George W. Bush

(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

From ABC news:

He doesn't assail any Democrats by name. Bush, however, he names. Over and over. ... While Gore stops short of flatly calling for the impeachment of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, he certainly gives the impression that in his view such a move would be well deserved. He calls the president a lawbreaker, a liar and a man with the blood of thousands of innocent lives on his hands.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

For a company who's motto is "Don't be Evil", they sure aren't putting up much of a fight in their slide towards wretchedness.

I love Google’s technology, don’t get me wrong. But I think Google has turned a page here. They have now enabled a piece of software that is hard to remove and forces users to look at a really bad page. In fact, Google knows that this provides users with a dramatically worse experience.

Of course, Microsoft has done this for years. If you type a wrong address into IE, it automatically comes up with an MSN search page. But I don't agree that it's hard to uninstall, just that people who don't know better won't realize that they CAN uninstall it.

I DO agree that this is a bad move on Google's part. If they are truly trying to create a better customer experience and make some money on the way, they made a bad move here. What they've done instead (and Dell too), is make some money by making a worse experience for the customer.

A former payday scum manager comes clean in a video released by The Center for Responsible Lending.

In this 4 minute video, Rebecca tells how payday loans are rarely two-week loans. Most of her customers came in payday after payday to renew the loan—after the first time, they couldn't afford to pay it off. Rebecca tells how she and her co-workers explained away the 400% interest rate, and how tough their collection tactics were. And she tells how she came to understand that rather than help her customers, these loans were "keeping them poor."

Now if Virginia would just kick out the whole industry like West Virginia did.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

I haven't talked about this before, but it's a problem that's been around a while. A lot of spammers will send full images containing their message instead of HTML or text because a spam filter can't recognize what's in a picture. Now that spammers have been seeing the results of advanced spam filters, they are moving more and more to image spam.

From the article I linked to, this is the most important piece of advice:

Disable graphics in e-mails you receive. Most e-mail services such as Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Mozilla Thunderbird automatically prevent graphics from showing in e-mails you receive unless you click on them or enable the graphics yourself. While this can slow things down a bit, it also reduces the chances that you will be caught clicking on a piece of image spam. You can also configure your e-mail account to only receive plain text, blocking rich text and graphics altogether.

The key is that if the image loads at all, even if you don't click it, the spammer can know you opened their e-mail which will encourage more spam.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

How does a sex offender get hired to do contracting work that could put him in close personal contact with potential victims? Aren't they required to report that they're a sex offender?

It wasn't like this guy was a one-time offender either. The article states that he had an "extensive history of violent attacks".

Though Niki was in no way harmed, you gotta be careful who you open your door to, even if they're coming from a brand-name store

Using a sound board to deal with debt collectors. Ha!

(Image is in the Public Domain)

This isn't really relevant to anything, but is very, very funny. Apparently the guy in this video has been harassed by a debt collectors for a while because he has the same last name as someone else with a debt. His way of dealing with the problem? Record a bunch of Judge Judy sound clips and use them during the telephone conversation to talk to the debt collector.

The best part is, this debt collector ends up having an entire conversation with a computer!

(Image is in the Public Domain)

It's getting worse over there.

Assistant chief constable Simon Byrne said: "People clamour for the feeling of safety which cameras give.

Yes, but that's only because you tell them that cameras make them safer. How do you prevent them from becoming abused? What if a new law suddenly turns all those cameras on normal people. Things could go from ok to nightmare in a single day because of the infrastructure of social control that they're building.

I like this quote from Slashdot:

Is there any evidence to suggest that this increasingly Orwellian society is actually any safer?"

Totally organic... sure

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

What is the point of an agency that thinks it's ok to label non-organic foods as organic?

USDA's rule, in contrast, permitted products labeled "organic" to contain non-organic substances so long as producers obtained certification that organic versions of the relevant ingredients were not available. Why should it matter whether substances are on the list?

My thoughts exactly.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 2.0 [SRC])

It's fast becoming apparent that food from China is dangerous. Despite the FDA's attempt to stop the tide, Chinese shippers are cleverly just trying again trying not to be in the 1% of checked shipments twice in a row.

(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

If you aren't watching your rates or if you don't understand what you're paying, you could end up with a huge cell phone bill by handing a teen a cell phone with text message capability.