US Debt Clock: http://www.usdebtclock.org/

Some CDROM Trivia: 52X is the Max. Speed possible as the outer edge of the disk is now travelling 100+ MPH. otherwise the disk can fly apart and wreck the computer!
But 72X has been made possible by using multiple lasers, like 7, at 10X.
1X== Music Disk rate of 150K/Sec. MORE HERE

-- Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

The Economic Returns for a Virus or Worm Infection on your PC!

 Orwellian Revocation of nothing less thatn 1984- AND Animal Farm by Amazon from its Kindle

Additional notes 

Editor's comments delimited by < >

It's not so easy to use an iPhone as a disk storage device as last week's show implied.
You can use an ipod ripper to get data off an iPod, iPhone, or iTouch.
There's also an app to show you what data is on your iPhone here.

Glenn tried using Cycorder to record videos with his iPhone but iTunes did not recognize any of it.

Paul played audio from zug.com that points out our cell phone records are not safe:

US debt clock mentioned. See above link.

The above link about CD ROM drives explains why it's difficult to get them to spin faster and thereby transfer data faster.
Early drives were required to have a speed of at least 150k bps to qualify as a multimedia drive in the early version of Windows. That's just fast enough for audio. The top theoretical speed is about 52 times that original speed.

Smartypig.com (above link) is a place to get a higher than usual interest on your savings. It also lets you to set up savings goals for yourself & others (like your children).
Check it out at Bank Rate using the above link.
Caveat emptor -- use it at your own risk. Check with fdic.gov if you want to be cautious.

The disclaimer: views & opinions are those of the show's hosts only.

A quote from Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867 is read (see above).

Network Solutions has been infiltrated by credit card fraud. See above link.

There's more information about why we get viruses if you follow the link in the first part of these notes.
There are 2 camps, those who write the viruses and those who from botnets. It's mostly a criminal enterprise now.

The above link, concerning the Kindle unit, is about Amazon's rescinding the sale of 2 ebooks because of copyright issues.

Learn about your CPU, memory type and graphics by going to cpuid.com (see the link above). The utility you download from there does not need to be installed, just run it.

Belarc Advisor is a similar utility.

There is a utility for Mac that shows how the disk space is used.

Grandperspective from Source Forge uses the TreeMap algorithm and also groups the files by type (like .jpg). WinDirStat does something similar for the windows users. See the above link where there's also a link to explain TreeMap. Treemap is a way to graphically present large amounts of complex information.

Mikhail emailed to say iPhone also has a kill switch -- similar to what was said about the Kindle -- to delete data from the iPhone. A jailbroken iPhone can have the kill switch disabled

A utility that comes from Cydia called boss prefs allows you to turn off the iPhone kill switch. switch (also see show notes for 4-6-09).

Glenn mentioned Google Mobile for the iPhone so you can talk to the phone instead of typing. More info about it here.. Paul mentioned 2 apps he likes -- Shazam (identifies music you play into the phone), and Red Laser <supposedly this is the link to it, I don't have iTunes to check it out so beware>. Red Laser lets you scan barcodes and identify products.

Glenn wonders if the iPhone has image stabilization, because he was getting such clear images, but Paul thinks that was because he was in a well lit place and the phone was using a high shutter speed.

A caller suggests using memtest86 as another utility to check out your machine.
The machine has to be booted from separate media like a bootable CD, floppy or flash drive.

A caller has a continually rotating hourglass icon and can't access his firewall settings.
- Paul thinks it may be Symantec that's hogging the CPU time.
- Get AVG www.download.com or free.avg.com and after installing it you can then...
- Uninstall the Symantec product
- Some of the current browsers (Firefox 3.5.1 and IE8) already warn you of nefarious web sites, thus doing some of the work of Symantec. So that, AVG and the built in firewall of your operating system should be all the protection you can reasonably expect. But note you can never be 100% protected.
- Spybot is also mentioned but the browsers & AVG also check for spyware.
- Go to popuptest.com to check how well your popups are blocked.
<Other useful utilities are listed in the show notes for Dec 17, 2007>

A caller using a Mac wants to know if using Parallels to run Window means he should use an anti-virus program.
- Yes, get AVG

One of the reasons for using Windows on a Mac is that some sites require Internet Explorer 7 or 8 <if you avoid them, maybe they'll get the message>. Some realtors because of the Paragon system are required to use one of the latest versions of IE.
An alternative to using Parallels and a Windows operating system is to use Crossover. <Also see the Mac iPhone show of 3-23-9>, which is based on the open source program called WINE. Crossover will run some but not all Windows programs without using Windows itself. Check the Crossover web site to see which applications it can run. Crossover is cheaper ($40 for standard, $70 for professional) than the Parallels and Windows combination.

A caller wants to convert her cassette tapes to digital files.
- Connect the tape deck using the red & white RCA jacks.
- Get the Audacity software to control the recording/
- Audacity is avaliable for both the PC & Mac.

Happy birthday Bugs Bunny, link above. Groucho Marx inspired the character.

A caller wants to know what software to use with an MP3 player that's not an iPod.
- Winamp allows you to manage the MP3s on a player that is neither an iPod nor a Zune.

jkdefrag is much better than the built-in Windows defragger and is now at version 4.11, the link is above. The built-in Mac defragger does a pretty good job, no need to replace it.