Cold Constructs Blog

The Shit startin to hit the fan, aint it? Either that or I’m bored and catching all these stories like no one’s business. With all this bad news I decided to make an antithesis for this series (seen below), but it took a lot longer to find stuff that makes as much of a difference as all this bad shit. Without further adieu…

CIA looking to monitor chat rooms. Again. Any idea how fucking retarded this is? “Serious threats” are NOT going to communicate through public channels, but rather the encrypted kind. So, there’s really no point to this except to harass and infringe on the privacy of the people who pay their bills. Punk-bitches.

Rubbish. This is Absolute Horse Shit. We now have COMPANIES telling the GOVERNMENT what laws to pass. I said before for cities to tax residents to pay for wireless broadband hotspots around the city, before Philly even announced their plan. Because I thought of it on my own I got pretty excited about this that it could be implemented (albeit poorly). Privatization came back to bite us in the ass. Didn’t see that one comin…

Fox News is saying Congressmen don’t read the shit they pass. I never doubted that lawmakers read the bills they passed. I don’t know why, and that bothers me. One should never trust ones government, but I did and didn’t even know it.

Advertising in gaming. I didn’t pay 50-fucking-dollars to envelop myself in a virtual world full of real life ads goddammit!!1! I paid 50 bucks to get away from everything real and have a good time. It’s pretty easy to guess what the next most popular mods will be: ad-removers. You know what, I’ll just never buy a game that has advertisements. Problem solved.

Feds to have unified biometric ID system. Read the article and comments, they provide more insight than I ever could. Groups of smart people tend to do that.

The problem with the news is that they focus on negativity–nothing but killing, dying, misery, and hate. This is because it’s what people will watch, what they want to watch. Good news doesn’t seem to get much air time, and I don’t know if it ever did. Well, the blogsphere is changing all that. Um. Kinda. Even the popular blog of Wonderful Things can’t help but bear_the_bad_news. The reason I post bad news (mostly political shit) is because it proves my point: the world is retarded, but we can easily change it and indeed I provide some solutions for most if not all the items. Too much negativity can really bring one down, so here’s some great things people are doing… mostly software though, since that’s the kind of stuff you can get right now and become immediately happy.

HoloDek Gaming Center. Finally, the next generation of the arcade center has arrived. The Sphere is the greatest idea ever. What’s rad is that the games we play are more realistic than even the US military’s sims, now even moreso with that Sphere thing. (I’ve been in some of the latest gen aircraft trainers, and the only argument defending their lack of graphical prowess is that that’s not the focus–accuracy of the mechanics is.) Anyway, this shit is gonna be hot.

A decentralized Bittorrent network! Shit yeah! Gimme!

The best all-in-one IM client that is small, fast, and customizable. Called Miranda IM, it let’s you have one contact list with all your friends on it no matter what protocol they’re using (be it aim, msn, icq, etc.). I use it and love it–it’s fully compatible with file transfers and whatever other features they use. Completely free and expandable via plugins and addons and you can even completely change the way it looks.

If you ever wanted to use your computer like a telephone for free with encryption, use Skype. You can also transfers any size files, msg, all encrypted as well. If you want to call someone’s cell/house phone you can use SkypeOut. It’s not free, but at 2 US cents a minute, it’s hard to beat (no limitations, plans, monthly or other fees, just throw down a sum of credit and use it away).

Did you ever read A Deepness in the Sky? You should, it’s really really good. In that book Vinge talks about automation, like it’s the cornerstone of every technologically advanced civ in the universe. Which is kinda funny, ‘cuz we’re just getting started.