Tapuz are advertising Ilan’s using spam E-mail

Today I received spam E-mail from [email protected] (http://www.tapuz.co.il/ is an established Hebrew language Web portal).

The spam is advertising a coffeehouse called Ilan’s House of Coffee (אילן’ס – בית של קפה).

If you, too, got this spam: both Tapuz and Ilan’s have publicly available E-mail addresses, which can be used for complaints.

A Vista Conspiracy Theory

One possible reason for the stupidity of Microsoft in handling MS-Vista, especially in its attempts to ram MS-Vista through its customers’ throats instead of MS-Windows XP, is as follows.

Shortly after SCO sued IBM and other companies due to violation of its Linux copyright, IBM and possibly other big companies decided upon two-pronged counter attack.  First, they would fight SCO in court to the bitter end.

The conspiracy theory expoused below has to do with the second prong.  The goal here is to cause Microsoft to bleed as much money and as quickly as possible, so that it’ll not have the financial means to continue to support SCO until its defendants wear out.

For this purpose, moles may have been installed in Microsoft (or maybe Microsoft employees were bribed) to deliberately make the wrong managerial decisions, to sap the morale of the working software developers, to entangle the projects in cobwebs, to bog the projects down in intricate dependencies and frivolous compatibilities with the past, to surrender too easily to Hollywood moguls when they ask for DRM measures to be built into MS-Vista.

Since Microsoft had the fatal combination of de-facto monopoly position and huge cash reserves, both had to be attacked.  The monopoly position was attacked by making MS-Vista incompatible with MS-Windows XP, so that people would find it just as easy to switch to Linux or to Mac OS as it is to MS-Vista.  The cash position was attacked by turning MS-Vista into huge cash drain.

Some thoughts about the placebo effect

WARNING: if the following can be made to work, several medical practitioners, mostly of the alternative medicine persuasion, will have to seek another employment to supplement their income.

The placebo effect is a well known phenomenon, which was scientifically confirmed to exist. It is said to happen when a sick person gets well even if the pill or treatment, which he gets, are known to be powerless by themselves to heal him. The placebo effect works by suggestion, which causes the patient’s brain to somehow command the body to heal itself. The exact mechanism has not been elucidated by science.

It would be good idea to develop methods to deliberately evoke the placebo effect. In other words, to train people to be able to auto-suggest that they are getting the appropriate treatment for whatever is ailing them – even without going to a medical practitioner or getting any medication.

One way in which this maybe could be done is to get the patient to remember a past incident, in which he got a medicine and felt that it is affecting him and he is getting well thanks to it – and to play back the incident in his mind.

Be prepared!

Head over to Amanda Ripley’s Web site and read her blog!

Highlights (my own summary):

  1. People behave in disasters differently from what you were taught about people.
  2. You can develop the personality traits needed to survive and help other people survive in disasters.
  3. Be prepared.
  4. Familiarize yourself with your surroundings.
  5. Your chances of survival are better than what you think – IF YOU REGAIN YOUR ABILITY TO THINK.

Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev

During the last few days, I have been alarmed by the news that the families of the soldiers abducted by Hezbollah and Hamas are suing the government in the Supreme Court in an attempt to force it to weaken itself in its negotiation tactics with Hezbollah and Hamas.

My concern is that those families are not taking the long range view.

The way they are pursuing now has the consequence of weakening the Israeli ability to deter its opponents. Thus, few months or years from now, Hezbollah and/or Hamas will abduct 5 soldiers. Then the families of those newly-abducted soldiers will be furious at the Shalit, Goldwasser and Regev families for preventing the government from adopting the hard-line stance, which would have deterred our enemies from ever kidnapping Israeli soldiers.

Contrary to popular opinion, this is not a personal Olmert issue. Any Prime Minister, faced with the same situation, would have to adopt a similar course of action.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s visit to Israel and the Embargo

In the wake of Sarkozy’s words of support of Israel against Iran, I have some questions.

  • Did France officially end the weapons embargo against Israel, which Charles de Gaulle imposed upon Israel at the start of the Six-Day War at 1967?
  • Did France officially apologize to Israel for excluding Iraq from the above embargo, which ostensibly applied to all sides in the Mideast conflict?  During the years after the Six-Day War, France sold weapons to Iraq, even though Iraq has always been in official state of war with Israel, having no ceasefire or armistice agreements with it.
  • Was Israel reimbursed the price it paid for the 50 fighter airplanes, which were ordered and paid for, but not delivered to Israel due to the embargo?

And since Iraq has been mentioned, I have an unrelated question:

  • Is Iraq, as an USA-controlled territory, now in official state of war against Israel?

Is Nokia E90 an upgrade for Nokia 9210i users?

Yesterday I met Erez and he demonstrated to me his new Nokia E90.
I am a Nokia 9210i user, and it still serves me well, after several years.
The Nokia E90 is good looking. It features a full keyboard – very useful for writing SMS messages. It has a built in camera, so I would not need to carry with me also a digital camera. It is capable of storing hundreds of MB of digital data. There is even a barcode reading and decoding application!

HOWEVER:

  • It does not have a FAX application, which Nokia 9210i has and which I consider to be essential, even though nowadays I do not use it frequently.
  • In the SMS application, it is very awkward to enter textual data, which mixes Hebrew and Latin letters.
    • Switching between those two keyboards is a 3-key operation rather than a single-key operation, as in Nokia 9210i (or 2 keys pressed simultaneously in personal computers).
    • If you press the Shift key while you are in Hebrew keyboard mode, you still get Hebrew letter – rather than uppercase Latin letter, as in all personal computer keyboards and in Nokia 9210i.

Conclusion: I’ll pass on it, and wait for the next model with similar features.

Socialism – 1830 style

At 1830 there were riots in England, which were caused by bad policies, which seem to have counterparts in today’s social and immigration practices.

  • People were paid subsistence salaries, with supplemental income paid by the local government from the parish fund, which was financed by a special tax – the Poor Rate. The modern counterpart (at least in Israel) is the practice of paying people at low-skill professions salaries below the legal minimum rate, and having them supplement their income by “hashlamat hachnasa” – complementary income. This practice discourages employers from paying those people salaries which would let them support themselves (and from the effort to train those people so that their productivity will be high enough to justify reasonable salaries).
  • The Poor Rate’s modern counterpart is the National Insurance (known in USA as Social Security) fee.
  • Today as at 1830, social policies created the notorious poverty trap, from which people could not escape without extraordinary measures.
  • People could not move from parish to another parish unless the original parish certified that it would take them back if they cannot support themselves in other parishes. The modern counterpart is that of countries requiring people arriving from other countries to have means to support themselves and travel back to their country of origin.