If Guiness is watered down to you, I would like to hear your opinion of American light beers. Seems like the brewers here are on a race to the bottom by offering beers with less in them. I can hardly wait for Miller to make a beer from the water they use to rinse out their brewing equipment (maybe that is what they serve up now for the low-calorie swill?). Zero-calorie beer will the next abomination (AKA bottled water with a hint of yellow color at twice the price of other overpriced bottled water).

I agree that the power that possession of your full name, date of birth, and SSN has is crazy. The government saying to protect it is worthless since that means never using it anywhere and if nobody used it outside of government agency use then it would not need to be protected as much.

The big problem I see is the credit reporting agencies not doing due diligence to protect your information or at least use better authentication to match the person to the data requests. Identity protection services should be the default protection and various opt-in and opt-outs should be used to protect the data from abuse and inaccuracy. I should not have to monitor 3 reports. I should be able to opt-out of the other two and concentrate on maintaining one accurate report. If that agency does not want to work with me to clean up the report to make it accurate, I can use one of the other two agencies to service my credit report an maybe get better results if they are competing instead of colluding. Also, I should be able to opt-in for more security for that one report so requests must be cleared by me through a predetermined communication channel so an identity thief cannot get get a car loan instantly and drive off with a car before anyone catches on to the fraud.

I am surprised that the businesses that pay to use the credit reports have not demanded better security and accuracy since this hurts them on lost legit sales due to bad reports and losses due to fraud. It just makes everything more expensive as rates and fees go up to cover the losses instead of fixing the system. Wasn't the last financial fiasco enough to wake up the stupid MBAs to realize they need to fix the system by hiring people who know something about security instead of just the latest buzzwords or only preservation of broken systems.

Dell might do better with corporate clients when it comes to service and support but for the average consumer client, it is pitiful at best. I did some Dell hardware warranty work a couple years back and heard the horror stories the customers had to go through to get parts sent out. There were/are way too many middle men in their support model. If you have to spend 5 or 6 hours on the phone with someone who does not speak English in the way the you do while trying to follow directions with technical terms you don't understand, that is not good support. Good support is having local presence that can diagnose and request the parts then follow up to install. The service calls I had were a joke since I had to diagnose the problem to see if the parts delivered were appropriate to solve the problem (the details given to me were usually just the parts sent and few words like WILL NOT TURN ON). This is a case where I see overseas outsourcing as a major failure since it tries to do too much to save money and the customer experience turns off the customer from buying from that vendor again. However, the industry gets away with it since they all typically follow this model.

Alternatively, always use the chat support for Dell or HP if possible. It is much more efficient since written communication versus spoken can help avoid confusion and no sitting on hold for forever.

I have little respect for the MBA degree by itself. It tells me nothing other than the holder wants to work management for the big bucks. It is nothing more than a check-box for qualifications. That degree says nothing about having the any of the right skills to manage a particular business and without a chance for further inquiry, I assume a stereotype of "money above all else" which leads to short-term gain, long-term loss methods if they get some nice contract with a golden parachute which rewards failure as much as it does success. In short, MBA != Competent Leader.

I wouldn't say you would be drunk from listening to Top 40 hits as much as you may need to be drunk to enjoy most Top 40 hits.

This could work well to inform users that their ISP is antiquated and even their computers are due for an upgrade. If Google, Facebook, etc. are still allowing IPV4 then information should be provided stating why IPV6 may not work for them before proceeding to the normal pages (they may be doing this but I can't be bothered to RTFA). Downside will be fear created by an unexpected pop-up or page stating this which will make many thing they have some type of malware since these sites did not come up as expected.

Either way, ISPs and computer services will be getting calls. Hopefully these calls will get appropriate answers and not lead to service offers to solve imaginary problems (Geek Squad anyone?) or upgrades to hardware that are premature.

Technology advances are great but if it requires scrapping working hardware for little or no benefit to the user then it is a waste of money and adds to the electronic junkyards. Many perfectly good mobile phones are scrapped due to plan upgrade discounts, locking phones to a carrier and carriers refusing to support old phones since they can't lock you into a service plan anymore.

The ship Titanic was doing great too... until it ran upon an iceberg. The Facebook problem is that it is over-valued based on what private investors have dumped into it. They don't want to go public since their books would reveal how little Facebook makes of its ads (which I block since many are one click away from malware so the whole lot must be blocked). When Facebook goes IPO, people will buy it up and make money for the current investors and then it will dry up like the last .com bubble burst.

User base growth is deceptive since many of these accounts are duplicates. Many people have an account for real life friends and then fictitious accounts for games that require and army of 501 "friends" to actually have a chance of advancing and not be beat up by everyone else with a larger army. With these fictitious accounts, the users add only other users active in those games. Farmville and Mafia Wars have driven casual non-gaming users insane with all the requests and status updates. Zynga has probably hurt Facebook more than it has helped for long-term growth and user retention. Granted, changes to Facebook to separate games into there own feed and block applications has helped but the dilemma is still upon the users to either learn the controls or just abandon their account. How many of those 600 million users are dormant and visited less than once a week/month or never again?

Dare I say this but does this problem actually work with a car analogy? If you dub the Internet as the "Super Information Highway" which I hate but works for the analogy that stupid people may understand. Your vehicle (make, size, fuel economy, etc.) is the content. The roads are owned and/or controlled by various entities (city, county, state, federal) with correspond to the ISPs, telcos, etc. and you have tollbooths at certain road transitions (ISP controlled or government controlled).

Pure Net Neutrality is removing all toll booths but allowing stoplights at on-ramps and intersections to keep the flow efficient as possible without favor or penalty to any the traffic.

Without government control over the ISP's actions, certain cars pay higher tolls or outright banned from their roads. That seems a bit more reasonable if the banned or higher tolled vehicles are overweight vehicles but not if it is Ford cars versus GM cars.

With government control and the fairness doctrine, the government sets the toll rates and gets a cut and also imposes silly rules like there must be an equal amount of Fords and GMs on the road at any given time so you cannot get past the tollbooth in a GM car until another Ford car comes along so the traffic stays equal. This sounds crazy since some days you will wait in line at the tollbooth and other days you get to go through immediately.

Many people are fearful of the overreach of government so they would rather be at the mercy of big business. The reality is that big business has control with or without government intervention since they can manipulate the government with their money more than the average person can with opinion/protest/voting power. The government intervention is like gambling though; sometimes you win but mostly you lose.

Snow is great if you like to ski, sled, or partake in other wintertime recreation that require it. It is nice to have (but not too much) in December for that effect it gives with the Christmas decor. But come January and February, it gets to be annoying as it turns to icy and an ugly yellow/brown from thaw cycles. Come March and April, it damn near angers many people since it slows the warming of spring. Many times in the past few years in South Dakota, we have gotten big snowstorms in the last couple weeks of April. That late snow does not stay around long but sometimes accounts for a large portion of the total inches of snow for the whole winter.

If you are smart (or at least concerned) enough to read a manual or know how to look up the correct warnings for your product on a website, then you are not the target audience for most warning labels. Also, most warning labels are probably at a reading level too advanced for the people who need it.

MBA = Masters in Business Atrophy

I see the appointment of a pure MBA (without any background in what that company makes as a product)to CEO as the sign to get ready to cash out after they do their "Short Term Gain, Long Term Loss" changes that spike the the stocks value and then nosedive it down when there is realization that the cost saving changes hurts the company the most in areas that previously made it successfully.

I swear some of these MBA's read Dilbert to get "good" ideas from Dogbert and the PHB.

Only one other case I would use Linux. I had a customer that had an old Windows ME PC that had issues. I put Ubuntu Linux on it with the understanding that this computer will be OK for games and using the Firefox browser. Considering Win ME only has IE6, the web experience will improve as long as they don't expect much for Flash-type content. I was upfront about the limitations based on the old hardware and compatibility issues with add-on devices like printers and cameras.

In the end, this is just an experiment to see what average Joes would think of Linux as a desktop. The biggest problem they have had so far is with the NVIDIA video driver and the resolution getting reset to Auto (a very low res) and having to manually setting it back to something usable like 1024x768.

Also, in this case, they have a newer PC with Win XP that the wife uses mostly and the old one was the husband's but she doesn't want him messing up hers. He mostly just plays games and goes to websites for NASCAR and local racetracks so it can handle that fine.

I am glad that we don't have a Worst Buy in this town. The closest I have to get to their messes is extended service plans people buy for some of the devices like printers. Don't get me started on my experiences doing Dell hardware warranty work.

Most of my customers are referral so I keep busy now that I have been doing this business for 3 years. I have no problem with being honest with my customers since I can fix a problem and tell them how to prevent it instead of trying to drain them of their cash by fixing the same problem over and over again. There are always other upgrades and repairs that I would most likely be considered for later and happy customers give referrals. Operations like Worst Buy prey upon consumer ignorance and try to get as much as they can before the customer can get wise.

Thanks for software and tool suggestions. I am always on the lookout for other tools that make my job easier and more efficient.

Well, when Worst Buy, as you call it, bought Geek Squad they took an service of flamboyant (VW bugs and nerdy uniforms) technicians and over time replaced educated technicians with sales monkeys shown how to run canned programs and charge about half the value of the computer to fix the simplest problems. They have a bunch of the sales monkey at the counter and possibly a real technician working in the background on machines not fixed (or made worse) by the sales monkeys.

We don't have a Best Buy in my town but I have visited a good computer shop in a town that does. Their rates are much more reasonable than Geek Squad and they shared a few stories of computers brought to them after being taken to Best Buy.

I provide home and small business computer support (mostly Windows, occasionally Mac, and experimenting with Linux for some customers). I find that most malware will disable most anti-virus programs (Norton and McAfee for sure). Why pay a yearly cost for software that slows down your computer worse than the malware and gives you less protection than a free competitor? I used to like AVG Free but have been using the MS Security Essentials instead since people get annoyed with AVG changing versions and requiring a manual upgrade.

My philosophy anymore is to have some type of firewall enabled (Windows Firewall or another free one), an active anti-virus (MS Security Essentials or another free one), and preferably Firefox with ABP instead of IE. Most malware not prevented by these is something obtained by a socially engineered attack (e-mail attachments, web browser ads, etc.) and usually lead to a fake anti-virus program that asks for money to fix the problem it created and will block most methods that can remove it. I find that most can usually be cleaned up with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware running in Safe Mode.

The vendors and the manufacturers are both guilty of selling products and services that are not secure but give the customers a false feeling of being safe from everything. This leads to reckless behavior that those who understand security would avoid doing even with a secure system.

Computer security software is no match for the behavior of ignorant users that will disable or circumvent security provide by others. Computer education related to security doesn't hit home until these people have to pay someone to clean up the malware mess.

True that.

But the GPS navigation and diagnostics system are not part of the CD player (IE) but they make use of the screen and controls on the deck (integrated OS features). That being said, your after-market CD player (Firefox, etc.) might be able to work with a GPS navigation and diagnostic system but that could be more difficult if this deck only uses certain standards and these other systems are using something proprietary.

Few carmakers do such setups unless they are high-end models to the point that the customer would rather pay whatever the factory would offer instead of the more reasonably priced after-market equivalent. Buying an Apple computer is more like this than a PC where many more parts are available and competitively priced.

Your intent of modification/upgrade, desired appearance, required functionality, and willingness to pay will influence car and computer purchases to varying degrees so this analogy works sometimes when discussing consumer motivations.