I think you are on to something here. We need to remember why there are inappropriate questions in the first place.
The essential reason is because asking them is likely to be insulting, deeming, or otherwise hurtful. As you point out my computer feels no pain, emotional or otherwise. So with pain out of the way we are left with other forms of abuse.
The only way to abuse a thing really is to use it for an unintended and wasteful purpose. Using a perfectly serviceable car as a boat anchor for example. Its abusive because it will make the car less useful in the future, the car was never intended for service as a boat anchor, and there are cheaper better things to use for boat anchors.
So here we are left with Cortana. Other than queries designed to trigger say something like SQL Injection that could damage the software or the database behind it, I fail to see how any particular query could be abusive under any reasonable system of morality. Microsoft is personifying a thing, and then being upset about the fact others don't embrace their personification and treat that thing as if it were a person. This is ridiculous. What's next are we going to start shipping every 8 year old boy who pulls the head of his little sisters Barbie off to juvie?
I live out in the middle of no where but Cville might be the nearest big city. I aggressively avoid going there because driving and parking is SO PAINFUL. It has to be the worst place I have ever driven a car. I mean driving in Boston is easier!
I can't describe the layout of streets in Cville as anything other than "aggressively stupid". Now add all the UVA students who are typical distracted, intoxicated, or stopping in completely random places for people to jump in or out of the cars and its the stuff of nightmares. There are few "main" roads other than US250 and US29 that go across town, so pretty much all travel is on "neighborhood streets". It does not surprise me that people are injured and even frequently. Speed isn't really the problem. Quite honestly I am terrified the entire time driving around there. Even crawling at 25mph anyone could step out from between two parked cars that you could not see with enough time to stop.
What Cville needs isn't speed limits and speed traps, its already got plenty (cops there are actually quite aggressive compared to most places IMHO, the professors experience not withstanding), it needs mirrors on polls so you can see around corners and over parked cars. It also seriously needs to demo some building and put in more off street parking, so it can disallow parking on the busier streets.
True but if you are looking to cause their down fall you stick a few single frames of the old goatse.cx somewhere in the middle. If you still get your 'G' or whatever 'appropriate for children' rating the BBC gives, you got a major scandal, "see see the censor's don't even really do their job its just a cash grab!"
Wost case its just as effective a DOS as this was anyway.
Pfft, I like my artisanal coal fired steam turbine generated electricity. The nuclear steam turbine stuff is alright for an everyday fix though. I'll even indulge in that bottom shelf hydro-electric stuff once in a while when money is tight.
The photovoltaic and wind turbine stuff though is rot-gut, nobody should have to suffer with that. The just don't bulbs don't glow right.
it violates the freedom of association by imposing warrantless surveillance.
I am pretty strong strict constructionist who is also willing to read in some implicit rights where I feel they are necessary to exercise the other explicit rights. The 9th amendment exists to support that interpretive action.
For examples, if I were a SCOTUS justice I would hold that the various travel restrictions like the no-fly list are unconstitutional because there is no due process around who is on the list. We have an explicit right to association and assembly in the first amendment. One must be able to go to where the assembly is taking place, if air travel is the only reasonably way to get there due to say time constraints, the government cannot prevent a citizen from traveling by air, without due process of law.
I find your argument that surveillance violates the freedom of association however. They government clearly is denied the power to prevent you from associating, but I don't see any explicit right to associated in secret. An association is not an effect, and while it might involve your person being present or not, it does not require the violation of your person to observe it. So I am struggling to find an implied privacy right here using the fourth amendment.
I am not sure there is a constitutional issue here. I do think there is a violation of law taking place however. Essentially you have a contract with the cellular carrier to interface your equipment with their own. These devices misrepresent the LEA as the carrier to your device. I don't see how this is any less fraudulent than if an officer arrived at your home dressed as gas company employee and professing to be from the gas company investigating an issue, and subsequently made the argument that you could be prosecuted for the contraband discovered in your home based on the fact that he was invited in and therefore did not require a warrant.
Plain clothes cops are one thing but to me these devices cross a line in that they are actively misrepresenting what/who they are. This possibly induces you to do things that might be materially against your interest like self incrimination. This is a form for fraud.
Remember kids, we have regulate every financial transaction out there because you can't be expected to read and understand a contract in plain language. Nope if you want to take out a short term loan at a high rate of interest or something you are a victim. On the other hand surely you can be expected to reach abstract conclusions about the behavior of cell phones and cellular networks by observation of advertising and the existence of various location aware apps. If you can't be expected to make decisions about your privacy based on that well tough beans.
You do know there are specific exceptions in firearms discharge laws, and speed laws for law enforcement and emergency responders right?
So no they are not breaking the law when they do those things at least not when they do them while performing an otherwise lawful enforcement or rescue action.
Why should somebody in the STATE govenment be locked up?
Because the liberal biased media, Obama, and the Clinton campaign want to blame those nasty Republicans in the state house for poisoning Flint's poor black population. That is pretty much the reason. Yes the water pipe corrosion happened because the emergency manager a state official made decisions to use a chemically different water source, to save money. That person did this without understanding the potential consequences.
Quite honestly this is clear argument for the IMPORTANCE of HOME RULE, when you let some big far away central government make decisions about local matters these are types of results you get, no matter what party that far away official belongs too. So really we are left with the question of why did Flint not have home rule on the matter, and the reason for that is because the left leaning local politicians had screwed things up so bad their fellow state citizens were stuck bailing them out! Essentially the people of Flint and their elected officials would have been unable to keep the lights on or the water running left to their own devices due to years of mismanagement. If not for the state government a little lead in the water would be the least of their problems. So I don't feel especially sorry for them. This is ultimately a disaster of their own make.
Putting aside the underlying puritanical bullshit, who broke the law here? Yes, that's right, the hackers and the extortionists. Wah wah wah, people have affairs and they'e evil people.. such moralizing bullshit. Neither Ashley Madison nor the people using the site broke any laws.
That isn't true, depending on what state you live in! Adultery is absolutely a crime in Virgina and probably other states. It should be a crime everywhere. If you are committing adultery and you are violating your marriage contract. At least if you spouse is ignorant of this its likely they are investing in the partnership in ways that would be against their interest if the marriage isn't sustainable. If they were aware of your misbehavior and would stop doing that in light of it you have induced them to act against their own interest by misrepresentation. That is basically the text book definition of FRAUD.
We don't tolerate legally or societal fraud elsewhere there is no justifiable reason it should be tolerated with regard to marriage. The reason it is tolerated is because progressives hate the idea of the family unit. Its a little to autonomous and independent for them so they do what they can break it down including stacking the legal framework against it.
At least here in Virgina adultery is still in fact a crime, though rarely prosecuted unfortunately. As it should be, because I does in fact harm society at large and the party who is cheated on is essentially being defrauded with regard to their marriage contract.
Personally I would like to see the state go after some of the AM users whose actual cheating can otherwise be corroborated. I think it would send a good message, and the fine is $250 bucks so its not ruin anyone. Sadly it wont happen since the lefties captured the governors office.
I would argue that cars should not have to have license plates as well. Its certainly the case with OCR cameras everywhere and database that license plates on cars represent a major violation of our privacy.
They are not needed for the most important types of traffic enforcement either. Just because we are used to them does not make their existence reasonable. Nobody had to hang plates on their horse, mostly not on their carriages or sleds. Those things had plenty of potential to cause property damage, injure or kill someone via trampling, or be used to conduct the transportation aspects of some other crime.
Quite honestly licenses plates should be an outrage!
Its perfectly legal to drive around without a license plate. Just not on the public roadways. You can drive all over your farm in that old unlicensed pickup, or a brand new one for that matter!
Virtually none of the internet infrastructure in the US is public road way. The telco's own all of it. The government can make whatever rules they want for accessing.gov systems but they haven't any right to tell AT&T if they must or must not allow anonymous traffic to flow over their network. Well no right unless you except the stupidly radical interpretations of the Commerce Clause the SCOTUS, which constitutional hasn't itself any right to say what is and isn't constitutional does.
I know of someone that has, as a hobby, spent many many years sewing all sorts of things. After all of that, apparently it took him about five hours to create something that could pass as a t-shirt you could sell, starting from scratch. If you paid someone five hours of labor for even your cheapest t-shirt, even at Chinese labor prices, you couldn't afford your wardrobe
Right but my point is that I would be surprised if your friend who does all the sewing even knows where that cotton was woven, if he or she knows that do they know all the different places the raw cotton was picked, who removed the seeds and spun it? The chain of inputs to most modern products is quite long. Even what we think of as from scratch really isn't. Well unless you a wearing a deer hide stitched with the animals own gut, you personal ran down and bludgeoned to death with a rock.
Its hard question. At some point it becomes very difficult to know even if you want to known where things are coming from. If you buy "finished" battery cells as a unit, how all the various things that went into them were sourced might not be discoverable easily, its not like your supplier is going to necessarily give you all the details on their suppliers, especially if they are in a different country with radically different regs.
The clothing industry has been dealing with this for two decades now. Certainly there are fewer inputs to a tea length dress, than a high density ultra light battery and the clothing industry can't seem to figure it out. I don't know how the tech industry could.
The trouble is if you excuse ignorance, that invites willful ignorance and allows the abuse to continue.
If you vote republican and accept Medicare and social security you are a hypocrite.
Hardly! That is not how a representative democracy works. You vote for who and to a lessor extent how you think things ought to be and then you play by the rules the winners set for society. Its does not make someone a hypocrite for accepting medicare or social security, while voting to end them. Since that person does not get a choice about paying medicare and social security taxes while they are working, they are as entitled as everyone else to accept the benefit.
What is interesting about a potential Bloomberg run is that it might split both parties votes. While Bloomberg has deal breaker positions on abortion, gun rights, size of government and others for many conservatives, the big business/military industrial complex/donner class likes him. That isn't a huge number of conservative/GOP voters but its a big slice of the GOP money pie.
If Bloomberg runs than essentially the election become entirely unpredictable. There will be no modern examples to compare the situation to even remotely.
We have those tools, they are called static source code analyzers, they are even very effective at identifying certain classes of bugs, though they won't find everything and the more clever the code is they worse they do as rule. Kernels unfortunately even when not being authorized by *real programers* tend to have some clever code by necessity and for performance reasons.
I can't imagine it would be either. The consequense for DCHP on IPv4 would be not great to say the least.
I would see address pool exhaustion, the concept reservations breaking entirely, any hardware based options variability failing (IE send the right pixie boot server for the device class) all becoming a total mess.
It's a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Have we gone completely schizo now. I thought the narrative was it was the surge and boots on the ground that finally brought some order to those places, or are we only talking about the narrow context of defeating the traditional military forces there?
Given the great success that Libya, Yemen, Syria, and to a lessor extent Iraq and Afghanistan I am not see much in the form of experiences we want to repeat. This whole air-power only strategy does not seem to be securing the outcomes we want. I think we could argue that its done little but destabilize the region going all the way back to William Cruise-missile Clinton.
I am of the opinion if we are not willing to put troops on the ground to create a reasonable security situation after we disrupt whatever it is that is going on we probably have no business meddling. If various groups around the world are upset at our presence and don't like our bases nearby I saw we pack up and go home. My suspicions are they will change their tune when they experience what its like to not have us there. The economic impacts of not having US troops and facilities to create demand in their local economies, our not being a deterrent to the ambitions of would be local bad actors, the suddenly greater influence of regional powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc, and finally the influence of other world powers China, Russia; I suspect all of these things would have them begging for us to come back.
Much like Russia/(old USSR) did ( intentionally or otherwise ) the best thing we could do is retreat from the world stage for awhile. We have enough lead in weapons tech, and plenty of money and economic influence still to re-assert ourselves once are detractors realize how good things were.
In addition to disposables, I but stuff from HF that I am likely to use once or only very rarely. Its often as cheap as renting something better and if the tool survives the project (I have had a number that did not), you have it if you need it again.
When you need something like a kick-saw for a remodel project HF is great. I probably won't need the kick-saw again for 10 years. Spending 4x as much on a Black and Decker or Porter Cable would have got me a much nicer tool but that is kinda silly when its something that is mostly going to sit on a high shelf in my garage.
The reality is for desktop and gaming workloads AMD's upper shelf products really are a better value. You will get a lot more value putting the savings on the processor/chipset into other system components like a little faster SSD or another 4GB of memory. The performance delta between Intel and AMD looks bigger in some of the benchmarks than it is in real world applications. The vast majority of desktop/laptop PC users don't benefit from Intel's premiums and lets call it superior "strait line performance" as for most applications the situation is I/O bound.
Which is NOT at all to say that if you have more specific workloads like you do a lot video processing, certain types of simulations, etc not to pick Intel.
If you are just getting a PC to do "generically everything and anything" with the A-series systems are a great value. If you have little more to spend FX + discrete video is still probably a better value than an equivalent i3/5 + video on the Intel side. If you really need an i7 for something than by all means get an i7.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are on to something here. We need to remember why there are inappropriate questions in the first place.
The essential reason is because asking them is likely to be insulting, deeming, or otherwise hurtful. As you point out my computer feels no pain, emotional or otherwise. So with pain out of the way we are left with other forms of abuse.
The only way to abuse a thing really is to use it for an unintended and wasteful purpose. Using a perfectly serviceable car as a boat anchor for example. Its abusive because it will make the car less useful in the future, the car was never intended for service as a boat anchor, and there are cheaper better things to use for boat anchors.
So here we are left with Cortana. Other than queries designed to trigger say something like SQL Injection that could damage the software or the database behind it, I fail to see how any particular query could be abusive under any reasonable system of morality. Microsoft is personifying a thing, and then being upset about the fact others don't embrace their personification and treat that thing as if it were a person. This is ridiculous. What's next are we going to start shipping every 8 year old boy who pulls the head of his little sisters Barbie off to juvie?
Cortana, you ignorant slut.
Yes and naturally the NSA will consider that a justification to listen to all your calls and read all your e-mails.
Right, because an international agreement negotiated by a Democratic administration is some hope to be blamed on the Republican party.
Pull your head out of your ass. The Establishment is the problem, If you are remotely considering voting for HRC or Rubio, THIS IS YOUR FAULT.
Vote Sanders, or Vote Cruz as you like but do not allow HRC or Rubio to get nominated!
I live out in the middle of no where but Cville might be the nearest big city. I aggressively avoid going there because driving and parking is SO PAINFUL. It has to be the worst place I have ever driven a car. I mean driving in Boston is easier!
I can't describe the layout of streets in Cville as anything other than "aggressively stupid". Now add all the UVA students who are typical distracted, intoxicated, or stopping in completely random places for people to jump in or out of the cars and its the stuff of nightmares. There are few "main" roads other than US250 and US29 that go across town, so pretty much all travel is on "neighborhood streets". It does not surprise me that people are injured and even frequently. Speed isn't really the problem. Quite honestly I am terrified the entire time driving around there. Even crawling at 25mph anyone could step out from between two parked cars that you could not see with enough time to stop.
What Cville needs isn't speed limits and speed traps, its already got plenty (cops there are actually quite aggressive compared to most places IMHO, the professors experience not withstanding), it needs mirrors on polls so you can see around corners and over parked cars. It also seriously needs to demo some building and put in more off street parking, so it can disallow parking on the busier streets.
True but if you are looking to cause their down fall you stick a few single frames of the old goatse.cx somewhere in the middle. If you still get your 'G' or whatever 'appropriate for children' rating the BBC gives, you got a major scandal, "see see the censor's don't even really do their job its just a cash grab!"
Wost case its just as effective a DOS as this was anyway.
Pfft, I like my artisanal coal fired steam turbine generated electricity. The nuclear steam turbine stuff is alright for an everyday fix though. I'll even indulge in that bottom shelf hydro-electric stuff once in a while when money is tight.
The photovoltaic and wind turbine stuff though is rot-gut, nobody should have to suffer with that. The just don't bulbs don't glow right.
it violates the freedom of association by imposing warrantless surveillance.
I am pretty strong strict constructionist who is also willing to read in some implicit rights where I feel they are necessary to exercise the other explicit rights. The 9th amendment exists to support that interpretive action.
For examples, if I were a SCOTUS justice I would hold that the various travel restrictions like the no-fly list are unconstitutional because there is no due process around who is on the list. We have an explicit right to association and assembly in the first amendment. One must be able to go to where the assembly is taking place, if air travel is the only reasonably way to get there due to say time constraints, the government cannot prevent a citizen from traveling by air, without due process of law.
I find your argument that surveillance violates the freedom of association however. They government clearly is denied the power to prevent you from associating, but I don't see any explicit right to associated in secret. An association is not an effect, and while it might involve your person being present or not, it does not require the violation of your person to observe it. So I am struggling to find an implied privacy right here using the fourth amendment.
I am not sure there is a constitutional issue here. I do think there is a violation of law taking place however. Essentially you have a contract with the cellular carrier to interface your equipment with their own. These devices misrepresent the LEA as the carrier to your device. I don't see how this is any less fraudulent than if an officer arrived at your home dressed as gas company employee and professing to be from the gas company investigating an issue, and subsequently made the argument that you could be prosecuted for the contraband discovered in your home based on the fact that he was invited in and therefore did not require a warrant.
Plain clothes cops are one thing but to me these devices cross a line in that they are actively misrepresenting what/who they are. This possibly induces you to do things that might be materially against your interest like self incrimination. This is a form for fraud.
Remember kids, we have regulate every financial transaction out there because you can't be expected to read and understand a contract in plain language. Nope if you want to take out a short term loan at a high rate of interest or something you are a victim. On the other hand surely you can be expected to reach abstract conclusions about the behavior of cell phones and cellular networks by observation of advertising and the existence of various location aware apps. If you can't be expected to make decisions about your privacy based on that well tough beans.
You do know there are specific exceptions in firearms discharge laws, and speed laws for law enforcement and emergency responders right?
So no they are not breaking the law when they do those things at least not when they do them while performing an otherwise lawful enforcement or rescue action.
Why should somebody in the STATE govenment be locked up?
Because the liberal biased media, Obama, and the Clinton campaign want to blame those nasty Republicans in the state house for poisoning Flint's poor black population. That is pretty much the reason. Yes the water pipe corrosion happened because the emergency manager a state official made decisions to use a chemically different water source, to save money. That person did this without understanding the potential consequences.
Quite honestly this is clear argument for the IMPORTANCE of HOME RULE, when you let some big far away central government make decisions about local matters these are types of results you get, no matter what party that far away official belongs too. So really we are left with the question of why did Flint not have home rule on the matter, and the reason for that is because the left leaning local politicians had screwed things up so bad their fellow state citizens were stuck bailing them out! Essentially the people of Flint and their elected officials would have been unable to keep the lights on or the water running left to their own devices due to years of mismanagement. If not for the state government a little lead in the water would be the least of their problems. So I don't feel especially sorry for them. This is ultimately a disaster of their own make.
Putting aside the underlying puritanical bullshit, who broke the law here? Yes, that's right, the hackers and the extortionists. Wah wah wah, people have affairs and they'e evil people .. such moralizing bullshit. Neither Ashley Madison nor the people using the site broke any laws.
That isn't true, depending on what state you live in! Adultery is absolutely a crime in Virgina and probably other states. It should be a crime everywhere. If you are committing adultery and you are violating your marriage contract. At least if you spouse is ignorant of this its likely they are investing in the partnership in ways that would be against their interest if the marriage isn't sustainable. If they were aware of your misbehavior and would stop doing that in light of it you have induced them to act against their own interest by misrepresentation. That is basically the text book definition of FRAUD.
We don't tolerate legally or societal fraud elsewhere there is no justifiable reason it should be tolerated with regard to marriage. The reason it is tolerated is because progressives hate the idea of the family unit. Its a little to autonomous and independent for them so they do what they can break it down including stacking the legal framework against it.
At least here in Virgina adultery is still in fact a crime, though rarely prosecuted unfortunately. As it should be, because I does in fact harm society at large and the party who is cheated on is essentially being defrauded with regard to their marriage contract.
Personally I would like to see the state go after some of the AM users whose actual cheating can otherwise be corroborated. I think it would send a good message, and the fine is $250 bucks so its not ruin anyone. Sadly it wont happen since the lefties captured the governors office.
I would argue that cars should not have to have license plates as well. Its certainly the case with OCR cameras everywhere and database that license plates on cars represent a major violation of our privacy.
They are not needed for the most important types of traffic enforcement either. Just because we are used to them does not make their existence reasonable. Nobody had to hang plates on their horse, mostly not on their carriages or sleds. Those things had plenty of potential to cause property damage, injure or kill someone via trampling, or be used to conduct the transportation aspects of some other crime.
Quite honestly licenses plates should be an outrage!
Its perfectly legal to drive around without a license plate. Just not on the public roadways. You can drive all over your farm in that old unlicensed pickup, or a brand new one for that matter!
Virtually none of the internet infrastructure in the US is public road way. The telco's own all of it. The government can make whatever rules they want for accessing .gov systems but they haven't any right to tell AT&T if they must or must not allow anonymous traffic to flow over their network. Well no right unless you except the stupidly radical interpretations of the Commerce Clause the SCOTUS, which constitutional hasn't itself any right to say what is and isn't constitutional does.
I know of someone that has, as a hobby, spent many many years sewing all sorts of things. After all of that, apparently it took him about five hours to create something that could pass as a t-shirt you could sell, starting from scratch. If you paid someone five hours of labor for even your cheapest t-shirt, even at Chinese labor prices, you couldn't afford your wardrobe
Right but my point is that I would be surprised if your friend who does all the sewing even knows where that cotton was woven, if he or she knows that do they know all the different places the raw cotton was picked, who removed the seeds and spun it? The chain of inputs to most modern products is quite long. Even what we think of as from scratch really isn't. Well unless you a wearing a deer hide stitched with the animals own gut, you personal ran down and bludgeoned to death with a rock.
Its hard question. At some point it becomes very difficult to know even if you want to known where things are coming from. If you buy "finished" battery cells as a unit, how all the various things that went into them were sourced might not be discoverable easily, its not like your supplier is going to necessarily give you all the details on their suppliers, especially if they are in a different country with radically different regs.
The clothing industry has been dealing with this for two decades now. Certainly there are fewer inputs to a tea length dress, than a high density ultra light battery and the clothing industry can't seem to figure it out. I don't know how the tech industry could.
The trouble is if you excuse ignorance, that invites willful ignorance and allows the abuse to continue.
If you vote republican and accept Medicare and social security you are a hypocrite.
Hardly! That is not how a representative democracy works. You vote for who and to a lessor extent how you think things ought to be and then you play by the rules the winners set for society. Its does not make someone a hypocrite for accepting medicare or social security, while voting to end them. Since that person does not get a choice about paying medicare and social security taxes while they are working, they are as entitled as everyone else to accept the benefit.
What is interesting about a potential Bloomberg run is that it might split both parties votes. While Bloomberg has deal breaker positions on abortion, gun rights, size of government and others for many conservatives, the big business/military industrial complex/donner class likes him. That isn't a huge number of conservative/GOP voters but its a big slice of the GOP money pie.
If Bloomberg runs than essentially the election become entirely unpredictable. There will be no modern examples to compare the situation to even remotely.
We have those tools, they are called static source code analyzers, they are even very effective at identifying certain classes of bugs, though they won't find everything and the more clever the code is they worse they do as rule. Kernels unfortunately even when not being authorized by *real programers* tend to have some clever code by necessity and for performance reasons.
Damn slashdot and its lack of edit, that should be DHCP
I can't imagine it would be either. The consequense for DCHP on IPv4 would be not great to say the least.
I would see address pool exhaustion, the concept reservations breaking entirely, any hardware based options variability failing (IE send the right pixie boot server for the device class) all becoming a total mess.
It's a very slick, efficient way to conduct the war, without having to have the massive ground invasion mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Have we gone completely schizo now. I thought the narrative was it was the surge and boots on the ground that finally brought some order to those places, or are we only talking about the narrow context of defeating the traditional military forces there?
Given the great success that Libya, Yemen, Syria, and to a lessor extent Iraq and Afghanistan I am not see much in the form of experiences we want to repeat. This whole air-power only strategy does not seem to be securing the outcomes we want. I think we could argue that its done little but destabilize the region going all the way back to William Cruise-missile Clinton.
I am of the opinion if we are not willing to put troops on the ground to create a reasonable security situation after we disrupt whatever it is that is going on we probably have no business meddling. If various groups around the world are upset at our presence and don't like our bases nearby I saw we pack up and go home. My suspicions are they will change their tune when they experience what its like to not have us there. The economic impacts of not having US troops and facilities to create demand in their local economies, our not being a deterrent to the ambitions of would be local bad actors, the suddenly greater influence of regional powers like Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc, and finally the influence of other world powers China, Russia; I suspect all of these things would have them begging for us to come back.
Much like Russia/(old USSR) did ( intentionally or otherwise ) the best thing we could do is retreat from the world stage for awhile. We have enough lead in weapons tech, and plenty of money and economic influence still to re-assert ourselves once are detractors realize how good things were.
In addition to disposables, I but stuff from HF that I am likely to use once or only very rarely. Its often as cheap as renting something better and if the tool survives the project (I have had a number that did not), you have it if you need it again.
When you need something like a kick-saw for a remodel project HF is great. I probably won't need the kick-saw again for 10 years. Spending 4x as much on a Black and Decker or Porter Cable would have got me a much nicer tool but that is kinda silly when its something that is mostly going to sit on a high shelf in my garage.
The reality is for desktop and gaming workloads AMD's upper shelf products really are a better value. You will get a lot more value putting the savings on the processor/chipset into other system components like a little faster SSD or another 4GB of memory. The performance delta between Intel and AMD looks bigger in some of the benchmarks than it is in real world applications. The vast majority of desktop/laptop PC users don't benefit from Intel's premiums and lets call it superior "strait line performance" as for most applications the situation is I/O bound.
Which is NOT at all to say that if you have more specific workloads like you do a lot video processing, certain types of simulations, etc not to pick Intel.
If you are just getting a PC to do "generically everything and anything" with the A-series systems are a great value. If you have little more to spend FX + discrete video is still probably a better value than an equivalent i3/5 + video on the Intel side. If you really need an i7 for something than by all means get an i7.