1. “It’s so much more secure!”
It isn’t. In fact, there’s evidence that it’s less secure than a Windows machine. Security these days is largely a problem that exists in the howling chasm between the ears of most Internet users. Anyone with a wireless network in their home has some manner of firewall built into the hardware, and if they don’t, they probably went out of their way to do it wrong. UNIX is a tried and trusted platform, so bias in favor of OS X for security’s sake is probably fair, but when you’re running everything as Administrator you might as well leave your front door and car completely unlocked, bicycle without a helmet, and hop backwards on your left foot down a flight of stairs, because clearly you have no concept of basic safety measures.

And you know what else? The notorious security checks of Windows Vista are there for a reason. Asking the user permission to do every Admin-level task will draw attention to the malicious software that tries to do something that the user had no intention of letting it do. Vista gives you the chance to stop malware in its tracks. Windows has to support thousands of third-party applications, and the guard rails have to go somewhere.

What you should say instead:
“I prefer the OS X security model over that of Windows.”

2. “There’s no Blue Screen of Death!” / “It’s so much more stable!”
This is like saying Mac OS X won’t give you polio. This is a problem that was cured a long time ago, but the way the Mac ads tell it, you’d think running Windows was an OSHA violation. I can’t even remember the last time I saw even a Windows XP computer bluescreen, and we use dozens of such machines at work. I haven’t yet heard of a Vista computer encountering a system-halting failure.

I worked on a newspaper for a semester and everyone was using Macs. It was a very nice and very appropriate setup, and most of the time everything worked fine, but I’d be a liar if I ever claimed those Macs ran flawlessly 100% of the time. Use your Mac long enough, and you’ll get to see an application hang or crash. You’ll get to lose unsaved work, to see the trackpad stop registering, or see a window refuse to dock, or witness some other unexplainable failure. It’s a computer! It runs billions of calculations each second working off of gigabytes worth of data and code! You don’t think that once or twice something is going to go wrong? Macs are not magic. They will fail you.

What you should say instead:
Nothing.

3. “There are no viruses!”
Yes there are. Remember when Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, told students at Columbia University that Iran has no gay people? The students laughed at him, and anyone who hears you make the above claim will react the same way if they know anything about computers. People who write viruses are usually trying to turn a computer into a spam-forwarding zombie, or harvest financial or identity information from a computer so they can go commit some fraud and identity theft. They try to cast a wide net, so usually they go the Windows route. So far, Mac users have enjoyed freedom from these threats just because they are such a small pool of users. In all cases, whether with Windows or Mac, the most important tool for avoiding viruses is your own brain. Every email is a suspect. Every website is a potential threat. Be aware and be cautious, because your operating system will NOT save you all by itself.

Sadly, this is a front where Windows suffers severely. Not from viruses, but from anti-virus software. Norton and McAffee antivirus programs infiltrate your computer just like the cooties they are meant to thwart, gum up the registry, slow things down, and can be impossible to uninstall.

What you should say instead:
“It’s less of a target for viruses than Windows, so I feel safer using it.”

4. “It just works!”
So does Windows, you ninny. That’s why nobody uses Linux. What’s worse is that the last time Microsoft bundled important software with their operating system, they had to waste millions fending off a lawsuit from the sore losers in the market. Yet almost every software program on your Mac was made by Apple! Is it any wonder they work so harmoniously?

What you should say instead:
“It suits my needs and I like it.”

5. “PCs suck!”
The cheapest Apple laptop is $1100. The cheapest Dell notebook is $500. There’s a $600 premium for that MacBook, because you’re paying for specialized hardware and top-notch design. Not everyone places so much value on those factors, and they don’t appreciate being talked down to.

What you should say instead:
“Macs rock!”

There’s plenty of good things about Apple’s computing platform. The elegant operating system, the slick design, and quality first-party applications are just the beginning. There’s no need to bash the conventional products as inferior. Hopefully, if you’re a Mac enthusiast, this article has helped make you less annoying to your PC-using friends.

The book market continues to morph, with customers diverting from mom-and-pop shops to Barnes & Noble and Borders, and ordering their used books over the Internet. It can look like the “small” brick-and-mortar bookstore is doomed. I choose to disagree.

This post isn’t what you think it’s going to be. I’m not going to wax poetic about the atmosphere, the community, the unquantifiable experience of buying a book at a locally-owned shop. The reason such book stores have a shot at surviving the coming decades, and even have an opportunity to prosper, does have something to do with those romantic aspects, but those things alone don’t make people look for a book at your store instead of going to a bigger, national coffee chain with a Doubleday distributorship attached, like Barnes and Noble.

People go where they can find what they want at a good price. I crave science fiction classics. Since only the smaller shops deign to carry used books, it is only in that venue that I can possibly find a meaningful selection. The big box retailers’ shelves are so full of new titles they only have the shelf space for a few of the most obvious classics. What I’m really describing is the problem with brick-and-mortar that the Internet supposedly solved, when Amazon showed you could market to the “long tail” and be successful online.

1. Localization Means Something: There are several little long tails in every town, and local book shops may be in a good position to capitalize on those small, sundry markets. The big retailers are victims of their own size, forced to strongly emphasize a huge selection of the most popular books and multimedia just to support their own massive weight. I can find a battered old copy of Wyrms by Orson Scott Card at a used book store. I have yet to discover this title on the shelves of Borders.

In any given community, there are countless library sales, garage sales, Salvation Army and Goodwill sales, just to name a few varieties, where bookstore proprietors can glean inventory for practically nothing. These used books are byproducts of what the community reads. They contain samples from several subsets of readers in the area. Out of Hooked on Books’ inventory of 250,000 books, I found a copy of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

I can never find that book at Barnes and Noble.

The owners of local bookstores are members of the local historical societies, various book organizations and clubs. In other words, they are positioned to know their market with a much finer resolution than the big box retailers run by corporate committees hundreds of miles away. Good bookstores’ finely tuned knowledge of the local literary environment, and their willingness to carry new and used books, actually gives them very good odds of having the book you want.

2. Used Prices Undercut New Prices: In a sagging economy, the fact that you can find an entertaining used paperback for half the price of a freshly-minted one is going to become an increasingly important factor in the buying decisions of readers. This is an entire class of book that the big boxes refuse to deal in. At the price point of a used paperback, introducing shipping makes an online purchase so prohibitive one may as well buy a new copy. As long as there is a market for used books, I feel it is rational to assume that brick-and-mortar book stores will be viable.

3. Digital May Introduce a “Print Premium”: The invention of the Amazon Kindle has introduced stupendous convenience into the book-buying experience. I may even buy one myself. However, the staggering number of works that remain out of digital format, which may never be converted to digital format, makes complete bunk out of the notion that our entire bookshelf will be reduced to so many electrons swirling inside an electronic reader.

Moreover, there are too many points of failure in such electronic contrivances. Suppose Amazon forgets what you’ve bought and your Kindle’s hard drive corrupts? Suppose the device breaks? Suppose you are unable to charge it for a long period of time? What happens when the 3G network has an outage? When all the infrastructure is humming along nicely, a Kindle is a superb way to condense your reading, save space and enhance the reading experience. I’m certain it makes a great traveling companion. But do you really want your entire library one day to be at the mercy of a single wafer of silicon?

Even if digital delivery of print media takes off and becomes one of the dominant vehicles of literature, it might help these brick and mortar book stores in an unexpected way: by turning physical books into objectes even more special than they currently are. The latest John Grisham novel will no doubt be available for $9.99 on the Kindle, to be bought and delivered instantly into the hands of anyone with that device and a desire to read it. But a great work by a more obscure author may never make it into digitized form, and its non-common status will make it equally impossible to obtain at B&N or Borders. The one place to get it will still be the used bookstore.

4. Digital does not make Analog obsolete: As there remains a market for vinyl records, so shall there remain a market for physical books. And I’m not suggesting that the dead-tree variety of books is going to go the way of vinyl in any way. It’s just an example that the introduction of a new form of media does not necessarily make the predecessor obsolete. The book is a form which has endured for thousands of years. It is unlikely that Jeff Bezos will drive it into obsolescence in less time than that.

Markets May Change, But Some Will Never Die. The arrival of the big box retailers has largely, but not completely, replaced the niches served in local markets by the smaller, locally owned stores. I doubt they ever wil. The advent of the usable e-book medium has not even begun to usurp the physical book, but it may very well change our relationship with physical books, and possibly for the better. It may seem like locally-owned brick-and-mortar bookstores are besieged by corporate giants and the inexorable march of technology, but the truth is that they serve a function in the market that they already do the best in serving. The number of such stores that the market can support may change, but the fundamental need for them may never go away.

I’m at last officially published in a magazine. You’ll find my article in the latest Republic Magazine, titled Building the Shield of Free Information. It covers several very important bases on the Information Freedom front, pointing out the threats to our digital liberty and some of the ways you can stay safe online. It’s also a plea to the freedom movement to mobilize over the Web even more than it already has. It will be coming out on July 27, so be sure to purchase your copy at Republic Magazine’s website.

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One of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

-G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

Ron Paul and his supporters are frequently derided as clinging to the 19th century, as lovers of anachronisms and “disproven” ideas. They love the barbaric relic of gold, and want to take us back to the age of robber barons and child labor. No matter how Ron Paul’s enemies choose to mischaracterize his agenda, his platform does indeed take much inspiration from the past. My contention, however, is that looking to the past constitutes a strength, not a weakness. In fact, the past is now the only route to a decent future.

Every election promises the same things: new ideas, a new direction, leadership that looks to the future. But what is so very wrong with the old ideas, the old directions or leadership that consults the past? There has to be something useful about the past! Do all the ideas of our predecessors become obsolete every four years?

This need to “look to the future” with “new ideas” and “progressive” thought is not just infatuation with the new, and it isn’t just the “progressive” left that does this. The gubernatorial campaign of the incumbent Republican governor in Indiana, Mitch Daniels, uses this vocabulary in profusion. I am convinced this language represents a fear of the past. And why shouldn’t our politicians be afraid of the past? The great statesmen of previous generations tower over today’s petty politics. Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense and moved a continent. When a modern politician writes a book, it is a stack of mass market chum published to boost campaign visibility.

The familiar turn of phrase, standing on the shoulders of giants, does not apply to modern America. She has not only climbed down from those sturdy shoulders, but is so intimidated by the giants she runs the other way.

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

-G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

If we avoid looking at the past, we are spared the task of living up to it. The blank slate of the future allows us to scribble our ambitions as if they were grand new ideas. It has not already been painted on by the great masters from the past.

This is what makes Ron Paul’s version of change wholly unique in the presidential field. He was brave enough to look to the past, and find the ideas that already did us well, even if America gave up on them. The gold standard was not disproven just because it was abandoned. In fact, it is this abandonment of hard money that has caused the present-day credit crisis! Laizzes-faire was not disproven just because government chose to intervene. Constitutionalism is not disproven just because the current government is too far out of its bounds. It is exactly because we gave up on these ideas that they are worth trying again. We’ve been trying “new” things for so long, a true change would be to try something old! And that is what Ron Paul’s campaign offered.

The term “conservative” at least suggests a respect for the past, which is why I find myself working in the Republican Party in order to affect some positive political change in this country. I believe a lot of other people have made the same decision, now that they have discovered Constitutionalism and the ideals that most consider “libertarian.” Hopefully there is room in this Party for more than one Ron Paul. I don’t see any new blood coming into the GOP from other sources, so there had better be, or Republicans are going to go share their fate with the Dodo, and for the same reasons.

When America observed strict Constitutionalism, exercised a more laizzes-faire policy than today, and stuck to a hard money standard, she enjoyed steady and sustainable economic growth that dwarfs even today’s booming Asia. For some reason, those ideas were given up on, because some people feared the inconveniences of too much freedom, and instead preferred the obstacles accompanying too little freedom. We have tried the welfare-warfare state for nearly a century. We have endlessly chased the new, and have not avoided what I can only describe as a brewing economic meltdown. In the present crisis, is it still too soon to look back and try the ideas that worked?

For example, do you know what a Raccoon is, and why it follows a beaver? Check out this terminology page. This game is so much more nuanced than I thought.

Now, I’m not a gamblin’ man so I didn’t risk any of my own money in the process, but I did want to provide a look at the software they provided.

The download was quick and the installation takes care of itself. I’m usually wary of downloading gaming software — you run a high risk sometimes of catching some adware and spyware in the process. Not so with BGroom so far. The application’s installation was clean and quick, didn’t ask for any personal details, and fired right up. The interface is snappy, intuitive, and easy on the eyes.

The main screen for their program, once you’ve installed it and created an account, looks like the image above. There are several rooms for different skill levels, each filled with games in progress as well as open games available to join. You can even create your own.

Before you and your opponent even begin, a screen allows you to negotiate the terms of your game, the stakes, which optional rules you’ll use and what the pace of the game’s timer will be like. It’s all very flexible and quick. You’ll be playing in no time.

Even those who have never played backgammon online (or even the traditional dead-tree variety) will find this online game relatively easy to pick up. Only the actions the game’s rules permit you to take are highlighted on the board when you roll the dice at the beginning of your turn. If you don’t know how to play, it can just about teach you. You can probably tell from the screen on the right that I still need some more teaching.

Even if the game itself is insufficient to teach you, they provide a pretty good introduction to the rules and strategies of the game at this website.

My experience with the software overall was very pleasant. I don’t know how long the practice points will last you if you have a habit of losing, but this is a version of backgammon I could easily choose over its flash-based rivals elsewhere on the Web.

Pages to check out:

• BGPrime (online backgammon) - Information on game etiquette,
• BGRoom (backgammon online)- Download one of the most successful backgammon web apps around
• 1on1Backgammon - Beginner’s tips, strategies and tutorials

Dear Supporter,

As we head into the graduation and summer holiday season, we have an exciting offer for all John McCain supporters. The John McCain 2008 campaign is offering you a special opportunity to receive an autographed copy of Faith of My Fathers, the national bestselling story of John McCain and his family.

In Faith of My Fathers, John McCain tells his amazing story of courage and leadership during his more than five years as a POW in North Vietnam. The examples and lessons taught by his father and grandfather enabled him to survive imprisonment and emerge as a true American hero. This book demonstrates that the McCain family has long believed that the highest honor one can gain is through service to our country. John McCain has served our country for decades, and we want him to continue serving as our next President of the United States.

Today, with your contribution of $150 or more, you will receive a signed, hardcover copy of the inspiring Faith of My Fathers. This book can be shared with your family and friends to help them understand, in John McCain’s own words, the service he and his family have had the honor of providing to our country. There is no doubt that this book will reinforce what you, his strongest supporters, already know; he is the right man at the right time to lead our country. Please follow this link to reserve your copy today.

Now, first of all, John McCain’s autograph just isn’t worth $150 to me. I used to like him, years ago. He was less supportive of the war than his Republican peers, and was apparently willing to stick to principle rather than party. That doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. He’s like so many other Republicans I’ve met, who may have once believed in the philosophy of freedom, but have since sold out or made compromises out of fear, or have caught the imperialist brain rot. They’re nice guys, but someone has flipped a few switches in their heads that make their actions wildly inconsistent with their beliefs. I think John McCain is one of those Republicans. Not sexy for a true believer in small, restrained government.

Second, this book was published in 1999. I don’t recall a whole lot about that election season’s primary race, but maybe this book was a good advertising mechanism back then. Back then, John McCain would have been a wee lad barely into his sixties. But he’s running for president again, and has he published anything else? Anything elaborating on what he really believes, and what he wants to do about it? Ron Paul has a book that was officially released two days ago, and from the very first page it shows sharp wit, the product of a vigorous mind. Johnny, you’re slipping. I guess you’re just not the young, energetic dynamo you were at 62. Like the candidate, this book is old and unoriginal. It’s a family memoir. I haven’t read it, but I doubt such a work contains a whole lot in the way of policy beliefs. If anything it’s a work of fan service for all those who feel a romantic nostalgia for the Fifties. I guess that’s appropriate. That demographic is the biggest group to remain loyal to the Republican Party over the last 8 years.

And finally, he didn’t even write this by himself. It was co-authored by Mark Salter. That’s not really a fault, but if you were to judge the remaining two Republican presidential candidates based on their book-related activities, John McCain is lagging way behind. He’s recycling a 9-year-old book about his family that he had help writing, while his competitor has just published an incisive manifesto, an exclamation point at the end of a candidacy which has already sparked a velvet revolution within the Republican Party, and American politics.

So John McCain is selling a flourish of his pen for $150. My guess is that his 71-year-old cancer-survivor hand can only handle about 50 such scribbles. Maybe 80 if he switches hands. Any takers?

At the very first page, Dr. Paul destroys the traditional paradigm. If you don’t know why some say there’s no difference anymore between the Democrats and Republicans, you will find out in the first chapter. From there, he builds. Through a series of examples out of history and contemporary times, he outlines a political philosophy, rooted firmly in objective reality, that has been sadly absent from the public discourse for many decades. For many, the ideas in this book will seem new, but they are only the conclusions arrived at by the venerated men who wrote the Constitution 230 years ago. Like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room, this book will reveal that war is not necessary for your safety, income taxation is not necessary for the government to function, that the country can be saved and returned to a state of peace, prosperity, and high standing in the world. The path is not easy; it’s not even likely, but it’s possible, and the plan is simple.

Whether or not you agree with Ron Paul, the precision and clarity of this book will make it impossible to misunderstand any longer just what he and his supporters stand for and why. It is a foundation, a launching point, a reference point for the popular constitutionalist revolution his candidacy has sparked, and that is why that revolution is now unstoppable.

The book is a succinct articulation of liberty, real liberty, along with its hows and whys. Anyone with a middle school education should be able to read and comprehend this book. Freedom is not complicated. Thus, the book is highly accessible, and very convincing. If Ron Paul’s campaign platform made easy converts (and it did), so will this book, and they’re mass-producing it. Now the Ron Paul supporters have a tool with which to easily and quickly spread the freedom message, in a comprehensible way. Freedom is an invigorating concept. This is why his supporters made such an impact in such a short time. To many, the message of this book will be as precious, as refreshing, as energizing as the first sweet gulp of water to someone lost in a desert. After the first few drops that this book provides, you may find yourself in search of more. Recovering from the political dehydration that most people in this country have suffered will take more than just a few drops. Fortunately, Dr. Paul included a reading list in the back of the book. The Revolution: A Manifesto is not just a manifesto, it is a beacon. The first puddle that leads to an oasis. It’s not a mirage. You can be free.

Read this book and begin to find out how.

To be fair, Sullivan is only crediting Barack with being smarter than Hillary Clinton and John McCain, which should be an insulting comparison for normal people, but since this is a politician we’re talking about, maybe he does deserve credit for noticing the obvious. What’s most interesting to me is that Sullivan did not mention the fourth candidate still in the race when lauding Barack’s prescience: Ron Paul. He either omitted the Texas Congressman because he knows Paul was even more “prescient,” or the good doctor is not even on the blogger’s radar. Either way, it takes some willful ignorance to praise Obama when Ron Paul and people like him, beat the Illinois Senator’s analysis by 2 or more years.

The wealth of articles you can find by Googling “housing bubble” with “2004″ or “2005″ makes citing particular ones redundant. Anyone who was paying attention knew trouble was brewing. Nobody was right about what exactly would happen or when, but the fundamentals were obvious to those with even a rudimentary understanding of economics. The axiom held true that markets always do what they’re supposed to do, just not when you expect it.

What we should really be noting about all this was that back in 2004-5, you had to go to the Internet to get anything more than a whisper that something might be wrong. Mainstream TV, radio and newsprint media apparently had little concern over the growing malinvestment in the housing market. The Fed was telling us in October 2005 that everything would be fine. The only ones pointing out any stormclouds this far back were people like gloomy old Ron Paul. Since the housing bubble couldn’t have been easier to spot if it ran up and slapped you, the very compelling question is: Why did the Fed lie to us? If your answer is that this is part of the Fed’s job, in order to help “control” the market, you’d be right. And it’s exactly as fishy as it sounds.

Back then, when all the pundits with the biggest megaphones were telling you everything was just great, the “doomsayers” who saw this coming were dismissed as being out of touch and unfairly down on the economy. Well, they turned out to be right.

What would you rather be? “In touch” and “optimistic”, or correct? The kind of economic prescience that saw the housing bubble a mile away is not difficult to apprehend. In fact, you can get a college-grade education in economics just by reading the recommendations at Mises.org. The Austrian school of economics makes the “dismal science” surprisingly simple and exciting, in part because it makes rational sense; it is rooted in pure logic.

So would you like to be able to beat Saint Obama’s next great economic prediction? Study the Austrian school. I recommend starting with Economics in One Lesson.

Fortunately, I already had a Western Digital Passport external hard drive, which meant I already had an appropriate adapter. And it was easier to get at than you might think.

Open the casing

Western Digital’s Passport external drives are slick little devices and might look like you can’t get them open, but it’s surprisingly easy. Just start along one of the bottom, edges where the seam is easiest to crack open. Take your time; the casing is made of only two parts, and they will unlatch given enough time, so there’s no need to rush and risk breaking anything. You’ll want to use the case later. Just keep working along the edge you’ve opened farther and farther until you’ve gotten all the way around, and soon enough the top part will pop right off and you’ll see a 2.5″ SATA hard drive just like the one you’re trying to read.

Remove the Passport’s original HDD

The drive that comes in the Passport will have a sort of aluminum foil adhered to it, which is folded around the circuitry we want to remove. Carefully peel the upper side off. What you will find plugged into the SATA interface of the 2.5″ hard drive is a small circuit board with the USB connector on the other side. The drive is not attached to the casing so you will be able to lift the whole thing right out.

Now, carefully pull off the connector and now you have a device that will turn any 2.5″ SATA hard drive into an external USB drive. I bet you could even solder on a different LED light if you wanted. That little blue thing is brighter than all get-out.

Once I had my SATA to USB converter in hand, I put my old 80GB HDD back into the Thinkpad and booted Vista. From there, I used the connector on the WD Scorpio and connected it to a USB port. Once Vista recognized it I fired up the command prompt and ran DISKPART. It will take a little fumbling around at first, but once you SELECT the disk and partition from within DISKPART, you can use the EXTEND command to extend that partition to encompass all the remaining unallocated space on the disk. I did that to the XP partition (the only partition on the drive), reinstalled the Scorpio in the Thinkpad, booted up, and viola!

Windows XP had the entire drive at its command. You’ll notice it only reads about 298GB total, but that’s because the marketers for the HDD manufacturers like to use a little fuzzy math when they tell you how big the drive is. This is still the biggest laptop hard drive on the market alongside Seagate and Toshiba’s.

Should we overcome the intense points of resistance and actually abolish public schooling, and stay off the drug even when it hurts, the market solutions surrounding education that would inevitably spring up during recovery would give us better choices for our children at a lower cost, with many more options and superior quality. I’m not saying government schools are all bad. But the present system has a distinct flavor of non-freedom, and my point is that our culture has developed a dependency on this system, one that abolishes our freedom of education for a one-size-fits-all government model.

The question I want to get you to ask is whether or not we, as a culture, will admit we have a problem and undergo the painful steps to recovery willingly. If we will not, then the national culture is destined to kill itself with its addiction, and a future generation will have to rebuild. Our choices are gradual recovery or sudden upheaval. I’m curious to see what the aggregate of America chooses.