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Around the first of the year all three working computers were just about stuffed full, so I thought of sticking a spare drive in the Linux box, when the Linux box died from a hardware problem. It's too old to spend time and money on, so its drive is going in the XP box (which is, of course, not on the network; except sneakernet). I decided to break down and buy an external hard drive. I found what I was looking for in the "Seagate Personal Cloud". And here I thought the definition of "the cloud" was someone else's server!

I ordered it the beginning of January, not noticing that it was a preorder; it wasn't released until late March. I got it right before April.

I was annoyed with its lack of documentation -- it had a tiny pamphlet full of pictures and icons and very few words. Whoever put that pamphlet together must beleive the old adage "a picture is worth a thousand words". Tell me, if a picture is worth a thousand words, convey that thought in pictures. I don't think it can be done.

I did find a good manual on the internet. For what I wanted, I really didn't need a manual, but since I'm a nerd I wanted to understand everything about the thing. Before looking for a manual I plugged it all up, and Windows 7 had no problem connecting with it. It takes a few minutes to boot; it isn't really simply a drive, it must have an operating system and network software, because it looks to the W7 notebook to be another file server. Its only connections are a jack for the power cord and a network jack.

The model I got has three terrabytes. I moved all the data from the two working computers (using a thumb drive to move data from XP) and the "cloud" was still empty. Streaming audio and video from it is flawless; I'm completely satisfied with it, it's a fine piece of hardware.

However, it WON'T do what is advertised to do, which is to be able to get to your data from anywhere. In order to do that, Seagate has a "software as a service" thing where you can connect to a computer from anywhere, but only the computer and its internal drives, NOT the "personal cloud". And they want ten bucks a month for it.

I downloaded the Android app, and I could see and copy files that were on my notebook to my phone, but I couldn't play music stored there on it. I uninstalled the crap. "Software as a service" is IMO evil in the first place, but to carge a monthly fee to use a piece of crap software like this is an insult. Barnum must have been right.

If you're just looking for an external hard drive, like I was, it's a good solution. If you want what they're advertising, you ain't gettin' it. The Seagate Personal Cloud's name is a lie, as is its advertising.

Irritable Duncan "Trust-me-I-know-what-I'm doing" Syndrome reckons that, when he and the rest of the Conservative Party are re-elected in this May's General Election, he'll make £12 billion (US$17.8 billion) of welfare cuts but he won't tell us before the election what these cuts will be, Allegedly, it's "Not relevant."

There aren't that many poor, sick, disabled and needy left un-kicked, but it's highly amusing that thousands of people in one of the world's most highly-developed countries are having to resort to food banks.

Goodness only knows how much worse it will get if the loony right UKIP get some seats. Anyone but an imbecile can see that they'd vote with the Conservatives on many issues or even form a coalition.

So hurry up and vote Tory to keep the hopeless, sneering socialists down.

God save the Queen etc.

I'm surprised that this hasn't been addressed by the academic communities. Someone with a degree in English or linguistics or something like that should have though of this decades ago.

This word (actually more than one word) has various spellings, and I've probably used all of them at one time or another. The word is email, or eMail, or e-mail, or some other variation. They're all wrong.

It's a contraction of "electronic mail" and as such should be spelled e'mail. The same with e'books and other e'words.

So why hasn't someone with a PhD in English pointed this out to me? I have no formal collegiate training in this field. It's a mystery to me.

In his 1951 short story The Fun They Had, Isaac Asimov has a boy who finds something really weird in the attic -- a printed book. In this future, all reading was done on screens.

When e'books* like the Nook and Kindle came out, there were always women sitting outside the building on break on a nice spring day reading their Nooks and Kindles. It looked like the future to me, Asimov's story come true. I prefer printed books, but thought that it was because I'm old, and was thirty before I read anything but TV and movie credits on a screen.

And then I started writing books. My youngest daughter Patty is going to school at Cincinnati University (as a proud dad I have to add that she's Phi Beta Kappa and working full time! I'm not just proud, I'm in awe of her) and when she came home on break and I handed her a hardbound copy of Nobots she said "My dad wrote a book! And it's a REAL book!"

So somehow, even young people like Patty value printed books over e'books.

My audience is mostly nerds, since few non-nerds know of me or my writing, so I figured that the free e'book would far surpass sales of the printed books. Instead, few people are downloading the e'books. More download the PDFs, and more people buy the printed books than PDFs and ebooks combined.

Most people just read the HTML online, maybe that's a testament to my m4d sk1llz at HTML (yeah, right).

Five years ago I was convinced ink was on the way out, but there's a book that was printed long before the first computer was turned on that says "the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated".

* I'll write a short story about the weird spelling shortly.

Hello, fellow Soylentils! Please come into my journal, as we prepare to discuss the pertinent issues of our times.

Two issues: Toxic posters. As much as I love Ethanol_Fueled, his charm, such as it is, wears of rather quickly. But he is a prince compared to gweg_troll, the single (if that)-minded racist who is oh so concerned about all rational people modding him down because he is, in fact, indubitubly, a racist. But there is still worse, my fellow Soylentils, MikeeUSA, the wanna be rapist of children, really need to be, well, exiled from our community. I suggest multiple SPAM mods, IP banning, and &*%*%$#$($@%#$^$&*/.

Part of what makes the internet such a tool for progressive politics is that it allows the recidivists to come out and state their positions. Yes, the fact that African Americans commit more crime per capita proves, well, that correlation is not causation. Poor people commit more crime, and African Americans tend to be in that demographic. Gee! I wonder why? See, it's %*^*^%&$&%s racism that creates the conditions that confirm racism. Boy, are you racists stupid! Ever read (excuse me for accusing you of being literate) Huck Finn? Jim was better man that any of you wannabe crackers could ever be.

Second, (notice I actually skipped Eth? That is because he is asleep on a mattress of dubious provenance right now) I want to see MikeeUSA on the Sex Offender Registry, because if he is not already on it, he definitely will be soon. This is one seriously sick person, one of those that cannot be cured by any know psychotherapy or time behind bars. So we, and the rest of the internet, need to find him, identify him to the authorities, and have him put into protective custody. I do not make this demand lightly, I know that Mighty Buzzard and others will defend personal rights to a point, but not to this point. The Bible says, "Blessed are the peace-makers". Never does it say, "blessed are the perverted pedofiles who quote the Old Testament". See?

So there is my "nice" journal, discussing pleasant topic which all might engage at their leisure. And we will just have to accept that modding has a clear "reality" bias, because, as Stephan Colbert put it,"reality has a clear liberal bias". So, as the great! Philosopher Hegel said, "reality's bias is just reality, so it's not a bias at all."

http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/18/google-disables-all-ads-on-antiwar-com/

This morning (3/18/15) we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page [Abu Ghraib photos] has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?"

1. Pierre Omidyar, his wife, and his top Omidyar Network director have logged in over a dozen visits to the Obama White House to visit senior officials and members of Obama’s National Security Council.

2. Between 2011-2013, Omidyar Network co-funded with USAID regime-change groups in Ukraine that organized the 2014 Maidan revolution. In India, the head of Omidyar Network’s operation, Jayant Sinha, concurrently worked for the far-right BJP Party leader Narendra Modi helping him take power in 2014, after which Modi appointed the Omidyar Network partner as his junior finance minister.

3. Pierre Omidyar is a free-market libertarian loon who told Nobel Prize winner Mohammed Younus he refused to donate to the poor unless he could personally profit off of it. A few years later, hundreds of poor rural Indians committed suicide to avoid debt collectors working for one of Omidyar’s for-profit microfinance lenders.

4. Omidyar is the chairman of eBay/PayPal, which boasts of its own private global police force that works “hand in glove with law enforcement agencies,” including the DEA, to whom eBay provides user data “on a silver platter” without subpoenas. Omidyar’s eBay executives boast of arranging thousands of arrests around the world.

5. Although Omidyar allegedly does not interfere in his journalists’ editorial, he does control all hiring and firing, budgets, approval of expenses for taxi rides and cocktails, snuffed months worth of investigative stories from leading investigative journalists, forces editorial staff to attend countless meetings, imposes task-management software on editorial, and “writes more internal messaging than anyone else.” But he does not interfere in editorial.

6. Omidyar believes that journalists should help police arrest sources who leak stolen information from private for-profit companies. Omidyar supported the persecution of the PayPal 14 because he believes that free speech rights should be subordinate to the rights of private enterprise’s mission to maximize profits for shareholders.

7. Omidyar is a committed prepper whose fear of pandemics and epidemics is so great, he has invested large sums into ensuring his own personal food supply, and has buried several months’ worth of food in storage facilities in properties around the world, from Hawaii to Montana, Nevada, and an island off the coast of France. Omidyar keeps a private French jet, and pays a private security detail made up of former Secret Service and State Department officials to help him survive his apocalyptic fantasies.

8. In 2007, Omidyar invested in Maui Land & Pineapple, which was subsequently accused of being part of the largest human trafficking operation ever busted by US federal officials.

9. Omidyar loved Second Life so much he invested in Linden Lab and communicated with its CEO through his Second Life character, “Kitto Mandala,” a tattooed black man who rode a Segway and wore a T-shirt that read “KISS ME I’M LAWFUL EVIL.”

10. Omidyar was investigated by Congress and sued for secretly “spinning stocks” — insider trading on IPOs — with Goldman Sachs. Omidyar was also accused by Craigslist and a Delaware judge of stealing the “secret sauce of Craigslist’s success” and passing those secrets to eBay in violation of contracts, fiduciary duties and securities laws.

Bonus: Pierre Omidyar arranged an interview with two “fiercely independent” journalists on Omidyar’s payroll at The Intercept, in which he revealed to them what tea he drinks in the morning. When asked to list his daily reading habits, The Intercept came in at number five, lower down on his reading list than the New York Times.

Don't give me that do-good, good bullshit.

You can't possibly wrap your mind around how much damage US Defense (sic) and the Pentangle Church of Death is doing to the world and humanity, but you can get a handle on how much it's costing every American taxpayer.

There are 100,000 bank branches in the USA, more or less, and the average bank robbery is $10,000. So if every branch of every bank across the USA was robbed, every day, that would be $1 BILLION a day, or $260 BILLION a year, if every bank branch in every State across the US was robbed, every single work day.

$260 BILLION, keep that in your head.

Don Rumsfeld 'lost track of' $2,300 BILLION during his two terms at Defense (sic) and Panetta 'went missing' $1,000 BILLION during his one term, or about $250 BILLION a year goes running out the bank vault doors of the Pentagon, AWOL, over the razor wire, every single year since the Hanging Chad Coup of 2000!

The equivalent of every bank branch across the US being robbed, every work day, forever.

Someone nicely gifted me a subscription to Soylent, in the last day or so. I just noticed, so sorry if there's a delay in ack.

Thanks!

I've uploaded a new book to mcgrewbooks.com. Edgar E. Smith was a well known science fiction writer known as "the father of space opera", and Doctor Smith was a food engineer in his other life. The novel I've uploaded is Triplanetary, first published in serial form in Amazing Stories in 1934.

Some of the dialogue is a bit juvenile, but it would make a great movie.