Welcome to the Neodux.com Rants page. Here is where you'll find the political and social voices of the Neodux membership (headed up by MrPresident). Any and all complaints as well as any "I take offense to that" messages can be emailed to this address.

Notes for web developers. rant : by Mackieman - February 16th 2010, 09:27AM
	Attention website developers: Have you spent the last six months living on Twinkies and jet fuel grade coffee to turn out your latest abomination creation? Does it incorporate validated syntax? Does it adhere to all of the W3C standards? Is it fully driven by CSS? If so, that's great. You've worked hard to achieve what countless Geocities authors could only dream of. However, this does not give you the right nor the justification to resize my browser without asking first. My personal window settings for my browser are just that: personal. Your content, while possibly revolutionary (but probably wholly unexceptional) is not special, and it does nothing to endear me to whatever your website is trying to tell me. And woe be unto you if you're trying to sell me something. Not only will I never patronize your site again, I will post rants on websites explaining exactly how you should be publicly flogged for forcing your sizing preferences on the rest of us. Stop being a butthorn and realize that your, "creatives" aren't anything more than some rendered text and a few pictures. Kisses, Mackieman
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Crap and Trade rant : by Grendel - November 25th 2009, 11:49AM
	With all the talk about healthcare and the oh-so-scary "public option", it's hard not to touch on the increasing obesity problem in America. A recent infographic outlines the American obesity problem. (Americans eat the same as the average Chinese citizen, plus 19 slices of bacon!) Is there some sinister plot out to get you? Surely not. It's mostly due to portion control on behalf of the consumer. (Remember how small a "small" used to be?) Also think about how seemingly offensive it is when you order a meal at a restaurant and you finish it all! Heaven forbid you finish your plate and not hurt afterward!) But, for the most part, food is cheap and we love to eat. Salt, fat and sugar: our big three food groups. You'd be hard pressed to name a favorite dish that isn't just mounds of these three. But, again, those 3 are the cheap ones. Most vegetables aren't very cheap compared to a bag of chips. Calorie for calorie, junk food is cheaper. Why? Corn. After watching the documentary Food, Inc., I began to realize just how extensive corn has become in all of our foods. Corn subsidies have helped junk food (of which corn is the #1 contributor) become the cheapest source of calories in the American diet. You can buy a ready-made hamburger for less than you can a head of lettuce. You can buy a order of french fries cheaper than you can buy a potato. These artificially low prices are due to corn subsidies. Subsidies ensure Americans have access to cheap food. The problem has now become that our subsidized food is now too cheap. It's time we come off of our subsidies. If we look at the infographic above, we learn that Americans consume nearly 4000 calories a day. That's almost 2000 calories more than we should, given our sedentary lifestyles. Essentially we're subsidizing excess calories that never get burned off. Excess food intake does one of two things, it either become fat (giving us the obesity epidemic) or it becomes waste (meaning our tax dollars are paying for crap). So with the whole healthcare issue at hand and Americans upset about government spending, consider how much of your tax dollars are going toward financing turds. update: Just in time for the holidays, if you don't believe that overeating causes more moves, consider this: The day after Thanksgiving is the busiest day for plumbers in America, of course Americans also appear to toss out about 40% of our food. So, whatever we're not flushing away, we're just throwing right in the trash.
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Net Neutrality setbacks. rant : by Mackieman - November 5th 2009, 10:24AM
	Former presidential candidate Senator John McCain has issued a press release outlining his new bill to prohibit the FCC from issuing binding rules on how the Internet is operated in the United States. Now, I am a fan of Net Neutrality from a philosophical standpoint. I firmly believe that Internet backbone carriers as well as end user ISPs should not be allowed to implement network practices that limit users based on the amount they pay for service or how much of a service they use. But, to me, the issue is much broader than basic FCC regulation over the physical network itself. This is a problem for the FTC in how data networks and Internet access is marketed to a strikingly dumb population, and it is an issue for the Justice department to been involved in when companies consort with one another to stifle competition in broadband markets. Since the early days of 56k V.90 dialup service, ISPs have shouted from the mountain tops that their service offerings were unlimited. Both myself and several of my friends (Bone_Enterprise can attest) took the ISPs to task on this by remaining connected for weeks at a time. Many times, accounts were disabled and we were informed that we were abusing their network. Despondent, we replied that they advertised the service as unlimited. The response was always, "it is unlimited, but you can't use all you want." The incongruity of it all was something that irked us to no end. As it turns out, what they were advertising is, "unlimited ability to access," and not, "unlimited usage." I believe this is false advertising in sheep's clothing. Regularly the FDA requires pharmaceutical companies to issue new profanely long commercials clarifying their claims about a particular drug and its side effects. Where is this watchdog mentality about the Internet and the trillions of dollars in GDP that it fosters? The answer is most assuredly money and power. Companies like the toolboxes over at Comcast (which launched this lovely new feature today) throw tens of thousands of dollars at politicians like Senator McCain and his fellow Congressmen (clogged tubes, anyone?) who are uniquely and egregiously unqualified to be making suppositions about global networks, much less binding law. Were the understanding of how networks function at an organic level and how an Internet free of corporate bullying drives innovation and economic prosperity truly understood by those with the power, I have a feeling that Net Neutrality would've been a reality some time ago. Of course, the blame is not solely on our elected officials; no, the blame is also shared with our fellow citizens. As a nation, and more specifically as a generation, the vast majority of us have become technology gluttons and demand that everything we interact with be simple, perfect, and require little to no effort from us. I believe this attitude is dangerous and stifles the inner need in each of us to grow and better ourselves through learning. If we can have such stringent oversight of things like pharmaceuticals and stock market actions, things that require significant time and effort to understand and master, why can we not expect the same from the shepherds of our technology? While I generally advocate less government interaction in our daily lives, I do believe that there are some roles in which government must serve, and this is one of them. When companies get so large and their services so vital, they must be cared for to ensure that they do not take advantage of their customers. It is my hope that, in a limited form, Net Neutrality quickly comes to pass and that companies are forced to fairly market their services to an unsuspecting populace. But something tells me it may be a ways off.
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Facebook: it was inevitable. rant : by Mackieman - July 20th 2009, 08:20PM
	Facebook has exploded in the last twelve months. Leaving MySpace, Orkut, and the rag tag group of other social networking sites in the dust, it has single handedly surmounted the world of telling everyone everything regardless of whether or not they actually wanted to know. Only Twitter is able to stave off the blitzkrieg of Facebook, and then only because stupid people haven't figured out how awful it is. I joined Facebook a few months ago at the incessant urging of small people from Scandinavia. Upon further inspection, I acquiesced to the request because Facebook looked like MySpace without the dumb. It was friends connected to other friends and there was some writing of stuff back and forth. It had a pretty clean interface and, minus the AJAX fetish that seems to permeate the site, it works pretty well. Oh my, how wrong I was. You see, on Facebook lies the concept of applications. These applications are about as varied as they come, but they all share one defining feature: they are all completely stupid. Share a round of drinks! Send a hug! Give a smile! Take a quiz! Become a fan of crab people! Most of this crap isn't even possible, much less a passing excuse for social interaction. Never in all my life have I been more thankful for the, "block this application" feature than I am with Facebook. Sure, Facebook is a lot less intrusive than MySpace, and certainly looks less like a drunk monkey vomited all over my computer screen than MySpace, but it is still sheer crap. In a clean package.
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History Channel is History rant : by Grendel - July 7th 2009, 09:53PM
	History Channel is history. It's no longer concerning itself with history which we can learn from. The History Channel should rename itself "Crap that didn't make it to Discovery Channel Channel" or "The Speculation About Stupid Crap, Imaginary Crap We Wish Was Real, Mythical Beasts, And Redneck Reality Shows Channel". At first, I was offended by Modern Marvels - this wasn't history, what's it doing on this channel?!, then it sorta grew on me. It was neat seeing things made. I swallowed the whole "modern history is history too" notion. Then it dawned on me, they don't cover history anymore! I remember when Roger Mudd did all their intro's and voiceovers. I still love to watch recordings from The History Channel at 6am when they do reruns from that time. You might catch a show about some little known aspect of the Civil War or some tribe of Vikings or a inconsequential battle that took place in southern Russia, but it was history! Now, it's just full of speculation about what the future will be like or how some backwoods dope claims to have been abducted by aliens and then you listen to "experts" drone on about how the dope probably really was abducted. It has to be true, they have a Ph.D on screen saying it could happen - nevermind the guy's Ph.D is from ITT for daisy-wheel printer and typewriter repair. I guess I just wanted to make you aware that I've reached my breaking point with History Channel. I used to love it, I hoped it was just a phase they were going through, but I have to admit (like NASCAR) it looks like it's here to stay. I don't have to say much more, if you don't know what I'm talking about, turn on the History Channel right now and I can almost guarantee you won't see content about anything from before 1970s. In closing, I'll leave you with this graph that I didn't make, but just about sums up this whole rant. Grendel sez: I can't confirm this, but I think History International and others are immune from the current load of crap taking up History's time slots. I look forward to the day I can get History Int'l, Military Channel and Wings. (the latter 2 are Discovery owned)
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