The View From the Outback© 2000 Richard C. Rhodes
A great deal of what we read in newspapers, magazines, and books, and what we see in the movies and on TV is written and produced in New York City or Los Angeles. Much of the "political wisdom" comes from the PR machines of the White House, the Congress, and from the Washington media corps. In short, one might conclude that all knowledge, wisdom, and wit are confined to those who inhabit New York City, Washington DC, or Hollywood. I am now a senior citizen, plus. My experience was gained in many cities in the U.S. and in about 30 foreign countries. That experience has included the U.S. Marines, law school, the ATF, the CIA, Fortune 500 executive, writer, public speaker, educator, editor, and publisher - for openers. For over 20 years, I have written articles off and on for various magazines and newspapers. I've had an enormous number of letters published in major national publications. Some insights come from talking with ham-radio operators in every major country and such idyllic places as the Cook Islands. The Outback is the rural area in Northeast Texas where I have lived for the past 14 years. I will attempt to post a new set of musings from the Outback every other Saturday, with updates as appropriate. Click on a Topic to go directly to that topic. Feb. 28, 2005: I watched most of the Oscar telecast, especially focusing on the comments of Chris Rock and on Hillary Swank's stunning backless dress. I have now read several mainstream media reviews of Chris Rock's performance. Chris got some of his biggest laughs making fun of President Bush and taking jabs at the war in Iraq. One would expect the Hollywood Elite to lap that stuff up. Chris even praised Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11." (which was not nominated). Some reviewers praised Rock for bringing new energy to the show. Some were critical of his verbal assault on the President and on some of his flippant and condescending attitude toward several of the movie stars. Other reviewers were even less kind. Chris Rock is just about the funniest man I know, when you can see him in his no-holds-barred HBO specials, for instance. He does (or did) a routine about the difference between "blacks" and "Niggers." His definition of Niggers includes all type of behavior but is roughly, very roughly, equivalent to our definition of "White Trash." Even black audiences laugh so hard they cry. Over the years, I have been around many blacks who referred to other less than upright and honest blacks as "Niggers." I am going to say what you will not see in the mainstream press. In attacking President Bush, the war in Iraq, and saying how much he learned from "Farenheit 9/11," -- none of which had any place in a show about celebrating actors and nominated movies -- Chris Rock passed over from being a brilliant black comedian to being a Nigger comedian. Surely, sane heads will prevail, and that will be his last gig of hosting the Oscars. I can't wait for his next Special, where he is supposed to be controversially funny and sarcastic. He just picked the wrong venue at the Oscars, considering that billions were watching around the world. Once more, Americans and our foreign friends, got the idea that President Bush is stupid, and the war in Iraq is wrong, if not immoral. Feb. 25, 2005: An upgrade and bug fix for Firefox, Version 1.0.1, is available at www.mozilla.org Feb. 23, 2005: Today, a friend was telling me of her son's tale of woe in trying to upgrade Norton Internet Security. It made a shambles of his computer. He spent 45 minutes on the phone with tech support, eventually digging into the Registry to delete many entries. After several hours of effort, he finally got the new NIS to work. Do yourself a favor and start to phase out all Norton security products on your computers. They are just too complicated and cause too many problems. The upgrade path is a nightmare. Trying to delete NIS can be next to impossible. I finally have expunged them from my two desktop computers (I had to reinstall WinXP and SP2 on one machine that NIS 2004 "uninstall" corrupted). My new ACER notebook had an optional Norton 90-day Antivirus trial CD-ROM - which I did not install. Again, I am very happy with ZoneAlarm and ZoneAlarm Pro (www.zonelabs.com)and EZ Antivirus from Computer Associates (www.my-etrust.com). I am donating the computer to my grandsons on which I had to reinstall WinXP from scratch due to the corruption of files from trying to upgrade NIS. After several days work, and with NO Norton products on it, it is clean as a whistle, with WinXP, SP2, all Windows updates, the latest Firefox update, and so on. And of course, ZoneAlarm and EZ Antivirus installed and up to date. Another two days wasted due to NIS corrupting another of my computers. Transfer all the data from grandkids corrupted machine to their new "clean" computer, install all of their programs, printer and monitor, and bring the old one back here to format the disk and start over with WinXP and SP2. If Peter Norton is still alive, he must be going around with a fake beard, sunglasses, and a baseball cap - so that nobody will recognize him. John Negroponte, currently our Ambassador to Iraq, seems like an odd choice to be the first Director of National Intelligence (DNI). President Bush said that Negroponte understands global intelligence needs because he's had a long career in the foreign service. My experience with senior foreign service officers was that many did not have a clue about intelligence matters. In Philadelphia (before I switched to the intelligence game), we once questioned the bona fides of our ATF boss, who had never been a criminal investigator. His answer was brilliant. "You do not need to have been a whore to run a whorehouse." John Negroponte has one real plus in that he will probably be less likely to accept pronouncements from the intelligence community without deep questioning, since he was never a part of that culture. And he was probably always suspicious of it while in the Foreign Service. Frankly, in many parts of the world, the American Ambassador is a figurehead. The CIA Station Chief is often the real power. I could not understand why so many people visit my page about how I had lived for a short time in Rome next to Anita Ekberg, the movie actress. Finally, I decided to post a photo of her as a young woman and one of her at age 68. It was then I discovered the attraction of the page. I had put in the Title bar in the html headings "Anita Ekberg in the nude." The Title bar phrase is one thing search engines catalog. That was much earlier in the history of the Outback, and I was trying to generate traffic. Yes, I had seen her in the nude, but I am sure most of the visitors were hoping to find photos of her in the nude. Now, the Title bar reads "Anita Ekberg My Neighbor in Rome." That will slow down the traffic, and cause a lot of men to put their underwear back on. Walter Mossberg, who writes on technology for The Wall Street Journal, made a good point a while back about the Clear Type screen-font option in XP. On an LCD computer monitor screen (and a laptop LCD screen), Clear Type can turn muddy-looking screen text into text that looks almost like it is printed in a book. To set Clear Type in Windows XP, right-click on the Desktop and click on Properties. Under Appearance, click on Effects. Under "Use the following method to smooth the screen fonts:" select Clear Type in the drop-down window and put a checkmark in the box. Click OK and OK. There is also a Clear Type Tuner on the Microsoft Web site, where you can adjust the clarity of the screen fonts on the fly. This story ought to drive PETA nuts, at least I hope so. A young man came to my door and asked if a friend of his named XXXXXX lived in the house on the hill. I said I was not sure of all the children's names. My visitor said that he wanted to hunt Geese on my neighbor's land, but nobody was home. I advised his against doing it without permission. When I asked if we were now in a Geese hunting season, he said, yes. "There are thousands of them back there. There is no limit. They have been declared a nuisance. They are eating the crops bare. Yesterday we got 134 Geese, weighing around 10 pounds each." Some were given to friends for food and others were kept and marinated. I do remember a few days ago that the sky was black with Geese. I wish I had known there was a hunting season and had gotten a license. I could be dining in style instead of the veggie salad mixed with a can of Tuna I had for dinner. The reason I pick on PETA is because they are nut-cases - totally whacked out. They protested the leather seats used in vehicles. Mercedes, bowing to the hysteria of PETA, will offer cloth and synthetic leather as options. Options is the key. Few customers will select those options. If PETA is so upset will all the cows used to make leather seats, imagine what the world would be like if no animals were killed for food or their hide. Animal populations would expand dramatically to an eventual point of being out of control. Thanks to PETA, we have too many deer and they now forage in the suburbs or kill many people a year by dashing in front of their vehicles. The hordes of Geese now existing was noted in the above paragraph. PETA folks ought to be forced to camp out here in the Outback and hear the nightly chorus of howls from the Coyotes and wild dogs that populate our woods. If I can hear maybe 25 each night, within a quarter mile of my house, imagine how many there are in the state of Texas. On my favorite subject, from: Psychosomatic Medicine, January/February 2005. A new study found that individuals in the lowest total cholesterol group (less than 200 total cholesterol) performed more poorly than patients with higher cholesterol levels on tests of similarities, word fluency, attention/concentration, and overall, the investigators report. Participants in the lowest total cholesterol group were 49 percent more likely than were participants in the highest total cholesterol group (240-380) to perform poorly, and 80 percent more likely to perform very poorly. As usual, there are caveats about the findings. Heaven forbid that anyone suggest that high cholesterol might have benefits, without caveats. Dr. Penelope K. Elias, Boston University, said that they did not examine the association between cognition and lower cholesterol achieved by using cholesterol-lowering medications. Doc, I think we all know the answer. Low cholesterol is low cholesterol. This is not the only negative finding of the results of having LOW cholesterol. Another new study said that taking statins did not reduce the risk of dementia or Alzheimer's disease. This contrasts with earlier studies in which it was suggested that statins do reduce the risk of dementia. The statin police are falling down on the job. They are letting studies get published which challenge their position that statins will reduce risks of half of maladies known to mankind. Are we in for a period of refreshing reports that question some of the many, many claims for statins? One would hope so. Normally, we are told by the medical community that it is better to get our nutrients from eating foods rich in the particular nutrient we seek. Now, a study (Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine) found that with the high levels of toxins, such as mercury and PCBs, often found in fish, taking a fish-oil capsule might be preferred. I spoke with another medical doctor who thinks that ads for prescription drugs on TV ought to be banned. He lets the pharmaceutical reps know his feelings, too. Good for you, doctor. We need a million more like you who might say, "You know, I really don't want your samples until you quit advertising on TV. If I think your product is right for any of my patients, I know how to write a script. Have a nice day."
Microsoft has announced that there will be a new version of its Internet Browser, Version 7, later in the year. It will be a separate download and will work on computers with WinXP and SP2 (there is a Service Pack 3 [SP3] in the works for WinXP). Also, it will work with the forthcoming Windows Server 2003 SP1 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. It seems pretty clear that the new IE7, in advance of the release of a new operating system, is a reaction to massive security breaches of IE6 and the number of people switching to Firefox and other browsers. Firefox 1.0 (now 1.0.1) has been downloaded 25 million times. But, one download can supply 1 to XXXXX people with the new browser. I carry Firefox 1.0.1 around on a USB flash drive. If someone wants Firefox, I can install it on their machine in about one minute. So, the 25 million downloads may mean that maybe 100,000 million machines, or more, have the browser installed. Just in my house, there are three computers with Firefox installed - and it is my "default" browser. Of course, Windows Update will only work on IE6, and a few sites, but very few in my experience, have IE6-specific coding. The increasing trend toward "registering" even a $29.95 computer antivirus program to a specific computer, and not allowing multiple installations within the same household, is costing American families a bundle. Corporations get so many tax breaks, and software is a deductible cost, that I have no problem with more expensive business "site licenses." Security experts decry how many home computers are "unprotected" by antivirus and firewall protection. When you have to pay $29.95 to $69.95 every year for an upgrade for every computer and for several programs in your home, is it any wonder that people choose to buy shoes for the kids instead? This "single-computer-license" thing is like saying to a magazine subscriber, "You must pay a separate subscription fee for everyone in your house who reads our magazine." I know, there are problems with abuses of software that is not "copy protected" or that is not "registered online." If the industry is clever enough to do an online registration, from Microsoft, to Symantec, to Computer Associates, to ZoneLabs, ad infinitum, then they could device a method for checking to see if the multiple registrations came from the same residential phone number - and allow from 3-5 users in that household to use ONE registered copy of the software. WE are not the problem. The problem is the millions of pirated program CDs out there. In a word, this single-user-license in a home is bullshit. Give us a break. If you are thinking of subscribing to satellite TV, and are looking forward to HDTV content, choose carefully. DishNetwork has ESPN, Discovery-HD, HDNET, HDMOVIE (from HDNET), TNT, and some HD content on HBO-HD - and CBS (if you can get a waiver from a CBS station anywhere in your part of the planet). DirecTV has about the same basic HD package as Dish, but several more major networks in HD. Dish has bought another satellite from VOOM, which may be used some for HD, but they don't seem inclined to add more HD programming until they change to a new type of compression for their signal - sometime later in 2005. DirecTV plans two new satellite launches in 2005 which will can provide 500 channels of HD content. If I were a betting man, I would put my money on DirecTV for HDTV in the coming months and years. When both vendors switch to the new compression scheme, it appears that all existing HD receivers will be obsolete. Again, I would put my money on DirecTV working more closely with their customers to upgrade their equipment at lower-cost than will DishNetwork. Dish did drop the price of their HDTV digital recorder, the DVR-921, from around $1,000 to about $500. Heck of a deal, since it will be mostly obsolete before the end of the year. This is a case study of how the U.S. Congress abuses its powers and finds powers that no rational person could find in the U.S. Constitution. It is not about the debate over guns or gun control or the concealed-handgun law in Texas. During a class to update my concealed-handgun license, being conducted by a senior police officer in a nearby town, we were discussing Gun Free School Zones. The state of Texas has a Gun Free School Zone law, which it had every right to enact. The subject of the Federal Gun Free School Zone law came up. I suggested that it had been overturned by the Supreme Court, which was right, up to a point. I had predicted in the Outback that the Fed Gun Free School Zones Act would be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. After the class was over, I did some more research of the case law and the U.S. Code. I was surprised to learn that although the U.S. Supreme Court did find the Federal Gun Free School Zone law unconstitutional in 1995, it was slipped back into an appropriations bill in 1996. Language was added to address the fact that the Court had said the Congress did not have the power under the Commerce Clause to impose Federal Gun Free School Zones. You say you don't care about gun laws or reading boring crap about Constitutional law. Well, everybody ought to be concerned about how the Federal government increasingly over decades has intruded into our lives by passing laws cloaked under the Commerce Clause or the power to tax. This case is a textbook example of the extreme leaps in legal logic used by the Congress to pass many laws. A young man named Lopez was convicted under the Federal Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990, for bringing a handgun and some ammunition into his school. The 1990 act was predicated on the right of the Congress to regulate "Interstate Commerce" (the Commerce Clause). In 1995, the Supreme Court, in U.S. v. Lopez, overturned the Federal Gun Free Zones, saying that the statute had nothing to do with commerce. The Court rejected the government's argument that firearms in school are actually substantially related to interstate commerce. It noted that the Constitution grants very few powers to the Federal government, and the rest are "reserved to the states." The Court said that 18 U.S.C. (U.S. Code) Sec. 922 (q) was "a criminal statute and has nothing to do with commerce or any sort of economic enterprise, however broadly one might define those terms."
Now comes the ludicrous part. The government had argued to the Court that the possession of a firearm in a school zone may result in violent crime and that violent crime can be expected to affect the functioning of the national economy in two ways. First, the costs of violent crime are substantial, and, through the mechanism of insurance, those costs are spread throughout the population. Second, violent crime reduces the willingness of individuals to travel to areas within the country that are perceived to be unsafe. The government also argued that the presence of guns in schools poses a substantial threat to the educational process by threatening the learning environment. A handicapped educational process, in turn, will result in a less productive citizenry. That, in turn, would have an adverse effect on the Nation's economic well being. As a result, the Congress could rationally have concluded that Sec. 922 (q) substantially affects interstate commerce. Read the last paragraph again! It gives new meaning to "a strained interpretation of the Constitution." Of all the legal cases I have read over decades, the above paragraph strikes me as the biggest pile of verbal manure I have ever seen. The Supreme Court basically agreed with me, but in a more courteous manner. The Court: "The Government admits, under its 'costs of crime' reasoning, that Congress could regulate not only all violent crime, but all activities that might lead to violent crime, regardless of how tenuously they relate to interstate commerce.... Thus, if we were to accept the Government's arguments, we are hard pressed to posit any activity by an individual that Congress is without the power to regulate." The next year, 1996, Sen. Herb Kohl (D - Wisc.), offered an amendment to the Treasury, Postal Appropriations bill which was a slightly modified version of the original Gun Free School Zones Act. You had to be paying close attention to see this one slip by on the outside corner of the plate. Now, if you read 18 U.S.C. Sec 922(q)(1), you find in part: (q)(1) The Congress finds and declares that - Just saying in a statute that the Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to enact this subsection does not make it so. The Supreme Court, in the Lopez case, had already told the Congress that most of the above arguments were rubbish. If another case like Lopez comes before the Supreme Court, they will surely once again reject the Federal Gun Free School Zones - as having nothing to do with the legitimate regulation of Interstate Commerce. Justice Clarence Thomas, for one, views many of these intrusions into essentially state matters, by perverse readings of the Commerce Clause, to be violations of the 10th Amendment. There is a more or less loose 5/4 majority that tends to agree with him. The 10th Amendment states that: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." A majority of states have their own Gun Free School Zone acts. In fact, at the time of the Lopez case, the punishment under the Texas statute was greater than the punishment under the Federal statute. The few high-profile shooting cases in and around schools get enormous attention. Prof. Gary Kleck, a criminologist at Florida State University, estimates that under 0.1% of students are caught carrying guns in school in any one year. One report stated that the likelihood of becoming a victim of a school-associated violent death is slightly less than 1 in a million. Where there is a problem with guns in schools, the states are perfectly capable of providing solutions and laws. As the Congress passes new laws that infringe on our private lives, the question of privacy is often raised. The more important issue is "does the Congress even have the right to enact the particular law?" Quite often, we are burdened with Federal regulations that use strained interpretations of the Commerce Clause or the taxing power. Read Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution entitled "Powers Vested in Congress." It will take only a minute to read, as there are precious few powers actually granted to the Federal Government. The rest, per the 10th Amendment, "are reserved to the States...." This is one of the big issues with who President Bush nominates to the Supreme Court. If there is at least one more justice on the Court who believes that the Commerce Clause really relates only to "regulating commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes," more and more laws based on "tenuous connections to interstate commerce," will be overturned. And some of those big buildings in Washington may end up empty. Now, we can't have that, can we? The Democrats will do what they can to block any potential justice who believes in a strict construction of the Constitution. Searching for a low-end, but capable notebook computer in the $1000 and under range, I looked at the usual suspects, Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, ACER, and Gateway. I settled on an ACER because in the price range it had a large screen, a fast Pentium M CPU, 3 USB jacks, 256MB of RAM, a CD burner, a generous-sized hard drive, a LAN, Wi-Fi, and modest weight. You have to look carefully at the model numbers on ACER notebooks, even within the Travelmate 4000 series. One had a 15-inch screen and 1024 x 768 resolution. Mine has a 15.4-inch WXGA screen and 1280 X 800 resolution. Some are Windows XP Pro and some XP Home. Some have 256MB of RAM and some 512MB of RAM, etc. There are other differences even within the 4000 series. Read carefully on the ACER web site, or at a vendor site that fully states the "specs," since the ads are not always clear as to all the differences. For $898 at Newegg.com, here is what I got: ACER Travelmate 4000WLCi, Pentium M 1.40 GHz Centrino CPU (with a 2MB Level 2 Cache), 256MB DDR333 RAM, 60 GB hard drive, 24x10x24 CD-RW burner (also plays DVD movies or install software from DVD-ROM disk), integrated stereo speakers, integrated 10/100 Fast Ethernet Adapter, integrated IEEE-802.11b/g Wi-Fi, 56K V.92 modem, 3 USB 2.0 jacks, Cardbus PCMCIA Type I or II slot, VGA 15-pin output jack, TV Out S-Video jack, Firewire jack, Fast Infrared Interface, AC adapter, and a Lithium-Ion battery - and Windows XP Home SP2 preloaded. There is no floppy disk drive, but I use either a 250MB USB Zip Drive, or a 256MB USB flash drive, to back up or transfer files. This model has no provision for a Docking Station, but you hardly need one with all the outputs available. The case is slim, an attractive silver, and the unit weighs about 6.5 pounds.
Battery life is said to be quite long by those who reviewed the ACER online. I cannot comment personally, since I have yet to run the unit on the battery for more than a few minutes. They use a proprietary power-saver module. For example, on AC, the screen is very bright, but on battery, the default setting is quite dim. You can construct personalized profiles for the power-saving feature. And curiously, this is the only place I found where I was able to turn off the LAN so that it did not give me an error in the task-bar tray about an unconnected cable when the LAN is not in use. Drove me nuts for a couple of days. Other than the CD and DVD software, I can't recall any other factory-installed software. There is a CD-ROM with a 90-day trial of Norton Antivirus on it and several CDs for System Restore. I prefer EZ Antivirus 7.0 and bought yet another downloaded version for $29.95. Because I seldom use this computer online, I installed the free ZoneAlarm 5.5xxx firewall. Actually, I prefer computers to come with just the operating system and software to play movies or burn CDs. I don't use Microsoft Word, or Office, or Outlook, so not having them preloaded saves disk space for programs I really use, like WordPerfect and Eudora.
Interestingly, the hard drive has two partions for C: and D: drives. Unusual for a factory to do that on a relatively small HD, but what I would have done anyway with 3rd-party partitioning software. The hard drive is formatted with FAT32 instead of NTFS, and I am not sure why. Maybe it is to accomodate dual-booting into Linux or something like that. For now, I will leave the FAT32 file format alone and not convert it to NTFS. There are two RAM memory slots. I waited to make sure that my computer had a single 256MB chip in one slot (not 2 x 128MB). At Crucial.com, you can order a 256MB DDR333 chip for this computer for just under $50, boosting your total to 512MB. I chose the 512MB stick for $99, giving me a total now of 752MB of RAM. I love RAM. My home-built Athlon 64 has 2GB of RAM. Experts are always saying that if you have a choice of moving up a step or two in CPU speed (if you are competent to swap out your CPU) or installing more RAM, choose the RAM. Plus, installing more RAM is a no-brainer with sites like Crucial.com which have a massive database of computers and motherboards and will "guarantee" that the RAM they suggest for your device will work. You snap in a RAM stick, reboot, and there it is. In the course of upgrading many computers, Crucial.com RAM selection and their quality has never failed me. There are other similar sites, but I am not about to switch from Crucial RAM after years of good service and quality. I even bought a RAM chip at Crucial for my digital camera. So far, I have used a very complex Windows ham-radio logging program, a mapping program, both IE6 and Firefox browsers, and a few accessory programs. The logging program is connected to my transceiver by a Serial cable, but I use a Serial/USB converter to feed one of the ACER's USB ports. The Serial/USB adapter requires a software driver and shows up in Device Manager as Com4. So, if you have an old serial device, such as an old PDA, you should be able to use the Serial/USB adapter. I have played a DVD movie. I have made a CD-R, using NERO 6.6 rather than the included software. Although it is difficult to find benchmarks for the Centrino "M" series of CPUs, I have the feeling that my 1.4GHz M is faster than my P 2.66GHz desktop with 1GB of RAM. It is certainly more than adequate for most applications. The 15.4 high-resolution LCD screen is terrific. My ham-radio logging program (LOGic 7) has about eight windows open at a time. I can see so much more material than I could on my old Win98SE laptop with a 14 inch 1024 x 768 screen. It is similar to the difference between a standard TV and a 16:9 format for HDTV. Another factor in choosing ACER was that it is made in Taiwan. Ever since I can remember, the bulk of the offshore motherboards and add-in cards have been made in Taiwan. China is a latecomer to this business. I think it was an HP notebook that I saw was "Made in China." Made in S. Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, or Japan, yes. China, no - although it appears that many major computer brands have some or all of their components made in China. ACER was for years a rather obscure name brand, but they are rapidly climbing the ladder in world sales. When I think of how much I paid for my old Win98SE laptop with a 12GB hard drive (about $2700 all tricked out) compared to the cost of this new and totally-capable ACER, I shed a tear. I sold the old laptop, which worked fine, for $225! Ouch. It is hard to think of a manufactured item that depreciates in value more rapidly than a computer. COPYRIGHT 2000 Richard C. Rhodes You are welcome to quote sections from this page - or the whole page, as long as the source URL is included. Of course, I would be flattered if anyone linked to this page. It is very hard to be the writer, editor, fact checker, copy editor, and publisher of anything. So, I beg your forgiveness for the many mistakes that creep in. Suggested Reading From Past Columns Click Here for Suggested Reading List Archive of Back Issues Media List of Addresses and e-mails Postal Service State Abbreviations, etc. Postal Service Abbreviations - Richard C. Rhodes End |