparison utilities are compiled and confirmed to be functioning correctly
   
8. the encryption software, hardware drivers, database and election software are compiled and confirmed to match specifications (checksums, file sizes, diffs)
   
9. the system is hardened (second pass eg. disable compilers) to provide only functionality required below
   
10. the various software bits are installed, confirmed to be working both stand-alone and in conjunction with each other
    
11. the hardware is tested to confirm it works with the software and to specification
    
12. the system is hardened (third pass eg. disable installers) to provide only functionality below
    
13. the system is set to a state so that it is ready to be used but not actually active (eg. initialize the databases)
    
14. the system is set to active and voting occurs
    
15. the dashboard is checked during the day for problems
    
16. when voting is finished, final printouts occur
    
17. election results are produced and sent by secure method to central repository
    
18. final diagnostics are run to confirm that nothing changed (checksums, executable sizes)
    
19. paper scan ballots are collected and placed in sealed envelopes (see Canada's system for further details)
    
20. the hard drive(s) are removed from the computer and placed in secure storage along with the installation media and any other materials other than the computer itself
    

----------------footnotes-----------

1. Except for the actual marking of the ballot - that's done behind an inexpensive cardboard screen. When nobody's actually marking ballots, scrutineers or election officials may go back to check nobody's left campaign materials or grafitti.

2. Yes, this could be faked, but the evidence would show up later.

Taught in the 70's by a totally out, shaved-head lesbian.

We spent the first two weeks of a one-semester course on Symbolic Logic. That's right, Logic 101 - syllogisms, formal arguments, logical fallacies, the whole ball of wax.

Then she used that to destroy everything we thought we knew about gender, sex, sex roles, feminity, masculinity, the GLBT community, religion and on and on. Worse, she made you do it yourself. You'd come up with some position like "only girls should be taught home-ec and only boys should be taught shop" then have to defend yourself against "why are most chefs men" and "why are many craftspeople women" and just when you thought you'd gotten away relatively unscathed, she was right back with "given that there are talented chefs such as Julia Child, why are most chefs men" (note, you're now arguing against yourself) and "why is craftsperson (along with a few others) one a few trades available to women".

One poor fellow, a "star of the football team" type (presumably there hoping for a quick credit) would often be reduced to tears of frustration by the end of the class. Being raised authoritarian, he knew what he knew about sex roles was right; being a quick study, he knew that he could prove that wrong now that he had the tools, and he was watching his whole philosophical world crumble in front of him. He passed, and his behaviour towards women (and the LGBT community) changed drastically. (Oxford commas intentional)

Now the problem with having a discussion or debate with an authoritarian on a specific topic is that you can't have a discussion or debate with an authoritarian at all - they'd flunk the course. Unlike my "star of the football team" colleague, they simply can't handle the tools. They wouldn't know cognitive dissonance if they tripped over it.

You want to change America? As soon as your kids are old enough (around age 14), teach them how to do a syllogism. That's immunize them!

These days, no economist worth his salt strays too far from Keynes (ignore the supply siders, they're either insane or authoritarian (or being paid by one)). When everything's fine, market forces can be allowed their dips and swings like a flock of pigeons. But when things get crazy, it's time to get good old Keynes off the shelf, blow off the dust and get cracking.

They're doing it up here. Government revenues have shrunk drastically due to the drop in oil prices, revenue generated by investments and various taxes.

In order to stimulate the economy they're thrown money at infrastructure. You can't see the sky properly because of all the cranes in the way and they're running practically 24/7. You can't drive anywhere and expect to get there on time because every major street is torn up and they're right there working on it from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. Two of the major hospitals have additions being built that pretty much double their capacity.

There's a theory that many successful countries (from a social standpoint) reside in the Targa climactic zone. Think Scandinavia and Siberia. Canada also qualifies because the majority of the country is up there and holds considerable voting power over the rest of the country's more benign climatery regions. We have a saying (from the Red Green show), "Keep your stick on the ice - we're all in this together".

Up here, you cannot get behind on your infrastructure. The reason the streets are often torn up is because the wild temperature swings are hard on asphalt and concrete. We keep our hospitals up to date (and have basically free health care) because we need a healthy, working population - it's easy to get sick up here(1). We need to keep everything else working because at -40, you can die really fast. We don't want to spend a whole lotta money getting somebody educated, kept healthy through adolescence, trained in the workforce, then have them freeze to death 'cause somebody let a powerline fray.

There's another reason to keep your infrastructure up to date - crime.

I'm on a number of committees relating to crime(2) and neighbourhood development. In our research we found studies showing that the number one way of keeping crime down was to keep up your infrastructure by removing graffiti practically before the paint's dry, replacing old store fronts (we've got government grants), pointedly encouraging businesses (and fining those who don't) to keep up their property, and keeping the streets clean and well lit. We've even got a program started here encouraging people to install extra lighting for their back alley (and providing the light bulbs). There's also huge artistic murals on the side of buildings. All this on a deficit budget.

So I go to the local transit station and notice there always seems to be some guy there sweeping or doing windows or washing the floor and it seems overkill until I also realize that the only person around who seems even vaguely threatening is the busker with the guitar singing waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayy off key. Yes, he's allowed there. There's even a picture of him on one of the murals.


----------------------Footnotes and digressions---------------

1. Yes, I'm aware the ambulance is going to have trouble getting to you if the streets are all torn up. That's why they send two from opposite directions.

2. I've been having a few mental health issues and dropped by the (free(3)) clinic at the hospital. One of the questions on the intake procedure is "have you had any involvement with the police?" When I replied, "Well, yes, I worked for awhile as a volunteer police officer and I'm currently doing quite a bit of committee work", I got these really wierd look, then "no, the other kind of involvement."

3. Yes, I'm going to keep rubbing it in.

Source: Metro UK

A cult leader in Papua New Guinea fled naked into the jungle after being confronted by police over allegations that he'd forced followers to have sex in public, with the promise that it would boost the banana harvest.

The man, identified as Thomas Peli, told his followers that the banana harvest would increase every time they had sex in public, according to the Parpua New Guinea Post-Courier - and he reinforced his demands for public fornication with threats of violence.


Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?...

---

I just planted new raspberry bushes in the back yard.

Think it will help?

That's the problem - they're just anecdotal stories with no data, no science to back them up. The "shithead insurance companies" won't pay for a therapy that isn't medically sound. And "medically sound" means controlled studies under controlled situations under peer review. Some quack chelating 5 kids then waving a piece of paper around saying he saw a 1% improvement in 2 kids out of 5 isn't good enough. That's not even statistically significant.

Sherlock Holmes is often (mis)quoted as saying "once you have eliminated all other possibilities, what remains must be true". This is the core of the fallacy of the undivided middle and many other logical fallacies.

A: We prayed to the white hippotomus for rain.
B: It rained.
C: Therefore praying to the white hippotomus worked.

B is the undivided middle. The only possible reason for rain is prayer, specifically to a white hippotomus. Let's ignore weather systems, let's not even take into account the idiot who just doused us with the water bomber. Nope, it's got to be the white hippotomus.

Sorry, you know how pissed off I get with religion.

Let's try a medical example.

A: My son had a cold.
B: We put him in an iron lung for three months. When he came out, the cold was gone.
C: Therefore the iron lung cured the cold.

Let's ignore the fact that unless the son's immune system is completely, uttterly shot (by which time pneumonia would long since have killed him) his own immune system would have long since figured out how to fight this particular strain of influenza all by itself. No iron lung required. But these idiots will go on national TV and backs of these fucking "cure autism" magazines claiming an iron lung will cure cancer or some damn thing. I think they're called barachoic chamber or something like that).

Now let's do it differently. Take 30 kids who all came down with colds the same day. You should be able to gather a cohort out of one elementary school. Take snot and blood samples. Put 15 in irons lungs for 3 months. Don't allow the other 15 any medication whatsoever. After 3 months see who has colds. Probably nobody. Maybe a couple of the control groups did. So the iron lung proponents start crowing that iron lungs cure colds. Guess what! The process doesn't stop there. All they can say is "we have some interesting numbers". They don't have proof. It's time to get out the microscopes. Remember the snot and blood samples - that's what they're for. So they look at blood and snot before and after. Here's what they discover.

Everybody originally had influenza strain #1344. Some had antibodies for #1345.

They kids who got well now have antibodies for #1344. Oddly enough, they were the same kids with antibodies for #1345. Presumably they were immune so didn't get sick a second time.

The kids who are still sick have antibodies for #1344, are sick with #1345 and have antibodies for both.

The kids in the iron lung got well and have antibodies for #1344. Some had #1345 as well. The rest got sick the next day.

So the iron lung proponents start demanding that everybody put their kids in iron lungs to prevent colds and petition the congresscritters to pass legislation to make insurance companies pay for it. Scientists point out that hand sanitizers and face masks work better. Chaos ensues. They post their data, results and conclusions in a doctor magazine.

So another scientist gets together another cohort and tries it again - pretty much same results. He publishes too. By the 15th study, it's pretty much established that unless somebody comes up with a study reversing those results, and can prove he hasn't faked his data, and somebody else can do it to, the only people honking the horn for treating colds with iron lungs are those who intend to make a whole lotta money at it fleecing folks who should know better.

So.

Prove to me that you have eliminated ALL other possibilites. That's right. Every damn possibility that something other than changing diet caused an improvement. There have been plenty of examples of delayed development resolving itself without change in diet. I was developmentally delayed and right about that age finally got my shit together - without diet change or chelation or iron lungs or wierd potions or any of the other shit in those stupid fucking magazines.

Show me peer reviewed studies in a proper medical journal, not some quack in the back pages of a porn magazine.

And if you start going on about "big pharma" and all the other conspiracies you read about in those magazines, I'll dismiss you just as easily as we dismiss the birthers.

I inherted an old TV from my parents. It had three idiosyncracies:

There was a problem with the design of the flyback transfomer that caused lines on the screen

There was a loose connection somewhere that would cause the entire screen to go blank, but if you pounded just the right spot on the side, it would come back. Every TV technician in the city had looked at it - it was unsolveable.

No way, no hell was it ever going to display colour. B&W TV's don't do that.


My brain is similar.

A section of my brain devoted to socialization is broken. It has always been broken. It always will be broken. You can't take it out and replace it - it's in the design.

Under stress, my brain cannot cope and it reacts with a meltdown. You can drug the hell out of me or send me to a dozen shrinks, put four people talking in my face for any length of time and bad things will happen - get over it. Have a cat handy just in case.

I am NOT going to remember who you are if I haven't seen you in the past week. I scare myself in the mirror. Yesterday I mistook my son for one of my daughters (he's got long hair). The section of my brain that does facial recognition has about as much hope remembering a blurry photo of your grandkid as my B&W TV does coping with Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Colour.

No amount of vitamins, hormones, iron lung therapy, chelation, fatty acids, magnetic fields, prayer, handwaving or screaming in my face is going to make my brain rewire itself. It can't. It doesn't know how. I don't own a copy of the genetic code to do it with.

I hope they do a similar one with guys driving so it doesn't get written off as "dumb blondes".

I'm old. I know my reaction time's going. I've been making lots of dumb-ass mistakes lately - lots of close calls. I can't remember the number of times I've wondered "where the fuck did he come from?"

Now add in the distraction of texting.

I grew up with a typewriter. I've got a Blackberry curve which has a little better keyboard than most but I still can't type my password correctly twice in a row, nevermind a line of text. Now try doing it one-handed, without looking, getting bounced around.

The other thing people forget is that in un-divided traffic, everything happens twice as fast. You may be comfortable driving at 50 kph, but you wander into the other lane and suddenly you're in highway conditions with zero warning. And you're not going to be able to resist the automatic temptation to check to make sure the lane you just (illegally) vacated is clear before you go back in. Or you could just freeze at the wheel (which you're holding one-handed, remember your Blackberry is in the other assuming you're not steering with your knees) and stare into the eyes of somebody's kids as you destroy their car and lives.

As to "winning" the next election, perhaps a brief introduction to the wacky world of Canadian politics might be in order.

Canada is a Parliamentary system (similar to Britain's). The election is won by a political party. The head of that party becomes Prime Minister and ostensibly "leads" the country although that leadership is primarily ceremonial - he has no real power at all. There is no equivalent to a President. The Queen signs documents but merely as a formality - the one time she was asked not to the controversy went on for the better part of a year.

There are four main parties.

Conservative - Republican-lite, conservative social, Reaganesque economics (assuming they get away with it which they don't)
Liberal - Centrist but ties to big business, liberal social, Keynesian economics
New Democratic Party (NDP) - left, left, left (they're the ones responsible for the Canadian health care system)
Bloc Quebecois - Quebec nationalists (with no real mandate), all-over-the-place, haven't gotten that far in their thinking

When the Liberals have a charismatic l eader (eg. Trudeau) and good policy wonks (eg. Chretien) they can usually form a majority government and get something accomplished. Currently they have neither.

When the Liberals have managed to get "mud on their face" (name that tune) they go down to defeat and the Conservatives (or whatever the right-wing party is called this week (amusingly, "CRAP" at one point)) often with a minority government, which is when the real fun begins .

In a parliamentary system, the government is in place until it either falls on a Motion of Non confidence or it decides it wants to hold an election (there is a law now in place that mollifies that slightly, but the Conservatives immediately broke that law so ). But...

...in order to keep "in power" a minority government has to make consessions, and more consessions, and MORE consessions to the point where the NDP (with the least number of seats) is passing bills and the Conservative government's own supporters are up in arms because Harper's turned into a closet Keynesian and saying "if this is what we get for 'winning' an election I'd hate to see what happened if we lost".

So who's going to "win" the next election? I'd say the NDP.

No, I'll never shake hands with Prime Minister Jake Layton (not that I haven't shaken his hands enough times and I have shaken PM Chretien and Martin's hands) - his economic ideas are so "out there" that they make my born-again Communism look like Reganomics, but he's not perceived as having any ties whatsoever into the current economic meltdown, all the health care noise downstairs is making people take a fresh look at some of his ideas for Canada and the NDP is gaining seats in key ridings, especially in Alberta.

I see a minority government - probably Conservative and probably a repeat of the previous scenario:

a lot of social conservative noise with no action

a lot of noise about Reaganomics masking a Keynesian policy to keep the Liberals happy

something on healthcare copied from the NDP playbook

some more bones thrown to Quebec

....unless....

...the Liberals suddenly get a charismatic leader (I don't think what's-his-name is if I can't remember his name - Ignatioff??) and a playbook from hell...

...unless....

hell freezes over

the Bloc Quebecois gives up in disgust

the Conservatives get mired in a juicy political scandal (sex won't do it - Harper could parade in full drag on the steps of Parliament and all that would happen is he'd get invited to the Rocky Horror Show)

the Canadian public still hasn't forgiven Chretien (don't ask why that's relevant - this is Canada )

Jake Layton actually listens to his handlers and keeps some of his wilder ideas under his hat

...at which point who knows what Canada might look like.

Full disclosure:

• I do not own a current Macintosh nor have I used one in decades.
  
• I do own an original 1984 Macintosh and it still works.
  
• I have several friends who own Macintosh laptops
  
• I own various PC's running Windows 2000, XP and Vista
  
• I do UNIX systems administration (primarily) and Windows server administration (secondarily) for a living
  

No doubt you've seen the recent Mac vs. PC ads. They portray the right-brain vs. left-brain arguments that are at the core of much of the Mac vs. PC wars. The Mac owners I know are artistic types (musicians and artists). The PC owners I know are primarily gamers or just ordinary users of email, office products and browsers. The gamers tend to scream and curse at their machines because they're never fast enough and they crash a lot. I blame a lot of this on the game. The regular users tend to be baffled by their machines because they usual run fine but occasionally lock up or become really sluggish and they don't know how to fix them.

A bit of history.

UNIX has been around for a long time. You can google for the details but it started as a mainframe/minicomputer operating system/kernel. Some users had access to some hardware and it ran hopelessly slow for what they wanted to do because it ran a huge multi-user operating system. They needed something lean, mean and fast so they wrote a single user kernel (the guts behind the operating system) to run their application. It was an immediate hit and they dubbed it UNIX, the "U" meaning unary. Their boss told them to rewrite it so it was multi-user (so much for unary) and the rest was history. It was designed from the ground up to be lean, mean and fast with state-of-the-art memory management, security and with features such as automatic disk defragmentation. Its user interface sucked because it was designed to be used by technical people. It was also a "home-brew" effort, which morphed into the "open source" community.

The Macintosh started out as highly proprietary piece of hardware with a very proprietary, closed operating system. There were very few applications, but they were brilliant - true word processing (MacWord) and graphics (MacPaint). In 1984, when I was in a market for a computer, I needed it to do three things - word processing (my handwriting has been completely illegible since grade 4), graphics (I can't draw worth shit) and mainframe terminal emulation with the APL character set (google is your friend). I believed all the advertising and went to the IBM store, took out my checkbook and actually had a system on the cart ready to go when (as an afterthought) started asking whether the system would actually do those things. They salesman kept saying "why would you want to do that?" so I tore up the cheque in his face and stormed out. I bought my Mac the next day 'cause it would do all of it, including the terminal emulation. The problem was that that was all it would do - there was no other software. However, there was a poster on the wall for the local Macintosh Users Group. Next thing I knew, I was writing Macintosh software (you had to buy several books, software and teach yourself Pascal and Object Oriented Programming) and people all over the world were using it - another open source movement.

It took years for the PC to catch up. When it finally did, it was because of extremely inexpensive hardware and some bad decisions on Apple's part. It eventually reached the point where Apple was having problems maintaining its own proprietary operating system, so they made an completely insane, off the wall, brilliant technical decision. They trashed their operating system. Yup. They trashed their OS and adopted a UNIX variant. Because Macintosh OS and GUI had been written using Object Oriented methodologies, it was a relatively simple matter to break the links for the Graphical User Interface (GUI - the windowing environment) and their propriety kernel (the guts) and drop the UNIX kernel in. Hence, they could concentrate on improvements to the GUI and leave the kernel to the open source community - people like me. They were left with the best of both worlds, a state-of-the art GUI and a designed-from-the-ground-up secure operating system kernel maintained by geeks like me.

Things did not bode so well on the PC side of things. Microsoft's operating system has always been in-house, always proprietary and always problematical, especially its memory management. They literally stole the Windows environment from Apple and plonked it on top and tried to make the two work together. It's always been a nightmare. Then they decided to tack-on multi-user capability (rather than it being designed in from day two). The whole thing is a hodge-podge mess that's never worked right, cannot work right by design (because there isn't one) and is responsible for Windows' horrible performance (that's why you need a gazillion gigahertz processor and gobs of RAM just to make it run at all), constant crashing and susceptibility to viruses. It's unfixable without a complete rewrite, or just trash the kernel and adopt UNIX like Apple did.

The problem is, that I've probably lost most of you with that explanation. To most people, the computer is the application and they have no clue what's going on behind the scenes. They don't even understand the distinction between application and GUI especially because in Windows there is no distinction. Windows is not an operating system - it's an application bolted on a kernel never designed to do the things it's being asked to do. Microsoft has so badly blurred the distinction between what is OS and what is application that's impossible to pry them apart. Windows Explorer code is everywhere. If it gets clobbered by a virus, it's into your operating system.

Finally, Microsoft absolutely refuses to follow any sort of standards. All the way back to mainframe days there have been standard ways of doing things. They are documented in RFC's. Microsoft always changes them, then calls them their own and claims to be the standard. They made a huge noise about Active Dirctory Services being the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's just Kerberos and LDAP with just enough tweaks to make it not work properly with industry standard Kerberos and LDAP. You have to buy separate software to make it work properly but even then it's a kludge.

So here's the whole war in a nutshell.

Windows:

Pros:

inexpensive

available in small markets

easy to use (in its own way)

lots of people have it

lots of propreitary applications

really good games

Cons:

proprietary closed OS

bloated

buggy as all hell

insecure

poor interoperability

non-standard

Macintosh

Pros:

robust, secure operating system

easy to use (in its own way)

lots of open source applications eg. Open Office

really good niche applications eg. music, artistic, drafting

Cons:

less market adoption

not available in many stores

proprietary hardware (less since Apple adopted Intel chips)

many PC titles not available, especially games

single-button mouse

They will lie to themselves and everybody else to maintain their delusions in the blaring face of reality.

Typical discussion: (variant of one with my mother)(note, she lives in a place of heavy ice and snow)

Mother: What kind of car should I buy next?
TrogL: I'd think about a Subaru Outback or Legacy. They've both got four-wheel drive (I'm not going to try to explain all-wheel drive to her), fairly good gas mileage and good safety ratings.
Mother: OK, I'm gonna buy a Honda sub-compact. I don't need anything but front-wheel drive and I'm a good driver so I don't have to worry about safety ratings.

On visit, during snowstorm.

TrogL: It's bad weather out, I'm worried about how your car's going to do in the snow and ice.
Mother: It'll be fine. Look out for that snowdrift *crunch*. Ok, maybe this nice man will push us out.
TrogL: The snow's getting worse.
Mother: It'll be fine. Look out for that snowdrift *crunch*. Ok, maybe this nice man will push us out.
TrogL: This stretch of road is really icy. I'm going to downshift so it doesn't get away from me.
Mother: It'll be fine. Look out for that snowdrift *crunch*. Ok, maybe this nice man will push us out.
TrogL: That parking lot hasn't been shovelled out, maybe I should park on the street.
Mother: It'll be fine. Look out for that snowdrift *crunch*. Ok, maybe this nice man will push us out.

...and on and on and on.

I think of these images as a ticking time bomb.

Suppose I build a nuclear bomb out of spare junk and keep it in my garden shed. I think I know it won't go off and I think my garden shed is secure because I bought a $50.00 lock instead of a $2.00 cheapie. Instead somebody breaks into my shed wanting to steal my lawnmower to pawn it for drug money and sets off my bomb instead. Oops.

I do computer and network security as part of my living. In a few minutes I'm going to make a phone call and chew somebody a new asshole for a very similar situation.

The girl and boy in question may think their computers are secure (I'll bet they're running Windows. Yes, I'll stop giggling now) and they may think their network connection is secure. It ain't. Unless they're going to extraordinary lengths (which is probably beyond their level of expertise) to establish a secure connection (which even I won't swear in court is possible) I can snoop that picture just fine, thank you.

If they've managed to catch themselves a virus or trojan, it could be rummaging around through their hard drives looking for interesting pictures. It could even have an algorithm to pick out the jpg's with lots of pink and pass them along or just broadcast them to the world for the hell of it. To quote Alfred "some men just want to watch the world burn".

How do I know all this? I'm the one who gets to sit on the intertubes watching the packets flow in, figure out which employee is violating the corporate computer use policy, break into his computer, see what disgusting images he's managed to download (one manager had nearly a gigabyte of anime porn) and watch his face turn all sorts of interesting colours (red to white to "I'm gonna puke" green) as I give "the speech".

Some of the worst images are scans of photographs taken decades before digital cameras. It may have started out in the 50's as some hubby shooting a naughty picture of his wife for his own use, but now it's crossing my corporate network, sitting on my expensive file server and wasting my time when I'd rather be doing useful work.

Should I be building a bomb in my back yard? (Agent Mike, piss off - it's an analogy)

To quote Spiderman, "with great power comes great responsibility" (gee, two movie quotes in one post).

If I have the power (ie. intelligence, mechanical expertise) to build a bomb, and that's what I want to do to get my rocks off, I have the responsibility to go work someplace where that's what you do for a living. Failing that, I have the responsibility to either not do it or take my lumps if things go awry.

If little miss chickie has "the power to cloud mens' minds" (oh crap, that's three) by flashing her titties over the intertubes, she (and her recipient if he put her up to it) need to take their lumps as well.

Incidentally, "Romeo and Juliet" laws have no precedent here. If the happy couple were flashing each other out their adjacent bedroom windows and visible from the street, the same would apply.

...for a free gig that could lead to paying gigs.

Mine has gone homeless and his cell phone got cut off (plus I think he's got my bass).

Requirements:

must have own equipment

fairly fast learner by ear (but music is available)

familiar with hard rock sound (eg. Guns + Roses, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple) but can handle other genres including prog rock (eg. Pink Floyd), or pop (Elton John), blues, NO COUNTRY

good stage presence

VERY open minded

...for a gig running late March to early April, then possibly again middle of August. Rehearsals starting almost immediately, dates to be negotiated.

Once first gig is done, there's talk of a band.

PM me then we'll figure out how to meet.