Population Control

This is perhaps one of the most useless things in the history of mankind that violates everything that makes a person human. And yes, I do think the world could use a lot fewer people on it right now, given how humans live. We spread all over the earth, taking up miles and miles of space -- when only a few blocks would do. But that isn't the point here. Soon different countries will end up limiting the number of children a family can have. Oh they'll say it's to help keep the population under control, and by the time they implement it, everyone will seem happy about it. But it's evil. What happens if they say a couple can only have two kids? What happens if they get a divorce and marry someone else? If it's phrased "wrong" they'll be some women and men who will never be able to have children not because they already have them -- but their spouse does. Picture a person who has a child with their spouse. The spouse dies. That person already has the max number of children allowed -- so whoever they marry or date will not only not want their own kids, but want kids.

People need to realize that the only way to maintain population controls is to murder, force castration, force abortions, and basically force people to request permission to have a child (and possibly sex). Don't think it'd happen like that? Oh, just wait. You see if you have one kid, and then you have another one illegally what else will they do? Throw the baby in prison or put it up for adoption? But then other couples will have maxed out their children or be forced not to have children of their own. But the governments are smart that way, they know people won't stand having their family torn apart for no good reason -- so they'll just force abortions or castrations on people. But then people will start to realize that those methods are way too violent -- and someone might complain.

So what then? Quite simple really: Governments will sterilize the populations without them realizing it. How? Well let's just say it's a fairly safe bet that humans drink water. Slip a few chemicals into the water supply that will sterilize the population and no one will be the wiser. Oh don't get me wrong, it won't be 100% effective, they'll try for maybe 10-25% of the population. And the best part is no one will ever realize it. It's not something that people would go around telling others -- not at first anyway. As soon as people start to realize that a number of their friends are sterile and it starts to make the news, maybe even before, a huge release of "disease X has caused humans to be sterile!" or even "cure for disease X has a potential side effect of sterilization". And that will be one glorious day.

Because at this point where the government's attempt to sterilize their populations -- they'll make a mistake. Their 10-25% population numbers will be higher to 75%+. Governments will panic and immediately stop all sterilization drugs in water supplies. Since it only takes one person in a couple being sterile to prevent conception, close to all couples in the world won't be able to have children. Populations will decrease rapidly within twenty years, causing a fear of "humans extinct due to sterilization?!?" headlines. People will be tested and forced donations will be done to artificially produce offspring in test tubes to try and repopulate humankind. Then it'll hit people, or perhaps before depending on the extent, the animal-based food supply will be affected as well. Entire lines of animals will die out (from drinking the same water as people). This will cause a huge food shortage (or at the least, force more people into being vegetarians). Some of the few people left alive that aren't sterile will be given the food, with the remaining being handed out to the others.

In the end, humans will survive. Just nowhere near the current population or lifestyles that we're accustomed -- then again, maybe we'll all die out due to some unforeseen side effects of the drugs -- like all of our offspring being sterile. That'd be the real treat. Mankind will kill off our entire species, in the attempt to cut back our population without the people complaining.

Kind of makes one wonder: are they actually planning this without anyone knowing about it? We'll never know, until we've drank up our species deaths.

Hagglers welcome at stores…

"There was a New York Times article titled "Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone"

I do understand that papers want to run articles of public interest. However the article "Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone" (By Matt Richtel - Published: March 23, 2008) also runs the risk of hurting people. I know what you're thinking, how can it possibly hurt someone?

Now while I agree that many items in stores seem overpriced, there are many reasons for it such as overhead and shoplifting. There's a markup on everything so they can pay the store's bills and buy more goods to stock the shelves. If someone tries to haggle on a price and the store agrees ("less profit is better than none" belief), it doesn't generally matter for a few customers as they'd recoup the cost with other items, possibly that they themselves bought. However, every sale costs the company money. Even if the sale generates profit by itself, the company could have spent more money to sell it than they made (ex: 30 minutes of an employee who makes $10/hr to make a $5 profit on an item – they "broke even").

The problem comes is with the article, more people are going to assume that they can haggle for prices anywhere. And that's a problem since they can't. More customers demanding lower prices mean more time taken out to negotiate. This means you are either understaffed (resulting in complaints and demands for discounts for the inconvenience), or more employees being hired which will cause prices to increase drastically. Why? Well for one they have to increase prices to give themselves more "haggle room" and two so that when the price is haggled down to the original selling price, they can pay for all the new employees that were hired to do the haggling! This leads to another problem. You walk into a store and find something noticeably more expensive than a competitor. What do you do? Either you leave and go to the competitor, or you haggle. Which means prices can't be increased a lot, so no new employees – so longer wait times. Assuming everything goes smoothly, you'll have a longer checkout time – five people in line, all prices have to be manually edited. A simple 20 minute visit could take you an hour.

Now let's say a store has two customers that are both buying the same TV. They enter electronics at different times for the haggle – but hit the checkouts at the same time. "Frank" gets $500 off the TV. "Charlie" only gets $450 off (you know, since haggling doesn't yield the same price off for everyone – unless it's a "fake haggle" where the store has a set price, and a second set price that's the actual price they want). Now when at the register, Charlie realizes that Frank got a better deal, so he demands another $50 off, and files a complaint against the employee (since you know, the employee probably said it was as low as they could go). Cashier is authorized to make the change (since the computer says so), and they're both happy. Frank goes home and discovers the TV's damaged so he returns it – and requests another discount because he had to make two trips for it. This would mean that the TV was marked up not just $500, but closer to $750-1000 over their cost – so they could haggle if needed. But it doesn't seem too bad.

But let's take this same situation from the employee's point of view.

Frank walks into electronics and sees a 27" widescreen LCD for $2500. He knows he saw the "exact same thing" at the store a few weeks ago for only $1200. And here the problem starts. Now I'll assume that the employee isn't busy with another customer and everything goes smoothly overall, which isn't always the case.

Frank: "Excuse me. I need to talk to someone about this TV."
Employee: "How can I help you?"
Frank: "I saw this exact same TV in here a few weeks ago and it was only $1200! So that's what I want to pay."
Employee: "We just got this TV in last week. It's a new model that (lists new features). We don't have the old one anymore."

(At this point Frank would complain, assuming employee is lying, accuse the employee of such, etc)

Frank: "Then just give me a thousand off this one."

(Employee checks computer, it's marked up $750 – i.e. only $750 can be taken off without a loss)

Employee: "We can take off $250."
Frank: "That's unacceptable! The other model was only $1200, and I should be able to get this newer one for just a bit more!"

(Insert a few minutes of complaints and explanations)

Employee (assuming a manager didn't have to step in): "We can take off $750."
Frank: "Fine." (leaves with TV in a huff).

Now, after the employee just got ripped a new one by one customer, she gets to get to deal with a few hundred more. If they heard that you could haggle – guess what they'd want to do? And guess what happens to the wait times? Figure out what will happen next? Demands for free or greater-discounted stuff for the long wait. All the while the employees are the target of the customer's rage. And they're not paid enough for it.

Most customers are generally kind to employees. But there's a percentage that aren't. Now that people have discovered that haggling can be done at some stores, they'll just assume it can be done anywhere ("But company X does it! If you don't do it I'll go there!"). They'll start being mean to employees, anything they can think of to make sure they get a discount. People complain now that it's hard to find employees to help you – imagine how hard it'd be if almost everyone needs an employee every time they visit the store. It'd reach a point that anything shy of one employee per customer and you'll have complaints (demanding more discounts!). Brick and mortar stores will have huge operating costs that they won't be able to pass on to customers, since the customers will just demand it be removed or "they'll go somewhere else". They wouldn't hire more people since they couldn't cover the costs. It'd just make more hassle and an overall hostile work environment.

While biased since it's an "employee customer horror story" site, you may want to visit http://www.customerssuck.com/board/ -- you'll get some ideas as to what employees deal with everyday, or every week for the lucky ones.


And that leads to the point of how that article will hurt people in one sentence: Many companies won't allow haggling for the reasons I put in here – and the customers will take it out on the employees.

I know that article was just trying to let people know of a "hidden secret" of sorts. But all it's going to do is hurt people. And like I said, a few people wanting to haggle is no big deal. But if your entire clientele realizes it – you've got some major problems. And from me visiting those stores listed in the article I can say I had a hard enough time getting help as it was with no one haggling. Now I don't know if I even want to visit them.

Cable that watches you back

Isn't it great to know that in the great USA your cable box will watch you? Isn't that great! Your cable box may have a camera inside it to peer into your lives to see who it recognizes -- you know, so it can customize your favorite channels. Just as Comcast! But don't worry, it's not going to recognize you based on face, just your body shape. So I guess if you're dieting and the cable box doesn't know who you are, congrats!

Couldn't you just imagine the bedroom! Lying there doing whatever it is you do when lying in bed watching TV. Couldn't you just imagine certain motions causing you to have a lineup of the skin channels, while others letting you see your crime dramas? Or just imagine the horror if your best friend comes in and the TV stations switch again.

I don't know about you all, but I can say without hesitation that when your TV starts watching you back, it's just another step to the end. Maybe not the end of life, but the end of something; privacy comes to mind. I could only imagine what would happen if the cameras actually had clear pictures, and some hacker found a way to get live feeds into America's bedrooms. The "greatest" porn site of them all would be launched "Comcast bedrooms" or "Hidden bedroom cams" -- come to think of it, they probably already exist.

Gamma Ray Burst Visible with Eyes, No Telescope Needed

Ah, doesn't this make you feel all warm and cozy inside? Gamma rays burst and you don't need any special tools to see it! Kind of makes them seem extra dangerous don't they? It does raise a question, are we noticing them more now because we're looking for them, or are they too picking up in frequency? Ok, maybe not "frequency" as this one was 7.5 billion years old (the earth wasn't even here when it happened). If you look for something, maybe you'll just find it. But then with the Mayan Calendar "ending" in 2012, and all these exciting things going on, almost makes you wonder.

Almost that is. Personally I'd love to have a near miss of a burst, just once, just to see what it'd look like. The rioting would be about as amazing as the churches being overrun by the "so-called" religious that never visited before. I think I'd be more partial to an asteroid myself… that or a massive volcanic eruption. Something that gives so much warning that we may or may not know the exact day of the end; but just enough for people to show their true selves.

FBI posts fake hyperlinks in order to catch child predators

Here we go -- actual examples of how the link scanners could (if the pages happened to be linked by search engines, while searching not for specific content, but info about it) get you arrested. Apparently the FBI's going around posting links to the illegal porn on sites, and getting search warrants. Now while on the surface this seems to make sense (despite all the problems, such as finding out the referrer to the content, and the content of the post that leads someone to the page), it'd be extremely easy to not only accidently click such a link -- but to also not even need to click it. What if someone wants to get even with you, so they send you an e-mail that just so happens to open up the link? What if you're just doing harmless searching and the page (or even a page that links to it, but isn't a porn site in itself)?

While it's true that now the story's broke out, they're probably getting nailed from every side possible -- and eventually will either fix the problems, or realize that "hey, we just had fifty million people go looking for illegal porn stuff, maybe something's up!" At least I hope so.

Safari the new "malware"?

No, it's not really bad. Well, I don't think it's bad that is, never used it myself. I figure using one primary browser with IE and Opera as backups is good enough (especially with all a free "see your website in other browsers/OS's" site). But I did think about installing it once!

So when I logged on today and saw Apple's updater saying that I needed to upgrade (yes UPGRADE not INSTALL) to Safari 3.1 for bug fixes (or something), I almost clicked install. In fact, had it not of required administritave permissions and actually had that little "admin required" icon on the button, I may have clicked it. But only for one reason, I thought that maybe I did install it and forgot about it! Been known to happen before. I've needed a program, found some free open source version, downloaded it only to be prompted with an "overwrite" or "filename(1)" in the folder -- because I've not only downloaded it before but installed it.

But with this program, I never did install it. The only traces of "safari" that exist is in my browser's history. So what's with Apple doing this? That's not an update by any means of the word! It's an actual install of a brand new program. Yet they purposely put it in their updater utility. And I'd bet that there are thousands of people out there that did click install. I'd also bet it happened to set itself as the default browser too. Funny, isn't it, that that's the act of malware?

Now I'm sure in today's software climate they're going to get nailed for this. But it's a sad thing when a legitimate company goes trying to trick users into installing their programs. I wonder how long before an apology surfaces… probably before this post hits the net -- they probably had the apology press release made before they pushed it out to everyone.

Beware of Linkscanners (Link Scanners) -- the things that check search results for viruses and malware

Please keep this in mind: Most likely you're using these and don't entirely know it! Many anti-virus companies have these "link scanners" setup on your computer just by installing their anti-virus program. Others, such as siteadvisor (that was purchased by McAfee) are stand-alone applications. I haven't tested them all, nor do I care to do so. But some of these are very bad things!

Why? Well there's two main reasons, and they all fall into one of these categories.

Category 1 -- Sends the link to a central DB for checking.

Why is this bad? Well let's say a site is classified as "Good", then it gets attacked and a virus gets uploaded the second after the test. Guess what? The site's no longer safe. But until the database for the program (*cough* siteadvisor *cough*) is updated in a timely fashion you'll go browsing around the site in a false sense of security. With a hope that your anti-virus program will block anything bad that might be on it. Computer viruses and malware are kind of like STD's. You could get tested at noon, but if the second the last test sample is taken you have sex with the nurse -- the results are potentially invalid for your current state.

Category 2 -- Parses the search result page for links, and then downloads all the info from the link pages to scan

Need I say more? If you're like me and have set your search preferences to return more than the top 10 results (come on, who really finds the exact thing they're looking for in the top 10 every time?), without even visiting a single site your IP address (and all the other "visit" related info) is passed to every search result! Doesn't seem like a problem? Imagine if you searched for "penalties for child molesters" and you notice that a link to a "child 'love'" site is listed. Would you click it (if you knew what it was that is)? Doubtful. But if you have a link scanner such as some anti-virus programs include you just did -- as far as their server logs are considered. So guess what happens if the site gets busted by the FBI? That's right; you get a knock on your door. And who do you think is right -- you that may have purged your computer history, or the server that has the date/time/ip/browser/etc of "your accessing their material" that's been confirmed by your ISP?

And yes, that's a worst-case scenario for the search things -- but here's an example that might hit closer to home.

Virtually every website uses tracking information to see how many people are accessing their website. They use this information for funding, website design changes, rates for advertisers, and countless other things that I can't think of offhand. Those examples are what my company uses the information for (we use Google Analytics as do many other sites). By these programs scanning a website, they're actually downloading the page (causing the site in question to get a "visitor"). If you click the link, they get a "second" visitor for the same information. If the search results have 4-5 results for the same place, they get 4-5 visitors even if you don't click the link. Every visitor access to a website uses your and the company's bandwidth! With some ISPs considering making you pay based on the amount of bandwidth you use (and the companies having to pay for every bit they use -- even if it's in large bulk quantities), these programs are potentially doubling your bandwidth use and the drastically multiplying the company's which can increase the cost.

Don't think that's a problem?

Let's say you search for a company's name. You get 10 results returned on your search page. You've just used bandwidth equivalent to viewing those 10 pages for both you and the company (let's say a total of 1MB). Now you decide to click one of the links. You've just visited 11 pages of that company. Now for you and the company that's not a big deal for the one user. Now let's say 1 million people search for the same thing…. Instead of 10 pages, that's 10 million. Instead of 1MB being downloaded, that's 1million MB (or just shy of 1 terabyte [TB]). Not to mention all the processor cycles required on the company's servers to display the page (php/jsp/asp/etc). And not a single true visit to the web server. Just think of all the bandwidth being wasted, not to mention company computer resources. If a company (even a small one) has to get more and better servers (costing thousands, potentially each month/year) to handle the traffic, don't for a second think they won't pass the cost on in their services. You'll even start to see a lot of index pages that have virtually nothing on them but "company X" followed by a search box or a few links to the main site (funny, isn't it, that this is already being done….). And guess what that does, invalidates the "safe" linkscan result since it's only scanning the index page and not any true content -- at least once companies start having to do that to save costs. What this causes (one page, minimal time, no clicking from that page) is referred to as "bounces" by some; high-bounce pages are frequently redesigned to either minimize bandwidth/processor usage on the server or redesigned for different content to prevent bounces (if possible).

And I know what some of you are thinking: But we'll know if the site is virus/malware free!

Guess what? If you click the link you're virus scanner will do something remarkable -- it'll scan the website for viruses and block them!

And that's the problem. These programs either show potentially out-dated information, or provide redundant scanning that wastes resources and time. Do yourself a favor -- disable these in your programs. Then write to the tech support of the companies and tell them that you don't want this huge "critical error!" looking thing in the system tray when you disable a unnecessary component. Because that's just what many of these do. Disable this "feature" and you get warnings shoved in your face. Then you're either forced to reactivate them, or not be notified (or notice) if your virus scanner or firewall (you know, the actual important things) have stopped running!

Gamma Rays

Just another way the world might be in a world of hurt. Only now it seems to be big in the news as well. Astronomers at the University of Sydney apparently found a binary star ready to go supernova, and it's pointed at us. To top it all off, it's only 8000 light years away! Well, on a galactic scale that's just down the street. Apparently the swirling appearance the star has proves we're looking right at the tail (poles?), more or less, so if a gamma ray were to be sent out, the earth could likely be hit. Scientists have apparently decided that a gamma ray burst about 6500 light years away could strip the earth's ozone layer (although I believe I've seen "strip the earth of its atmosphere" mentioned as well), thereby ending almost all life or all life.

Know what? Sure sounds like a "Jesus has returned" type of thing. Everyone on the planet would see it at the same moment and life would end as the people would be shoved into the heavens (or pummeled into the ground, vaporized, whatever). And now we've got proof it could happen! Although I doubt many religious people think Jesus and God are stars in a solar system. Or maybe it's just another little thing that could end all life that only now are people noticing and being told exist. The only real question is, if it happened, would we even notice? If death happened in a millisecond (total, brain dead, no chance for "near death" experiences so to speak), would anyone even realize it?

All I know is if you see a sign on the road telling you that interstate 666 is up ahead for all lanes -- it's probably over.