I'd say that it's more that the Japanese don't consider sex as big a deal as westerners do, even when it involves young teenagers. Actual sex with children is illegal, of course, but teenage prostitution is pretty common and doesn't carry the social stigma it does in the U.S., and the authorities tend to turn a blind eye to it unless there are complaints.
Also, you see a lot of tits in manga and anime, but bear in mind that in Japan, a lot of women in rural areas still go around topless. While not as common as some manga makes out, mixed sex baths do exist, and you get all ages of both sexes in them. Nudity is not quite the taboo there as it is in the west, and the two dominant religions there don't view sex as "sinful" (I'm not sure how sin works in Shinto or Buddhism anyway).
There are definitely issues about sex in Japan - women gained equal rights before the society there was ready, so you tend to have issues with sexual harrassment and unequal pay and opportunities. I have a theory that this is why japanese porn tends to focus on the humiliation and domination of women (think bukkake, tentacle rape, regular rape, etc.).
I know the U.S. Marines were interested in a suborbital deployment system, where they could put marines on your doorstep anywhere in the world in a couple hours' notice.
I'm not sure where I read about it (probably here, actually), but it's been a while.
A lot of people can't visualize 4,300mph. Saying, "New York to London in an hour" makes it easier to visualize.
For me, it's about two weeks' worth of driving per hour. I'm not sure how you would visualize it.
Considering this is an unmanned drone, any passengers would have to be strapped to it. Somehow I doubt anyone willing to try that would have been the same type of customer the Concorde was designed for (but probably the type of customer padded rooms were designed for).
I never understood why. On Debian unstable, I can go a couple months and then apt-get upgrade half a gig of packages in less time than my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine can run some routine updates. Downloading the files takes forever, which I suppose could be caused by a lack of server capacity on Microsoft's part, but why does it take so long to check for new updates or install an update?
It's been that way ever since they first implemented it. I thought it would improve once they pulled it out of IE and made it its own application, but no - it's still slow.
Quiet offices didn't exist back when the Model M was designed. It's actually pretty quiet compared to the IBM electronic typewriter I learned to type on. Our teacher would have us start an exercise or time test, and the whole room would fill with loud clacking sounds.
Just imagine what the secretary pool sounded like when those were the state of the art:)
You get used to it, of course, and then you prefer what you're used to. I have a couple, but my girlfriend can't stand them.
None of those things are true if you buy a used Model M.
I'm sure it's not an official policy, but I was missing a few keycaps off a Model M (a 1980s model) and shot off an email to Unicomp to ask them if I could buy just a few caps from them. I made it clear that I was expecting to pay for them.
The guy emailed me back, asking what keycaps I was missing. I answered, and then didn't hear from him again. A week or so later, I get a small box in the mail with my keycaps.
I had never given Unicomp a dime of my money - this was an old IBM product I wanted parts for. Since then, I've bought three of their keyboards, and they're the only keyboard I'll buy.
Yes, but they did at least evolve. X11 is still X11. And there is no X12:-)
Forget something? Like maybe that letter R and the number after it? You don't think that might be significant?
There's quite a bit of evolution hidden in that number you've so conveniently left out.
Lower-level standards.
Yes. X11 is a lower-level standard as well. Your point?
If you want to compare Win32 to X11, you need to compare it to DirectX, Direct3D, DirectDraw, and all their multiple versions.
It's exactly like win32 with all those other bits. Try using old win32 calls in Windows 7. They (mostly) work. Just like old Xlib calls still work. There's newer functions that add functionality, just like in X. DirectX and company has its equivalents for use in X, and there's well-used ways of applying them for X applications.
Ever program with Xt? You still can. You can use Athena and Motif widgets to your heart's content. Pretty much no one does, because there's new ways of doing things that most everyone agrees are better. That's just like how you can use win32 widgets that date all the way back to OS/2 version 1.x (which predates NT 3.x), but most people use the more modern set introduced in later versions.
Comparing, say, X11R4 with X11R7.x is like comparing the graphical systems of Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 7. The same old calls are there, and some of them are still used, but there's also a lot of newer stuff available.
Just a guess, but I'd say it's because there's stories just like yours for every manufacturer out there*.
Case in point: hard drives. Ask 20 people what hard drives they've had trouble with, and you'll find they pretty much average out as all of the companies having issues. I use Seagate, but you'll find a lot of people here who swear they're the worst drives on the market.
Another example: T-Mobile. I had nothing but trouble with them. They would, for no reason, forgo the automatic draft from my Visa and then shut me off for non-payment. Their customer service was horrible. When I called them at the end of my contract and told them I wanted my service cut as soon as the contract was over, the sales drone threatened me that if I didn't pay the final bill, they'd sue me. I hadn't said anything about it up to then, so this was just out of the blue. (Of course, I knew he was full of shit, and intentionally didn't pay my final bill because of it.)
With all that, T-Mobile has an excellent reputation for customer service and very few people I know have issues with them. Go figure.
The article was about the difference between soundcards and integrated sound, and just happened to use Asus cards for the testing. Your last paragraph was on topic, but the rest of your post wasn't.
* There are a few manufacturers that have earned widespread derision, like PC Chips for its fake cache chips or SCO for judicial douchebaggery. Asus isn't anywhere near that level.
Nobody's summoned me to viewscreen for mandatory calisthenics lately
I wouldn't be surprised if they started doing that in Japan. I used to see the Japanese contractors out on the flightline doing calisthenics every morning. If my boss tried that on me, I'd park a trailer on him. Hrm, might do that anyway...
I haven't heard from the Junior Antisex League all week.
Move down here to the bible belt and you'll hear from them all the time.
The only depressing thing about Brave New World is the fact that anyone took it seriously.
I mean, yeah, nuclear weapons get invented and you have a potential for a lot of bad stuff. Electronic surveillance can lead to abuse by governments, corporations, and criminals. But birth control and artificial insemination?
The problem with Brave New World is that it ignores basic human nature. The kind of scenario depicted would only be possible if humans were altered to remove their drives for family and reproduction.
This is the power supply for a Vectra. This particular one is 100W, and by the date I'd guess it was for a 486. Most of the ones I had were 120W, manufactured in 1996, and ran Pentiums.
Note the odd shape? That little slanted area on the bottom of it is where the fan is. It blew onto the processor's heat sink. Here is another picture, where you can see that fan.
Here is a picture of a 486 Vectra's processor. The Pentium models were very similar, and had no dedicated processor fan.
You don't know what you're talking about, and my guess is that you were in diapers when these machines were made. Go back to your tinker toys, little AC - the adults are talking.
Anyone who used CDE and compiled other window managers would have been intimately familiar with Xaw. There were a lot of utilities that used it. While they might not have been in the default menus for a particular brand of Unix, they were there with the rest of the X stuff.
I miss Xaw. I started writing a battery meter in it a few months ago but got sidetracked*. Back before GTK+ and QT, Linux users used Xaw and tk apps for pretty much everything. I even used to use an Xaw web browser (chimera). Netscape was, of course, Motif-based.
* Frikkin' Lenovo removed the battery LED on the Thinkpad, so now I know my laptop became accidentally unplugged when it shuts itself off. There's no battery app that I liked that would swallow into FvwmButtons.
You were on an Alpha, which probably had TGA graphics. You were one of the lucky ones.
A lot of us poor saps were using Sparcs with 8-bit color.
Sun seemed to think no one cared about color depth until '97 or so. They did sell a few systems with 24-bit color, but they were expensive as hell. They'd charge twenty times the price for the same features a PC user would get with a discount Trident card.
Either way, it makes little to no difference as far as remote X displays. The only time the increased color depth affected the bandwidth was when you were viewing raster images. X over dialup was usable enough, unless you were doing graphics work.
Because at the time I built the firewall, such things didn't exist.
I used that machine as a firewall for about a decade (it was already seven years old at that time). That $250 nettop PC probably wouldn't still be running after that long. Yeah, I upgraded and reinstalled the software a few times, but that machine served me well and like I said, I keep it as a backup firewall.
Besides, that Vectra has a 120W power supply in it, and was cooled by the power supply fan rather than its own processor fan. Pentium I machines weren't power hogs compared to modern desktops. People seem to forget how computer power requirements jumped up during the PIII and PIV era.
I never said Social Security wasn't mismanaged. The surpluses in the past should have been invested for the contingency we're going to face with the boomer retirement.
That doesn't mean the program is bad, just that the government sucks at not keeping its grubby hands off the stash. The solution? Stop voting for politicians who refuse to raise taxes to support the budget. They're going to get the money somewhere, and for quite some time that somewhere was the Social Security surplus.
I really do not get why progressives are so violently adamant about not means testing Social Security.
Because Social Security isn't welfare. It's a program you pay into with the expectation of getting benefits later. Warren Buffet paid into it, so he should get his benefits. It's only fair.
If you want to deny Warren Buffet welfare or housing assistance or food stamps, feel free.
Old hardware is only useful because it's cheap (or often free) and it's fun, if that's your thing.
I've got a few old Sparcstation 20s that I play around with. Why? They're fun. Or at least they were, before Oracle mucked about with docs.sun.com.
I've got some old Pentium I machines that I've used as small network servers and firewalls. As of yesterday, I'm on all modern (and much more energy efficient) machines, but a Pentium I will serve DHCP just as well as an i7. I used to keep a few old HP Vectras around to act as a "network in a box" - firewall and DNS/DHCP - to install on networks when a family member wanted additional computers. I don't bother anymore, since home routers are the default these days.
My advice? Take the old stuff you don't need and put them outside where they can be seen - preferably under an awning or something to protect them from the weather. I got my start on hardware when a friend of mine saw an old guy throwing away a shed full of 8088 and 286 class machines - you never know if a pickup truck full of Pentium 4s is all a prospective geek needs to kickstart his hobby. If no one claims them in a week, recycle them.
A few years ago I aquired a ton of old HP Vectras that were all Pentium 1 machines, except for one 486 that I put DOS and Windows 3.11 on (just for fun - I had a few floppies with Windows games on them). I've only got a couple left.
The nice thing about them is that they still use lead-based solder, so there's no problem with tin wiskers shorting out the system after a few years. I've got a crate of old, small hard drives, and a lot of them still work just fine (I'm talking between 100MB and 2GB here).
Anyway, they make great firewalls, DNS/DHCP servers, IRC servers, etc. for small networks. Yesterday I replaced my firewall (the last Vectra on my network) with a diskless OpenBSD install on a Mini-ITX system. I still keep the Vectra in the server cabinet in case something goes wrong, though.
You don't give names to router interfaces, uplink ports, ect.
Just curious, but why not? If you've got your own DNS system, it shouldn't be difficult to do. Adding router3-ring.example.com and router3-lan.example.com would make it easier to parse tcpdump output (or whatever you use) and would probably only take a couple hours for a medium-sized installation.
I'm in the USA, and HP and Dell desktops are common for home users. Most people buy their computers from large stores (Best Buy, CompUSA, Staples, Office Max, etc.) or they order them direct from the manufacturer. Beige boxes are only used by enthusiasts or people who have enthusiasts build their machines.
I'll agree that optical media as a personal form of data transport is dying. You don't burn CDs for your friends anymore - you use a USB stick. People still buy their movies on DVD and Blu-Ray, and that shows no sign of stopping soon. You don't see games and software sold on flash drives - they're sold either online or on optical discs.
Optical drives aren't dying, and they're not going away any time soon. Even when they do, they'll take a long time to die - after all, look at how long the floppy drive held on after optical drives rendered it obsolete.
The insurance company has to either keep considerable assets on hand in case of a large scale payout, or reinsure with someone else who does that.
And what, would you say, are the assets of the U.S. government?
They can't just payout by redirecting money from other customers' payments.
They can, and they do. Where do those assets come from in the first place? If you bought a $100,000 life insurance plan and was killed by a drunk driver the next day, where does that $100,000 they pay your family come from?
I'm not free to drop Social Security.
Sorry if that was unclear, but I was not saying that you were. I was saying you were free to drop life, home, car, and (for another year and a half) health insurance.
I'm not free to drop health insurance in 2014.
See above.
That's how a government-backed scam works. Make it mandatory with a solid voting bloc that benefits, then it doesn't matter how transparent the con is.
OK, and how, exactly, is it a scam now?
You obviously don't like it, but that doesn't make it a scam. You have to register for the draft if you're male, but it's not a scam. You have to pay taxes, but they're not a scam. You have to attend school until a certain age, based on your state, but it's not a scam. Social Security is just mandatory retirement insurance. It's no more a scam than any other insurance.
Actually, I take that back: there's one way it can be considered a scam, and that's where the retirement age got pushed back. That's shitty of the government to do, since people were expecting benefits at 65. That doesn't make the whole program a scam, though.
Or you could just not have such a program. There's no reason for a society, civilized or otherwise, to have institutionalized retirement.
Do you know why we have Social Security in the first place? Are you aware of the problems it was designed to solve?
What do you plan to replace it with? "Nothing" is not an acceptable answer.
"From who?" is the question here. The insurer by contract should provide the service, but they're in the act of reneging on that contract. So you shouldn't be able to demand the service from another paying customer. Current recipients of US Social Security (and many other public pensions) get their money directly from other payers. There's no saving or investing of past Social Security payments. That money is long gone.
Yes. That's because it's insurance. Learn how it works. A good start would be the paragraph you apparently completely missed in my last post.
And when the recipients are also the ones who voted for the current setup, it's a rather blatant theft by older generations from the younger. Why should such contracts be honored when they could have been fixed any time in the past 80 years and weren't?
Because they weren't broken in the first place. When the current recipients of Social Security were paying in, they were paying for the generation before them. It's part of the basic design of the system, and it works.
I'm assuming here you built your own machines. Fair enough, then - most of my machines don't have them either, because I don't need them for my servers. Since we built our machines, we can opt out of optical since we know we don't need them (in my case, I have a couple around the house I hook up to a machine as needed for installs, etc.).
That said, however, people who build their own machines are still in the vast minority. Most people have laptops, which still come with optical drives (except, as you mention, the ultralight laptops, which don't have space for them), or desktops they purchased from companies like Dell or HP.
I decided to double-check, just to make sure I'm not just getting old. I went to Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Acer and looked at several random desktop models. Of those, Lenovo had the only model where an optical drive was optional. That was a business machine, not a general purpose computer - their everyday use machines included optical drives and you couldn't opt out of them. The last time I looked at desktops at Staples (it's been a few months), they all had optical drives.
I was in Wal-Mart the other day and walked past the game section. There's an awful lot of PC games available on CD/DVD, as well as other software.
So, back to my point - modern computers still have optical drives. They're standard on all but special use cases. They're not going away any time soon.
Social Security doesn't work that way. It's just another 15% tax on income in addition to the normal income tax. Coupled with that is a pretty retarded pyramid scheme for paying a little bit for everyone's retirement. It's also not break even, even if you pretend to respect the founding myths like the "lockbox". It has been in the red in that sense since 2010.
It's a tax because the government is doing it. If you were buying retirement insurance, it would be a premium. What's the difference? You could mandate everyone get a retirement program of some sort, similar to the health insurance mandate, I suppose. You'd still pay money into it either way.
The only reason it doesn't break even right now is because of the 1 year 2% reduction in that tax. Without that tax break, it would have stayed nice and solvent right up to the point where the baby boomers all retired. Give it a bit to recover and it'll be solvent again, at least for a while.
My opinion is drop the pension part altogether except for some needs based thing to keep Grannie from eating catfood.
So you want to replace Social Security with... welfare?
And either drop the 15% tax or just add it to the regular income tax.
The tax is separate for a reason. Yeah, congress has pillaged the Social Security fund and fed it into the federal budget on too many occasions (that money would have been nice for the upcoming baby boomer retirement), but they have to explicitly do so. Mixing it in with income tax would just make it that much easier for them.
And really, what's wrong with having it as a separate tax? Most people have both state and federal taxes. At least with FICA you don't have to file a return.
Frankly, it wouldn't be right for either of you to get a payout since the insurer spent the insurance proceeds instead of investing them and is paying (for the moment) insurance payouts with other peoples' payments, milking the con for a little while longer so that they can get as much money out of you as they can.
It wouldn't be right to get the service you paid for? WTF?
Your health, life, car, and home insurance works exactly the same way. You think your premiums go into an account just for you? Unless you go around crashing your car every couple of years, your car insurance pays for other people's wrecks. Your life insurance payments go to other people. The whole point is that you get money when you have a legitimate claim.
If you think that's a scam, you're free to drop all the above (at least until 2014 for health insurance).
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I'd say that it's more that the Japanese don't consider sex as big a deal as westerners do, even when it involves young teenagers. Actual sex with children is illegal, of course, but teenage prostitution is pretty common and doesn't carry the social stigma it does in the U.S., and the authorities tend to turn a blind eye to it unless there are complaints.
Also, you see a lot of tits in manga and anime, but bear in mind that in Japan, a lot of women in rural areas still go around topless. While not as common as some manga makes out, mixed sex baths do exist, and you get all ages of both sexes in them. Nudity is not quite the taboo there as it is in the west, and the two dominant religions there don't view sex as "sinful" (I'm not sure how sin works in Shinto or Buddhism anyway).
There are definitely issues about sex in Japan - women gained equal rights before the society there was ready, so you tend to have issues with sexual harrassment and unequal pay and opportunities. I have a theory that this is why japanese porn tends to focus on the humiliation and domination of women (think bukkake, tentacle rape, regular rape, etc.).
I know the U.S. Marines were interested in a suborbital deployment system, where they could put marines on your doorstep anywhere in the world in a couple hours' notice.
I'm not sure where I read about it (probably here, actually), but it's been a while.
A lot of people can't visualize 4,300mph. Saying, "New York to London in an hour" makes it easier to visualize.
For me, it's about two weeks' worth of driving per hour. I'm not sure how you would visualize it.
Considering this is an unmanned drone, any passengers would have to be strapped to it. Somehow I doubt anyone willing to try that would have been the same type of customer the Concorde was designed for (but probably the type of customer padded rooms were designed for).
Dunno about GTE or Verizon, but with Southwestern Bell you could just tell them you didn't need touch tone service.
You still got it - it's not like they had you on a different switchboard - but you didn't have to pay for it.
Windows update has always been dog slow.
I never understood why. On Debian unstable, I can go a couple months and then apt-get upgrade half a gig of packages in less time than my girlfriend's Windows 7 machine can run some routine updates. Downloading the files takes forever, which I suppose could be caused by a lack of server capacity on Microsoft's part, but why does it take so long to check for new updates or install an update?
It's been that way ever since they first implemented it. I thought it would improve once they pulled it out of IE and made it its own application, but no - it's still slow.
Quiet offices didn't exist back when the Model M was designed. It's actually pretty quiet compared to the IBM electronic typewriter I learned to type on. Our teacher would have us start an exercise or time test, and the whole room would fill with loud clacking sounds.
Just imagine what the secretary pool sounded like when those were the state of the art :)
You get used to it, of course, and then you prefer what you're used to. I have a couple, but my girlfriend can't stand them.
None of those things are true if you buy a used Model M.
I'm sure it's not an official policy, but I was missing a few keycaps off a Model M (a 1980s model) and shot off an email to Unicomp to ask them if I could buy just a few caps from them. I made it clear that I was expecting to pay for them.
The guy emailed me back, asking what keycaps I was missing. I answered, and then didn't hear from him again. A week or so later, I get a small box in the mail with my keycaps.
I had never given Unicomp a dime of my money - this was an old IBM product I wanted parts for. Since then, I've bought three of their keyboards, and they're the only keyboard I'll buy.
Yes, but they did at least evolve. X11 is still X11. And there is no X12 :-)
Forget something? Like maybe that letter R and the number after it? You don't think that might be significant?
There's quite a bit of evolution hidden in that number you've so conveniently left out.
Lower-level standards.
Yes. X11 is a lower-level standard as well. Your point?
If you want to compare Win32 to X11, you need to compare it to DirectX, Direct3D, DirectDraw, and all their multiple versions.
It's exactly like win32 with all those other bits. Try using old win32 calls in Windows 7. They (mostly) work. Just like old Xlib calls still work. There's newer functions that add functionality, just like in X. DirectX and company has its equivalents for use in X, and there's well-used ways of applying them for X applications.
Ever program with Xt? You still can. You can use Athena and Motif widgets to your heart's content. Pretty much no one does, because there's new ways of doing things that most everyone agrees are better. That's just like how you can use win32 widgets that date all the way back to OS/2 version 1.x (which predates NT 3.x), but most people use the more modern set introduced in later versions.
Comparing, say, X11R4 with X11R7.x is like comparing the graphical systems of Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 7. The same old calls are there, and some of them are still used, but there's also a lot of newer stuff available.
Linux is still using an operating system design that's about 40 years old.
It, and most programs for it, are written in a programming language that's even older.
We're communicating using http, which is twenty years old.
That moves over TCP, which is about ten years older, give or take.
Your computer is gets its power from the wall, where the standards written for it are over 100 years old.
What was your point again?
(Oh, and guess how old the win32 API is?)
Just a guess, but I'd say it's because there's stories just like yours for every manufacturer out there*.
Case in point: hard drives. Ask 20 people what hard drives they've had trouble with, and you'll find they pretty much average out as all of the companies having issues. I use Seagate, but you'll find a lot of people here who swear they're the worst drives on the market.
Another example: T-Mobile. I had nothing but trouble with them. They would, for no reason, forgo the automatic draft from my Visa and then shut me off for non-payment. Their customer service was horrible. When I called them at the end of my contract and told them I wanted my service cut as soon as the contract was over, the sales drone threatened me that if I didn't pay the final bill, they'd sue me. I hadn't said anything about it up to then, so this was just out of the blue. (Of course, I knew he was full of shit, and intentionally didn't pay my final bill because of it.)
With all that, T-Mobile has an excellent reputation for customer service and very few people I know have issues with them. Go figure.
The article was about the difference between soundcards and integrated sound, and just happened to use Asus cards for the testing. Your last paragraph was on topic, but the rest of your post wasn't.
* There are a few manufacturers that have earned widespread derision, like PC Chips for its fake cache chips or SCO for judicial douchebaggery. Asus isn't anywhere near that level.
Nobody's summoned me to viewscreen for mandatory calisthenics lately
I wouldn't be surprised if they started doing that in Japan. I used to see the Japanese contractors out on the flightline doing calisthenics every morning. If my boss tried that on me, I'd park a trailer on him. Hrm, might do that anyway...
I haven't heard from the Junior Antisex League all week.
Move down here to the bible belt and you'll hear from them all the time.
The only depressing thing about Brave New World is the fact that anyone took it seriously.
I mean, yeah, nuclear weapons get invented and you have a potential for a lot of bad stuff. Electronic surveillance can lead to abuse by governments, corporations, and criminals. But birth control and artificial insemination?
The problem with Brave New World is that it ignores basic human nature. The kind of scenario depicted would only be possible if humans were altered to remove their drives for family and reproduction.
Really?
This is the power supply for a Vectra. This particular one is 100W, and by the date I'd guess it was for a 486. Most of the ones I had were 120W, manufactured in 1996, and ran Pentiums.
Note the odd shape? That little slanted area on the bottom of it is where the fan is. It blew onto the processor's heat sink. Here is another picture, where you can see that fan.
Here is a picture of a 486 Vectra's processor. The Pentium models were very similar, and had no dedicated processor fan.
You don't know what you're talking about, and my guess is that you were in diapers when these machines were made. Go back to your tinker toys, little AC - the adults are talking.
Anyone who used CDE and compiled other window managers would have been intimately familiar with Xaw. There were a lot of utilities that used it. While they might not have been in the default menus for a particular brand of Unix, they were there with the rest of the X stuff.
I miss Xaw. I started writing a battery meter in it a few months ago but got sidetracked*. Back before GTK+ and QT, Linux users used Xaw and tk apps for pretty much everything. I even used to use an Xaw web browser (chimera). Netscape was, of course, Motif-based.
* Frikkin' Lenovo removed the battery LED on the Thinkpad, so now I know my laptop became accidentally unplugged when it shuts itself off. There's no battery app that I liked that would swallow into FvwmButtons.
You were on an Alpha, which probably had TGA graphics. You were one of the lucky ones.
A lot of us poor saps were using Sparcs with 8-bit color.
Sun seemed to think no one cared about color depth until '97 or so. They did sell a few systems with 24-bit color, but they were expensive as hell. They'd charge twenty times the price for the same features a PC user would get with a discount Trident card.
Either way, it makes little to no difference as far as remote X displays. The only time the increased color depth affected the bandwidth was when you were viewing raster images. X over dialup was usable enough, unless you were doing graphics work.
Because at the time I built the firewall, such things didn't exist.
I used that machine as a firewall for about a decade (it was already seven years old at that time). That $250 nettop PC probably wouldn't still be running after that long. Yeah, I upgraded and reinstalled the software a few times, but that machine served me well and like I said, I keep it as a backup firewall.
Besides, that Vectra has a 120W power supply in it, and was cooled by the power supply fan rather than its own processor fan. Pentium I machines weren't power hogs compared to modern desktops. People seem to forget how computer power requirements jumped up during the PIII and PIV era.
I never said Social Security wasn't mismanaged. The surpluses in the past should have been invested for the contingency we're going to face with the boomer retirement.
That doesn't mean the program is bad, just that the government sucks at not keeping its grubby hands off the stash. The solution? Stop voting for politicians who refuse to raise taxes to support the budget. They're going to get the money somewhere, and for quite some time that somewhere was the Social Security surplus.
I really do not get why progressives are so violently adamant about not means testing Social Security.
Because Social Security isn't welfare. It's a program you pay into with the expectation of getting benefits later. Warren Buffet paid into it, so he should get his benefits. It's only fair.
If you want to deny Warren Buffet welfare or housing assistance or food stamps, feel free.
Old hardware is only useful because it's cheap (or often free) and it's fun, if that's your thing.
I've got a few old Sparcstation 20s that I play around with. Why? They're fun. Or at least they were, before Oracle mucked about with docs.sun.com.
I've got some old Pentium I machines that I've used as small network servers and firewalls. As of yesterday, I'm on all modern (and much more energy efficient) machines, but a Pentium I will serve DHCP just as well as an i7. I used to keep a few old HP Vectras around to act as a "network in a box" - firewall and DNS/DHCP - to install on networks when a family member wanted additional computers. I don't bother anymore, since home routers are the default these days.
My advice? Take the old stuff you don't need and put them outside where they can be seen - preferably under an awning or something to protect them from the weather. I got my start on hardware when a friend of mine saw an old guy throwing away a shed full of 8088 and 286 class machines - you never know if a pickup truck full of Pentium 4s is all a prospective geek needs to kickstart his hobby. If no one claims them in a week, recycle them.
I was, until yesterday.
A few years ago I aquired a ton of old HP Vectras that were all Pentium 1 machines, except for one 486 that I put DOS and Windows 3.11 on (just for fun - I had a few floppies with Windows games on them). I've only got a couple left.
The nice thing about them is that they still use lead-based solder, so there's no problem with tin wiskers shorting out the system after a few years. I've got a crate of old, small hard drives, and a lot of them still work just fine (I'm talking between 100MB and 2GB here).
Anyway, they make great firewalls, DNS/DHCP servers, IRC servers, etc. for small networks. Yesterday I replaced my firewall (the last Vectra on my network) with a diskless OpenBSD install on a Mini-ITX system. I still keep the Vectra in the server cabinet in case something goes wrong, though.
You don't give names to router interfaces, uplink ports, ect.
Just curious, but why not? If you've got your own DNS system, it shouldn't be difficult to do. Adding router3-ring.example.com and router3-lan.example.com would make it easier to parse tcpdump output (or whatever you use) and would probably only take a couple hours for a medium-sized installation.
I'm in the USA, and HP and Dell desktops are common for home users. Most people buy their computers from large stores (Best Buy, CompUSA, Staples, Office Max, etc.) or they order them direct from the manufacturer. Beige boxes are only used by enthusiasts or people who have enthusiasts build their machines.
I'll agree that optical media as a personal form of data transport is dying. You don't burn CDs for your friends anymore - you use a USB stick. People still buy their movies on DVD and Blu-Ray, and that shows no sign of stopping soon. You don't see games and software sold on flash drives - they're sold either online or on optical discs.
Optical drives aren't dying, and they're not going away any time soon. Even when they do, they'll take a long time to die - after all, look at how long the floppy drive held on after optical drives rendered it obsolete.
The insurance company has to either keep considerable assets on hand in case of a large scale payout, or reinsure with someone else who does that.
And what, would you say, are the assets of the U.S. government?
They can't just payout by redirecting money from other customers' payments.
They can, and they do. Where do those assets come from in the first place? If you bought a $100,000 life insurance plan and was killed by a drunk driver the next day, where does that $100,000 they pay your family come from?
I'm not free to drop Social Security.
Sorry if that was unclear, but I was not saying that you were. I was saying you were free to drop life, home, car, and (for another year and a half) health insurance.
I'm not free to drop health insurance in 2014.
See above.
That's how a government-backed scam works. Make it mandatory with a solid voting bloc that benefits, then it doesn't matter how transparent the con is.
OK, and how, exactly, is it a scam now?
You obviously don't like it, but that doesn't make it a scam. You have to register for the draft if you're male, but it's not a scam. You have to pay taxes, but they're not a scam. You have to attend school until a certain age, based on your state, but it's not a scam. Social Security is just mandatory retirement insurance. It's no more a scam than any other insurance.
Actually, I take that back: there's one way it can be considered a scam, and that's where the retirement age got pushed back. That's shitty of the government to do, since people were expecting benefits at 65. That doesn't make the whole program a scam, though.
Or you could just not have such a program. There's no reason for a society, civilized or otherwise, to have institutionalized retirement.
Do you know why we have Social Security in the first place? Are you aware of the problems it was designed to solve?
What do you plan to replace it with? "Nothing" is not an acceptable answer.
"From who?" is the question here. The insurer by contract should provide the service, but they're in the act of reneging on that contract. So you shouldn't be able to demand the service from another paying customer. Current recipients of US Social Security (and many other public pensions) get their money directly from other payers. There's no saving or investing of past Social Security payments. That money is long gone.
Yes. That's because it's insurance. Learn how it works. A good start would be the paragraph you apparently completely missed in my last post.
And when the recipients are also the ones who voted for the current setup, it's a rather blatant theft by older generations from the younger. Why should such contracts be honored when they could have been fixed any time in the past 80 years and weren't?
Because they weren't broken in the first place. When the current recipients of Social Security were paying in, they were paying for the generation before them. It's part of the basic design of the system, and it works.
I'm assuming here you built your own machines. Fair enough, then - most of my machines don't have them either, because I don't need them for my servers. Since we built our machines, we can opt out of optical since we know we don't need them (in my case, I have a couple around the house I hook up to a machine as needed for installs, etc.).
That said, however, people who build their own machines are still in the vast minority. Most people have laptops, which still come with optical drives (except, as you mention, the ultralight laptops, which don't have space for them), or desktops they purchased from companies like Dell or HP.
I decided to double-check, just to make sure I'm not just getting old. I went to Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Acer and looked at several random desktop models. Of those, Lenovo had the only model where an optical drive was optional. That was a business machine, not a general purpose computer - their everyday use machines included optical drives and you couldn't opt out of them. The last time I looked at desktops at Staples (it's been a few months), they all had optical drives.
I was in Wal-Mart the other day and walked past the game section. There's an awful lot of PC games available on CD/DVD, as well as other software.
So, back to my point - modern computers still have optical drives. They're standard on all but special use cases. They're not going away any time soon.
Social Security doesn't work that way. It's just another 15% tax on income in addition to the normal income tax. Coupled with that is a pretty retarded pyramid scheme for paying a little bit for everyone's retirement. It's also not break even, even if you pretend to respect the founding myths like the "lockbox". It has been in the red in that sense since 2010.
It's a tax because the government is doing it. If you were buying retirement insurance, it would be a premium. What's the difference? You could mandate everyone get a retirement program of some sort, similar to the health insurance mandate, I suppose. You'd still pay money into it either way.
The only reason it doesn't break even right now is because of the 1 year 2% reduction in that tax. Without that tax break, it would have stayed nice and solvent right up to the point where the baby boomers all retired. Give it a bit to recover and it'll be solvent again, at least for a while.
My opinion is drop the pension part altogether except for some needs based thing to keep Grannie from eating catfood.
So you want to replace Social Security with... welfare?
And either drop the 15% tax or just add it to the regular income tax.
The tax is separate for a reason. Yeah, congress has pillaged the Social Security fund and fed it into the federal budget on too many occasions (that money would have been nice for the upcoming baby boomer retirement), but they have to explicitly do so. Mixing it in with income tax would just make it that much easier for them.
And really, what's wrong with having it as a separate tax? Most people have both state and federal taxes. At least with FICA you don't have to file a return.
Frankly, it wouldn't be right for either of you to get a payout since the insurer spent the insurance proceeds instead of investing them and is paying (for the moment) insurance payouts with other peoples' payments, milking the con for a little while longer so that they can get as much money out of you as they can.
It wouldn't be right to get the service you paid for? WTF?
Your health, life, car, and home insurance works exactly the same way. You think your premiums go into an account just for you? Unless you go around crashing your car every couple of years, your car insurance pays for other people's wrecks. Your life insurance payments go to other people. The whole point is that you get money when you have a legitimate claim.
If you think that's a scam, you're free to drop all the above (at least until 2014 for health insurance).