Send this to everybody you know!

I just got one of those forwarded emails claiming that I should forward it to everybody in my address book. It was a dire warning about a virus that has been discovered but so far a fix hasn't been found. It didn't pass the smell test so I looked it up and it turned out to be a hoax. The bottom line is this. People use fear so sell things and that includes politicians. I've made peace with my computer a long time ago. The home computer is too new and the software hasn't been perfected. Maybe we'll be around long enough to see this happen, I don't know. But until then, I'm not going to let the troublemakers ruin it for me. I still compare all of this to the early days of color TV. People were constantly fidgeting with the controls. Images had green lines around them, people had purple faces, you had to adjust the color and fine tuning every time you changed a channel. People who had the money called the TV man in to degauss the picture (as if that did anything other than make the TV man richer). The vertical control would have to be adjusted or the picture would start rolling. Now the TVs don't even have fine tuning controls or vertical or horizontal controls. You just plug it in and turn it on. It even finds the channels for you. For $250 you can go to Walmart and buy a Sanyo 32" TV that will blow away anything costing thousands of dollars in the old days. And you don't even need the TV man because it'll last for 20 years and then you throw it out. I think computers will get to the point where they won't need constant tweaking, monitoring, and protecting. Maybe if we're lucky we'll get to see the day when we can walk into Walmart and buy a high powered computer for $200 that will be safe from viruses, but until then, you need to make peace with the unit because the people who make money from selling fear are the ones who win by preventing you from getting any enjoyment from the technology.