My new (to me) computer is an Acer Aspire x1420G, rated at 3.2 GHz, it has 4 GB of memory in it, 750 GB disk space, and one of NVIDIA's video cards so it's not shabby. It also came with Acer speakers, which either I didn't notice in the specs or wasn't listed, but they're nice. Has front and back audio ports, and - as expected - if you plug headphones into the front panel that disables the speakers on the back. But the speakers themselves also have a jack for the headphone. But when you need to plug the microphone which is part of the headphones in at the same time, you can't do that, because there's not enough reach between the two, so you plug the headphones in with the microphone, disabling the speakers, or you just plug the microphone from the headset in, and continue to use the speakers. I did the former.

I mentioned what I was doing to somebody, and one of the things they suggested was, why don't I just build my own machine? Well, as the saying goes, "been there, done that, got the tee shirt." I built a computer myself, back around 2002. It was a turquoise-colored case tower computer (I think it was around a 100 Mhz Pentium), and I bought all the components for it, case with Power Supply, motherboard, processor, fan, memory, hard drive, retail copy of Microsoft Windows, and oh yes, a modem. (I think we were still using Windows 98 or Windows 98 Second Edition or something like that, and in those days you still used a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet.) Bought a book that explains exactly how to put the computer together. I did exactly that, and amazingly enough it worked without a single problem as soon as I started it. I think I used that machine for couple of years, until I bought another one, I think that one was actually a brand new machine, probably the first time I bought a new machine in my life. In fact, I think I still have it, it was an eMachines 333 MHz computer. It's stuck in my closet somewhere.

I decided to stop building my own computers, because of my disability it's a lot of hard work to do (my right hand has something like carpal tunnel syndrome), and because I can't walk, anything that I purchase from the store I have to lug home in my lap on my power wheelchair, balanced with my left hand. So what it means, is that I have to buy it in a lot of pieces over several visits to the store. Also, realize that most computers are using standardized parts, which the manufacturer can buy wholesale, (and when you or I purchase them we're buying them retail) unless you need bleeding-edge technology, such as a high-end gaming machine, a pre-built machine is usually cheaper than building it yourself. The big problem, of course, is Windows. At this point, it does not make sense for a machine I want to use to only have Linux; some things just aren't there. And OEM price of Windows 7 is around $40, the retail price is about $135, so it immediately boosts the price of a build-it-yourself computer by $100.

Let's see, right now I have four computers in front of me. I have a KVM switch which supports four computers using USB mouse and USB keyboard.

One machine I bought on eBay, it's a 32 bit dual-core processor, with a handle on the top, and a transparent Lexan case instead of a metal case. I made a mistake when I bought it, I thought it was a 64-bit dual core. I think it has 80 GB or so of disk and 512M of memory. But it is useful for doing tasks as a separate machine, so that I can run them as if they were run in the background. It also serves nicely as my telephone processor.

I have a Magic Jack plugged in the back of it, which allows me to have the equivalent of a desktop telephone on my desk, as opposed to just running with a cell phone. (Right now it's unplugged because I ran out of electrical sockets in my UPS, and in order to plug in the Acer, one of my computers had to be unplugged. Since anybody I need to hear from that calls me on that line knows my cell phone number, I can get away with turning it off for the time being; the only people who will really get dumped to voicemail are people who want to try to get money out of me, like people think I want to invest in various investment schemes which usually I'm not really interested in.)

I've mentioned this in other contexts, but it's still worth repeating, Magic Jack normally does what it promises, for under two bucks a month, you get about 98% of a hard line telephone. Occasionally, you get a bad connection, or the call isn't perfect, but most of the time, the service is flawless. Plus you have the added advantage, you can't get hit by collect calls, long distance charges (all calls to the U.S. and Canada are free), and you can't make overseas calls unless you deposit money for them, there's no way you can end up paying more than the once a year service charge. Since they announced they were raising the prices for the service, I decided to renew my license for the service for five years for $69.00, as opposed to normally paying $19.00 a year, because they're raising the price to $29.00 the year, and while it is worth it even at the extra 10 bucks a year, I decided paying for two years and getting three free with a pretty good deal.

The second computer I have in front of me is another machine I also bought refurbished from Micro Center, a Hewlett Packard Pavilion A 305 W rated at 2.69 Ghz, Windows XP Home, which has so many modifications from when I bought it over the years that it's ridiculous: memory boosted from 128 MB to 1 GB (the maximum it can handle), 160 GB hard drive, DVD writer, and at some point it even had a replacement graphics card. I've probably had it since 2002, I've had it for years. That was my prime machine until about 14 months ago.

Then I spent about $200 to buy machine Number 3 about 14 months ago, a Dell Optiplex 740, which is a single-core 64-bit machine I think is at or near the same speed, running 32-bit Windows XP Professional. Over time, I boosted it from 1GB memory and 80GB disk, to 3GB memory, and 2 TB of disk. (I lucked out on that; about 6 months after I bought the drive for less than $90 something happened in the Far East, Singapore or someplace near there, damaging some major suppliers and as a result, hard drive prices have gone up at least double.)

Then we come to my newest addition to my collection, the machine I am now using to write this article, the Acer.

And it comes with something amazing, so much so I keep forgetting to use it. Because I didn't have the functionality before and am used to doing manually what this computer provides in a semi-automatic function. That activity is typing. My new computer includes a voice recognition software package. What's hard is sitting here, thinking out what am I going to say, instead of just typing, again, because I can only type about 1/3 as fast as I can speak (a quite reasonable 50 words a minute) so, as it turns out, I can actually speak (a lot) faster than I can think what I wanted to say. When I have to type in words manually, it usually means that I am basically waiting on my fingers to finish typing so I've a lot of time to think about what I want to say, whereas with voice recognition I can say it about as fast as I can think it, and the computer then types what I just said.

You know, now being able to "type" using voice recognition on the computer allows me to say a lot of things I would not otherwise bother to say, because normally I don't want to spend a lot of time typing in things if they're not that significant, but just speaking it out makes it fairly easy to have done it already. Then once it is entered,I can go back and edit it, and I realize just how much easier it is to write this way, than the way I have been writing in the past. I mean, I used to think about how people originally wrote using quill pens, pencils, ballpoint pens, manual typewriters, electric typewriters, then word processors and now computers. When I think about how much easier it is to type in things on a keyboard, as opposed to sitting down and writing things by hand using a pen, I have to wonder how they accomplished so much with such limited tools. Now I see the difference in just saying what I want to say, and having to type it in.

I think about the fact that I often think I have so many things to say but now that I don't even have to type it in, I sit here and I can't think of anything to say. So at this point sometimes it seems like I'm just sitting here and mouthing off talking about nothing at all.

I suppose, if it comes down to it, when I really have something to say, it will be fairly easy to just sit here and say something, otherwise it's just basically drivel. The only difference being that this is so easy to type that it's more or less unimportant drivel, as opposed to the more important drivel that I have to make the effort to actually type by hand, when it drools out of me from time to time.

One thing I like about this voice recognition system, is that I don't even have to turn off the TV in the background. It doesn't hear it, and it only responds to my voice, not to the voices on the TV. This kind of reminds me of the closed-captioning systems on TV, where most of the time it does pretty good, but occasionally it misses a few things. And as much as it does, for as little as it costs, it is kind of amazing. I mean, the whole computer - a nice desktop with a quad-core processor - only cost less than $350 including tax, refurbished, and separate software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, sells at retail for less than $90.00 including a headset. It kind of surprises me, because this is not an ad on package, it's included with Windows 7.

Right now I'm using a cheap $6.00 headset microphone, and it works fairly well. Occasionally the voice recognition software will misunderstand me, but it's fairly good on being able to make corrections. I have found it kind of helps to use short phrases and let it catch up, as opposed to using very long phrases where it might lose some words. For example, in the previous sentence, the program misunderstood the phrase "where it" and thought I said "what."

Even the instructions for the program recommends you use short sentences and speak similar to a newscaster, trying carefully to clearly enunciate your words. Of course it has the usual problems with homonyms, in the previous sentence where I said "to clearly enunciate" it guessed the wrong use of the word "to"—it did so in this sentence as well; it used the word "two" instead in both cases.

But I have learned a few things in the three days I've had the new computer. The voice recognition software was actually just serendipitous because I didn't even know that it was included with the computer. The software is actually fairly good, in this entire page, when I originally wrote it, I've had to Type in less than 10 manual corrections, more or less because it's faster than speaking them. I put a lot more material in it from when I first started, and made a lot more corrections. But it's still pretty good, and actually, it tends to make less errors than OCR software.

The nice thing about it is, when I want to stop saying something, I just literally say that. All I have to do is say the words "stop listening" and it will go into sleep mode, and ignore anything it hears on the microphone until I say the words "start listening," and it will then start listening for commands and text. Basically if you say things in a stream of words, it will then interpret it as text, and it types it in.

If you say individual words by themselves, and they represent commands to the program, it is usually smart enough that it will the interpret them as commands, and execute whatever function they provide. For example, if I say " all you have to do is say the words close window" that it will enter it as text as it just did in the previous phrase, whereas if I just say "close window" then it will actually attempt to close the window for whatever program is active. So when you say commands in a string of text it does not execute them, lessening the possibility of accidentally closing the window of whatever program you are using, because you said "close window" in a sentence.

I can say save save save save all day long, and it will ignore me - inserting the words into the current document as text - and it won't save the document at all, unless I say the word "save" alone by itself, then it would issue the save command, and the word "save" will not be put into the document.

For making corrections is fairly easy to do, although it is a bit tedious. If you have a word that is wrong, you just say the word "correct" followed by the word (or words) in error. The box pops up with suggestions on what it thinks you meant instead of what it actually put in. It will show nine different choices, and if what you meant is there, you just say the number, it will highlight it, and you say the word OK and it will replace what was there with the corrected text. If it isn't there, you can try pronouncing what you did mean, and it will try creating that text instead. Often this will work, sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't work, then it offers you the opportunity is spell what you meant instead. So it's not too bad, except, in some cases it's probably easier just to make the change by typing in manually. But when you're actually writing the text to begin with by speaking it, this is probably a reasonable solution.

There are some "yeast in beer" issues I have with the program, minor things I wish it did better, but aren't really that critical. For example, I'm not really sure how to get it to put double quotes around something, without it adding extra spaces. On the other hand, when I want to put an em dash "—" in a document, in many cases I can't get a space before and after, it will often put an em dash immediately after the word I want, rather than put in a space between the word, the symbol, and the next word.

But let me try something here: I'm going to say a statement press double quote and some words with that in the middle. But if I say I'm going to say a statement" and stop before the word "press," then say that by itself, then continue, then it seems to work. Mostly the requirement is I have to stop, say the punctuation, and then continue with the next words. I also have to remember to say the word "comma" as part of what I am saying or will not insert the symbol.

The phrase I did not know was the word "literal" which can be used to type in a symbol that is normally a command. Of course this means the word "literal" has to be doubled to actually use the word literal in a sentence. I actually had to say the previous sentence as "Of course this means the word has to be doubled to actually use the word literal literal in a sentence." But it means now if I actually want the word comma in a sentence I just say the phrase "literal comma" and the punctuation is not put into the text, the actual word is. Of course that can cause some somewhat humorous strained expressions, because to get that phrase "literal comma" I have to say the phrase "literal literal literal comma." Merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a dream.

Oh wait, I just remembered something, I can train it to recognize certain phrases and spell them a certain way and I'd forgotten this. I've just added a new word to the speech dictionary and I'm going to try to see if it works. I've defined the phrase open double quote as a single item to represent that symbol and am going to see if it works. I want to " try" to see if it works, and it does seem to work, except it's still inserting a space after the double quote. There is a command of "no space" which causes it not to insert a space before the next word, and it seems to work so I'm going to try it now. I want to "try" to see if it works. Huh, it actually works.
I can guess that this sort of thing we're really because when you are doing just ruins of consciousness statements or you are in fact reading what you want to say such as the lines from The Tempest:

Our rebels now are ended;
These our actors as I have told you
Were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it shall inherit, shall dissolve;
And, like this in substantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind.

No, it doesn't get it that great the first time, it's close, probably in the 90% to 95% range. It's not bad, actually. Sometimes you do have to edit the text manually to fix errors. When it does this, it reminds me of Teri Garr—and unbelievably it actually spelled her name right—in the original 1960s Star Trek, who was presented with an electric typewriter by extraterrestrial agent Gary Seven, that preceded to type everything she said as she said it, and when she kept telling it to "stop it", "stop it!" with further exasperation as it kept on printing everything she said until she banged on it with her fists in frustration to try to get it to stop typing what she said. (I am kind of surprised that the spelling checker in this program had the phrase "extraterrestrial agent" in it and spelled it right.)

There was one thing that bothered me and I realize that the program that does the voice recognition can't do, is to activate the formatting features in a particular word processing program which I am using when I say these words, that is I can't say italic some words end italic, and get it to do exactly that, because the voice recognition software has no way to know what command by using the mouse is needed for the keyboard to activate the italic function, and how to deactivate it. But thinking about what is required to enable it to do the things that it does is to realize that it does a helluva lot of work just to get this far. I'm kind of amused by the fact, that when I said "a hell of a lot of work," it used the short form "helluva lot of work."

Those who disagree with the situation need to take action, and I have done so. As I posted from the article two years ago in the politics section, "The Last Words of Lasantha Wickrematunge", that man repeated from Martin Niemuller, from his famous poem, "First they came for the Jews / and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew," that even if it doesn't directly have an effect upon us, we need to oppose this sort of thing.

I made a comment on Wikipedia about supporting their putting up a blackout page in response.

The (clearly unnecessary) increase (from life +50 years to life+70 years or from 75 years to 95 years for pseudononymous works and works for hire) in copyright terms was forced (by the copyright industries, especially Disney, they got the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act because they were going to see Mickey Mouse go into the Public Domain around 1998 when Steamboat Willie was 75 years old) for the purposes of "harmonizing" copyright terms among countries in order to force those with shorter terms to lengthen them (thus giving the copyright owners a huge benfit and gives nothing to the public; adding 20 years to the end of a copyright term doesn't give us new works and the difference is not enough that if it wasn't there that it would discourage new developments); this sort of garbage, if it starts here, will be forced on other countries by the copyright industries claiming (a completely false premise, of course, just like the alleged "need" to "harmonize" copyright terms, but always upward) that this sort of draconian legislation is necessary in all countries. It isn't and we have to oppose this. Paul Robinson, 19:27, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

So I'll start.

I got up on Tuesday morning, a clear and sunny day like the kind you think of as the sort of wonderful weather you'd expect for summer or between summer and fall as it's not cold or hot, just nice and pleasant. I'm reminded of a line from a song by Sophie B. Hawkins: "It felt like springtime, on that February morning..."

While I was getting ready for work they reported a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. I didn't think much of it, as I point out later in this article, this sort of thing happens. I had to go to work, if I even thought about the event I probably thought about how we'd hear more details later. Uh, that comment I just posted is so eerily prescient, isn't it?

I stopped in a 7-11 on the way to work to get a couple of chili cheese dogs and a soda to eat for breakfast; the place was a block from my office. I happened to mention casually to the clerk that a plane had crashed into a building in New York, no big deal, these sort of things happen, pilot error or other thing, tragedies like this do happen. I might have been thinking of a prior plane crash into the Empire State Building.

I get to my office and I discover that a second plane had crashed into the other tower of the World Trade Center. All of us in the office watched on TV as the two buildings collapsed into rubble, and for me it was a body blow. I was numb. Then I discover that the Pentagon, which is located only 4 miles from my house, in my home town in Arlington, had also been struck.

The president of the company sent a message saying anyone who wanted to could go home. He was right and the office closed down, nobody was in any condition to work that day. I discovered that to be true in my own case as well.

As it turned out the system administrator had sent out a system-wide message asking everyone what the machine name of their computer was. I mistakenly did "reply all" instead of reply. My message read like this:

My computer's name is Licorice.
----
"If we find out what country did this, I say, bomb the sons-a-bitches back into the stone age. Turn them into crater glass and nuclear waste." - Paul Robinson, September 11, 2001.

My boss said he understood but I would have to change the tag line on my messages.

I drove home. So did everyone else; the roads were jammed and traffic was very slow, but I don't think anyone really cared, we just moved along and eventually, perhaps an hour or two longer than it took normally, we all got home. I remember how all the radio stations that normally were music had basically switched to talk radio that day, they were taking calls from the public and letting people release their grief.

Cell phone service was basically hit or miss over about the next month or so, I guess people kept jamming the lines. I had just gotten a new phone about three weeks before the incident, so I didn't know if the bad service was the result of a special incident causing excessive use or was the result of too many people trying to use an oversold service (I had it with Sprint and you were only charged for daytime minutes; minutes after 7Pm and before 5AM or 7AM and on weekends were free. Typically calls went through okay during the time when you had to use your charged minutes but during free minutes time it was difficult to get a call through.) I've switched cell phone providers three times since then but I still have the same cell phone number I did when I got the phone in August, 2001.

I got through it, like everyone did. I went to work the next day, and the next, and the rest of the month, and so on and so forth, but to this day I have no recollection of the rest of September, 2011; it's not even a blur, it's like it ceased to exist. I managed, but I think I was probably just going through the motions.

Oh, as for the comment tag line on my e-mail, how do I feel about it?

"If we find out what country did this, I say, bomb the sons-a-bitches back into the stone age. Turn them into crater glass and nuclear waste." - Paul Robinson, September 11, 2001.
"I proudly stand by that statement to this day." - Paul Robinson, September 11, 2011.

Recommendation No. 2011-028

Pursuant to the provisions of Article 62(b) of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Compact I hereby file a request with the Board of Directors for a hearing with respect to the service rendered with the facilities of the Authority. The remainder of this letter explains the matters and things on which the request relies, and deals with the Authority's potential actions to intentionally disable cell phone service in Metrorail stations and the need for an explicit, published policy indicating when such an action would be permitted, and a recommendation to add preparations in the event cell service is not available in an emergency and to prepare for it in emergency drills.

I only found out this morning that on Thursday, August 11, San Francisco's Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system decided to disable cell phone service in certain stations for several hours, not because of an emergency condition or something that was happening at the time, but because some people had posted an announcement on a web page stating that they were intending to conduct a protest in rail stations over the alleged killing of a passenger by BART Transit Police. I suspect one of the issues being that they might have stated they intended to use cell phones while in the BART system to coordinate protests.

BART claimed the action was necessary to protect the public from some unspecified danger and to prevent what it claimed was an "illegal" protest. While protecting the public from the possibility of injury is an important goal, an even more important point needs to be made: no actual protest took place; BART essentially chose to cut off service because there might have been a problem.

Not only that, but apparently BART decided that it was merely for courtesy reasons that it chose to inform the cell carriers that their service was being intentionally disrupted, and it was under no obligation to tell them anything; apparently the carriers were left in the dark over this matter.

A number of questions have been raised over these issues. While there is no constitutional right to have cell phone service in a subway system, once a government agency decides to allow service to operate, there are First Amendment issues regarding the use of the service. The comparison here is that if someone in my home decides to use his cell phone to say unflattering remarks about me, I have the right to choose to require he stop doing so or leave, because the 1st Amendment does not apply to private individuals or non-government entities. However, as a government agency, a transit authority is subject to the First Amendment and does not have this luxury, e.g. if a Transit Police officer hears someone on their phone in a normal voice talking about how bad the service is and urging people get together to have the Authority disbanded and replaced by something else, they cannot stop this person from doing so or order them to leave.

Now, given that this is the Nation's capital and there are even more serious threats that might occur here than would occur just about anywhere else in the country, there are a number of conditions which might require in some cases that WMATA might, at some point, need to intentionally disable cell phone service in one or more stations or areas such as tunnels because of an emergency or unusual circumstance, there should be a standard policy clearly stating under what conditions it would undertake such actions and for the Authority to make this policy a matter of record.

I have made a cursory search of WMATA's web site and have found many documents regarding its attempts to increase reach of cell service in the stations and trains, and in this, the Authority is to be commended. But there is not one document discussing under what circumstances the Authority might intentionally disable cell service. Perhaps the subject never came up or it wasn't thought it ever would be necessary.

With the incident on BART's system occurring it is clear that the subject has now come up and this issue may very well become necessary.

A decision that it is necessary to do so might occur at some point, and the making of a decision whether it is appropriate to do so is an extremely important matter, and not something that should be made on an ad-hoc basis.

Therefore, the matter and things upon which this request relies is the recommendation that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority establish a policy under what circumstances the authority would intentionally disable cell phone service (under what emergency conditions, for non-emergency scheduled maintenance and upgrades, etc.), what areas would be subject to disruption, which person(s) would be authorized to make a decision to do so, the persons and entities to be notified when and if such an action were to take place, how much advance notice - including posting notice in stations - is to be made for non-emergency conditions (like equipment replacement), how soon after an emergency occurs are the appropriate parties to be notified, such other conditions and specifications as the authority decides are necessary to be included in this policy, and that this policy be made public as well as published on the Authority's website.

I would also like to recommend the reverse issue should also be considered and the potential be included as far as when the Authority conducts emergency training, or emergency drills, that it make efforts from the opposite site, by doing disabling of cell phone service as if an attacker had decided to operate cell phone jamming equipment and how this would affect the Authority and other emergency personnel to be able to coordinate if they were unable to use cell phones, and whether standby equipment such as temporary cell phone boosters ("microcells") should be available in emergencies and what other emergency preparations be made in the event either cell phone service must be intentionally disabled or where for some reason cell phone service becomes unavailable by accident (as happened immediately after this week's earthquake) or because of attacks by third parties.

Thank you for your time in reading this letter and I hope you will consider my recommendations.

Sincerely Yours,
Paul Robinson
"A computer programmer and Notary Public in and for
the Commonwealth of Virginia, at large, and the
State of Maryland in and for Prince George's County."

CC: WMATA General Manager
Metro Transit Police
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Then a really big one hit as the whole house moved from side to side.

Being a 15-year resident of California I recognized it immediately as an earthquake, which basically almost never happens here in Maryland, this is the first one I've noticed and only the second quake that was strong enough to feel in the entire 23 years I've been here (I was asleep during the previous one that happened here, about a year or so ago). Reportedly the last quake this strong to hit the area was back in 1897.

My cell phone won't work, I can't get a call through; it's conceivable cell towers were damaged.

Since it was strong enough for me to feel it I estimated it was probably 5-6 on the Richter scale. I saw a report on the news saying an earthquake of 5.8 occurred about 100 miles away in Virginia. News reports it was 5.9 and located 3 miles underground below Mineral, Virginia, and was felt as far south as Chapel Hill, NC. Cell networks are jammed.

I believe there was no damage here. Nothing I noticed fell down or broke.

Now, the incident reminds me of the worst earthquake in the United States because nobody expected it as it wasn't in a typical earthquake area. No, it wasn't in California or anywhere out west. It was about 150 years ago, in New Madrid, Missouri. It was so strong it caused the Missouri river to run backward.

"Load shedding" is a term I borrowed from the electrical industry. When too many customers want power and they can't keep up with the demand, your typical public utility will first reduce voltage, then it will shut down customers who have agreed to have their electricity curtailed such as residential customers who will allow their air conditioning shut off for 15-30 minute stretches, then industrial customers who have interruptable service. Once you run out of the low hanging fruit, then you have no choice but to cut neighborhoods and areas for a while. This is "load shedding" and its not pretty.

If you are working and then become unemployed, if you're stupid you keep paying everything the same until you run out of money and then you really have painful choices to make about what you can pay. If you're smart, you decide as soon as your financial status changes what bills you have to pay, and what bills that you do not want to lose the product or service of that vendor. And you'd call your creditors - especially the ones you're not going to pay - and let them know. Either case, where you are forced to cut drastically because you stupidly pretended you weren't out of money, or you cut carefully because you start when you're aware you have reduced funds, is a form of load shedding. The "load" in this case is your debt load or the amount of expenditures you make.

Well, in the case of the United States Government, if the debt ceiling isn't raised by midnight tonight, load shedding has to start immediately because we waited too long. The debt ceiling was recognized as needing to be raised as far back as January but it was pushed off. This means the Department of the Treasury decides which 2/3 of the bills it can pay; the rest get delayed payment.

Treasury has been using various accounting tricks to avoid failing to pay things; this worked for a couple of months but if the debt ceiling fails to get raised, the real choices have to be made, and they won't be pretty.

I used to think Congress wasn't stupid enough to let the government run out of debt it could raise. I might be wrong. Some say that the Republicans won't let it happen because it gives Obama total authority to decide what bills get paid and which ones don't, and they don't want to give him that much power.

What has been most amusing in this whole debacle is that the Republicans - specifically Tea Party members - who've been going around saying we didn't need to raise the debt ceiling, and it wasn't going to be that bad if the government defaulted on paying its obligations, while the Democrats were the ones pointing out this was irresponsible. It's usually the Republicans who talk about fiscal responsibility and the Democrats who don't. This whole incident has turned everything around and changed how things normally are.

So, as a result of the minor connection these incidents are sometimes being referred to as 'Craigslist Killings' or the alleged perpetrator as the 'Craigslist Killer'. Now, the question to be asked, is this just the usual and customary news media hyping of bad incidents because, of course, bad news sells more newspapers and gets higher ratings on television, which, of course, translates into higher advertising prices, or is it because of an attempt to 'smear' Craigslist which is, of course, a serious 'dangerous competitor' to all media, not just newspaper classified ads?

Craigslist provides free classified ads for people to buy and sell things and to look for friends and romantic partners. They have low overhead and basically make their money from accepting commercial help wanted ads in some markets. This, of course, is extremely dangerous to any other place that depends on commercial advertising.

Craigslist gets no public funding and operates on the same terms as any other business, and so this sort of 'shooting the messenger' sounds a lot like an attempt to tar them for the actions of third parties.

If we went back, say, ten years ago when the only way in general to find other people such as buyers or sellers was through paid advertisements, and someone robbed or killed someone who responded to an ad, or robbed or killed the advertiser, would the media be blaming the newspaper? Do we hear of cases of the Chicago Tribune Killer? The Washington Post Killer? The Las Vegas Sun Killer?

Some newspapers - the Washington Times being one - are even going in the direction of allowing tiny advertisers to run free ads. Selling items under $200 in small ads are free; it's probably a loss-leader to get people to subscribe or to get people to buy the paper. The Washington Times has had real problems getting people to take it seriously for a number of reasons including that it's owned by the Unification Church ("The Moonies") and is a weak competitor to the much larger Washington Post. It's also losing about $50 million a year.

But at least they're trying to think of new ideas. Newspapers have a flawed system of delivering content because they're not realizing the way they need to deliver content has changed, and they themselves need to change. Most newspapers belong to the Associated Press and they are doing the stupidest thing. They give AP their content (that they spent money to create) for free but pay for an AP wire. Ayn Rand points the stupidity out - over 50 years ago - in her book "Atlas Shrugged" when Dagny Taggart notes how Taggart Transcontinental got the Railroad Unification Plan set up so that each railroad is responsible for its own costs but gives competitors use of its track for free. (The only thing different that - at least for now - that newspapers are not doing is pooling their income and splitting it somehow. Or at least, except in the case of some multi-newspaper cities where they've done something like this where they get government permission to run a 'joint operating agreement' to try and eliminate 'duplicate' functions by running two newspapers with some shared services.)

Do we doubt that there have been cases where someone was robbed or killed as a result of running a newspaper ad or responding to one? It's part of the problem of inviting someone you don't know into your home, (or going to the home of someone you don't know) they are usually a nice person or honorable, but in rare instances they're a sociopath. But I don't remember anyone connecting the newspaper to the perpetrator of these crimes. But they do in the case of Craigslist.

The big difference and the reason Craigslist is going to be very popular is that you can run an ad on Craigslist for free. A newspaper ad is going to cost anywhere from $10 to $100 or more for a day to a week depending on how it's priced and how big your ad is. A Craigslist ad can basically be a long as you want, include pictures and if you can figure a way to rephrase the content so as not to be duplicate, you can rerun it as often as you want and run it in as many cities or regions as you want.

So I question whether this is basically an attack on what is essentially a function of capitalism, in which a low-cost competitor (Craigslist) comes along with a new idea that destroys an entrenched market (newspapers and to some extent other paid advertising-based media) or just the result of typical hype which also is inherent in news media in a capitalist market that has, to some extent, be noisy in order to get attention in order to be able to sell advertising.

Why is this item so important? Because this was the tenth time that Sanchez had tried to kill himself. I think it took Thomas Edison thousands of tries to find out that he needed to use tungsten as the fillament in incandescent light bulbs. He said that he hadn't failed, he simply knew of 6,000 ways not to build a light bulb.

Sanchez had jumped to his death using prosthetic legs, which he got from injuries from previous unsuccessful suicide attempts.

Read more: http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_18214429#ixzz1OturF6bd