Who gives a shit and who doesn't and why.

What has this world come to? 

Just because someones a self-centered,one way, lazy ass who doesn't give a shit about anyone else or anything else is no reason to give up on him.

I never cared about anything in my life and look where it's gotten me. I don't have any money. I don't have a nice car or home and it's not my fault. Just because I didn't give a shit about anything is no excuse to deny me the same opportunities that everyone else enjoys.

That doesn't work. It just makes me give a shit even less. I mean I'd like a chance to have nice stuff to not give a shit about too.

Eh, watch the vid or don't because I really don't give a shit if you do anyway...

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

A Rocumentary on Thin Lizzy

This is the 5 star documentary on Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy called "Outlawed: Thin Lizzy And The Real Phil Lynott (2006)". 
The reviews on it come back as highly rated and I myself will be seeing this for the first time in my post. Ordinarily I would download the vid to watch it before posting it but today I am sharing my internet connection with others and due to their usage that option is not possible for me right now.

As usual you can save this vid using the link provided and from there watch it on any avi player (I recommend using  VLC Media Player which is free from the folks at VidLan) or you can stream it here and watch it on my blog if you have the DIVX codec pack installed.


Enjoy...

User review from IMDB.com's page:

Compelling story, 4 October 2006

Author: david howard from United Kingdom

Not much is know really about the man Phil Lynott most remember "The Boys Are Back In Town" This is a very well produced show.

This is an amazing recount of the life of Phil Lynott especially the early years; Lynott was a man whose talent is acknowledged universally but whose early life of poverty is less well documented.

We're treated to a rare insight and a remarkably frank interview by his mother Philomena, who speaks fondly of her famous son, ranging from her trauma in the early years to the devastation of finding him close to death just 37 years later; the revelations are incredibly moving and remarkably informative.

♪ Johnny Rivers - Summer Rain ♫

The year 1967 gave us Carrol Shelby's Mustang GT-500 Fastback, Kurt Cobain was born on February 20th, they closed the Suez Canal for 8 years and I danced in the Summer Rain listening to Johnny Rivers...

♪ Johnny Rivers - Summer Rain ♫

 

Google offers FREE phone to USA & Canada!

How cool is this folks???


The following I got from Yahoo News on this page linked here, but couple things first. After reading about it I signed up on this page here and that took almost all of about a minute. After getting my number Google called my home phone to test the call forwarding feature so that people can call my Google number and if I want to I can just answer it on my home phone. Then they offered a link through a pop-up window to see a vid on the features. Here is that link too, now I got my free phone and I'm hooked.


Enjoy the article, use the links, get the phone and save some money.

Google plugs free PC-to-phone calling into e-mail

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer

SAN FRANCISCO – Google Inc. is adding a free e-mail feature that may persuade more people to cut the cords on their landline phones.

The service unveiled Wednesday enables U.S. users of Google's Gmail service to make calls from microphone-equipped computers to telephones virtually anywhere in the world.

All calls in the U.S. and Canada will be free through at least the end of the year. That undercuts the most popular PC-to-phone service, Skype, which charges 1.2 cents to 2.1 cents per minute for U.S. calls. It also threatens to overshadow another free PC-to-phone calling service called MagicTalk that was just introduced by VocalTec Communications Ltd.

Skype, Google and many other services have been offering free computer-to-computer calling for years.

Google hopes to make money on its PC-to-phone service by charging 2 cents or more per minute for international calls. The international rates will vary widely, sometimes even within the same country. Google posted a rate chart at https://www.google.com/voice/b/0/rates.

People also will be able to receive calls on their PC if they obtain a free phone number from Google or already have one.

The phone numbers and technology for the new PC-calling service are being provided by Google Voice, a telecommunications hub that the company has been trying to expand. It had been an invitation-only service until two months ago when Google Voice began accepting all number requests.

Google disclosed last year that it had assigned about 1.4 million phone numbers through its Voice service, which can field calls made to a person's home, mobile or office number. Craig Walker, a Google product manager who helped develop Voice, said the service has expanded its reach since then, but he wouldn't provide specifics.

Besides planting Voice's technology into Gmail, Google also plans to promote the service by setting up red phone booths at universities and airports scattered across the United States. People will be able to make free calls from the booths to U.S. and Canadian numbers and save on international calls.

Google also plans to enable people to transfer, or "port," their existing home or mobile phone to Voice to widen the service's appeal. Walker said Wednesday that flexibility will be available soon.

The PC-to-phone calling option initially is being offered only to consumers who have accounts on Google's Web-based e-mail, but the company left open the possibility that it will be expanded to the millions of businesses and government agencies that rely on Gmail as part of an applications suite that includes other programs such as word processing.

The added competition comes at an inopportune time for Skype S.A., the Luxembourg-based company that recently filed plans for an initial public offering of stock. Skype has 560 million registered users, including 8.1 million paying customers (most people use the free PC-to-PC service). After four years under the ownership of eBay Inc., Skype was sold to a group of private investors last November for about $2 billion. The company has been doing well since the sale, earning $13 million on revenue of $406 million during the first half of this year.

As always my post is just a cheap imitation of the professionally done post and I recommend you go to the original [here] and see this formatted the way it was intended. 

Follow-up: 

Yes I have tried the Google phone app and "yes it is fantastic", but it is just a little more complicated than expected

I'll try to explaine...

I first thought it would be just another version of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), but instead it was sort of a marriage between internet phone, land -line & cell phone technology.

I live in a Village (not even a poor excuse of a town) up amongst the canyons in the desert region we choose to call "Nebraska". It's a fairly wealthy area carved out of society that at first glance has all the bells and whistles, all the little extra's that the rest of our society enjoys. What I have noticed though is it has much less. Everything here I have found to be partial to slightly less or even in many cases just a poor imitation of what the rest of those in out nation have just grown to take for granted.

Our internet service, our cell phone service, our governing agencies, all of those things just as just about all the rest of our services are nothing but poor representations of what we would expect to be. Our cellular service is like the rest of it out here. It reminds me of a cheap toy that comes to you out of the package broken and the best they can offer you is "we'ell it's betterin nothin, ain'it?".

So that leaves me with only one service which is only one land line because my personality is "Just keep your crap and talk to me when you've got it working", I don't even bother with the rest of their crap.

Back on topic... The features of this service are different in that you can program in your home phone, your cell phone number and your business phone along with other numbers and through it you can both send and receive phone calls from any of those services. You can also receive voice mail as an email transcribed from each if you should miss a call. 

LOL, I however can only use the land line end of it.

First I open up my Google phone page. Then I type in your phone number, then I select on which phone I wish to call you from and then I select the call button. I select "call from home". The computer then calls my phone and it rings. I then answer it to hear it ringing on the other end and when the person answers I hear them and we talk just as if I placed the call from home.

Pretty simple, huh? It is except this time I'm calling you for free and that's nice. 

I haven't tried it yet but I believe I can add other phones temporarily to it for use under other circumstances like when I'm traveling. Like when I'm on my way to Massachusetts to visit my family and while I'm there visiting.

This for me would mean no more lost access to people when I'm out or away and that I like.

Come back next week when I bitch about Connecticut, Virginia, Louisiana and Woonsocket, Rhode Island (not all of Rhode Island, just Woonsocket. I actually like Rhode Island but Woonsocket Sucks).

"Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car"

The Government's New Right to Track Your Every Move With GPS

By ADAM COHEN, posted from our friends at Time Magazine [here].

Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway - and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre - and scary - rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants - with no need for a search warrant. (See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.)

It is a dangerous decision - one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.

This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle's underside.

After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA's actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)

In fact, the government violated Pineda-Moreno's privacy rights in two different ways. For starters, the invasion of his driveway was wrong. The courts have long held that people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their homes and in the "curtilage," a fancy legal term for the area around the home. The government's intrusion on property just a few feet away was clearly in this zone of privacy.

The judges veered into offensiveness when they explained why Pineda-Moreno's driveway was not private. It was open to strangers, they said, such as delivery people and neighborhood children, who could wander across it uninvited. (See the misadventures of the CIA.)
 
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, who dissented from this month's decision refusing to reconsider the case, pointed out whose homes are not open to strangers: rich people's. The court's ruling, he said, means that people who protect their homes with electric gates, fences and security booths have a large protected zone of privacy around their homes. People who cannot afford such barriers have to put up with the government sneaking around at night.

Judge Kozinski is a leading conservative, appointed by President Ronald Reagan, but in his dissent he came across as a raging liberal. "There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist," he wrote. "No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter." The judges in the majority, he charged, were guilty of "cultural elitism." (Read about one man's efforts to escape the surveillance state.)

The court went on to make a second terrible decision about privacy: that once a GPS device has been planted, the government is free to use it to track people without getting a warrant. There is a major battle under way in the federal and state courts over this issue, and the stakes are high. After all, if government agents can track people with secretly planted GPS devices virtually anytime they want, without having to go to a court for a warrant, we are one step closer to a classic police state - with technology taking on the role of the KGB or the East German Stasi.

Fortunately, other courts are coming to a different conclusion from the Ninth Circuit's - including the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That court ruled, also this month, that tracking for an extended period of time with GPS is an invasion of privacy that requires a warrant. The issue is likely to end up in the Supreme Court.

In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit's pro-privacy ruling was unanimous - decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (Comment on this story.)

Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell's totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania."

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.

Cohen, a lawyer, is a former TIME writer and a former member of the New York Times editorial board.
Download TIME's iPhone and BlackBerry application.
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View this article on Time.com

Related articles on Time.com:

• Seattle's Judge Judy Suspended over Courtroom Insults
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• Q & A: Why We Get Lost

I just had to post this one.

First I'd like to thank Attorney Cohen for the original post and second Time Magazine for the heads-up on this crock of shit situation.

My comments? Trust me, You don't even want to hear what I have to say about these warped and twisted people that WE put in charge of OUR future. 

Again. You can go to this link here for the original post.

[NEWS] More Companies Phasing Out Retirement Option

In the news today...

More Companies Phasing Out Retirement Option

January 25, 2006 | ISSUE 42•04
NEW YORK—With pension funds dwindling as retirees enjoy longer, more capable lives, many businesses have opted to freeze their workers' employment status and keep them on the job through their sunset years.

"Under the new approach, our employees gain the advantage of lifelong job security," Hewlett-Packard CEO and president Mark Hurd said. "Even though our workers will no longer be able to collect a pension, they will receive checks as long as they are able to be wheeled into work and punch the clock."
Hewlett-Packard, Verizon, and IBM are just a few of the Fortune 500 companies that are phasing out the retirement option in favor of "indefinite-employment" plans, under which thousands of qualified workers will continue to earn yearly stipends in exchange for work.
"To the list of outmoded and costly business practices such as health insurance, overtime pay, and lunch breaks, add age-based quitting," corporate management consultant Robert Hopgood said. "Post-retirement-age labor is great for companies, and it's a great way for seniors to stay active."
American companies are following the model set by General Electric, which in the 1970s began requiring departing employees to give 45 years' notice.
Although the paradigm shift is highly admired among cost-conscious managers in the business world, employees question its practicality.
"I don't need to support my family anymore," said 93-year-old Alfred Nuzzo, who has worked as a products inspector for GE's small-appliance division for 68 years. "I have a dead wife and three dead kids."
Multitasking while dying on the job can take its toll. GE customer-service representative Esther Fischbeck, 88, is juggling career, widowhood, and early-stage Alzheimer's disease.

"What is this?" said Fischbeck, clawing at her phone headset. "When do I go home?"
Responding to critics who say that phasing out retirement shows a lack of concern for workers, IBM CEO Samuel Palmisano argued that if companies didn't care about their elderly employees, they would not keep them on the payroll.
"We frequently honor their birthdays with celebrations, and our going-away parties are always respectful and appropriately somber affairs," Palmisano said. "IBM is like a family—you don't leave a family."
Lawrence Babbio Jr., president of Verizon, defended his company's newly enstated non-retirement plan.
"We believe in our workers," Babbio said. "Everyone is valuable and has something to offer, and we're not going to phase them out just because they only have a few years left to live. Even vegetative employees can serve the company by donating valuable, hard-to-find organs to our younger executives. And our comatose employees are very useful as product testers."
Saying that an older person in a wheelchair "shouldn't be pushed into a corner, but in front of a desk," Hewlett-Packard's Hurd said lifetime employment will make his company more inclusive.
"There's a place at our organization for everyone—the young, the old, the mentally incapacitated, the moribund," Hurd said. "All we ask of them is to work a regular 40-hour shift and honor our 'no mercy killing' policy."
He added, "We pride ourselves on the fact that, even after death, our employees can continue to contribute to the company's growth. In an uncertain world, we offer real job security—from training to the grave."

More News

• « U.S. Holds Going-Out-Of-Business Sale (January 17, 2006)
• Secretary Of Agriculture Keeps Bragging He ... » (January 25, 2006) 

That was copied from The Onion News (America's Finest News Source)

The Brandon Teena Story (1998) [Full Movie]

No my friends, this is NOT another Nebraska story. It's about Nebraskans and their shallow views on some subject matter but this story could have happened almost anywhere, in any society based on imitation family values, prejudice and total disregard for peoples privacy and social conditioning.


The thing that strikes me most about a film like this is the lengths that others will go to to justify such behavior It does to me seem that people comfortable with ignorance and blind tradition are often the first ones out there to stand the proudest and scream the loudest for the rights to defend their bigotry and condemn others without ever even taking an honest look at them or the situation that they are in.


This my friends is a story about cruelty and the damage that people are capable of delivering onto their fellow neighbors just for the sake of doing so while portraying to others the false image of understanding and compassion towards others.


Rest in peace Brandon Teena...

The Brandon Teena Story (1998) 

 

unbelievability toward the ignorance of the average American, 3 October 1998

IMDB's page on the film is [here], below is another readers opinion on the film from that page...

  

_The Brandon Teena Story_ is a shocker. I, a traveled New Yorker, sat in the theater slack-jawed at how narrow minded and ignorant people of my own country (and therefore of my own "culture," presumably) could be. The true story, which takes place in Nebraska, USA, is of a person, born a girl, who lives her life as a boy. People, even girlfriends, believe in her sexuality; however, she is eventually exposed, raped, and then murdered (along with 2 other people who happened to be with her that night). The documentary focuses on her friends and girlfriends, as well as her killers and the people who knew her in Nebraska. There is a general sense of disapproval and confusion, as well as love and acceptance from those who knew her well.

Maybe it's my more globally-minded perception, but I simply cannot imagine committing a hate-crime towards a person who is different, a person I simply don't understand. I cannot fathom denying that person's right to live as a human being. I immediately judge those people in that part of the country as ignorant and bigoted. But I do this without giving them a chance, just like they didn't give Brandon one. Is it right to impose my values onto them, just as they did theirs to Brandon? It may not be "right" but I choose to do it anyhow, just as they chose to judge Brandon. Or ... is it the same? What the movie does is challenge the morals and values of the world outside the society in which Brandon lived. I believe that if I had seen the movie in Fall City Nebraska, I would not have heard the gasps in the audience throughout the film. I would have been appalled, but the rest of the audience would have identified with the people on the screen. Do I have to live with that "ignorance" in my own country? To them, I may seem like the "ignorant" one, the "liberal without VALUES." I, of course, see it in the opposite light. But this will not soon be reconciled. The closest thing we can get to is understanding, and we reach understanding through exposure, through sources such as _The Brandon Teena Story_.