Here's a Frightening Thought:...

 03/22/2014

Windows XP support will be retired in just 16 days, but 95 percent of the world’s ATMs are still running this particular OS version, according to third-party statistics.

* While I understand that the site operators who provided this info have to make a living and are compensated for publishing this. I can personally testify for another alternative. Rather than the need to buy a new computer or pay for an upgrade that will likely need more resources than your XP computer likely has, there is another alternative. And it is absolutely FREE! It is called Linux. It is an extremely virus and malware resistant OS which comes in many flavors. And ironically there is a link on the site where this article came from for 100s of versions. Being a newbie you may wish to stick to more complete ones with many alternative programs you would likely pay for a Microsoft OS. As you become more comfy you may wish to try other flavors, like those specializing in music production or anonymous internet browsing. Either way, what have you got to lose? They are free, unlike new computers and 200 dollar operating systems. All you'll need is a cd burner, a dvd burner, or a flash drive with 16 gb and an iso burner, which even for windows is free!  Give it a shot... LINK 

Any question about selection or procedures please ask in the comment section.


  - As of April 8, Microsoft will no longer release patches and security updates

The Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlement Systems (GhIPSS) knows that this is quite a critical moment for all banks in the country, so it has released a warning for all local financial institutions, saying that they can either move from Windows XP to Windows 7 or 8 or face sanctions.

Forcing banks to step away from Windows XP by preparing fines isn’t quite the right way to convince them to upgrade, but it could be a solution to keeping customers protected, especially because security experts are predicting an avalanche of attacks after end of support.

The problem for banks is that upgrading from XP to any other operating system is very expensive, so all cash machines also need hardware improvements.

On the other hand, the upgraded ATMs would benefit from new features and better security, which means that customers would get better services across the country. It remains to be seen however how many banks can deal with this upgrade process with only 16 days left on the clock and with everyone asking them to migrate to a newer OS as soon as possible.

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What Constitutes A Glitch In Voting?

03/22/2014

Last month, the Metropolitan Development Commission voted 5-3 to reject a proposed development in the 5900 block of North College Avenue that called for the demolition of two residential homes in order to make way for a mixed use development. The neighborhood's council member, Will Gooden (R), whose law firm represents developers, sided with the developer in this case over the strong opposition of neighborhood residents as he has done in every case since his appointment to the council seat vacated by Ryan Vaughn. WTHR is now reporting that another vote will be taken due to a glitch in the voting. "The commission originally rejected the plan by a 5-3 vote but one of the tallies was difficult to read so it will be reconsidered at a meeting Wednesday," WTHR reports. The video above shows the part of the proceeding where the vote was taken. The commission's clerk can be seen lingering by a couple of the commission members for a lengthy period before announcing the vote tally. The glitch must mean that someone didn't get the memo from the mayor's office on how they were supposed to vote. Adam Kirsch was confirmed at Monday night's council meeting as the latest appointee to the commission.

UPDATE: Naturally, the re-vote led to a reversal of the vote with 5 members now supporting its approval to only 2 votes against. Republican appointee Bruce Schumacher's vote supposedly was misread by the clerk at the first meeting as a "no" instead of a "yes," which would have made the vote an indecisive 4-4 vote. 

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Obama's Next Assault on Working Class Wallets: Michelle Obama says internet access should be 'universal right'

03/22/2014

Michelle Obama delivers her speech at the Stanford Center at Peking University. Photograph: Feng Li/Getty Images

Michelle Obama has declared that access to the internet should be a universal right, in a rare and controversial foray into the world of international politics during a cultural visit to China.

The US first lady, who is on a week-long trip to the communist state with her daughters and mother, risked upsetting her hosts in Beijing by declaring access to information as a birthright. During a speech at Peking University's Stanford Centre, she called for greater freedoms while refraining from a direct attack on the controls over information in China.

The so-called "great firewall of China" blocks access to internet sites deemed sensitive, while a vast censorship machine swiftly deletes content considered objectionable. Twitter and Facebook are both blocked.

Obama told a crowd of about 200 students, most of whom were from the US: "It is so important for information and ideas to flow freely over the internet and through the media. My husband and I are on the receiving end of plenty of questioning and criticism from our media and our fellow citizens, and it's not always easy. But I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world."

She added: "When it comes to expressing yourself freely, and worshipping as you choose, and having open access to information – we believe those are universal rights that are the birthright of every person on this planet."

Chinese students in the audience reportedly thronged around the first lady after her speech, taking pictures with their cellphones. Nevertheless, American newspapers reported that several students declined to discuss the rights section of Obama's speech.

When asked about universal rights, Mary Yan, 23, an English student at Peking University, was reported as saying: "It was quite enlightening to hear about her experience and her struggle. But it's not convenient for me to talk about such issues."

However, Obama's comments will also be seen as a criticism of the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who announced restrictions on Twitter last week.

The Turkish state tried to block the micro-blogging site after some users in recent weeks posted voice recordings and documents purportedly showing evidence of corruption among Erdogan's inner circle. Turkey said that action had been taken against Twitter as a "protection measure".

The US frequently criticises China's human rights record, including its lack of protection for freedom of speech, but before her trip the White House had stressed that America's first lady would avoid sensitive subjects.

Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer, is focusing on promoting education and cultural ties, and will visit the Great Wall, the historic city of Xi'an, and the southern city of Chengdu along with her family.

Her three-city tour marks only the third time that Obama has made an overseas trip without her husband since the family moved into the White House.

Former US first ladies Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton have both criticised other countries' human rights records on trips abroad while their husbands were in office. The American ambassador to China, Max Baucus, also touched on internet freedom in remarks to the students before Obama's speech. "Between texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat we're all interconnected," he said, describing how technology enables better communication between cultures.

Obama also met Chinese president Xi Jinping on the first day of her tour. The formal meeting occurred in a state guesthouse and included Xi's wife, Peng Liyuan, who has an unusually high profile in China where the spouses of leaders generally stay hidden.

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NAME THAT PARTY: Federal Agents Investigate Former Illinois Lawmaker For Child Pornography

03/22/2014

State Rep. Keith Farnham (Tribune Photo)

An Illinois Democratic lawmaker, State Rep. Keith Farnham, abruptly resigned from office earlier this week a day after he won re-nomination to his seat in Tuesday's Democratic Party unopposed after it was learned that federal agents executed a search warrant on his district office and home in Elgin, Illinois earlier this month and seized several computers. Farnham cited health reasons for his resignation, but the contents of the search warrant executed on his office indicates that federal agents were searching for child pornography on his computer according to the Chicago Tribune. 

An attachment to the March 7 warrant to search Farnham’s district office indicated agents were searching for “documents in any format and medium pertaining to the possession, receipt or distribution of child pornography” as well as computer files, copies and negatives of child pornography or any documents that depicted minors “engaged in sexually explicit conduct.” Agents also sought accounts tied to any Internet service provider or computer file sharing, according to the records.

The Tribune reports that officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") also seized a laptop computer from his Illinois State House office on Thursday that he used for his legislative work.

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Díaz-Balart: Obama May Issue 'Very Controversial Executive Orders' on Immigration

03/22/2014

Last week, President Obama directed his Homeland Security Department to examine its current deportation practices -- "to see how it can conduct enforcement more humanely, within the confines of the law," the White House announced on March 13.

But with immigration reform stalled in Congress, what more can Obama do?

"I think he's going to wait until August," said Telemundo anchor and immigration-reform advocate José Díaz-Balart. And if Congress doesn't act on immigration reform by then, "I wouldn't be surprised if he starts making some very controversial executive orders to mitigate the pain of millions of people who face deportation," Díaz-Balart told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday.

Díaz-Balart suggested that Obama could scrap a Homeland Security program called Secure Communities, which allows state and local police to check the immigration status of people  they detain for other reasons.

"That has caused more thn 150,000 people to be deported," Díaz-Balart said. "And maybe the president could tackle that specifically. That would mitigate immediately in local communities people who have minor traffic infractions and find themselves deported."

Secure Communities was created by the Bush administration, not by Congress.

Díaz-Balart mentioned families that are "divided and destroyed" every day in this country when relatives who came here illegally are sent back home and forced to leave their American-born children or other American relatives.

Díaz-Balart said he believes the president not only "feels the pain" of deportations -- he also feels the sting of criticism from groups such as the National Council of La Raza, which recently called him "deporter in chief."

"That, I think, has hurt the president and his message that he is the person who supports immigration reform...I think that does cause him to say, well let me see what I can do if nothing is done by August. Maybe I'll have to step forward, even take controversial decisions that right now I'm not willing to take."

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Pelosi to Receive Planned Parenthood Award Honoring Eugenicist

03/22/2014

                               Pictured:Nancy Pelosi, sworn in with a roomful of useful unaborted fetuses.

Next week, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America will present House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) with the Margaret Sanger Award. The award is the group’s “highest honor” and is named for a woman who believed in breeding better humans through eugenics.

Planned Parenthood is the nation's leading abortion provider, having performed 327,166 of the procedures in 2012, according to its latest annual report.

Pelosi, a Catholic, will receive the Margaret Sanger Award at the PPFA’s annual gala in Washington, D.C. on Mar. 27. She is being honored, according to PPFA, because of her “leadership, excellence, and outstanding contributions to the reproductive health and rights movement over the course of her career.”

Planned Parenthood, according to its website, traces its origins to 1916 when Sanger opened a birth control office in Brooklyn, N.Y. (In 1917, she started publishing The Birth Control Review.) In 1923, Sanger opened the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau in Manhattan to provide contraceptives to women and collect data on their effectiveness.

In 1922, Sanger incorporated the American Birth Control League, a group designed to address issues such as "world population growth, disarmament, and world famine." The American Birth Control League subsequently merged with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and later became the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.

In 1921, Margaret Sanger wrote an essay entitled “Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda," which was published in the Oct. 5 edition of The Birth Control Review.

In the article, Sanger expressed her support for eugenics, which is defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a science that tries to improve the human race by controlling which people become parents,” and which is broadly defined as the practice of selective breeding and sterilization to “improve” the genetics of a human population.

                             

Page 1 from Margaret Sanger's 1921 essay, "Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda." (Library of Congress)

Sanger states in this essay that eugenics at that time had been subject to “the cruel ridicule of stupidity and ignorance.”

“Today, eugenics is suggested by the most diverse minds as the most adequate and thorough avenue to the solution of racial, political and social problems,” Sanger wrote. “The most intransigent and daring teachers and scientists have lent their support to this great biological interpretation of the human race.”

Sanger goes on to write: “In the limited space of the present paper, I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal with the final aims of Eugenics.”

The essay goes on to state: “As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit,’ admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes.

“In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes.

“On the contrary," Sanger continued, "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)

“Birth Control,” she wrote, “is not advanced as a panacea by which past and present evils of dysgenic breeding can be magically eliminated.

“Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupidly cruel sentimentalism,” Sanger wrote.

Sanger began advocating for the legalization of contraceptives in the United States in 1914 in her publication, The Rebel Woman.

She specifically fought to overturn the 1873 Comstock Act, which amended the Post Office Act to prohibit distributing obscene literature through the mail, including literature about contraceptives, according to the 1992 biography by Ellen Chesler, Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America.

Sanger also lobbied for birth control to be funded by the federal government to increase access to contraceptives for low-income populations and to include contraceptives as a public health benefit in federal programs for maternal and child health.

The 1921 article in The Birth Control Review was neither the first nor last time Sanger discussed eugenics.

In February 1919 in The Birth Control Review she published an article entitled “Birth Control and Racial Betterment” in which she argued that while birth control advocates and eugenists  both want the “elimination of the unfit,” eugenicists wanted to promote reproduction of the “fit” while the birth control advocates also saw economic reasons for limiting reproduction.

"Before eugenists and others who are laboring for racial betterment can succeed, they must first clear the way for Birth Control," Sanger wrote.

"Like the advocates of Birth Control, the eugenists, for instance are seeking to assist the race toward the elimination of the unfit," she wrote. "Both are seeking a single end but they law emphasis upon different methods."

“We who advocate Birth Control, on the other hand, lay all our emphasis upon stopping not only the reproduction of the unfit but upon stopping all reproduction when there is not economic means of providing proper care for those who are born in health," wrote Sanger. "The eugenicist also believes that a woman should bear as many healthy children as possible as a duty to the state. We hold that the world is already over-populated. Eugenicists imply or insist that a woman's first duty is to the state; we contend that her duty to herself is her duty to the state."

In this 1919 essay, Sanger argued that women had a "right" to decide how many children to have.

“We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother," wrote Sanger.

"To this end we insist that information in regard to scientific contraceptives be made open to all," she said. "We believe that if such information is placed within the reach of all, we will have made it possible to take the first, greatest step toward racial betterment and that this step, assisted in no small measure by the educational propaganda of eugenicists and members of similar schools, will be taken.”

In the “conclusion” of an undated, typed, draft article that is included in the Margaret Sanger Papers at the Library of Congress, and that is entitled “The Unfit,” Sanger did not say that it was a woman's right to decide how many children to have but that said that some people should be given "a choice of sterilization or isolation."

In that article, she wrote:

“We can see how naturally we are today brought up to those questions of birth control as an instrument of higher breeding and regeneration of the race," wrote Sanger.

Condoms (AP Photo)

“In case of refusal such persons should have a choice of sterilization or isolation," she said. "Under no circumstances should the state allow such parents to cast their diseased and demented progeny upon society for the normal and fit to provide for.”

The Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger includes portions of a speech that Sanger gave on Aug. 5, 1926 at the Institute for Euthenics at Vassar College.  It was also published in The Birth Control Review in October 1926. This speech, entitled “The Function of Sterilization,” proposes how the practice can lead to “race betterment.”

Sanger states, “The Question of race betterment is one of immediate concern, and I am glad to say that the United States Government has already taken certain steps to control the equality of our population through the drastic immigration laws.

“There is a quota restriction by which only so many people from each country are allowed to enter our shores each month," she said. "It is the latest method adopted by our government to solve the population problem. Most people are convinced that this policy is right, and agree that we should slow down on the number as well as the kind of immigrants coming here.

“But while we close our gates to the co-called 'undesirables' from other countries, we make no attempt to discourage or cut down the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home.”

(AP Photo)

In this speech Sanger said: “It now remains for the United States government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or a yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit."

Sanger goes on: “There is only one reply to a request for a higher birth rate among the intelligent, and that is to ask the government to first take off the burdens of the insane and feeble-minded from your backs. Sterilization for these is your remedy.”

Sanger’s article “Birth Control: Yes or No” was published in “Fairplay” on Sept. 20, 1919 and portions of the text are missing. It was the third of a three-article series, “Prudence and Purity in Sex Matters.”

“Yes, but how about the unfit--the mental defectives who ought most of all to avoid offspring--would they know enough to use the knowledge if it were given to them?" she wrote.  "The great majority of mental defectives are not in institutions, but are at large in the community. No defective can produce normal offspring.

"These people are therefore a serious menace to community health," Sanger said. "Experts such as Dr. H. H. Goddard of the Vineland Training School for the Feeble Minded, have expressed the very definite opinion that large numbers of defective people are capable of understanding and acting upon contraceptive information, and that they should be taught. The institutions for feeble-mindedness and insanity are increasingly overflowing. The supply of defectives should be cut off at the source. Mere governmental economy demands this -- even if there were no other reasons. To use public funds needlessly for the care of the unfit instead of for education and opportunity for the normal is criminal stupidity.”

Sanger also states that “family limitation” does not necessary mean small families:

Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards and President Barack Obama. (AP)

“It must never be inferred that advocates of family limitation are necessarily urging small families as such. It is true that relatively few parents can give successful care to large families, but all who can ought surely to have as many as they want.”

Sanger's article, “Will Birth Control Diminish It?” was published in Eugenics on March 23, 1929. In this piece Sanger wrote: “The garden of humanity has been choked by the destructive forces of uncontrolled and misdirected procreation.”

"To say that birth control runs the risk of excluding from life geniuses as well as defectives is to imply that chance is a better guide than intelligence," she said. "The total number of geniuses in the whole of human history is much less than one thousand. The total number of defectives could never be computed. The damage they have done to civilization cannot be counterbalanced by the benefits we have derived from genius. The garden of humanity has been choked by the destructive forces of uncontrolled and misdirected procreation. Small wonder that the potentialities hidden in the human species have so seldom flowered in genius.

"Father McClorey [who wrote the opposing view in the magazine] may think it better to abandon the garden to the weeds, naively confident that geniuses will make their appearances regardless of heredity and environment," Sanger said. "But no student of genetics, no one who has even superficially observed the achievements of scientific horticulture and animal breeding, can consider seriously that the road to human perfection can ever be attained by abandoning scientific control and reverting to a childish reliance upon the blind forces of uncontrolled procreative instincts.”

In announcing that Planned Parenthood had picked Pelosi’s to receive this year’s Margaret Sanger Award, PPFA President Cecile Richards said: “No one is more deserving of this honor than Leader Pelosi, who has fought tirelessly throughout her career to protect and expand women’s access to health care."

Previous winners of the Margaret Sanger Award include the late Justice Harry Blackmun, who wrote the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion on demand in the United States, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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