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Showing posts from October, 2008

$18,048,000 Bill for China

Apparently Microsoft is being accused of abuse in China because it is cracking down on illegal copies of its software. [1] One excerpt from the article sums up the mentality in China: More than 80% of the 60,000 Internet users participating in an online survey conducted by Tencent, one of the largest Internet service portals in China, protested the campaign. They complained that it was the high price of a legitimate copy of XP that had forced them to turn to counterfeits. A genuine copy of XP Pro is priced at $376 (2,578 yuan) in the Chinese market. So if you don't like the price of candy at the local grocery store, you should just steal it. Why should you pay their fair market price when you could just take it and then claim that they forced you to steal it. China is the single largest offender of global information espionage and currency manipulation. On all of the computer systems that I monitor daily, the vast majority of elicit hacker activity originates from IP addresses in C...

Faster Climate Change

CNN reports that a WWF study has found that global climate change is happening faster than predicted in 2007 and that there will not be any arctic ice by 2013, or 2040. [1] Then it goes on to say that global sea level will increase by 1.08 meters by the end of the century, which is 2100, 92 years from now. Quite honestly, nobody really cares what is going to happen to the planet in 98 years. Why? Because in 98 years we (as humans) will either: (1) Obliterate ourselves because God told us to do it. (2) Eat eachother because there will no longer be any land available to grow crops and sustain living quarters for our 50 billion people. (3) Suffocate because our planet will no longer smell nice thanks to 50 billion people producing lots of solid waste in our oceans. (4) Leave the planet because there will no longer be enough fresh water to sustain our lives. Wait a minute. Consider (4) for a moment. Where can we get an abundance of fresh water TODAY? Anyone? Yeah, the arctic! It's goin...