What I've found, big as a PITA as it is, if you have to apply ALL BIOS updates IN ORDER. Lets say you have firmware 1.2 and the latest release is 1.8, with a 1.4 and 1.6 in between? Then you will HAVE to apply 1.4 AND 1.6 before you apply 1.8. The reason being the firmware designers ONLY test for going from 1.6 to 1.8 not for every prior release.
I was told that many years ago and have stuck with it and NEVER had a bricked device, while some of the shops I worked at had workers that would try to skip straight to the latest and I'd say a good 1 in 3 ended up doorstops. Yes it takes a little longer but if you time is worth more than the cost of the device you should probably just replace it anyway, otherwise you are risking a bricking for what on average is an extra 30 minutes worth of work.
Well if you go to StarMicro you can get the 5600+ X2 for $58, that is a 2.9GHz and is probably the cheapest you are gonna get with enough speed to do basic gaming.
That said if it were me I'd get this Biostar board for $35 as it supports 16GB of DDR 3 and up to an 1100T X6 CPU, add a cheap CPU like Phenom II 3GHz dual core until you can afford to grab an X4 or even better an X6 (the 1035T and 1045T are both great values and can be found in the $100 range) and finally add a cheap 2GB or 4GB stick of DDR 3.
If you used the rest of the guts of your old system for around $100 you would have a new system with PLENTY of upgrade potential down the line. I personally game on an X6 and see no reason in the near future to even think about getting anything else as turbocore gives me a fast triple for single threaded games and of course I have 6 cores when I need to do heavy lifting, its a great chip. And this way you'd have a core system that has plenty of headroom for adding RAM or a faster chip without breaking your wallet.
Well Billy when his boss won't even pay him to sit there and do the work I seriously doubt he's hiring more warm bodies rather than buying hardware.
I deal with these kinds of companies all the time dude, and frankly most have NO CLUE how much power that old P4 is actually crapping through. When I tell them they can have a new system that will use less power running full blast than that Prescott P4 did just sitting there AND it will lower their cooling bills since modern chips don't belch out waste heat like the old systems do? Then I will usually at least get the go ahead to set up one test system for them to see. It don't take long for the boss to see how the temp drops and the fans aren't roaring and of course the employee talking about how great and fast it is will usually close the deal.
Honestly man you don't know how many think "A PC is a PC" and don't realize how much cash we were going through with those old P4s. The sooner those things are landfill fodder the better as far as I'm concerned.
I doubt seriously they have anything to do with Java, its just some name dropping to make TFA more "trendy".
But THIS is why I don't recommend IE and in fact go out of the way to make sure my customers have IE alternatives installed. IE could be the greatest browser on the planet but because its the browser of the clueless it has a 50 foot bullseye painted right in the middle of its too juicy a target.
I have to agree with Osgeld, if your board will take an AM3 get one now and then you can upgrade the board later. That said I know a lot of AM2 boards can't take an AM3, so check out StarMicro and see how much it'll cost to get a chip that is close to max. Also you can look at my previous post for a link to an AM3 Athlon triple kit for $135 after MIR that'll give you the chip, HSF, RAM, and a nice case for it to go in but I don't know what kind of budget you are talking.
I don't think Crysis is a joke, I think its sad that so many use it as a benchmark when its frankly a shitty engine. Sure it'll make purty screencaps but there is A REASON why nearly every game out there uses Unreal while the CryEngine is only used by the parent company.
I mean when you have to have a fan made patch for Crysis 1 to keep the infamous last level from spitting out graphics salad on even decent cards that will crank out levels a LOT more graphically dense than the last level of Crysis, its the engine that is just badly coded.
I don't know...would it be better to get a Q6600 for $70, and still have slower RAM and probably a lower amount, lower speed PCIe, probably SATA 1 if you are lucky, when you can just get a new triple, board, RAM and case for $130 after MIR and you'll have DDR 3, SATA 3, and a board that will go up to a Phenom II X6 later on if you need more speed later?
That said if you have a board already and don't want to risk ebay you can get a quad Q8200 from StarMicro for just $55. I've bought from StarMicro for years, great bunch of guys and great service.
Question...why are you using a 32bit OS when you have a 64bit CPU? Win 7 X64 is a nice OS, if you want to stay with XP then use XP X64 which is really 2K3 Workstation and is quite nice. I ran XP X64 for nearly 5 years until switching to Win 7, its a solid OS and runs great. Personally I prefer Win 7 X64 because it has better memory management with regards to caching but XP X64 is a great OS.
If you have frankly 3GB or better using a 64bit OS just makes sense.
Tell him he is throwing money right out the window thanks to all the waste heat and power. systems 10 years ago didn't give a rat's ass about power or heat, its was all about the MHz. You can buy an Phenom II X6 system for a couple hundred that will use half the power to start with thanks to the fact that it'll drop down to just 800MHz when its not being used and then when you add in the fact that the software will get the job done in less than a quarter of the time you end up saving a pretty big amount when it comes to power and waste heat.
I'm sorry but even on my old Sempron XP NetTop I use at the shop I have 2GB of RAM, its really not hard to max a system out and its just foolish to cripple a system like that when so many RAM sticks have been made and thus can be found dirt cheap. For a system that old its probably DDR or DDR 2, with DDR 1GB sticks are cheap, with DDR 2 you can still find 2GB sticks cheap, so there is really mo excuse to hobble a system like that.
I can tell you when i went from the 512MB that the system came into the shop with to 2GB it really gave that system a kick in the pants. SD video, multiple tabs, it runs great and having 2GB of RAM also lowers the amount it uses swap by a huge amount (most of the time it doesn't even use swap) which lowers the amount of wear on the drive and just makes it so much smoother.
I'm also an AMD fan but I wouldn't say the A10 is a good buy, not when you can get an Athlon triple WITH 8GB of RAM AND a nice case to put it in for just $135. This would give you a boost from dual to triple, much more RAM than the C2D system is gonna hold, and will play just about any game with a middle of the road card.
Actually if you keep an eye out for the Tiger sales (I'd suggest signing up for the emails) you can cut a good $100 or more off that AMD if you don't mind MIRs.
For examples if you can re-use some of the guts like HDD and DVD burner you can get an Athlon X3 for $133 or a Phenom II X6 for $206 And that gives you the CPU with HSF, RAM, and a nice case to put it in. Either of these chips will be great for gaming, I know because my youngest games on an Athlon X3 that is only 100MHz faster than the 450 and my oldest has the X6 1045T and both play tons of games, from TF2 to huge MMOs and shooters.
So the ONLY data that "counts" is if the government hands it to you on a silver platter? Well i guess the Gulf of Tonkin actually happened, Nixon never did anything wrong, Reagan didn't trade arms for hostages, because ALL of this was NOT handed out by mommy government but found by whistleblowers.
But like the deeply religious you don't care what the government does, because you won't hear any evil of your "God". Everyone else can use common sense and judge for themselves.
There is a GOOD reason for this, and its the same reason why Jon Stewart was able to make a "he who shall not be named" video about Ron Paul, as outlet after outlet refused to say his name no matter what. Look at who OWNS the media companies and then look at what else they OWN, it'll make you sick. Everything from defense industry contrats to selling the government ink and paper for the printers the owners of the media cartels feed at the gov trough and they feed VERY well.
So there is no wondering needed about why all our "news" is which Kardashian gave a BJ and whether Assange got some pussy or is a pussy, because it would be like expecting a subsidiary of Union Carbide to do the investigation of the Bhopal disaster. These companies feed like fat rats on gov contracts, think they are gonna say jack shit to offend Big Bro?
I would say it all comes down to what games you are playing. if you are playing games like TF2 and Batman:AC? Well no problem then, slapping a new GPU will give it a good kick in the pants. if you are trying to play some huge RTS with a ton of units? Then the CPU is gonna be the bottleneck.
That said its often cheap to upgrade your CPU, especially if you have an AMD as they have so many backwards compatible chips and hung onto the AM socket for so long. A good place to look at getting a new CPU would be StarMicro which I've used a LOT in the shop with never any issues, they go from the socket 478 on the Intel side to socket 754 on the AMD side with just a ton of chips to choose from. If you want a gaming machine they have plenty of high clocked Athlon and Phenoms at good prices and if you want a chip to make a killer HTPC out of this low power Phenom X4 makes a pretty kicking HTPC chip and its only $68 bucks.
So its really not that hard to keep a system that is a few years old gaming well, my youngest is gaming great on a 3.3GHz Athlon X3 and that chip was only $65 on sale, and my oldest got a Phenom II X6 for only $100 as part of a kit. While these aren't gonna beat any i7 like my 1035T they are still great for gaming and have no trouble playing all the new games we have run on them.
So Apple got thrown in jail for the "I'm a Mac" ads? Ads running down competitors products are as old as ads themselves, that is just how the game is played. Sega does what nintendon't, remember that one?
What was that saying about "never attribute to malice" again? you DO know that we are talking about a company that has a CEO that Forbes named the WORST, not one of the worst, THE WORST period. A company that has got to have blown through a good 40 billion plus on one dumb. fucking. idea. after another, and you are gonna think its some sort of "plot" to have a shitty low ball company do their ads?
I'm sorry but as long as the sweaty monkey is in the big chair I wouldn't trust anybody at MSFT to catch a cold, much less a clue, so more likely they handed it to some ass kissing PHB middle manager who went to the lowest bidder and will get a nice bonus for "saving the company money"...gee isn't corporate stupidity fun?
Honestly I don't give a rat's ass if Manning was gay or Assange is fucking goats, all I care about is the DATA, that is what matters. Did everyone forget that Woodward and Bernstein were treated like shit by many in the editorial column, even being called communists which back then was like being called traitor? Didn't change those canceled checks from CREP to the plumbers though, did it?
At the end of the day there are thousands of documents that NOBODY disputes the reality of, even the government whose dirty laundry they bear, and THAT is what we should be focusing on. Spending all our time giving a shit about Assange would be like an investigation into whether Woodward fucked around or Bernstein cheated on his taxes...who gives a fuck? Its not ABOUT them, its ABOUT the bold faced lies we have been sold for decades, going all the way back to the Gulf of Tonkin and probably beyond. thousands, maybe even millions, have died because of lies by men who stood to profit from war, yet we are supposed to ignore this? Fuck you, lets focus on the real issue and that ain't whether Assange is a dick or not!
Why is it a "smear campaign" though? I would say its more a "pot, meet kettle" at best but I don't even know if that is truly accurate as last time I dealt with IE (IE 9 IIRC) it had an opt out from "customer improvement" whereas I can't opt out of squat on Google chrome. As far as privacy policies go i don't know who is worse, i kinda lean Google simply because they have more services that people actually use (rimshot) therefor can build a MUCH more detailed profile, not to mention the way YouTube keeps trying to hassle me into using my real name is just creepy.
Meh I guess it don't really matter as i don't have a horse in this race. i use gmail as a Spamdump and other than a Live account I set up and promptly never used just so bioshock II would STFU I don't use any of MSFT's services. Well other than Bing image search, I like the UI better than google image search. Finally I avoid both IE and Chrome like an STD, I give my customers Comodo Dragon and IceDragon which I use myself, it has nicer security features and everything can be opted out by just checking a box at any time, its just nicer.
Like it or not the only ones suffering because of Syria and NK is their own people, and as we saw with the Arab Springs people can and do rise up against dictators even today. The countries he named, USA, China, Russia are exporting misery all over the globe. You would be hard pressed to find even a half a dozen countries that hasn't felt some sort of hardship or been pressured by those 3. While I don't have a timeline for China and Russia look at this timeline of CIA interventions and realize that is just one branch of the US gov, you are talking dozens of countries, dozens of atrocities across the globe.
You forgot about the two big false flags, the Gulf of Tonkin which killed 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese, and Fast & Furious which we still don't have an exact body count over but considering they were handing American guns to vicious drug cartels will most likely be pretty high.
Don't try to say the world war (WWII was just an extension of WWI, there were several that predicted that when WWI was over we had just bought 20 years) was about "freedom" until you look at what we had before and what we had after. Before WWI there was NO property taxes, income taxes, no passports, no green cards, no military industrial complex, no spy agency, we were MUCH more free before and MUCH less free after.
Look up who owns the NYT, hell look up who owns the majority of media outlets in the USA, you'll see the same half dozen names over and over and over. You got to give those in power credit, when they had the laws removed that kept them from owning more than a minority of a single market they gave themselves a blank check to own as many markets as they desired. And because they and the government are in bed together (look up what other companies these media cartels own, you'll find all kinds of government connections, from defense contracts to supplying paper for the printers) they will rush to cover for each other.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, if Watergate were to happen today both sides of the aisle would rush to cover for Nixon and Woodward and Bernstein would see their lives turn to shit but quick. there is just too many ties between the media and the government, its like the old days of the USSR and Pravda.
While I agree this is a classic "look over there!" kind of tactic by those whose dirty laundry is now on Wikileaks the whole "accountable to the people" is just bullshit. How many protest were there against the war in Iraq? How many marches? didn't change a thing did it? did occupy accomplish anything besides getting a bunch more names added to the watchlist?
The simple fact is for several decades the people have been ignored because those in power have a revolving door between DC and big business. if you "throw the bums out" the bums get cushy jobs at the companies they shilled for and the next guy has a big fat check waiting when he walks through the door. Why do you think Obama upheld and even expanded so many of Bush's policies with the left so against them? Because its kayfabe, just like pro wrestling. they handed him a check and told him STFU and read the cue card.
This is why all the "debates" end up being over something like gay rights or abortions, these are things the big corps don't give a shit about and so allowing the people argue over them doesn't hurt the bottom line. But if you think the people have any choice deeper than Coke VS Coke in a different shaped bottle I have a bridge to nowhere you may be interested in, politics is a billion dollar business and big corps pull the strings.
If one store has an item for $10 and another has the same item for $2 where are you gonna buy that item? The second store, right? But what you can't see as a consumer is that 4 states away somebody else is paying MORE than $10 for that item because Walmart has already put their competition out of business.
Look up "product dumping" on wikipedia and read for yourself, they have an excellent in depth article on the subject. What Walmart does is use their leverage to sell below costs any items that the competition has been making money on and when the competition goes under they then raise the prices because they are the only game in town. Read up about it, its an international problem and has put countless businesses under because if you are large enough its easy to make up those losses in another place where you have a monopoly.
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What I've found, big as a PITA as it is, if you have to apply ALL BIOS updates IN ORDER. Lets say you have firmware 1.2 and the latest release is 1.8, with a 1.4 and 1.6 in between? Then you will HAVE to apply 1.4 AND 1.6 before you apply 1.8. The reason being the firmware designers ONLY test for going from 1.6 to 1.8 not for every prior release.
I was told that many years ago and have stuck with it and NEVER had a bricked device, while some of the shops I worked at had workers that would try to skip straight to the latest and I'd say a good 1 in 3 ended up doorstops. Yes it takes a little longer but if you time is worth more than the cost of the device you should probably just replace it anyway, otherwise you are risking a bricking for what on average is an extra 30 minutes worth of work.
Well if you go to StarMicro you can get the 5600+ X2 for $58, that is a 2.9GHz and is probably the cheapest you are gonna get with enough speed to do basic gaming.
That said if it were me I'd get this Biostar board for $35 as it supports 16GB of DDR 3 and up to an 1100T X6 CPU, add a cheap CPU like Phenom II 3GHz dual core until you can afford to grab an X4 or even better an X6 (the 1035T and 1045T are both great values and can be found in the $100 range) and finally add a cheap 2GB or 4GB stick of DDR 3.
If you used the rest of the guts of your old system for around $100 you would have a new system with PLENTY of upgrade potential down the line. I personally game on an X6 and see no reason in the near future to even think about getting anything else as turbocore gives me a fast triple for single threaded games and of course I have 6 cores when I need to do heavy lifting, its a great chip. And this way you'd have a core system that has plenty of headroom for adding RAM or a faster chip without breaking your wallet.
Well Billy when his boss won't even pay him to sit there and do the work I seriously doubt he's hiring more warm bodies rather than buying hardware.
I deal with these kinds of companies all the time dude, and frankly most have NO CLUE how much power that old P4 is actually crapping through. When I tell them they can have a new system that will use less power running full blast than that Prescott P4 did just sitting there AND it will lower their cooling bills since modern chips don't belch out waste heat like the old systems do? Then I will usually at least get the go ahead to set up one test system for them to see. It don't take long for the boss to see how the temp drops and the fans aren't roaring and of course the employee talking about how great and fast it is will usually close the deal.
Honestly man you don't know how many think "A PC is a PC" and don't realize how much cash we were going through with those old P4s. The sooner those things are landfill fodder the better as far as I'm concerned.
I doubt seriously they have anything to do with Java, its just some name dropping to make TFA more "trendy".
But THIS is why I don't recommend IE and in fact go out of the way to make sure my customers have IE alternatives installed. IE could be the greatest browser on the planet but because its the browser of the clueless it has a 50 foot bullseye painted right in the middle of its too juicy a target.
I have to agree with Osgeld, if your board will take an AM3 get one now and then you can upgrade the board later. That said I know a lot of AM2 boards can't take an AM3, so check out StarMicro and see how much it'll cost to get a chip that is close to max. Also you can look at my previous post for a link to an AM3 Athlon triple kit for $135 after MIR that'll give you the chip, HSF, RAM, and a nice case for it to go in but I don't know what kind of budget you are talking.
I don't think Crysis is a joke, I think its sad that so many use it as a benchmark when its frankly a shitty engine. Sure it'll make purty screencaps but there is A REASON why nearly every game out there uses Unreal while the CryEngine is only used by the parent company.
I mean when you have to have a fan made patch for Crysis 1 to keep the infamous last level from spitting out graphics salad on even decent cards that will crank out levels a LOT more graphically dense than the last level of Crysis, its the engine that is just badly coded.
I don't know...would it be better to get a Q6600 for $70, and still have slower RAM and probably a lower amount, lower speed PCIe, probably SATA 1 if you are lucky, when you can just get a new triple, board, RAM and case for $130 after MIR and you'll have DDR 3, SATA 3, and a board that will go up to a Phenom II X6 later on if you need more speed later?
That said if you have a board already and don't want to risk ebay you can get a quad Q8200 from StarMicro for just $55. I've bought from StarMicro for years, great bunch of guys and great service.
Question...why are you using a 32bit OS when you have a 64bit CPU? Win 7 X64 is a nice OS, if you want to stay with XP then use XP X64 which is really 2K3 Workstation and is quite nice. I ran XP X64 for nearly 5 years until switching to Win 7, its a solid OS and runs great. Personally I prefer Win 7 X64 because it has better memory management with regards to caching but XP X64 is a great OS.
If you have frankly 3GB or better using a 64bit OS just makes sense.
Tell him he is throwing money right out the window thanks to all the waste heat and power. systems 10 years ago didn't give a rat's ass about power or heat, its was all about the MHz. You can buy an Phenom II X6 system for a couple hundred that will use half the power to start with thanks to the fact that it'll drop down to just 800MHz when its not being used and then when you add in the fact that the software will get the job done in less than a quarter of the time you end up saving a pretty big amount when it comes to power and waste heat.
I'm sorry but even on my old Sempron XP NetTop I use at the shop I have 2GB of RAM, its really not hard to max a system out and its just foolish to cripple a system like that when so many RAM sticks have been made and thus can be found dirt cheap. For a system that old its probably DDR or DDR 2, with DDR 1GB sticks are cheap, with DDR 2 you can still find 2GB sticks cheap, so there is really mo excuse to hobble a system like that.
I can tell you when i went from the 512MB that the system came into the shop with to 2GB it really gave that system a kick in the pants. SD video, multiple tabs, it runs great and having 2GB of RAM also lowers the amount it uses swap by a huge amount (most of the time it doesn't even use swap) which lowers the amount of wear on the drive and just makes it so much smoother.
I'm also an AMD fan but I wouldn't say the A10 is a good buy, not when you can get an Athlon triple WITH 8GB of RAM AND a nice case to put it in for just $135. This would give you a boost from dual to triple, much more RAM than the C2D system is gonna hold, and will play just about any game with a middle of the road card.
Actually if you keep an eye out for the Tiger sales (I'd suggest signing up for the emails) you can cut a good $100 or more off that AMD if you don't mind MIRs.
For examples if you can re-use some of the guts like HDD and DVD burner you can get an Athlon X3 for $133 or a Phenom II X6 for $206 And that gives you the CPU with HSF, RAM, and a nice case to put it in. Either of these chips will be great for gaming, I know because my youngest games on an Athlon X3 that is only 100MHz faster than the 450 and my oldest has the X6 1045T and both play tons of games, from TF2 to huge MMOs and shooters.
So the ONLY data that "counts" is if the government hands it to you on a silver platter? Well i guess the Gulf of Tonkin actually happened, Nixon never did anything wrong, Reagan didn't trade arms for hostages, because ALL of this was NOT handed out by mommy government but found by whistleblowers.
But like the deeply religious you don't care what the government does, because you won't hear any evil of your "God". Everyone else can use common sense and judge for themselves.
There is a GOOD reason for this, and its the same reason why Jon Stewart was able to make a "he who shall not be named" video about Ron Paul, as outlet after outlet refused to say his name no matter what. Look at who OWNS the media companies and then look at what else they OWN, it'll make you sick. Everything from defense industry contrats to selling the government ink and paper for the printers the owners of the media cartels feed at the gov trough and they feed VERY well.
So there is no wondering needed about why all our "news" is which Kardashian gave a BJ and whether Assange got some pussy or is a pussy, because it would be like expecting a subsidiary of Union Carbide to do the investigation of the Bhopal disaster. These companies feed like fat rats on gov contracts, think they are gonna say jack shit to offend Big Bro?
I would say it all comes down to what games you are playing. if you are playing games like TF2 and Batman:AC? Well no problem then, slapping a new GPU will give it a good kick in the pants. if you are trying to play some huge RTS with a ton of units? Then the CPU is gonna be the bottleneck.
That said its often cheap to upgrade your CPU, especially if you have an AMD as they have so many backwards compatible chips and hung onto the AM socket for so long. A good place to look at getting a new CPU would be StarMicro which I've used a LOT in the shop with never any issues, they go from the socket 478 on the Intel side to socket 754 on the AMD side with just a ton of chips to choose from. If you want a gaming machine they have plenty of high clocked Athlon and Phenoms at good prices and if you want a chip to make a killer HTPC out of this low power Phenom X4 makes a pretty kicking HTPC chip and its only $68 bucks.
So its really not that hard to keep a system that is a few years old gaming well, my youngest is gaming great on a 3.3GHz Athlon X3 and that chip was only $65 on sale, and my oldest got a Phenom II X6 for only $100 as part of a kit. While these aren't gonna beat any i7 like my 1035T they are still great for gaming and have no trouble playing all the new games we have run on them.
So Apple got thrown in jail for the "I'm a Mac" ads? Ads running down competitors products are as old as ads themselves, that is just how the game is played. Sega does what nintendon't, remember that one?
What was that saying about "never attribute to malice" again? you DO know that we are talking about a company that has a CEO that Forbes named the WORST, not one of the worst, THE WORST period. A company that has got to have blown through a good 40 billion plus on one dumb. fucking. idea. after another, and you are gonna think its some sort of "plot" to have a shitty low ball company do their ads?
I'm sorry but as long as the sweaty monkey is in the big chair I wouldn't trust anybody at MSFT to catch a cold, much less a clue, so more likely they handed it to some ass kissing PHB middle manager who went to the lowest bidder and will get a nice bonus for "saving the company money"...gee isn't corporate stupidity fun?
Honestly I don't give a rat's ass if Manning was gay or Assange is fucking goats, all I care about is the DATA, that is what matters. Did everyone forget that Woodward and Bernstein were treated like shit by many in the editorial column, even being called communists which back then was like being called traitor? Didn't change those canceled checks from CREP to the plumbers though, did it?
At the end of the day there are thousands of documents that NOBODY disputes the reality of, even the government whose dirty laundry they bear, and THAT is what we should be focusing on. Spending all our time giving a shit about Assange would be like an investigation into whether Woodward fucked around or Bernstein cheated on his taxes...who gives a fuck? Its not ABOUT them, its ABOUT the bold faced lies we have been sold for decades, going all the way back to the Gulf of Tonkin and probably beyond. thousands, maybe even millions, have died because of lies by men who stood to profit from war, yet we are supposed to ignore this? Fuck you, lets focus on the real issue and that ain't whether Assange is a dick or not!
Why is it a "smear campaign" though? I would say its more a "pot, meet kettle" at best but I don't even know if that is truly accurate as last time I dealt with IE (IE 9 IIRC) it had an opt out from "customer improvement" whereas I can't opt out of squat on Google chrome. As far as privacy policies go i don't know who is worse, i kinda lean Google simply because they have more services that people actually use (rimshot) therefor can build a MUCH more detailed profile, not to mention the way YouTube keeps trying to hassle me into using my real name is just creepy.
Meh I guess it don't really matter as i don't have a horse in this race. i use gmail as a Spamdump and other than a Live account I set up and promptly never used just so bioshock II would STFU I don't use any of MSFT's services. Well other than Bing image search, I like the UI better than google image search. Finally I avoid both IE and Chrome like an STD, I give my customers Comodo Dragon and IceDragon which I use myself, it has nicer security features and everything can be opted out by just checking a box at any time, its just nicer.
Like it or not the only ones suffering because of Syria and NK is their own people, and as we saw with the Arab Springs people can and do rise up against dictators even today. The countries he named, USA, China, Russia are exporting misery all over the globe. You would be hard pressed to find even a half a dozen countries that hasn't felt some sort of hardship or been pressured by those 3. While I don't have a timeline for China and Russia look at this timeline of CIA interventions and realize that is just one branch of the US gov, you are talking dozens of countries, dozens of atrocities across the globe.
You forgot about the two big false flags, the Gulf of Tonkin which killed 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese, and Fast & Furious which we still don't have an exact body count over but considering they were handing American guns to vicious drug cartels will most likely be pretty high.
Don't try to say the world war (WWII was just an extension of WWI, there were several that predicted that when WWI was over we had just bought 20 years) was about "freedom" until you look at what we had before and what we had after. Before WWI there was NO property taxes, income taxes, no passports, no green cards, no military industrial complex, no spy agency, we were MUCH more free before and MUCH less free after.
Look up who owns the NYT, hell look up who owns the majority of media outlets in the USA, you'll see the same half dozen names over and over and over. You got to give those in power credit, when they had the laws removed that kept them from owning more than a minority of a single market they gave themselves a blank check to own as many markets as they desired. And because they and the government are in bed together (look up what other companies these media cartels own, you'll find all kinds of government connections, from defense contracts to supplying paper for the printers) they will rush to cover for each other.
I've said it before and I'll say it again, if Watergate were to happen today both sides of the aisle would rush to cover for Nixon and Woodward and Bernstein would see their lives turn to shit but quick. there is just too many ties between the media and the government, its like the old days of the USSR and Pravda.
While I agree this is a classic "look over there!" kind of tactic by those whose dirty laundry is now on Wikileaks the whole "accountable to the people" is just bullshit. How many protest were there against the war in Iraq? How many marches? didn't change a thing did it? did occupy accomplish anything besides getting a bunch more names added to the watchlist?
The simple fact is for several decades the people have been ignored because those in power have a revolving door between DC and big business. if you "throw the bums out" the bums get cushy jobs at the companies they shilled for and the next guy has a big fat check waiting when he walks through the door. Why do you think Obama upheld and even expanded so many of Bush's policies with the left so against them? Because its kayfabe, just like pro wrestling. they handed him a check and told him STFU and read the cue card.
This is why all the "debates" end up being over something like gay rights or abortions, these are things the big corps don't give a shit about and so allowing the people argue over them doesn't hurt the bottom line. But if you think the people have any choice deeper than Coke VS Coke in a different shaped bottle I have a bridge to nowhere you may be interested in, politics is a billion dollar business and big corps pull the strings.
If one store has an item for $10 and another has the same item for $2 where are you gonna buy that item? The second store, right? But what you can't see as a consumer is that 4 states away somebody else is paying MORE than $10 for that item because Walmart has already put their competition out of business.
Look up "product dumping" on wikipedia and read for yourself, they have an excellent in depth article on the subject. What Walmart does is use their leverage to sell below costs any items that the competition has been making money on and when the competition goes under they then raise the prices because they are the only game in town. Read up about it, its an international problem and has put countless businesses under because if you are large enough its easy to make up those losses in another place where you have a monopoly.