Tweakhound.com

Just revisited good ole Tweakhound.  He has a whole up to date section on Windows 10, lists of RAM hogs and CPU hogs that can be shut down to make Win 10 more lively.  Also  Tweakhound has a good description of Microsoft's "telemetry", where by your computer reports all sorts of stuff back to Microsoft, and instructions for shutting much of it down.  Microsoft has sworn up and down that "telemetry" is only used for bug fixing, and all data is anonymous, and data will never be sold on the open market.  You can believe as much of that as you like.   I shut as much telemetry down as I dare, thinking to free up RAM and CPU cycles for my purposes rather than Microsoft's.
   I am not a gamer, I just use the machine for email, photo storage, web surfing, some writing, nothing demanding compared to games.  I find Win 10 slow.  Running on a fairly new HP laptop, WIN 10 is no faster, in fact somewhat slower, than XP running on my ancient desktop.   The new laptop has double the speed, both CPU and RAM, 8 gigs of RAM, and yet the software load of Win 10 slows it down to worse than a ten year old machine. 
   Out of the box, Win 10 was a good deal faster than Win 8 from which I upgraded the laptop.  And after a bit of tweaking here and there, it is now noticeably livelier than it was out of the box. 
   Some of the stuff Tweakhound recommends is pretty drastic.  He strongly recommends you do a full disk backup before proceeding.  I agree with him.  My laptop has some 60 Gigs of hard drive used, which would take  maybe 15 DVD's to back up, which is just too much work for me.  So,  I didn't do the drastic stuff, and stuck with the tamer stuff, going thru Settings, or Services.  No register editing, and no massive deleting of stuff.  Works for me. 

Wall St Journal calls Internet Privacy bill phoney panic

That was the title of a Saturday WSJ editorial.  I assume they were discussing a bill that has made the news in the last couple of days.  So I read the  editorial, hoping to understand just what the bill was and what it would do.  Especially what it would do to me. 
   No luck.  The Journal's standards are slipping.  The editorial was unreadable.  And it made at least one big whopper.  The Journal said " The crew pushing the rule say cable companies deserve scrutiny because it is easy to change websites but hard to change internet service providers.  The reality is the reverse:"  Many of us live out of town and we don't get a choice of ISPs.  Up here Time Warner is the ONLY ISP offering broadband.  It is not hard the change ISP, it's impossible, there is only Time Warner. 
   The rest of the editorial jumped around, issued blame, with out ever getting down to the real issue, how much privacy are we giving up and to who. 
   There isn't much privacy left.  I figure my browsing history, all my email, all my purchases on the net, all my facebook posts, every app installed on my laptop, and probably some other stuff, is on the net, and anyone (cops, political opponents, nosy snoopers, the Russians, anyone) can see it.  I only post harmless stuff, photos of local scenery, cat pictures, cute kid pictures.  I don't visit porn sites and I don't visit music share sites.  I don't do Internet banking, I pay the bills with paper checks.   Since I am retired, out of the job market, and the children are grown up, I don't worry much.  Those of you still in the job market and still raising children need to do the worrying. 

Hillary wearing black leather?

She was on TV, behind a podium, campaigning again.  They didn't say what she was campaigning for.  And she had given up on the brightly colored pants suits she wore in the presidential campaign.  Now she is wearing a slick black leather coat, not quite motorcycle leathers, but close.  I wonder what voters she thought might find leather attractive.  Her former colorful pants suits outfits at least fit in with who she is, a little dowdy, fully mature (let's not say old), lady politician.  Her choices are limited, she lacks the figure and the looks to do the Jackie Kennedy or Melania Trump fashion look.  She doesn't want to do the Barbara Bush grandmother look.  But the black leather look?  At her age? 

The Russians are coming the Russians are Coming

This screwball topic has sucked up all the newsies for a week now.  Democrats are trying to smear the Trump administration with sucking up to commies.  For which zip for evidence has been forthcoming.  And what could the Russians offer Donald Trump either before or after the election of any value.  Hell Trump is probably richer than Russian intelligence, they aren't going to have enough money to buy him.
  And the newsies been all bouncing off the ceiling about a Republican Congressman paying a visit to the White House.  He is a Congressman after all.  He is perfectly entitled to visit the White House, any time, to have a cup of coffee, to talk things over with friends, to receive classified information, anything at all.  What's the big deal?
   Anyhow that's all the news from the TV this week.  You'd think there would be something more, but there isn't.

Sean Spicer's daily dog & pony show

Living alone, I like some noise in the house, so I have the TV on.  And set to Fox news.  Around lunchtime every day they carry the president's news conference, Sean Spicer, press secretary, presiding, live.  For an hour or more.   Spicer is fairly good,  he is seldom at a loss for words, he is glib, he forth rightly defends the administration.  He even occasionally says "Gee I don't know, can I get back to you?"
   The newsies are less impressive.  Their questions are mostly worthless, of the "what does so-and-so think about thus and such?" sort.  I don't care much about what people think, I want to know what happened.  What, Where, When, Who, and Why are news questions, the five big W's.  What  someone thinks ain't news, it's gossip.  And the newsies all wear big "Lefty Greenie" buttons on their lapels.  I think less of newsies who announce which side they have taken.  Makes me doubt their impartiality and their honesty.  

4 out of 5 heroin addicts started with presciptions

  Dr. Marc Siegel, in an op-ed in today's Wall St Journal, and on Fox news where he is the medical expert,  states that 4 our 5 heroin addicts got started on their addiction with opioids prescribed by their doctor.  Things like Percoset, Oxycontin, Vicodin, prescribed for pain, often back pain.  The Oxycontin situation is so bad that many pharmacies refuse to stock it, citing the risk of robberies by addicts.
   There has been a lot of talk about the opioid crisis, the over dose deaths from heroin and fentanyl and the need for "programs" (what ever that might mean) to "do something" about it.
   Maybe we need the medical profession to tight up their prescribing habits.  I haven't heard any talk about that.  
  

200 US paratroopers to Iraq.

That's maybe two companies of soldiers.  The TV news has been talking about it all day.  To listen to the TV will make you think a couple of hundred US troops is like D-Day in 1944.  Our troops are good, everyone agrees on that, but I don't think a mere 200 troops, no matter how good,  is going to turn the war around.