Sexconker, there are things that are funny all the time, things that are funny once, things that are not funny, and things that are unfunny. I'll be generous and say that this was funny once; it's now moved to not funny, and if you keep it up, it's rapidly going to become unfunny. So quit while you're ahead.
****************
Now, then: We keep trying to create 'artificial intelligence', and we don't even understand how our own 'natural intelligence' actually works yet, especially what we refer to as 'consciousness'. Any work in 'AI' is just busy-work until we figure out how our own brains work.
In my opinion people spend way too much time, money, and effort, attempting to 'live as long as possible'. What they should be doing instead is focusing on quality of life.
Yes, but: If everyone can live hundreds or thousands of years, and there is no more 'decline with age', then everyone has time to learn new skills and educate themselves, so theoretically there could be a Golden Age of true prosperity. Note I said 'theoretically'. What would probably happen is the rich would start spending their money to keep the so-called 'commoners' down, and it would become even more obvious than it is right now. Of course that is assuming this 'cure for the disease of aging' would even be allowed by the rich to fall into the hands of the 'commoners' in the first place; their game plan will obviously include funding the research, and then when it's developed and perfected, asserting their ownership of it -- and perhaps even silencing (permanently, if need be) the researchers (and anyone else who knows about it who can't be trusted) so only the rich have access to it.
There are 'manufacturers' (using the term very loosely here) in China and other Asian countries, who produce whatever cheap shitty garbage they can, and sell it to the West. There's little to no quality control of any kind, and they really don't give a damn about the consequences, they only care about profit.
Actually, that is a particularly un-Christian position
Where did I say they were 'good' or even actual Christians? They're not, any more than certain Sunni extremists are considered good or proper Muslims. But that's what these people seem to believe, and they prove it with their actions. You want to call them out for being 'bad Christians'? Go right ahead, be sure to let us know how that's working for you. They'll gleefully fuck the environment of the entire planet because they believe it's their God-given right to do so, and they collectively have enough money and influence to make sure anyone that gets in the way of what they want to do, can have their lives ruined, permanently.
No, they don't. They believe that the world is going to come to an end, and God is going to come down and take them all Home, and nothing we did here will really matter; the Earth is just here for us to use up and who cares what happens to it afterwards? So far as they're all concerned the sooner it all comes to an End the better, they think there's a Heaven waiting for them where everything will be wonderful. Of course they're all idiots and will destroy our REAL home unless we reign them in.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet.
Cynical, but undeniably true. In my opinion, the day that the vast majority of human beings alive on Earth look at things like religion and superstitions and say "That doesn't make any sense!", will be the day that the Human race will start truly becoming what I consider to be 'sentient' and 'civilized'.
I once had a disagreement with someone with regards to the security of SSDs versus rotating magnetic media: I was saying that you can use something like Eraser or sdelete to overwrite every block of an SSD, and the person I was disagreeing with claimed that 'wouldn't do anything' and it was impossible to completely erase an SSD; would someone please clear that up for me? I can't see how writing random data to every block of an SSD woudl fail to securely erase it.
But on that same subject: an SSD is more time-consuming and difficult to 'erase' securely, especially considering that with a traditional HDD you can put it through a degausser and completely erase it in a matter of seconds; with an SSD, you'd either have to overwrite it, or literally dismantle it and carefully smash every single flash memory unit on it in order to be 100% sure it's unrecoverable.
Morons. They'll ruin peoples lives, likely based on some moron that saw Minority Report and thought it was a Good Idea. Someone doesn't just need to be fired outright for this, someone needs to be dragged out into the street and flogged publicly over it. You can't convict someone for a crime you think they MIGHT commit, and what they're doing here has essentially the same effect with regard to the general public.
Disclaimer: I know nothing of 'statistics' in the math sense of the word, therefore I'm rather ignorant on the subject.. but that being said, what I think of as 'true random', out in our Universe, looks to me in my mind's eye like a classic pseudorandom number generator, like you'd build with shift registers and logic gates (or the programmatic equivalent), except it's so many bits wide that you'll never see the whole sequence ever repeat itself. Rationally I know that there are a finite number of forces acting upon a die when you roll it, and those forces have (for the most part) finite ranges, and if you could define and control all of them, you could make a die roll whatever you want, whenever you want.
3000 rolls isn't anywhere near enough. Two: All gamers, apparently, go through a phase where they blame their dice for things not going their way. Get over it. Three: This is why there are so many gamers that have boxes full of dice; they haven't got over it yet. Four: Still insist on 'physical' dice hamstringing you? Fine. Write a smartphone app that uses the Quantum Random Bit Generator free service. If that isn't random enough for you, then you need psychiatric help, you're way too in denial to be healthy.
I'm betting that if and when Russia does have boots on the ground on the Moon, Putin tries to claim some (or all) of the real estate there, international treaty or not. Same bet applies to China, assuming they ever made it there (less likely, though).
Obama to (Republican-controlled Congress): Quit hogging the ball, it's everybody's ball, we want to play with it, too! Congressional Republicans: Haha, we don't like you, so we're not going to let you play, and there's more of us than there are of you, so get lost, loser! Congressional Democrats: Hey, we want him and his buddies to play, and he's right, and you're all just being mean! Congressional Republicans: STFU or we'll beat you up again -- and you can't stop us from doing that, either! Obama:... Congressional Democrats:... Congressional Republicans: Shoe on head or we accidentally the whole Federal Government again! Obama: -_- Congressional Democrats: T_T Congressional Republicans: Y U SO MAD THO? XD XD XD XD
That's about how the climate-change conversation goes on The Hill these days.
However, they can be made to fail safe and hopefully infrequently
I'm sorry, but I don't think you've ever designed any sort of technology in your entire life, let alone aircraft, if you think that way. You cannot control random failures. Prime example: Battery suddenly fails completely. No 'algorithm' can function in a system with NO POWER. Drone drops like a rock, maybe on a car, maybe on someone's head. I can't say it enough: When human safety and lives are at stake you cannot assume things will always work and just hope for the best, you have to take every precaution, both in design and in operation. That's why this sort of thing really isn't going to see the light of day: you can't guarantee with even a reasonable degree of predictability that nobody will have a drone fall on them. This isn't even touching on the subject of things like property damage. Really, it's all a publicity stunt.
As usual, the whole "drones will fall on my head" thing is luddite horseshit based on little to no evidence from the real world.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this..
You don't need to respond to it. Anyone who immediately turns to name-calling, mistakenly thinking it somehow validates their 'point', isn't worth the trouble to even listen to in the first place. Furthermore, that guy, whoever he is, is just another child (millennial, maybe?) who likely has never had anything bad happen to them their entire lives ('bad things happen to OTHER people!') and just can't imagine anything actually going wrong. They don't understand that technology can and does fail, and that where human safety and lives are at stake, you can't afford to just hope things work like you want them to, you have to take precautions.
No, see, YOU are the one who is stupid. I'll bet cash money that you've lived your entire life without anything bad ever happening to you, and as a result you firmly believe that The World Is Your Oyster, never a single serious thought for what could go wrong, skating through life with Rose Colored Glasses on. Chances are you're under 30. In your opinion, 'bad things' are what happen to other people, and it's due to something they did wrong, so they get what they deserve, isn't that right Mister AC? Well I got news for you, kid: People like who you're responding to, and myself, are the reason you're allowed to think you live in a world so ideally suited to you, where nothing bad ever happens to you; we're the ones who DO think about what can go wrong, point out the flaws, and take the appropriate pre-emptive measures to prevent disasters from happening.
But of course, someone like you will never admit or believe any of that. You're 100% sure you're right, and everyone else is wrong. We'll be sure to put that on your headstone, fool.
Now, then: IoT and 'The Cloud' are in fact for dopes; only a fool allows some faceless 3rd-party company to hold their data for them, and a couple minutes Google search of past news stories shows how many 'Cloud' companies have decided to close up shop, leaving their customers out in the cold. Furthermore who knows how many of these 'cloud' companies are hacking people's data, encrypted or not, for datamining purposes? You're stupid if you use them in the first place, and most IT security professionals agree on that point. So far as the 'Internet of Things' go? you may as well put a CCTV camera up your ass and post it on the Internet. Everything being said about the lack of security of these devices is 100% true and more evidence of that truth is being discovered every single day. Even if not true, someone like you really believes that these companies aren't datamining you through these devices and selling that data to 3rd party 'partner' companies, in spite of any so-called 'privacy agreements' they may trot out for you? TRY to wake up, will you?
I'm wondering if part of the motivation behind a move like this is to close the 'analog hole', meaning eliminating a baseband audio output, which is far easier to pirate music with (the connected device just has to have the correct impedance, and you have high-quality analog recording capability). Not that it can't still be done by hacking a Bluetooth or other digital device to get at the baseband audio, but Bluetooth at least has it's own compression algorithm it uses to transmit high sampling rate audio, and it's lossy.
You've got issues - if somebody buys a card rated for 1.2 GHz and won't run there, they should return it and get a refund.
I agree with this; if the silicon (and the implementation) weren't tested during development at a reasonable margin for temperature and supply rail voltage, then someone did a sloppy job and you shouldn't have to put up with it.
Objectively (or at least as objectively as I can be), no, it's not as bad as the media can make it out to be -- because warm-and-fuzzy news doesn't make for great ratings, death, destruction, violence, disaster, and all things extreme make for great ratings. Speaking of extremes, that's what we're seeing right now: extremes in both directions. One might also opine that some of the extremes on the violent/horrifying/terror end of the scale are being artificially inflated by the perpetrators of said actions (and you know who I'm talking about, so no need to name names that are named way too much these days) by way of propaganda -- not that we can or should completely ignore them, though; we can't afford that luxury. But perception counts, and the perception that I get (and I think I'm not alone in this) is that it's like an inverted Bell curve right now: there are really good things happening at the same time that there are some really extremely horrifying things happening. Historically speaking,and to provide some perspective, it's not the first or last time in Human history that things will be this way, either. Tends to be cyclic.
No, Mister AC, I've never even been outside of California much, let alone ever outside the U.S., so what? Assumptions are being made on both sides, here, and one is worth about as much as the other: not much. Nobody is 'deciding' or 'judging' anything here, not in any significant way, it's just conversation by a bunch of random people on the Internet. You want real information? Go interview or poll a bunch of random people in Paris, then interview some of the troops on the streets, and the decision-makers in France. Otherwise we're all just armchair-quarterbacking the whole thing from behind our keyboards.
I'd happily live down the street from a Thorium reactor.
I second the motion. Speaking as someone who, back in the late 80's, out of my own fear due to ignorance and a lack of foresight, voted to shut down Rancho Seco, I've come full circle on the subject, and now feel that nuclear power is, for at least the time being, an excellent option to break us out of the use of fossil fuels, at least while other technologies are being (further) developed, and from what I've read on the subject, thorium reactors are a better, safer choice than uranium reactors, and more sustainable for the time being due to the relative abundance of thorium -- assuming we've learned from our mistakes and can design and operate such plants in an appropriately safe manner. Meanwhile I'll hold out hope that we manage to solve the puzzle of workable fusion reactor design, and the proliferation of technologies like photovoltaics can do nothing but good and I encourage their further development wholeheartedly. As a sidebar we need to persuade the electric power industry to stop whinging about rooftop solar and embrace it rather than treating it like it's The Enemy Trying To Destroy Them; just another case of an outdated business model that refuses to die, and profit standing in the way of much-needed progress, much like the way the auto industry treats upstart plug-in electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla. Big Business can't be allowed to determine the course human progress is going to take, because on average they'll choose profit over what's good for people over the long run every single time (in my opinion).
I'm not looking for cheap, I want best quality and performance
Unless you're buying a 'package deal' from a retailer and know down to the last fastener exactly what's going into the box you're buying, always build your own box if you can. Even then, if it's me, I'd end up auditing the entire pre-build anyway, to make sure their tech didn't do something stupid that would end up biting me in the ass down the road. But either way, if you have the capability to do so, spec out and build your system yourself, picking the best quality components and case, so you get exactly what you want, instead of what had the best profit margin for someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Sexconker, there are things that are funny all the time, things that are funny once, things that are not funny, and things that are unfunny. I'll be generous and say that this was funny once; it's now moved to not funny, and if you keep it up, it's rapidly going to become unfunny. So quit while you're ahead.
****************
Now, then: We keep trying to create 'artificial intelligence', and we don't even understand how our own 'natural intelligence' actually works yet, especially what we refer to as 'consciousness'. Any work in 'AI' is just busy-work until we figure out how our own brains work.
In my opinion people spend way too much time, money, and effort, attempting to 'live as long as possible'. What they should be doing instead is focusing on quality of life.
Yes, but: If everyone can live hundreds or thousands of years, and there is no more 'decline with age', then everyone has time to learn new skills and educate themselves, so theoretically there could be a Golden Age of true prosperity. Note I said 'theoretically'. What would probably happen is the rich would start spending their money to keep the so-called 'commoners' down, and it would become even more obvious than it is right now. Of course that is assuming this 'cure for the disease of aging' would even be allowed by the rich to fall into the hands of the 'commoners' in the first place; their game plan will obviously include funding the research, and then when it's developed and perfected, asserting their ownership of it -- and perhaps even silencing (permanently, if need be) the researchers (and anyone else who knows about it who can't be trusted) so only the rich have access to it.
..and yes, I'm a cynic, what's your point?
There are 'manufacturers' (using the term very loosely here) in China and other Asian countries, who produce whatever cheap shitty garbage they can, and sell it to the West. There's little to no quality control of any kind, and they really don't give a damn about the consequences, they only care about profit.
Actually, that is a particularly un-Christian position
Where did I say they were 'good' or even actual Christians? They're not, any more than certain Sunni extremists are considered good or proper Muslims. But that's what these people seem to believe, and they prove it with their actions. You want to call them out for being 'bad Christians'? Go right ahead, be sure to let us know how that's working for you. They'll gleefully fuck the environment of the entire planet because they believe it's their God-given right to do so, and they collectively have enough money and influence to make sure anyone that gets in the way of what they want to do, can have their lives ruined, permanently.
Because they hate us and want us to die.
No, they don't. They believe that the world is going to come to an end, and God is going to come down and take them all Home, and nothing we did here will really matter; the Earth is just here for us to use up and who cares what happens to it afterwards? So far as they're all concerned the sooner it all comes to an End the better, they think there's a Heaven waiting for them where everything will be wonderful. Of course they're all idiots and will destroy our REAL home unless we reign them in.
A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet.
Cynical, but undeniably true. In my opinion, the day that the vast majority of human beings alive on Earth look at things like religion and superstitions and say "That doesn't make any sense!", will be the day that the Human race will start truly becoming what I consider to be 'sentient' and 'civilized'.
I once had a disagreement with someone with regards to the security of SSDs versus rotating magnetic media: I was saying that you can use something like Eraser or sdelete to overwrite every block of an SSD, and the person I was disagreeing with claimed that 'wouldn't do anything' and it was impossible to completely erase an SSD; would someone please clear that up for me? I can't see how writing random data to every block of an SSD woudl fail to securely erase it.
But on that same subject: an SSD is more time-consuming and difficult to 'erase' securely, especially considering that with a traditional HDD you can put it through a degausser and completely erase it in a matter of seconds; with an SSD, you'd either have to overwrite it, or literally dismantle it and carefully smash every single flash memory unit on it in order to be 100% sure it's unrecoverable.
It works the same way that the 'bad guy' in a movie should have strong moral fiber and believes that he does the right thing from his point of view.
There is nothing more dangerous than someone who fervently believes they are right when what they believe is so completely and totally wrong.
Why are you posting as an AC? You actually said something intelligent!
Morons. They'll ruin peoples lives, likely based on some moron that saw Minority Report and thought it was a Good Idea. Someone doesn't just need to be fired outright for this, someone needs to be dragged out into the street and flogged publicly over it. You can't convict someone for a crime you think they MIGHT commit, and what they're doing here has essentially the same effect with regard to the general public.
Disclaimer: I know nothing of 'statistics' in the math sense of the word, therefore I'm rather ignorant on the subject.. but that being said, what I think of as 'true random', out in our Universe, looks to me in my mind's eye like a classic pseudorandom number generator, like you'd build with shift registers and logic gates (or the programmatic equivalent), except it's so many bits wide that you'll never see the whole sequence ever repeat itself. Rationally I know that there are a finite number of forces acting upon a die when you roll it, and those forces have (for the most part) finite ranges, and if you could define and control all of them, you could make a die roll whatever you want, whenever you want.
3000 rolls isn't anywhere near enough.
Two: All gamers, apparently, go through a phase where they blame their dice for things not going their way. Get over it.
Three: This is why there are so many gamers that have boxes full of dice; they haven't got over it yet.
Four: Still insist on 'physical' dice hamstringing you? Fine. Write a smartphone app that uses the Quantum Random Bit Generator free service. If that isn't random enough for you, then you need psychiatric help, you're way too in denial to be healthy.
I'm betting that if and when Russia does have boots on the ground on the Moon, Putin tries to claim some (or all) of the real estate there, international treaty or not. Same bet applies to China, assuming they ever made it there (less likely, though).
Obama to (Republican-controlled Congress): Quit hogging the ball, it's everybody's ball, we want to play with it, too! ... ...
Congressional Republicans: Haha, we don't like you, so we're not going to let you play, and there's more of us than there are of you, so get lost, loser!
Congressional Democrats: Hey, we want him and his buddies to play, and he's right, and you're all just being mean!
Congressional Republicans: STFU or we'll beat you up again -- and you can't stop us from doing that, either!
Obama:
Congressional Democrats:
Congressional Republicans: Shoe on head or we accidentally the whole Federal Government again!
Obama: -_-
Congressional Democrats: T_T
Congressional Republicans: Y U SO MAD THO? XD XD XD XD
That's about how the climate-change conversation goes on The Hill these days.
However, they can be made to fail safe and hopefully infrequently
I'm sorry, but I don't think you've ever designed any sort of technology in your entire life, let alone aircraft, if you think that way. You cannot control random failures. Prime example: Battery suddenly fails completely. No 'algorithm' can function in a system with NO POWER. Drone drops like a rock, maybe on a car, maybe on someone's head. I can't say it enough: When human safety and lives are at stake you cannot assume things will always work and just hope for the best, you have to take every precaution, both in design and in operation. That's why this sort of thing really isn't going to see the light of day: you can't guarantee with even a reasonable degree of predictability that nobody will have a drone fall on them. This isn't even touching on the subject of things like property damage. Really, it's all a publicity stunt.
As usual, the whole "drones will fall on my head" thing is luddite horseshit based on little to no evidence from the real world.
I'm not even sure how to respond to this..
You don't need to respond to it. Anyone who immediately turns to name-calling, mistakenly thinking it somehow validates their 'point', isn't worth the trouble to even listen to in the first place. Furthermore, that guy, whoever he is, is just another child (millennial, maybe?) who likely has never had anything bad happen to them their entire lives ('bad things happen to OTHER people!') and just can't imagine anything actually going wrong. They don't understand that technology can and does fail, and that where human safety and lives are at stake, you can't afford to just hope things work like you want them to, you have to take precautions.
Hardware fails, drones will fall from the sky..
This is all Amazon trying to create publicity for themselves. It'll never really happen.
No, see, YOU are the one who is stupid. I'll bet cash money that you've lived your entire life without anything bad ever happening to you, and as a result you firmly believe that The World Is Your Oyster, never a single serious thought for what could go wrong, skating through life with Rose Colored Glasses on. Chances are you're under 30. In your opinion, 'bad things' are what happen to other people, and it's due to something they did wrong, so they get what they deserve, isn't that right Mister AC? Well I got news for you, kid: People like who you're responding to, and myself, are the reason you're allowed to think you live in a world so ideally suited to you, where nothing bad ever happens to you; we're the ones who DO think about what can go wrong, point out the flaws, and take the appropriate pre-emptive measures to prevent disasters from happening.
But of course, someone like you will never admit or believe any of that. You're 100% sure you're right, and everyone else is wrong. We'll be sure to put that on your headstone, fool.
Now, then: IoT and 'The Cloud' are in fact for dopes; only a fool allows some faceless 3rd-party company to hold their data for them, and a couple minutes Google search of past news stories shows how many 'Cloud' companies have decided to close up shop, leaving their customers out in the cold. Furthermore who knows how many of these 'cloud' companies are hacking people's data, encrypted or not, for datamining purposes? You're stupid if you use them in the first place, and most IT security professionals agree on that point. So far as the 'Internet of Things' go? you may as well put a CCTV camera up your ass and post it on the Internet. Everything being said about the lack of security of these devices is 100% true and more evidence of that truth is being discovered every single day. Even if not true, someone like you really believes that these companies aren't datamining you through these devices and selling that data to 3rd party 'partner' companies, in spite of any so-called 'privacy agreements' they may trot out for you? TRY to wake up, will you?
I'm wondering if part of the motivation behind a move like this is to close the 'analog hole', meaning eliminating a baseband audio output, which is far easier to pirate music with (the connected device just has to have the correct impedance, and you have high-quality analog recording capability). Not that it can't still be done by hacking a Bluetooth or other digital device to get at the baseband audio, but Bluetooth at least has it's own compression algorithm it uses to transmit high sampling rate audio, and it's lossy.
It's two hours, I'll watch it this weekend, and thanks for the link.
You've got issues - if somebody buys a card rated for 1.2 GHz and won't run there, they should return it and get a refund.
I agree with this; if the silicon (and the implementation) weren't tested during development at a reasonable margin for temperature and supply rail voltage, then someone did a sloppy job and you shouldn't have to put up with it.
Objectively (or at least as objectively as I can be), no, it's not as bad as the media can make it out to be -- because warm-and-fuzzy news doesn't make for great ratings, death, destruction, violence, disaster, and all things extreme make for great ratings. Speaking of extremes, that's what we're seeing right now: extremes in both directions. One might also opine that some of the extremes on the violent/horrifying/terror end of the scale are being artificially inflated by the perpetrators of said actions (and you know who I'm talking about, so no need to name names that are named way too much these days) by way of propaganda -- not that we can or should completely ignore them, though; we can't afford that luxury. But perception counts, and the perception that I get (and I think I'm not alone in this) is that it's like an inverted Bell curve right now: there are really good things happening at the same time that there are some really extremely horrifying things happening. Historically speaking,and to provide some perspective, it's not the first or last time in Human history that things will be this way, either. Tends to be cyclic.
No, Mister AC, I've never even been outside of California much, let alone ever outside the U.S., so what? Assumptions are being made on both sides, here, and one is worth about as much as the other: not much. Nobody is 'deciding' or 'judging' anything here, not in any significant way, it's just conversation by a bunch of random people on the Internet. You want real information? Go interview or poll a bunch of random people in Paris, then interview some of the troops on the streets, and the decision-makers in France. Otherwise we're all just armchair-quarterbacking the whole thing from behind our keyboards.
I'd happily live down the street from a Thorium reactor.
I second the motion.
Speaking as someone who, back in the late 80's, out of my own fear due to ignorance and a lack of foresight, voted to shut down Rancho Seco, I've come full circle on the subject, and now feel that nuclear power is, for at least the time being, an excellent option to break us out of the use of fossil fuels, at least while other technologies are being (further) developed, and from what I've read on the subject, thorium reactors are a better, safer choice than uranium reactors, and more sustainable for the time being due to the relative abundance of thorium -- assuming we've learned from our mistakes and can design and operate such plants in an appropriately safe manner. Meanwhile I'll hold out hope that we manage to solve the puzzle of workable fusion reactor design, and the proliferation of technologies like photovoltaics can do nothing but good and I encourage their further development wholeheartedly. As a sidebar we need to persuade the electric power industry to stop whinging about rooftop solar and embrace it rather than treating it like it's The Enemy Trying To Destroy Them; just another case of an outdated business model that refuses to die, and profit standing in the way of much-needed progress, much like the way the auto industry treats upstart plug-in electric vehicle manufacturers like Tesla. Big Business can't be allowed to determine the course human progress is going to take, because on average they'll choose profit over what's good for people over the long run every single time (in my opinion).
I'm not looking for cheap, I want best quality and performance
Unless you're buying a 'package deal' from a retailer and know down to the last fastener exactly what's going into the box you're buying, always build your own box if you can. Even then, if it's me, I'd end up auditing the entire pre-build anyway, to make sure their tech didn't do something stupid that would end up biting me in the ass down the road. But either way, if you have the capability to do so, spec out and build your system yourself, picking the best quality components and case, so you get exactly what you want, instead of what had the best profit margin for someone else.