> I'll stick with OTA where the quality is better.
Or not. The public broadcasters here in LA now jam LPB[123] onto their one HD OTA stream. The ABC station has a secondary NBC feed that has been abused to 720p to match the rest of the station's setup. The NBC station that is closest feeds NBC and a pair of SD junk streams. And so on.
I predicted this here on/. years ago, that real HD would be a chimera as soon as I read that stations would have the option to broadcast multiple streams. No way they would refuse the chance to increase revenue at the expense of picture quality.
Yup, it can be set to automagic. I do it, and lemme tell ya something. That one feature boosted the WAF by 50% alone. Making half-zoom the default on 4:3 content sealed the deal. Few TVs can even do that trick. She is now ready to go for an upgrade to a Prime and have to watch everything through Myth. The advantages of getting rid of/minimizing the stupid black bars everywhere were enough to overcome the slow channel changing while filling the ring buffer. And it looks like 0.25 has sped that up anyway so yea!
Actually I sometimes see that problem as well. I have a PVR-350 although I no longer use the output port on it. If two programs are recorded back to back on different channels there is a small chance mythbackend will die and the second program will not record and nothing else will until I notice it and restart the backend.
I'm not super worried because I'm already saving my pennies for a Prime, especially with a new version out and hopefully simplifying setting one of them up to use all three tuners.
> Well, since Egypt is clearly in the hands of the Egyptian army,
For now. Thankfully. But once the elections are over it i going to be increasingly hard for the military to maintain control. We have managed to remove almost all of thier legitimatcy and if you haven't figured out yet that Obama will pull their aid if they don't hand the coiuntry over to the Brotherhood you aren't paying attention.
> I wonder who you think the "terrorists" are.
The Muslim Brotherhood. They are the parent organization of pretty much every terrorist organization. If AQ if "The Base" then the MB is the "Mothership."
> And female contraceptives don't even work that way.
Female contraceptives are $/mo at Walmart.. or more to the point the Target that is less than 2 miles from Georgetown she attends. That price is with a doctor's prescription (because the pill is a controlled substance) but without any insurance. So the only way you get from there to $1000 is lots of condoms. And since she lives in the east coast blue hive, condoms are free is so many places you have to try hard to avoid them. Not to mention that the pill itself is available from multiple free clinics within a couple of miles of her location. In other words, as I said, she isn't a slut; she is a lying liar who lies.
Of course I have a bone to pick. I object to most of the Federal Government.
> If you're not talking about Social Security, Medicare, Military Expenditures, or Debt Service, you're not serious about the budget.
Well debt service is off the table for reasons that should be so obvious they don't require comment. So that leaves the big ones. And you are partly right that those are the problem. But you are also wrong that the small stuff should therefore be left untouched. Your side is engaged in a circular argument in bad faith bacause you guys don't want to see ANY government touched. You see, as soon as we propose cutting the small but useless crap you point to the bit ticket items and proclaim that until we cut or reform them we must not touch sacred cows such as NPR. Propose reforming 'entitlements' and the argument instantly flips and some wasteful program is held up and we are told that we can't touch granny's medicid while we are wasting billions on other stuff.
And no, we won't be able to mount an argument to cut 'entitlements' while stupid crap is being funded, no way we can make the argument that this is a crisis while surrendering the fight to cut NPR. So how about this answer: cut everything until we balance the budget. Start with a budget that spends what we are taking in, cutting everything in proportion, then let the battle royal begin to restore funding to really important programs at the expense of less important ones.
And before you even say it, no. Won't work. Raising taxes in the current reality would almost certainly reduce revenue, not increase it. If you want to reform the tax system I'm all for it so long as it is revenue neutral (static score) and depends on growing the economy to raise revenue.
> Rather is a counter-example as is Limbaugh and his slut-tirade.
Eh? In Rather's case we ain't talking about a minor infraction of the PC rulebook, that was the most notorious case of journalistic fraud in at least the last ten years, he was fair busted in days and the chain of evidence had totally fallen apart in a week yet it took months to fire him. Comparing that to a speech code violation isn't apple to oranges, itis more like apples to jeeps., a category error.
As for Rush, if you have (5-1 against) actually listened to all of what he said it wasn't that extreme. When someone enters the political arena they are subject to being ripped on by entertainer/commenters on the arena. Ms. Fluke is at least a principle, not the preteen daughter of one that pussies like Bill Mahar and Letterman prefer attacking. If ya can't rip on the stupid comments of a political activist who is on the way to a law degree from a major university, something is seriously wrong. And what the woman said was pretty damned stupid even in the age of idiocy we are living in. And yes, I'll go there: If the crazy girl is really going through a thousand dollars a year in contraceptives she has to be f*cking like a porn star. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'd call her a slut too but that would be an insult to sluts. I mean, we all know hippie chicks are easy, but G*ddamn! Or she is a liar bearing false witness as a cheap political stunt, which is closer to the truth.
But more important is there isn't anyone to 'fire' him. He owns the company. So all his opponents could do was attack his advertisers and the network of stations which carry his program. Both were done. That it failed to suceed says something about the strength of Media Matters... or lack thereof.
> Ah yes, the lies to show how you are the only persecuted side, and all others are protected. Wasn't there some hubbub about > a newscaster with a forged draft-dodge document getting fired, and no apology stopped that?
You mean Dan Rather's 100% faked report dropped days before a Presidential election and clearly intended to swing the election? The one that was debunked in epic fashion (the infamous throbing GIF) by the Internet so fast it actually boomeranged and likely helped reelect Bush? And still it took CBS months and a special Blue Ribbon Commission of all stars to decide that yes, this was so obvious (and equally likely that it FAILED and helped reelect Bush) that the honor of the network required his producer be sacked... then when that didn't go over Rather went under the bus.
How about a more recent case that more closely bears on this one, of a CNN host tweeting something homophobic and getting to keep his job. Google can supply examples until you get sick of reading them. Bigoted and liberal, ok. Bigoted and conservative, not ok. Hell, I'm conceding the point that Derb went over the line in responding to the race hustlers who wrote the original pieces in the NYT, WaPo, etc. And if we were having a spasm of disgust and cleaning house, firing everybody on all sides who has been crossing the line lately, well ok; sucks for everybody who lost jobs in this crappy economy but life ain't fair. Kinda ex post facto and all, but at some point we might want to draw some lines and raise the level of discourse in our leading publications.
> No, it's not. For one, it's quite minuscule in the Federal budget
True enough. But cut it, the whole of CPB and the NEA and a few thousand other useless and/or programs that are nice to have in fat times and it is real money, even on the Federal Budget scale. Reality says things that can't continue don't. And our current Federal Budget can't continue. Longterm you can't extract more than about 20% of the U.S. economy in taxes and we are spending far more than that. If you refuse to even cut NPR after you state they don't really need the money, where will you cut?
> especially when one compares it to the subsidies of the oil companies.
What subsidies? Do you mean the tax incentives/etc that any manufacturer ca get? Or the extraction credits anyone in the extracive fields like mining/drilling/etc. get? You have fallen for another one of the false narratives of the left. Big oil pays a lot of taxes. They pay to lease the land the drill on from private individuals or the government, then they pay extraction taxes. Then they pay corporate taxes at state, federal and sometimes local levels. They pay a lot of money to hire Americans to do hard, skilled jobs that pay very well, and both the oil companies and those employees pay a shedload of taxes for that. Then when they sell a gallon of gas a big chunk of the selling prices are highway taxes. Far more of a gallon of gas is paying various taxes than ever makes to the profits or dividends of the oil companies.
And you know that on some level. If you really thought oil companies were awash in insanely great profits you wouldn't be bitchin' you would be owning shares in em. But while they are performing fairly well they ain't dominating the stock pages. Unlike a certain company known for insanely great profit margins and almost no American employees.
> If you want to keep it real, you ought be a lot more concerned about why men are such fuck-ups before you worry about what color the men are.
Ask a hard question next time. That one is pretty simple. We have built a society where men are unneeded, and left unattended and without a purpose most men will quickly go feral, especially when raised without a positive male role model as a stabilizing influence. But fear not, the same feminism that created that problem is still at work... women are fast becoming as violent as men so in a few more generations we will at last have equality even in depravity. Why isn't that a happy thought? Probably because of the realization that if the current trend lines continue our civilization will implode long before that 'equality of depravity' comes to pass.
Any person who was actually following events in the Middle East could have easilly predicted that Egypt and Libya would be in the hands of terrorists a year after their respective 'regime change.' It follows that even if the Idiot Child in the White House isn't up on things foreign, and even if (unbeliveable) Sec Clinton was also clueless, that somebody in a position to speak up loud enough to be heard warned of the probable result of throwing Mubarak and Kadaffy under the bus. Thus we are justified to assume that this result was desired or at least considered better than the alternatives.
> NPR is "government funded" like oil companies are "government funded". NPR is no BBC.
Ok, then lets remove their government funding. If they don't really need it and the govenment is broke, here is a budget cut we should all be able to agree on. Removing the stigma of government funding would free them from accusations of being the government's mouthpiece. Seriously, is the fraction of NPR's funding that comes from the government SO important that we should be borrowing it from China? That is the question we should be asking on every single line item of the Federal Budget until it lower the deficit to a point where can at least finance it by mostly internal borrowing.
You do capture the reality correctly. But should it be? An opinion writer fired for expressing an opinion.... at a completely different forum that the one doing the firing? Juan Williams fired from NPR for saying something on FNS or Derb fired from NR for writing something at Taki. I can totally understand when NR fired Ann Coulter for her 9/12 column since it was published on NR. But really, this fire at the first politically incorrect thought has to stop. Of course it only works one way. Lefties get away with saying the most vile things and if the stink is really bad they issue an apology and move on.
Funny thing, every few months some lefty (like the POTUS or AG Holder, etc) issues a call for a 'frank discussion of race' or some such, or calls white people 'cowards' for refusing to have a 'dialog on race' yet the second somebody actually takes them serious and issues a response to some of their race baiting (as Derb was doing btw.) the trap is sprung; they are branded a 'racist' and expunged from polite society. Meanwhile Rev. Sharpton incites riots that actually KILL PEOPLE, launches race baiting hoaxes and is using his perch as an MSNBC host to attempt to incite mass riots and nobody is saying a damned word... and if he succeeds will almost certainly go unprosecuted. It is the imbalance that is objectionable. Were Rev. Al as unwelcome in polite society as David Duke we would be making progress toward a color blind society.
But now lemme add a few notes here. Defending Derb's (or Juan Williams) right to say what he said doesn't imply I agree with it. On the other had I do agree with everything Ann Coulter wrote on 9/12, especially in light of her personally losing a close friend the day before. And on the gripping hand agree NR had to sack her, that wasn't the sort of thing that NR does. Such is life. Especially didn't like Derb's bits about IQ since that is underdetermined at best.
Intelligence testing was at about the level of phrenelogy when all serious inquiry was halted by political correctness from the 'rational, scientific progressives' as CrimeThink of the first order. So we can't say anything of value on the subject because it is forbidden to even ask those sort of questions. I believe it is obvious that progressives believe blacks are inferior, both when they were mostly overt racists themselves (look it up people, it IS) and now when they design policies based on an assumption black people are incapable of making it without the constant assistance of white limousine liberals. But that is more likely a defect on the progressives part than anythng connected to reality. At any rate the whole American experiment depends upon "All men are created equal..." so any system that requires treating people differently based on things like race, color, gender, etc. should be avoided to the maximum extent possible. (Can't be entirely because some corner cases simply can't be handwaved away, especially gender. But for most practical purposes it can be abstracted away and should.)
The one thing all of the little hardware boxes do that your Pi running XBMC (or small Atom) can't do is streaming media. To be allowed to do that you have to prove to Netflix, Amazon, etc. that the box is tamper proof enough they feel safe in allowing 'The Precious' to be sent to it. Of course since pretty much every BlueRay player streams and sucks at actually playing irregular discs (as in downloaded content) just have one of those to cover locked content and build a media box of your own for everything else.
Except of course, like everything else in this story, those facts are wrong. Trayvon is usually pictured as a much younger child. But there is also a photo of him in his football uniform. Yes, the kid played football. That means he isn't the weakling the media want you to believe he is. And Zimmerman isn't 240lbs either, that was enhanced to feed the narrative as well. Conflicting accounts so I won't even venture a guess as to the actual number but odds are they were fairly well matched in the weight class while Trayvon was an active young athete being drilled by a football coach.... when not suspended of course. Meanwhile Zimmerman looks kinda out of shape in those police station videos.
They just happened to get a cyron graphic over his head right when a possible injury would have been visible. Just happened, nothing intentional at all. Same for NBC just happened to drop the middle of the exchange and transform the 911 tape into something horribly racist. And they just by accident keep reusing an obviously outdated photo of Trayvon making him look like a pimply faced youth and they just happen to always use what looks like a mug shot of Zimmerman when other more flattering photos DO exist. Popular (from early media accounts) legend says Zimmerman called 911 46 times in a little over a year. Reality? Try since 2004, which for a neighborhood watch captain isn't so wierd. A few sources have corrected but we all know how corrections are buried and the original account becomes 'fact.' So many coincidences, every one pointing in the same direction. And good luck finding the phrase "White Hispanic" in use before this case.
What happened that rainy night? At this point we will probably never know, it will pass into legend like the JFK assassination.
As for me though, I haven't needed to follow the case all that close because I have a proxy that has so far been 100% accurate. Al Sharpton. He is on one side so that side is wrong, never fails. If I had to serve on a jury I'd have to hunker down and examine all of the evidence because eventually, like a stopped clock, he will be right but for day to day purposes the Sharpton test is reliable enough.
> Come up with actual reasons for your opinions or we'll treat them with the respect they deserve...
No opinion in what I posted. Why did the Kennedys work so hard to scuttle a wind project near them? They didn't want to see em. That was their stated reason so that is a fact.
The present of turbines can thus be said to lower property values. Again, fact not opinion. Whether they SHOULD isn't the point, the fact is enough people consider them eyesores that they DO lower property values. That leads to NIMBY.
> Seriously, actual logical reasons why having something on your property that SAVES you money every month is bad?
Except in this case they don't save the property owners money. But by lowering their property value it could put their mortage under water. I'm sure the person owning the actual property where the turbines will be located (if offshore, that would be the government) is being paid for the use of that land, but the neighbors? Nah. They get nothing out of the deal, yet see real loses and are thus complaining to their elected reps. What part of that do you find objectionable?
> it's a wonder that any one would be against the use of renewable energy sources.
Yea, it is totally outside yer understanding. That is the problem with greens, you really can't undertand how anyone could possibly disagree with a single one of your policies. After all, they are so self evidently perfect and all that.
On the other hand some of us understand NIMBY. While I too doubt the possibility for health problems for people miles/kilometers from one, or even directly under one for that matter, they will certainly lower property values. And if you are too close they can be noisy and a lot of the same hippies agitating for alternative energy find them an eyesore, again lowering property values.
Welcome to the real world. You end up having to stuff them in god awful places where almost nobody lives then lose too much current to wire losses and increased expenses to send people out to work on them. Then as soon as the government subsidies stop you lock the thing down because the unsubsidized operating costs often exceed the value of the electricity produced. But it looked so good on the glossy brocure to the stockholders and government regulating agencies handing out those sacks of cash.
> I recently ran mke2fs -c -c on a 2TB USB3 drive. It took 48 hours to complete.
I suspect USB is the problem. I can run a full raid parity check on six 1TB drives in a RAID5 in a few (3-7) hours, while backups are flowing to them from the network. Something else you might look at is RAM usage, if it is puny enough mke2fs might be swapping?
That said, you do have a kernel of truth in your statement, improvement in read/write times hasn't kept pace with capacity growth now for years. And seek times are pretty much stuck around where they were a decade ago. It is a problem. People are working on it.
> I've always used "consumer" grade HD's in my servers...
A lot depends on what your servers are doing. Try putting a consumer drive in a news server some time if you want a good laugh. Or put one in any server that is really busy 24/7 and a cheap drive will crap out fairly fast since they were never designed for that sort of constant abuse. Meanwhile good drives can and will hold up for years of that kind of torture. Yes they will all happilly spin 24/7 and thrive if the drive is well cooled since power cycles are when most drives die, but constant seeking is another kettle of fish.
> Raid is toast. I dont care WHAT raid you are running, none of them can withstand a loss of 50% of the drives.
Actually.... RAID 1, 1+0, 1+5 and 1+6 can do just that. Two seperate cabinets connected to two controllers on possibly two hosts. Then you can kick out a cable and survive. Just depends how much money you throw at it, which usually depends on how much downtime costs.
> Raid is NOT a backup. it's high availability mitigating the highest failure rate part, the hard drives.
Which is also true since RAID does nothing to help when filesystem corruption is the problem.
> In terms of genocide we're having pretty good luck slaughtering Islamic people recently.
This word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means. Genocide is an attempt to wipe out a people. If the US set out to wipe out a group of people I would hope we would be a little better at it because if that were our goal we suck. Try looking up the historical record of what 'success' in this department looks like. And yea, I'll even give you the US vs the Indians, even though an argument can be mustered that we (or at least most of us) weren't intending to wipe em all out the results are pretty clear. And since I'm about to lambaste yer but on the whole intent vs results I'll go ahead and mark up that demerit for my team.
Lets go to the board on that... Team America: One. Team Progressive: Averaged about a million a year in mass graves over the 20th Century in countless incidents/wars/purges/atrocities... all quite intentional. Oh wait... low score is good? Yea America!
> The so-called progressive leaders you list were simply the oldest forms of conservatives; despots and monarchists.
Ah, I have seen this debating style before. Everything with a bad result is relabeled 'conservative', 'reactionary', etc. So logically you are saying every smelly hippie in a Che t-shirt is really a conservative... even if they don't know it and would (while denouncing violence) punch you in the junk if you called them one to their face. Thus the word becomes like 'fascist' has become, a meaningless noise that implies dislike but has no concrete definition.
Sorry, there were two basic schools of thought as the end product of the Enlightenment, the classical liberal set of ideas that culminated in the American Revolution's notion of the modern Republic and the 'scientific, rational' Revolutions in France and Russia. One school of thought is defended by what are now referred to as 'Conservatives' (since you guys poached 'liberal' when 'progressive', 'socialist' and 'communist' became so radioactive none could proclaim them and be elected dog catcher) and the other line lead to evil, tyranny mass graves and the modern Democrat Party.
> Progressive leaders have historically empowered the common people, not subjugated them.
You guys keep saying that but EVERY time one of ya gets power the jack boots come out. Just as soon as the masses don't follow along on one of the Great Leader's pet notions. You keep believing that next time will be different, that the 'right' people will finally get the power and utopia will result. The 'right' people can't get the power and couldn't keep it anyway without becoming the wrong people in the process. Go rewatch ST:TOS "Patterns of Force" to see an example of what I'm on about here.
We understand two things your team doesn't.
1. Governent is naked force. It is right there on the label, right beside the part where Government claims an exclusive right on the power to initiate force. Political philosophers call it the 'Police Power.' In English it is the part where they claim the Right to tell you to do something and to be able to add the "or else."
2. Humanity is inherently flawed. Get there by way of philosophy or religion's notions about 'fallen man' but it is a key insight to have in mind when designing a government.
We deal with those problems by wanting a government as small as possible while still able to do those things that only a State can do at our current level of understanding of political philosophy. We want it small because government is inherently dangerous and the power will be wielded by flawed people of the sort who tend to be attracted to power in the first place. But we have to have a government in the first place because people will tend toward the base without one. This is the Truth the anarchists and idiotarian libertarians miss.
> The founding fathers of the U.S. had progressive tendencies, but even they had to compromise(!) > on slavery and apparently didn't really th
Oh please. You do a disservice to your team with BS like that.
Conservatives support genocide? Evidence please. Meanwhile the Progressive family tree has every one of the top ten mass murdering sons of a bitches of the 20th Century's blood on it's hands. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on. All various flavors of progressive, socialist, communist, fascist (read up on what fascism really is, it is not "people liberals don't like") and other crackpot trying to reimagine civilization around the same smelly core of bankrupt notions.
Censorship? Really? Who calls for removing anyone who disagrees with the fashionable politically correct idea of the day from the public square? Ever been by Media Matters for America's website? Who calls for boycots on an almost daily basis purely because they don't like what somebody says?
Book Burning? Evidence please! Meanwhile.... look at your progressive utopias of the 20th Century. Book banners all. They would burn the book and kill the owner.
> Small cities / towns can't afford this sort of thing without significant state and federal money. We can't even bond out that kind of money because the tax base isn't there.
Hmm. I'm about as anti-tax as ya get but here I go. I read that statement and hear the marketplace saying you guys need to raise yer revenue to a point where you can buy your own darned electrical capacity instead of asking everyone else to subsidize your lifestyle. Either through property taxes or jacking electric rates you folks should be paying for what you need yourselves. There are many positives to living in a remote location, I don't have to tell you those as you decided to live there, but there are also negatives that raise the cost of living. YOU should be the one paying those costs.
It is millions of cases like yours that has driven us to the brink of insolvency. Everybody wants to have their subsidy so they can do something that makes little economic sense but dammit they want it. Of course now that we have reached the point where everybody is getting a subsidy for something it means everybody is paying... or borrowing from China, and the whole system is breaking down.
> When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt...
This. If hydro is currently producing 6% of our electricity, increasing that by 50% gets you all the way up to 9% but the cost in construction and maintaining so many small installs will dwarf the benefit. To borrow someone else's phrase, "Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
> The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
While I do agree in this case, note that the enviros ALWAYS say the ecological damage isn't worth it. ALWAYS. Since they cry wolf so regular most normal folk have taken to discounting claims of enviromental harm. Enviros really should consider that and instead of opposing everything every time tell us what they are FOR.
Me, I say build the crap of nukes and convert fleets to natural gas.
It would be a case where the government could make a positive impact and NOT be exceeding their legal bounds. If all large government fleets went natural gas every service station would quickly add the ability to sell to them without any mandate or tax breaks needed. Imagine every new school bus, city bus, police car, etc. converting. Every one of those vehicles stopped needing gas it would relieve a lot of pressure on crude prices AND on our strained refining capacity. Then we could think about the big rigs.
As for nukes, we should be building them. New safer designs so we can retire the current units which were less safe than a modern design before we have operated them far beyond their original service life. Which design is best? Who knows, so have a bake off and pick a half dozen different designs and build some. Dump some R&D into thorium, if only to get those people on board. Right now electric vehicles are just indirect coal burners, get enough nuke capacity onto the grid and they make a lot more sense. Now if we could just get the battery tech up to scratch....
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> I'll stick with OTA where the quality is better.
Or not. The public broadcasters here in LA now jam LPB[123] onto their one HD OTA stream. The ABC station has a secondary NBC feed that has been abused to 720p to match the rest of the station's setup. The NBC station that is closest feeds NBC and a pair of SD junk streams. And so on.
I predicted this here on /. years ago, that real HD would be a chimera as soon as I read that stations would have the option to broadcast multiple streams. No way they would refuse the chance to increase revenue at the expense of picture quality.
Yup, it can be set to automagic. I do it, and lemme tell ya something. That one feature boosted the WAF by 50% alone. Making half-zoom the default on 4:3 content sealed the deal. Few TVs can even do that trick. She is now ready to go for an upgrade to a Prime and have to watch everything through Myth. The advantages of getting rid of/minimizing the stupid black bars everywhere were enough to overcome the slow channel changing while filling the ring buffer. And it looks like 0.25 has sped that up anyway so yea!
Actually I sometimes see that problem as well. I have a PVR-350 although I no longer use the output port on it. If two programs are recorded back to back on different channels there is a small chance mythbackend will die and the second program will not record and nothing else will until I notice it and restart the backend.
I'm not super worried because I'm already saving my pennies for a Prime, especially with a new version out and hopefully simplifying setting one of them up to use all three tuners.
> Well, since Egypt is clearly in the hands of the Egyptian army,
For now. Thankfully. But once the elections are over it i going to be increasingly hard for the military to maintain control. We have managed to remove almost all of thier legitimatcy and if you haven't figured out yet that Obama will pull their aid if they don't hand the coiuntry over to the Brotherhood you aren't paying attention.
> I wonder who you think the "terrorists" are.
The Muslim Brotherhood. They are the parent organization of pretty much every terrorist organization. If AQ if "The Base" then the MB is the "Mothership."
> And female contraceptives don't even work that way.
Female contraceptives are $/mo at Walmart.. or more to the point the Target that is less than 2 miles from Georgetown she attends. That price is with a doctor's prescription (because the pill is a controlled substance) but without any insurance. So the only way you get from there to $1000 is lots of condoms. And since she lives in the east coast blue hive, condoms are free is so many places you have to try hard to avoid them. Not to mention that the pill itself is available from multiple free clinics within a couple of miles of her location. In other words, as I said, she isn't a slut; she is a lying liar who lies.
> Maybe they just have a bone to pick.
Of course I have a bone to pick. I object to most of the Federal Government.
> If you're not talking about Social Security, Medicare, Military Expenditures, or Debt Service, you're not serious about the budget.
Well debt service is off the table for reasons that should be so obvious they don't require comment. So that leaves the big ones. And you are partly right that those are the problem. But you are also wrong that the small stuff should therefore be left untouched. Your side is engaged in a circular argument in bad faith bacause you guys don't want to see ANY government touched. You see, as soon as we propose cutting the small but useless crap you point to the bit ticket items and proclaim that until we cut or reform them we must not touch sacred cows such as NPR. Propose reforming 'entitlements' and the argument instantly flips and some wasteful program is held up and we are told that we can't touch granny's medicid while we are wasting billions on other stuff.
And no, we won't be able to mount an argument to cut 'entitlements' while stupid crap is being funded, no way we can make the argument that this is a crisis while surrendering the fight to cut NPR. So how about this answer: cut everything until we balance the budget. Start with a budget that spends what we are taking in, cutting everything in proportion, then let the battle royal begin to restore funding to really important programs at the expense of less important ones.
And before you even say it, no. Won't work. Raising taxes in the current reality would almost certainly reduce revenue, not increase it. If you want to reform the tax system I'm all for it so long as it is revenue neutral (static score) and depends on growing the economy to raise revenue.
> Rather is a counter-example as is Limbaugh and his slut-tirade.
Eh? In Rather's case we ain't talking about a minor infraction of the PC rulebook, that was the most notorious case of journalistic fraud in at least the last ten years, he was fair busted in days and the chain of evidence had totally fallen apart in a week yet it took months to fire him. Comparing that to a speech code violation isn't apple to oranges, itis more like apples to jeeps., a category error.
As for Rush, if you have (5-1 against) actually listened to all of what he said it wasn't that extreme. When someone enters the political arena they are subject to being ripped on by entertainer/commenters on the arena. Ms. Fluke is at least a principle, not the preteen daughter of one that pussies like Bill Mahar and Letterman prefer attacking. If ya can't rip on the stupid comments of a political activist who is on the way to a law degree from a major university, something is seriously wrong. And what the woman said was pretty damned stupid even in the age of idiocy we are living in. And yes, I'll go there: If the crazy girl is really going through a thousand dollars a year in contraceptives she has to be f*cking like a porn star. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'd call her a slut too but that would be an insult to sluts. I mean, we all know hippie chicks are easy, but G*ddamn! Or she is a liar bearing false witness as a cheap political stunt, which is closer to the truth.
But more important is there isn't anyone to 'fire' him. He owns the company. So all his opponents could do was attack his advertisers and the network of stations which carry his program. Both were done. That it failed to suceed says something about the strength of Media Matters... or lack thereof.
> Ah yes, the lies to show how you are the only persecuted side, and all others are protected. Wasn't there some hubbub about
> a newscaster with a forged draft-dodge document getting fired, and no apology stopped that?
You mean Dan Rather's 100% faked report dropped days before a Presidential election and clearly intended to swing the election? The one that was debunked in epic fashion (the infamous throbing GIF) by the Internet so fast it actually boomeranged and likely helped reelect Bush? And still it took CBS months and a special Blue Ribbon Commission of all stars to decide that yes, this was so obvious (and equally likely that it FAILED and helped reelect Bush) that the honor of the network required his producer be sacked... then when that didn't go over Rather went under the bus.
How about a more recent case that more closely bears on this one, of a CNN host tweeting something homophobic and getting to keep his job. Google can supply examples until you get sick of reading them. Bigoted and liberal, ok. Bigoted and conservative, not ok. Hell, I'm conceding the point that Derb went over the line in responding to the race hustlers who wrote the original pieces in the NYT, WaPo, etc. And if we were having a spasm of disgust and cleaning house, firing everybody on all sides who has been crossing the line lately, well ok; sucks for everybody who lost jobs in this crappy economy but life ain't fair. Kinda ex post facto and all, but at some point we might want to draw some lines and raise the level of discourse in our leading publications.
> No, it's not. For one, it's quite minuscule in the Federal budget
True enough. But cut it, the whole of CPB and the NEA and a few thousand other useless and/or programs that are nice to have in fat times and it is real money, even on the Federal Budget scale. Reality says things that can't continue don't. And our current Federal Budget can't continue. Longterm you can't extract more than about 20% of the U.S. economy in taxes and we are spending far more than that. If you refuse to even cut NPR after you state they don't really need the money, where will you cut?
> especially when one compares it to the subsidies of the oil companies.
What subsidies? Do you mean the tax incentives/etc that any manufacturer ca get? Or the extraction credits anyone in the extracive fields like mining/drilling/etc. get? You have fallen for another one of the false narratives of the left. Big oil pays a lot of taxes. They pay to lease the land the drill on from private individuals or the government, then they pay extraction taxes. Then they pay corporate taxes at state, federal and sometimes local levels. They pay a lot of money to hire Americans to do hard, skilled jobs that pay very well, and both the oil companies and those employees pay a shedload of taxes for that. Then when they sell a gallon of gas a big chunk of the selling prices are highway taxes. Far more of a gallon of gas is paying various taxes than ever makes to the profits or dividends of the oil companies.
And you know that on some level. If you really thought oil companies were awash in insanely great profits you wouldn't be bitchin' you would be owning shares in em. But while they are performing fairly well they ain't dominating the stock pages. Unlike a certain company known for insanely great profit margins and almost no American employees.
> If you want to keep it real, you ought be a lot more concerned about why men are such fuck-ups before you worry about what color the men are.
Ask a hard question next time. That one is pretty simple. We have built a society where men are unneeded, and left unattended and without a purpose most men will quickly go feral, especially when raised without a positive male role model as a stabilizing influence. But fear not, the same feminism that created that problem is still at work... women are fast becoming as violent as men so in a few more generations we will at last have equality even in depravity. Why isn't that a happy thought? Probably because of the realization that if the current trend lines continue our civilization will implode long before that 'equality of depravity' comes to pass.
> Citation or it didn't happen.
Do you get CNN on your planet?
Any person who was actually following events in the Middle East could have easilly predicted that Egypt and Libya would be in the hands of terrorists a year after their respective 'regime change.' It follows that even if the Idiot Child in the White House isn't up on things foreign, and even if (unbeliveable) Sec Clinton was also clueless, that somebody in a position to speak up loud enough to be heard warned of the probable result of throwing Mubarak and Kadaffy under the bus. Thus we are justified to assume that this result was desired or at least considered better than the alternatives.
> Juan Williams didn't just say something "NPR did not like," he said something incredibly and unapologetically racist.
Except of course he did nothing of the sort, which is why when the smoke cleared the person who fired Juan was also looking for work.
> NPR is "government funded" like oil companies are "government funded". NPR is no BBC.
Ok, then lets remove their government funding. If they don't really need it and the govenment is broke, here is a budget cut we should all be able to agree on. Removing the stigma of government funding would free them from accusations of being the government's mouthpiece. Seriously, is the fraction of NPR's funding that comes from the government SO important that we should be borrowing it from China? That is the question we should be asking on every single line item of the Federal Budget until it lower the deficit to a point where can at least finance it by mostly internal borrowing.
> So to answer your question: Yes.
You do capture the reality correctly. But should it be? An opinion writer fired for expressing an opinion.... at a completely different forum that the one doing the firing? Juan Williams fired from NPR for saying something on FNS or Derb fired from NR for writing something at Taki. I can totally understand when NR fired Ann Coulter for her 9/12 column since it was published on NR. But really, this fire at the first politically incorrect thought has to stop. Of course it only works one way. Lefties get away with saying the most vile things and if the stink is really bad they issue an apology and move on.
Funny thing, every few months some lefty (like the POTUS or AG Holder, etc) issues a call for a 'frank discussion of race' or some such, or calls white people 'cowards' for refusing to have a 'dialog on race' yet the second somebody actually takes them serious and issues a response to some of their race baiting (as Derb was doing btw.) the trap is sprung; they are branded a 'racist' and expunged from polite society. Meanwhile Rev. Sharpton incites riots that actually KILL PEOPLE, launches race baiting hoaxes and is using his perch as an MSNBC host to attempt to incite mass riots and nobody is saying a damned word... and if he succeeds will almost certainly go unprosecuted. It is the imbalance that is objectionable. Were Rev. Al as unwelcome in polite society as David Duke we would be making progress toward a color blind society.
But now lemme add a few notes here. Defending Derb's (or Juan Williams) right to say what he said doesn't imply I agree with it. On the other had I do agree with everything Ann Coulter wrote on 9/12, especially in light of her personally losing a close friend the day before. And on the gripping hand agree NR had to sack her, that wasn't the sort of thing that NR does. Such is life. Especially didn't like Derb's bits about IQ since that is underdetermined at best.
Intelligence testing was at about the level of phrenelogy when all serious inquiry was halted by political correctness from the 'rational, scientific progressives' as CrimeThink of the first order. So we can't say anything of value on the subject because it is forbidden to even ask those sort of questions. I believe it is obvious that progressives believe blacks are inferior, both when they were mostly overt racists themselves (look it up people, it IS) and now when they design policies based on an assumption black people are incapable of making it without the constant assistance of white limousine liberals. But that is more likely a defect on the progressives part than anythng connected to reality. At any rate the whole American experiment depends upon "All men are created equal..." so any system that requires treating people differently based on things like race, color, gender, etc. should be avoided to the maximum extent possible. (Can't be entirely because some corner cases simply can't be handwaved away, especially gender. But for most practical purposes it can be abstracted away and should.)
The one thing all of the little hardware boxes do that your Pi running XBMC (or small Atom) can't do is streaming media. To be allowed to do that you have to prove to Netflix, Amazon, etc. that the box is tamper proof enough they feel safe in allowing 'The Precious' to be sent to it. Of course since pretty much every BlueRay player streams and sucks at actually playing irregular discs (as in downloaded content) just have one of those to cover locked content and build a media box of your own for everything else.
Except of course, like everything else in this story, those facts are wrong. Trayvon is usually pictured as a much younger child. But there is also a photo of him in his football uniform. Yes, the kid played football. That means he isn't the weakling the media want you to believe he is. And Zimmerman isn't 240lbs either, that was enhanced to feed the narrative as well. Conflicting accounts so I won't even venture a guess as to the actual number but odds are they were fairly well matched in the weight class while Trayvon was an active young athete being drilled by a football coach.... when not suspended of course. Meanwhile Zimmerman looks kinda out of shape in those police station videos.
They just happened to get a cyron graphic over his head right when a possible injury would have been visible. Just happened, nothing intentional at all. Same for NBC just happened to drop the middle of the exchange and transform the 911 tape into something horribly racist. And they just by accident keep reusing an obviously outdated photo of Trayvon making him look like a pimply faced youth and they just happen to always use what looks like a mug shot of Zimmerman when other more flattering photos DO exist. Popular (from early media accounts) legend says Zimmerman called 911 46 times in a little over a year. Reality? Try since 2004, which for a neighborhood watch captain isn't so wierd. A few sources have corrected but we all know how corrections are buried and the original account becomes 'fact.' So many coincidences, every one pointing in the same direction. And good luck finding the phrase "White Hispanic" in use before this case.
What happened that rainy night? At this point we will probably never know, it will pass into legend like the JFK assassination.
As for me though, I haven't needed to follow the case all that close because I have a proxy that has so far been 100% accurate. Al Sharpton. He is on one side so that side is wrong, never fails. If I had to serve on a jury I'd have to hunker down and examine all of the evidence because eventually, like a stopped clock, he will be right but for day to day purposes the Sharpton test is reliable enough.
> Come up with actual reasons for your opinions or we'll treat them with the respect they deserve...
No opinion in what I posted. Why did the Kennedys work so hard to scuttle a wind project near them? They didn't want to see em. That was their stated reason so that is a fact.
The present of turbines can thus be said to lower property values. Again, fact not opinion. Whether they SHOULD isn't the point, the fact is enough people consider them eyesores that they DO lower property values. That leads to NIMBY.
> Seriously, actual logical reasons why having something on your property that SAVES you money every month is bad?
Except in this case they don't save the property owners money. But by lowering their property value it could put their mortage under water. I'm sure the person owning the actual property where the turbines will be located (if offshore, that would be the government) is being paid for the use of that land, but the neighbors? Nah. They get nothing out of the deal, yet see real loses and are thus complaining to their elected reps. What part of that do you find objectionable?
> it's a wonder that any one would be against the use of renewable energy sources.
Yea, it is totally outside yer understanding. That is the problem with greens, you really can't undertand how anyone could possibly disagree with a single one of your policies. After all, they are so self evidently perfect and all that.
On the other hand some of us understand NIMBY. While I too doubt the possibility for health problems for people miles/kilometers from one, or even directly under one for that matter, they will certainly lower property values. And if you are too close they can be noisy and a lot of the same hippies agitating for alternative energy find them an eyesore, again lowering property values.
Welcome to the real world. You end up having to stuff them in god awful places where almost nobody lives then lose too much current to wire losses and increased expenses to send people out to work on them. Then as soon as the government subsidies stop you lock the thing down because the unsubsidized operating costs often exceed the value of the electricity produced. But it looked so good on the glossy brocure to the stockholders and government regulating agencies handing out those sacks of cash.
> I recently ran mke2fs -c -c on a 2TB USB3 drive. It took 48 hours to complete.
I suspect USB is the problem. I can run a full raid parity check on six 1TB drives in a RAID5 in a few (3-7) hours, while backups are flowing to them from the network. Something else you might look at is RAM usage, if it is puny enough mke2fs might be swapping?
That said, you do have a kernel of truth in your statement, improvement in read/write times hasn't kept pace with capacity growth now for years. And seek times are pretty much stuck around where they were a decade ago. It is a problem. People are working on it.
> I've always used "consumer" grade HD's in my servers...
A lot depends on what your servers are doing. Try putting a consumer drive in a news server some time if you want a good laugh. Or put one in any server that is really busy 24/7 and a cheap drive will crap out fairly fast since they were never designed for that sort of constant abuse. Meanwhile good drives can and will hold up for years of that kind of torture. Yes they will all happilly spin 24/7 and thrive if the drive is well cooled since power cycles are when most drives die, but constant seeking is another kettle of fish.
> Raid is toast. I dont care WHAT raid you are running, none of them can withstand a loss of 50% of the drives.
Actually.... RAID 1, 1+0, 1+5 and 1+6 can do just that. Two seperate cabinets connected to two controllers on possibly two hosts. Then you can kick out a cable and survive. Just depends how much money you throw at it, which usually depends on how much downtime costs.
> Raid is NOT a backup. it's high availability mitigating the highest failure rate part, the hard drives.
Which is also true since RAID does nothing to help when filesystem corruption is the problem.
> In terms of genocide we're having pretty good luck slaughtering Islamic people recently.
This word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means. Genocide is an attempt to wipe out a people. If the US set out to wipe out a group of people I would hope we would be a little better at it because if that were our goal we suck. Try looking up the historical record of what 'success' in this department looks like. And yea, I'll even give you the US vs the Indians, even though an argument can be mustered that we (or at least most of us) weren't intending to wipe em all out the results are pretty clear. And since I'm about to lambaste yer but on the whole intent vs results I'll go ahead and mark up that demerit for my team.
Lets go to the board on that... Team America: One. Team Progressive: Averaged about a million a year in mass graves over the 20th Century in countless incidents/wars/purges/atrocities... all quite intentional. Oh wait... low score is good? Yea America!
> The so-called progressive leaders you list were simply the oldest forms of conservatives; despots and monarchists.
Ah, I have seen this debating style before. Everything with a bad result is relabeled 'conservative', 'reactionary', etc. So logically you are saying every smelly hippie in a Che t-shirt is really a conservative... even if they don't know it and would (while denouncing violence) punch you in the junk if you called them one to their face. Thus the word becomes like 'fascist' has become, a meaningless noise that implies dislike but has no concrete definition.
Sorry, there were two basic schools of thought as the end product of the Enlightenment, the classical liberal set of ideas that culminated in the American Revolution's notion of the modern Republic and the 'scientific, rational' Revolutions in France and Russia. One school of thought is defended by what are now referred to as 'Conservatives' (since you guys poached 'liberal' when 'progressive', 'socialist' and 'communist' became so radioactive none could proclaim them and be elected dog catcher) and the other line lead to evil, tyranny mass graves and the modern Democrat Party.
> Progressive leaders have historically empowered the common people, not subjugated them.
You guys keep saying that but EVERY time one of ya gets power the jack boots come out. Just as soon as the masses don't follow along on one of the Great Leader's pet notions. You keep believing that next time will be different, that the 'right' people will finally get the power and utopia will result. The 'right' people can't get the power and couldn't keep it anyway without becoming the wrong people in the process. Go rewatch ST:TOS "Patterns of Force" to see an example of what I'm on about here.
We understand two things your team doesn't.
1. Governent is naked force. It is right there on the label, right beside the part where Government claims an exclusive right on the power to initiate force. Political philosophers call it the 'Police Power.' In English it is the part where they claim the Right to tell you to do something and to be able to add the "or else."
2. Humanity is inherently flawed. Get there by way of philosophy or religion's notions about 'fallen man' but it is a key insight to have in mind when designing a government.
We deal with those problems by wanting a government as small as possible while still able to do those things that only a State can do at our current level of understanding of political philosophy. We want it small because government is inherently dangerous and the power will be wielded by flawed people of the sort who tend to be attracted to power in the first place. But we have to have a government in the first place because people will tend toward the base without one. This is the Truth the anarchists and idiotarian libertarians miss.
> The founding fathers of the U.S. had progressive tendencies, but even they had to compromise(!)
> on slavery and apparently didn't really th
Oh please. You do a disservice to your team with BS like that.
Conservatives support genocide? Evidence please. Meanwhile the Progressive family tree has every one of the top ten mass murdering sons of a bitches of the 20th Century's blood on it's hands. Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and so on. All various flavors of progressive, socialist, communist, fascist (read up on what fascism really is, it is not "people liberals don't like") and other crackpot trying to reimagine civilization around the same smelly core of bankrupt notions.
Censorship? Really? Who calls for removing anyone who disagrees with the fashionable politically correct idea of the day from the public square? Ever been by Media Matters for America's website? Who calls for boycots on an almost daily basis purely because they don't like what somebody says?
Book Burning? Evidence please! Meanwhile.... look at your progressive utopias of the 20th Century. Book banners all. They would burn the book and kill the owner.
> Small cities / towns can't afford this sort of thing without significant state and federal money. We can't even bond out that kind of money because the tax base isn't there.
Hmm. I'm about as anti-tax as ya get but here I go. I read that statement and hear the marketplace saying you guys need to raise yer revenue to a point where you can buy your own darned electrical capacity instead of asking everyone else to subsidize your lifestyle. Either through property taxes or jacking electric rates you folks should be paying for what you need yourselves. There are many positives to living in a remote location, I don't have to tell you those as you decided to live there, but there are also negatives that raise the cost of living. YOU should be the one paying those costs.
It is millions of cases like yours that has driven us to the brink of insolvency. Everybody wants to have their subsidy so they can do something that makes little economic sense but dammit they want it. Of course now that we have reached the point where everybody is getting a subsidy for something it means everybody is paying... or borrowing from China, and the whole system is breaking down.
> When total energy required on the order of TWatts, you want to boast about 18GWatt...
This. If hydro is currently producing 6% of our electricity, increasing that by 50% gets you all the way up to 9% but the cost in construction and maintaining so many small installs will dwarf the benefit. To borrow someone else's phrase, "Electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."
> The ecological damage for that pittance of power just isn't worth it.
While I do agree in this case, note that the enviros ALWAYS say the ecological damage isn't worth it. ALWAYS. Since they cry wolf so regular most normal folk have taken to discounting claims of enviromental harm. Enviros really should consider that and instead of opposing everything every time tell us what they are FOR.
Me, I say build the crap of nukes and convert fleets to natural gas.
It would be a case where the government could make a positive impact and NOT be exceeding their legal bounds. If all large government fleets went natural gas every service station would quickly add the ability to sell to them without any mandate or tax breaks needed. Imagine every new school bus, city bus, police car, etc. converting. Every one of those vehicles stopped needing gas it would relieve a lot of pressure on crude prices AND on our strained refining capacity. Then we could think about the big rigs.
As for nukes, we should be building them. New safer designs so we can retire the current units which were less safe than a modern design before we have operated them far beyond their original service life. Which design is best? Who knows, so have a bake off and pick a half dozen different designs and build some. Dump some R&D into thorium, if only to get those people on board. Right now electric vehicles are just indirect coal burners, get enough nuke capacity onto the grid and they make a lot more sense. Now if we could just get the battery tech up to scratch....