JKane

There is a school of thought that purports to account for growing old together/young on train tracks... I did notice two sets of actors for the children in the credits, but they looked the same and in the same clothes, to me. Will have to see again soon. Also, there's this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY69-AgUmDQ&feature=player_embedded

Yeah, I kinda wish they worked! (And the minus signs.)

I've never understood their popularity. In California I prefer Fatburger by far. But I'd also usually take a Wendy's burger over In and Out. I googled In and Out's secret menu though and saw one or two things I'd like to try.

Credit unions are great, I belong to three! They are ideal for loans and credit. Seem to bend over backwards for customers fairly often. But they are a bit inconvenient for some general banking duties. Other than the incident I relate above, I've been surprised by how well things have gone with my huge bank. I never would've chose them, but they've done a good job so far. ATMs everywhere, branches all over the world. I didn't know USAA was also a bank, I've heard great things about their insurance. I don't qualify, but it sounds like anybody who does should try them out. It's interesting to hear somebody having a problem with Wells Fargo, I thought maybe they'd be the new WaMu everybody seemed to love. The bank I've by far heard the most complain about, mostly for general incompetence--even before the banks screwed the economy--is Bank of America. I've had several people tell me of incidents where they go to a branch and can't do what they need because their account was opened in another state, hilarious given the bank's fucking name. To me BofA = Bunch of Assholes; wouldn't go near them on a dare.

I also eventually got merged into a huge bank, and had this experience once so far. It was about 8 months ago, just trying to deposit and get some cash, the teller starts looking in accounts unrelated to the transaction, commenting on my balances and trying to sell me CDs and such. Financial advice through a fucking bulletproof barrier from one of the banks BIG on the govt. bailout list!! WITH people waiting behind me, after I had to wait for them pull the same on the person in front of me (who didn't understand at all what they were even talking about). I was livid! When I got back to the office I emailed customer service and faxed the branch a very angry letter. I have used a teller there once or twice since, hasn't happened again (though it's hard to believe my disgust with their actions could make a change in such a big company). But I am serious in my threat to yank ALL my accounts from them if they ever do such a thing to me again. Wouldn't affect them at all, and would be a PITA for me, but it's the principal!

Mine too, but it feels a little better when I see an actual Reaganite explaining to 'the party of Reagan' that if we went back to the tax rates under their beloved mascot the deficit would be solved overnight. And as true as it is for the nation, it's triply true here in California. Instead the Republican party plays lip-service to Reagan while transparently striving to do nothing more reasoned than to cut their *own* taxes as much as possible, with NO regard to any other consideration, just hastily made up justifications. Watch any one of them, worth tens of millions of dollars or more, rail against the dreaded 'death tax' to a group of people lucky to be able to save up the very minimum they need to retire. And yet they buy it! Isn't there some famous quote from antiquity, along the lines of 'No society survives its' voters discovering they can vote down their own taxes.'?

I saw the 'daddy' graphic on a local roto-rooter type of company's truck the other day! Wherever Daddy's avatar is originally from, they stole it too.

BGP! Welcome to the renaissance! I was fervently hoping you'd pop back up and help us make it last!

Greenspan is getting up there with Joe Lieberman and Andy Rooney on my list of guys I wish would just die already. I am also worried about the strength of the economy and would like to avoid any more colossally stupid moves in my retirement account, but Greenspan's the last place I'd turn to for advice. My recollection is he missed two major bubbles that greatly impacted our economy (tech bubble being the first). If fact, anybody relying on any kind of Ayn Rand-ian 'invisible hand' -- i.e. the only problem is too much regulation -- mode of 'thought' is immediately discounted as a imbecile interested only in their own short-term best interest in my book. Seriously, how many more times can those fucktards be proven wrong before people stop giving them microphones (or positions)?

I know I'd love to know more! While I've figured out how to pick up guys places like Santa Monica BLVD, I've never gotten anywhere with the 3 or so legitimate hitchhikers I've picked up in my life. Was never nearly brave enough to try hand on leg though!

You're welcome! I agree the suites have gotten way too heavy. I'd been using AVG (don't recommend) but now like Essentials which has very low performance impact. I've generally relied on the built-in Windows firewall (plus a NAT-ing router), but one of the more robust software firewalls that makes sure connections aren't going *out* of your computer without your knowledge makes sense for the extra security conscious. I worry that they bury many users in too many requests and become worthless as soon as the user just starts hitting 'allow' automatically though. I've never felt the need for a specialized registry cleaner, with so many of them being scams. Ad-aware has disappointed me the last couple times I tried to use it to clean up an infection, tried Spybot with mixed results, lately I've had pretty good success with Malwarebytes.

Wow, and so few realize this is even happening... Thanks for providing first-hand knowledge on it! Guess this is another reason to donate to the EFF!

I'd heard something about this when announced, I guess I don't understand why the BB would be singled out... because any smartphone can send and receive encrypted messages. I guess maybe it's because that's apparently the default for BBs, preventing those mideast governments from keeping their populations in check with casual spying by their secret police.

Something about movies, the ones that suck me in (which most do, when I see them the first time in-theater) can make me tear up amazingly easily. Doozies I can remember: Schindler's List of course, more recently Pixar's Up, and speaking of amazing animated movies, next time you're on Netflix add 'Grave of the Fireflies' to your list. It's a masterwork from studio Ghibli in Japan, Ebert has it as one of the best 100 movies of all time.

I would agree it's not *needed*... until one day it desperately is... For a long time there weren't enough Apple computers out there for people to target with the really malicious stuff. But given the increased marketshare plus the wealthier demographic it's likely to be a growing target for the criminal type of 'hacker', the ones who act for money (stealing account info or extorting money to give you back your data/function of your computer). Do not, however, mistake the lack of serious threat *so far* for Apple's OSX being any more secure. There've been a couple tests where hackers are challenged to break in to several brand new computers and in the latest rounds I believe Win7 usually lasted longer than OSX. Plus there's the way that MS gives free updates for pretty much the life of the hardware, often adding significant improvements and features in service packs--while Apple makes you spend $100 every year or two for any improvement to their OS, leaving a lot Macs running older, more vulnerable operating systems. One of these days something really nasty is bound to hit Macs, and since there won't be much established in the way of Antivirus software or urgent patching apparatus it may well spread like wildfire. So the short answer is that it would probably be a good idea to run some form of Antivirus, but I'm not sure there is even anything particularly good available, because the market is currently so complacent about it. At least keep your browser up to date, maybe look into some browser plugins that try to block websites from doing malicious stuff. Also run the Apple update, for what it's worth (they do provide some security fixes). Use a strong password and be careful with how you set any sharing settings--remember that if sharing is setup wrong it could give anybody on the same WiFi network access to your stuff.

I generally don't give a shit, Levi's cute enough but none too bright. Though I'm constantly amused by the hypocrisy of the champion of 'Christian Values' and abstinence-only education's daughter being knocked up. Maybe if Sarah hadn't prevented Bristol from learning about condoms in school Levi would've never gotten his 15 minutes of fame. That's an interesting thought, given his education and other prospects, would there maybe be a review or two for him on this site in that alternate universe? Hmm, makes me wonder who exactly we do have listed for Alaska... I did find this, at the end of the article you linked, absolutely hilarious: Asked if Palin and Johnston would stay together despite the latest drama, a rep for the Palins told RadarOnline.com "no official decision has been made."

Writing out how to protect and secure your laptops reminded me that I wanted to tell everybody that not all is doom and gloom when it comes to our digital rights. Years ago, a bunch of very old men--without even the understanding of the Internet as 'a series of tubes' did what they were told to do by their bosses, i.e. their benefactors at pretty much all corporations involved in media production/distribution (plus some others). Unfortunately these men were in the US Congress and what they did is known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was YET ANOTHER horrible law known by an acronym starting with D signed into law by the beloved President Clinton. DMCA pretty much ended the 'fair use' doctrine many continued to think applied and as technology advanced it became more and more onerous. Making a digital copy of *music you bought* so you can play it anywhere? Technically illegal. Getting past copy protection on that music or video game you bought SO THAT IT WILL NOT DAMAGE YOUR COMPUTER? Absolutely illegal! Decrypting the laughably bad protection on a DVD so you can watch it on a computer running Linux, your cell phone, or from a file you can keep on your computer instead of carrying around the disk? By Jack Valenti's rotting corpse you're going to jail! Well, NOT ANYMORE!!! You may have heard something about how you may now 'jailbreak' your iPhone. You always could, of course--to get by Apple's endless restrictions on what you could or couldn't do, and their controls on who could sell or even GIVE you software to run on YOUR PHONE, just now you can't go to jail for it! Though Apple may still void your warranty and deny you future software updates... More interestingly, you can also go beyond that and UNLOCK your phone from the carrier you bought it from. Now, with the iPhone on AT&T it is a somewhat Pyrrhic victory as T-Mobile's network is no gem plus *just* different enough to not work at 3G speed for DATA and Verizon's network (as well as Sprint's, I believe) is entirely different technology. If you travel it may be of use though--you might be able to get a SIM from a local 3G provider that will provide much cheaper calling and data overseas. Even on AT&T you could often ask for this unlocking for that specific purpose on their other phones--but they wouldn't do it on the iPhone. The legal right to decrypt DVDs YOU OWN for non-commercial private use isn't quite established as 100% legal, but it seems it's a lot less illegal than it was (yet doing the same with Blu-Ray is still apparently illegal!). There's a couple other exceptions added that're more interesting to geeks like me, but one specifically speaks to some BULLSHIT that just cropped up recently. Amazon figured a nice feature to give the Kindle would be the ability to read a book to you in a simple computer voice. Many publishers balked at this, forced the feature removed from smaller company's e-readers, and tried to bully Amazon into disabling it because they felt the audiobook rights were being violated (even though there's a night a day difference between a Stephen Hawking-ish voice stumbling over the goofy words in Harry Potter and a celebrity, actor, or author actually reading it to you...). The deaf and many others took great exception to the publisher's assertions, of course. And now, it is now 100% legal for any eBook to be read aloud, even if you have to crack the DRM (encryption) of an eBook you bought to do it. My god I love the Electronic Frontier Foundation! I have *got* to get around to donating to them, like I've meant to for so long! I also intend to have them in my will.

Another important point on computer security/privacy is that US Customs (and that of some other countries) has the right to search your computer and other devices, without cause, as I understand it now. This kind of thing may be especially targeted at men coming back from certain Asian countries, anywhere that underage sex tourism might be happening. So keep in mind that you may not want to travel with your porn collection on your laptop and that pictures of perfectly 'legal' guys on your camera or phone from your vacation may cause some hassle as you won't have proof of their age with you. Better safe than spending 24-48 hours in limbo (or worse) as you try to get back home. BUT, as I understand it, (Lucky might have more insight here), they may NOT compel you to give your password. So it is a very good idea (also in case of theft!) to have a strong password on your login account(s) (if you hate typing it in each time get one with a fingerprint scanner built in, it's a very common feature now). You should also go into the BIOS and make sure it's set to boot from the hard drive *first* and that the BIOS is password protected for changes. (Booting off an external drive /USB key and copying everything is a common tactic; or if stolen this change makes your laptop pretty worthless to the thief--so a 'reward for return to' sticker might actually get it back to you.) Just be sure YOU remember this password, as you'll need it if you ever need to repair/re-install the OS. If you're really paranoid or have to have critical personal/work info on your laptop there are also options to encrypt the hard drive either built into many laptop's BIOS (if it has a fingerprint scanner it's likely an additional feature) or built into the higher-end versions of Windows (Pro and Ultimate). Be careful with encryption though--if you do it wrong you may never be able to access that data again! And finally, BACKUP your laptop before travel (before playing with encryption too!). Again, FOR FREE, there is a great option built into Windows; Windows 7 especially: you simply plug in an external drive formatted NTFS (formatting as NTFS is smart thing to do with any new drive regardless), and tell it to make a backup. (I think it even asks if you'd like to!) Takes maybe 20 minutes and you're set. Do this on your main computer ever couple weeks too! But be sure to store that drive someplace SAFE, as it would be easier for somebody else to get to your files on it than on your laptop if you followed the suggestions above!

Even $40 isn't an excuse! Microsoft now has a very good antivirus product they offer for free! It's called Microsoft Security Essentials, I'm using it and have read several favorable reviews: it ranks among the top of the free products and is very competitive with the expensive ones--without all the unnecessary (IF you exercise a little bit of caution online!) bloat that often comes with 'suites' from Symantec or McAfee. So I highly recommend MS Security Essentials as well as keeping your PC up to date with the the latest service pack and other updates through Windows Update. All free! As for pornsites and their 'leavings', I always use 'Private Browsing' (Firefox) or 'InPrivate' (Internet Explorer) if I go anywhere near that kind of thing (even my 'hobby' email address) at work. At home I have a separate login on my computer for that kind of stuff (preferably an account without administrative privilege). It's actually what I spend most of my time logged into (first step is admitting you have a problem...), but if anybody were to use my computer under the 'normal' account they'd have no access to anything naughty I've done, nor would anything that compromises my porn/escort browsing login have easy access to where I do my online billpay and keep various financial records/etc.

I chose to think it was answered, for the reasons mentioned above... But now that more have seen it and are participating, anybody else have opinions on it? I'd like to see it again on an Imax screen, maybe this weekend.

And you feel it's *good* we allowed genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda, then gave in to brutal warloards raping their country to pieces in Somalia? Because it saved some tax dollars? I mean sure, between those three millions of people died, but they didn't have oil so fuck 'em! Of course we'll also allow Somalia to continue developing into what Afghanistan became under Clinton: the breeding ground for world wild terrorism; and since we can never learn from our mistakes we'll only try to do something about it after they kill thousands of Americans (or at least get really close to pulling it off...).

Afghanistan allowed to develop into the mess that spawned 9/11 and the tech bubble allowed to grow then burst plunging the economy back down much of any gains...

Yep, that sounds like the bad beat I watched, don't think I'd ever seen anything quite that high lose before. No, I just visit relatives in Texas once or twice a year and usually get dragged up there. Have watched it triple in size these last couple years. Usually try to play a tournament but if I miss it 2-5 or a bit higher sounds right.

I don't get how gays can idolize the Clintons or think Hillary would do better by them! These are the people that brought us DADT *and* DOMA. Could've vetoed either, in fact with DADT they let congress legislate what had been a presidential prerogative so no future President could just 'desegregate' again. Instead they gave both hearty bi-partisan support. But hey, at the time it helped them hold onto some power, and that's all that is important. Especially when they went on to use that power to... wait, what did they actually accomplish? My memory is of an administration on the floor curled up into a ball crying 'not in the face' at the Republican leadership, their pets like Ken Star, and the Fox echo chamber for the last several years. Backing down to cries of 'wag the dog' when it was clearly time to go after Bin Laden and Afghanistan because he couldn't have kept it in his fucking pants.

And you're getting a much higher dose of nicotine per cigar than cigarettes. Yet you're not getting the added chemicals and you're generally not inhaling smoke into your lungs, which combined with the frequency lessens the medial impact greatly.