Soapbox, ballot box, ammo box - prescribed in that order.

How many letters to the White House have you sent?
How many times have you written to your congress critters?
How many of your friends, relatives, and acquaintances have you educated, relative to these issues?
Are you speaking to your children and their friends?
Have you encouraged all of those friends, relatives, acquiantances, and children to write to the PTB?
Have you involved your state representatives in the discussion?
Have you approached your local representatives?

I promise you that if you consider the issue to be an administrative issue, you're in for a rude awakening. It isn't Obama - it is GOVERNMENT. Obama may be a rather large and obvious cog in the machine, but he is still just a cog.

You're about 80% correct. Like yourself, though, I am a member of a family. There's a television in my home. I don't watch it, but others do. It's right there in the living room, kinda central to life in the house. I could go all fascist, and just get rid of the damned thing because I hate it. But, I can't do that. It sits there and spews out the most mindless drivel. Ehhhh - no, I'm not "forced" to endure that crap, but what are my choices, exactly? I endure it for the sake of peace in the home.

Trumped with the race card, huh?

So, tell me, how long were you personally enslaved? How many times were you flogged for failing to pick your "fair share" of cotton? I don't do guilt trips for things that I didn't do, and none of my ancestors participated in. I just don't do them. You would have me apologize for not being black, or at least brown? Guess what - that makes YOU the bigot. Yes, it really does. You look at me, and because I'm not black, you ASSume that my family was complicit in the slave trade. Funny thing is, my ancestors in Europe weren't a whole lot better off than slaves. My ancestors in the Americas were one of the downtrodden peoples that you're referring to in your third sentence.

Tell ya what. I'll trump your race card with a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGqlrVmVULc

?????????

"shouts over the GP"

Alright, whatever. But, I thought the name-calling was a plus. It's like, "here's my thoughts" then, a considered, thoughtful addendum, "P.S: Fuck you." It's not like he wasted a post to say "Fuck you" - it's just an add on to the real post. I'm left wondering if AC simply has a romantic attraction to noh8rz10. Things like that happen, after all.

Alright, Phil - help me to understand the logic here.

We've been told for a long time now, that all our hardware is made in China. And, that China is engineering back doors into all that hardware. It's been a common mantra, threaded into all sorts of news articles and doomsday prophecies.

So, now that we know the NSA is back dooring all sorts of hardware, you've decided that you would prefer to have China holding the keys to your back door?

It might be safe to bet that the hardware that China built their back doors into probably have duplicate keys, hanging on the key rack at NSA headquarters.

Not bashing you here, I just want to understand your point of view. Is longsoon really the best way to go?

Hey, we could check out what Siemens is selling - no one will mess with European chips, right? Oh, wait - the Israelis are all over that one already . . . .

Bell bottoms were a fad? Crap - I thought they were a uniform. I enlisted so that I could get some. You mean, I could have just gone to K-mart and bought them?

I was having similar thoughts. Thanks for speaking my mind so clearly.

ALL social media sites are simply fads. There is not one that will stand the test of time. Facebook selling stock? Cool - Suckerburg really got one over on all the greedy fools with money to gamble. It certainly isn't going to last as long as MS, Apple, or Google. Facebook isn't the new IBM, or even Timex. Bars, pubs, and other social meeting places come and go. Facebook offers nothing truly special, unless they start serving free beer.

You and I have differed on some things in the past. But, on this one, all I can say is, the uninitiated simply cannot believe. I have problems with some of the things that the US does to other people - but we most certainly have our enemies.

I don't dismiss ANY stories of foreign penetration of our shores, or our airspace. If, and I say if, I were to gain real first hand information that positively put the lie to an incident, then I would dismiss it. Since this stuff doesn't happen where I can witness it - I can't possibly say whether Spetznaz came ashore or not. It is plausible. I've walked ashore in a couple of countries where I wasn't invited, and I didn't bother to look up the local constabulary to inform them that I was there. Why can't other people do the same? I'm not real special, certainly not super human or anything. If I can do it, anyone with balls can do it.

When I was in the Navy, I heard a bunch of stories that I've never been able to verify, or to debunk. Old sailors claim that there are several Soviet subs sunk off the coast of Cape Canaveral - now Cape Kennedy. I heard the stories from people that I was sure were full of crap - but I also heard the stories from people whom I believe are very credible.

Ehhh - if you don't have a "need to know" you are never going to get all the information.

It's just that thin veneer of civilization. A determined force can cripple the infrastructure, up close and personal, in pretty short order. You simply cannot secure all the infrastructure in this country. There are people who do little more than train themselves on methods to destroy stuff, and to kill people. Most nations maintain armies of men and women dedicated to that purpose. It shouldn't be surprising that not all people with a destructive bent are in the military.

It is noteworthy that only two men were involved here. A squad, or a platoon, or a company of men with a mission could really wreak havoc. At least these guys weren't intent on gaining physical access to a generating plant, where they may have killed any number of people.

I have said that Microsoft hurt the future of computer science. This particular instance, the AARD code, would be meaningless as an isolated instance. Cumulatively, Microsoft's actions have held science back.

Extraordinary evidence? There it is, all over the web. "The AARD code ran several functional tests on the underlying DOS that succeeded on MS-DOS and PC DOS, but resulted in an error message on competing disk operating systems such as DR-DOS" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

I think you posted that same information, didn't you? Of course I'm not retracting any statement I have made. Because I lack documentation for frustrations I experienced more than 20 years ago, I should retract my statements? Are you nuts?

As for moderations - don't worry about them. I don't. Sometimes, the mod demons beat hell out of me. Stuff happens. As with Microsoft's actions, it's the cumulative effects that matter. You post intelligent posts, and your karma stays high. You've been stubborn in this thread, but you haven't been stupid.

I do have some strong anti-Microsoft sentiments. I've explained them. No other company on earth has inflicted as much frustration on me as Microsoft. How many operating systems are there, which you could install, then connect to the internet for updates, and be thoroughly infected with a half dozen viruses before the updates could download? That was much more frustrating than my experience with Windows 3.11 refusing to install on any but Microsoft's select, approved OS's. And, that too is documented on the internet!

I view MS with a jaundiced eye, you view MS through rose tinted glasses. I think my view is more realistic. We have agreed earlier that both Apple and Google do wrong. It seems to me that it is demonstrably true that MS has done far more wrong than either of the other two. Someone above argues that Google is more evil because they outed some Chinese dissidents. Here's a story about Microsoft doing the same thing,
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2004/feb/01/business.microsoft

Both companies have backed off of exposing dissidents, apparently because they suddenly realized how "real" that shit can get. I suppose that I might find a similar story on Apple if I searched.

Whatever - Happy New Year. Maybe we'll battle over another subject sometime soon.

I don't believe so.

Everything on the website is under the vendor's control. The listing, the price in the listing, the checkout, everything. The ONLY part of the process under the customer's control, is the decision to enter financial information. Just like any brick and mortar store, once the transaction is concluded, and the customer has a receipt in hand, the vendor is obligated to deliver the goods.

We've just had Black Friday, where damn near everything in the world was advertised at 50% to 80% off. With their bogus sales running like that, how is the customer to know that the store didn't mark the item up 600% so that he could then mark it down 80% and STILL make a huge profit? That is standard procedure today, after all.

And, if there WERE a problem with the checkout, then the vendor most certainly should have caught it before he shipped the items. He is still obligated to deliver them, at the price he charged - but if he caught his mistake before he shipped, he could at least negotiate with the customer. "Look, Pal, I made a serious mistake, and I sold this item so far below cost that my boss is going to fire me. Can we meet in the middle? No? How 'bout you pay for the shipping, and you'll still be way ahead of the ballgame! Alright - if that sounds good to you, I'll just charge another ten bucks to your card, and ship it out today!"

The vendor cannot arbitrarily cancel a sale, or arbitrarily add a charge to the sale. The customer has his receipt, the property is his. All you can do is beg him to meet you in the middle. And, doing that may well cost you a return customer.

It's best if the vendor just swallows the loss.

Excellent point. Political correctness flat out denies any pride in your heritage, unless you are part of some select minority.

A reference way back in the early '90's would have been good. It's going to be 2014 next week. I don't even have all those installation disks anymore. At this date, I can't remember exactly which versions of which operating systems I used. I variously used PC-DOS, TRS-DOS, DR-DOS, IBM-DOS, and MS-DOS. On everything except MS-DOS, I got a message telling me that Windows could only be installed on MS-DOS. And, in fact, I later got that message when I attempted to install Windows on MS-DOS 6.22. I did get Windows working on 6.22, but initially it didn't want to install.

I did recover (from an estate sale) various versions of Windows preceding 3.1 which were happy to install on all of the above. As I recall, I had Windows versions 1.2 and 2.6, and a partial set of 2.8 or 2.9 but I won't swear to those version numbers now.

What is certain, and what has been documented, is that MS did put that AARD code into it's products. If you've actually read up on it, you'll realize that Win3.1 is not the ONLY place it showed up. Win3.1 is the only place where I personally encountered it.

Is that you, Nancy?

That late beta nonsense doesn't cut it. I personally tried to install Win 3.11 on top of non-Microsoft OS's - and always, it failed. Since I was not on the mailing list during Windows development, it's hard to believe that what I had in my hands was a "late beta".