You wanna blame somebody don't blame AMD, blame Intel. Intel owns the patents on HDCP and because AMD doesn't have access to the fabs that Intel does they can't afford to put HDCP support on a separate part of the chip so its baked into the heart of the GPU.
And for those complaining about the Windows drivers? i honestly don't know what you are complaining about as i have used probably over a hundred at the shop and since AMD bought the company the drivers have been nothing but solid. Now are the cards buggy when you buy the bleeding edge? yep but that is true of nvidia as well, there is a REASON why they call it the bleeding edge after all and i have found BOTH companies take about 6 months from the time of a new chip rev before they are good and stable. Good rule of thumb? stay at least one version behind, that way the drivers have all the beta bugs out and are ready for prime time.
But AMD has handed all the specs they can without tapdancing into a patent minefield, so if all you care about is Linux and video decoding? You should probably buy Nvidia although if recent headlines are too be believed we may see Nvidia go the way of 3DFX, man I always said they should have bought Via when they had the chance.
And finally as for XP? Good Lord guys, just let the damned thing DIE already, okay? Running as admin is stupid, trying to get XP to behave without always admin is a PITA and a lot of programs just won't run,its patches have patches, it suffers winrot, it just wasn't that damned great guys, it really wasn't. Now XP X64? THAT was a great OS, as was 2K in its day but we have Windows 7 now which is the new XP, so let us just let XP quietly die. Hell I have Win 7 running on Pentium D systems and lets face it anything older than that is gonna be more trouble than its worth, just let it go.
Dude as someone that has to work on PCs six days a week let me make ONE thing clear, there is NOTHING extra you gotta do to pwn XP, that OS is oooolllllldddddd, okay? It has had 3 service packs, God knows how many patches, hell when it came out a decent PC was a 700Mhz P3 with 128MB of RAM!
Look I get wanting to save old gear okay? But XP wasn't great to start with and its practically ancient now, let it RIP okay?
Well that ain't something we have to worry about, we southerners can't even understand them damned Yankees/carpetbagging bastards/, we sure as hell ain't gonna be able to understand them folks in Thailand. Although I always LMAO at the looks the ones that flooded into our area in the 80s during the whole "boat people" thang get when they hear their young 'uns speaking with an accent they could cut with a chainsaw, could'a warned 'em we tend to "turn" anybody that stays any length of time, heh heh.
Now see those I have NO problem with, every country gets their own TLD and if they want to sell them for this or that service? NO problem with that. What I DO have a problem with is the crapflood of TLDs which is gonna be a fricking jackpot for squatters and scammers, I work for ordinary folks and its hard enough to teach them to watch what they type or click on and only stick to.com,.net, and.org. I can just imagine the "fun" I'm gonna have when all those are meaningless because you'll have everything from.fun to.smile, its gonna be hell for us guys in the trenches.
That is why the trick is to make sure they have JUST ENOUGH that they think they might have a chance at breaking even but not enough for them to think about anything else. Living in the deep south and frankly being surrounded by grinding poverty I can say that this is something the USA gov seems damned good at. Look at how someone on welfare lives and you'll see what I mean, every day is just a struggle to make it to the end of the month, they are too busy trying to survive this month to think about anything else, the perfect position for a government to keep its citizens.
How were the musicians LOL? That is one thing i loved about playing anywhere and everywhere, you met pretty much every kind. I have sat playing backroom poker with guys that I would bet are in witness protection (you really don't get too many "Guido the Icepick" types in Alabama) and had my truck packed with strippers because "this one had a problem with her car, that one is tired of waiting on her ditzy roommate" etc and all in all? I found the strippers and hookers to be some of the smartest and most easy to get along with, certainly easier to deal with that a female shitkicker in a redneck bar.
Are there some junkies? I answer that with show me ANY profession where there are no junkies. I have known junkie lawyers and docs, even met a preacher whose sermon quality was dependent on how good the weed he has was, that you are gonna find anywhere. But most of the gals i met were smart as hell, had plans, and were using that money to get ahead. I personally don't see a problem with that and agree that society needs to grow the fuck up when it comes to sex.
Dude I've played in bars like what that comedian used to describe in his "five stages of drunk" (damn if anybody knows the bit I'm talking about could you post a link? he talks about by 3AM you are drinking a thick blue liquid and the devil on your shoulder is working the bar?) where the girls had fresh tats and the band was behind chicken wire.
Sure in those places you get more girls working there to pay for their habit, but I've known girls that worked at the mall to pay for their habit, that ain't saying anything. But to paint all or even the majority as slaves is frankly insulting, I've hung out with plenty of strippers and a few hookers in my day and most of them? Frankly smarter than a lot of guys here.
Hey facing reality isn't pessimistic its being SMART. Why am I not worried? I'm the guy that can fix stuff and am good at picking things up, in a "shit goes to hell" sitch you're gonna need a guy that can fix things and I'm easy to get along with. I'm also kin to many country folks with enough land we can go old school and live just fine, they'll set me up a little workbench in the back and I'm good.
Its the ones in the mega-cities that are gonna be royally screwed, that is where the food will run out and the law will break down first. Hell look at Detroit, it ALREADY has huge sections that don't even have streetlights after dark, not enough cops, its already turning into old Detroit from Robocop even as we speak. Anybody who thinks you can send all the jobs overseas, allow uncontrolled mass immigration with a border so open entire cartels and gangs can just walk across, and just keep on printing that money like its monopoly? Is gonna be in for a RUDE awakening.
I urge you to watch this video because while I don't agree with his beliefs (I believe libertarians can be divided in 2 camps, one that wants a gov to whip the peasants, the other wants to hire a goon squad to do the whipping) one thing I can't argue with is his math,and he shows the math for why the stock market MUST crash. In a nutshell Reagan pumped up a huge bubble with 401K and 403B and then the corps sent all the jobs overseas so that money ran dry so to keep the gravy train rolling the gov just started throwing money directly into the market.
Anyone with a brain can see there is ONLY one way that can end, you can't keep printing without workers paying in and you already have nearly half the country getting aid in some form from the gov. The bubble HAS to burst, and when it does the depression is gonna look like a bad weekend, we are talking a good century of dead economy and hardship and as i said I REALLY can't see the peasants going off to starve, not gonna happen. it WILL get ugly and realizing that and being ready isn't pessimistic its just smart.
Sir I used VMS, knew VMS, VMS was a friend of mine, Windows is no VMS.
Cutler used some of the same IDEAS he used in VMS, same as Torvalds rightly or wrongly, depending on your opinion of the results, used ideas from minix and Unix, but the results are NOT the same. Most of the ideas like portability which Cutler incorporated into early NT in fact were removed for speed, which is now why MSFT can't get away from X86, if they would have actually kept Cutler's ideas it would have been trivial to port, but they went the speed route and it bit them in the ass.
For an example of how badly "Wintel" infected that company look at how Cyrix and Winchip ran great on OS/2 and BeOS but barely passable on Windows, or hell how the Bulldozer arch by AMD gets a lot more performance under linux than Windows.
Dude I've found what the meat of the matter is and its MUCH deeper than that...folks don't understand how the Internet WORKS, and THAT is a serious problem!
I work with ordinary folks 6 days a week and you'd be shocked how many truly believe the net is this big ball of blackness where things just disappear,never to be seen again, that these websites only know they are there when they are there, its a serious problem man. i had a customer just the other day set him up a Yahoo Chat (Boy MSFT shot themselves in the foot by killing Live Messenger, been a LOT of folks jumping ship lately) and he was shocked! shocked i tell you! That Yahoo had names showing up under his friends that he hadn't spoken to in like half a decade. he honestly thought that once he had stopped talking to people that was it, that just went poof and it was like it never existed.
So I think even before we talk about this specific case we really need to figure out how to explain how this thing we call the net REALLY works, because frankly its this misconception that the corps are using to gather all this info and data on us. Folks just don't understand that once something reaches the net it NEVER goes away, delete means nothing, its ALWAYS on a server somewhere.
Thank you, and what is so wrong with not trusting a new protocol from a company that has not had the greatest record when it comes to user privacy and security, until some guys that know their stuff and are NOT on the payroll have had a chance to tear it apart and look for obvious flaws?
Now once Bruce Schneier and a few of the other heavyweight crypto guys have had a look at it, if they say its good? THEN I'll be happy to try it. To all these fanbois, would you be saying the same thing if it were MSFT or Apple? Then why does Google deserve a free pass?
But this is SUPPOSED to be a geek site, do we REALLY need to fricking spell out how simply saying "there is a spec' isn't magic fairy dust to insure it doesn't have a backdoor already? I mean are we REALLY gonna have to paste a page and a half explaining the basics, how complex crypto is, how having something "similar to" something currently being used doesn't mean it won't have serious holes, or the whole "what you get from the spec isn't always what the final product is" ala MSFT OpenDoc?
I mean good lord if the only way to shut up the fanbois is to paste a couple of paragraphs of explanation, after we've had nothing but back to fricking back NSA headlines for a year? I'll happily clean out the plasma conduits, get me outta here!
So let me get this straight, Yahoo owns Altavista and uses Bing for a back end, took down Altavista only to put it back up with a yahoo back end, that is really being back ended by Bing?
Damn no wonder they pulled the plug, hell the ping times must have been awful!
Sadly the government doesn't even need to do that, just keep a good chunk of the populace in grinding poverty.
In the late 90s I worked for a little while with a guy from a former Eastern bloc nation and since my grandfather spent his last years in the USAF on a base in Germany naturally I was curious as to what life was like on the other side of the wall. According to him people were too busy trying to secure food and supplies to really give a shit about politics, sure the propaganda was there but they were too busy trying to make sure everybody ate that week to care.
Now look up how many Americans are "food insecure" (God don't you just love political correctness? Sounds sooo much nicer than "Doesn't know where their next meal is coming from" or "starving") and then add in the working poor that are just a single illness away from being homeless and you can see the US gov could do pretty much whatever it wants and already have a sizable portion that will be just too busy trying to survive to care. After all its not easy to have ideals when you are worried whether your kids get fed tonight.
I prefer to look to the wise when it comes to such things, such as Jefferson "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." and JFK "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.".
Basically revolutions happen when the government no longer listens to the people, ignores their grievances, and caters only to a few at the top. Whether this is the case here or not is open to debate but ultimately it will be the masses who decide, not the individual.
Its actually all part of the despot playbook, watch Naomi Wolf's End Of America lecture where she lists all the different plays made by Franco, Stalin, the crazy Austrian, and how many of those plays are being done here now, oh and just FYI but she's on the watchlist now. Land of the free indeed.
Some of the Peavey boards, a lot of the Behringer boards which frankly aren't bad as long as you don't push 'em too hard, I think a couple of the Sony pro boards buts it has been awhile since i ran across one, and IIRC quite a few of the Mackie boards have 'em as well.
Hell maybe my memory is failing but didn't some of the old HP Business laptops have a combined mouse and keyboard port, where if you just wanted one or the other you could just plug it in but if you wanted both you used this special adapter that let you plug both into the single port?
In any case using a single port for more than one job isn't exactly a new idea, but knowing the USPTO all they'll have to do is put in a lot of jargon and they'll get the patent anyway.
Actually we already have two people in jail for thoughtcrime, so frankly it shouldn't even be a surprise anymore. The first is the guy that wrote that supposedly "pro-pedo" book, no pics or deeds was he charged with, he was put in jail for writing down his thoughts on the subject, the other was a guy that was arrested with a "thought diary" his shrink had him write where he was supposed to put every thought he found disturbing so they could talk about it in therapy. again no actual deeds, just his thoughts on a page which if that isn't the textbook definition of "thoughtcrime" i don't know what is.
So anybody that thinks this is "the land of the free", sorry, that place don't exist anymore, all we have is differing levels of fascism here.
Dude every time I think porn can't get more twisted i'll have a customer come in with a new porn bug and will completely break the scale again, so I'd say porn getting more twisted has got to be one of the laws of the universe.
That is why I think its weird that anybody is surprised, two rich guys figure out how to make money together, news at 11...and this just in, water is wet, who knew?
Ya know I USED to make fun of the survival nuts, but after driving through the south and seeing scene after scene that could have been taken straight out of 1934? i really can't anymore.
And I have met the type you are talking about, fifth and sixth gen money who live in their little bubbles with other bubble living people that parrot the same and all I have to say is they better "Get to teh choppa!" when the shit finally does hit the fan because i don't see the peasants going gently off to starve like they did in the 30s, I really don't. look at NO after Katrina to see what will be more likely to happen, it was total "welcome to the jungle" and in a survival situation where its survival of the fittest? they ain't looking very fit from where I'm sitting.
But anybody who believes their little 'recovery" bullshit really needs to take a trip through the flyover states, you'll find reality FAR different from the BS they are spewing. More and more scrambling to get on the dole just to keep a roof over their head, boarded up homes and businesses, its getting pretty damned bad here folks. I see all this shit like H1-Bs and all I can think of is some rich guy drinking wine while the boat sinks, sooner or later reality is gonna bitchslap them and when it does its not gonna be pretty. the shit they have done in the last 20 years will probably take a century to fix and all the BS in the world isn't gonna make that reality go away.
For all those that say "the spec is open" so is the spec for MSFT Open Doc, don't actually work IRL does it? for a spec to mean shit 1.- it has to be 100% what they are actually using (the "can you trust the compiler" problem) and 2.- You have to have somebody with enough skill (as you pointed out) to spot any flaws in the crypto that would give any bad guys or bad govs a backdoor.
I urge all those who think just having the spec alone is enough to look up "The Obfuscated C contest" and please download the source and see for yourself. in that contest you KNOW there is a backdoor, you KNOW what that backdoor does and its STILL pretty damned hard to spot where the backdoor is. there are several of those i showed to long time programmers and without telling them what flaw they should be looking for they couldn't find it.
Now THINK for a second, if amateurs trying to win a stupid contest that really doesn't offer more than bragging rights can cook up backdoors that are THAT well hidden, what could somebody like Google cook up with a blank check from the NSA? doesn't Google brag they hire the best programmers on the planet?
Give it up friend, you can give 'em a page of citations but anything to do with Google or Apple gets a "doubleplus good" by default here, free thought isn't allowed.
I have to think these companies must laugh their asses off at board meetings, just looking at how many peasants will rush to defend them. Fuck that noise, i want somebody OTHER than a researcher on the payroll to tear this thing apart with a fine tooth comb before i trust jack shit from ANY of these major corps. I mean for fucks sake, hasn't ANYBODY been reading the headlines here for the past year? How many whistleblowers does it take before you figure out these corps like government green just as much as yours and will be happy to sell your asses out if the check is right?
For God's sake you'd think these people were stockholders by the way they rush to crush anything that doesn't read "Gee Bill, isn't (insert corp) great? Why it sure is Bob, why I heard they cured AGW and hunger in just an afternoon! How anybody could ever doubt (insert corp) is beyond me, they are so sweet and kind!"...If the future is corp ass kissing and flag waving, can i get a lift out of here please? i promise i have my towel ready.
Bandwidth. Many of those virtual servers have really shitty bandwidth amounts and if a lot of people are checking out your blog i could see running into that limit pretty quickly, especially if you have any videos like reviews up there.
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You wanna blame somebody don't blame AMD, blame Intel. Intel owns the patents on HDCP and because AMD doesn't have access to the fabs that Intel does they can't afford to put HDCP support on a separate part of the chip so its baked into the heart of the GPU.
And for those complaining about the Windows drivers? i honestly don't know what you are complaining about as i have used probably over a hundred at the shop and since AMD bought the company the drivers have been nothing but solid. Now are the cards buggy when you buy the bleeding edge? yep but that is true of nvidia as well, there is a REASON why they call it the bleeding edge after all and i have found BOTH companies take about 6 months from the time of a new chip rev before they are good and stable. Good rule of thumb? stay at least one version behind, that way the drivers have all the beta bugs out and are ready for prime time.
But AMD has handed all the specs they can without tapdancing into a patent minefield, so if all you care about is Linux and video decoding? You should probably buy Nvidia although if recent headlines are too be believed we may see Nvidia go the way of 3DFX, man I always said they should have bought Via when they had the chance.
And finally as for XP? Good Lord guys, just let the damned thing DIE already, okay? Running as admin is stupid, trying to get XP to behave without always admin is a PITA and a lot of programs just won't run,its patches have patches, it suffers winrot, it just wasn't that damned great guys, it really wasn't. Now XP X64? THAT was a great OS, as was 2K in its day but we have Windows 7 now which is the new XP, so let us just let XP quietly die. Hell I have Win 7 running on Pentium D systems and lets face it anything older than that is gonna be more trouble than its worth, just let it go.
Dude as someone that has to work on PCs six days a week let me make ONE thing clear, there is NOTHING extra you gotta do to pwn XP, that OS is oooolllllldddddd, okay? It has had 3 service packs, God knows how many patches, hell when it came out a decent PC was a 700Mhz P3 with 128MB of RAM!
Look I get wanting to save old gear okay? But XP wasn't great to start with and its practically ancient now, let it RIP okay?
Well that ain't something we have to worry about, we southerners can't even understand them damned Yankees/carpetbagging bastards/, we sure as hell ain't gonna be able to understand them folks in Thailand. Although I always LMAO at the looks the ones that flooded into our area in the 80s during the whole "boat people" thang get when they hear their young 'uns speaking with an accent they could cut with a chainsaw, could'a warned 'em we tend to "turn" anybody that stays any length of time, heh heh.
Now see those I have NO problem with, every country gets their own TLD and if they want to sell them for this or that service? NO problem with that. What I DO have a problem with is the crapflood of TLDs which is gonna be a fricking jackpot for squatters and scammers, I work for ordinary folks and its hard enough to teach them to watch what they type or click on and only stick to .com,.net, and .org. I can just imagine the "fun" I'm gonna have when all those are meaningless because you'll have everything from .fun to .smile, its gonna be hell for us guys in the trenches.
That is why the trick is to make sure they have JUST ENOUGH that they think they might have a chance at breaking even but not enough for them to think about anything else. Living in the deep south and frankly being surrounded by grinding poverty I can say that this is something the USA gov seems damned good at. Look at how someone on welfare lives and you'll see what I mean, every day is just a struggle to make it to the end of the month, they are too busy trying to survive this month to think about anything else, the perfect position for a government to keep its citizens.
How were the musicians LOL? That is one thing i loved about playing anywhere and everywhere, you met pretty much every kind. I have sat playing backroom poker with guys that I would bet are in witness protection (you really don't get too many "Guido the Icepick" types in Alabama) and had my truck packed with strippers because "this one had a problem with her car, that one is tired of waiting on her ditzy roommate" etc and all in all? I found the strippers and hookers to be some of the smartest and most easy to get along with, certainly easier to deal with that a female shitkicker in a redneck bar.
Are there some junkies? I answer that with show me ANY profession where there are no junkies. I have known junkie lawyers and docs, even met a preacher whose sermon quality was dependent on how good the weed he has was, that you are gonna find anywhere. But most of the gals i met were smart as hell, had plans, and were using that money to get ahead. I personally don't see a problem with that and agree that society needs to grow the fuck up when it comes to sex.
Dude I've played in bars like what that comedian used to describe in his "five stages of drunk" (damn if anybody knows the bit I'm talking about could you post a link? he talks about by 3AM you are drinking a thick blue liquid and the devil on your shoulder is working the bar?) where the girls had fresh tats and the band was behind chicken wire.
Sure in those places you get more girls working there to pay for their habit, but I've known girls that worked at the mall to pay for their habit, that ain't saying anything. But to paint all or even the majority as slaves is frankly insulting, I've hung out with plenty of strippers and a few hookers in my day and most of them? Frankly smarter than a lot of guys here.
Hey facing reality isn't pessimistic its being SMART. Why am I not worried? I'm the guy that can fix stuff and am good at picking things up, in a "shit goes to hell" sitch you're gonna need a guy that can fix things and I'm easy to get along with. I'm also kin to many country folks with enough land we can go old school and live just fine, they'll set me up a little workbench in the back and I'm good.
Its the ones in the mega-cities that are gonna be royally screwed, that is where the food will run out and the law will break down first. Hell look at Detroit, it ALREADY has huge sections that don't even have streetlights after dark, not enough cops, its already turning into old Detroit from Robocop even as we speak. Anybody who thinks you can send all the jobs overseas, allow uncontrolled mass immigration with a border so open entire cartels and gangs can just walk across, and just keep on printing that money like its monopoly? Is gonna be in for a RUDE awakening.
I urge you to watch this video because while I don't agree with his beliefs (I believe libertarians can be divided in 2 camps, one that wants a gov to whip the peasants, the other wants to hire a goon squad to do the whipping) one thing I can't argue with is his math,and he shows the math for why the stock market MUST crash. In a nutshell Reagan pumped up a huge bubble with 401K and 403B and then the corps sent all the jobs overseas so that money ran dry so to keep the gravy train rolling the gov just started throwing money directly into the market.
Anyone with a brain can see there is ONLY one way that can end, you can't keep printing without workers paying in and you already have nearly half the country getting aid in some form from the gov. The bubble HAS to burst, and when it does the depression is gonna look like a bad weekend, we are talking a good century of dead economy and hardship and as i said I REALLY can't see the peasants going off to starve, not gonna happen. it WILL get ugly and realizing that and being ready isn't pessimistic its just smart.
Sir I used VMS, knew VMS, VMS was a friend of mine, Windows is no VMS.
Cutler used some of the same IDEAS he used in VMS, same as Torvalds rightly or wrongly, depending on your opinion of the results, used ideas from minix and Unix, but the results are NOT the same. Most of the ideas like portability which Cutler incorporated into early NT in fact were removed for speed, which is now why MSFT can't get away from X86, if they would have actually kept Cutler's ideas it would have been trivial to port, but they went the speed route and it bit them in the ass.
For an example of how badly "Wintel" infected that company look at how Cyrix and Winchip ran great on OS/2 and BeOS but barely passable on Windows, or hell how the Bulldozer arch by AMD gets a lot more performance under linux than Windows.
Dude I've found what the meat of the matter is and its MUCH deeper than that...folks don't understand how the Internet WORKS, and THAT is a serious problem!
I work with ordinary folks 6 days a week and you'd be shocked how many truly believe the net is this big ball of blackness where things just disappear,never to be seen again, that these websites only know they are there when they are there, its a serious problem man. i had a customer just the other day set him up a Yahoo Chat (Boy MSFT shot themselves in the foot by killing Live Messenger, been a LOT of folks jumping ship lately) and he was shocked! shocked i tell you! That Yahoo had names showing up under his friends that he hadn't spoken to in like half a decade. he honestly thought that once he had stopped talking to people that was it, that just went poof and it was like it never existed.
So I think even before we talk about this specific case we really need to figure out how to explain how this thing we call the net REALLY works, because frankly its this misconception that the corps are using to gather all this info and data on us. Folks just don't understand that once something reaches the net it NEVER goes away, delete means nothing, its ALWAYS on a server somewhere.
Thank you, and what is so wrong with not trusting a new protocol from a company that has not had the greatest record when it comes to user privacy and security, until some guys that know their stuff and are NOT on the payroll have had a chance to tear it apart and look for obvious flaws?
Now once Bruce Schneier and a few of the other heavyweight crypto guys have had a look at it, if they say its good? THEN I'll be happy to try it. To all these fanbois, would you be saying the same thing if it were MSFT or Apple? Then why does Google deserve a free pass?
But this is SUPPOSED to be a geek site, do we REALLY need to fricking spell out how simply saying "there is a spec' isn't magic fairy dust to insure it doesn't have a backdoor already? I mean are we REALLY gonna have to paste a page and a half explaining the basics, how complex crypto is, how having something "similar to" something currently being used doesn't mean it won't have serious holes, or the whole "what you get from the spec isn't always what the final product is" ala MSFT OpenDoc?
I mean good lord if the only way to shut up the fanbois is to paste a couple of paragraphs of explanation, after we've had nothing but back to fricking back NSA headlines for a year? I'll happily clean out the plasma conduits, get me outta here!
So let me get this straight, Yahoo owns Altavista and uses Bing for a back end, took down Altavista only to put it back up with a yahoo back end, that is really being back ended by Bing?
Damn no wonder they pulled the plug, hell the ping times must have been awful!
Sadly the government doesn't even need to do that, just keep a good chunk of the populace in grinding poverty.
In the late 90s I worked for a little while with a guy from a former Eastern bloc nation and since my grandfather spent his last years in the USAF on a base in Germany naturally I was curious as to what life was like on the other side of the wall. According to him people were too busy trying to secure food and supplies to really give a shit about politics, sure the propaganda was there but they were too busy trying to make sure everybody ate that week to care .
Now look up how many Americans are "food insecure" (God don't you just love political correctness? Sounds sooo much nicer than "Doesn't know where their next meal is coming from" or "starving") and then add in the working poor that are just a single illness away from being homeless and you can see the US gov could do pretty much whatever it wants and already have a sizable portion that will be just too busy trying to survive to care. After all its not easy to have ideals when you are worried whether your kids get fed tonight.
I prefer to look to the wise when it comes to such things, such as Jefferson "But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." and JFK "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.".
Basically revolutions happen when the government no longer listens to the people, ignores their grievances, and caters only to a few at the top. Whether this is the case here or not is open to debate but ultimately it will be the masses who decide, not the individual.
Its actually all part of the despot playbook, watch Naomi Wolf's End Of America lecture where she lists all the different plays made by Franco, Stalin, the crazy Austrian, and how many of those plays are being done here now, oh and just FYI but she's on the watchlist now. Land of the free indeed.
Some of the Peavey boards, a lot of the Behringer boards which frankly aren't bad as long as you don't push 'em too hard, I think a couple of the Sony pro boards buts it has been awhile since i ran across one, and IIRC quite a few of the Mackie boards have 'em as well.
Hell maybe my memory is failing but didn't some of the old HP Business laptops have a combined mouse and keyboard port, where if you just wanted one or the other you could just plug it in but if you wanted both you used this special adapter that let you plug both into the single port?
In any case using a single port for more than one job isn't exactly a new idea, but knowing the USPTO all they'll have to do is put in a lot of jargon and they'll get the patent anyway.
Actually we already have two people in jail for thoughtcrime, so frankly it shouldn't even be a surprise anymore. The first is the guy that wrote that supposedly "pro-pedo" book, no pics or deeds was he charged with, he was put in jail for writing down his thoughts on the subject, the other was a guy that was arrested with a "thought diary" his shrink had him write where he was supposed to put every thought he found disturbing so they could talk about it in therapy. again no actual deeds, just his thoughts on a page which if that isn't the textbook definition of "thoughtcrime" i don't know what is.
So anybody that thinks this is "the land of the free", sorry, that place don't exist anymore, all we have is differing levels of fascism here.
Dude every time I think porn can't get more twisted i'll have a customer come in with a new porn bug and will completely break the scale again, so I'd say porn getting more twisted has got to be one of the laws of the universe.
That is why I think its weird that anybody is surprised, two rich guys figure out how to make money together, news at 11...and this just in, water is wet, who knew?
Ya know I USED to make fun of the survival nuts, but after driving through the south and seeing scene after scene that could have been taken straight out of 1934? i really can't anymore.
And I have met the type you are talking about, fifth and sixth gen money who live in their little bubbles with other bubble living people that parrot the same and all I have to say is they better "Get to teh choppa!" when the shit finally does hit the fan because i don't see the peasants going gently off to starve like they did in the 30s, I really don't. look at NO after Katrina to see what will be more likely to happen, it was total "welcome to the jungle" and in a survival situation where its survival of the fittest? they ain't looking very fit from where I'm sitting.
But anybody who believes their little 'recovery" bullshit really needs to take a trip through the flyover states, you'll find reality FAR different from the BS they are spewing. More and more scrambling to get on the dole just to keep a roof over their head, boarded up homes and businesses, its getting pretty damned bad here folks. I see all this shit like H1-Bs and all I can think of is some rich guy drinking wine while the boat sinks, sooner or later reality is gonna bitchslap them and when it does its not gonna be pretty. the shit they have done in the last 20 years will probably take a century to fix and all the BS in the world isn't gonna make that reality go away.
For all those that say "the spec is open" so is the spec for MSFT Open Doc, don't actually work IRL does it? for a spec to mean shit 1.- it has to be 100% what they are actually using (the "can you trust the compiler" problem) and 2.- You have to have somebody with enough skill (as you pointed out) to spot any flaws in the crypto that would give any bad guys or bad govs a backdoor.
I urge all those who think just having the spec alone is enough to look up "The Obfuscated C contest" and please download the source and see for yourself. in that contest you KNOW there is a backdoor, you KNOW what that backdoor does and its STILL pretty damned hard to spot where the backdoor is. there are several of those i showed to long time programmers and without telling them what flaw they should be looking for they couldn't find it.
Now THINK for a second, if amateurs trying to win a stupid contest that really doesn't offer more than bragging rights can cook up backdoors that are THAT well hidden, what could somebody like Google cook up with a blank check from the NSA? doesn't Google brag they hire the best programmers on the planet?
Give it up friend, you can give 'em a page of citations but anything to do with Google or Apple gets a "doubleplus good" by default here, free thought isn't allowed.
I have to think these companies must laugh their asses off at board meetings, just looking at how many peasants will rush to defend them. Fuck that noise, i want somebody OTHER than a researcher on the payroll to tear this thing apart with a fine tooth comb before i trust jack shit from ANY of these major corps. I mean for fucks sake, hasn't ANYBODY been reading the headlines here for the past year? How many whistleblowers does it take before you figure out these corps like government green just as much as yours and will be happy to sell your asses out if the check is right?
For God's sake you'd think these people were stockholders by the way they rush to crush anything that doesn't read "Gee Bill, isn't (insert corp) great? Why it sure is Bob, why I heard they cured AGW and hunger in just an afternoon! How anybody could ever doubt (insert corp) is beyond me, they are so sweet and kind!"...If the future is corp ass kissing and flag waving, can i get a lift out of here please? i promise i have my towel ready.
Bandwidth. Many of those virtual servers have really shitty bandwidth amounts and if a lot of people are checking out your blog i could see running into that limit pretty quickly, especially if you have any videos like reviews up there.