West Hollywood Equal Marriage Rights rally

The Bushies are cynically want to make equal marriage rights a wedge issue in hopes of mobilizing the right and thus re-electing Bush. However, polls have shown the majority of Americans either favor same sex marriage or, at the very least, are not opposed to it.

The Senate vote to call for a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage will be this week. It’s expected to lose badly. But their real point is to enrage the right enough to get them to vote for Bush. Sickening.

Yesterday in West Hollywood, The Coalition for Equal Marriage Rights LA with other groups, staged a lively rally and march. A surprising amount of media came, at least five TV stations, showing this is an hot issue that resonates with the public. 

For a moment, I thought I’d landed on a different planet because someone utterly out of my range of comprehension happened. West Hollywood is, of course, heavily gay and lesbian. Their police are hired from the L.A. Sheriff Department which, um, does not have an overwhelmingly positive record when it comes to treatment of minorities. Except in West Hollywood, that is. I was beyond startled when several “L.A. Sheriff volunteers”, who were watching the demo, came over and hugged some of the demonstrators (who they apparently knew.) Lemme tell ya, folks, two miles away in Hollywood, LAPD volunteers are NOT known for being huggers …

Would it be that all police departments were as enlightened as West Hollywood!

That’s Roxanne Reaver, in the photo above, wearing the t-shirt she designed. Check out her website!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actress Sally Kirkland

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The upcoming Microsoft release of SP2. Warning warning danger danger.

Service Pack 2 will be released soon by Microsoft as a major security upgrade to the current easy-to-attack, Windows XP.

True, SP2 has some good features like stopping popups, examining website code for viruses and attacks, and letting you see and disable browser add-ons. But, these utilities will argue with any current utilities you might have installed that perform these same tasks.

It gets worse. When you install this monster, it reconfigures your existing networks so file and print sharing are off. It also installs a software firewall that may block your access to the Internet. SP2 does all this without asking, and you can’t tell it not to.

In other words, after you install it, your network will not function. Microsoft is advising that SP2 installations be done by pros who know what they are doing, something which leaves the ordinary user lost in the wilderness. Techs like myself will make good money reviving networks killed by SP2 - but Microsoft is just asking for a disaster, plus what about all the home users and small to medium sized businesses that will have dead networks and not know what to do? (Large businesses have IT departments to handle this.)
 
Oh yes, SP2 is currently a whopping 270 mb. Microsoft hopes to reduce that to a dainty 90 mb. translation: Don’t even think of downloading it with a dial-up, it would literally take days to do so.

Microsoft is saying this new version will protect against the current attacks for … about 30 days … and then attacks aimed directly at SP2 will start. How reassuring.

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