Downsizing, from boats to Buicks

I finally traded my trusty 2003 Mercury Grand Marquis, the last of the traditional Detroit boats, six passenger four door V8 sedan.  The body rot had broken thru the fenders, my friendly local mechanic told me he might not be able to give it an inspection sticker next year due to serious rust underneath, and it had 110K miles. 
   I found a low mileage 2003 Buick Le Sabre.  It's not too bad.  It's smaller than the boats, it's just a four passenger car with the old Chevy V6 for power.  It's the top of the line as far as bling and interior trim goes.  The engine isn't anything like as strong as the 4.6 liter V8 in the Merc, even pulling a smaller lighter car.  It has a tachometer, I really need that for those fast power shifts drag racing off the stop lights.  Right.  It has an amazingly tall front axle gear, the engine is only doing 1000 RPM at 50 miles an hour.  At least the transmission lets the engine wind up to the red line if you put your foot into it.  Passing power is OK, but nothing like the Merc. 
  Fuel economy is decent, I got 30 mpg on a trip down to Lebanon and back.  That's better, the Merc only did 22 mpg.  
   The dashboard is confusing.  I had to dig into the owner's manual to figure out how to turn the headlights off, and work the radio.  The damn manual is 300 pages long, the index sucks, and it's missing things like factory recommended tire pressure.  It's full of platitudes about seat belt usage and DUI.  Most of the buttons on the dash have two or three difference meanings, tap once ,double tap, press and hold and they all do different things.  You wouldn't believe what you have to do just to set bass and treble on the radio.  There is a single little hard to read digital display that can show oil pressure, battery voltage, fuel economy, tire pressure, coolant temperature, and the phase of the moon, after you press all the right buttons.  For all this digital fanciness, it lacks an outside temp thermometer, a winter driving necessity. 
   Styling is undistinguished, standard industry all rounded over look. 

Can "The Cloud" keep anything secret?

I'm not fully up to speed on how "The Cloud" works internally, but wanna bet it can be hacked?  And since it's on line 24/7, the hackers can keep hitting it until they get in.  Whereas I can unplug my computer from the internet, and nobody can get at it short of breaking and entering.  If I was really serious, I'd burn the stuff to DVD and hide the DVD's in the house.  And disable Windows auto run so a single thumb drive insertion doesn't put a root kit on my system.

Anti Virus Programs, major time suckers

Used to be anti virus just scanned the hard drive looking for virii files living there on and zapping them.  Now they have real time scanners, permanantly resident, running, and soaking up CPU time to the point that Trusty Desktop gets annoyingly sluggish.  I got into the control panels of MalwareBytes and tried to turn off the real time scanner.  Nothing much happened.  So I used Windows Task Manager to kill the "mbam.exe" process and the machine got more lively.  I ought to uninstall the damn thing and be done with it but maybe, next time I power up the mbam.exe time sucker won't be active.  If it is, bye-bye malwarebytes. 
  Did the same thing with Spybot Search and Destroy.  The real time scanner did shut down and seems to stay down. 
  

Republican debate on CNN

Well, it wasn't as good as the Fox debate last month.  The Donald survived the evening without taking a serious hit, despite the fact that everyone on stage was gunning for him and the "moderators" were egging them on with "Trump said this about you, what do you think" questions.   Carly came on strong, very convincing, eloquent, substantive.  Marco Rubio looked and sounded good.  JEB Bush showed more spunk than I've seen from him in the past.
   For us voters, we should be looking for a good winning candidate, who could govern effectively.  There is Trump.  I got big reservations about him.  I fear his blunt, rude manner would anger everyone in the country, and overseas.  It's hard to get anything done if everyone is trying to get even with you.  I also wonder about Trump's motives, what does he really want to do?  I'm thinking about  the incumbent who campaigned as a liberal democrat, but once elected he revealed his Communist agenda.  What is Trump's agenda, really?
  If we are not going Trump, then who is our best bet?  Carly looks good to me.  She has experience, she speaks plainly and well, she could get it done.  Marco Rubio looks and sounds good.  Ben Carson is polite and soft spoken, so soft spoken I wonder about his resolve in the clutch. 
   I don't like Rand Paul, he is an isolationist.  He wants to pull back to North America and let the rest of the world burn down. 
   Chris Christy came on strong and feisty, and he was the strongest defender of / warrior for  the drug war, which doesn't excite me.   Far as I am concerned, pot should be a states issue, decided by votes in the state legislature, not by judicial dictators.  It is no business of the Feds.
   The questions mostly sucked.  Way to go CNN.

US Healthcare is too damn expensive

The US puts 19% of GNP into health care.  That's incredible.  Nearly one dollar in five is spent on health care.  US made products are 19% more expensive than they ought to be, just to pay the worker's healthcare.  No other country in the world spends (wastes?) this much money on healthcare.  Other first world industrial countries pay one half what we do, and their health is every bit as good, in some cases a little better than in the US.  And their products bear only an 8 % healthcare markup compared the 19% in the US.  No wonder manufacturing is moving over seas.  Relocate and cut your healthcare costs in half.  Such a deal.  Who can resist?
   The media offers no information about where the lavish US health spending goes.  They don't know, and don't have a clue.
   I can tell one story, the rise of the fetal heartrate monitor.  I designed one of these goodies back when I worked at Analogic.   At this time, every single delivery room in the US is equipped with one of these $10,000 dollar devices.  Analogic made quite a bit of money selling them.  Today, to lack a fetal heart rate monitor is to invite a malpractice law suit.  Any hospital would far rather buy some $10K gizmos than face a million dollar lawsuit.
   Unfortunately, all this high price high tech did absolutely nothing to reduce infant mortality.  Several studies published in the medical journals showed that infant mortality rates did not change at all after the introduction of  fetal heart rate monitors.  The only effect of the new tech was a solid increase in the rate of C-sections.  Everytime the monitor trace looked a little funny some one would cry "Fetal Distress" and zap, off to the operating room.
   In short, a good deal of money was spent but results did not improve.  I wonder how many other expensive things get charged to the health insurance that look nice but don't actually do anything.
   The rest of the world  enjoys good health care while spending half as much.  Why cannot we learn how to do it too?
  Some one ought to ask the two doctors in the race what they think and what might be done.

And after three antivirus passes, they are still out there

Just for grins, I used Explorer to search my hard drive for the oddly named program (80454612.exe) I saw running in task manager yesterday.  Surprise, surprise, it was still hiding out on my hard drive, two copies in two obscure locations.  This after running three different anti virus programs.  Naturally I deleted both copies on general principles.
   Take away, if you have the name of a piece of malware, Explorer can find it and zap it.
Being on a roll, I then ran regedit and searched for the same name in the registry.  And, sure enough, on the "Run" key were three program names, one of them odd name.  The other two programs I recognized as my wireless card driver and my calendar program.  So I zapped the odd name just to make sure it was dead.
Take away, if you want to make sure something is gone, search the registry for it and delete any keys containing the name.
  Be careful with regedit.  It will do anything you tell it to.  Some of the stuff in the registry is essential to Windows and if you damage it, Windows will fail to boot up next time.
   There is a place in the registry called "MUIcache" which often contains the names of programs run in the past.  The purpose of MUIcache is not documented by Micro$oft.  Net rumor has it that MUIcache records stuff from the file header of every program ever run.  On my machine, MUIcache had the odd program name that I had been zapping.  I left the MUIcache registry  leaf alone on the majority of advice from the net.  I'm told that popular disk cleaner CCleaner zaps MUIcache, and there was a lively discussion as to whether this was a good idea or not.  I decided not to mess. 

Trashing Trump ain't gonna work

Trump is out there, trashing everyone in sight.  The Republican competition is beginning to trash back.  About time actually.  But I don't think it will work.  Trump appeals to the voters as a man who will go to Washington, take names, kick ass, and clean house.  To these voters, trashtalk is action, they like it, they want more of it.  And,  hearing other's trashing The Donald, just makes them get up and cheer The Donald on.  Counterproductive that is.
  What to do?  I suggest the competition take some stands on issues.  I haven't heard any of them saying much of substance.  They are all foursquare for motherhood and apple pie, but that ain't enough.  They have to take a stand on immigration, Obamacare, taxes, and other stuff.  Bush did have an Op Ed piece on tax reforms he wants in last Saturday's Wall St Journal, but that is about it.  And Bush's op ed was pretty tame stuff,  Did not list the loopholes he would close, did not call for everyone to pay income tax. 
  Whereas Trump was out denouncing high CEO pay the next day.  That's a real issue that people relate to.  Much more interesting than a tepid tax reform.