| Wednesday,
January 27, 2010 Editorial from today's Wall Street Journal
"Taxpayers may look at the unlimited federal
credit line now enjoyed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and see disaster.
But New York Senator Chuck Schumer sees opportunity.
"Yesterday he demanded that the two failed
mortgage giants guarantee low rent for tenants in a Manhattan property
they now own after the owner defaulted. As they say in Democratic
Washington, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste."<snip>
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB1000142405274870390620
4575027491265360632.html
Obama may or may not have learned something from the recent elections.
The Ravening Wolves of the Democratic Congress have learned nothing and
forgotten nothing. Tax and spend, elect and elect; using the public purse
to buy votes.
In the same issue of the Journal we have the op ed article:
The Supreme Court's decision last week in
Citizens United v. FEC fundamentally changed the nature of political
campaigns. In a 5-4 ruling, the court held that corporations have a
constitutional right to spend millions of dollars in independent campaigns
that attack or support particular candidates.
Critics of the decision worry, with good
reason, that corporate interests might now exhibit outsize influence on
campaigns.<snip>
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB200014240527487039062045750
27021768240904.html
I suspect that most readers know about and have some worries about the
Supreme Court decision, and few had known or cared much about the new
earmarks for Fannie and Freddie. Americans are concerned about big
corporations, and with good reason; yet perhaps there's more to be scared
of with the increasing scope of government which grows by the inexorable
work of the Iron Law -- only the Iron Law action is accelerated by the
self interest of the Ravening Wolves, who use your money to buy votes for
themselves, and build community action organizations to turn out the vote
and raise money -- in other words to substitute for political parties.
It's not likely that middle class citizens can organize the welfare
recipients and those who benefit from other public spending including rent
subsidies.
Most middle class citizens don't even think about such things. Perhaps
the corporations, which are the victims of much of this tax and spend
activity, will make us all more aware of them.
Actually the Supreme Court decision probably doesn't do what you think
it does. Most corporations already intervene in politics, but they do it
through lobby activities, not through taking out political advertisements.
As was noted by political thinkers for a long time but perhaps most
notably by Harold
Lasswell (Politics: Who Gets What, When, and How) it's pretty
hard to keep people with money from spending some of it to promote their
own interests, and laws that suppress political spending generally just
make these operations less transparent. In my judgment it's more important
to have transparency: I'd rather the unions and the corporations be more
visible in what they do.
More on this another time, but it did seem to me the two events are
better connected than is generally realized.
===========
The Apple iPad Tablet is now real. About ten inch screen. No stylus,
which in my judgment is a mistake: it's a giant iPhone in some ways. Ten
hour battery life, on-screen keyboard. About $500 but I suspect you'll end
up paying $800 by the time you are finished with it and accessories. AT&T
G3 connection.
From what I have seen it's less useful than I had hoped: I really
wanted something that would do what a TabletPC with OneNote can do for
research, in addition to what the iPad does. I do presume that the iPad
will be able to function as a telephone, as well as a book and magazine
reader.
There's considerably more from CNN.
http://news.cnet.com/
8301-31021_3-10440943-260.html?tag=nl.e498
Apparently it is not going to be a telephone. It won't run OS X. It
does run iPhone apps. It does not have a camera. If you carry this you
will also have to carry a telephone.
It may changed publishing and it may not. It's not going to change
communications. Not yet, anyway. I guess you can't Tweet with it...
===========
Thanks to all who responded to my queries about
transferring Firefox settings and running 16-bit programs in Windows 7.
===============
Apparently I am ruined and the new system is
useless. (READ TO END before replying, it's weird but the problems are
solved. Or look here.)
I have installed Outlook; but I cannot access the application data file
under my user name although I am supposed to be the administrator for the
system. Windows 7 does things a great deal differently from XP, and I
can't do it.
My usual practice in installing outlook is to let it set itself up and
save an outlook.pst file. Then I go nuke that and when I open outlook
again it complains that it can't find a pst file. I tell it to go to
C:\outlook and look there, and lo, it does that, and all is well. I did
that in Vista even. Now, though, I go to my user files, application data,
and I am told that I cannot access that file. HELP tells me to go to
properties for that folder and set permissions. I did that. Nothing helps.
Maybe I have to reset the machine after I do this?
Microsoft, I am beginning to hate you. You built a buggy system. You
panicked and rewrote everything. You also brought in a series of nice
people to make everything more friendly by hiding everything and removing
control from the user. Thanks a bunch, Microsoft. You have cost me a day.
Eventually we'll figure this nonsense out I suppose, but for the moment I
am stuck. I can't get Outlook on the new machine to look in Outlook.pst
for its files so I cannot set it up. Damn all. If anyone out there
knows someone in Microsoft who can help with this, I'd appreciate it. I
suppose the story will eventually have a happy ending, but at the moment I
am pretty upset.
I have gone to the file properties for the application data folder. It
says that I am supposed to have full access to that folder. I still can't
open it. In desperation I tried to give EVERYONE access to that folder. It
won't let me do that, as I have insufficient permission.
In setting this up I was never asked to set up an Administrator
account, so I never did. The properties seems to believe there is one, but
it has no more privileges than I do -- and it doesn't seem to exist
anyway. This is serious. Is there something broken here or is this
just Windows 7 being stupid? Whatever it is, it is making this machine
useless.
I have restarted the machine. That doesn't help either. Nothing seems
to be able to give me access to that file folder.
Well, I got to it. I opened a command line, and used that to get to the
folder, and deleted the folder. Outlook then asked for a place to find
outlook.pst and I told it C:\outlook and now I can configure Outlook. So I
was able to work around the problem, but no thanks to Microsoft. This is
ridiculous.
No wonder people try to turn off all security. Better my machine is a
zombie? Why not, since Microsoft seems to want to lobotomize it.
But I still cannot access the application data file from Explorer.
Something about the latest Windows 7 is fouled up. Perhaps in the
latest corrections, But to have folders on your machine that you can only
open with a command line is very silly.
=====================
{Read all of this before send me email about it; this is a DAY BOOK and
most of the problems have been resolved. It goes in the column
eventually.}
Windows 7 is goofy enough, but Firefox is weird too. On the t42 I
bookmarked all open tabs, and managed to export that to a file. I put the
file in a Work directory. I had no problem importing that to a work
directory on the new machine. And there I stand. I find no mechanism for
importing those bookmarks.
Does anyone actually USE these programs they design? It's like things
have gone back to what they were in the early days of computing when
computer people did things their way without regard for users, and were
really surprised that no one knew how to use all the wonderful stuff they
had invented.
Since the t42 is in another room, I need to network to it; but all the
folders with firefox data are forbidden. There seems to be no way to turn
off this madness. I can go up there and export stuff to a work file which
I can then access by network. Maybe then I could experiment with settings
and profiles and what not. But probably not. The security system is set up
to make sure I don't actually get any work done.
I certainly understand why people just turn off the security systems.
I'd rather have a machine turn into a zombie than be unable to use it at
all. This is just goofy. There's an "import" menu item in Firefox. It
won't import from anything except Internet Explorer or something else
that's on the machine. It won't look in any other files, just looks for
other browsers. Yowsa! That's real smart program design! And these are the
people who back in earlier days were going to put Microsoft out of
business with their network operating system. Yowsa! Brilliant program
designs.
I have mail from readers recommending various programs, but my problem
is I doubt they'd have much access either. Maybe I can go up to the room
with the t42 (since its screen isn't working and it needs an external
monitor, which is why I needed a replacement, it's not really very
portable) and figure out ways to export whatever files I need to a work
file, but really, I did export the bookmarks I want, and I see no way to
get them into a new Firefox. I suppose what I will have to do is copy
their addresses into a text file, copy that to a work file, copy the work
file, and use cut and paste to open each one of those bookmarked windows
by hand. There are about 50 of them. That's really great program design.
Yowsa!
All this gets to the column eventually. You're seeing the log books.
Maybe I should hide them. I don't come off looking very smart or very
patient. Actually I'm mad as hell, but it looks like I have got to take
whether I want to or not...
[Problem is solved. See tomorrow's view. One problem is that Firefox
wants to export bookmark backup in json format, but it doesn't tell you
that it will import that, or make it easy to see where it looks to find
backup files. It explicitly offers to import html but offers no help in
how to create an html bookmark backup. Anyway, I have all the files in a
bookmark folder in the new machine, and I can open them to get to the
specialized stuff I have found on Medieval Naval Logistics. And it's time
to get to work.]
========
The Windows 7 problem is solved and worth writing
up, but it's weird. In Windows 7 under users/jerryp there are two files.
One is application data. That one is not accessible by any means known to
me, and as far as I can see, to anyone else. In theory I own it, and in
properties/security/advanced it shows I have full access, but in fact I
don't. No one does. It just sits there. I am not sure it has any content.
There is also users/jerry/appdata and lo! I do have access to control of
that one, and it turns out, that is where outlook put the outlook.pst
file. Once I deleted that I was able to get Outlook to look at the file I
had copied over and all worked well. I suspect that my memory played
tricks on me: that I used the command line to get into appdata because the
command line doesn't seem to be able to find 'application data' even
though Explorer does. In any event this is a major and
irritating goof, and if anyone in Microsoft is reading this -- I know some
subscribe -- please have a look at the 'user/name/application data/' file.
It's weird. Weird.
I now have instructions for getting the bookmark files into Firefox,
and I've printed them out, and we'll see. Anyway, that's enough on
this story. It will look a lot smoother in the column.
Wednesday TOP
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