Chell's Roost

It wasn’t quite hiking weather this morning, but I grabbed a couple pics of the spring thaw. The rain is really working on melting our snow. We’ve had “pea soup” fog for a couple of days, but it let up just enough for the camera. A week of temps in the 50’s is coming up- yay!!

“Your fair share is not in my pocket.” This Tea Party slogan was on a sign held by a protester against Obamacare in a morning news photo, and I couldn’t agree more.

Health insurance is a scam. It’s not health care, it doesn’t guarantee care, and it often stands in the way of getting care. It seems criminal for the federal government to demand I take food off of my family’s table so I can give my hard earned money to such a scam. Real positive health care reform would, instead, focus on lowering the cost of services and supplies and not letting patients be turned away for choosing to pay directly for care. Of course someone will charge you $20 and up for two Tylenol if they can repeatedly get away with it.

As far as the have’s and the have not’s, I’m very sorry if you are one of the latter. Me too, at least for now. Your local community, even your state, will do a better job of managing local needs than an out of touch federal government. Generally a stingy, self-centered bastard is not well respected for it. His community may show this by not continuing to contribute to whatever made this person, but it’s not the government’s job to mandate that one cannot be a selfish bastard. Putting the federal government up to robbing those who either have more than you or those who simply go without in order to stay off of Welfare doesn’t absolve you of responsibility for the dirty deed.

Unless you were born with a stick shift up your butt and a Michelin birthmark, sit down and shut up about health insurance being the same as auto insurance. Know the difference between deciding to drive and simply being born. Know the difference between state laws and a federal mandate.

Obama and many Democratic senators have made it clear they favor railroading health care reform through via reconciliation. Because this process is aimed at budget issues, it is yet to be seen exactly how many of the proposed changes in the bill could hop this train. Another glimmer of hope for our freedoms is that not all Democratic senators are on board, and the House and Senate may not even act in unison enough to pass anything.

If your state has legislation on the table related to the Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act, be a strong voice in support of getting it on the ballot. Let the citizens decide!

If you’re worried about online privacy, you may regularly delete browser cookies. You may even have your browser set up not to accept them from websites not on your whitelist. But you may still have cookies on your machine, in a directory you don’t know exists. Flash cookies, Local Shared Objects, aren’t managed via browser settings and they aren’t listed there like regular cookies. They can be much larger than browser cookies. They don’t expire. They can be accessed by their issuing websites for years.

Rather than changing global settings for these cookies via the Adobe Flash program installed on your own computer, you must visit the flash settings manager, on the Adobe website. When I changed these settings, the Adobe website created a “settings.sol” file, a flash cookie, on my computer. And their turd of a program proceeded to allow additional new flash cookies to be created on my computer, gleefully ignoring my settings.

I deleted these .sol files using a Seamonkey add-on called BetterPrivacy, also available for Firefox. It’s also perfectly fine to delete them in your file browser. On my Linux machine, they were in a “hidden” folder named .macromedia/Flash_Player in my user home directory. Once the files are deleted, to keep LSO’s from being created there, change the permissions for this directory. I also deleted the files and folders in .adobe/Flash_Player, and set the same permissions for that folder.

Since I made these changes, no new flash cookies have been created on my machine. MySpace music doesn’t play, but YouTube videos play fine. SmallWorlds doesn’t work, but at least some of the flash games on Facebook work fine. News, mail, and financial websites haven’t broken. Privacy and security are far more important to me than fun and games.

To simplify things, if you wish to do this, no special add-ons or programs are required. Locate the folder where .sol files are stored. You can search for .sol files in your file browser to accomplish this. In Windows it might be something like Macromedia\Flash Player, in Linux, .macromedia/Flash_Player. Delete existing .sol files in the folder. Give yourself access but not create/delete permissions for files in the folder. Search for and delete files under the .adobe/Flash_Player folder (again, it will be different for Windows), and restrict permissions for it as well. Done.

Flash cookies are nothing new. It’s outrageous that this shady method of storing this type of cookie has been accepted for as long as it has.

Preoccupied with gaming or with logging back on? Think you’re the character in real life you are in-game? Get a clue! Tend and talk to your kid. Clean your house. Go to work. Brush your teeth even! Try to drum up the courage you have in-game when it comes to stepping out your real front door and dealing with people face to face in the here and now. That goddess or god you’ve been flirting with on the screen is as big a loser as you. Um, unless he or she happens to be a program. Like the one this guy married. Ahh hahahahahaaaa!! Is game addiction even a real thing? I think it’s just an excuse for stupid.