Government officials in Canada may temporarily block wireless signals as part of an effort to secure world leaders during the G8 and G20 summit scheduled in Ontario later this month.

via Wireless signals to be jammed in Canada for G8 summit • The Register.

(Interesting. Demonstrations from the socialist left cause the disruption of  the freedoms of others.  Sad but tru.)

The record lows that Sprint has hit, put the American wireless economy at a turning point.

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Call me cynical I guess. The touted tax rebate is a meaningless gesture and will do nothing for the majority of property owners in Maryland. That rebate will not even cover the increase in property taxes we have seen over the last two years. Thirty percent. It will have no “spending effect” for my family. We are taxed by Maryland governments, state and local to the max with no hope in site of relief. The FIRST tax rebate was swallowed up in the same way. The tax money is simply being reallocated to the states!

The politicians are all about spend, spend, spend. When they run out of money they just come get more at the tax payer’s expense. The problem is spending discipline. There is no discipline in Annapolis and there is obviously none in Washington.

The so-called tax rebate is a joke. As one person testifying before Congress put it, it’s like pouring a glass of water in the ocean hoping it will make a difference. The tiny income made from advertising on this website does not come close to even covering the new taxes we have endured in addition to soaring energy costs and gasoline costs.

The economy is a nightmare and the politicians and the American lending businesses  are largely responsible for the problem! This rebate is nothing more than an election year ploy. Count me as one conservative that is completely unimpressed. A tax rebate my foot. Phooey.

(Election Day – Maryland) As if we have not gotten enough political news, advertising, and posturing. Last night and the day before in Maryland our home telephones rang.. As each was answered the recorded political rhetoric started. Two Republican candidates this time invading my private space and the privacy of perhaps thousands.

In some states this kind of privacy invasion is not legal, but here in Maryland state politicians reserved telephone harassment as their First Amendment right. When the final election comes in November all of the parties are going to use this technique. I hate the election season because these obnoxious calls to my home never seem to cease. In my opinion, it is a sleazy waste of time on the days proceeding election day. It would not surprise me me if some citizens voted against the candidate using telephone broadcasting. They could I suppose but I doubt it would change anything until enough of us told law makers we have had enough of their antics.

…Mariah Power is seriously poised to release their vertical axis wind turbine this spring for $3,995. This is incredible news. (PopWireless – Wind power generation is becoming mainstream! Click read more to visit Jetson Green and read about wind generation within reach. I know it has nothing much to do with “wireless” but with a few of these maybe I could disconnect from the power grid. is that wireless?    )

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Consumer confidence fell to an all-time low as worries about jobs, energy bills and home foreclosures darkened people’s feelings about the country’s economic health and their own financial well-being.

According to the RBC Cash Index, confidence tumbled to a mark of 56.3 in early January.

Click “read more” and visit BreitBart.com for the rest of the story.

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Have we forgotten our development roots from the early days of computing? I recall from the FidoNet days when I ran a board and a hub in California’s Net 161 that FidoNet had a basic rule. It was a generic rule about getting along. The rule applied to software, human behavior, and the interactions sysops and users had with each other. In general, it was easy to tell who was or was not observing the rule. I don’t recall the exact words we used then but it was a simple concept that started out as an early standard.

The words “excessively annoying” come to mind. We were all asked not to be excessively annoying in whatever we did – for, to, or with others. We have forgotten our roots. When the money grubbers, bean counters, and corporate raiders took over our personal and professional behavior tanked. It’s a subject for another time but I believe it was also one big reason for the dot com collapse of 2001.

In current times, day after computing day, I keep running into the excessively annoying. Annoying software, annoying hardware, and annoying companies delivering annoying computer products and services. These are just a few of my own peeves:

1. The virus program that nags and nags and nags until I finally reboot my computer. Selecting reboot later has no effect. It reminds you AGAIN in just a few minutes.

2. The browser that with every click warns you a site is trying to open another site in your trusted list and no amount of trusting seems to fix it! You finally give up on the browser and only use it when you have to.

3. The browser that doesn’t work on everyone’s website. We worried about compatibility in the early days and we still are. Do we ever learn?

4. Off-shore customer service. I’m sure I would enjoy visiting the country but I am very sure I do not want my customer service there. I’m not sure if a decent headset or even English lessons would help. They follow scripts that prohibit human interaction and quality trouble shooting. Help desks are now No-Help Desks.
5. Customer no service.

6. The digital camera company that INSISTS you use THEIR digital camera software to organize your photos whether you want to or not!

7. Software that installs tool bars you don’t want or need.

8. Software that gives you a choice whether or not you want the tool bar but hides the option under the ADVANCED-Recommended for advanced users only.

9. The ISP start-up disk that you really didn’t need to load in the first place (they insisted in the instructions) but you did it because you thought you had to. When you ran the “installer” you found that the ISP modified your browser software and email programs through the registry. They BRANDED your browser with their ICONS and images and in some cases installed useless tool bars.

10. The ISP’s that reset my Skype connections after thirty minutes time. (I don’t use bit torrent. People using that technology to avoid paying for on-line products might deserve to have their sessions reset since their behavior might be considered excessively annoying ESPECIALLY if ISP’s consider the behavior a serious load on their systems. (Excessively annoying can mean different things to different people )

11. The ISP that advertises fast MYSQL database connections but delivers a service that causes pages to take three minutes to load and still continues to brag knowing full well they are not delivering as promised. Promises should be kept don’t you think? Not keeping promises is excessively annoying.

12. A user interface that has obviously not been through any usability testing.

13. Software companies that acquire competitors just to kill them. This is not capitalism. This is greed.

14. American “business” ended competition on product features and quality. There is no real competition in the software business anymore. It’s all about keeping the investors, marketing and sales folks wealthy from quarter to quarter. It’s like I was told once by a sales professional, “I don’t care what’s in the box. It doesn’t matter what’s in the box.”

15. Cookie cutter responses telling me that a company cares about me. Reminders that in a syrupy sweet way tell me what a great company they are. The implication is that I should be proud to be their customer even though they fail to deliver great service with a marginal product. This is excessively annoying. In my opinion these are belligerent insults upon those with even simple intelligence. The bad taste these messages leave without setting expectations are almost never forgotten.

16. Failing to set expectations, the fear of delivering bad news, and a total lack of transparent honesty is way unfriendly.

Pardon me, I have to stop what I’m doing to to check the “I’ll restart later,” button.

17. Installers that can’t remember your configuration from the previous version! Come on developers! How many years has the world been writing software? Why should a customer have to reconfigure over and over again.

18. Tech support services that just ignore you or treat you like you are a minion of the damned.

19. Incompetent billing departments that can never get the charges right.

20. Software companies that changed the subscription paradigm from, “Your subscription expires unless you renew,” to “Your subscription automatically renews and we WILL charge your credit card UNLESS you tell us not to….and no we will not remind you either.” When I was kid I NEVER had to accept or decline TERMS to subscribe to a magazine or a service. Heck those businesses were happy to have me! Now I have to accept or decline after CAREFULLY reading the fine print for things I don’t like about the offer – like automatic renewals. In my case I have given up every automatic renewal based subscription because none of them allow an opt out. One company even had no contact information on their site to opt out!

21. Including a lengthy TERMS document to either accept or decline with every product. I understand the need but now these are being used to the complete advantage of the company. The legalese is barely understandable by the average person.

21. Pop ups. The pop up is an obscene intrusion on personal productivity. Every time I see one I think bad things about the people that put them there.

22. Spammers, sploggers, fraudsters, pranksters, and virus writers. Do the words, “Get a real job,” mean anything to you? Why do people grow up just to be mean spirited bottom dwellers?

23. The product documentation that is so out of date the installation instructions are actually incorrect and harmful to the full enjoyment of the product if you follow them. I purchased a two-hundred dollar multi-input sound card with the worst product manual in the world. The product still doesn’t work correctly and the failure is probably related to following the company’s instructions.

23. Telephone trees.

I could go on but you get the drift. It’s getting much worse, not better. The company that finally gets it earns the millions. The others have angered customers so badly over the years that the good will finally win because of an obvious effort to do the right thing – but only if they have the money to fight the company killers living at the bottom of the pond.

We should be going after ILLEGAL aliens and not the wives of our heroes who happen to be of foreign birth. Immigration is going after the easy marks for easy stats. This is SHAMEFUL and DISGUSTING behavior of our government.

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Samples of DNA from plants, butterflies, and spiders found 1.2 miles (2 km) beneath the ice in Greenland indicates that the temperature probably reach 50 degrees F (10 C) in summer and 1 degree F (-17 C) in winter during a period estimated at 450,000 to 900,000 years ago.

This finding conflicts with modern climactic models and theories.

I know it’s not on topic for PopularWireless.com but I wanted everyone to see this given the hysteria caused by the movie Al Gore produced.

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