Too many ideas to handle.

It's those inside out people again.
Then there's the pointers to pointers for accessing information.  It's a conceptual thing.
If you could zoom out from time like you can zoom out in space what would it look like?
They are building the railways and the gas chambers in cyberspace.
As with Damien Hirst's "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living" it is similarly true that "Arguing from within a double bind is self destructive".
And there is the possibility of being somewhere in time where you don't exist in space.
There is the issue of the DWP only paying your subsistence (they call it a benefit) if you agree to give them authority to withdraw funds from your account.
Try being cooperative in a bartering culture.
There are level crossings and railway gates which symbolise human brainlessness.

I am seriously disturbed by the culture in Britain.  It is not unique to Britain and in part it can be seen throughout human history and across the globe.  But it is not always there and it can appear in different dilutions in different times and places.  I am talking about the cruel oppressive culture.  People talk about slavery, wage slaves, abuse, oppression, power, control, subservience as if these things are aspects like leaves and bark on a tree.  You could think of 'green' and 'tall' as other kinds of 'aspects'.  There is also the case of illness being physical or psychological.  What is interesting is that these differentiations of qualities or aspects can too easily lead to thinking of them as separate entities.  But they are aspects, inherent in the whole.  Like time and space they do not exist in any way separately.  It took Albert Einstein to make some coherent sense of what otherwise looks like a piece of magic.  There is no such thing as time if there is no 'space'.  And what is space if there is no 'time' for it to 'be'.  Space-time is a more coherent perception of the reality in which we live.

The issue here is that human behaviour, and particularly I am talking about the rampant control culture that is escalating in Britain, is multifaceted and there has to be some holistic comprehension of the state of affairs for there to be any reasonable chance of getting out of this alive.  I am talking dramatically and literally on many levels including personally (or for any individual person) and collectively (for Britain, every other country and culture and humanity and even life itself).  Just as a thought for those sceptics who argue that pursuing research in science just for the sake of it is fruitless let me draw your attention to the (getting well worn) fact that satellite navigation doesn't work without General Relativity.  There is a lovely small article on Physics Central entitled "Einstein's Relativity and Everyday Life" about this issue which is worth a read if you like that kind of thing.

Cultures have collapsed before and there are many theories which say something about the whys and wherefores of their demise but clearly there is no comprehensive satisfactory understanding otherwise we would not be doing it so consistently over and over again.  But I do have some theories which also have something to say about it.  It is the Inside-Outness that occurs.  In some sense it starts with Inside-Out people.  Inside-Out people as I describe them are people who build a map of the world in their head and then think the map is the real world.  We all build a map of sorts in our heads.  What happens is stuff happens and it affects us.  The effects cascades through our physical being causing changes in the balance of all our molecules ranging from muscles and hormones to blood and neurological connections.

The bit I am concerned with is the brain.  The behaviour of the brain, and therefore its actual physical form, changes.  Psychiatrists refer to neural pathways which are sets of connections that allow electrical impulses to flow through a particular route in the brain.  This arrangement of the brain reflects the experience of the person in the world.  Analogously we build a map.  Obviously the world we think we see is our map and so long as our interactions with the real world 'work' everything is fine.  When something doesn't work as expected this is the point at which we can 'learn' something new.  We can adjust our map based on our experience to more accurately fit the real world.  But Inside-Out people do it the other way round.  I am talking, at this point, mostly about their response to other people although it is a general theory.

It seems that as people get older they become less versatile.  It varies enormously in different people but we are at our most sensitive to learning when we are younger.  If people experience trauma which they cannot handle it affects their versatility and ability to learn.  Also if people are oppressed they are conditioned to repress certain emotional responses thereby limiting their ability to learn along that pathway.  Oppression is a form of applied trauma.  First the trauma is set up and then it is constantly threatened to control the individual.  Often parents are unaware that their disapproval of behaviour is a threat to not support the child and, of course, the child is dependent upon the parent for its survival.  Unbeknownst to most parents they are quite capable (even if inadvertently) of threatening the child's life.  But the child is unlikely to react as if it has been threatened it just learns how to behave in order to survive.  But that behaviour is likely to be compulsive and transparent to the child as they grow into adulthood.  The reason I mention all of this is because it seems the 'best fit' cause for the prevalence of Inside-Outness.

So, for Inside-Out people, if something doesn't work it is the world that is wrong not their map.  A simple example is, say, a Doctor sticking a needle into a child's arm.  When the child says "Ow" an Inside-Out Doctor's response is "It doesn't hurt".  Another classic "This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you."  Inside-Outness appears very judgemental because it doesn't understand why the other person may be behaving the way they are.  The Freudian Oedipus complex is a bit Inside-Outish too because the focus of attention is on what is in the way of the goal as opposed to the goal.  In other words aspects of the real world need destroying in order make the external world fit the internal map.  They are trying to 'fix' the wrong thing.  Inside-Outness appears to be caused in part by an inability to deal with the real world.  It is caused when the individual feels threatened.  Due to the consequences of the socio-economic climate a large proportion of people in Britain feel threatened.  They are acting more and more Inside-Out.  The people at the top are coming up with totally Inside-Out solutions like taking money from the poor to protect the rich.

Then there is the theory of the benign oppressor and the closely related Stockholm syndrome.  The reason I mention these here alongside Inside-Outness is because they are all aspects of the rather perverse way that culturally we perceive the world.  These traits seem to cause certain aberrant thinking and actions.  Some years ago the government (of the UK) changed a small piece of legislation regarding the Children Services (a part of the Social Services - it is horribly complicated and they don't even quite understand who they are or even what they are called - but then obfuscation is desirable since they steal and abuse children - that is a matter of record and much as they apologise and even retire somebody when they get caught they still do it - and yes I have got a thing about them but not for here - check out the Children Services Abuse section if it interests you).  The law had been that the Children Services could not interview a child alone without the parent's permission.  They changed the law such that they had the power to take a child away from the parents against their wishes and interview the child.  Here is the problem: If the parents are abusive the child needs the opportunity to talk freely.  To talk freely requires that the interviewers are benign.  If the Children Services are in any way prejudiced or have some agenda of their own and the parents are benign and have the child's interests at heart then the danger becomes clear that the malevolent party now has the legal right to remove the child from the benign parents.  There are solutions to this but that is for another discussion.  The important issue is that the new law is clearly unsatisfactory and prone to, even encourages, abuse.  The reason it appears to be a good idea to the legislators is because they believe themselves to be above reproach and view the population as having bad elements that need weeding out.

If people fear the ruler they need to see the world through the oppressors eyes.  They take on the world view of the oppressor and have to interpret their experience through that paradigm in order to guarantee their safety.  They become Inside-Out by proxy.  (This neatly includes the reference to pointers to pointers at the beginning of this post.)

And then there is the issue of the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions - used to be the Department for Health and Social Security (DHSS) - funny that - and nobody notices the profound renaming of this department from our "Oh so benign" government 'oppressors'.) only paying people's subsistence (they call it a "benefit") if they agree to give them authority to withdraw funds from your account.  It was clear, as with the Children Services example above, that there is a fundamental philosophical flaw in this new rule.  Of course if you start with the premise that the authority is benign and the population contains bad eggs then it makes sense.  When unscrupulous individuals defraud the system the authority simply removes the "stolen" funds back from the person's bank account.  And, of course, with the horrible views of the likes of the Baroness Neville Jones, that the government will never do anything bad - it might make the occasional mistake, but not intentionally - there is no problem.  Except there is a problem.  It is clear that the government must respect the rights of the individual and if the transaction is fraudulent they must go through the proper channels, as any individual or business would have to, to get the law to redress the fraud.  That is how it works but the government have ridden rough shod over the rule of law.  This seems to be done largely on the basis of the ignorance of the population.  There is a most horrible assumption by the people of this country that the "authority" has the right to invent the law BECAUSE it is the government.  That constraint on the people claiming their insurance - their social insurance - the tax taken by the government for that purpose - is wrong, disgusting and worst of all it is very frightening.

One might worry that they will start stealing people's money.  But as the Right f'ing Baroness would say "Of course they wouldn't do that."  Well watch this - They have now introduced a new layer of complexity whereby the disability allowance can be stopped.  The claimant can appeal and this can be a lengthy process.  Enquiries were made about this and the official line was that you can claim Job Seekers Allowance in the interim.  Then when your appeal is successful they can claim your JSA was fraudulent because you were clearly NOT fit for work.  You might want to appeal against this but they will have the money out of your account anyway.  I could get very angry about this but I will leave it as an observation of the criminality of their thinking let alone their actions.  They are culling the population and it is working!

So now that we have WikiLeaks' Julian Assange trapped illegitimately in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because of the Americans belligerent and ruthless illegal pursuit of him ... and we have Edward Snowden trapped in the transit zone of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport because of the American's belligerent and ruthless illegal pursuit of him ... and we have Barrett Brown, a journalist, imprisoned in the USA without bail, facing over 100 years of potential jail time, much of it for posting an http link to a public forum ... and we have Aaron Swartz, the founder of Demand Progress which launched the campaign against the Internet censorship bills (SOPA/PIPA), who was found mysteriously dead in January 2013 after facing 50 years of imprisonment and $1 million in fines ... and the list goes on.

We have the corrupt cookie laws which make the users responsible for the abuse of data instead of holding the owners of the web sites responsible for their own behaviour.  We have the NSA/GCHQ/PRISM scandal which is just the tip of the iceberg.  Given the governments' propensity for breaking the law and demanding information from mega internet moguls like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft and more it wouldn't even be necessary for them to be trawling the internet for their own illegitimate data but they are doing.  They are doing so with the same back to front logic as the DWP and the Children Services insofar as they say they are only interested in tracking terrorists.  But does no one see that if they have all the data and they happen to see you as a thorn in their side they have the wherewithal to search the data for anything they could construe as illegal?  And none of us are perfect.

But, of course, as per usual, there is something worse.  I have often wondered how the Germans actually built the industrial scale extermination machine of the Holocaust.  Didn't anybody realise what was going on?  Were they all stupid?  Were they burying their heads in the sand?  Didn't they see the dedicated railways being built?  Didn't they wonder what the giant ovens were for?  Well I happen to think that it would be nice if more people took personal responsibility for their lives (gratuitous remark coming up - instead of abdicating responsibility to some fictional delusion of a benign oppressor called God) and "Just said NO" to the authoritarian bigots but there is another factor contributing to their 'ignorance'.  Retrospectively we have the whole picture (NO - correction - the bigger picture) but at the time they probably didn't envisage what was to come.  Some did - they knew what they were doing - but most people were suffering the Stockholm syndrome of believing that escaping the Third Reich's terrors was equal to the Third Reich being 'good' to them and so they kind of trusted them.  After all you don't expect the people you talk to or see in suits in responsible positions, the people psychologically who fit into your 'parent', 'guardian' or 'teacher' paradigm to be inhuman.  Please go back and take a good look at the current political leaders - they are more like the Third Reich than you would like to think.  And why then can we not see the final solution being built on the internet.  Why are so many people so blind they cannot see that they are walking into the abattoir of the internet.  They are handing over all their rights, their bank accounts, their freedom to the megalomaniacs running the country and the electronic neural network.

IF WE ARE NOT CAREFUL WE WILL FIND OURSELVES TRAPPED INSIDE THE INSIDE-OUT ABATTOIR OF THE WEB.

I missed out the bit about the level crossings. - How stupid to change a failsafe design for a fail-prone alternative.  Gates, as illustrated in the picture, are closed to either the road or the railway or both but never to neither.  It is so simple really, but someone had to design barriers that go up and down instead. - WHY?

There was also the question "If you could zoom out from time like you can zoom out in space what would it look like?" but I will have to think on that one because it is just a question.  You may want to boggle your mind on it for a while.

And there was the Damien Hirst thing but I will have to leave that for another blog.

Love to all the good people (I know there aren't many of you but hey) and good night.

Pain, DWP, Atos and ukcolumn

So now is the morning.  I get up and my back aches and my stomach feels bloated.  I get coffee and take pain killers and things evolve and I feel as if I need to go to the loo.  My lower back is aching and threatening to hurt and the top of my legs at the front are stinging and aching.  So I go to the loo and my stools are like sheep poop.  And although it is a slightly taboo topic I wonder why it is taboo.  Doctors know these things matter but we are not allowed to talk about them; It does rather brush things under the carpet (Not the sheep poop!).

And then, as I sit here and play Go I feel slightly shaky and quite worn out, I wonder what life is like.  I have nothing to do.  I don't know what to do.  I am browsing old photos from a software convention that I attended as the 'official' photographer some 10 years ago.  Hundreds of enthusiastic software developers' faces and I look at them and wonder what life is like for them.  What are they doing now?  I recall how I felt all those years ago and how rushing around for three days attending talks, taking hundreds of photos, socialising in the evenings and consuming large quantities of alcohol was all done with energy and enthusiasm to spare.  I had ridden over 100 miles to the conference on my motorbike and returned to edit and organise all the photos to put them up on the internet.  All this was done with ease.  But as I sit here and write this diary whilst resting both arms on the table I find that if I need to take the weight of my body with my back in order to lift my arm to hold the mouse to edit a mistake I am tempted to leave it until later because it is a significant effort.

I am not well.  There are 90 year olds who have more energy than me.  I am only 56.  But the significant thing for me is that I know this level of exhaustion is not right for me at the moment.  I don't mind getting old and worn out but I do object to feeling far worse than I might reasonably expect.  And just to put all this in perspective I am devastatingly broke.  It strikes me as interesting that when I mention this other 'taboo' subject people have a strange way of interpreting what is meant by 'broke'.  I know I have interpreted broke as meaning different things at different times in my life.  So how do I simply explain what my financial situation is?  And, perhaps more importantly, how do I convey the incredible negativity of it and the destructive power of my situation.

I look at these revolutions and collapsing economies around the world and although I regard myself as relatively lucky at the moment they are very close to how it is for me.  When I make references to the Holocaust people seem to think I am being extreme and exaggerating.  But for me, although it is an exaggeration, it is not so much of one that it is unreasonable.  There are thousands of people that understand we are doing very similar things in this country right now.  For the record and as supporting evidence there is the frightening case of the DWP and Atos Healthcare.  Currently there is a call for them to be investigated for corporate manslaughter and crimes against humanity.  One set of evidence is the rise of people on sick benefit who have died.  In 2010 310 people who were on sick benefit died.  That might be regarded as the baseline or the norm.  When the DWP introduced their 'medical examinations' carried out by the IT company Atos, masquerading as a healthcare company, in 2011 the death rate rose sharply.  In the first nine months of 2011 10,600 people who were on sick benefit died.  Many people who are involved in this situation are very clear that this is the result of intimidation, stress, and hardship imposed by the DWP.  A very moving illustration of the utter inhumanity and ridiculousness of this scheme is well represented in the image below from Mike Silver's blog.

When you are confronted with the insanity of what is going on it comes as a profound shock and then a frightening realisation that you wouldn't have believed it.  What is frightening is that you know other people simply will not believe it if you tell them.  You begin to understand how the illusion is maintained.  So which way do you turn?  Who can you tell when the very people who are in a position of influence are the very people whose focus of interpretation is on defending the perpetrators of the crime.  You begin to realise how the holocaust happened.  You start to see that the people who make the most noise about how the holocaust was an unacceptable and intolerable crime against humanity are the very people who are enabling it to happen all over again.

Someone once told me that they didn't trust sentimental people.  I wondered about this for many years but over time I certainly began to understand at least 'a' reason for not trusting sentimental people.  It is similar to people who deny something a bit too much.  The suspicion rises that perhaps they have a reason to be denying it.  It seems to me a bit psychological.  It seems a bit Freudian.  They cannot accept that part in them that is 'like' the undesirable attributes of the oppressor.  They actively 'hide' it from themselves and become over emotional and sentimental about the devastation and pain.  But what do these people actually 'do' about this subject that appears to distress them so much?  Very often they do nothing but continue to soak up the opulent substance of their current environment.  They are materially comfortable and psychologically secure and they cling to it compulsively.  To fend off guilt they go to church and give a pittance to charities (who are too often simply offering the service in the style of 'selling indulgences' - that issue that was central to the protestant movement led by Martin Luther in 1517 - for their own benefit).  What they don't do is face the terrible truth.  They don't concern their conscious mind with the evident paradox.  They don't object to the bits of insanity around them.  Why not?  Because to object to these small bits of cruelty and irrationality would disrupt their comfort and would appear to make no difference to the larger picture.  There seems no point in making an issue of things.  And so they carry on.  It is the very same reason why all this shock and horror at the Jimmy Savile affair will do nothing to stop abuse in our culture.  All it will achieve is to brush it further under the carpet and to make it harder to detect.

I cannot write more at the moment because I am in pain and exhausted but I will continue to put these incomplete missives up on the internet in the hope that eventually I will be able to coordinate it all.  In the mean time please set up a standing order to pay me £1 (or $1 if you are a parochial American) a month (If you are serious you can contact me via Toxic Drums contact page :).  It would only take a thousand or so people doing that to afford me a way to live and look after my daughter.  Then, maybe, I would start to get better and get stronger and be able to do something about the terrible situation that is rapidly evolving in this country.  You could also take a look at the ukcolumn which is a very informative organisation pursuing real insight and justice.

Making money on the internet

Making money on the internet is not as easy as it used to be.  It has rarely been easy.  Well it is like winning the lottery is easy - if you win.  Some people have made very easy fortunes on the internet like the million dollar home page but it is not easy to come up with ideas that make money and there are no easy recipes.  There are ways, however, to do it.  The way I do it is to create adverts for merchants on affiliate networks and place them on my web site.  I write content and stuff for the web site and if certain products or services are relevant then I can point to the adverts.  People find the adverts and click through to the vendors website.  If they buy something I get a small commission.  It doesn't cost the customer any money and it is a very neat targeted marketing plan for the merchants.  They only pay if they sell something.  I create pages like ...


So if you are wondering how I make money on the internut - that is how!  It's not easy and it doesn't make much at the moment.  But the revenue is growing and if I keep at it I might get out of this poverty hole I am stuck in.  And here is some really neat labelling software if you want to create address labels quickly and easily.  Like that!  And if you want to make money out of thin air that is really easy.  If you want to know something interesting that is easy too :)  And I like making animated gifs too!

Videos Keep Freezing Browser

If you have a Windows XP computer or Windows 7 you might find YouTube frequently causes the computer to crash or your computer freezes.  Sometimes the video continues playing but the browser freezes.  You might ask yourself "Why does my computer freeze?"  Well I was having this problem and I found out why my computer freezes!

Image by Andreas Tille

Strictly speaking it was only the browser and not the computer that was locking up and not responding.  It was happening more and more as I used YouTube.  I searched the internet for a solution but found endless "problem pages" with hundreds of people asking why their computers locked up or froze when watching videos but no useful answers.  I hate these "forum like" sites that elicit questions from users only to offer no answers but hundreds of adverts.

But I persisted and I came across a useful bit of software provided by Microsoft which analyses the codecs on your cvomputer to inform you of any possible clashes or problems.  Codecs are bits of software that facilitate digital video streaming in Windows and various media players.  The software executable is called MicrosoftFixit.Codec.Run.exe and you can download it from: http://support.microsoft.com/mats/video_freezes_or_crashes/en-us.  The reason I mention this is because you don't always know if you can trust downloads nowadays and I have checked this out extensively and used it on my own computer with complete success.

The software checks all the codecs and informs you of any clashes.  You then get the option to disable ones with a problem.  This is always a bit worrying since you don't usually know enough about what is going on inside your machine to feel confident about disabling or deleting system stuff.  But the information I got from the software was pretty straightforward.  It told me there was a conflict problem with a particular codec installed by RealPlayer.  Given that RealPlayer are getting more pushy I don't use their software if I can help it so I was happy to let this software disable RealPlayer's codec.  I have had no more freezing videos.  Problem solved!  That easy once you have a reliable source.

So if your videos keep freezing your browser causing it to hang up you might want to visit http://support.microsoft.com/mats/video_freezes_or_crashes/en-us and download the MicrosoftFixit.Codec.Run.exe program.  Running it to see if anything is wrong doesn't change anything on your computer and you always get the option to fix the problem only if you want.

Thank you Wikipedia

Wikipedia has taken the unprecedented decision to black out all English language content of its web site for 24 hours to raise awareness of SOPA and PIPA.

If you are reading this during the blackout you can view the site by adding ?banner=none to the url.  Try this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page?banner=none for example.  You can also disable your browser from running JavaScript and then you can view the website perfectly fine.

In this oppressive, hierarchical, control freak world we live in, there are too many jerks who think they are important and know what's best for everyone else.  Their methods have been proven consistently throughout history to benefit no one but themselves and actually to cause a great deal of harm to the majority of nice folk.

Those sanctimonious dictatorial prats waltzing around the halls of power  in their clean cut suits pontificating to all and sundry about the moral values that need to be maintained are nothing more than vicious little bullies.  They are self-serving opinionated bastards.  They are no better than Colonel Gaddafi and his security forces or the Nazis or Fascists.  The only difference is that they are fooling enough people at the moment to avoid having to use open violence.

But their need for control is insatiable.  They continually erode the hard won acknowledgement of real human values.  They are relentless in their attempts to define and control the world and how it works.  Ironically King Canute sat on the beach to make the point that he was not all powerful.  He has been entirely misrepresented by control freaks.  It is ironic because they (the control freaks) actually think they have more power than they actually have and try to illustrate that they understand the limitations of their power by ridiculing Canute.  It is a little like the ancient Turks who religiously put mistakes in their rugs because only God could make a perfect rug.  The irony is missed on control freaks

These rather intellectually stunted testosterone driven gnomes relentlessly interfere with perfectly good principles in their egocentric attempts to prove themselves "good" by making new laws to protect individuals from harm.  But the only individuals they "protect" are themselves and their cronies from being hoist by their own values.

I have a hard time believing the utter ridiculousness of laws which profess to protect liberty but are clearly quite the opposite.  I have spent too much of my valuable life troubled by, and wondering about, these issues.    The conclusion to date is that people in power are grossly stupid and that they succeed insofar as they manage to dull the minds of so many people that they get away with it.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) are the two issues which are currently scheduled for debate in America and which have given rise to Wikipedia's 24 hour blackout.  I have read around the subject and both these proposed laws essentially turn things on their heads.  If you consider the premise that a person is considered innocent until proven guilty these laws do just the reverse.  If, for example, someone leaves a comment on my blog with a link to a site which is linked to a site (presumably ad infinitum) which has content which is simply believed in good faith (woolly phraseology) by some authority to be in breach of any law then I am, by association, assumed to be guilty and my website can simply be shut down until I can prove in a court of law that the final offending material is not in fact illegal.  These proposed laws are simply broad brush legalised censorship.  They are intellectually contradictory (they would make the activities of the White House illegal but - hey - what's new?), pretentiously complicated and basically bullies giving themselves a sense of legitimacy.

I personally object strongly to the American Administration making utterly brainless and bad laws like SOPA and PIPA and I don't even live in the USA.

Freedom is not only freedom to do what the hierarchy demands.  To have a free society one has to accept that sometimes some people will do things you don't like or agree with.  The thing is you have to deal with those occasions when they arise and not make laws to prohibit anything that might be undesirable.  And it is very important to prevent the bullies and the bad guys from making the laws.  It is essential that the control freaks do not alter the laws for their benefit.  It is what happened in Germany prior to the Second World War and precipitated the holocaust and it is currently happening in the USA, the UK, many countries in Europe and God knows where else.

By the way - the holocaust never happened!

Woops!  Don't link to my web site now or you might be taken down.

EVENTVWR

The Indian enevtvwr phone scam.

The Scam

Many people will have experienced the Indian telephone virus scam.  It starts with a telephone call and an Indian technical expert telling you s/he has information that your computer is infected with a virus.  He then tells you to press the "Windows" key (the one with the flag on it) and the "R" key.  This, of course, opens the "Run" window where you can type commands into the operating system.  There are various different scams that they use but a typical one is to ask you to type "eventvwr" which runs the Micro$oft Windows Event Viewer.  This shows a list of logged events and typically is full of error messages.  The error messages are quite normal and Windows generates a lot of them as it tests all sorts of things.  They are meant to be there and are only interesting if you are very technical and want to know detailed information about what sequences of operations Windows is executing.  (Another use I have discovered is to detect if anyone has switched your computer on whilst you were away.)  But...

To the uninitiated this can look like a lot of frightening error messages and presumably the scammer then goes on to frighten you and to suggest there is something wrong with your computer.  They may suggest you have a virus or a bug or a Trojan or a worm or some other dastardly infection.  They will then get you to hand control of your computer to them and they will download all your data which will likely contain bank accounts, passwords, credit card details and all sorts of very useful information for what is called "identity theft".

There is little more that needs explaining here except to say they can do a lot of damage and get away with a degree of serious profit.

The Conversation

I just received one such phone call and was very entertained to keep the guy going for a while.  I kept asking him to spell things again and again and then declared, with feigned horror, that the box had disappeared and we had to go through the process again.  I did enquire as to how much he was paid and suggested he told his boss to put his finger up his rear orifice.  He queried the word "office" and so I spelt it very slowly with the phonetic alphabet (which I learnt during my time as a seaman (not a sperm); O for Oscar, R for Romeo, I for India, at which point he asked me if I liked India... F for Foxtrot, I for India (the same silly joke), C for Charlie and E for Echo.  A moment later another voice, speaking much better English, announced "Hello this is Peter."  He went on to say "Do you see in the top right hand corner of your screen that I am fu<*ing your mother and your daughter."  Well I had to laugh.  I said if he could see my mother he wouldn't be so proud of his claim.  The abuse got more and more basic and obscene and I laughed more and more.  I had clearly got under his skin.  This went on for a while with comments going back and forth until I said to him that I understood he was only trying to make a living and I wished him well in the future and hoped he could find a better way to do it.  The torrent of abuse that was flowing quite rapidly evaporated and he said that he had not sworn at me but that he had done it because I had been rude to [whoever] and in no time at all we were having a civilised conversation.  It was brief, to the point, he apologised and we both wished each other well and said goodbye.

The Philosophical Point

It is all well and good for us civilised people to satisfy our egos that we are really nice and morally good people.  It is a sad fact that a lot of that is precisely collective Freudian projection.  I have discovered that this civilised world of ours is not so civilised after all.  The Joker's quote from The Dark Night: "When the chips are down, these uh, these 'civilized people', they'll eat each other." comes to mind.  We are living in an aggressive, competitive, oppressive, controlling hierarchy akin to the ancient Egyptian slave culture.  We are wage slaves (well those of you who are lucky enough to have a wage).  The financially well off are controlling the environment and like a game of musical chairs it doesn't work if you supply enough chairs.  They require poor people and they manipulate the situation to achieve that.  And poor doesn't just mean hard up it means at the bottom of the pile life is as bad as it gets and death is the only reprieve.  They need that threat to force others to comply with their wishes.  So we pretend we live in a democracy and we pretend we care about other people, we pretend we have a National Health System and a Social Security system, we pretend we have a just and reasonable legal system and we pretend to offer an education to our children, but all these things still require compliance for their own financial survival and very well being.  Notice the salaries of the people who are at the top of these systems and check up the actual facts behind the production and distribution of health or the facts behind the education system or the legal system and you will soon discover that if they don't get their way they are ruthless in the extreme.  So we here in the "West" are some of the richest humans on the planet and we need poor countries to be under our control and doing our biding.  The poor folk in India are in an unacceptable state of human deprivation but they have the internet.  Humans have the potential to be intelligent and the message is spreading far and wide even more so than when the printing press was invented.  Some people get the idea that the people who are squeezing them to death have no right to do that and eventually, combined with their instinct to survive, they resort to the same tactics they feel are used against them.  Deception and trickery to obtain income to survive seem the only option short of suffering in silence and losing their life.  It is perfectly understandable that they would resort to "ripping people off" just as the hierarchy are doing to them.  And when you think about it, if you are going to succeed, you have to pick on people who are weaker than you, just as the hierarchy do.  So I get it.  (Unlike the Prime Minister Baboon Cameroon who makes the same claim.)  If you want to see how sincere these kind and helpful organisations like the Children Services really are, then check out their behaviour and how they "handle" a complaint at the Toxic Drums "Children Services Abuse" section.

We live in an abusive controlling culture that strips people of self responsibility and infects them with a charade of a "moral framework" that perpetuates the power mongers control.  Think about our education system for example.  It is an inhumane mechanism of brainwashing.  Kids are not really provided with useful information for themselves but rather they are taught lessons that are useful for the controllers.  Studies amply illustrate that what kids really learn at school is how to kowtow to the bosses.  Of course if you do this better than the next chap you will be rewarded better and so the hierarchy supports itself.  Until people start taking personal responsibility for their lives the human race is destined to failure.  People in this culture regard themselves as good because they do what they are told and they regard what the politicians do in their name abroad as not their personal responsibility but it is.

Untill you are willing to do something about stopping the disgusting deception and abhorrent behaviour of the politicians you can't complain when the little guys in another country simply want to steel some of your dosh.  Let me correct that: You can complain but with no moral legitimacy.

For lots more information on this scam and many others see Zyra's Phone Virus Scam page.

Google Analytics Content Overview problem

Google are a dangerous force to reckon with nowadays.  They started out as a good company but I think ideas, institutions, corporations and all manner of virtual objects or systems develop along the same lines of survival as Darwinian evolution.  Google seem to think they do everything so "right" that there is no real need to actually communicate with their "users".  (Telling phrase that: "users".  Sounds like drug addiction.)  The Christians thought they were so good they even embarked on an Inquisition to do good in the world and look what that turned into.  People and institutions that think they are so good are maintaining a Freudian "ego" that suits them for the purposes of survival.  That is a primary problem with bringing children up with a judgemental controlling moral framework.  They need to get their parents approval and "being good" achieves just that.  So they have to "be good" to survive and it becomes a compulsion.  A compulsion so strong they will kill to maintain their constructed or conditioned self image.  Have you ever heard any government justifying slaughtering loads of foreigners on moral grounds?  And guess what?  In the end the cannon fodder go along with it believing they are fighting for justice and peace.

So what has this got to do with Google?  Well Google are isolated from their victims with the idea that they service so many billions of individuals that it is impractical to deal with them individually.  So they are perceiving people as their commodity.  Of course they will do things that "appear" to be good and the worst of it is that they will believe it themselves;  That is the purpose of it.  So they are now defining the morality of the communication network that is the internet.  Like any "thing" they need to survive so they will "do good" when it keeps them alive and they will do harm when they interpret a situation as being bad.  A simple example being that they cancelled my account because I mistakenly typed a voucher code in and it was meant for "new users" and I had used them before.  It seems they have analysed this behaviour as malicious so they stop the account and keep the outstanding money.  It is annoying but I don't care much because I found another way around it.  The important thing is that they define what is good and bad with no investigation or trial just their own broad-brush analysis.

Now they have changed the Google Analytics interface.  Of course everyone is going to have to change to it.  At the moment they allow you to use the old version but it will be terminated like a euthanasia subject one day.  The trouble is that although they do their market research they still design it for their own advantage.  It is on such a large scale and affects so many people that it actually defines the way certain business is conducted.  And can you communicate with them over this?  No!  You can tell them what you think but it is a one way conversation.  They get the info for their use and you get nothing.

Anyway - what brought me to this blog was that I just sent them another "comment" from the Google Analytics Content Overview page:

Are you going to fix this problem with long URLs causing the page to fit the screen width instead of the browser width?


Google had a saying once: "Do no evil."  Methinks your lack of contactability is the beginnings of a very evil force in the world.  You might think you are a nice chap working for a nice company but bear in mind they (Google) are running the show now, and like any nice evolved life form it will survive at any cost.


But it would be nice if you could fix this problem on my way to your corporate digestive system.

Another Anonymous DDoS arrest!

Yet Another person has been arrested over the Anonymous attacks on Amazon, Mastercard and Visa.  The Telegraph reports, in an article entitled New arrest over Anonymous' pro-WikiLeaks attacks, that a 22 year old human (I've removed the prejudicial gender) (though perhaps it shouldn't be huMAN either.  Maybe huwoman!  But then that would be the same but different.  Um... Huperson, that'll do!) from Cleveland has been arrested in connection with the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on the offending web sites.  It seems ironic to me that the authorities are desperately searching for ways to prosecute and intimidate people who they feel have made any attempt to interfere with the legitimate use of the internet.  But hang on a minute!  Who is being prosecuted for disrupting WikiLeaks?  Is the federal government of the United States being arrested and imprisoned for instigating a giant assault on WikiLeaks?  No!  Are Mastercard or Visa being inconvenienced for illegitimately preventing WikiLeaks doing legal business on the internet?  No!  Are Amazon being fined for illegitimately disrupting WikiLeaks' perfectly legitimate business activities?  No!  These companies are waging a kind of internet war all of their own.  And I bet if one investigated the matter that WikiLeaks would be squeaky clean and the likes of the Bank of America and Amazon that they could be found to be breaking the law in many ways.  I'm just voicing a suspicion you understand.  It is a suspicion born of experience though.

Many years ago I wrote some software similar to the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (the software used for the DDoS) to bugger up people's web servers.  I knew it wouldn't have a major effect whilst it was only me that was operating it.  But at the time it seemed like a perfectly legitimate activity.  I simply entered a URL and set the software running and it would repeatedly request the web page.  And software can do that pretty fast!  Why did I do this?  Because I was getting too much SPAM!  After a while of getting annoyed I realised that no one would do anything about this so I aimed to put a pointless load on the websites that benefitted from the SPAM.  Well it kept me happy for a while.  It strikes me that when organisations like Amazon and PayPal (yes they are another guilty party) abuse their high and mighty position to cow-tow to the all powerful governments and cause great hardship to other people that it may just be reasonable in a "democratic" sort of way for people to inundate their servers with requests.

Considering that one person running one piece of software will make virtually no difference to the offending web site it seems very democratic for everybody to have some of this software and they can effectively "vote" against a company by firing it at them.  If only a few people were upset nothing much would happen but if thousands objected then the offending company would have to at least deal with the problem.  It always seems so unfair to me that companies like the Bank of America or Amazon can take offensive action against someone and actually cause serious harm but if someone retaliates they will get arrested.

Its not that I think this sort of retaliatory action is simply a good thing in itself.  I actually think it is a bad thing to interfere with other people's web sites.  We have to be consistent here (unlike the US government).  Internet freedom should be protected vigorously.  But that is the point.  Amazon and Visa and ... etc ... acted illegitimately and curtailed someone else's freedom.  What they should have done was to have followed the law and if WikiLeaks were judged by a court of law to be acting illegally then they could quite legally withdraw their services.  Simples!  But No!  Those cronky companies took the law into their own hands.  I find that seriously objectionable.  So when someone does the same kind of thing to them (but so miniscule compared with their offence) I applaud them for standing up against these megalomanic, self-important, arrogant, bigoted, control freak bullies.

WELL DONE ANONYMOUS!

Global Revolution

These are not just uprisings or regime changes in the Middle East. These are not just economic downturns or recessions in the West. The internet is not simply a faster, bigger, better medium. Humanity is now evolving to a higher consciousness. The interconnectivity availed by the internet is confirming and enabling people's inner beliefs that justice, equality, respect, cooperation, love, compassion and truth are real and achievable. Read more on the Global Revolution.

Windows 7 Home Premium

A warning about Windows 7 Home Premium:
Microsoft claim that Windows 7 Home Premium is so much better than previous versions of Windows like er... Vista. This is true in many respects but there are some really fundamental issues that Microsoft gloss over and even try to suggest otherwise. (see more about Micro$oft Windows 7)

There is no doubt that it is much faster starting up and shutting down. It is faster to load applications and and the interface is smoother for many tasks. But the trouble is they have focused on a typical user and although that will satisfy perhaps a majority it will frustrate millions. Microsoft focus on the computer as an entertainment console. As a toy. But if you want to actually use your computer for your purposes it can become very frustrating.

Computers are general purpose machines but Microsoft is turning yours into a toy for a mindless consumer. Before you know it the easiest thing to do will be to watch movies, listen to music, play games and buy more products and services from Microsoft. There is the argument that it is their prerogative to tempt you into their world to sell you more. Entrepreneurs would congratulate Microsoft for their ingenuity and inventiveness. They have done a massive amount of research into the psychology of the "user" But this "achievement" is only a good thing in a context. Rather like oil in the sea! It is perfectly fine to wash your hands in the sea but to spew billions of tons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico is no longer the same issue.

There have been years and years of of legal wrangling over the Antitrust laws basically alleging that Microsoft has abused a monopoly position in the market. Those legal battles unfortunately have only managed to focus on a tangible example of Microsoft's bad behaviour. In some way they have been a distraction from the generic behaviour of the company. Windows 7 lures you into a smooth, glossy, slick (not the oil type), environment and before you know it you are beginning to think the way they want you to.

They claim: "Share files and printers among multiple PCs" and "Connect to networks easily". The implications of this are wrong. For many people who have money to spend and little use for a computer outside of family fun these claims refer to features that will probably satisfy them. They do add the small print that says "from one Windows 7-based PC to another, you can share files, music, photos, and even printersacross your home network." and referring to the "Connect to networks easily" statement they add "view and connect to any available wireless network in as few as three clicks.". But what they don't emphasize in the first of these example claims is that you cannot have more than one network and all computers on that network must be running the Windows 7 Operating System! This is not what "networking" is about. This is a trap. Many users will find they have to buy a new version of Windows for all the computers in the house. Friends come round and they can no longer link into your network. The frustrations are endless. And for anything more than a mindless "user" this is unacceptable. There is a problem at the moment in the schools in Britain. Many of them have been duped by this sales hype. They have invested in the new operating system and found out they now have to spend vast rafts of money getting their systems to work properly. And who gets the money? Bear in mind that having invested MORE MONEY in the Windows operating system Farmer Micro$oft will come to milk them every morning and evening!

Micro$oft seem to be taking the term "Computer USER" to a new level of meaning. Oooooh - I just need some more of that WINDOWS 7 Home Premium.

Convert Delphi project to Delphi 2010 look and feel

Delphi 2010 button "look and feel"

How to convert a Delphi 6 project to Delphi 2010

convert old Delphi project to Delphi 2010 "look & feel" to Delphi 2010

buttons in Delphi project still look old

move project from old Delphi version to Delphi 2010

I bought a new Windows 7 machine.  It's a Packard Bell IXTREME X5620 with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 processor.  In general use it is wickedly fast.  I installed Delphi 2010 on the Windows 7 machine and ported all my Delphi 6 projects from my old trusty XP machine to the new one.

I noticed that in the designer the buttons were looking very up to date and Windows 7 ish but when I ran the application the form looked Windows 7 style but the buttons and other controls were clunky old XP/Delphi 6 buttons.  Very grey and stiff with sharp corners that any unsuspecting child could injure themselves on.

So I set about looking for a solution.

Select Project/Options/Application and set the "Enable runtime themes"

This does the trick.  Now everything is looking nice and modern.

Delphi 2010

Having bought Delphi 2010 as an upgrade from Delphi 6 I was expecting it to be a vast improvement.  Knowing and loving the product since it was the Turbo Pascal I have seen the changes over the years and the introduction of the Integrated Development Environment under DOS and then with the advent of Windows the virtually sublime Visual Component Library.  I have owned most versions of Delphi up to version 6 and have used Delphi 7 in someone else's office.  I was impressed with the advances in some areas and the debugging in particular.  I had a lot of experience of that because I was working for someone else and having to fix some dire code.  I don't normally have much call for a debugger with my own code.  But the help had become almost helpless.  I rely on the help because my memory is no good.  I have a good conceptual memory and I only have to understand polymorphism once and I've got it but can I recall where the ... well there you go.  I went looking for the override directive and could I find it?  No!  I'm not going to spend all day trying to make this point but it seems that Pascal is being forced into history.  I did eventually get to what I suspect is the best help by searching for Pascal Language Guide but it is seriously lacking in integrity.  I even read a remark in the help somewhere that "Real programmers don't use Pascal."  Whether that was a joke or not I don't know but if it was a joke it wasn't funny.  Pascal is a seriously good high level language.  As far as I understand it the guy who concocted C which later became C++ was basically coding Pascal so that it was unreadable.  The whole idea of a high level language is that it is easier than writing in machine code.  But hackers (as I like to call them) prefer to massage their egos by having code that "looks" really complicated.  It makes them feel cleverer.  But it doesn't help productivity.  And anyway they get away with a lot more bugs because it is nearly impossible to spot them.  Pascal was developed with two main characteristics.  One was that it was a teaching language so it was designed with very clear reserved words like begin and end to mark the beginning and end of a block of code and "English" style commands like for N:=1 to 20 do, and repeat...until  but C has to "shorten" every thing with curly brackets and weird arrangements of symbols.  It is simply not explicit and you have to have a memory for what all the codes mean.  The second significant thing about Pascal is that it is rigidly consistent.  It is fractal in a way.  There are a few simple rules and everything else follows.  It has been thought out very carefully.  But C comes along and starts making exceptions right left and centre.  After a while it is a jumble of special cases.  But back to the Delphi 2010.

I was trying to get the main form that I was designing to tear itself away from the top left corner of the space in which it's container was docked.  Eventually I found, under Tools/Options/Delphi Options/VCL Designer, that you can set "Embedded designer" on or off.  If it is on then the forms you are working with are as a multi document interface and they are stuck to the top left corner of their work space.  If you turn it off you are informed that it will not take effect until you close Delphi and restart it.  Funny but true.  So I did that and it seemed more agreeable until I realised that the form had a "Stay On Top" quality so that when you are editing the code the form is in front of it.  There seems no way to get it behind your work space so you have to minimise it every time you want to edit the code.  I found also that you can do something about the arrangement under View/Desktops.  But although it gives you the option to select the old style "Classic Undocked" (which I was so relieved to discover) it turns out that all the windows are undocked except the form in the corresponding workspace as the text editor.  So it is still stuck in the top left corner of a container.  So the frustration is mounting.  I don't get the "advances" in the code completion either.  Maybe I will understand it one day but at the moment it takes more work to manage the code completion unless of course you don't know how to program in Pascal at all.  That's a thought!  Maybe I could learn C that way.  No - it wouldn't work.

A lot of this ranting is so that a) I get to vent my frustration, b) I get to have notes on things I have found like the search for "Pascal Language Guide" and other interesting things I might forget in months to come, and c) so that there may be some useful hints and tips, workarounds and solutions for other people searching the internet.

Anders Hejlsberg was the guy responsible for designing the Visual Component Libray and he made an exceptional job of it.  He was then pirated by Microsoft and designed the .NET framework.  If any of you budding techies out there are wondering why C# ever got invented it is because the .NET environment is written in Pascal with the Visual Component Library and is basically an extension of it.  XML is largely the streaming structure from the VCL.  All down to one very clever man.  But most programmers use C++.  As the comment I noticed referring to "real programmers" not programming in Pascal suggests most people who were going to use .NET are C programmers but it is written in Pascal.  So they invented a middle ground for C programmers and called it C#.  Why not Pascal?  It annoys me.  But that is probably because I have spent so many years programming in Pascal and I am a very slow learner and don't want to learn C.  I have recently got involved with HTML and am shocked by the inconsistencies in that.  Sometimes I think it is a bit like evolution.  It has to have inherent weaknesses otherwise it couldn't evolve.