and also, where is the notion of a mass dragnet ALLOWED by the constitution?
its not. never was allowed. any dragnets were always illegal (not to mention immoral).
they over-reach with this mass surveillance stuff. they know they are on borrowed time and that, eventually, we the people will not tolerate it. it may take years to get the laws fixed; meanwhile, they enjoy the fruits of the poison tree and enjoy their little spy-fest.
careful there - next time there is an R running the country, expect the same exact 'treatment'.
I know you are trolling, but for some reason, you got marked insightful and there's nothing at all insightful about your post. it would come straight from faux news - and that's hardly anything 'insightful'.
btw, what does obama have to do with local state police? you think he's in control of everything in the US?
banks are not voted on, not representative, no checks and balances (lol) and they are not answerable to the population on anything they do.
so WHY are we leaving matters of legality to banks? they are not legal institutions and should not have 'boycott' power!!
you know, I wish the joker (in the movie) did slice lehey's throat. its a bad thing to say, but since he's not a very nice person, I don't feel bad about wishing harm on him.
damn. the american system of 'justice' is such a laughing stock. we now seem to be the world's most powerful banana republic...
why do banks get to pick and choose who to do business with?
sounds like we need to SCRAP the banking system and start all over, if this is truly the case. too much depends on the ability to move money around, in this world, and banks can basically kill you (pretty much literally, over time, of course) if they want to.
this is NOT RIGHT. its unamerican, its anti-freedom, its unacceptable.
keep fueling the revolution, boys. sooner or later, y'all will be up against the wall.
its not just governments. I used to live at an apartment complex and when I was there, they signed a 5 or even 10 year technology contract with a cable company, exclusively. they wired our building and we had to buy service from them. zero choice in the matter.
what was funny (not ha-ha funny) was that in the middle of silicon valley, we had some of the worst service I've ever seen. 20 years ago I moved from boston to the bay area and stereo tv was pretty common at the time, and yet our pay-tv (mtv was semi watchable at that time) was all in mono and the vendor would not upgrade since he signed a many-year contract and had no MOTIVATION to upgrade anything!
silicon valley and we could not get stereo encoded tv shows. that's just an example and I'm sure its long since been changed by now, but this shows what you get when you sign exclusive contracts that last many years with someone who clearly does not want to invest one penny more than he has to.
even if townships allow multiple isp's in, apartment complexes still sign contracts with just one vendor and you are stuck with them for years and years.
regular people have no say in this. the only say you have is to put up your own sat dish (for tv, at least) and have that ugly thing take up your personal balcony space. as for internet, you have pacbell dsl (which is now dog-slow by modern standards) and you have one cable co that will service your area. that's it.
and its been this way since, well, forever. for as long as mainstream broadband has been around, at least.
and the various governments (this is not about the US, its about the new trend, or rather the new-found ability in mankind to truly neutralize all privacy and secret communications) are all addicted to this drug.
they can't give it up. they have a monkey on their back.
the stingrays are the gateway drug; and it soon is not enough and you want more. you want ALL the wireless and wired datacomms traffic.
we should shift our war-on-drugs effort to the real drug that is invading everyone's lives, though due to no fault of their own.
and again, this is not about the US or its agencies. do you really believe your own government is not wanting or having the ability to do this, as well?
this is about mankind and one of his worst weaknesses.
we should make a 'teaching moment' from this and disallow ourselves this ability. just like we really can't handle the responsibility of nukes, as a people, we can't handle THIS much power, either.
no one should have it. and yes, I truly mean NO ONE. you give it to one, and the rest want it (both good guys and bad guys).
will we use this as a teaching moment and make some change for the better?
well, I'm over 50 and have no hope left for us, as a species. we have proven we can't handle this level of responsibility. I don't expect change, but I do expect people to at least SEE what's going on and to try to work around it without giving up, entirely.
to show how much variation there is, I am also in the bay area and I have a year of 'intro deal' pricing where its less than $50 for 100meg down and 10meg up. no shit, either; I do get those speeds.
well, one caveat. I run openvpn almost 7x24 and this pisses comcast off, even though they won't ever say it. I get disconnected almost every hour on the hour. I work around it with my own form of creative network mgmt (...) and I'm annoyed by them, but its not stopping me.
note, when I don't run my vpn, I don't see the disconnects coming. strange, huh?
anyway, when the intro 12mo deal is over, I'll have to find some other service. there isn't much else to pick from! I once had clear.com (clearwire) - a semi-4g usb 'mifi' dongle that would give me acceptable connectivity without any house wiring. when I was short-term renting, that did the trick. neat little dongle, too. maybe I'll look into that again.
I just need to leave comcast (when my year is up) for 3mos, then I can reset the clock, get a new intro pkg and start again, but this time it probably will only be a 6mo special.
if you don't play these games, you get stuck for over $100/mo!
THIS is why comcast needs to be bitchslapped. and the others, too, but in my area, comcast is the only choice you get.
silicon valley - where we pretty much DID invent the internet - and we have a single vendor to pick from. sigh;(
update: why didn't I try the simple thing, first? sigh. do a full uninstall, then install the new and this does not carry over previous 'settings'. it seems that even installing the new one over my older one was not so great. had to do a full remove and then add.
but after that, all is well! amazing. none of the problems I had are now there. loading an mkv file can take a long time over ac-rated wifi (sometimes 10 secs of the screen just sitting there, no status or anything) but then the video plays and from then on, its fine.
random positioning no longer shows the blockiness or buffering problem. playing dvd files is now fine and hd files continue to be fine.
wow. so, the 'trick' I'm glad to say, is simple. full uninstall and then fresh install. I should have known, sigh.
but really glad that it was not something other than 'bad settings'.
but if win media player can play dvd data files perfectly, I'm thinking the video layer is fine as it is, and its vlc's buffering or queueing that seems broken.
if you FF to skip across compressed video, it will take some settle time to deblock, but on vlc it takes an absurd amount of timeto do that on mkv and mp4. and on dvd files, it never seems to play well, no matter what.
very odd that 'hard' files (such as hd) play with clocklike perfection and yet the lower res, lower bandwidth 'easy' files give such a hard time.
lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with vlc on win7. not sure why.
when I use wired ethernet, things seem fine (source of data is my nas box). I can play hd files that were downloaded (...) and those play great, even at 1920/120hz native refresh.
BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?
system is i7 haswell with onboard intel video. the system is fine, it can handle any hd file I throw at it. well, ok, one problem that might be related; if I skip around on the file, it takes forever to resync and unblock the blockiness. its like the deltas (non i-frames) are staying out of sync and there's no resync ability. 10 seconds or more, later, the file fixes itself (the player, that is) and the hd video looks great again.
that blockiness never seems to go away on pure dvd filesets.
I wonder what's going on? I'm pretty sure I was able to play 'simple dvd's about a year ago, but lately its unusable. if I feed that video_ts folder to win media player (included on win7) it plays as perfectly as a hardware based dvd player would, flawless. and yet, vlc chokes badly on dvd style data.
anyone see that on the last few builds? I don't know when things broke but I'm interested in finding a player that WILL work for all formats and is stable enough to use. win media player is great for the codecs it supports but there are too many it won't read and work with, hence my use of vlc.
I don't bother with vlc on linux on my htpc since the video system is still not as good as win7 is. still too much tearing compared to the perfect video I get from 7 (I hate saying that, too, but its true).
the republicans are liars, plain and simple. they say they are for a free market but they only mean a free hand for big business.
you have to be able to read their 'talking points' and interpret them in a way that removes their spin.
the party of 'small government' would have no business being in your bedroom, spying on your data comms and telling you who you can marry and who you can not. they lie when they say they are for small government.
the democrats also lie. but they are not standing in the way of the free internet, its all about the republicans, this time. they seem to live in another world than the rest of us. the rest of us realize that special lock-in deals limit all of our choices and that the internet is too important to let big companies make all the rules.
I have no idea if this is true or not. interesting read. and its plausible, given how deep corporate secrets are these days and how those in charge LOVE to have backdoors into your systems.
wish someone would confirm this. without confirmation, its just a rumor.
posting it here for the slight chance an AC might confirm this with actual first-hand info.
in this day and age, only the foolish and brainwashed want and encourage religious views.
the rest of us understand that this bronze-age bit of illogic has no place in the modern world. we know all the religious statements about creation and the universe to be wrong. we can see the self-inconsistencies in all major religions' books. to this day, there is still no solid proof on the existence of any kind of god.
the religious right speaks out of emotion and ignorance. you can't convince them or even reach them, intellectually. its not even worth the effort. once a mind is closed, its closed off. there is just no way to reason with those who think their god is real and all others are fake. (the difference between an athiest and a christian is that the athiest believes in one less god than the christian does).
christianity, like most organized religions, keeps its motivation mostly secret. its not about gods and being 'saved', but it has always been about control and power over fellow mankind. look at the power structures and you'll understand that this is the real reason for all religions. its not about giving anyone any kind of 'truth', its about manipulation, control, wealth and power. PERIOD.
I was surprised to find out that the video system on the i7 (not sure about i3) can run at full 1920 @120hz! when I connected a brand new vizio (39" iirc), I saw both the win7 panel and the display menus say it was syncing at 120hz.
that's way beyond what blueray can do. in fact, hdmi is not really spec'd for 1920@120hz unless you use dual link cables (or a single hdmi 1.4 cable). BD players don't yet support this, I don't think.
besides, I boycott bd. I hate sony, I will avoid giving them any money if I can avoid it and I get my content online in 'easy' mp4 and mkv format. the quality of modern rips at 120hz playback is quite impressive and unexpected for me since I was not sure the 120hz was real (lower end vizios use a backlight faking scheme to get 120 but mid end versions are actual 120hz refresh, no faking at all).
that's not a lot of money. you get to use the case again and again, as long as you keep with a mini-itx format, you can upgrade for years and still use the same case. to me, there's value in that.
plus, silence is golden;) if you have never used a 100% silent pc, you have no idea what you are missing. even the smallest whirring fan can be heard in a quiet room.
recently, I was cleaning up my garage and I found all the pci cards (etc) that I bought over the years. I found my first 'high end' pci card, an s3-968 4meg video card that I paid over $400 for, nearly 20 years ago. we forget that computers used to cost a LOT! now, they are mostly dirt cheap. $200 for a case that will let me watch movies and listen to music in full peace and quiet is easily worth 'half of that video card' that I bought so many years ago.
even going back just 10 years, the famous lian li cases were well over $100 for the aluminum mid tower and that did not include the $50-$100 you'd pay for a good psu.
today, on that fanless system, the psu fits inside the atx power socket and is just a small board (pico-psu) and those can be gotton for under $50.
gig-e: onboard. video: onboard. disk i/o: onboard. sound: onboard. just need a mobo, disk, mem and cpu.
when I look back at where we've been the past 20 or so years, I really don't mind the very low prices we now pay for very fast computer hardware. the case is on the pricey side, but its not outrageous, really, and there is solid value in removing all noise from the computer.
and now that everyone 'knows' the nsa has exceeded their charter, the problem will be fixed and all will return to normal.
no? you don't agree?
neither do I! we'll NEVER be able to know, for sure, if they have disbanded, continued or even increased their hidden powers.
they can say 'ok, you caught us, we'll start following the law again' but even congresscritters won't know for sure. anyone who does know for sure, will NOT be telling us any truth about it, either.
so, what do you have from this? complete and permanent lack of trust in the three letter agencies in the US, and the equivalent ones overseas in pretty much every country.
why even talk about this anymore? those that have this power won't ever give it up, we will continue to be kept in the dark and nothing will change for the better.
cat is out of the bag, won't get back in and now we all have to live with cats, everywhere. so to to speak.
ok, let me turn your argument against you. the way history happened, and the side that we're on, yeah, the ability to decypher german messages helped us win.
but suppose we lost? suppose it was them that decyphered OUR important messages and suppose that freedom lost out when our private messages were understood by the germans.
see, the analogy only 'works' for you when it happens to correlate with the desired outcome. bad guy did something wrong, you caught him because you can read his messages. USA USA USA!f
but, not so fast. it could very easily be the other way around. I'm sure it has been, too, but that its not made public. the fact that foreign countries can pick up and decode our private messages surely have hurt us in the past and continue to hurt us.
the solution is clear, if you understand the above. everyone gets to have privacy or no one has it, not even governments and those who think that they are above the laws that the rest of us have to live by.
if you get privacy, we should have it. and that means that you don't get to break it! or, if you argue for that, then we demand symmetry. and I'm SURE you won't want that!
probably a few of them would not be ABLE to get ANY healthcare if they had 'pre-existing' conditions. at least they did get rid of that big problem!
I have a PEC that made it (past tense!) very hard to get private insurance, so this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I know I won't have a low price on my insurance, but I will at least be able to GET SOME AT ALL.
for those that don't have PEC's, you will never know the pain of being rejected, for no fault of your own, simply because you were unlucky.
prices go up and obamacare is NOT there to stop or help with that.
how can it? with this near-religion we have about bowing down to 'free markets', the gov won't ever force the HC companies to have reasonable prices and limit the price increases. they SHOULD step in, but the republicans would throw yet another fit and since they're mostly in control now, we won't get anything else out of this system until a new guard comes in.
of course, you are IGNORING the fact that every single year, prices of HC go up and this was before obama was even in office.
perhaps that's why you are marked TROLL. people realize that 'costs going up' is nothing that any president can do anything about. especially with the blockades that stand in his way of doing ANYTHING for the regular common people of america.
I have a t420s - business grade laptop that I bought for personal use. its what everyone else had at my previous job, they were reliable, they were well built (they really are, even to the level of having a plastic spill-protector layer over the motherboard, inside the case. nice touch.)
the business grade laptops didn't have this spyware installed and they would probably not risk their business customers.
consumers: they are fuckable. we can screw them and we don't care. no one respects 'consumers' anymore anyway. if we get pissed off, so what; we are only shopping based on lowest price and not loyalty so some other schmo will come along and find we have a low price and buy our stuff. they do not care about return customers. almost no one does anymore, which is quite a shame.
would I buy another lenovo? probably not. the thing that annoyed me the most about my t-laptop is that it has a blacklist and refuses to accept a pci-e card of MY choice (ac wireless, for example). you have to buy the branded lenovo version and it has to come WITH the laptop or it will be blacklisted in the bios. I found a 3rd party hack for the bios to remove the blacklist but now, technically, I can't truly trust my bios anymore. I have no certain idea what the 3rd party did to remove the blacklist. maybe nothing bad, but who knows!
so, lenovo business lappies are locked down and that sucks. consumer grade ones are full of crapware and the company does not respect you in the least.
maybe that really is a good reason to stop buying lenovo, for ANY reason. hardware is nice, and I loved having a 3 button mouse on the bezel, but maybe I'm done with this company, at this point.
Slashdot Mirror
and also, where is the notion of a mass dragnet ALLOWED by the constitution?
its not. never was allowed. any dragnets were always illegal (not to mention immoral).
they over-reach with this mass surveillance stuff. they know they are on borrowed time and that, eventually, we the people will not tolerate it. it may take years to get the laws fixed; meanwhile, they enjoy the fruits of the poison tree and enjoy their little spy-fest.
careful there - next time there is an R running the country, expect the same exact 'treatment'.
I know you are trolling, but for some reason, you got marked insightful and there's nothing at all insightful about your post. it would come straight from faux news - and that's hardly anything 'insightful'.
btw, what does obama have to do with local state police? you think he's in control of everything in the US?
'insightful', my ass!
guilty until proven innocent.
oh, and we don't care if you try to defend yourself, we've already made up our mind.
the US lawmakers are a bunch of spoiled children....
interesting point.
banks are not voted on, not representative, no checks and balances (lol) and they are not answerable to the population on anything they do.
so WHY are we leaving matters of legality to banks? they are not legal institutions and should not have 'boycott' power!!
you know, I wish the joker (in the movie) did slice lehey's throat. its a bad thing to say, but since he's not a very nice person, I don't feel bad about wishing harm on him.
damn. the american system of 'justice' is such a laughing stock. we now seem to be the world's most powerful banana republic...
why do banks get to pick and choose who to do business with?
sounds like we need to SCRAP the banking system and start all over, if this is truly the case. too much depends on the ability to move money around, in this world, and banks can basically kill you (pretty much literally, over time, of course) if they want to.
this is NOT RIGHT. its unamerican, its anti-freedom, its unacceptable.
keep fueling the revolution, boys. sooner or later, y'all will be up against the wall.
# sudo ln -s /dev/null /dev/google
its not just governments. I used to live at an apartment complex and when I was there, they signed a 5 or even 10 year technology contract with a cable company, exclusively. they wired our building and we had to buy service from them. zero choice in the matter.
what was funny (not ha-ha funny) was that in the middle of silicon valley, we had some of the worst service I've ever seen. 20 years ago I moved from boston to the bay area and stereo tv was pretty common at the time, and yet our pay-tv (mtv was semi watchable at that time) was all in mono and the vendor would not upgrade since he signed a many-year contract and had no MOTIVATION to upgrade anything!
silicon valley and we could not get stereo encoded tv shows. that's just an example and I'm sure its long since been changed by now, but this shows what you get when you sign exclusive contracts that last many years with someone who clearly does not want to invest one penny more than he has to.
even if townships allow multiple isp's in, apartment complexes still sign contracts with just one vendor and you are stuck with them for years and years.
regular people have no say in this. the only say you have is to put up your own sat dish (for tv, at least) and have that ugly thing take up your personal balcony space. as for internet, you have pacbell dsl (which is now dog-slow by modern standards) and you have one cable co that will service your area. that's it.
and its been this way since, well, forever. for as long as mainstream broadband has been around, at least.
and the various governments (this is not about the US, its about the new trend, or rather the new-found ability in mankind to truly neutralize all privacy and secret communications) are all addicted to this drug.
they can't give it up. they have a monkey on their back.
the stingrays are the gateway drug; and it soon is not enough and you want more. you want ALL the wireless and wired datacomms traffic.
we should shift our war-on-drugs effort to the real drug that is invading everyone's lives, though due to no fault of their own.
and again, this is not about the US or its agencies. do you really believe your own government is not wanting or having the ability to do this, as well?
this is about mankind and one of his worst weaknesses.
we should make a 'teaching moment' from this and disallow ourselves this ability. just like we really can't handle the responsibility of nukes, as a people, we can't handle THIS much power, either.
no one should have it. and yes, I truly mean NO ONE. you give it to one, and the rest want it (both good guys and bad guys).
will we use this as a teaching moment and make some change for the better?
well, I'm over 50 and have no hope left for us, as a species. we have proven we can't handle this level of responsibility. I don't expect change, but I do expect people to at least SEE what's going on and to try to work around it without giving up, entirely.
to show how much variation there is, I am also in the bay area and I have a year of 'intro deal' pricing where its less than $50 for 100meg down and 10meg up. no shit, either; I do get those speeds.
well, one caveat. I run openvpn almost 7x24 and this pisses comcast off, even though they won't ever say it. I get disconnected almost every hour on the hour. I work around it with my own form of creative network mgmt (...) and I'm annoyed by them, but its not stopping me.
note, when I don't run my vpn, I don't see the disconnects coming. strange, huh?
anyway, when the intro 12mo deal is over, I'll have to find some other service. there isn't much else to pick from! I once had clear.com (clearwire) - a semi-4g usb 'mifi' dongle that would give me acceptable connectivity without any house wiring. when I was short-term renting, that did the trick. neat little dongle, too. maybe I'll look into that again.
I just need to leave comcast (when my year is up) for 3mos, then I can reset the clock, get a new intro pkg and start again, but this time it probably will only be a 6mo special.
if you don't play these games, you get stuck for over $100/mo!
THIS is why comcast needs to be bitchslapped. and the others, too, but in my area, comcast is the only choice you get.
silicon valley - where we pretty much DID invent the internet - and we have a single vendor to pick from. sigh ;(
but they feel no pain, like people. no ability to show remorse or ethics or shame.
they can't be jailed and they are almost never punished in any meaningful way.
they have all the good things we, people have; but none of the bad things.
"gee, dad, when I grow up, I want to be a corporation!"
update: why didn't I try the simple thing, first? sigh. do a full uninstall, then install the new and this does not carry over previous 'settings'. it seems that even installing the new one over my older one was not so great. had to do a full remove and then add.
but after that, all is well! amazing. none of the problems I had are now there. loading an mkv file can take a long time over ac-rated wifi (sometimes 10 secs of the screen just sitting there, no status or anything) but then the video plays and from then on, its fine.
random positioning no longer shows the blockiness or buffering problem. playing dvd files is now fine and hd files continue to be fine.
wow. so, the 'trick' I'm glad to say, is simple. full uninstall and then fresh install. I should have known, sigh.
but really glad that it was not something other than 'bad settings'.
thanks for the idea.
but if win media player can play dvd data files perfectly, I'm thinking the video layer is fine as it is, and its vlc's buffering or queueing that seems broken.
if you FF to skip across compressed video, it will take some settle time to deblock, but on vlc it takes an absurd amount of timeto do that on mkv and mp4. and on dvd files, it never seems to play well, no matter what.
very odd that 'hard' files (such as hd) play with clocklike perfection and yet the lower res, lower bandwidth 'easy' files give such a hard time.
lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with vlc on win7. not sure why.
when I use wired ethernet, things seem fine (source of data is my nas box). I can play hd files that were downloaded (...) and those play great, even at 1920/120hz native refresh.
BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?
system is i7 haswell with onboard intel video. the system is fine, it can handle any hd file I throw at it. well, ok, one problem that might be related; if I skip around on the file, it takes forever to resync and unblock the blockiness. its like the deltas (non i-frames) are staying out of sync and there's no resync ability. 10 seconds or more, later, the file fixes itself (the player, that is) and the hd video looks great again.
that blockiness never seems to go away on pure dvd filesets.
I wonder what's going on? I'm pretty sure I was able to play 'simple dvd's about a year ago, but lately its unusable. if I feed that video_ts folder to win media player (included on win7) it plays as perfectly as a hardware based dvd player would, flawless. and yet, vlc chokes badly on dvd style data.
anyone see that on the last few builds? I don't know when things broke but I'm interested in finding a player that WILL work for all formats and is stable enough to use. win media player is great for the codecs it supports but there are too many it won't read and work with, hence my use of vlc.
I don't bother with vlc on linux on my htpc since the video system is still not as good as win7 is. still too much tearing compared to the perfect video I get from 7 (I hate saying that, too, but its true).
the republicans are liars, plain and simple. they say they are for a free market but they only mean a free hand for big business.
you have to be able to read their 'talking points' and interpret them in a way that removes their spin.
the party of 'small government' would have no business being in your bedroom, spying on your data comms and telling you who you can marry and who you can not. they lie when they say they are for small government.
the democrats also lie. but they are not standing in the way of the free internet, its all about the republicans, this time. they seem to live in another world than the rest of us. the rest of us realize that special lock-in deals limit all of our choices and that the internet is too important to let big companies make all the rules.
http://everist.org/eevblog/201...
I have no idea if this is true or not. interesting read. and its plausible, given how deep corporate secrets are these days and how those in charge LOVE to have backdoors into your systems.
wish someone would confirm this. without confirmation, its just a rumor.
posting it here for the slight chance an AC might confirm this with actual first-hand info.
in this day and age, only the foolish and brainwashed want and encourage religious views.
the rest of us understand that this bronze-age bit of illogic has no place in the modern world. we know all the religious statements about creation and the universe to be wrong. we can see the self-inconsistencies in all major religions' books. to this day, there is still no solid proof on the existence of any kind of god.
the religious right speaks out of emotion and ignorance. you can't convince them or even reach them, intellectually. its not even worth the effort. once a mind is closed, its closed off. there is just no way to reason with those who think their god is real and all others are fake. (the difference between an athiest and a christian is that the athiest believes in one less god than the christian does).
christianity, like most organized religions, keeps its motivation mostly secret. its not about gods and being 'saved', but it has always been about control and power over fellow mankind. look at the power structures and you'll understand that this is the real reason for all religions. its not about giving anyone any kind of 'truth', its about manipulation, control, wealth and power. PERIOD.
why can't it be both?
fallacy of exclusion, and all.
I was surprised to find out that the video system on the i7 (not sure about i3) can run at full 1920 @120hz! when I connected a brand new vizio (39" iirc), I saw both the win7 panel and the display menus say it was syncing at 120hz.
that's way beyond what blueray can do. in fact, hdmi is not really spec'd for 1920@120hz unless you use dual link cables (or a single hdmi 1.4 cable). BD players don't yet support this, I don't think.
besides, I boycott bd. I hate sony, I will avoid giving them any money if I can avoid it and I get my content online in 'easy' mp4 and mkv format. the quality of modern rips at 120hz playback is quite impressive and unexpected for me since I was not sure the 120hz was real (lower end vizios use a backlight faking scheme to get 120 but mid end versions are actual 120hz refresh, no faking at all).
that's not a lot of money. you get to use the case again and again, as long as you keep with a mini-itx format, you can upgrade for years and still use the same case. to me, there's value in that.
plus, silence is golden ;) if you have never used a 100% silent pc, you have no idea what you are missing. even the smallest whirring fan can be heard in a quiet room.
recently, I was cleaning up my garage and I found all the pci cards (etc) that I bought over the years. I found my first 'high end' pci card, an s3-968 4meg video card that I paid over $400 for, nearly 20 years ago. we forget that computers used to cost a LOT! now, they are mostly dirt cheap. $200 for a case that will let me watch movies and listen to music in full peace and quiet is easily worth 'half of that video card' that I bought so many years ago.
even going back just 10 years, the famous lian li cases were well over $100 for the aluminum mid tower and that did not include the $50-$100 you'd pay for a good psu.
today, on that fanless system, the psu fits inside the atx power socket and is just a small board (pico-psu) and those can be gotton for under $50.
gig-e: onboard. video: onboard. disk i/o: onboard. sound: onboard. just need a mobo, disk, mem and cpu.
when I look back at where we've been the past 20 or so years, I really don't mind the very low prices we now pay for very fast computer hardware. the case is on the pricey side, but its not outrageous, really, and there is solid value in removing all noise from the computer.
a nice fanless i7 (haswell) build, with the magic being a heatpipe heatsink case and a 45w i7 chip:
https://farm8.staticflickr.com...
search for streacom fc8 as the case. then, stay under 65w (to be safe) and you can be fully fanless.
for htpc use, there is NO reason to ever have a fan, again. even the i3 has a 35w chip that works just fine for movies and desktop stuff.
and now that everyone 'knows' the nsa has exceeded their charter, the problem will be fixed and all will return to normal.
no? you don't agree?
neither do I! we'll NEVER be able to know, for sure, if they have disbanded, continued or even increased their hidden powers.
they can say 'ok, you caught us, we'll start following the law again' but even congresscritters won't know for sure. anyone who does know for sure, will NOT be telling us any truth about it, either.
so, what do you have from this? complete and permanent lack of trust in the three letter agencies in the US, and the equivalent ones overseas in pretty much every country.
why even talk about this anymore? those that have this power won't ever give it up, we will continue to be kept in the dark and nothing will change for the better.
cat is out of the bag, won't get back in and now we all have to live with cats, everywhere. so to to speak.
world war 2? really??
ok, let me turn your argument against you. the way history happened, and the side that we're on, yeah, the ability to decypher german messages helped us win.
but suppose we lost? suppose it was them that decyphered OUR important messages and suppose that freedom lost out when our private messages were understood by the germans.
see, the analogy only 'works' for you when it happens to correlate with the desired outcome. bad guy did something wrong, you caught him because you can read his messages. USA USA USA!f
but, not so fast. it could very easily be the other way around. I'm sure it has been, too, but that its not made public. the fact that foreign countries can pick up and decode our private messages surely have hurt us in the past and continue to hurt us.
the solution is clear, if you understand the above. everyone gets to have privacy or no one has it, not even governments and those who think that they are above the laws that the rest of us have to live by.
if you get privacy, we should have it. and that means that you don't get to break it! or, if you argue for that, then we demand symmetry. and I'm SURE you won't want that!
fallacy of omission, right there.
probably a few of them would not be ABLE to get ANY healthcare if they had 'pre-existing' conditions. at least they did get rid of that big problem!
I have a PEC that made it (past tense!) very hard to get private insurance, so this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I know I won't have a low price on my insurance, but I will at least be able to GET SOME AT ALL.
for those that don't have PEC's, you will never know the pain of being rejected, for no fault of your own, simply because you were unlucky.
prices go up and obamacare is NOT there to stop or help with that.
how can it? with this near-religion we have about bowing down to 'free markets', the gov won't ever force the HC companies to have reasonable prices and limit the price increases. they SHOULD step in, but the republicans would throw yet another fit and since they're mostly in control now, we won't get anything else out of this system until a new guard comes in.
of course, you are IGNORING the fact that every single year, prices of HC go up and this was before obama was even in office.
perhaps that's why you are marked TROLL. people realize that 'costs going up' is nothing that any president can do anything about. especially with the blockades that stand in his way of doing ANYTHING for the regular common people of america.
I have a t420s - business grade laptop that I bought for personal use. its what everyone else had at my previous job, they were reliable, they were well built (they really are, even to the level of having a plastic spill-protector layer over the motherboard, inside the case. nice touch.)
the business grade laptops didn't have this spyware installed and they would probably not risk their business customers.
consumers: they are fuckable. we can screw them and we don't care. no one respects 'consumers' anymore anyway. if we get pissed off, so what; we are only shopping based on lowest price and not loyalty so some other schmo will come along and find we have a low price and buy our stuff. they do not care about return customers. almost no one does anymore, which is quite a shame.
would I buy another lenovo? probably not. the thing that annoyed me the most about my t-laptop is that it has a blacklist and refuses to accept a pci-e card of MY choice (ac wireless, for example). you have to buy the branded lenovo version and it has to come WITH the laptop or it will be blacklisted in the bios. I found a 3rd party hack for the bios to remove the blacklist but now, technically, I can't truly trust my bios anymore. I have no certain idea what the 3rd party did to remove the blacklist. maybe nothing bad, but who knows!
so, lenovo business lappies are locked down and that sucks. consumer grade ones are full of crapware and the company does not respect you in the least.
maybe that really is a good reason to stop buying lenovo, for ANY reason. hardware is nice, and I loved having a 3 button mouse on the bezel, but maybe I'm done with this company, at this point.