Brain Dump My @#$% Mac SE Windows stuff Odds & Ends Conspiracy

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Conspiracies

Note: Due to sheer volume, GeoCities conspiracies are now on a separate page

 Corporate Delilah
8/6/99

Let me hazard a guess here. Do you listen to Delilah's radio program? You know-- Dee-lyyy-laaaa! Yeah, I thought so. So do I. I live in Angola, IN. Where do you live?

It kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it. Who the hell is Delilah, and how can she be everywhere at once? There are only 2 people on the entire planet that can be everywhere at once: God and Santa Claus. Arduous scientifical studies have already debunked Santa Claus as a fraudulent myth, and the jury's still out on that other guy. So, a brief excursion into Logic Land here...

Delilah  God
Delilah  Santa Claus

So what the f*** is going on then? The answer lies within our own modern greed and technology. There are many, many cities in the US with nonoverlapping radio signals. So in each of these zillion cities, somobody's got to do the ubiquitous "Eighties at Eight" (yes, every alternative-rock station has one), and likewise, somobody's got to crank out all those wussy love songs until midnight every weekend on the Adult Contemporary frequency. The 3 or so media giants that control 95% of the national radio dial got a wisebug up their collective ass and said, "Hey, why are we wasting our money on having a DJ in every city? Let's just have a central DJ in, say, New York and just run the rest of the nation's radio stations on autopilot via satellite feed?" The obvious reasoning is that since Americans are inherently stupid, we have no idea whatsoever that our "local" station is just feeding us the same tired news and personalities the rest of the nation is getting from that same central office. Funny how many people assume the radio personalities they hear every morning on their local station are indeed local. "Ol' weatherman Zeeke feels our pain..." So the next time you're driving to work to the music and witticisms of Bob & Tom/Eddie & Jobo/Mancow/Delilah/etc., just bear in mind... it's the same damn stuff everyone else is listening to.

Lay back, I am now going to tell you the story of Mister Alternative. Once upon a time there lived a man who wrote Crappy Music.  He made horrible annoying music with little or NO synthesizers.  People hated him because it was the Eighties, and New Wave was extremely popular.  Then a great guitarist by the name of Kurt Cobain would change all that.  He released an album called Bleach (Which KRISTOFF OWNS) in 1989.  It had a really cool punk sound.  (too bad all of his other CD's were so bogus that he had to blow his brains out in 1993, He was truly a one hit wonder)  Any way, The crappy music man had a brilliant idea!  "Hey why don't (contractions are for illiterates) I write a series of songs that sound just like this Cobain guy.  I can write and sing it all.  Then I will create a series of hundreds of imaginary groups that will lip sync my material!  First was Pearl Jam, then Hootie and the Blowfish, then Third Eye Blind, Then Bare Naked Ladies, the Backstreet Boys, etc...  (name all the bands that sound identical, yet are oddly enough loved by the general populous of brainwashed Nineties youth)  Oh, and do NOT forget Dave Math.... Anyway, his imaginary bands became immensely popular.  Even though each band hit a high point, and then died away quite a bit (look at Pearl Jam's latest record, it was a disaster compared to their previous records, or look at Hootie, etc)  He would resurrect his sound by a new name, Cake is one such recent incarnation.  But, it did not stop there, oh no.  He stated that his music was ALTERNATIVE, when in fact is was more pop than anything pop before it!  The masses thought they were listening to original music, when in fact all they listened to was poorly written rock with little or no experimentation.  I know Mister Alternative does not take Drugs!  How can you write good music without drugs? And, Mister Alternative is not a bi-sexual.  How can you write good music if you do not swing both ways.  But, mister alternative has one thing going for him, he is married to misses alternative. So misses alternative lost her love in 1993 when he blew his brains out.  She was hysterical.  Then she thought "Hey I can write s*ckier (that is a bad word) than my husband who wrote only one good CD in his entire life, and then a bunch of pop crap that hurt my ears, and lead him to drug abuse (see all good rockers take drugs)  I will now write and sing music, And make a whole bunch of bands, including my own, which will profit off the general masses' stupidity!"  Hence Hole, Alanis Morrissette, and many other annoying Nineties chick bands were born.  Mister Alternative was at a Hole concert when he realized, I have found my future wife.  So at a Dave Matthews Band concert they were married, in secrecy!  Now they work together on their bogus crap music, and subject us all to the worst music of all time. In their free time they run Microsoft.  Wait, you mean to tell me you did not know who Mister Alternative was?  That is right, it is Bill Gates, who controls all things.  That evil man is actually controlling us through his evil music.  So repent, buy the real alternative music, NEW WAVE!  Buy Bowie from the seventies and Eighties, Buy Sting, Peter Gabriel, Meat Loaf, Depeche Mode, U2, Pink Floyd, Boy George, The Call ... Give your money to the drugged out bi-sexuals who know what they are doing, and not Bill Gates!  NOW you know the rest of the story!

-KRISTOFF, The Great

(quoted from my own "college life")
It's the middle of Math class. But not just any math class. PRECALC. You're a college freshman who took calculus last year in high school, made a few little mistakes on your college placement exam and got kicked back to Trig/Precalc. The professor is busy trying to teach the fat girl in the first row, again, what a graph is. "X Axis. Y Axis. Origin. Do you know what a quadrant is, or should I explain it again?" You apparently nodded off for a few seconds...minutes...periods...because you spasm awake just in time to see the professor explain how to reduce a fraction. You remember hearing him say, "Naaah, let's do something a little simpler." Muffled sniggers and a voice from the back of the room: "Like what--addition?"

You have come to the understanding that this class is a hopelessly pointless Waste of Your Time. You pass the time the best way you can, by playing games on your graphing calculator. Your matte black TI-85 calls out to you, begging to be played with. "Jut one quick game of Tetris," it says, "Come on, it'll be fun." After a few minutes..no..seconds of cajoling from your calculator, you're heavily engrossed in a deathmatch round of Dr. Mario with the guy next to you. The prof apparently doesn't notice all those little black wires stretched between desks, linking opponents in multiplayer winner-take-all deathmatches. And so it continues, day in, day out. Until....
"I love Breakout...dink, donk, dink, donk...woah.....waiiiit a minute, what's going on here....oh no....no.....No....NOOOOOOOOOOO!..."

"My damn batteries!"

Now, no graphing calculators that I have seen use any kind of standard battery type. Mine for example uses triple-A size batteries. As far as batteries go, 'AA' is like the everpresent dust mite, while 'AAA' is more like a Dodo bird. You can't go rob some new 'AAA's out of your Walkman or the cushions of your sofa. Getting these wierd-o batteries involves an arduous trek in search of them (for a lazy college freshman like yourself, the 15-minute jog to Walmart is an arduous trek). So that leaves you with no hope save for The Bookstore, a rapacious in-school establishment that is not really part of the school at all, but a money-leeching corporate snakepit disguised as a benevolent here-to-help-you establishment. And of course, they carry 'AAA' batteries. For $8.95 apiece. They know you'll be needing them. After all, who do you think was in charge of hiring all those boring professors? And rewriting the entrance exam in Japanese? And making sure that Zshell and all the best calc games were always readily availible? Duh.
 (end quote. Pathetic, isn't it, when you plagarise yourself??)

It used to be 10-321, right? Save a kajillion dollars on your long-distance bill, calling so dirt-cheap you can throw away your Blue Box and make those five-hour calls to Grandma in San Jose without dialing collect? Now it's 10-10-321, you say?

You may think that this is just some one-time screwup, that you can go on calling with 10-10-321 'til the end of eternity. Well, folks, it ain't. What you are looking at here is a poorly-covered conspiracy by the Government. The whole dial-this-string-of-numbers-and-save-a-few-pennies-on-the-call-if-this-and-this-and-this-condition-are-met deal is a psychological experiment, and we are the guinea pigs. Similar experiments have been done before. Remember Bandura? Remember Skinner's boxes and Pavlov's salivating dogs? The 10-10-321 experiment could go either of two ways:

1. They will spring more and more of these 'save money' numbers upon us labrats; they've already started. You've heard of 10-10811 and 10-10-297, right? For the first few, they will extoll the benefits of dialing the extra digits. TV commercials, billboards, and posters all over will make very sure you know just how much money you'll save by dialing this number. Then, more numbers. They won't say, necessarily, that you'll save money. They'll just give you a new string of numbers. Dial This Number, they'll croon. And you'll do it. You used to pick these things up to save money, but now dialing these extra numbers will be a conditioned response, much like that of Pavlov's trained dogs.
2. They'll take the several existing save-money numbers, such as 10-321 and begin adding extra digits every month or so. "Attention folks, now it's been lengthened to 10-10-321..." ...and in another month or two, "Attention folks, 10-10-321 is now 10-426-10-321..." A couple months later they will lengthen the save-money number some more. The idea is, they want to see how many extra junk digits you are willing to commit to memory and dial before each call to save a little money.

You'd better stay away from the Internet. It's evil, I tell you! EVIL!  All there are out there are stalkers, murderers, pedophiles and serial rapists that will hunt you down and rob, mutilate and kill you, or even worse. All the Web has to offer is pages and pages of racist hate propaganda. And cults. Can't forget about the cults. Behind every HTML file there is another Marshall Applewhite trying to sucker more of your precious children away from you and into a hemlock-drinking suicide frenzy to join some nonexistant extraterrestrials on some nonexistant spaceship hiding behind some as-yet-unmentioned celestial phenomenon. We're talking sick, twisted people. Racists denouncing the minority-of-the-week from their high HTTP pedistals, counting on the alleged anonymity of the network to ensure that they can continue to spew their racist crap. Stalkers following you through the seedy back alleys of the most disgusting and perverted chatrooms imaginable, waiting for their moment to pounce. Hackers behind every corner trying to pry your credit-card number from your buggy, loose-lipped browser, then toss you some files you don't want and give your computer AIDS.

You, as a current Internet user who's been there and seen the real 'Net, know that this is a load of sensationalist, yellow-journalism hogwash. But what if you've never ventured out on the real live 'Net, having to instead rely on accounts such as the above to paint your only picture of this wonderful resource that educates, entertains, and brings people all over the world closer together? If rape and robbery is what you thought the Internet was all about, wouldn't you be afraid to set up an online account? Bingo! Welcome to the world of mass media. Sadly, Internet scares like the above are rampant in today's print and television media. Walter Jacobsen, cheif anchormidget of the ubiquitous Fox television network, can be heard almost weekly trotting out yet another piece of oversensationalized scare propaganda emphasizing the depraved, evil influence of the Internet and all the filthy little perverts like you and I that comprise it.

Why does this happen? Why does all you ever hear about the 'Net on TV refer back to some stalking incident of someone who gave her home address to some creep in alt.sex back in 1994? Why does the newspaper take such glee in turning the slightest misdeed even remotely connected with the Internet into a front-page, sickenengly twisted 'Don't let this happen to you' exposé? Simple. It's a battlefield out there in the media world. It's a constant battle for your eyes. You may have noted that, especially before the days of the world's largest and arguably most useful-to-the-everyday-person network, the newspapers continually sniped at television as a horrifying, twisted abomination that would rot our brains, singlehandedly create dysfunctional families of every description, and poison the minds of our impressionable little children. Simply put, television news was detracting from newspaper readership (and therefore purchase, subscriptionship and advertising dollars), just as the Internet is drawing millions of couch potatoes away from the boob-tube now. Newspaper and TV execs estimate that the 'Net has usurped anywhere from 10 to 40 percent of its audience, and even polls by various PC and Internet-related magazines show that as us 'eyeballs' spend more and more time online, newspaper reading and especially TV viewing hours drop sharply. To keep their hold as long as possible, what else can the other media do but scare people away from the 'Net? Tell ya what: Jacobsen, and all you other media moguls whose job it is to keep people off the Web and in front of your screens instead, keep it up. Please, keep as many people away from the Internet as possible. Save some more bandwidth for the rest of us. After all, the more people you can succesfully scare away, the faster my child pornography will download. Thank you, and God bless.

Been to Hotmail lately?  If you have, you might have noticed it's new partnership with Microsoft.  Since then, Microsoft Network pulldown menues have been popping up all over Hotmail.  If Microsoft has the power to change the main sites of Hotmail, then they most certainly have access to all of our names, addresses, personal information and all of that other info that we filled out when we first signed up.  And they most certainly use the information collected by Hotmail cookies.
Microsoft now knows almost everything there possibly is to know about all Hotmail users, and I'm betting that in time, all of those that use Netscape will have difficulties getting around Hotmail.

And what is with the amount of time it takes for Microsoft to scan your computer to see which version of IE you have?  I just decided to upgrade to 4.1 (please don't hurt me because I use the exploiter...I'm fully aware of how evil it makes me) Microsoft scanned my comoputer for at least a minute (or maybe it just felt that long).  I wonder what kind of stuff they found out about my system besides which version of IE I was using.

hmmm...

Bill Gates' golf commercial.  Have you seen it?  I have never wanted to kick in my TV more than I did then.  That wimpy piece of shit couldn't hit a golf ball more than 5 feet.  I can't believe he's doing advertisments like that.  Obviously he's trying to appeal to a larger market or something, but somehow his whiny little voice makes me want to burn everything Microsoft (but of course, we know the size of a hole that would put in the ozone layer - and knowing gates, he'd patent it).  There's a good article in last week's The Onion about Bill Gates' patents.

 --Submitted by Adam Middleton

Just got word from the_omega, Micro$oft's website is now inaccessible from the Anonymizer. Seems that, in their eternal quest to keep very close tabs on its suckers (err, patrons), Microsoft has written the Anonymizer's webmaster requesting that they block all anonymous access to their site. Not only that, but the error page given when trying to anonymize MS is different from their standard 'access denied' page. (Maybe it is specifically formulated to let MS know exactly who is trying to drop by anonymously???)

The following clip was taken directly from C|Net's news.com site (I hope they do not come after us for copyright...):

 

... "Earlier, MSNBC contained a feature that would not allow readers to view certain news stories in their full glory unless the reader was using Internet Explorer."  ...  Original Article

As we screeched away from Window #2, Bugman handed me my Big Mac. "This is a Big Mac?" he said, experimentally weighing the teensy package the zitfaced burgerslinger handed us through the bulletproof glass of the McDonald's drive-through. "It don't look like any Big Mac." Indeed, I had almost completely scarfed the lettuce-laden midgetburger by the time we pulled out of the parking lot onto the vast expanse of LaGrange Road. Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it? Have the truth-in-advertising people somehow overlooked the food people? Since when is a Big Mac a Big Mac? Why does a Family Size meal from your grocer's frozen section never satisfy an entire family? On what exactly are these serving sizes based? Families of anorexic pygmies? Just for fun, I sat down with one of those "family size' Encore lasagnas that supposedly feeds five. I nuked and ate the whole thing myself, and could not honestly consider myself satisfied. In fact, if I had another one handy I would have eaten most if it, too. Unfortunately, this type of food fraud is everywhere. Cans of olives, fruit cups, bottles of soda, and especially bags of chips are subject to this food fraud. Even more strongly hit are 'low fat' or 'diet' entrees. The reason these entrees are low fat in the first place is simply because there isn't enough volume of food there to contain a significant amount of fat and calories. It could be a block of lard and still qualify as 'lowfat'. This is no doubt a conspiracy by unseen agencies with poorly hidden agendas, possibly the same forces responsible for liposuction and the Barbie doll, bent on perpetuating the 'thin is in' ideal of bodily perfection that currently grips America by its collective testicles, and converting us into a nation of scrawny, anorexic-looking weenies. Could it be another nation that intends to take us over? Certainly underfed scrawnies would not put up much of a fight. Worse yet, could it be an alien civilization that, instead of fattening the good citizens of Earth like Hansel and Gretel, is weakening us for an easy takeover? Just a thought...
PS:  Do not tell McDonald's about this page. If you've heard anything about the McLibel court cases, you'd know that McDonalds does not take the badmouthing of its products lightly, and there is a chance that we could even be sued for posting this material. Even if that doesn't happen, this site will most definitely get deleted. This would cause a big stir with the mass media, which would then paint McDonalds as a mean ogre for going so far as to censor a harmless humor page, resulting in an untold amount of lost business for McDonalds, and the end result would be two very ticked-off parties. So don't do it.

Yep, 'Sweetest Day' has come and gone. But had you even heard of it ten years ago? No! And here's why: Hallmark Corp. invented it. As you know, Hallmark makes greeting cards for holiday occasions. Sweetest Day was made up so Hallmark could sell more cards. About six years ago, they just printed up millions of 'Sweetest Day' cards and sneaked them onto store shelves along with the usual Birthday, Graduation, and I-hope-you-recover-from-those-37-stab-wounds-in-the-back-soon best wishes. People started to buy them, thinking this was an actual holiday. Then Hallmark brought out its secret weapon: Guilt. By using 'plants', members of the general population (mostly women) paid to put their significant others through a heart-wrenching hell for forgetting them on Sweetest Day and informing as many others as humanly possible of this shameful fact, they guilted the heartstrings of American men into buying their greeting cards so that their girlfriends don't dump them. Yes, guilt is a marketing tool. If you disbelieve, carefully watch the next TV peanut-butter commercial: Moms that care about their children choose Spiffy-Nut. Those *bad parents* of grossly dysfunctional families, who really don't give a rat's ass about anything except their next drug fix, they buy the other leading brand. Come on, people. Inventing holidays? Yes, this is indeed shameful.

The search engines have officially been corrupted. Participating in an ongoing conspiracy to completely commercialize the Internet, major searches such as Infoseek have been configured to automatically give higher relevancy ratings to commercial and business sites, generally any sites that want to sell you something rather than inform you. Additionally, commercial sites can 'buy off' some searches, paying the operators an undisclosed sum in exchange for higher relevancy ratings. In case you don't believe it, look carefully at the next search results you receive. In doing research for a paper on the cable television system, I did a search for the 'cable TV bullet' on Infoseek. The very top site in the search results was: Hot Springs Lodging Guide. The words 'Cable TV' were used only twice in the entire document, describing the accommodations of their hotel rooms. 'Bullet' was not found in it at all. In another search I was looking for a specific JavaScript program to display the last-modified date of a page. The keywords searched for on Lycos were JavaScript dowArray. The top-ranked result? Not a Javascript site, not a programmer's page, but Hand Blown Glass Creations. (I checked the page source and everything, no Javascript anywhere to be found.)  Have you had your own strange experiences with a search engine? You probably have. When you are searching for that specific bit of information, do you find yourself instinctively hitting the 'next results' link two or three times to bypass the commercial sites? If you've had similarly strange experiences with a search engine (Cable TV bullet, indeed!) be sure to  the results. Be sure to include the actual keywords searched for and the search engine being used.
In still another attack on personal content in favor of mass commercialization, searches such as Lycos, Infoseek, Excite and others now refuse to index the free hosted pages that represent the human side of the Web. Hosts such as Geocities, Tripod and Angelfire have been banned from these indexes entirely. While the operators of the searches claim it's because personal pages like these attempt to subvert search engine relevancy ratings, we all know the real reasons behind this move. The Web is to become a multi-million gigabyte infomercial; a money maker for advertisers, marketers, and spammers.

The promise of the 'Evil TV' has come true. The next time you're in a hotel and find a television set that lets you order pay-per-view, get room service, and play video games at the push of a button, beware. Hotels are beginning to use televisions that are capable of two-way communication via coaxial cable. These cables are linked to a central computer, which can divy out free and pay-per-view feeds, dial out foor room service and pizzas from the local restaurant, and even emulate certain video-game platforms and coordinate them with input from a controller attached to the TV. Think carefully about this for a minute. This television, while you're watching it, could be watching you back. From simply turning the set on, the hotel can determine that the TV is in use, what you are watching, when you are watching it, and can build a database of your general interests and infer some demographic information such as race, gender, and social status. And the hotel already knows your name, home address, and probably your credit-card number as well. So? While the information gathered by the TV may not appear to be harmful even in the wrong hands,  just try and imagine the guys reading the logs or watching the screen of the computer running it: "Hey, get a load of this! Johnson is watching the porno channel again! What's it been, like six hours now? Of course, we all know what he's doing during the commercials..." (muffled sniggering from around the room) "Uh-oh, the TV just went off. Better send the maid up with extra towels...! " Just remember, the next time you're sitting in your hotel room watching Baywatch or the Alternative-Lifestyles channel, SpyTV may be watching you.

This just in: Rumor has it, Microsoft has designed its website in such a way that Netscape users cannot access parts of it, such as the IE bug reports. While we'd never actually stoop low enough to visit Microsoft's website unless absolutely necessary, it does sound an awful lot like something Microsoft would do. Most likely, the bug reports have been made inaccessable to Netscape users so that they are not dissuaded from downloading M$IE by these bug warnings. No wonder nobody is too fond of these sneaky b*stards

--Informed by The Omega

Have you been to the movies lately? If so, you may have noticed that everybody and his brother on the silver screen smokes. Not only that, but the movie smokers are usually portrayed as popular, well-liked, and (for the smoker men) highly strong and masculine; a man's man. You may ask, "So what?", and blow this off as some coincidence. Don't. The reason for the popularity of cigarettes on TV and in the theaters is quite simple: Tobacco companies, faced with bad publicity and advertising restrictions, must again trick the public into thinking that smoking is 'cool', everyone else does it, it's not harmful, and the list goes on. While this may seem insignificant, bear in mind the role peer pressure played in the Holocaust. Simply put, the tobacco companies are playing with our minds. If they can fool one person, the person they fool will serve as a signpost to fool others. If this continues, smoking will once again become socially-accepted. Don't let yourself be fooled.

Okay, listen up. Here's the short and bitter scoop on the Apple-Microsoft deal: Antitrust Guard.  With an estimated 6% market share dropping rapidly, Apple is on the verge of extinction. And if there is no Apple, there's no real competition for Microsoft. That means they're a monopoly. (Okay, they're already a monopoly. But this would make it one in the "legal" sense.) The Feds would then be forced to put M$'s little stranglehold on the computer market to an end. Obviously, Microsoft would not like that. So, by keeping Apple afloat yet harmless, they can prevent this from happening. The deal also involves integrating M$ Internet Exploiter with the Mac OS, just like it has been with Windows. (Us OSR2 persons know the feeling quite well!) This deals another blow to Netscape Communications, their only potential rival, who is already a rabbit in the path of the oncoming steamroller.
 

Why are many Netizens smelling something fishy about Microsoft Internet Explorer? Besides the aforementioned security holes and spying potential, something just seems a little odd about how hard M$ is cramming this thing down everybody's throats. As if giving it away wasn't enough, they felt the need to fully integrate it into your computer's operating system. Question: Why incorporate this thing into my system like this? Do I really need MIE to play Duke Nukem or format a disk? (well, that last one can be accomplished right from within IE, should the need arise...) In case you haven't yet figured out why this thing is permanently rooted to your desktop and plugged on your startup screen, we'd like to explain: It's a technique known as software dumping. This illegal procedure is an attempt by a software company (usually a big one) to force another (usually a small start-up, like Netscape Communications) out of business by distributing an identical product below-cost or for free in an effort to keep the competition from turning a profit. Why else would a company like Microsoft spend millions of dollars (or even more) advertising a product, paying large teams of programmers to create, maintain, and continue to update and release new versions of it, and then just give it away? Duh. "Hmmm, why would I spend $50 for a web browser, when I can get the same thing absolutely free?" This must be stopped if you want to continue to see an affordable Web browser. Think: What would happen to browser prices if one company had a monopoly on them? At any rate, don't expect IE to stay free once Netscape is taken care of.

Ever wonder why operating systems get fatter every year? Why code gets more bloated, slow, and inefficient? Why the required amount of RAM and processing MHz to run your computer increases exponentially to the year? Why hard drives are growing so large as to require their own ZIP codes? It's no accident. Manufacturers of drives and chips, faced with a saturated market, are desperate for a way to get their customers to buy bigger, better, more expensive computer hardware. These companies, in collaboration with King Microsoft who came into power in the 80's, have conspired with software manufacturers to continually make programs bigger, sloppier, and slower. This necessitates buying bigger drives to hold them, more RAM to run them, and ever faster CPUs to keep them moving along at an acceptable speed. And why would they keep their mouths shut and comply? Rest assured that Wintel is giving handsome kickbacks to all who go along with it.