Uhhh I paid $60 for my R9 380x, shipped to my door. Its not hard if you are willing to bid to get a decent deal on a GPU, hell some of those Xeon Workstations come with nice 2Gb Quadro cards that will play most games at 1080p OOTB.
And there are a ton of Dell and HP workstations that are quite cheap and which will take CPUs well beyond anything a normal desktop will take (short of a top gamer board).Just look at something like an HP Z420, most of those come with a Quadro 2Gb, win 10 Pro, and can take 12c/24t CPUs that can be had quite cheaply which would be nice for video rendering as well as streaming games at 1080p.
Oh BS, you don't need to build a brand new system to easily do 1080p 60FPS. You can go on eBay right now and pick up a 4c/8t Xeon workstation for sub $200 with a 1Tb drive and Win 10 Pro, grab an SSD for sub $50 along with an R9 380X or RX 480 and tada! A Win 10 Pro system that will kick the shit out of a console and which can easily go up to 12c/24t later on down the line if you just want to go ludicrous power.
Yup, that is why the grandkid has an Xbone, building him a halfway decent windows gaming PC at the time (this was during the crypto mining bubble) would have cost a good $400+ while his Xbone he got on sale for like $230 with codes for 3 free games.
I will always be a PC gamer, quite love my budget AMD FX-8 box (still great for streaming and recording at 1080p) but even I can see that there are use cases where the console makes more sense, and for the games he plays like Forza and Fortnite? The Xbone was the cheaper option and I'm sure with this discless version it'll probably be sub $200. At that price? No way in hell I could build a good 1080p gaming PC at that price.
As I have a grandkid with an Xbone and ya know what? I don't think he has ever run a disc in the thing, all his games came from the Xbox store. He doesn't even need the drive for his older X360 games as his 360 still is hooked up and runs just fine so I can see a market for this.
And its not like we haven't seen the same thing happen to PC gaming, hell the last time I bought a "physical copy" of a game it just turned out to be a CD with a Steam installer and a Steam code so its not like having the disc means shit in this day and age anyway, so if they can make it cheaper and everyone is grabbing their games from the Xbox store why not?
Truth is truth and the issue isn't the UI, hell Linux has had nice easy to use UIs for ages...the problem is what a clusterfuck Linux is when something goes wrong.
Lets say your laptop boots up and the Wifi doesn't work. In Windows a good 90% of the time you just go "clicky clicky" on system restore and tada! Its all fixed, user didn't need to know shit about the hardware or software, just clicky clicky. Now how do you do the same in Linux? Fuck if I know as apparently every distro has a different procedure, most of which requires CLI and a knowledge of the hardware in question. What about printers? MSFT keeps a billion printer drivers so the user has to do precisely jack squat as the OS calls home and does all the work, Linux? Yeah GLWT as if it isn't a corp laser printer your ass had better know enough to find the website, download the LPD file, know how to install said file, and get that shit up and running. Which BTW can be finicky as hell, couldn't get Linux lite to see a Brother wireless printer even after following the instructions for setting up the LDP file, didn't matter in the end as the next update shat on the wireless so I ended up going back to Windows....and THAT is the problem.
You see Linux users just because YOU can do something or enjoy futzing with CLI or spending lord knows how long Googling fixes when shit goes wrong? Does NOT mean Joe and Jane average will do it, or even have the capability. If you want to gain all those desktop users (which just FYI there has NEVER been a better time as win 10 is a buggy POS) here is what you need to do....
1.- Make something as butt simple as system restore/rollback drivers so that the OS can instantly be rolled back to a previous snapshot if shit breaks, 2.- Make a central driver repo which ALL DISTROS USE which will contain ALL THE DRIVERS THERE IS, period the end. I don't care if its a 10 year old printer or a brand new sound card, if there is a Linux driver? That shit needs to be in there with some sort of standard ABI so there is none of this "requires kernel X, GCC Y" nonsense, just a simple automatic driver install for any and all hardware the user has. 3.- Work with hardware vendors to put a penguin on the box. A user shouldn't have to be Columbo to try to figure out when they go shopping what works and what don't, after all the Apple users just look for an Apple on the box, Windows users the Winflag, you need to have just as many mainstream devices with penguins on boxes (and again it needs to be standard, none of this "requires distro X" BS) so that its just as easy to buy everything from a USB Wifi dongle to a AIO printer as it is with Windows and Apple.
Do these things? Linux could easily grab share as Windows 10 is about as loved as anal cancer, but as long as Linux is a CLI heavy royal PITA when anything goes wrong? Ordinary users just aren't gonna bother, its not worth the hassle.
The one Pale Moon "blacklisted" refused to fix serious issues with getting it running on PM so the PM team simply replaced it with uBlock Origin, they even have a handy updater that contacts Github and grabs the latest uBlock version compatible with PM so you don't need to deal with keeping up with versions.
Considering uBlock actually works with PM and does the same job while the later versions of NS was crashy AF on PM? I really see blacklisting an extension that wouldn't work properly as a non issue as uBlock does the same job and is compatible. BTW feel free to contact the NoScript dev and ask him to support the latest version of PM but don't be surprised if he tells you which bridge to jump off of as I've heard the dev is rather..."surly" and doesn't take criticisms or suggestions very well. A shame really but...well "not very sociable" developers aren't exactly a new thing are they?
Would you like me to provide the links showing how the same talking heads said a big threat was Iraq with its WMDs? How about video showing a random dude shopping in Venezuela in a store as well stocked as your local Wally World while the US press talks about how they are eating rats and dogs? A country that has a huge military industrial complex and corporatocracy that gasp! shock! constantly tries to start new wars with non threats like magical invisible WMDs or starving people in Venezuela while leaving out their biggest problem is hyperinflation because the USA is crushing them with sanctions? Yeah if you buy the North Korea bullshit I have some swampland you might be interested in.
BTW if you want to see how far back this scam goes? Look up "Kuwait incubator baby conspiracy" where Shrub Sr used the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter as a "random hospital worker" (yeah like her ass had worked on anything but her nails in her life) to bawl before congress about how Iraqi soldiers went into the hospital she was working at and threw babies out of the incubators. Before that point the American public was against a war but after every MSM outlet pushed the fake baby incubator story? Support for war went up to 85%. So next time you see some story about how some piss ant country that wouldn't last 5 seconds against the USA is a "big threat" you might want to follow the money.
But just in case you need a hint....psst...Venezuela has a larger oil field than Saudi Arabia and North Korea is sitting on billions worth of minerals, just like Afghanistan. Hmmm...funny we only charge into countries that have resources our big corps can make a shitload of dosh off of, while those resource poor countries like the Congo and Sudan can be just as horrible and nobody gives a fuck. Huh must be a big coincidence.
The entire argument is just silly as Amazon Basics is a generic brand so the only ones they are really "competing" with are those that likewise make generic products and those companies have ALWAYS had competition because by their very design generic products are something nobody gives a shit about brand wise.
I mean do I REALLY give a shit who sells me batteries for my remote when I only use it about 15 seconds per day so that any battery will net me 2+ years? Nope don't care, any more than I care who sells me a mousepad or a USB cable, its who has the best price that day. If companies don't like that? Then make a product that stands out and can sell on branding, like Apple, Nike,etc.
I would have been happy to have either Rand or Bernie as both were anti-war and both seem to really care about this country....but that wasn't the choice we got.
Our choice was a former gameshow host that trolls on Twitter or a war mongering corpratist sociopath....sorry but if my only choices are a Twitter Troll or a war loving, Wall Street kissing sociopath that used her influence to keep herself out of jail (show me ANY time where taking a hammer to cellphones and using DoD wiping software to erase data under subpoena hasn't gotten the person jail time for obstruction) while cheering sending more of our children to shithole countries to die so her pals can clean up? Yeah I'll take the Twitter troll any day of the damn week, he is frankly a hell of a lot less of a threat.
I'd say they did pretty damn well, after all it was Shillary that pushed Trump in the first place (pied piper strategy) and after the people heard her laughing about getting a scumbag who raped a 12 year old girl off, seen her laughing about killing foreign leaders with "we came, we saw, he died ha ha ha" (and brought back slavery in that country, great going you sociopath) and saw her policies were all PRO Wall Street, Pro globalism, PRO wars, they looked and said...."Yeah...ya know what? A former gameshow host who trolls on Twitter about how hot his wife is is a HELL of a lot less dangerous than this psycho" and that is why you have Trump now.
So I'd say if you want to blame anybody blame Shillary and Wasserman Schultz for rigging the primary against Bernie who had a damn good shot of beating Trump, Shillary had so many skeletons in her closet and was just so unlikeable all Trump had to do was play a few clips of her being smug AF, falling down and looking like a loon and just shrug and say "Crooked Hillary" and it was in the bag.
I've also never had a problem with it and having the Amazon Basics item on top? Has gotten them exactly ZERO sales from me as there is always a better deal right below it from companies like Monoprice.
Walmart has Great Value, Amazon has Amazon Basics, my local grocer has Best Choice...and? Stores have been making in house brands for at least 50+ years and "On The Internet" doesn't magically change that nor does it affect Joe and Jane Normal anymore than having a sale on Great Value ice cream is gonna make them ignore their Ben & Jerrys.
Riiight..../looks at USB drive filled with GOG.EXE installers and game manual PDFs/....really not too worried, nope.
And sadly when it comes to games there is a reason to support DRM in some situations...namely douchebag cheating scumbags in PVP focused games. Nothing will kill a game quicker than those that busted their ass to learn the game and get good at it constantly getting owned by garbage players using wallhacks, auto-aim hacks, and other cheats. And before anybody says "run your own servers"? That is fine if you want to only play a game with a couple of friends, when you want to play against hundreds to thousands of players worldwide? Yeah that strategy ain't gonna work.
You mean teaching a dog to do a stupid trick to make fun of Nazis? Yup, because offensive humor is in the eye of the beholder and I don't want some Big Brother telling me what is and is not funny.
Funny though that all this hate speech protected spaces bullshit is doing is causing a hell of a hard right shift as many from feminists (hell they had lesbians giving a talk at the Heritage Foundation and if you would have told me 10 years ago that would happen I would have said you were insane) to old school liberals simply walk away from the left because they have become so authoritarian and frankly racist and sexist nobody other than college indoctrinated millennials will buy it. I personally voted straight left for 30 years straight, I even voted for Dukakis against the first Shrub and Kerry against the second, but even though I cannot stand most if not all of what the right stands for I will vote straight R in 2020 simply because the regessives and the racist sexist garbage they stand for is about as appealing to me as anal cancer.
And say what you will about the right but you can go to any right wing website and be as leftist as you want, they will make fun of you or respond with memes but they won't ban you or try to silence you, try the same thing at HuffyPo or Mary Sue and see how quickly they erase you, no thoughtcrime accepted on the left anymore, only bubbles of groupthink allowed.
Because he is robbing Peter to pay Paul and without the Windows network effect they be fucked? Lets look at their business and see what happens if we remove Windows from the equation, shall we?
Well if I don't need Windows there goes MS Office, I can just as easily use Google's offerings or Open Office, there goes a chunk of cash. If I'm not using windows I'm not gonna be using an MS browser or MS services as they won't be the default on a Google or Apple device so all of that datamining and selling is tits up. Also Win 10's backwards compatibility is more and more shit by the day so all those SMBs and SOHOs are fucked...oh wait all the Linux business offerings come with butt simply VM setups so you can keep an old copy of Windows with mission critical apps running forever, oh and hey VMWare offers VM support for those cheap Chromebooks so we can save money on hardware as well! Starting to get the picture?
A huge chunk of MSFT's business benefits in some way from the Windows network effect and Windows 10 is quickly becoming a punch line, with so many having a piss poor experience its actually making Vista look good. Hell I've watched live streams where win 10 has BSODed right in the middle of the stream and I haven't seen that kind of shit since XP, that is fucking sad. And its not like the old days where there was nobody to step up, Google is more than happy to drink their milkshake and even Wally World I'm starting to see carry wide arrays of Chromebooks.
So while he may be growing now with his "cloud cloud cloud" don't forget Ballmer monkey and his thinking they could just buy Nokia and force their way into the smartphone game and how that ultimately turned out. Google and Amazon aren't gonna go away, if anything their integration with devices is gonna get even tighter and with every passing day Nutella lets windows rot? The more and more users are gonna find they really don't need MSFT anymore, Google or Apple or Amazon can give them a better experience.
Wow...you DO realize that George Carlin was thrown in a squad car and hauled off with Lenny Bruce for speech that didn't follow the narrative of the time, yes? And that if Carlin were alive today and did the same bits today he did then he would likewise probably be thrown in jail for so called "Hate Speech" right?
Funny how we are going right back to the authoritarian days of the 1940s and 50s, with just different groups being protected and attacked. BTW anybody who says Carlin wouldn't? Hasn't seen his bit where he spills out every possible racist term he can come up with just to show how absurd the entire concept was, which in many places simply using those terms out loud with protected classes in the audience would be considered hate speech.
You should try Win 8.1 with OpenShell, runs just as nice and stable as Win 7, the updates aren't a hot mess of fail like Win 10, and you can have it look and behave like Win 7 or even WinXP if you prefer.
I've been running it for nearly 2 years now and I have to say its one of the best workstation OSes I've ever run, right up there with WinXP X64, while my customers that run Win 10 have to deal with buggy AF updates and MSFT constantly resetting defaults. Hopefully by 2023 when Win 8.1 goes EOL they will have replaced Nutella with someone that actually cares about making a good OS or I'll be having to jump to Google or Linux.
Thanks I forgot about that. So you had 20 to 1 PLUS beanbags, flashbangs, tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets AND the cops had body armor AND had shields or were behind cars....against a single guy in a pair of shorts.
I just don't see how anyone sane can make excuses for these SWAT units anymore, what they are doing is nothing but straight up executions. With that many non lethal choices there is NO REASON why they can't put a single guy in shorts standing on a porch down without risking their lives of taking his, none. And again if this is supposed to be a hostage situation, where is the hostage negotiator? Oh that is right, you only have one of those when you want to end the situation peacefully instead of use civilians for target practice, my bad.
Riiight. if you think the big threat is USA VS USSR or China? Might want to wake up and smell the crazy coming from the ME. You know the place where they are chopping hands off thieves and throwing gays from rooftops and living like its 999?
The next big threat the USA is gonna have to face ain't nukes flying from some other superpower, its religious whack-a-doodles cooking up some sort of NBC bomb and transporting it in a Ryder truck and setting it off. After all Russia and China (and even crazy ass NK) knows if they let one fly an assload of death is gonna be raining down on their heads and they will be just as fucked as the country they launch theirs at, after all that is the entire MAD strategy and its worked for like 60+ years.
No the threat is from those that don't give a shit if you kill them because you are just making them a martyr and getting them brownie points in the afterlife and helping encourage their people to jump in and fight or their God. And as long as the USA has a border that is so badly busted that bad guys can bring hundreds of thousands of kilos of dope, human slaves for sex trafficking, weapons and God knows what else into this country that is gonna be a hell of a weak spot that those that believe our beliefs defile their god sooner or later WILL take advantage of. And your fancy Star Wars defenses, your ability to rain death on their home countries, all the nukes in the world ain't gonna mean shit because they believe it is the will of their god that you die. And THAT is gonna be the real threat in the coming decades, how to deprogram religious nutters so they are no longer a threat without having to "pull a Stalin" and just outright ban their beliefs.
Or....and this is just a thought, how about putting the blame where it really lies which is SWAT teams that act more like hit squads than cops?
We have reached a point in technology where there really is no excuse for killing a suspect that isn't actively shooting at people simply because of the ton of non lethal options every police dept has. They have tear gas, flashbangs, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, tasers, all of which will put someone on the ground WITHOUT filling them full of holes, yet despite the SWAT units having all these options AND more body armor than a soldier in Iraq AND often hiding behind shields or cars when engaging...their default state is to ventilate. And do not forget this was supposedly a HOSTAGE situation...where was the hostage negotiator? Oh that is right SWAT teams today shoot first and fuck anything sensible like trying to talk a situation down peacefully.
So while the douchebag deserved the jail time the innocent person's death needs to be blamed on those that pulled the trigger without even attempting anything less than lethal force...the cops.
How is this ANY different than the MS Java case? Google went to Oracle( just like MSFT went to Sun) and tried to get a license while offering peanuts. Oracle (just like Sun) say "No we won't accept that" and Google (just like MSFT) copied it and slapped a different name on it.
The only difference I can see is that Google gave it a weird name while MSFT called it MS Java so by this logic MSFT would have been perfectly fine to rip off Sun if they would have called their version something like flexfair or some other BS name.
Were you there in 1954? Because Big Mikes died out on the American continent in the mid 50s, in fact the only places left that still have Big Mikes for sale are southeast Asia so unless Panama is in Asia? yeah you are full of shit.
"OMG this doesn't fit my narrative so I'll scream names at people!"...wow, do you need a safe space? Want to show where those evil ideas touched you?
BTW I know your teeny tiny narrow mind cannot comprehend this concept, but Rogan has said a million times the reason he likes Alex Jones is precisely BECAUSE he is completely batshit, has said repeatedly that Jones' ideas are as nutty as they come, but because he actually supports free speech he supports Jones' right to be batshit....OMG, shock gasp! Free Speech mans supporting people that don't think like you do! Wow who woulda thunk it?
Uhhh yeah sorry, I've actually had a Big Mike (a friend sent me some banana chips when he was stationed in South Korea as you can still get Big Mike products in some markets in Asia) and yup...tastes just like banana Laffy Taffy, the Big Mike has a very strong sweet flavor that is pretty much dead on with what "artificial" banana tastes like.
The problem is you've only tasted Cavendish, which tastes nothing like the Big Mike (and doesn't have much taste at all) and was only chosen as it was immune to Palm Blight. Its a shame as the Big Mike is frankly a much superior banana, but its doubtful we'll ever see it make a come back.
Riiight, that is why on the Joe Rogan podcast last week the CEO of Twitter and his lawyer admitted they had "blocked the bots" of a guy that admitted to the NYT to using fake Russian bots to try to swing an election in Alabama while refusing to block the person actually making the bots while at the same time banning people who had used the "learn to code" meme?
You really ought to watch the podcast as its quite eye opening and more than a little scary how blatant companies like Twitter are when it comes to pushing a narrative. If you are hard left? You can dox, you can threaten people's lives, call for violence, perfectly okay, if you are right? A meme can get you suspended or banned...which is exactly why places like 8chan exist. Remember for there to be actual free speech? It has to include ALL speech, just not those that agree with you, and sadly we are seeing with the big media giants like FB and Twitter only one voice is welcome there, the one that talks and thinks like they do.
For those that do not know the reason why banana candy doesn't taste like bananas? Is because it DOES taste like bananas, it just tastes like bananas that were once the banana you got in the stores that has since nearly been wiped out by disease. The Gross Michael or "Big Mike" banana was THE banana you found in stores from the mid 1800s-1950s, but then Palm Blight attacked the fields and nearly wiped them out completely as it spread. Now remember this was in the 40s and 50s, a time when it could take weeks to get from one side of the world to another, can you imagine how much quicker disease can spread these days, when you can hop on a plane and be on the other side of the world in a few days?
Now I haven't done enough research on the disease attacking the citrus plants to see if its another Gross Michael style disease (and I bet the writer of the article hasn't either) but if its a similar style attack? You could see this spread like wildfire and if that happened all the citrus plants affected could go the way of the Big Mike banana. Remember that nearly all these fields are made from clones so if one plant is susceptible to this disease? They ALL are. So unless you want another "Yes we have no bananas" song (written because for many years bananas simply could not be found anywhere) and to have to explain to your kids why we have citrus candy but no more actual citrus fruits? I'd want to have more information and see whether this is just a random disease or a possible Big Mike style threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh I paid $60 for my R9 380x, shipped to my door. Its not hard if you are willing to bid to get a decent deal on a GPU, hell some of those Xeon Workstations come with nice 2Gb Quadro cards that will play most games at 1080p OOTB.
And there are a ton of Dell and HP workstations that are quite cheap and which will take CPUs well beyond anything a normal desktop will take (short of a top gamer board).Just look at something like an HP Z420, most of those come with a Quadro 2Gb, win 10 Pro, and can take 12c/24t CPUs that can be had quite cheaply which would be nice for video rendering as well as streaming games at 1080p.
Oh BS, you don't need to build a brand new system to easily do 1080p 60FPS. You can go on eBay right now and pick up a 4c/8t Xeon workstation for sub $200 with a 1Tb drive and Win 10 Pro, grab an SSD for sub $50 along with an R9 380X or RX 480 and tada! A Win 10 Pro system that will kick the shit out of a console and which can easily go up to 12c/24t later on down the line if you just want to go ludicrous power.
Yup, that is why the grandkid has an Xbone, building him a halfway decent windows gaming PC at the time (this was during the crypto mining bubble) would have cost a good $400+ while his Xbone he got on sale for like $230 with codes for 3 free games.
I will always be a PC gamer, quite love my budget AMD FX-8 box (still great for streaming and recording at 1080p) but even I can see that there are use cases where the console makes more sense, and for the games he plays like Forza and Fortnite? The Xbone was the cheaper option and I'm sure with this discless version it'll probably be sub $200. At that price? No way in hell I could build a good 1080p gaming PC at that price.
As I have a grandkid with an Xbone and ya know what? I don't think he has ever run a disc in the thing, all his games came from the Xbox store. He doesn't even need the drive for his older X360 games as his 360 still is hooked up and runs just fine so I can see a market for this.
And its not like we haven't seen the same thing happen to PC gaming, hell the last time I bought a "physical copy" of a game it just turned out to be a CD with a Steam installer and a Steam code so its not like having the disc means shit in this day and age anyway, so if they can make it cheaper and everyone is grabbing their games from the Xbox store why not?
Truth is truth and the issue isn't the UI, hell Linux has had nice easy to use UIs for ages...the problem is what a clusterfuck Linux is when something goes wrong.
Lets say your laptop boots up and the Wifi doesn't work. In Windows a good 90% of the time you just go "clicky clicky" on system restore and tada! Its all fixed, user didn't need to know shit about the hardware or software, just clicky clicky. Now how do you do the same in Linux? Fuck if I know as apparently every distro has a different procedure, most of which requires CLI and a knowledge of the hardware in question. What about printers? MSFT keeps a billion printer drivers so the user has to do precisely jack squat as the OS calls home and does all the work, Linux? Yeah GLWT as if it isn't a corp laser printer your ass had better know enough to find the website, download the LPD file, know how to install said file, and get that shit up and running. Which BTW can be finicky as hell, couldn't get Linux lite to see a Brother wireless printer even after following the instructions for setting up the LDP file, didn't matter in the end as the next update shat on the wireless so I ended up going back to Windows....and THAT is the problem.
You see Linux users just because YOU can do something or enjoy futzing with CLI or spending lord knows how long Googling fixes when shit goes wrong? Does NOT mean Joe and Jane average will do it, or even have the capability. If you want to gain all those desktop users (which just FYI there has NEVER been a better time as win 10 is a buggy POS) here is what you need to do....
1.- Make something as butt simple as system restore/rollback drivers so that the OS can instantly be rolled back to a previous snapshot if shit breaks, 2.- Make a central driver repo which ALL DISTROS USE which will contain ALL THE DRIVERS THERE IS, period the end. I don't care if its a 10 year old printer or a brand new sound card, if there is a Linux driver? That shit needs to be in there with some sort of standard ABI so there is none of this "requires kernel X, GCC Y" nonsense, just a simple automatic driver install for any and all hardware the user has. 3.- Work with hardware vendors to put a penguin on the box. A user shouldn't have to be Columbo to try to figure out when they go shopping what works and what don't, after all the Apple users just look for an Apple on the box, Windows users the Winflag, you need to have just as many mainstream devices with penguins on boxes (and again it needs to be standard, none of this "requires distro X" BS) so that its just as easy to buy everything from a USB Wifi dongle to a AIO printer as it is with Windows and Apple.
Do these things? Linux could easily grab share as Windows 10 is about as loved as anal cancer, but as long as Linux is a CLI heavy royal PITA when anything goes wrong? Ordinary users just aren't gonna bother, its not worth the hassle.
The one Pale Moon "blacklisted" refused to fix serious issues with getting it running on PM so the PM team simply replaced it with uBlock Origin, they even have a handy updater that contacts Github and grabs the latest uBlock version compatible with PM so you don't need to deal with keeping up with versions.
Considering uBlock actually works with PM and does the same job while the later versions of NS was crashy AF on PM? I really see blacklisting an extension that wouldn't work properly as a non issue as uBlock does the same job and is compatible. BTW feel free to contact the NoScript dev and ask him to support the latest version of PM but don't be surprised if he tells you which bridge to jump off of as I've heard the dev is rather..."surly" and doesn't take criticisms or suggestions very well. A shame really but...well "not very sociable" developers aren't exactly a new thing are they?
Would you like me to provide the links showing how the same talking heads said a big threat was Iraq with its WMDs? How about video showing a random dude shopping in Venezuela in a store as well stocked as your local Wally World while the US press talks about how they are eating rats and dogs? A country that has a huge military industrial complex and corporatocracy that gasp! shock! constantly tries to start new wars with non threats like magical invisible WMDs or starving people in Venezuela while leaving out their biggest problem is hyperinflation because the USA is crushing them with sanctions? Yeah if you buy the North Korea bullshit I have some swampland you might be interested in.
BTW if you want to see how far back this scam goes? Look up "Kuwait incubator baby conspiracy" where Shrub Sr used the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter as a "random hospital worker" (yeah like her ass had worked on anything but her nails in her life) to bawl before congress about how Iraqi soldiers went into the hospital she was working at and threw babies out of the incubators. Before that point the American public was against a war but after every MSM outlet pushed the fake baby incubator story? Support for war went up to 85%. So next time you see some story about how some piss ant country that wouldn't last 5 seconds against the USA is a "big threat" you might want to follow the money.
But just in case you need a hint....psst...Venezuela has a larger oil field than Saudi Arabia and North Korea is sitting on billions worth of minerals, just like Afghanistan. Hmmm...funny we only charge into countries that have resources our big corps can make a shitload of dosh off of, while those resource poor countries like the Congo and Sudan can be just as horrible and nobody gives a fuck. Huh must be a big coincidence.
The entire argument is just silly as Amazon Basics is a generic brand so the only ones they are really "competing" with are those that likewise make generic products and those companies have ALWAYS had competition because by their very design generic products are something nobody gives a shit about brand wise.
I mean do I REALLY give a shit who sells me batteries for my remote when I only use it about 15 seconds per day so that any battery will net me 2+ years? Nope don't care, any more than I care who sells me a mousepad or a USB cable, its who has the best price that day. If companies don't like that? Then make a product that stands out and can sell on branding, like Apple, Nike,etc.
I would have been happy to have either Rand or Bernie as both were anti-war and both seem to really care about this country....but that wasn't the choice we got.
Our choice was a former gameshow host that trolls on Twitter or a war mongering corpratist sociopath....sorry but if my only choices are a Twitter Troll or a war loving, Wall Street kissing sociopath that used her influence to keep herself out of jail (show me ANY time where taking a hammer to cellphones and using DoD wiping software to erase data under subpoena hasn't gotten the person jail time for obstruction) while cheering sending more of our children to shithole countries to die so her pals can clean up? Yeah I'll take the Twitter troll any day of the damn week, he is frankly a hell of a lot less of a threat.
I'd say they did pretty damn well, after all it was Shillary that pushed Trump in the first place (pied piper strategy) and after the people heard her laughing about getting a scumbag who raped a 12 year old girl off, seen her laughing about killing foreign leaders with "we came, we saw, he died ha ha ha" (and brought back slavery in that country, great going you sociopath) and saw her policies were all PRO Wall Street, Pro globalism, PRO wars, they looked and said...."Yeah...ya know what? A former gameshow host who trolls on Twitter about how hot his wife is is a HELL of a lot less dangerous than this psycho" and that is why you have Trump now.
So I'd say if you want to blame anybody blame Shillary and Wasserman Schultz for rigging the primary against Bernie who had a damn good shot of beating Trump, Shillary had so many skeletons in her closet and was just so unlikeable all Trump had to do was play a few clips of her being smug AF, falling down and looking like a loon and just shrug and say "Crooked Hillary" and it was in the bag.
I've also never had a problem with it and having the Amazon Basics item on top? Has gotten them exactly ZERO sales from me as there is always a better deal right below it from companies like Monoprice.
Walmart has Great Value, Amazon has Amazon Basics, my local grocer has Best Choice...and? Stores have been making in house brands for at least 50+ years and "On The Internet" doesn't magically change that nor does it affect Joe and Jane Normal anymore than having a sale on Great Value ice cream is gonna make them ignore their Ben & Jerrys.
Riiight..../looks at USB drive filled with GOG .EXE installers and game manual PDFs/....really not too worried, nope.
And sadly when it comes to games there is a reason to support DRM in some situations...namely douchebag cheating scumbags in PVP focused games. Nothing will kill a game quicker than those that busted their ass to learn the game and get good at it constantly getting owned by garbage players using wallhacks, auto-aim hacks, and other cheats. And before anybody says "run your own servers"? That is fine if you want to only play a game with a couple of friends, when you want to play against hundreds to thousands of players worldwide? Yeah that strategy ain't gonna work.
You mean teaching a dog to do a stupid trick to make fun of Nazis? Yup, because offensive humor is in the eye of the beholder and I don't want some Big Brother telling me what is and is not funny.
And BTW thx for proving my point, when we have people being dragged into court and convicted for a stupid dog trick while the left doesn't say a thing about Muslims forcing pro-LGBT lessons to shut down or Twitter CEO admitting banning a feminist who refused to call a trans by the their chosen pronouns just shows how sadly free speech on the left has become "only that which fits my narrative".
Funny though that all this hate speech protected spaces bullshit is doing is causing a hell of a hard right shift as many from feminists (hell they had lesbians giving a talk at the Heritage Foundation and if you would have told me 10 years ago that would happen I would have said you were insane) to old school liberals simply walk away from the left because they have become so authoritarian and frankly racist and sexist nobody other than college indoctrinated millennials will buy it. I personally voted straight left for 30 years straight, I even voted for Dukakis against the first Shrub and Kerry against the second, but even though I cannot stand most if not all of what the right stands for I will vote straight R in 2020 simply because the regessives and the racist sexist garbage they stand for is about as appealing to me as anal cancer.
And say what you will about the right but you can go to any right wing website and be as leftist as you want, they will make fun of you or respond with memes but they won't ban you or try to silence you, try the same thing at HuffyPo or Mary Sue and see how quickly they erase you, no thoughtcrime accepted on the left anymore, only bubbles of groupthink allowed.
Because he is robbing Peter to pay Paul and without the Windows network effect they be fucked? Lets look at their business and see what happens if we remove Windows from the equation, shall we?
Well if I don't need Windows there goes MS Office, I can just as easily use Google's offerings or Open Office, there goes a chunk of cash. If I'm not using windows I'm not gonna be using an MS browser or MS services as they won't be the default on a Google or Apple device so all of that datamining and selling is tits up. Also Win 10's backwards compatibility is more and more shit by the day so all those SMBs and SOHOs are fucked...oh wait all the Linux business offerings come with butt simply VM setups so you can keep an old copy of Windows with mission critical apps running forever, oh and hey VMWare offers VM support for those cheap Chromebooks so we can save money on hardware as well! Starting to get the picture?
A huge chunk of MSFT's business benefits in some way from the Windows network effect and Windows 10 is quickly becoming a punch line, with so many having a piss poor experience its actually making Vista look good. Hell I've watched live streams where win 10 has BSODed right in the middle of the stream and I haven't seen that kind of shit since XP, that is fucking sad. And its not like the old days where there was nobody to step up, Google is more than happy to drink their milkshake and even Wally World I'm starting to see carry wide arrays of Chromebooks.
So while he may be growing now with his "cloud cloud cloud" don't forget Ballmer monkey and his thinking they could just buy Nokia and force their way into the smartphone game and how that ultimately turned out. Google and Amazon aren't gonna go away, if anything their integration with devices is gonna get even tighter and with every passing day Nutella lets windows rot? The more and more users are gonna find they really don't need MSFT anymore, Google or Apple or Amazon can give them a better experience.
Wow...you DO realize that George Carlin was thrown in a squad car and hauled off with Lenny Bruce for speech that didn't follow the narrative of the time, yes? And that if Carlin were alive today and did the same bits today he did then he would likewise probably be thrown in jail for so called "Hate Speech" right?
Funny how we are going right back to the authoritarian days of the 1940s and 50s, with just different groups being protected and attacked. BTW anybody who says Carlin wouldn't? Hasn't seen his bit where he spills out every possible racist term he can come up with just to show how absurd the entire concept was, which in many places simply using those terms out loud with protected classes in the audience would be considered hate speech.
You should try Win 8.1 with OpenShell, runs just as nice and stable as Win 7, the updates aren't a hot mess of fail like Win 10, and you can have it look and behave like Win 7 or even WinXP if you prefer.
I've been running it for nearly 2 years now and I have to say its one of the best workstation OSes I've ever run, right up there with WinXP X64, while my customers that run Win 10 have to deal with buggy AF updates and MSFT constantly resetting defaults. Hopefully by 2023 when Win 8.1 goes EOL they will have replaced Nutella with someone that actually cares about making a good OS or I'll be having to jump to Google or Linux.
Thanks I forgot about that. So you had 20 to 1 PLUS beanbags, flashbangs, tear gas, tasers, rubber bullets AND the cops had body armor AND had shields or were behind cars....against a single guy in a pair of shorts.
I just don't see how anyone sane can make excuses for these SWAT units anymore, what they are doing is nothing but straight up executions. With that many non lethal choices there is NO REASON why they can't put a single guy in shorts standing on a porch down without risking their lives of taking his, none. And again if this is supposed to be a hostage situation, where is the hostage negotiator? Oh that is right, you only have one of those when you want to end the situation peacefully instead of use civilians for target practice, my bad.
Riiight. if you think the big threat is USA VS USSR or China? Might want to wake up and smell the crazy coming from the ME. You know the place where they are chopping hands off thieves and throwing gays from rooftops and living like its 999?
The next big threat the USA is gonna have to face ain't nukes flying from some other superpower, its religious whack-a-doodles cooking up some sort of NBC bomb and transporting it in a Ryder truck and setting it off. After all Russia and China (and even crazy ass NK) knows if they let one fly an assload of death is gonna be raining down on their heads and they will be just as fucked as the country they launch theirs at, after all that is the entire MAD strategy and its worked for like 60+ years.
No the threat is from those that don't give a shit if you kill them because you are just making them a martyr and getting them brownie points in the afterlife and helping encourage their people to jump in and fight or their God. And as long as the USA has a border that is so badly busted that bad guys can bring hundreds of thousands of kilos of dope, human slaves for sex trafficking, weapons and God knows what else into this country that is gonna be a hell of a weak spot that those that believe our beliefs defile their god sooner or later WILL take advantage of. And your fancy Star Wars defenses, your ability to rain death on their home countries, all the nukes in the world ain't gonna mean shit because they believe it is the will of their god that you die. And THAT is gonna be the real threat in the coming decades, how to deprogram religious nutters so they are no longer a threat without having to "pull a Stalin" and just outright ban their beliefs.
Or....and this is just a thought, how about putting the blame where it really lies which is SWAT teams that act more like hit squads than cops?
We have reached a point in technology where there really is no excuse for killing a suspect that isn't actively shooting at people simply because of the ton of non lethal options every police dept has. They have tear gas, flashbangs, rubber bullets, bean bag rounds, tasers, all of which will put someone on the ground WITHOUT filling them full of holes, yet despite the SWAT units having all these options AND more body armor than a soldier in Iraq AND often hiding behind shields or cars when engaging...their default state is to ventilate. And do not forget this was supposedly a HOSTAGE situation...where was the hostage negotiator? Oh that is right SWAT teams today shoot first and fuck anything sensible like trying to talk a situation down peacefully.
So while the douchebag deserved the jail time the innocent person's death needs to be blamed on those that pulled the trigger without even attempting anything less than lethal force...the cops.
How is this ANY different than the MS Java case? Google went to Oracle( just like MSFT went to Sun) and tried to get a license while offering peanuts. Oracle (just like Sun) say "No we won't accept that" and Google (just like MSFT) copied it and slapped a different name on it.
The only difference I can see is that Google gave it a weird name while MSFT called it MS Java so by this logic MSFT would have been perfectly fine to rip off Sun if they would have called their version something like flexfair or some other BS name.
Were you there in 1954? Because Big Mikes died out on the American continent in the mid 50s, in fact the only places left that still have Big Mikes for sale are southeast Asia so unless Panama is in Asia? yeah you are full of shit.
"OMG this doesn't fit my narrative so I'll scream names at people!"...wow, do you need a safe space? Want to show where those evil ideas touched you?
BTW I know your teeny tiny narrow mind cannot comprehend this concept, but Rogan has said a million times the reason he likes Alex Jones is precisely BECAUSE he is completely batshit, has said repeatedly that Jones' ideas are as nutty as they come, but because he actually supports free speech he supports Jones' right to be batshit....OMG, shock gasp! Free Speech mans supporting people that don't think like you do! Wow who woulda thunk it?
Uhhh yeah sorry, I've actually had a Big Mike (a friend sent me some banana chips when he was stationed in South Korea as you can still get Big Mike products in some markets in Asia) and yup...tastes just like banana Laffy Taffy, the Big Mike has a very strong sweet flavor that is pretty much dead on with what "artificial" banana tastes like.
The problem is you've only tasted Cavendish, which tastes nothing like the Big Mike (and doesn't have much taste at all) and was only chosen as it was immune to Palm Blight. Its a shame as the Big Mike is frankly a much superior banana, but its doubtful we'll ever see it make a come back.
Riiight, that is why on the Joe Rogan podcast last week the CEO of Twitter and his lawyer admitted they had "blocked the bots" of a guy that admitted to the NYT to using fake Russian bots to try to swing an election in Alabama while refusing to block the person actually making the bots while at the same time banning people who had used the "learn to code" meme?
You really ought to watch the podcast as its quite eye opening and more than a little scary how blatant companies like Twitter are when it comes to pushing a narrative. If you are hard left? You can dox, you can threaten people's lives, call for violence, perfectly okay, if you are right? A meme can get you suspended or banned...which is exactly why places like 8chan exist. Remember for there to be actual free speech? It has to include ALL speech, just not those that agree with you, and sadly we are seeing with the big media giants like FB and Twitter only one voice is welcome there, the one that talks and thinks like they do.
Or they don't want another "Big Mike" banana incident.
For those that do not know the reason why banana candy doesn't taste like bananas? Is because it DOES taste like bananas, it just tastes like bananas that were once the banana you got in the stores that has since nearly been wiped out by disease. The Gross Michael or "Big Mike" banana was THE banana you found in stores from the mid 1800s-1950s, but then Palm Blight attacked the fields and nearly wiped them out completely as it spread. Now remember this was in the 40s and 50s, a time when it could take weeks to get from one side of the world to another, can you imagine how much quicker disease can spread these days, when you can hop on a plane and be on the other side of the world in a few days?
Now I haven't done enough research on the disease attacking the citrus plants to see if its another Gross Michael style disease (and I bet the writer of the article hasn't either) but if its a similar style attack? You could see this spread like wildfire and if that happened all the citrus plants affected could go the way of the Big Mike banana. Remember that nearly all these fields are made from clones so if one plant is susceptible to this disease? They ALL are. So unless you want another "Yes we have no bananas" song (written because for many years bananas simply could not be found anywhere) and to have to explain to your kids why we have citrus candy but no more actual citrus fruits? I'd want to have more information and see whether this is just a random disease or a possible Big Mike style threat.