No….still the same. All these important issues have not yet been resolved. Right wing nut jobs are still on top. At least with the previous administration, they had the balls to get things done - however ill-conceived their notions were. They didn’t give a damn whether everyone was on board with their policies, they knew they were in the majority and could afford to say - screw the rest, lets get this done. Democrats now are trying to please everybody. Obama does not want to ruffle any feathers in his quest for improved health care. Firstly, they can never satisfy everybody. The conservative base is already riled up by morons like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Democrats are always looking for a compromise. Firstly, they drop the “Single Payer” option and bring in a half baked “Public Option”. Now they are open to leaving out the public option in favor of insurance companies. They have the majority in the House and the Senate, but are still unable to do anything about it. Add in to the mixture that 65% of the country is in favor of the public option.

Appears that the first major mistake made by the Democrats is the name of the Health Care bill. Something like “Public Option” doesn’t sound that great. How about naming it something like “The Jesus Health Care Plan” with the slogan “What would Jesus do?”. They need to learn how to name bills from the Republicans. Remember how they changed the “Estate Tax” to the “Death Tax”? The Estate Tax was levied on rich people who died and passed their estate onto others. On being renamed as the Death tax, the average Joe was made to think that since he would someday die, this tax would apply to him. This way, Republicans were able to successfully repeal the Estate Tax.

Now, we have the Republican “Death Panels”. It may be the most effective catch phrase of the health care debate so far. How is it that most of Hollywood with their brilliant writers support the Democrats and they still cannot come up with some sort of a good catch phrase? How about it Mr Sorkin? Can you help our President? I’m sure you could use some of the writings from The West Wing.

Mr President, you have an excellent Chief of Staff in Rahm Emmanuel. He knows how to get things done. However, he cannot do it without twisting a few arms and ruffling a few feathers along the way. We have great expectations from you. Please show us the change that we have hoped for.

An OLPC?

Remember the $100 computer that was to be given to children in the Third World Countries under the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Project? The cost went up to $200 and then they started a program through which you could buy a PC here and one would be donated to a child in Africa? It was an ambitious project, one that unfortunately, did not succeed.
Fast forward to today. India has announced the $10 computer. This 10″ X 5″ gadget called the Sakshat actually resembles a palmtop. It is a wireless e-learning device with 2GB RAM, Wifi and wired ethernet. Due to some initial hiccups, the cost is currently somewhere in between $20 and $30. India, however, is confident that they can bring down the cost over time.
India will use its initial production to hand these out to primary and secondary school students free of charge. All textbooks will be available free of charge for wireless download on these devices. Imagine the money they will save on textbooks!!!

Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3 ½ inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out!

Compress was something you did to garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You’d be in jail for awhile!

Log on was adding wood to a fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode!

Cut - you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider’s home
And a virus was the flu!

Worry not. Windows 7 Beta is here. Of course, it will only run through August, but something is better than nothing. You can always change the system clock to keep it running beyond that date. Yes, it has bugs. But, it’s still better than Vista. Come to think of it, my trusty old Windows 3.1 was better than Vista. Yes, you can run Windows 7 perfectly on your current hardware. You don’t need to buy a new Quad core machine for it.

Do not install the Beta version on your primary machine. It’s good, but any Beta version is always unstable and has bugs. That’s why it is a Beta version. I used a spare hard drive to test this OS. If you do not have a spare drive, please back up all your data and keep a copy of your current OS handy before installing this OS.

I tested Windows 7 on a Toshiba Satellite laptop with a 2 Ghz Pentium Dual Core processor and 2 GB RAM.

Nice uncluttered appearance

Installation:
Installation took about an hour and was up and running with the greatest of ease. It automatically found all drivers needed for the laptop and installed them without any prompting. I installed both Google chrome and Firefox immediately without any issues.

Desktop:
We have all experienced the memory hogging issues of Vista. Windows 7 booted up quick and did not seem to be memory intensive. It is stated to be launched for netbooks as well. Aesthetically, it seems similar to Vista, albeit with larger icons. Also, the taskbar is better organized. For example, running the mouse pointer over the IE icon shows full images on all open IE tabs. This OS is definitely much faster than Vista. It felt extremely responsive and had a good old Windows XP, but better, feel to it.

Homegroups: This brings about a new and much better way for home networking. All your computers, portable devices, mp3 players are shown in your network. This is certainly not new, but the difference is the way the process has been simplified and able to accomodate videos, pictures, albums and files. Printer sharing was also remarkably easy.

UAC (User Account Control):
The UAC which is the main irritant in Vista has been toned down in Windows 7. With all the software that I installed, I was disrupted by the UAC only once. The UAC can be configured to different levels as per your individual choice.

Issues:
After a few hours, it stopped recognizing the headphone socket and would play sounds through the internal speakers only. Changing settings and troubleshooting did not help.

Conclusion:
Hopefully, when the final version of this OS comes out, it will be comparable to the Beta with lesser bugs. Windows 7 is what Microsoft envisioned when they launched Vista. With bug fixes, Windows 7 should be a pretty formidable opponent to both Apple and Linux.

Did you know?

- To create an “Ambilight Experience” on your Plasma or LCD TV, all you have to do is put a small light fixture at the back of your TV. Plasmas and LCDs use a backlight in order to display bright images. This is what causes your electric bills to skyrocket. Phillips came out with its high end Ambilight range of TVs which had a secondary light at the back of the TV. A small flourescent light placed at the back of your TV has the same effect.
Switch on the external light, go into your Picture Settings, bring down the Backlight strength and watch your bills go down while achieving a better picture.

• Liberals ended slavery ( A liberal Republican! What happened to them?)
• Liberals gave women the right to vote
• Liberals ended segregation
• Liberals gave us clean water via the Clean Water Act
• Liberals are trying to give us cleaner air
• The Mt. Rushmore Presidents–Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt–were each considered radical liberals in their day.

Below are major American achievements that liberals fought for, and conservatives opposed:

•   Independence from Great Britain. Conservatives, who then were called Tories, were against the War of   Independence.
•    Separation of church and state. This great achievement was eventually embodied in the First Amendment of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.  It was opposed by conservatives who wanted to preserve the special status of established churches in Virginia (the Episcopal Church) and Massachusetts (the Congregational Church).
•    Freedom of the press. Conservatives distrusted a free press.  This provision, which was fought for by liberals, also made its way into the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
•    The Abolition of Slavery. At the outset of the Civil War, abolitionists were regarded by conservatives as dangerous extremists.  Most were persecuted and many were killed.  Some religious denominations split over the issue.  Today’s Southern Baptist Convention owes its origin to conservative Southern ministers who believed that the Bible approves of slavery.  The Republican Party–which for decades was run by liberals–was formed to prevent the spread of slavery into the western territories and states.
•    The Pure Food and Drug Act. A liberal extremist by the name of Upton Sinclair wrote a book called The Jungle which described slaughterhouse practices so vividly that a reluctant, conservative Congress was shamed into creating a federal agency with the responsibility to test all foods and drugs destined for human consumption.
•    Women’s Suffrage. Generations of women lectured, wrote, lobbied, marched, and practiced civil disobedience in order to get the right to vote.  They were called liberal extremists, and worse.  Only a few early liberals lived to see final victory in 1920.
•    Equal Rights For Women. The Equal Rights Amendment, which has been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923, was passed by Congress in 1972 but failed to be ratified by the necessary number of states.  Conservatives successfully kept it from becoming law. The dangerous wording of the Amendment is as follows: “Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex.”
•    Birth Control. In the 1870s conservatives in Congress passed the Comstock Law which made it illegal to disseminate information about birth control practices.  In 1938, in a case involving liberal extremist Margaret Sanger, Justice August Hand lifted the federal ban on birth control.
•    Child Labor. Liberal extremists called “muckrakers” exposed horrible abuses of hundreds of thousands of child laborers. In 1916 Woodrow Wilson pushed the Keating-Owen Act through Congress which banned articles made by children from interstate commerce.  The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.  Not until  the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 did any meaningful child labor legislation succeed.
•    The Repeal of Prohibition. The 18th Amendment, which prohibited the sale and use of alcoholic beverages, was opposed by liberals. It was  repealed in 1933.
•    Social Security. Before FDR introduced Social Security in 1934, most elderly Americans lived in poverty, yet it was fought by conservatives as a socialistic scheme.  Without it today, most elderly Americans would still live in poverty.
•    The Tennessee Valley Authority. This creation of the Roosevelt era brought cheap electric power to rural areas of the economically devastated Depression-era South.  Private firms had passed on doing it themselves because it was too big and not lucrative enough, but TVA was branded as Communistic.
•    The United Nations. The UN is a favorite whipping boy of conservatives.  Conservatives in another generation killed the League of Nations, which if properly implemented, might have prevented WWII.  Undoubtedly the UN is flawed and often ineffectual, but the world would be a more dangerous place if there were no forum for all the nations of earth, rich and poor, dangerous and peaceful, to talk, talk, talk before they fight, fight, fight.
•    Desegregation of the America’s armed forces. President Harry S. Truman, by executive order, ended Jim Crow practices in the U.S. military.  His civil rights initiatives split the Democratic Party.  Strom Thurmond, a staunch Southern conservative who later became a Republican Senator from South Carolina, ran for President as a Dixicrat, and carried four Southern states.
•    Civil Rights. Over the fierce opposition of conservatives, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed which made racial discrimination in public places such as restaurants, hotels, and theaters illegal, and guaranteed voting rights. President Lyndon Johnson, who had supported segregation while he was a Texas Senator, was branded as a traitor by conservatives.
•    The Environmental Movement. John Muir, Benjamin Harrison, and Teddy Roosevelt led in the creation of national parks and the preservation of wilderness areas over the opposition of conservative forces led by mining and timber companies and developers.

A good network referral?

And of course, for John and Bert, here’s a network referral :):)

On his couch as usual!!!

Is there anything you would like? Perhaps a nice piece of bacon?