475 Million Pages a Year

Yesterday President Obama signed a Presidential Memo instructing Federal agencies move into a digital-based record keeping system.

 

The Federal Government creates 475 million pages of records a year-- digitizing these records will save money, promote accountability, and increase government transparency.

Why I Own a PC, part 2

By Zach Foster

Continued from Part 1

There are two things that distinguish Apple computers from PCs.  One is the marvelous function of right-click.  I’m unapologetic as to my preference towards right-click because it simply makes my life easier.  I have the freedom to utilize this efficient right-click technology rather than memorize some key strokes or having to click on the menu to accomplish a task.  My friends keep telling me that right-click is unnecessary to work a computer.  That’s nice and good for them; indoor plumbing isn’t necessary to maintain a living but it makes my life more comfortable.

The other difference is that Apples are much more centralized.  Just like the Borg from Star Trek, one Apple computer can share the same existence—the same artificial consciousness—with an iPhone, an iPod, an iPad, iTunes software, and the iJackass who has unknowingly (or worse yet: knowingly) given up the vital instincts and skills to critically think and strive to survive—instincts and skills either bestowed upon us by the Intelligent Designer or accumulated over countless years of survival of the fittest—all for the pleasures provided by technology and in the name of the same technology, and progress, and the future.

Being a lover of liberty, a subscriber to many of the teachings of Austrian Economics, and a free thinker who sees through the utopian visions of socialism, I obviously have a problem with being constantly watched by iBigBrother; honestly, it’s bad enough having a large and inefficient Federal government dominating the economy, the markets, the agendas of political parties, and much of my waking life.  The last thing I need is for my data to be collected and used to generate advertisements specifically tailored to my spending habits (or my web clicking habits).  Worse yet, the highly centralized Apple products remind me of socialism: one class of workers, one local soviet council, one regional soviet council, one supreme soviet, one social consciousness with no room for deviation—all of them constantly holding you to terms and conditions and updates, very much like the ever-changing whims and mandates of the central planners.  All of the above evils are claimed to be carried out in the name of progress.

I don’t buy it.  I happen to be a socio-technological fossil known by two names: an individual and a human being, and despite the empty slogans and rhetoric collectively spouted by an amorphous thing called society, I lay claim to an old concept known as rights.  Among these rights I claim are the right to privacy and the right to be left alone.  I don’t want custom ads; if I feel like spending money, I’ll buy something.  Just as I can reject the sleazy advances of a door-to-door salesman, I can ignore an electronic banner claiming to hold the key to changing my life, improving my sex drive, bringing in a higher tax return, etc.  Half the reason I subscribe to cable with DVR capabilities is so that I can skip past the commercials.  I’m not saying I don’t find these ads on Windows—I do, since they’re all over the Internet—but at least on PCs I can disable many if not most of the ads through changing a few settings.

I also don’t care about the capability of different pieces of electronic equipment to link up and share information.  I am not one police department sharing information with another police department with the goal of catching a traveling convict, nor am I a satellite waiting to hear from various spacecraft and land rovers.  When I feel like listening to music, I turn on the radio.  When I feel like reading a book, I curl up in an armchair by the fire and open one of the 600-page tomes from my bookshelves.  While I almost considered buying the iPhone exclusively for the Kindle application, I quickly realized that reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States or H.W. Crocker III’s Don’t Tread On Me would be highly infuriating from a three-inch screen.  If I have to read anything online, I prefer PDF because I can easily print out the literature.  However—call me old fashioned—but none of the above replace actually turning pages in a large hardcover book.  I can only hope my muscles don’t strain under such a burden.

Nonetheless, the burden is mine and mine alone because I choose for it to be so.  PCs are just tools in accomplishing some of my aims.  I don’t impose my burden on others.  It is mine, and I have the freedom to make it so.  Every person has the freedom to do the same or to do something completely different—whatever makes them happy.

Why I Own a PC

A discussion on individual liberty by Zach Foster

It never fails to amaze me (and cause me great shame) that the main reason I watch the later seasons of South Park is not to laugh, but rather to be engaged by a social criticism of current events and trends.  Matt Stone and Trey Parker have managed to outdo just about every news anchor and political pundit on television when it comes to political and social analysis.  The latest episode, a highly disturbing one that satires both the Apple Corporation and the horror film Human Centipede, reminded me exactly of why I own a PC computer and not a Mac (or any of the latest lines of the Apple Whatever Device).  The fact of the matter is that I like my freedom.

Plain and simple; I’m one of the few non-sheep in modern society who objects to constantly being tracked, constantly being advertised at, constantly being solicited to contractual agreements and eternally bound by them, and constantly enduring the whittling away of personal freedom by a globalized corporation (which begins to impede on my personal liberties almost as much as the mentally challenged collectivist federal leviathan based in Washington D.C.) all in the name of technology, progress, and an abstract concept called “the future.”

When I log onto the Internet, I do so for a variety of reasons.  One of the first things I do is log onto social networks like Facebook—not because I’m addicted to a social network, since four out of five contacts I don’t talk to even on a semi-regular basis—but because I enjoy communicating with and hearing from friends and relatives I don’t get to see often enough.  Still, every once in a while I’ll see some foolish thing they write and post for the world to see, and I have to question my sanity as well as the reason I associate with these individuals.  And no, I will not play Farmville nor will I join anyone’s cause.

The good thing about the social network is that I can log off at any time.  Furthermore, my PC has settings that allow my information to not be tracked.  While others would be lazy and allow the machine to store their information, including email addresses, ID names, and passwords, I take the rougher path and resign myself to the hardships of typing out my email address and password every time I log on.  No computer or database needs to store that information; my privacy is my own, and especially not the business of an outside party.  Or maybe I’m just a masochist who enjoys making life harder for himself.  We’ll just have to wait and see how the future plays out.

Many people make the grievous error of mistaking their computers for simple machines, like cars, and think nothing else of storing personal information inside those machines.  The reality is that computers are not just machines, but more so they are windows into another world, and just like cars can be broken into, computers can be hacked, often by legitimized e-peddlers like Apple and Google.

Continued in Part 2: There are two things that distinguish Apple computers from PCs