Have Laptop Will Travel

Bush denies spying infringes on privacy

Originally posted on May 11, 2006 @ 1:56 pm

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President George W. Bush denied on Thursday the government was “trolling through” Americans’ personal lives, despite a report that a domestic spy agency was collecting phone records of tens of millions of citizens.

Defending his administration’s espionage program, Bush said intelligence activities he had authorized were lawful and the government was not eavesdropping on domestic calls without court approval.

Ok, this is messed up. Apparently the National Security Agency has been building up a database of phone call records of tens of millions of Americans.

According to a USA Today report, the NSA has been collecting data from AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth since the September 11 attacks to search for patterns that might help identify terrorist networks.

The story goes on to say that the NSA collected records from landlines and cellphones at homes, businesses and government offices across the country, including calls by individuals not suspected of wrongdoing.

Did you catch that? They’ve been collecting calls from people NOT suspected of wrongdoing. I believe this violates our Constitutional Rights.

It’s time for “We The People” to stand up and fight.

Microsoft Patches Coming Next Week

Originally posted on May 5, 2006 @ 1:29 pm

Microsoft WindowsMicrosoft says on their Security Bulletin Advance Notification site Windows users should expect to see three security bulletins on Tuesday May 9. At least two of the three patches will include fixes for flaws Microsoft dubs “critical.”

Microsoft is planning to release the following updates:

  • One Microsoft Security Bulletin affecting Microsoft Exchange. The highest Maximum Severity rating for this is Critical. These updates may require a restart. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer.
  • Note that this update will include the functionality change discussed in Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 912918. Administrators are urged to review this Knowledge Base article prior to release and take steps appropriate for their environment.
  • Two Microsoft Security Bulletins affecting Microsoft Windows. The highest Maximum Severity rating for these is Critical. These updates may require a restart. These updates will be detectable using the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer and the Enterprise Scanning Tool.

As always, Microsoft will shoot for a 10 am PDT roll-out of the fixes. Your mileage may very.

Last month, Microsoft released 5 patches that fixed 14 flaws and later in April, Microsoft was forced to re-release one of the updates because of conflicts with various Hewlett-Packard programs and older NVIDIA graphics card drivers.

Only in America

Originally posted on June 22, 2006 @ 11:47 pm

Is it just me or does anyone else find it amazing that our government can track a cow born in Canada almost three years ago, right to the stall where she sleeps in the state of Washington? They can even track her calves to their stalls but they’re unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country?! Maybe we should give them all a cow?

Ok, here’s an idea… for each person that enters the United States, they’ll receive one cow. We have now given you a way to travel when your car breaks down, milk for when you have your children and food for when all your relatives come. Only in America.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking our statue of liberty, it’s just so amazing how we can track diseases, cows, Terrell Owens Rap sheet but we can find Osama Bin Laden or missing children? Nope.

Yesterday I posted about our constitution and how we don’t use it anymore and should give it to Iraq. I received a few hate emails saying that I was “so un-american” and “if I don’t like it, I should move away”. For the record, I’m very American and love my country.

Read on if you dare as I’m about to rant a little more about my thoughts on the United States Constitution.

We have the freedom to speak as long as we do it quietly, we don’t offend anyone and the public doesn’t hear us. We have the right to bear arms, just don’t shoot anyone trying to hurt you, they may sue you… and win! We are free, yet the government can come in at anytime and take everything you own including your children. Only in America.

Google and Dell Partnership

Originally posted on May 25, 2006 @ 6:32 pm

GoogleGoogle announced earlier today that Dell Inc. has agreed to ship 10’s of millions of computers with Google software installed.

This news is really going to upset Microsoft because now another powerful company (Google) is getting into the same market share that’s been dominated by Microsoft for over a decade. What market share do you ask? The desktop of course.

This partnership deal is really going to widen the usage of Google products and provide another boost to its already rapidly growing profits. I’m sure it will help Dell as well.

Basically the three year deal has Dell pre-installing Google’s search application for searching a computer hard drive and emails. It also has a Web browser toolbar linking to Google’s online search and other services like Gmail and Google News.

The best part about this deal for Google is Dell would set the homepage of the computer’s browser to a co-branded Dell/Google Web site and would make Google the default search application.

Google has emerged as a serious threat during the past two years and as we all know, there’s been a very heated competition between Google and Microsoft. Who do you think is going to win? My money is on Google.

You’ll definitely want to keep your eye on this story for sure!

Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator Update

Originally posted on May 18, 2006 @ 5:29 pm

Attention vintage gamers, a few days ago the latest version of MAME was released and it’s now available in my MAME section.

That’s right, I’ve got fresh downloads for you. Come and get them while they’re hot!

A few people were asking for the Windows command line version of MAME, so I added that to my page as well.