What forced? Hell you can find units several orders of magnitude faster in your average dumpster! The super in my building knows I like to refurb PCs at the shop so I always have some ultra low cost units for the poor folks so since he services several office buildings and government offices they let him cart off the ones they are tossing and he brings 'em to me, hell I haven't even seen a P3 in like 5 years from the guy, its ALL Pentium 4s and now I'm starting to see the Pentium Ds and early Cores and Athlon X2s.
So really there is NO excuse for having a 386 except for nostalgia, you can sign up to your local freecycle and get a unit for nothing a couple of hundred times faster. Hell just last week I was tossing a couple of 1.4Ghz units as nobody wants anything that slow anymore and I'm debating whether to give away this 1.8Ghz sitting in the shop or strip it for parts and toss it, nobody HAS to use a 386 anymore if they don't want to, so many of the P4s and Athlons out there it isn't funny.
Kinda bummed I'm gonna have to toss a working T-Bird Athlon though, I only got one board that is Socket A and 2 chips and its just not worth buying a board for. Man now you want a great chip THAT was a great chip. Plenty of headroom for OCing, back in the day those were a gamer's dream, hell you can still surf nicely with one of those.
Sorry, didn't know there was a correct way to put that, kinda sad that people have tried this kind of bullshit enough that there IS a correct way to say it, but I'd never heard it put that way so my bad.
That said the idea of "your own network and phone" was actually tried in a way, before the Dotbomb there was a company that would give you a "free PC!" back when computers were actually expensive and IIRC they also gave you free dialup, you just had to have a home phone. the way it was supposed to work is they basically had a captive audience for all their spam which would run as a banner at the top of the screen as well as making IE pop up a full page ad every 30 minutes or so. Problem was that dialup was slow as hell to start with and constantly having to download all those ads made any surfing on the thing painful, so since their contract stated they had to use it so many hours a week to get the free PC people just left the thing on in the corner until the contract expired so they could have somebody wipe the computer to get rid of the ads.
At the end of the day if this guy wants to wave his little "Odumbo" or "RobMe" flags I couldn't care less but what I DO care about is higher prices thanks to all that spam. I don't see how anybody could argue this has anything to do with free speech because the sidewalk is paid for by everybody, its yours, its mine, so you standing on your corner waving a little flag don't cost me shit, hell it might even provide me a chuckle as I laugh at you freezing your ass off.
But bandwidth ain't free and the costs of dealing with this spammer end up on MY phone bill and I shouldn't have to open my wallet to pay for HIS spam supporting crap I don't support. This is why I think that we should have a nationwide broadband paid for by taxes BUT have companies lease access to provide competition, because if the government ran it then asses like this could argue it was a first amendment issue and all the bandwidth would end up blown away by a league of spammers.
At the end of the day guys like this douchebag are adding a tax to ALL of us because its damned hard to live these days without a cell phone and asshats like this raise the price of the service for ALL of us, just so he can make some money being a prick.
Where we all got screwed was when the PC makers stopped making monitors and just started buying their panels from the TV companies, that is where we went off the tracks. What works good for watching Harry Potter or LOTR does NOT work well for running office programs, we need more height than width. What screwed us was the switch to LCDs, before that TVs just didn't have the resolution to be used as monitors but after the switch the OEMs saw that you could buy panels straight from the same companies building them for TVs and get them a LOT cheaper and since price has been king for quite awhile in the PC biz that was that, we were stuck with the same movie theater aspect ratio because that is what sold TVs.
This is why I'm shocked most desktop monitors are still either 20 or 22 inch, with the laptops I get why they are small because "thin is in" and nobody wants to lug some 20 incher around all day, but since 27 and 32 inch TVs have been dropping in price like crazy I'm shocked the OEMs haven't started using those panels for their monitors yet because you think the economies of scale on the 27 and 32 would make it more expensive to use the 20 and 24, after all it isn't getting used for laptops OR for TVs.
Not to mention with MSFT trying to force one app at a time bullshit with Win 8 all this would do is give you one really bad low res app REALLY big across the screen...great.
Look I GET why we are stuck with 1366x768, 16x9 and 1080p, its because its a cutthroat business and the TV panel makers had better economies of scale so the PC makers just bought the panels, I get that, but what the hell with pushing an even more insanely wide wide screen on a fricking desktop? Are the TV makers gonna start pushing this format so LG just got ahead of the game, or what? If anything we need more VERTICAL, not more horizontal, as most OSes and programs don't use what we have now well, so why in the hell would you want even more screen the OS and programs don't know what to do with?
So unless the TV companies are gonna start pushing this width I just don't really see a point in having a screen THIS wide,,,maybe if you bought 4 of them and used Eyefinity to actually give you more height and more width?
While this is true nowhere in the constitution does it say "You have to pay for my right to speak" but that is EXACTLY what this company is proposing, because bandwidth has a cost and those costs are passed onto consumers.
So if they want to send spam? Fine, send 'em a bill for every piece of spam they send. They are allowed to speak, sure, but the free speech laws are all about the government not blocking your right to speak NOT giving a free medium for you to speak in. You are allowed to hold up a sign on a street corner professing your belief on this or that issue but you do NOT have the right to demand free access to an auditorium owned by a private company just to air your rants and that is what these guys are basically trying to get, everyone else to bear the costs of their bullshit.
But as someone who spent his 20s on the wrong side of the tracks, playing in bars that honest to God had chicken wire, i think you have it right on this subject and crap drugs like bath salts? they are done because the junkie can't find anything better so that is what they do, same as I knew plenty of guys smoking that "legal pot" crap that has so many chemicals in it its pathetic because they couldn't find real pot or were afraid of losing their job to a piss test.
I'll never forget a story I heard ages ago, whether true or not it perfectly illustrates a junkie mindset. During the occupation of Afghanistan the Soviets were losing a LOT of small arms and grenades to the other side because of junkies trading it for dope, so they said "That's easy to solve" and put the bases on a STRICT lock down, if you weren't on mission you were on base PERIOD. So what happened? Well suddenly the accident rate went through the roof, planes, tanks, helicopters, all started having accidents so they sent a team to find out WTF was going on, what they found? The junkies were drinking the brake fluid out of all the vehicles! They would just strain that shit through white bread and guzzle that shit down for a buzz.
I've known guys that sprayed RAID on cigarettes, shot JD and ditchwater, drank sterno, if they can't find anything else a junkie WILL get high, no matter how nasty the shit is they got to use. But when those same junkies had access to good dope at decent prices? they didn't do that shit because they could get high without the issues.
So I think if pot and uppers were legal you wouldn't see much use of this shit at all, except for the occasional dumbass like in TFA that hears it'll give him super hard ons. But the regular junkies don't want to do nasty shit, they just won't go straight so if that's all they can get that is what they are gonna do, simple as that. Hell the RAID guy was actually a pot head but the area was going through a dry spell so he was during RAID instead. That is just how junkies think, they are gonna get high today and if they can't find their drug of choice they'll do whatever they can.
I'm so sick of this "If you like something u must be a shill ZOMFG!" horseshit, i really fucking am. I mean if someone says they like their iPhone, does that mean they work for Cupertino?
The simple fact is I can think of NO app selling service other than Steam whose whole attitude isn't "fuck u and give me money bitch", can you? GFWL will show you NOTHING but Xbox games, even when you are in Windows using GFWINDOWS LIVE, because some PHB put out a PPT and said "Herps derp, product, herp derp metrics, on message derpa de derp" and the rest feel like being stuck in the 90s with Bonzi Buddy "You want to buy? How about buy? You buy now?"
So excuse the fuck out of me that I have found one service I actually like buying from, as opposed to just pirating everything. If you haven't figured it out yet I'll clue you in, like Win 7, hate Win 8, like Comodo's AV and browsers, don't like AVG, like AMD and Asus/Asrock (although not Bulldozer on AMD) and don't like Intel and MSI. Oh and I like pizza with a nice layer of creamy mashed potatoes on top.
So there you go, you can now tell me how I'm actually a millionaire with product deals with everybody from Redmond to the Idaho farmers group, oh and I fly an invisible jet I stole from Wonder Woman and am not freezing my balls off during a cold snap in the south, I'm secretly blogging from South America next to Elvis whose been here since 79.
I don't know about him but I have run Win 7 on a first gen P4 with 512Mb of RAM, not great but it ran. Sadly if you really want to play "How low can you go?" with Windows then you just have to run the pirate version, specifically the "Tiny Windows" versions. They were made by gamers trying to strip down the lowest they could go and still have at least 90% program compatibility and frankly it makes Windows Embedded and WinFLP look like bad jokes, we're talking WinXP full patched running less than 80Mb of RAM and Win 7 running great on less than 200Mb. Of course Vista Tiny uses the most of all at 480Mb, they're hackers, not miracle workers.
As for TFA I never understood why they kept it as long as they did. I mean is anybody here wanting to run the latest version on a 386? That seems to me to be just as dumb an idea as slapping Win 8 on a P3, why would you want to torture yourself like that?
Actually what you want is a cat scan to make sure you aren't brain damaged. i'll tell everyone here the same i tell my SMBs when I got them off those power sucking P4s "When you look at how much useful work you get VS how much power the unit takes its simply not worth keeping" and that applies just as much to a 386 as it does to a P4.
I mean lets face facts folks, you can take one of those AMD Bobcats or Intel Atom setups (Personally prefer the Bobcat as it gets better performance for a pretty similar price) and get a dual core CPU that uses less than 18w under load, most jobs it'll use between 5w-8w, and you can do just about any task you'd have for a low power unit. A 386 when you figure in the PSU and board is simply going to use a lot more power for every unit of work you get out of it because back then nobody really cared about power usage, it was all about the clocks. And if you don't require 386 support frankly a $25 ARM thumbstick will give you much more work per watt while being even lower powered than the Bobcat or Atom.
So there really isn't a point to keeping any of these old junkers except for the case of nostalgia which if you want it for nostalgia you are gonna be running an OS from that period, like Win 2.0 or the first Slax release, so having support for such an ancient CPU really makes no sense. Personally if it were me I'd cut off support at the P4, anything older than that frankly is gonna be worthless for anything and while I hate the fact the P4 is a power sucking hog you can still get reasonable amounts of work done with a P4, especially if its one of the later ones like the Cedar Mill with hyperthreading or the Pentium D models.
I wouldn't call it spin, I'd just call it another example of how appstores don't do shit to stop piracy and frankly suck.
The ONLY distribution service where I can truly say "Its worth it" is Steam, because they give me cheaper prices, often with all the games AND all the DLC included in one low price, they give me an excellent chat client built in (in fact I got rid of my regular chat client since everybody I cared to chat with already was on Steam)along with all updates to my games automated, a really nice community that is quite helpful, and excellent customers service even when I would have honestly not been mad if it took awhile, such as during their crazy volume Xmas sale.
But from what I've seen all these new "appstores" frankly don't give you dick for advantages, and a hell of a lot of downsides. so is it any surprise that some choose to bypass the bullshit? Hell I bought Bioshock II yet played the pirate version for nearly 2 years, simply because I fricking hate GFWL. I honestly don't blame anybody who wants to bypass these appstores as from what I've seen they are all sucky and just not worth the bullshit.
Oh and I have to point out you're wrong (Someone on the Internet is Wrong! I must swing into action!) because it honestly doesn't matter HOW "long" the hacks are, thanks to the smart cow problem. I mean do you think your average person could hack SecuROM or Starfuck or write their own hacked bootloader like the pirates did with Win 7 and Win 8? Nope but they can read an NFO file "how to" packed along with all the pre-hacked files in a nice.RAR from TPB, that's not hard at all. All it takes is ONE guy to get it right for even your average 13 year old to be able to do this shit, just you watch they'll be pirated game apps with all the call homes removed and a million credits sitting in the character's account, just as many of the pirated PC games would often include a trainer that let you push a button and give your character everything from unlimited bullets to unlimited money.
at the end of the day you simply have to make the appstore a better value to the consumer than the pirate version but so far from what I've seen most of these corps don't get that. Instead they see it as a great chance for lock in, skimming a percentage of every sale, and for nickeling and diming the user to death. I mean could I not pirate every game I have in Steam? Sure and in fact many of the pirated versions are the Steam version with hacks, but why should I? The games are cheap, the extras are nice, and its as easy as "push button to get game" so i simply see no point and THAT is what these appstores are gonna have to do, make it so using their service is so much nicer than dealing with the pirated version that many won't bother.
Actually its quite easy to burst the libertarians bubble, you ought to see the hate I get on YouTube from libertarians because I obliterate their bullshit to the point all they can do is call me dirty names and mod me down.
Just point out how many murders of peasants were bought and paid for by the corps through their private army the Pinkertons, point out how many superfund sites are still left from that era, how JP Morgan and Rockefeller used their money to crush competition (A staple in the libertarian "magical thinking" is that if there wasn't gov regulations then competition would fix everything) and how many of these dynasties not only were NOT negatively affected by government regulation later but actually thrived on it by having the laws twisted to suit their own needs.
At the end of the day libertarian-ism, like fascism and communism all comes down to "magical thinking" that ALL hinge on one simple and easily disproved fallacy, that those at the top won't use their power (because in the end that's all money is, power in an easily to carry form) to enrich themselves and royally fuck those below them. You can take ANY point in history from any country and prove this to be a lie, from the USA's libertarian 1800s to the old USSR to the classical fuedal system, in the end the ONE thing you can always count on is those at the top of the food change becoming ever greedier and fucking those at the bottom ever harder.
This is why I ultimately think the USA and most capitalist countries will fall just like every other empire before it, from the Roman to the British, because those at the top end up so fucking greedy that they will fuck the long term survivability of the country for their own short term gain. As Lenin so aptly put it all those years ago "A capitalist will gladly sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" only if he would have saw what Stalin and pals were gonna do he would have replaced "capitalist" with "those at the top" as its more accurate because its not limited to capitalism.
While we normally don't agree I have to say you pretty much nailed it, all I would add is if you have skills you level up and side quests that you can choose to do or ignore that would also be RPG to me.
But to me this is why you don't just go "ZOMFG this is the BEST of (category)" because in categories this broad what may be your cup of tea might be sewer sludge to me. Take Diablo style hack and slash like Titan Quest or Torchlight series, some hate those with a passion but I just love 'em to pieces, to rip a line from Angry Joe's review of Sacred II "I'm a total loot whore" and as long as it has tons of loot and rare items and sets to try to get? i'm all for it.
Same thing with shooters, some people think the whole TF2, CoD MP, BF series MP heavy frag fests are just the greatest thing since sliced bread but even though i love shooters they just leave me cold. Its not that I can't play 'em, in fact I was doing pretty damned good on TF2, its that to me its boring as hell, like watching a bunch of people run around like chickens with the head cut off just blasting everything that moves. I want a story, I want an objective with multiple ways to go about it, I want to decide if I want to plan out an ambush or trap before i go in or just go guns blazing, whereas with the MP heavy games you seem to only be able to really rack up if you are a twitch player that is good with headshots, no real planning or tactics required if you're a good twitch shooter.
So if I think a game is great I tell folks to look up a review or a "Let's Play" video and see if its something they'd like, maybe get a hold of a demo if there is one, because these genres are so broad what one might think is a great example of the genre others might hate. I personally never cared for Planescape, Fallout, or Steamworks because that style of game play just doesn't appeal to me, give me a Diablo style or even a classic dungeon crawl like Eternal Sun or Grimlock any day, reading tons of texts while managing tons of stats just isn't my thing. That is probably why I like the more action heavy RTS games like C&C or CoH over the ultra realistic sims like the Koei games, i just want to get in there and have fun, not worry about how many liters of fuel i need to requisition for each base before a campaign.
How are you gonna dual license desktops? Games? productivity software? Frankly there is no point even responding to the rest when you think dressing up support contracts with another name counts as anything but exactly what it is, the "blessed 3" which is the only way you can make money in GPL land.
And ironically thanks to the economy I'm betting you'll see a BUNCH of GPL based software companies go under, because the support contract model is dying. companies are either buying cloud services or paying consultants on a one off basis for fixes, and again dual licensing does nothing since thanks to the GPL you can't say "for home use only" so I can just take your software for nothing and you can go starve for all I care. Look at how many companies have switched to CentOS over RHEL, why pay for the contract if I can just take it for nothing and pay a consultant if I have a problem?
The simple fact is if your software doesn't fit into the "blessed 3" you're sunk if its GPL, this is why LO sucks compared to MSO, why people laughably try to hold Gimp as an ersatz Photoshop, why GPL games all look like shit that could have ran on the SNES or are just Q3 Arena ripoffs, because VERY few of the multitude of uses for software fall under the blessed 3. Again how will the blessed 3 work on desktops? it won't which is why no B&M stores carry Linux and why I predict Canonical will "give Ubuntu to the community" and struggle to survive on the server and embedded, only to close their doors by 2015, maybe 2014.
The reason GPL is a flop outside of the blessed 3 is the redistribution clause, simple as that. Without it RMS still would have his "printer story" problem fixed, the users would be able to inspect and modify all day long, even post those mods just as game mods are posted all the time, but then you would get actual progress on the software that doesn't fit the blessed 3. But since RMS would rather be buried in a MSFT coffin than lose the redistribution clause you can take it to the bank that Linux will be an also ran in any category that doesn't fit the big 3.
Hell last reports say even Google is losing money on it, last reports have Google spending a cool billion a year on Android development and not even making a tenth of that back in ad revenue. Ironically the reason Google doesn't mind losing the money is lock in, they want everybody to think Google and Chrome equals the web so that those Android users will go home and use Google search on Chrome. But if even a supersized corp like Google can't make any money on software that doesn't fit the blessed 3 I honestly don't see how you expect companies like canonical to survive.
Of course with all the anti-corporation zealotry in the GPL camp I wouldn't be surprised if most are cheering the idea of Canonical going under, even if it makes sure no company is gonna spend shit trying to make an improved desktop using GPL again. But mark my words and mark them well, hell bookmark this post and come back and see if it isn't true, I predict less than 24 months after Valve releases Steam on Linux they drop support. Why? Because the Steambox fits into the blessed 3, the Linux client don't, so they will lose money on it.
The problem is the league itself simply isn't gonna give a fuck until they get enough bad press for it, just as they used to let boxing matches go on with guys that were obviously in a bad way until the stink got so bad that the league stepped in and made refs able to call a fight if it looked like they were seriously hurt.
I mean look up the videos on YouTube Rez, this is NOT an isolated thing here, you have players obviously told that "if it looks like they are gonna score, yank the helmet off" and there are just a ton of videos on YouTube showing this taken to an obscene extreme, with players practically trying to rip the other guy's head off to get the helmet off in time to kill the play. it has gotten so bad that many players will just remove the chin strap once on the field so they don't risk getting a neck injury when some asshole tries to rip the helmet off.
So while I would argue that a 3 point reduction would nip this crap in the bud the simple fact is Rez until some poor bastard gets crippled the league ain't gonna do shit. In a way it reminds me of Pro Wrestling, allowing teams to do this gives the fans something to boo and thus generates "heat" for the rivalries and makes fans more pumped because they want to see "that cheating player" get his comeuppance on the field. As long as it generates controversy that in turn generates sales the league ain't gonna do shit. Again look at boxing, it wasn't until the negative press got to the point it was costing more than the sales generated by letting it continue that the league did anything about it. I would argue that this is how UFC got the boost it did, when boxing quit letting fights keep going was right about the time UFC got known as the "bloody no holds barred" sport and its sales skyrocketed.
Sadly as long as they can make more money by not doing anything the league just isn't gonna give a shit, simple as that.
If the fact that the Chinese would rather steal Windows than use Linux don't slap people with a cluebat I don't know what will. Again whether they like it or not, whether it fits into Stallman's "bum's paradise' of all programmers working for nothing or not, the simple fact is good software costs good money and with the "blessed 3" unless you are in an enterprise niche, and sometimes not even then, then you simply have no hope of competing or even making a truly good software product.
I mean look at the costs, a good CS degree is gonna cost upwards of a high 5 to low 6 figures, then you have the costs for the building and the boxes and the power, how are they suppose to work for free? The tooth fairy gonna pay those bills? Gonna hit everybody up for a "FOSS tax" whether they use it or not?
If you truly want FOSS to win over non-FOSS then you have to give a way for companies like canonical to survive, simple as that. Its the classic "busted shitter" problem in that if I ask you to paint me a picture or write me a song for free? i'll have plenty of takers, if I ask for someone to come fix my nasty turd filled shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.
And whether the "bum's paradise" people like it or not, and frankly that is EXACTLY what RMS is, even he calls himself a "squatter on MIT", the simple fact is a LOT of jobs in software are just as nasty as fixing a busted shitter. Apple and MSFT pay millions to get THEIR shitters fixed, in FOSS you better get used to pissing in the sink. Bug fixing, writing docs, focus testing, QA and QC, regression testing, all of these jobs are long, slow, boring, tedious and thankless work so they just don't get done.
Hell for a perfect illustration look at the state of "FOSS gaming" right now, this like desktops is an area where the "blessed 3" of the GPL doesn't work, so what do you get? Games that look like they could have ran on the SNES 20 years ago or yet another MP only Q3 Arena ripoff, why? Because despite being called "games" they have lots of truly shitty jobs, writing the scripts, doing the voice acting, bug fixing and regression testing, so since thanks to the redistribution clause meaning you can't make shit since its not one of the "blessed 3" use cases people ONLY do the easy and fun work like making models for Q3 and then just using the code that ID already made THEIR money on to do the grunt work.
Despite all the screams of "shill!" because I won't drink the koolaid I actually WANT FOSS to succeed, I really do. You think I like paying more for the OS I want because MSFT is trying to shove Win 8 down my throat? Think I like having to sell some boxes with XP on them because the cost of a Win 7 license would make the system cost more than its worth? But until companies like canonical can actually make enough to survive and still have enough left over to pay for all those nasty busted shitter jobs the fact is Linux just won't cut the mustard. On the desktop its just cobbled together and has a really half ass feel, sorry but it does. Missing docs, drivers getting shit on when you update, programs crashing when you do a simple task like its fricking Win98, its just not in the same league and its because nobody can get paid for fixing all these busted shitter problems so year after year they don't get fixed. I can take a copy of XP RTM, patch it all the way to current and ALL of the drivers and software I installed on the RTM will STILL WORK, I do that on any Linux distro using half that amount of time and I end up with a buggy crashy mess of an OS.
again you remove the redistribution clause which NOBODY I noticed could come up with a reason for BTW, and you would still solve the printer story, still let the users modify their software all day long, but still allow companies like canonical to make a living fixing the problems. this is why I said the big mistake Shuttleworth made was going Linux over BSD, Jobs used BSD and built an empire around solid software with an "it just works" mantra, shuttleworth used Linux and is struggling to keep the lights on. What more proof do you need that if your software doesn't fall into the very teeny tiny niche of "the blessed 3" then its doomed in GPL land?
Yeah I had the same problem,/. must have really shit the bed.
But that still don't explain about the tanks crosshair, i mean lets take out remote systems all together, no UCAVs, no remote guns, hell just a handful of F15s at 35k feet with today's missiles could scrap your entire tank corp with little to no risk to themselves, thanks to our missiles and JDAMs.
So I still don't get the "why?" when it comes to the tank. It sucks a shitload of gas, heavy as hell so hard to drag across the planet, i just don't see why you can't just mount a 105mm main gun to the top of an APC and call it a day. I mean other than the battle of 86 easting (IIRC, not sure the exact title) most of our tanks were doing jobs that frankly a modern APC could handle just as well. Slap some reactive armor on the front, give something like the Stryker or Bradley a regular cannon as opposed to a RWS and Bob's your uncle. Hell between the cannon, the TOWs, and a 20mm gatling you've got pretty much every major role of a ground vehicle covered and according to the "great tank battles" video on 86 easting there were several times where a Bradley with TOWs just slaughtered the MBTs of the Iraqi republican guard, the only real problems they had were the limited number of TOWs that could be loaded.
So I just don't get the "why?" when it comes to tanks, other than to cut really big checks to defense contractors, because like the battleship it seems more like a relic of WWII than a really useful modern battlefield instrument. Hell I can see arguments for the carrier (although I still think we don't need more than 6, that is 3 times more than anybody else and 3 carriers worth of aircraft pack a hell of a punch) better than I can see the tank, at least we can point to times in the past where countries have refused to let us use bases on their soil or fly over their country like Libya in the early 80s where a carrier could come in handy, but with the incredible accuracy of modern missiles between the APCs with TOWs, the choppers with hellfires, and of course the F-Teen series with missiles they can launch from insane distances I honestly don't really see a need for a tank on the modern battlefield.
I will give you that depending on drones and RWS is a dumb idea, but I have to wonder how much of our drone costs are just bill padding as from what i understand the Israeli drones don't cost a tenth of what ours does and is just as good. To me the whole point of the drone was supposed to be a "cheap weapon platform" that took the risk of losing pilots out of the equation, but like every defense program we've had for decades its because another black hole of money. Honestly what we need is a remote controlled Avenger or Skyraider, something tough, long loiter times, able to carry any combo of bombs, rockets, missiles AND with a couple of guns, and most of all cheap and reliable. Sadly like everything else we get today what we'll end up with is a fussy over-engineered POS, but that is the MIC for you.
Accept we have seen even WITH huge government subsidies (taken out of your pocket by BOTH the left and right, look up the Cheney energy bill which was the right's gift to big corps, just as "green" is a codeword for friends of the POTUS) you still can't make a company competitive, because the one that doesn't play by the rules gets to externalize all his costs while internalizing all the profits.
Just look at all the superfund sites we have here in the USA, in every one of those cases the corp got to internalize profits and externalize costs and when it looked like they might have to pay for their messes they just walked away. This is EXACTLY what China is finding out the hard way, already a full 15% of their farmland would be considered too toxic by western standards for even animal feed, yet when the Chinese get tired of sucking toxic waste and demand that corps not just dump shit straight into the Yangtze they'll find a bunch of empty factories filled with barrels filled of toxic waste, superfund sites as far as the eye can see, just as when the factories started moving to China my own home town had to hire guys in moonsuits to tear down the abandoned factories because they had asbestos and other toxic crap, but thanks to shell corps and other tricks they just walked away with the profits and stuck US with the tab.
At the end of the day TINSTAAFL and all we are doing is exporting misery and suffering so a handful at the top can live like Gods. This is why I'm against the scam known as cap & trade because NEVER, not even once, have you heard Rev Al Gore and friends talk about high tarrifs to countries that refuse to play the game, why? Why because through shell corps they make a fucking mint off that suffering, that's why! As long as you have the "free trade" scam you can't do shit about pollution, or global warming, or toxic waste, abused workers or tax scams like double dutch, because there will ALWAYS be some government willing to sell out for a buck and as long as there are no restrictions frankly it'll be cheaper to have shit made on the other side of the planet and have it shipped on some smog belching barge than it will be to actually make a clean product.
More likely the fun of autocorrect got you, I don't know how many times I got texts from customers where I go "WTH does this mean?" for them to go "That wasn't what I was trying to type!". You should check out the website devoted to it some time there are some hilarious bloopers on there. I like the one where the mom texted her teen daughter to ask what she was gonna do for the weekend and the text came back "I'm gonna get pregnant" which naturally caused the mom to flip her shit until the daughter texted back she was trying to type pringles and got bit by autocorrect.
As for TFA? Meh, not really worried too much about NK. I have a feeling that if it looks like they are getting ready to roll the tanks rather than have a hot and possibly nuclear war in their backyard the Chinese will drop the hammer on their asses, and considering most of the stuff NK uses is based on 60s and 70s Soviet tech I really doubt they are gonna get much in the way of accuracy on these things. If anybody should be worried its Japan as having cheap NK junk falling in their backyard could be a problem but SK has one of the most modern military forces on the planet so I kinda doubt NK is gonna be stupid enough to try a full blown restart of the Korean war.
More likely this is more weenie waving by NK so they don't look so weak compared to their neighbors and so they can get more aid, that's all. Its pretty common knowledge that Juce is a failure, their economy is a bad joke, and if it weren't for aid the whole thing would fall down, so most likely this is just another attempt to extort more aid to prop the place up. Frankly I'm shocked after "dear leader" bought the farm that they let the kid take over, frankly right up until it was certain daddy wasn't gonna make it nobody had even heard of the kid, so I have to wonder if he isn't just a puppet told to STFU and stand there while the generals really run the show.
Bingo! They have been disputing the borders for ages, and frankly there is a LOT of animosity from what I've been reading since this whole thing blew up so it was a smart move by McAfee to run there. It would be like being wanted in India and running to Pakistan, it really wouldn't matter what you were accused of as it would be more about Pakistan being able to flip the bird at India than the person, smart move.
That said after reading some of his rambles about how "Bath salts" made him a tiger in the sack? My guess is he wasted the dude. I have a couple of customers who are cops and when this thing about bath salts first came up in the media I asked them about and man, you should hear the horror stories. These aren't the kind of guys to do the whole "ZOMFG drugs will make your dick rot!" kinda of hype bullshit either, in fact they both think pot should be legal and one doesn't see any problem in adults doing what he calls "hippie drugs" like acid and mushrooms as long as they aren't gonna be driving or taking care of kids on the stuff, but...man, they say that shit is one of those drugs where if you have a bad trip its REALLY fucking bad, we are talking caged animal full blown paranoid. They both said the guys they've seen on that shit make meth paranoia look like coffee jitters, and you have to approach somebody whacked on that shit like you would a wild animal, slow movements and calm tones because they can get dangerous REALLY fucking fast. The worst part is they said it seems to do some really long term mental damage to a percentage that does the shit even once as they had a couple of calls where somebody did that shit just looking for a cheap buzz and ended up in the mental ward, REALLY bad shit.
So you got a guy that ALREADY thinks people are against him, has a huge gun collection, had previous disputes with the victim and to top it all off is waxing in his blog about how wonderful a drug is that has a known side effect of extremely bad paranoia where the person on it often becomes dangerous to themselves or others when having a bad trip...yeah I can't see why Belize would be wanting to talk to this guy.
I have a feeling this is gonna be another one of those cases where because they got money they get to walk away from shit that should land anybody in PMITA prison. It just goes to show you if you have enough money you can get away with anything. I have to say though I was impressed how he used a double to throw cops off the trail, that was a pretty damned slick move. Personally I'm shocked that they just let the double walk when he was helping a murder suspect run from the cops, but I guess they didn't want a court case making them look like idiots for falling for a double.
This is why I don't understand why all the superpowers keep building tanks as opposed to just building armored troop carriers with a big remote gun like the Bushmaster or like the 105mm on the Stryker, because with the astounding accuracy of missiles you can take a Vietnam era Cobra and just wipe out all the tanks with little to no risk to your troops. heck with UAVs you can bring the risk down to zero as the most they can do is waste a drone while you waste their tanks.
So I really don't get it, the Bradley and Stryker can deal with ground forces, heck so can the old M113 with some extra armor on the bottom to protect from IEDs and mines, while any enemy that is gonna have a tank capable of fighting on the modern battlefield is also gonna have planes and choppers that can take out the enemy tanks from longer distances than any tank. So for what reason other than they look big and scary are all the superpowers building tanks for?
And I agree about the drone strikes being a waste which is why I never understood why they just don't mount a Gatling or even a couple of 50 cals like we did in WWII to the UAVs so you don't have to blow million dollar missiles on a couple of guys carrying $50 AK47s. I think it was an episode of Dogfights talking about gun kills where an F-4 pilot that was one of the first to get the gun pod said it best, he said something like "Shot down 4 MiGs on last sortie, first 2 with missiles, cost $39,000 for each downed MiG, the last 2 with the gun, cost $1100 total for the ammo".
Thanks for the links Crosshair, i bookmarked them so I can watch 'em when I'm off work. But honestly those videos i doubt I'll find surprising, we have been seeing the same shit since WWII, where an inferior design gets babied through testing and bought (for an insane profit for the contractor) only to find out its completely worthless in the field, the Mark 14 torpedo just to give one example. That thing was so shit the sub drivers could hear the things clanging against enemy hulls so would have to just empty racks and fire huge spreads just in the hope that even one wasn't a dud. you look at reports and there was plenty of cases of subs firing a dozen of them at an already damaged and slow moving target and all 12 would just clang and drop, not a single good one in the bunch.
Only now it is a hundred times worse,as all the mergers and consolidation means you have a handful of corps who ALL know how to play the game like a harp from hell. The only thing that has saved us is the fact we've been going up against primitives using old Soviet hand me downs, if we ever had to go against another equal like we did in WWII we'd get slaughtered. Most of our planes are 30+ years old but the DoD won't allow the purchase of new proven F teen series because their friends are making out like Gods on turkeys like the F-35 which is obvious that like the F-22 is gonna end up another billion dollar boondoggle that will end up with only a handful built, meanwhile any future enemies can pick up a new SU-35 for $30 million flyaway and a new MiG 29 for less than 60 million, and unlike our techno-turkeys the Russian and Chinese planes are easy to fly, easy to maintain, and easy to afford.
But the simple fact is our procurement and R&D has become a bad joke, with companies paid hundreds of millions even if we cancel the contracts, so where is the incentive not to pad the bill and just push out junk? And as long as the DoD is in bed with the MIC things will never change, we'll keep buying fighting weapons built for a cold war that hasn't existed in 25+ years and designed for battlefields we'll never fight on. Hell what good is stealth when our enemies either fight from caves with IEDs or like NK are using 40+ year old Soviet hand me downs that frankly the F-4 wouldn't have a problem dealing with?
You want a way to wake people around you up AC? point how long the same players have been playing the game, Goldman Sachs, est 1860s, JP Morgan, est 1870s, Rockefeller, Rothschilds, all came into power during the age of the robber barons and NEVER LEFT, they just grew more powerful with each generation. Goldman has controlled the Fed since the day it started, look at how many heads of the Fed since its start nearly a century ago has been GS employees.
The simple fact is if there was ANY way to change the caste system then the faces at the top would change over the decades, but they don't. The only growth is from the offspring of these dynasties having more kids some generations than before, that's all. The power players change the names of their corps once in awhile, some like GS don't even bother to do that, but if you follow the money and look at the real players, the ones that can actually affect global economies, start wars and profit from misery no matter what happens on the global stage? its ALL the same bunches over and over AND OVER, no different than the Counts and Barons of old, they simply changed titles and kept doing business as usual.
How about dozens of show stoppers, would that work? Well here ya go and here is the page from 3 years ago so you can compare. Hell even one of the developers of Red Hat says trhe current "let the devs do it" is made of fail and the problems he list are damned near identical to mine, too many drivers and too few devs equal no QA and QC so buggy shit gets shoved out the door, so I really don't know how much more proof one needs besides the fact that every major OEM and BB retailer has tried your product and now treats Linux like a pox upon their houses, never to be mentioned again, why? because unlike Internet sellers they actually have to support the products they sell, and the mess that is Linux makes that a losing proposition.
What I'm saying is that the GPL has a fatal flaw that makes it worthless unless you are able to make a living using one of the 3 "blessed" models of usage, software contracts, selling hardware, begging like a bum. the fatal flaw? the redistribution clause.
And to show what an anti capitalist asshole RMS is I'd like anybody to explain how removing that one clause would change the outcome in his "printer story" that gave birth to the GPL in ANY way? After all he would still have the code, no change there, he could still modify it, again no change, he could even share his modifications, no different than how mods for non free games are perfectly fine and even encouraged by many companies, nope the ONLY thing it would do is allow a company to survive by selling copies of their software which whether you like it or not IS how much software has to be distributed because there are many places the GPL blessed 3 don't work. Games? Nobody is gonna buy contracts, nobody is gonna sell dedicated hardware for each game, and begging is not gonna bring in enough to keep a triple A game house afloat, which is why all GPL games look like shit from 30 years ago. And in the case at hand, desktops? Nobody is buying support contracts, in fact look at the sheer hate best Buy gets for pushing their GS support contracts. hardware? Unless you are Apple nope, not gonna get the economies of scale to compete and nobody is gonna pay more just to have a niche OS on hardware no better than what they get at Wally World in a $300 Dell, begging? We see what that has gotten Canonical, IE not enough to keep the lights on.
Again whether you like and accept it or not the "blessed 3" simply doesn't work in the majority of cases, hell its beginning to fail in the corporate market as more and more are saying fuck the enterprise contracts and just hiring consultants to do jobs on a one off basis when problems arise. The hardware model means you might as well rename FOSS as "Chinamart" since no American firm is gonna be able to compete with a regime that lets you dump toxic waste out the back door and of course you can hire Chinese coders for less than what we pay the guy cleaning the puke up at Chuck E Cheese, and finally the begging model may work for a couple of guys in their garage doing it as a hobby, you sure as fuck aren't gonna grow and compete with the big boys by holding out a tin cup.
The problem is that free trade is a LIE because it allows those countries that have no evvironmental or worker regulations a distinct market advantage over those that do. It would be like playing a football game where you tell one side only "There are no rules and no penalties for you, do what you want" while the other team plays by the rules. Can anybody guess which team will win every time?
What we should do is slap high tariffs on any country that doesn't have similar working conditions to ours. if you let the factories dump their waste into the rivers, or allow them to belch toxins right out the stacks? Then it wouldn't do you a bit of good as you'll only be able to trade with countries that are in a similar situation.
But until we do this you can give up ever having things built in this country again as we'll simply never be competitive. By dumping their toxins the corps get to remove the costs associated with running a clean factory and pass it on to the peasants who'll have poisoned water and land, but since there are many dictatorships and regimes that simply don't give a fuck WHAT you do to the peasants that will always be an open, same as there are plenty of places that won't care if you expose those peasants to cancer causing substances in the course of their daily grind, so again this gives a great advantage as those costs now disappear.
All we will do long term if we allow this to continue is allow a handful of megacorps to concentrate ever more wealth while making sure more and more of the third world hates our guts and wishes us dead, and for good reason. And for those that say "They're just going through an industrial revolution like we did, it'll get better"? Might want to look what is stamped on those trash cans and other cheap low skill stuff as its NOT China anymore, its places like Malaysia and Vietnam. As the workers in China demand not to be treated like factory fodder and live in toxic waste the megacorps are simply moving to new places to export their cancer factories, still dozens of third world countries left to exploit and at this rate you're looking at a good 200+ years before they have ran through them all, leaving superfund sites in their wake.
Never forget the words of Thomas Jefferson, for they are just as true today as we he uttered them over 2 centuries ago: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."
Slashdot Mirror
What forced? Hell you can find units several orders of magnitude faster in your average dumpster! The super in my building knows I like to refurb PCs at the shop so I always have some ultra low cost units for the poor folks so since he services several office buildings and government offices they let him cart off the ones they are tossing and he brings 'em to me, hell I haven't even seen a P3 in like 5 years from the guy, its ALL Pentium 4s and now I'm starting to see the Pentium Ds and early Cores and Athlon X2s.
So really there is NO excuse for having a 386 except for nostalgia, you can sign up to your local freecycle and get a unit for nothing a couple of hundred times faster. Hell just last week I was tossing a couple of 1.4Ghz units as nobody wants anything that slow anymore and I'm debating whether to give away this 1.8Ghz sitting in the shop or strip it for parts and toss it, nobody HAS to use a 386 anymore if they don't want to, so many of the P4s and Athlons out there it isn't funny.
Kinda bummed I'm gonna have to toss a working T-Bird Athlon though, I only got one board that is Socket A and 2 chips and its just not worth buying a board for. Man now you want a great chip THAT was a great chip. Plenty of headroom for OCing, back in the day those were a gamer's dream, hell you can still surf nicely with one of those.
Sorry, didn't know there was a correct way to put that, kinda sad that people have tried this kind of bullshit enough that there IS a correct way to say it, but I'd never heard it put that way so my bad.
That said the idea of "your own network and phone" was actually tried in a way, before the Dotbomb there was a company that would give you a "free PC!" back when computers were actually expensive and IIRC they also gave you free dialup, you just had to have a home phone. the way it was supposed to work is they basically had a captive audience for all their spam which would run as a banner at the top of the screen as well as making IE pop up a full page ad every 30 minutes or so. Problem was that dialup was slow as hell to start with and constantly having to download all those ads made any surfing on the thing painful, so since their contract stated they had to use it so many hours a week to get the free PC people just left the thing on in the corner until the contract expired so they could have somebody wipe the computer to get rid of the ads.
At the end of the day if this guy wants to wave his little "Odumbo" or "RobMe" flags I couldn't care less but what I DO care about is higher prices thanks to all that spam. I don't see how anybody could argue this has anything to do with free speech because the sidewalk is paid for by everybody, its yours, its mine, so you standing on your corner waving a little flag don't cost me shit, hell it might even provide me a chuckle as I laugh at you freezing your ass off.
But bandwidth ain't free and the costs of dealing with this spammer end up on MY phone bill and I shouldn't have to open my wallet to pay for HIS spam supporting crap I don't support. This is why I think that we should have a nationwide broadband paid for by taxes BUT have companies lease access to provide competition, because if the government ran it then asses like this could argue it was a first amendment issue and all the bandwidth would end up blown away by a league of spammers.
At the end of the day guys like this douchebag are adding a tax to ALL of us because its damned hard to live these days without a cell phone and asshats like this raise the price of the service for ALL of us, just so he can make some money being a prick.
Where we all got screwed was when the PC makers stopped making monitors and just started buying their panels from the TV companies, that is where we went off the tracks. What works good for watching Harry Potter or LOTR does NOT work well for running office programs, we need more height than width. What screwed us was the switch to LCDs, before that TVs just didn't have the resolution to be used as monitors but after the switch the OEMs saw that you could buy panels straight from the same companies building them for TVs and get them a LOT cheaper and since price has been king for quite awhile in the PC biz that was that, we were stuck with the same movie theater aspect ratio because that is what sold TVs.
This is why I'm shocked most desktop monitors are still either 20 or 22 inch, with the laptops I get why they are small because "thin is in" and nobody wants to lug some 20 incher around all day, but since 27 and 32 inch TVs have been dropping in price like crazy I'm shocked the OEMs haven't started using those panels for their monitors yet because you think the economies of scale on the 27 and 32 would make it more expensive to use the 20 and 24, after all it isn't getting used for laptops OR for TVs.
Not to mention with MSFT trying to force one app at a time bullshit with Win 8 all this would do is give you one really bad low res app REALLY big across the screen...great.
Look I GET why we are stuck with 1366x768, 16x9 and 1080p, its because its a cutthroat business and the TV panel makers had better economies of scale so the PC makers just bought the panels, I get that, but what the hell with pushing an even more insanely wide wide screen on a fricking desktop? Are the TV makers gonna start pushing this format so LG just got ahead of the game, or what? If anything we need more VERTICAL, not more horizontal, as most OSes and programs don't use what we have now well, so why in the hell would you want even more screen the OS and programs don't know what to do with?
So unless the TV companies are gonna start pushing this width I just don't really see a point in having a screen THIS wide,,,maybe if you bought 4 of them and used Eyefinity to actually give you more height and more width?
While this is true nowhere in the constitution does it say "You have to pay for my right to speak" but that is EXACTLY what this company is proposing, because bandwidth has a cost and those costs are passed onto consumers.
So if they want to send spam? Fine, send 'em a bill for every piece of spam they send. They are allowed to speak, sure, but the free speech laws are all about the government not blocking your right to speak NOT giving a free medium for you to speak in. You are allowed to hold up a sign on a street corner professing your belief on this or that issue but you do NOT have the right to demand free access to an auditorium owned by a private company just to air your rants and that is what these guys are basically trying to get, everyone else to bear the costs of their bullshit.
But as someone who spent his 20s on the wrong side of the tracks, playing in bars that honest to God had chicken wire, i think you have it right on this subject and crap drugs like bath salts? they are done because the junkie can't find anything better so that is what they do, same as I knew plenty of guys smoking that "legal pot" crap that has so many chemicals in it its pathetic because they couldn't find real pot or were afraid of losing their job to a piss test.
I'll never forget a story I heard ages ago, whether true or not it perfectly illustrates a junkie mindset. During the occupation of Afghanistan the Soviets were losing a LOT of small arms and grenades to the other side because of junkies trading it for dope, so they said "That's easy to solve" and put the bases on a STRICT lock down, if you weren't on mission you were on base PERIOD. So what happened? Well suddenly the accident rate went through the roof, planes, tanks, helicopters, all started having accidents so they sent a team to find out WTF was going on, what they found? The junkies were drinking the brake fluid out of all the vehicles! They would just strain that shit through white bread and guzzle that shit down for a buzz.
I've known guys that sprayed RAID on cigarettes, shot JD and ditchwater, drank sterno, if they can't find anything else a junkie WILL get high, no matter how nasty the shit is they got to use. But when those same junkies had access to good dope at decent prices? they didn't do that shit because they could get high without the issues.
So I think if pot and uppers were legal you wouldn't see much use of this shit at all, except for the occasional dumbass like in TFA that hears it'll give him super hard ons. But the regular junkies don't want to do nasty shit, they just won't go straight so if that's all they can get that is what they are gonna do, simple as that. Hell the RAID guy was actually a pot head but the area was going through a dry spell so he was during RAID instead. That is just how junkies think, they are gonna get high today and if they can't find their drug of choice they'll do whatever they can.
I'm so sick of this "If you like something u must be a shill ZOMFG!" horseshit, i really fucking am. I mean if someone says they like their iPhone, does that mean they work for Cupertino?
The simple fact is I can think of NO app selling service other than Steam whose whole attitude isn't "fuck u and give me money bitch", can you? GFWL will show you NOTHING but Xbox games, even when you are in Windows using GFWINDOWS LIVE, because some PHB put out a PPT and said "Herps derp, product, herp derp metrics, on message derpa de derp" and the rest feel like being stuck in the 90s with Bonzi Buddy "You want to buy? How about buy? You buy now?"
So excuse the fuck out of me that I have found one service I actually like buying from, as opposed to just pirating everything. If you haven't figured it out yet I'll clue you in, like Win 7, hate Win 8, like Comodo's AV and browsers, don't like AVG, like AMD and Asus/Asrock (although not Bulldozer on AMD) and don't like Intel and MSI. Oh and I like pizza with a nice layer of creamy mashed potatoes on top.
So there you go, you can now tell me how I'm actually a millionaire with product deals with everybody from Redmond to the Idaho farmers group, oh and I fly an invisible jet I stole from Wonder Woman and am not freezing my balls off during a cold snap in the south, I'm secretly blogging from South America next to Elvis whose been here since 79.
I don't know about him but I have run Win 7 on a first gen P4 with 512Mb of RAM, not great but it ran. Sadly if you really want to play "How low can you go?" with Windows then you just have to run the pirate version, specifically the "Tiny Windows" versions. They were made by gamers trying to strip down the lowest they could go and still have at least 90% program compatibility and frankly it makes Windows Embedded and WinFLP look like bad jokes, we're talking WinXP full patched running less than 80Mb of RAM and Win 7 running great on less than 200Mb. Of course Vista Tiny uses the most of all at 480Mb, they're hackers, not miracle workers.
As for TFA I never understood why they kept it as long as they did. I mean is anybody here wanting to run the latest version on a 386? That seems to me to be just as dumb an idea as slapping Win 8 on a P3, why would you want to torture yourself like that?
Actually what you want is a cat scan to make sure you aren't brain damaged. i'll tell everyone here the same i tell my SMBs when I got them off those power sucking P4s "When you look at how much useful work you get VS how much power the unit takes its simply not worth keeping" and that applies just as much to a 386 as it does to a P4.
I mean lets face facts folks, you can take one of those AMD Bobcats or Intel Atom setups (Personally prefer the Bobcat as it gets better performance for a pretty similar price) and get a dual core CPU that uses less than 18w under load, most jobs it'll use between 5w-8w, and you can do just about any task you'd have for a low power unit. A 386 when you figure in the PSU and board is simply going to use a lot more power for every unit of work you get out of it because back then nobody really cared about power usage, it was all about the clocks. And if you don't require 386 support frankly a $25 ARM thumbstick will give you much more work per watt while being even lower powered than the Bobcat or Atom.
So there really isn't a point to keeping any of these old junkers except for the case of nostalgia which if you want it for nostalgia you are gonna be running an OS from that period, like Win 2.0 or the first Slax release, so having support for such an ancient CPU really makes no sense. Personally if it were me I'd cut off support at the P4, anything older than that frankly is gonna be worthless for anything and while I hate the fact the P4 is a power sucking hog you can still get reasonable amounts of work done with a P4, especially if its one of the later ones like the Cedar Mill with hyperthreading or the Pentium D models.
I wouldn't call it spin, I'd just call it another example of how appstores don't do shit to stop piracy and frankly suck.
The ONLY distribution service where I can truly say "Its worth it" is Steam, because they give me cheaper prices, often with all the games AND all the DLC included in one low price, they give me an excellent chat client built in (in fact I got rid of my regular chat client since everybody I cared to chat with already was on Steam)along with all updates to my games automated, a really nice community that is quite helpful, and excellent customers service even when I would have honestly not been mad if it took awhile, such as during their crazy volume Xmas sale.
But from what I've seen all these new "appstores" frankly don't give you dick for advantages, and a hell of a lot of downsides. so is it any surprise that some choose to bypass the bullshit? Hell I bought Bioshock II yet played the pirate version for nearly 2 years, simply because I fricking hate GFWL. I honestly don't blame anybody who wants to bypass these appstores as from what I've seen they are all sucky and just not worth the bullshit.
Oh and I have to point out you're wrong (Someone on the Internet is Wrong! I must swing into action!) because it honestly doesn't matter HOW "long" the hacks are, thanks to the smart cow problem. I mean do you think your average person could hack SecuROM or Starfuck or write their own hacked bootloader like the pirates did with Win 7 and Win 8? Nope but they can read an NFO file "how to" packed along with all the pre-hacked files in a nice .RAR from TPB, that's not hard at all. All it takes is ONE guy to get it right for even your average 13 year old to be able to do this shit, just you watch they'll be pirated game apps with all the call homes removed and a million credits sitting in the character's account, just as many of the pirated PC games would often include a trainer that let you push a button and give your character everything from unlimited bullets to unlimited money.
at the end of the day you simply have to make the appstore a better value to the consumer than the pirate version but so far from what I've seen most of these corps don't get that. Instead they see it as a great chance for lock in, skimming a percentage of every sale, and for nickeling and diming the user to death. I mean could I not pirate every game I have in Steam? Sure and in fact many of the pirated versions are the Steam version with hacks, but why should I? The games are cheap, the extras are nice, and its as easy as "push button to get game" so i simply see no point and THAT is what these appstores are gonna have to do, make it so using their service is so much nicer than dealing with the pirated version that many won't bother.
Actually its quite easy to burst the libertarians bubble, you ought to see the hate I get on YouTube from libertarians because I obliterate their bullshit to the point all they can do is call me dirty names and mod me down.
Just point out how many murders of peasants were bought and paid for by the corps through their private army the Pinkertons, point out how many superfund sites are still left from that era, how JP Morgan and Rockefeller used their money to crush competition (A staple in the libertarian "magical thinking" is that if there wasn't gov regulations then competition would fix everything) and how many of these dynasties not only were NOT negatively affected by government regulation later but actually thrived on it by having the laws twisted to suit their own needs.
At the end of the day libertarian-ism, like fascism and communism all comes down to "magical thinking" that ALL hinge on one simple and easily disproved fallacy, that those at the top won't use their power (because in the end that's all money is, power in an easily to carry form) to enrich themselves and royally fuck those below them. You can take ANY point in history from any country and prove this to be a lie, from the USA's libertarian 1800s to the old USSR to the classical fuedal system, in the end the ONE thing you can always count on is those at the top of the food change becoming ever greedier and fucking those at the bottom ever harder.
This is why I ultimately think the USA and most capitalist countries will fall just like every other empire before it, from the Roman to the British, because those at the top end up so fucking greedy that they will fuck the long term survivability of the country for their own short term gain. As Lenin so aptly put it all those years ago "A capitalist will gladly sell you the rope you intend to hang him with" only if he would have saw what Stalin and pals were gonna do he would have replaced "capitalist" with "those at the top" as its more accurate because its not limited to capitalism.
While we normally don't agree I have to say you pretty much nailed it, all I would add is if you have skills you level up and side quests that you can choose to do or ignore that would also be RPG to me.
But to me this is why you don't just go "ZOMFG this is the BEST of (category)" because in categories this broad what may be your cup of tea might be sewer sludge to me. Take Diablo style hack and slash like Titan Quest or Torchlight series, some hate those with a passion but I just love 'em to pieces, to rip a line from Angry Joe's review of Sacred II "I'm a total loot whore" and as long as it has tons of loot and rare items and sets to try to get? i'm all for it.
Same thing with shooters, some people think the whole TF2, CoD MP, BF series MP heavy frag fests are just the greatest thing since sliced bread but even though i love shooters they just leave me cold. Its not that I can't play 'em, in fact I was doing pretty damned good on TF2, its that to me its boring as hell, like watching a bunch of people run around like chickens with the head cut off just blasting everything that moves. I want a story, I want an objective with multiple ways to go about it, I want to decide if I want to plan out an ambush or trap before i go in or just go guns blazing, whereas with the MP heavy games you seem to only be able to really rack up if you are a twitch player that is good with headshots, no real planning or tactics required if you're a good twitch shooter.
So if I think a game is great I tell folks to look up a review or a "Let's Play" video and see if its something they'd like, maybe get a hold of a demo if there is one, because these genres are so broad what one might think is a great example of the genre others might hate. I personally never cared for Planescape, Fallout, or Steamworks because that style of game play just doesn't appeal to me, give me a Diablo style or even a classic dungeon crawl like Eternal Sun or Grimlock any day, reading tons of texts while managing tons of stats just isn't my thing. That is probably why I like the more action heavy RTS games like C&C or CoH over the ultra realistic sims like the Koei games, i just want to get in there and have fun, not worry about how many liters of fuel i need to requisition for each base before a campaign.
How are you gonna dual license desktops? Games? productivity software? Frankly there is no point even responding to the rest when you think dressing up support contracts with another name counts as anything but exactly what it is, the "blessed 3" which is the only way you can make money in GPL land.
And ironically thanks to the economy I'm betting you'll see a BUNCH of GPL based software companies go under, because the support contract model is dying. companies are either buying cloud services or paying consultants on a one off basis for fixes, and again dual licensing does nothing since thanks to the GPL you can't say "for home use only" so I can just take your software for nothing and you can go starve for all I care. Look at how many companies have switched to CentOS over RHEL, why pay for the contract if I can just take it for nothing and pay a consultant if I have a problem?
The simple fact is if your software doesn't fit into the "blessed 3" you're sunk if its GPL, this is why LO sucks compared to MSO, why people laughably try to hold Gimp as an ersatz Photoshop, why GPL games all look like shit that could have ran on the SNES or are just Q3 Arena ripoffs, because VERY few of the multitude of uses for software fall under the blessed 3. Again how will the blessed 3 work on desktops? it won't which is why no B&M stores carry Linux and why I predict Canonical will "give Ubuntu to the community" and struggle to survive on the server and embedded, only to close their doors by 2015, maybe 2014.
The reason GPL is a flop outside of the blessed 3 is the redistribution clause, simple as that. Without it RMS still would have his "printer story" problem fixed, the users would be able to inspect and modify all day long, even post those mods just as game mods are posted all the time, but then you would get actual progress on the software that doesn't fit the blessed 3. But since RMS would rather be buried in a MSFT coffin than lose the redistribution clause you can take it to the bank that Linux will be an also ran in any category that doesn't fit the big 3.
Hell last reports say even Google is losing money on it, last reports have Google spending a cool billion a year on Android development and not even making a tenth of that back in ad revenue. Ironically the reason Google doesn't mind losing the money is lock in, they want everybody to think Google and Chrome equals the web so that those Android users will go home and use Google search on Chrome. But if even a supersized corp like Google can't make any money on software that doesn't fit the blessed 3 I honestly don't see how you expect companies like canonical to survive.
Of course with all the anti-corporation zealotry in the GPL camp I wouldn't be surprised if most are cheering the idea of Canonical going under, even if it makes sure no company is gonna spend shit trying to make an improved desktop using GPL again. But mark my words and mark them well, hell bookmark this post and come back and see if it isn't true, I predict less than 24 months after Valve releases Steam on Linux they drop support. Why? Because the Steambox fits into the blessed 3, the Linux client don't, so they will lose money on it.
The problem is the league itself simply isn't gonna give a fuck until they get enough bad press for it, just as they used to let boxing matches go on with guys that were obviously in a bad way until the stink got so bad that the league stepped in and made refs able to call a fight if it looked like they were seriously hurt.
I mean look up the videos on YouTube Rez, this is NOT an isolated thing here, you have players obviously told that "if it looks like they are gonna score, yank the helmet off" and there are just a ton of videos on YouTube showing this taken to an obscene extreme, with players practically trying to rip the other guy's head off to get the helmet off in time to kill the play. it has gotten so bad that many players will just remove the chin strap once on the field so they don't risk getting a neck injury when some asshole tries to rip the helmet off.
So while I would argue that a 3 point reduction would nip this crap in the bud the simple fact is Rez until some poor bastard gets crippled the league ain't gonna do shit. In a way it reminds me of Pro Wrestling, allowing teams to do this gives the fans something to boo and thus generates "heat" for the rivalries and makes fans more pumped because they want to see "that cheating player" get his comeuppance on the field. As long as it generates controversy that in turn generates sales the league ain't gonna do shit. Again look at boxing, it wasn't until the negative press got to the point it was costing more than the sales generated by letting it continue that the league did anything about it. I would argue that this is how UFC got the boost it did, when boxing quit letting fights keep going was right about the time UFC got known as the "bloody no holds barred" sport and its sales skyrocketed.
Sadly as long as they can make more money by not doing anything the league just isn't gonna give a shit, simple as that.
If the fact that the Chinese would rather steal Windows than use Linux don't slap people with a cluebat I don't know what will. Again whether they like it or not, whether it fits into Stallman's "bum's paradise' of all programmers working for nothing or not, the simple fact is good software costs good money and with the "blessed 3" unless you are in an enterprise niche, and sometimes not even then, then you simply have no hope of competing or even making a truly good software product.
I mean look at the costs, a good CS degree is gonna cost upwards of a high 5 to low 6 figures, then you have the costs for the building and the boxes and the power, how are they suppose to work for free? The tooth fairy gonna pay those bills? Gonna hit everybody up for a "FOSS tax" whether they use it or not?
If you truly want FOSS to win over non-FOSS then you have to give a way for companies like canonical to survive, simple as that. Its the classic "busted shitter" problem in that if I ask you to paint me a picture or write me a song for free? i'll have plenty of takers, if I ask for someone to come fix my nasty turd filled shitter for free? Well I better get used to pissing in the sink.
And whether the "bum's paradise" people like it or not, and frankly that is EXACTLY what RMS is, even he calls himself a "squatter on MIT", the simple fact is a LOT of jobs in software are just as nasty as fixing a busted shitter. Apple and MSFT pay millions to get THEIR shitters fixed, in FOSS you better get used to pissing in the sink. Bug fixing, writing docs, focus testing, QA and QC, regression testing, all of these jobs are long, slow, boring, tedious and thankless work so they just don't get done.
Hell for a perfect illustration look at the state of "FOSS gaming" right now, this like desktops is an area where the "blessed 3" of the GPL doesn't work, so what do you get? Games that look like they could have ran on the SNES 20 years ago or yet another MP only Q3 Arena ripoff, why? Because despite being called "games" they have lots of truly shitty jobs, writing the scripts, doing the voice acting, bug fixing and regression testing, so since thanks to the redistribution clause meaning you can't make shit since its not one of the "blessed 3" use cases people ONLY do the easy and fun work like making models for Q3 and then just using the code that ID already made THEIR money on to do the grunt work.
Despite all the screams of "shill!" because I won't drink the koolaid I actually WANT FOSS to succeed, I really do. You think I like paying more for the OS I want because MSFT is trying to shove Win 8 down my throat? Think I like having to sell some boxes with XP on them because the cost of a Win 7 license would make the system cost more than its worth? But until companies like canonical can actually make enough to survive and still have enough left over to pay for all those nasty busted shitter jobs the fact is Linux just won't cut the mustard. On the desktop its just cobbled together and has a really half ass feel, sorry but it does. Missing docs, drivers getting shit on when you update, programs crashing when you do a simple task like its fricking Win98, its just not in the same league and its because nobody can get paid for fixing all these busted shitter problems so year after year they don't get fixed. I can take a copy of XP RTM, patch it all the way to current and ALL of the drivers and software I installed on the RTM will STILL WORK, I do that on any Linux distro using half that amount of time and I end up with a buggy crashy mess of an OS.
again you remove the redistribution clause which NOBODY I noticed could come up with a reason for BTW, and you would still solve the printer story, still let the users modify their software all day long, but still allow companies like canonical to make a living fixing the problems. this is why I said the big mistake Shuttleworth made was going Linux over BSD, Jobs used BSD and built an empire around solid software with an "it just works" mantra, shuttleworth used Linux and is struggling to keep the lights on. What more proof do you need that if your software doesn't fall into the very teeny tiny niche of "the blessed 3" then its doomed in GPL land?
Yeah I had the same problem, /. must have really shit the bed.
But that still don't explain about the tanks crosshair, i mean lets take out remote systems all together, no UCAVs, no remote guns, hell just a handful of F15s at 35k feet with today's missiles could scrap your entire tank corp with little to no risk to themselves, thanks to our missiles and JDAMs.
So I still don't get the "why?" when it comes to the tank. It sucks a shitload of gas, heavy as hell so hard to drag across the planet, i just don't see why you can't just mount a 105mm main gun to the top of an APC and call it a day. I mean other than the battle of 86 easting (IIRC, not sure the exact title) most of our tanks were doing jobs that frankly a modern APC could handle just as well. Slap some reactive armor on the front, give something like the Stryker or Bradley a regular cannon as opposed to a RWS and Bob's your uncle. Hell between the cannon, the TOWs, and a 20mm gatling you've got pretty much every major role of a ground vehicle covered and according to the "great tank battles" video on 86 easting there were several times where a Bradley with TOWs just slaughtered the MBTs of the Iraqi republican guard, the only real problems they had were the limited number of TOWs that could be loaded.
So I just don't get the "why?" when it comes to tanks, other than to cut really big checks to defense contractors, because like the battleship it seems more like a relic of WWII than a really useful modern battlefield instrument. Hell I can see arguments for the carrier (although I still think we don't need more than 6, that is 3 times more than anybody else and 3 carriers worth of aircraft pack a hell of a punch) better than I can see the tank, at least we can point to times in the past where countries have refused to let us use bases on their soil or fly over their country like Libya in the early 80s where a carrier could come in handy, but with the incredible accuracy of modern missiles between the APCs with TOWs, the choppers with hellfires, and of course the F-Teen series with missiles they can launch from insane distances I honestly don't really see a need for a tank on the modern battlefield.
I will give you that depending on drones and RWS is a dumb idea, but I have to wonder how much of our drone costs are just bill padding as from what i understand the Israeli drones don't cost a tenth of what ours does and is just as good. To me the whole point of the drone was supposed to be a "cheap weapon platform" that took the risk of losing pilots out of the equation, but like every defense program we've had for decades its because another black hole of money. Honestly what we need is a remote controlled Avenger or Skyraider, something tough, long loiter times, able to carry any combo of bombs, rockets, missiles AND with a couple of guns, and most of all cheap and reliable. Sadly like everything else we get today what we'll end up with is a fussy over-engineered POS, but that is the MIC for you.
Accept we have seen even WITH huge government subsidies (taken out of your pocket by BOTH the left and right, look up the Cheney energy bill which was the right's gift to big corps, just as "green" is a codeword for friends of the POTUS) you still can't make a company competitive, because the one that doesn't play by the rules gets to externalize all his costs while internalizing all the profits.
Just look at all the superfund sites we have here in the USA, in every one of those cases the corp got to internalize profits and externalize costs and when it looked like they might have to pay for their messes they just walked away. This is EXACTLY what China is finding out the hard way, already a full 15% of their farmland would be considered too toxic by western standards for even animal feed, yet when the Chinese get tired of sucking toxic waste and demand that corps not just dump shit straight into the Yangtze they'll find a bunch of empty factories filled with barrels filled of toxic waste, superfund sites as far as the eye can see, just as when the factories started moving to China my own home town had to hire guys in moonsuits to tear down the abandoned factories because they had asbestos and other toxic crap, but thanks to shell corps and other tricks they just walked away with the profits and stuck US with the tab.
At the end of the day TINSTAAFL and all we are doing is exporting misery and suffering so a handful at the top can live like Gods. This is why I'm against the scam known as cap & trade because NEVER, not even once, have you heard Rev Al Gore and friends talk about high tarrifs to countries that refuse to play the game, why? Why because through shell corps they make a fucking mint off that suffering, that's why! As long as you have the "free trade" scam you can't do shit about pollution, or global warming, or toxic waste, abused workers or tax scams like double dutch, because there will ALWAYS be some government willing to sell out for a buck and as long as there are no restrictions frankly it'll be cheaper to have shit made on the other side of the planet and have it shipped on some smog belching barge than it will be to actually make a clean product.
More likely the fun of autocorrect got you, I don't know how many times I got texts from customers where I go "WTH does this mean?" for them to go "That wasn't what I was trying to type!". You should check out the website devoted to it some time there are some hilarious bloopers on there. I like the one where the mom texted her teen daughter to ask what she was gonna do for the weekend and the text came back "I'm gonna get pregnant" which naturally caused the mom to flip her shit until the daughter texted back she was trying to type pringles and got bit by autocorrect.
As for TFA? Meh, not really worried too much about NK. I have a feeling that if it looks like they are getting ready to roll the tanks rather than have a hot and possibly nuclear war in their backyard the Chinese will drop the hammer on their asses, and considering most of the stuff NK uses is based on 60s and 70s Soviet tech I really doubt they are gonna get much in the way of accuracy on these things. If anybody should be worried its Japan as having cheap NK junk falling in their backyard could be a problem but SK has one of the most modern military forces on the planet so I kinda doubt NK is gonna be stupid enough to try a full blown restart of the Korean war.
More likely this is more weenie waving by NK so they don't look so weak compared to their neighbors and so they can get more aid, that's all. Its pretty common knowledge that Juce is a failure, their economy is a bad joke, and if it weren't for aid the whole thing would fall down, so most likely this is just another attempt to extort more aid to prop the place up. Frankly I'm shocked after "dear leader" bought the farm that they let the kid take over, frankly right up until it was certain daddy wasn't gonna make it nobody had even heard of the kid, so I have to wonder if he isn't just a puppet told to STFU and stand there while the generals really run the show.
Bingo! They have been disputing the borders for ages, and frankly there is a LOT of animosity from what I've been reading since this whole thing blew up so it was a smart move by McAfee to run there. It would be like being wanted in India and running to Pakistan, it really wouldn't matter what you were accused of as it would be more about Pakistan being able to flip the bird at India than the person, smart move.
That said after reading some of his rambles about how "Bath salts" made him a tiger in the sack? My guess is he wasted the dude. I have a couple of customers who are cops and when this thing about bath salts first came up in the media I asked them about and man, you should hear the horror stories. These aren't the kind of guys to do the whole "ZOMFG drugs will make your dick rot!" kinda of hype bullshit either, in fact they both think pot should be legal and one doesn't see any problem in adults doing what he calls "hippie drugs" like acid and mushrooms as long as they aren't gonna be driving or taking care of kids on the stuff, but...man, they say that shit is one of those drugs where if you have a bad trip its REALLY fucking bad, we are talking caged animal full blown paranoid. They both said the guys they've seen on that shit make meth paranoia look like coffee jitters, and you have to approach somebody whacked on that shit like you would a wild animal, slow movements and calm tones because they can get dangerous REALLY fucking fast. The worst part is they said it seems to do some really long term mental damage to a percentage that does the shit even once as they had a couple of calls where somebody did that shit just looking for a cheap buzz and ended up in the mental ward, REALLY bad shit.
So you got a guy that ALREADY thinks people are against him, has a huge gun collection, had previous disputes with the victim and to top it all off is waxing in his blog about how wonderful a drug is that has a known side effect of extremely bad paranoia where the person on it often becomes dangerous to themselves or others when having a bad trip...yeah I can't see why Belize would be wanting to talk to this guy.
I have a feeling this is gonna be another one of those cases where because they got money they get to walk away from shit that should land anybody in PMITA prison. It just goes to show you if you have enough money you can get away with anything. I have to say though I was impressed how he used a double to throw cops off the trail, that was a pretty damned slick move. Personally I'm shocked that they just let the double walk when he was helping a murder suspect run from the cops, but I guess they didn't want a court case making them look like idiots for falling for a double.
This is why I don't understand why all the superpowers keep building tanks as opposed to just building armored troop carriers with a big remote gun like the Bushmaster or like the 105mm on the Stryker, because with the astounding accuracy of missiles you can take a Vietnam era Cobra and just wipe out all the tanks with little to no risk to your troops. heck with UAVs you can bring the risk down to zero as the most they can do is waste a drone while you waste their tanks.
So I really don't get it, the Bradley and Stryker can deal with ground forces, heck so can the old M113 with some extra armor on the bottom to protect from IEDs and mines, while any enemy that is gonna have a tank capable of fighting on the modern battlefield is also gonna have planes and choppers that can take out the enemy tanks from longer distances than any tank. So for what reason other than they look big and scary are all the superpowers building tanks for?
And I agree about the drone strikes being a waste which is why I never understood why they just don't mount a Gatling or even a couple of 50 cals like we did in WWII to the UAVs so you don't have to blow million dollar missiles on a couple of guys carrying $50 AK47s. I think it was an episode of Dogfights talking about gun kills where an F-4 pilot that was one of the first to get the gun pod said it best, he said something like "Shot down 4 MiGs on last sortie, first 2 with missiles, cost $39,000 for each downed MiG, the last 2 with the gun, cost $1100 total for the ammo".
Thanks for the links Crosshair, i bookmarked them so I can watch 'em when I'm off work. But honestly those videos i doubt I'll find surprising, we have been seeing the same shit since WWII, where an inferior design gets babied through testing and bought (for an insane profit for the contractor) only to find out its completely worthless in the field, the Mark 14 torpedo just to give one example. That thing was so shit the sub drivers could hear the things clanging against enemy hulls so would have to just empty racks and fire huge spreads just in the hope that even one wasn't a dud. you look at reports and there was plenty of cases of subs firing a dozen of them at an already damaged and slow moving target and all 12 would just clang and drop, not a single good one in the bunch.
Only now it is a hundred times worse,as all the mergers and consolidation means you have a handful of corps who ALL know how to play the game like a harp from hell. The only thing that has saved us is the fact we've been going up against primitives using old Soviet hand me downs, if we ever had to go against another equal like we did in WWII we'd get slaughtered. Most of our planes are 30+ years old but the DoD won't allow the purchase of new proven F teen series because their friends are making out like Gods on turkeys like the F-35 which is obvious that like the F-22 is gonna end up another billion dollar boondoggle that will end up with only a handful built, meanwhile any future enemies can pick up a new SU-35 for $30 million flyaway and a new MiG 29 for less than 60 million, and unlike our techno-turkeys the Russian and Chinese planes are easy to fly, easy to maintain, and easy to afford.
But the simple fact is our procurement and R&D has become a bad joke, with companies paid hundreds of millions even if we cancel the contracts, so where is the incentive not to pad the bill and just push out junk? And as long as the DoD is in bed with the MIC things will never change, we'll keep buying fighting weapons built for a cold war that hasn't existed in 25+ years and designed for battlefields we'll never fight on. Hell what good is stealth when our enemies either fight from caves with IEDs or like NK are using 40+ year old Soviet hand me downs that frankly the F-4 wouldn't have a problem dealing with?
You want a way to wake people around you up AC? point how long the same players have been playing the game, Goldman Sachs, est 1860s, JP Morgan, est 1870s, Rockefeller, Rothschilds, all came into power during the age of the robber barons and NEVER LEFT, they just grew more powerful with each generation. Goldman has controlled the Fed since the day it started, look at how many heads of the Fed since its start nearly a century ago has been GS employees.
The simple fact is if there was ANY way to change the caste system then the faces at the top would change over the decades, but they don't. The only growth is from the offspring of these dynasties having more kids some generations than before, that's all. The power players change the names of their corps once in awhile, some like GS don't even bother to do that, but if you follow the money and look at the real players, the ones that can actually affect global economies, start wars and profit from misery no matter what happens on the global stage? its ALL the same bunches over and over AND OVER, no different than the Counts and Barons of old, they simply changed titles and kept doing business as usual.
How about dozens of show stoppers, would that work? Well here ya go and here is the page from 3 years ago so you can compare. Hell even one of the developers of Red Hat says trhe current "let the devs do it" is made of fail and the problems he list are damned near identical to mine, too many drivers and too few devs equal no QA and QC so buggy shit gets shoved out the door, so I really don't know how much more proof one needs besides the fact that every major OEM and BB retailer has tried your product and now treats Linux like a pox upon their houses, never to be mentioned again, why? because unlike Internet sellers they actually have to support the products they sell, and the mess that is Linux makes that a losing proposition.
What I'm saying is that the GPL has a fatal flaw that makes it worthless unless you are able to make a living using one of the 3 "blessed" models of usage, software contracts, selling hardware, begging like a bum. the fatal flaw? the redistribution clause.
And to show what an anti capitalist asshole RMS is I'd like anybody to explain how removing that one clause would change the outcome in his "printer story" that gave birth to the GPL in ANY way? After all he would still have the code, no change there, he could still modify it, again no change, he could even share his modifications, no different than how mods for non free games are perfectly fine and even encouraged by many companies, nope the ONLY thing it would do is allow a company to survive by selling copies of their software which whether you like it or not IS how much software has to be distributed because there are many places the GPL blessed 3 don't work. Games? Nobody is gonna buy contracts, nobody is gonna sell dedicated hardware for each game, and begging is not gonna bring in enough to keep a triple A game house afloat, which is why all GPL games look like shit from 30 years ago. And in the case at hand, desktops? Nobody is buying support contracts, in fact look at the sheer hate best Buy gets for pushing their GS support contracts. hardware? Unless you are Apple nope, not gonna get the economies of scale to compete and nobody is gonna pay more just to have a niche OS on hardware no better than what they get at Wally World in a $300 Dell, begging? We see what that has gotten Canonical, IE not enough to keep the lights on.
Again whether you like and accept it or not the "blessed 3" simply doesn't work in the majority of cases, hell its beginning to fail in the corporate market as more and more are saying fuck the enterprise contracts and just hiring consultants to do jobs on a one off basis when problems arise. The hardware model means you might as well rename FOSS as "Chinamart" since no American firm is gonna be able to compete with a regime that lets you dump toxic waste out the back door and of course you can hire Chinese coders for less than what we pay the guy cleaning the puke up at Chuck E Cheese, and finally the begging model may work for a couple of guys in their garage doing it as a hobby, you sure as fuck aren't gonna grow and compete with the big boys by holding out a tin cup.
The problem is that free trade is a LIE because it allows those countries that have no evvironmental or worker regulations a distinct market advantage over those that do. It would be like playing a football game where you tell one side only "There are no rules and no penalties for you, do what you want" while the other team plays by the rules. Can anybody guess which team will win every time?
What we should do is slap high tariffs on any country that doesn't have similar working conditions to ours. if you let the factories dump their waste into the rivers, or allow them to belch toxins right out the stacks? Then it wouldn't do you a bit of good as you'll only be able to trade with countries that are in a similar situation.
But until we do this you can give up ever having things built in this country again as we'll simply never be competitive. By dumping their toxins the corps get to remove the costs associated with running a clean factory and pass it on to the peasants who'll have poisoned water and land, but since there are many dictatorships and regimes that simply don't give a fuck WHAT you do to the peasants that will always be an open, same as there are plenty of places that won't care if you expose those peasants to cancer causing substances in the course of their daily grind, so again this gives a great advantage as those costs now disappear.
All we will do long term if we allow this to continue is allow a handful of megacorps to concentrate ever more wealth while making sure more and more of the third world hates our guts and wishes us dead, and for good reason. And for those that say "They're just going through an industrial revolution like we did, it'll get better"? Might want to look what is stamped on those trash cans and other cheap low skill stuff as its NOT China anymore, its places like Malaysia and Vietnam. As the workers in China demand not to be treated like factory fodder and live in toxic waste the megacorps are simply moving to new places to export their cancer factories, still dozens of third world countries left to exploit and at this rate you're looking at a good 200+ years before they have ran through them all, leaving superfund sites in their wake.
Never forget the words of Thomas Jefferson, for they are just as true today as we he uttered them over 2 centuries ago: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."