I don't use it for backup, I use two MyBooks that I rotate - one home, one off-site.
I still buy music in CD. I don't buy much music, I'd say 95% is classical. I also have ripped around 95% of all my music into 312lkbps MP3.
For video, I stream / netflix snailmail as a means to screen before i buy it. If I like it I buy it, and on Blu-Ray if possible.
I have a 7-foot screen on the horizontal and fairly decent projection, sound and room. I have a pretty good blu-ray player. It's still my primary source. (Oppo BD-103, for the curious). Presentation matters.
I like my shelves full of books, CDs and bluray/dvd. I also like the convenience of media-less formats. Why not have both?
"Feliz, feliz en tu dia, Amiguito que dios te bendiga, Que te pase un camion por encima, Y QUE CUMPLAS MUCHOS MAS!!!"
It's Puerto Rican for Happy Birthday. We kinda have a gallows humor down there;o)
But seriously, yes, Happy Birthday, Linux, it was you who sent me down the professional IT path. Before that, it was just tinkering. Oh who am I kidding I'm still tinkering XD
They're called "rigged elections". It's nothing new; during the 1968 presidential election, Hubert Humphrey's mic would randomly and abdruptly cut off in mid-sentence....
Puerto Rico, 1980: A vicious campaign season, which yielded much two great little campaign jingles...
Anyway, the night of the count, the incubment proclaims he's the winner, while the official count had the challenger way ahead.
Then, the power went out at the counting center. The computers crashed. When they came back online, the challenger was up by only 1000 votes, with the San Juan Metro area still to count - an area which favored the incumbent.
Roughly a month later, the results were certified. The incumbent had won by roughly 3000 votes. You shoulda heard the shouting and hand-wringing during that month. It was a comedy of epic proportions, at least for our little island. I was 10 then. Learned a lot about politics that year but especially with the election itself.
I'm not buying that power-out story.. although to be fair, late 70's power in PR sucked so bad my house in a nice 'hood had four kerosene cold-blast lanterns and they got used a lot. I loved the light they put out, I have two here myself even today. Blowing transmission-line towers with TNT was a tactic used by the linemen union. Lots of sags and outright outs.
You do realize the problem is party-agnostic, right? It doesn't matter what party the congresscritters belong to -- they're bought and paid for. Been like this for ages, but it seems to have gotten real bad in the early 70's.
I wonder... perhaps as payback for the whole anti-war movement? That's part of the Powell memo... the schools are teaching anti-corporate sentiments.. therefore the scools must be silenced or "encouraged" -- via generous "donations" to change their teachings, and the Rabble (that's us) needs to be silenced and our vote diminished.
Go read it, AC. There's copies of it all over the 'net.
Is there even remotely a chance that this insidious cycle can be broken?
Voting party lines won't fix this. This is party-agnostic.
It's time we add something to the Constitution: The separation of Commerce and State. But this will never, everty-ever happen. That relationship predates the US, it predates most of the last 2000 years, and I bet such shenanigans went on before that, too.
Citizen's United made it bloody plain these grotesque hybrid corporation/person abominations have the right to Free Speech, and money is speech. This BS needs to be overturned, it's probably Step 1.
Step 2 may be the Lobbies must be busted. Commerce went on a union-busting binge, we need to go on a lobby-busting binge.
The Soap Box is drowned in a sea of noise, the Ballot Box is broken, the Jury Box is bought and paid for, maybe it's time for the Ammo Box?
Frankly, the thought of sitting on an assembly line mindlessly inserting tab A into slot B all day is horrifyingly dreary.
I have done mindless tab A into slot B, and I've done careful hand-fitting of a board I just stuffed onto another board, on an assembly line. Tab A into slot B is indeed awful. But it paid better than washing dishes. Stuffing boards and mounting them to another board paid better and was more involved, and I enjoyed the precision aspect of it. Not what I would call bad or awful or boring. The stench of solder is something I miss, and reminisce about when I have to solder something these days.
I wasn't always an IT guy. Well, I was, but as a hobby. I had a day job with the gov't, and it paid shit, so I moonlighted at a local computer customization shop, where I was stuffing the aforementioned boards. This was in the early-mid 90's. Batches were typically around 2500 machines, all done to the same spec.
One morning they padlocked the gates, and bolted a sign to them: Closed with no notice. Call xxx-xxx-xxxx for your next instructions.
Yeah. Tossed out like so much garbage. One week's pay as severance. The work, we later heard, was sent to Malaysia.
Would I go back to factory work? Y'know, if I was making things I have an interest in, yeah, I'd do it. Watches. Cars. Yeah. Hand-made audio amps. Even if it *is* only bolting the hinges to the body, or only doing a few steps of a larger assembly.
But what do they make where I live? Hot air, bad music, awesome food. But manufacturing jobs? Heh... no. Perversely, a previous IT employer of mine just moved into what used to be a major Motorola factory. That IT employer has nothing do do with manufacturing of any kind.
What I'm trying to say, is that there can be pride in assembly work. I've felt it, and if you look at enough factories you'll see other people with that pride too. It's not all mindless tab A into slot B. Some people get to make something out of nothing more than sand, fire and molten metal. I would love to do that.
I thought Apple was first and foremost a technology company?
You can be a tech company and try to not be total douchebags.
Or, you can be a tech company with no conscience and burn and pillage your way to profit. Which btw, IS the norm. I'd rather deal with the less evil. Even if I had money invested in it.
When they made the 6 and 6+, Apple broke one of the most critical tenets of engineering: Form Follows Function, not the other way 'round. Thinner isn't always better. They made the 6 and 6+ trendy, hip and skinny -- and that broke the Function part of engineering.
I'm glad I still have my 5S, and when the time comes that it goes to cellphone heaven, I'll replace it with a new small phone. I'm so glad Apple is making one again. Fatter, shorter phones don't bend as much as a thin huge phone.
This thing of the government being inept, have you seen private bureaucracies at work?
After working for a decade and a half in the private sector, yes, I have seen private red tape and wonder just how exactly money is made, given the overall disjointedness of it all.
Does anyone here really believe this cyber bullshit?
Yes, yes I do.
Rationale being: "Government is inept at best and criminal at worst. A happy medium is they being criminally inept. NSA is a Government agency, ergo all the batshit insane ineptness that infects the Government also infects the NSA"
So yes, I believe the NSA got owned, and now begins the rearranging of deckchairs. A few people will be fired or otherwise disposed of, new techniques and tools will be developed, and life will be back to its nefarious normality again.
But for now, grab your bacon, popcorn and intoxicant of choice, sit back and watch! This may be the best damn show of our age!
(or it may be a brilliant piece of mis-direction, which would not make it any less real, just thornier and harder to decipher)
Verizon bloatware will be just as unremoveable (unless you root the phone) as Apple's bloatware.
Funny, I don't see apps for Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Macy's, etc pre-installed on my iToys. (I suppose those would be 3 of the "Big Brands" Verizon was about?
I do see things like the a stock ticker, Watch app, and a few other things I can't remove, so I've made a folder called "useless," put those things in there, and away we go. Hell, I use the stock ticker myself to research the health of say, a prospective new employer.
What Verizon wants to do is put "Big brand" apps in your phone. Which Apple hasn't done, and I hope they don't.
But hey -- starting with iOS 10 you will be able to remove the useless built-in apps you don't want!
I'm not concerned at all about these tools being used to penetrate Joe Sixpack's computer.
I am, however, tickled pink that these tools will be used against the tools of the Government and Commerce.
Yes, you tools! Let's see what happens when your sordid affairs, your innermost secrets and every repulsive, nauseating detail of your rape of America for the past half century are revealed!
In other words, Commerce and Government, fuck you with a splintered phonepole. I hope it hurts every bit as bad as what you've done to this country.
(Provided this toolkit is as powerful as claimed, and its leak isn't some False Flag operation.)
If I wanted to promote a security consulting business, I could identify a niche of that market and make up a bunch of stats for that market that show a need and enough people might buy into what I wrote that I could get some consultancy business.
This is why every single scrap of "white papers," "studies" and "recommendations" from every single research group or "Think Tank" should automatically be suspect and raise the questions of "Who paid for this?" and "Who benefits from this?"
There was a terrorist thwarted earlier this week near where I live. The police tracked him on the internet, knew of his sympathy for ISIS, and were able to act just before he was going to set off his bombs. That ability saved lives.
Can you tell us if the police just saw his incoherent allahu ackbar noise on Facetwat, or did the police actually got a warrant, and broke into his.. what.. email? SMS?
You see, AC, I doubt most crims have their plans squirreled away on a secur-ish machine encrypted on hardware and locked in a safe. I think most crims brag their intentions openly, be it Facetwat, or the local pub or burger joint.
I'm sure the ad-blockers will adapt to this. And BTW it isn't just facebook, it seems lately some ads are starting to come through on other sites. I don't know if that's ABP being more of a whore than usual... even though I have it set to *not* allow "unintrusive" ads through.
Besides, WTF do I care.. there's only one page on facebook that I actually *do* care about.
The article states this Chinese plane is roughly the size of a 737, which is given in wikipedia as having a wingspan of 117 ft with winglets, and a length of 138 ft max, both of those numbers for the 737 NG.
Boeing 314 had wingspan of 152 ft, length of 106 ft, cruise of 163 kts, range of 3,685 miles at cruise. 11 crew, 74 passengers.
OK so it's not pressurized, it cruised at 163 kts and may not even be the largest flying boat made - but this one flew for airlines and made money, unlike the Hughes Hercules. One of them did an unintended round-the-world flight.. on December 7, 1941. Pacific Clipper. It was born California Clipper but renamed after that impromptu round-the-world flight.
As an aside trivia, Pan Am did later launch in 1947 two round-the-worlds that persisted into the Jet Age and kept doing it until Pan Am was dismembered in a futile attempt to survive. The round-the-worlds were Flight 1 (Clipper 1) westbound, Flight 2 (Clipper 2) eastbound. Initially they were done with Lockheed Constellations.
Is the Chinese one actually flying, or is it vaporware?
Neo-classical economics was invented in the 1880s to protect the robber-barons from the single-taxers: Against Henry George
I'm skimming this one, and will likely read it cover to cover, but one thing jumped out at me --- even back then, the Real Estate people were applying economic pressure to upgrade sub-par land (dykes, irrigation, etc) to sell this not-so-good-land to people who could barely afford it. ?!? This sounds like an early version of the housing bubble.
Sweet cheese and crackers. The more I learn about this, the more my blood boils and the more I realize we indeed got played, played big, by every side there is, and has been going on since industrialization. And there's nothing we can do now in the short term to offer relief.
Nixon didn't separate from the gold standard, the last remnant of that died with Kennedy
By the late 60's things were already going down hard and fast, so this isn't surprising. I wasn't aware of the timing of the gold standard break.
President Johnson knew the economy was sliding off a cliff, in no small part because of having to fund the Vietnam War. He wanted all big industry to slow down a bit. And I learned of that in a book about Pan American Airways, no less. A most unexpected source. We almost didn't get the 747.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't use it for backup, I use two MyBooks that I rotate - one home, one off-site.
I still buy music in CD. I don't buy much music, I'd say 95% is classical. I also have ripped around 95% of all my music into 312lkbps MP3.
For video, I stream / netflix snailmail as a means to screen before i buy it. If I like it I buy it, and on Blu-Ray if possible.
I have a 7-foot screen on the horizontal and fairly decent projection, sound and room. I have a pretty good blu-ray player. It's still my primary source. (Oppo BD-103, for the curious). Presentation matters.
I like my shelves full of books, CDs and bluray/dvd. I also like the convenience of media-less formats. Why not have both?
Do you suck dicks with that shit-eating grin?
Nope. But I did snog the tonsils outta yo momma last night.
She also gave me her number.
*ahem*
"Feliz, feliz en tu dia,
Amiguito que dios te bendiga,
Que te pase un camion por encima,
Y QUE CUMPLAS MUCHOS MAS!!!"
It's Puerto Rican for Happy Birthday. We kinda have a gallows humor down there ;o)
But seriously, yes, Happy Birthday, Linux, it was you who sent me down the professional IT path. Before that, it was just tinkering. Oh who am I kidding I'm still tinkering XD
They're called "rigged elections". It's nothing new; during the 1968 presidential election, Hubert Humphrey's mic would randomly and abdruptly cut off in mid-sentence....
Puerto Rico, 1980: A vicious campaign season, which yielded much two great little campaign jingles...
Anyway, the night of the count, the incubment proclaims he's the winner, while the official count had the challenger way ahead.
Then, the power went out at the counting center. The computers crashed. When they came back online, the challenger was up by only 1000 votes, with the San Juan Metro area still to count - an area which favored the incumbent.
Roughly a month later, the results were certified. The incumbent had won by roughly 3000 votes. You shoulda heard the shouting and hand-wringing during that month. It was a comedy of epic proportions, at least for our little island. I was 10 then. Learned a lot about politics that year but especially with the election itself.
I'm not buying that power-out story.. although to be fair, late 70's power in PR sucked so bad my house in a nice 'hood had four kerosene cold-blast lanterns and they got used a lot. I loved the light they put out, I have two here myself even today. Blowing transmission-line towers with TNT was a tactic used by the linemen union. Lots of sags and outright outs.
Still.... I'm still not buying that power-out.
Couldn't find an English version of this farce.
Then again, USA claims a similar fiasco.. 2000.... x.x
We are doomed, aren't we..
Oh great, now I have this looping in my brain
That "advice" will be "Make FCC STFU" scribbled on the memo line on big fat checks to friends of the telcos in scattered about in Congress.
You do realize the problem is party-agnostic, right? It doesn't matter what party the congresscritters belong to -- they're bought and paid for. Been like this for ages, but it seems to have gotten real bad in the early 70's.
I wonder... perhaps as payback for the whole anti-war movement? That's part of the Powell memo... the schools are teaching anti-corporate sentiments.. therefore the scools must be silenced or "encouraged" -- via generous "donations" to change their teachings, and the Rabble (that's us) needs to be silenced and our vote diminished.
Go read it, AC. There's copies of it all over the 'net.
Is there even remotely a chance that this insidious cycle can be broken?
Voting party lines won't fix this. This is party-agnostic.
It's time we add something to the Constitution: The separation of Commerce and State. But this will never, everty-ever happen. That relationship predates the US, it predates most of the last 2000 years, and I bet such shenanigans went on before that, too.
Citizen's United made it bloody plain these grotesque hybrid corporation/person abominations have the right to Free Speech, and money is speech. This BS needs to be overturned, it's probably Step 1.
Step 2 may be the Lobbies must be busted. Commerce went on a union-busting binge, we need to go on a lobby-busting binge.
The Soap Box is drowned in a sea of noise, the Ballot Box is broken, the Jury Box is bought and paid for, maybe it's time for the Ammo Box?
Frankly, the thought of sitting on an assembly line mindlessly inserting tab A into slot B all day is horrifyingly dreary.
I have done mindless tab A into slot B, and I've done careful hand-fitting of a board I just stuffed onto another board, on an assembly line. Tab A into slot B is indeed awful. But it paid better than washing dishes. Stuffing boards and mounting them to another board paid better and was more involved, and I enjoyed the precision aspect of it. Not what I would call bad or awful or boring. The stench of solder is something I miss, and reminisce about when I have to solder something these days.
I wasn't always an IT guy. Well, I was, but as a hobby. I had a day job with the gov't, and it paid shit, so I moonlighted at a local computer customization shop, where I was stuffing the aforementioned boards. This was in the early-mid 90's. Batches were typically around 2500 machines, all done to the same spec.
One morning they padlocked the gates, and bolted a sign to them: Closed with no notice. Call xxx-xxx-xxxx for your next instructions.
Yeah. Tossed out like so much garbage. One week's pay as severance. The work, we later heard, was sent to Malaysia.
Would I go back to factory work? Y'know, if I was making things I have an interest in, yeah, I'd do it. Watches. Cars. Yeah. Hand-made audio amps. Even if it *is* only bolting the hinges to the body, or only doing a few steps of a larger assembly.
But what do they make where I live? Hot air, bad music, awesome food. But manufacturing jobs? Heh... no. Perversely, a previous IT employer of mine just moved into what used to be a major Motorola factory. That IT employer has nothing do do with manufacturing of any kind.
What I'm trying to say, is that there can be pride in assembly work. I've felt it, and if you look at enough factories you'll see other people with that pride too. It's not all mindless tab A into slot B. Some people get to make something out of nothing more than sand, fire and molten metal. I would love to do that.
As long as that doesn't include off-sourcing jobs to China, and paying taxes to any country except the one that made Apple possible...
And if that's Apple, just imagine what others are doing.
Apple's not blameless and have plenty of business nastiness in them. No one gets as old as they are and remain idealists.
There's a lot worse out there.
I thought Apple was first and foremost a technology company?
You can be a tech company and try to not be total douchebags.
Or, you can be a tech company with no conscience and burn and pillage your way to profit. Which btw, IS the norm. I'd rather deal with the less evil. Even if I had money invested in it.
Just my two cents.
When they made the 6 and 6+, Apple broke one of the most critical tenets of engineering: Form Follows Function, not the other way 'round. Thinner isn't always better. They made the 6 and 6+ trendy, hip and skinny -- and that broke the Function part of engineering.
I'm glad I still have my 5S, and when the time comes that it goes to cellphone heaven, I'll replace it with a new small phone. I'm so glad Apple is making one again. Fatter, shorter phones don't bend as much as a thin huge phone.
I thought "The Expendables" was a pair of bad hero comedies, but it seems the name applies to all of humanity now.
We're all Expendable at least in the eyes of Commerce. Workers? Who needs those?! So expensive and unreliable!
This thing of the government being inept, have you seen private bureaucracies at work?
After working for a decade and a half in the private sector, yes, I have seen private red tape and wonder just how exactly money is made, given the overall disjointedness of it all.
PFM, I suppose.
Does anyone here really believe this cyber bullshit?
Yes, yes I do.
Rationale being: "Government is inept at best and criminal at worst. A happy medium is they being criminally inept. NSA is a Government agency, ergo all the batshit insane ineptness that infects the Government also infects the NSA"
So yes, I believe the NSA got owned, and now begins the rearranging of deckchairs. A few people will be fired or otherwise disposed of, new techniques and tools will be developed, and life will be back to its nefarious normality again.
But for now, grab your bacon, popcorn and intoxicant of choice, sit back and watch! This may be the best damn show of our age!
(or it may be a brilliant piece of mis-direction, which would not make it any less real, just thornier and harder to decipher)
Verizon bloatware will be just as unremoveable (unless you root the phone) as Apple's bloatware.
Funny, I don't see apps for Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Macy's, etc pre-installed on my iToys. (I suppose those would be 3 of the "Big Brands" Verizon was about?
I do see things like the a stock ticker, Watch app, and a few other things I can't remove, so I've made a folder called "useless," put those things in there, and away we go. Hell, I use the stock ticker myself to research the health of say, a prospective new employer.
What Verizon wants to do is put "Big brand" apps in your phone. Which Apple hasn't done, and I hope they don't.
But hey -- starting with iOS 10 you will be able to remove the useless built-in apps you don't want!
I'm not concerned at all about these tools being used to penetrate Joe Sixpack's computer.
I am, however, tickled pink that these tools will be used against the tools of the Government and Commerce.
Yes, you tools! Let's see what happens when your sordid affairs, your innermost secrets and every repulsive, nauseating detail of your rape of America for the past half century are revealed!
In other words, Commerce and Government, fuck you with a splintered phonepole. I hope it hurts every bit as bad as what you've done to this country.
(Provided this toolkit is as powerful as claimed, and its leak isn't some False Flag operation.)
If I wanted to promote a security consulting business, I could identify a niche of that market and make up a bunch of stats for that market that show a need and enough people might buy into what I wrote that I could get some consultancy business.
This is why every single scrap of "white papers," "studies" and "recommendations" from every single research group or "Think Tank" should automatically be suspect and raise the questions of "Who paid for this?" and "Who benefits from this?"
Follow the money, and you'll find the benefactor.
There was a terrorist thwarted earlier this week near where I live. The police tracked him on the internet, knew of his sympathy for ISIS, and were able to act just before he was going to set off his bombs. That ability saved lives.
Can you tell us if the police just saw his incoherent allahu ackbar noise on Facetwat, or did the police actually got a warrant, and broke into his.. what.. email? SMS?
You see, AC, I doubt most crims have their plans squirreled away on a secur-ish machine encrypted on hardware and locked in a safe. I think most crims brag their intentions openly, be it Facetwat, or the local pub or burger joint.
I'm sure the ad-blockers will adapt to this. And BTW it isn't just facebook, it seems lately some ads are starting to come through on other sites. I don't know if that's ABP being more of a whore than usual... even though I have it set to *not* allow "unintrusive" ads through.
Besides, WTF do I care.. there's only one page on facebook that I actually *do* care about.
Bloom County.
I'm sure that if FB implodes Berkeley Breathed will just find some other means to distribute Bloom County.
I literally don't visit any other part of facebook.
Clearly we need a new buzzword for this, er, feature. How about "fully-synergistic non-performance"?
Asymmetric performance.
So when I read the headline, my head said "Wait what?! 3 billion for a plane? WTF did they buy, a B-2 and 2 F22's??!"
Then I realized this will be a hopeless play at trying to play catch-up after 15 years of staying still.
The article states this Chinese plane is roughly the size of a 737, which is given in wikipedia as having a wingspan of 117 ft with winglets, and a length of 138 ft max, both of those numbers for the 737 NG.
Back in the late 30's, Pan Am and BOAC flew the Boeing 314 Clipper.
Boeing 314 had wingspan of 152 ft, length of 106 ft, cruise of 163 kts, range of 3,685 miles at cruise. 11 crew, 74 passengers.
OK so it's not pressurized, it cruised at 163 kts and may not even be the largest flying boat made - but this one flew for airlines and made money, unlike the Hughes Hercules. One of them did an unintended round-the-world flight.. on December 7, 1941. Pacific Clipper. It was born California Clipper but renamed after that impromptu round-the-world flight.
As an aside trivia, Pan Am did later launch in 1947 two round-the-worlds that persisted into the Jet Age and kept doing it until Pan Am was dismembered in a futile attempt to survive. The round-the-worlds were Flight 1 (Clipper 1) westbound, Flight 2 (Clipper 2) eastbound. Initially they were done with Lockheed Constellations.
Is the Chinese one actually flying, or is it vaporware?
Neo-classical economics was invented in the 1880s to protect the robber-barons from the single-taxers: Against Henry George
I'm skimming this one, and will likely read it cover to cover, but one thing jumped out at me --- even back then, the Real Estate people were applying economic pressure to upgrade sub-par land (dykes, irrigation, etc) to sell this not-so-good-land to people who could barely afford it. ?!? This sounds like an early version of the housing bubble.
Sweet cheese and crackers. The more I learn about this, the more my blood boils and the more I realize we indeed got played, played big, by every side there is, and has been going on since industrialization. And there's nothing we can do now in the short term to offer relief.
Nixon didn't separate from the gold standard, the last remnant of that died with Kennedy
By the late 60's things were already going down hard and fast, so this isn't surprising. I wasn't aware of the timing of the gold standard break.
President Johnson knew the economy was sliding off a cliff, in no small part because of having to fund the Vietnam War. He wanted all big industry to slow down a bit. And I learned of that in a book about Pan American Airways, no less. A most unexpected source. We almost didn't get the 747.