My little corner of Opera

Welcome to the mother of all adware, brought to you by Microsoft. Protecting you from yourself since when? That's right. Microsoft has filed a patent for an "advertising framework" that will use "context data" from your hard drive to serve you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to advertisers in real time. This was originally featured on Information Week, and profiled by Ars Technica, which was then subsequently featured on Slashdot.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201001485&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070717-microsoft-patents-the-mother-of-all-adware-systems.html

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/17/1536230

What are your thoughts on this? I for one am not happy by this development. Looks like this may finally be the time for me to switch to Linux as my desktop operating system if this does go through.

I don't know what I did to anger some higher power, but I'm really feeling the heat right now so to speak. As you all might recall, a couple months ago, my computer started acting up. Slowing down, taking forever to load and all that jazz. Until it finaly gave out on me. On my birthday.

So there I was, stranded without a computer for about five weeks. During this time you'd think I'd have enough work coming in to allow me to get a new one. Nope. For reasons I can't discuss (because of my own code of ethics), I didn't earn enough to get that new PC I was looking at, much less a notebook computer I could use until things settled down. So I had to bum off of library computers, my brother's computer (on the other side of town) and even a friend's computer (which ended up running a "pirated" copy of Windows XP because Microsoft decided to block the product key). I was able to pay the bills, but not much else during that time.

Now, once I realized that a new computer was out of the question, I decided to look into resurrecting mine from the dead. It took a while, but I eventually got it working again. Yay me, I can work again! I can finish helping out the people I had promised I'd help back then! Right?

I was wrong.

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For those who have been paying attention, my computer died on me about six weeks ago (April 27th to be exact). Everything I did suddenly ground to a halt, as I was forced to use different computers (friends, family, even the public library) each and every day since then.

I had thought about getting a new one, but money suddenly became tight (WHY ME?) so I had to forget about that. So I finally bit the bullet and decided that either I can waste my time using everyone else's computers (which would hurt not only myself but also those I help out online), or I can bite the bullet and try to fix it.

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