I only use my Gmail for a spamdump and don't use it for anything else, so what EXACTLY am I missing here? In what way, shape, or form is a Google account supposed to "help" me in any way? I have ABP so frankly i don't care how accurate their ads are as i never see the damned things, don't use social crap (only use FB to log into sites i don't give a crap about) so no need got Google+, sow hat exactly is great and wonderful about a Google account? if I closed mine tomorrow i could just have a Hotmail spamdump just as easy, it doesn't really matter who gets all the website registration spam and I prfer yahoo for real mail, so what great thing am i missing out on?
As for TFA that's why I use Yahoo Search now, damned SEOs ruin Google search results playing buzzword bingo with keywords. I've found Yahoo Search (yes i know the backend is Bing but I hate the Bing UI, the Yahoo UI is nicer IMHO) actually lets me find what i want without SEO spam. Sure its classic functionality by obscurity in that the SEOs don't pound bing's engine like they do Google, but as long as it works i couldn't care less.
But if they didn't how could Sen Porkman and Congressman Kickbackus waste money like drunks in vegas and throw away billions on useless military shit? I mean look at the F35, stealth makes it both a lousy fighter (lack of engagement time due to no external fuel tanks and lack of firepower due to no missile hardpoints) AND a lousy bomber (both the fuel and hardpoints problems) so you'll end up with the F15 having to babysit the damned thing so it don't get its ass kicked, then of course there is the Ford carrier, we already have TEN to the next largest countries TWO but hey, who cares if we are ass deep in red ink,gotta show our military muscles right?
Frankly we could probably lower taxes AND pay for our social programs if we just got rid of really dumb shit. Get rid of the dumbass F35 for more F15s and add some stealth eagles if you want something "stealth", fix the damned border so we aren't wasting billions in law enforcement and security theater when a terrorist could literally drive a rider truck with a bomb right across the border and into any city they wanted, get rid of all the loopholes that let corps like GE pay ZERO taxes on billions in profits, tax the living shit out of the speculators that are constantly flipping stocks and instead reward actual long term investment so that companies can actually do things that will grow their businesses without fear that the speculators will tank their stock price, basically bring common fucking sense back into the system because lord knows we are severely lacking in it ATM.
I truly believe that even though I am atheist that there are a handful of companies that are truly evil. That they are run by those that take sick delight in causing real suffering and misery upon their fellow human beings, your Goldman Sachs, your Halliburton, your Monsanto, companies that if they could increase their profits 15% by throwing live babies in a meat grinder they would. I don't see how anyone can not believe in real evil when seeing these pigs living like kings off of the misery and suffering they have caused with zero remorse. Hell if I walked into any of those companies and saw actual demons in three piece suits going to meetings like Wolfram & hart frankly I wouldn't even be surprised, these companies do nothing but profit from suffering.
But you seem to forget we had the draft for ages and the rich simply either went to college or some reserve unit in some cushy location like Dubya in Alabama. The 1% may cause the misery but they aren't about to let their delicate selves get dirty like the peasants. look how many chickenhawks are pushing for a war with Iran, notice how none of their kids are in harm's way?
Sadly it WILL change, but only after you see the rich fleeing the country like the fall of Saigon after the whole thing falls apart. Even an 8th grader with 2 economics classes can see the situation is simply unsustainable, you have nearly half a billion people and all the factories were sent overseas. As Huckabee pointed out even our military can't function anymore without CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) and we make less tech now than we did in 1975! if you have a strong stomach you might want to look at these numbers and realize that they are over 2 years old and the downward trends they are listing have accelerated since that time. How anyone can believe that there is any other path in our future but an Arab Spring is beyond me, because the poor simply aren't gonna go crawl off into a corner and slowly starve like they did in the depression. Things are gonna get ugly, I believe after the student loan bubble bursts followed by the stock market bubble you'll see US money become practically worthless and at that time their little red VS blue distractions simply won't placate the masses anymore. If the conspiracy theorists are right they are building "FEMA camps" for just this eventuality, some nice out of the way concentration camps to put the teeming masses. But nobody is gonna put up with camps thanks to the Germans so when that happens will be when the shooting starts.
Well it all comes down to balancing price VS performance. i mean sure if you have Bill Gate's money the best thing to do would be to remove the wires completely and have supercooled lasers transmit the bits at the speed of light, which of course keeps you from losing bits as the atoms are kept from bouncing by the subfreezing temps and the energy of the laser keeps them tightly packed an on track, but sadly such perfection is simply out of the price range of all but the top 0.01% so we mere mortals have to make due with what we can get. But thanks to the great work of companies like Monster we can have nearly 80% of the sound quality of laser transmission at only 50% of the cost! they should probably get a Nobel prize for their humanitarian work, bringing such great sound to the masses and all.
Painful isn't it? I swear i have 12mbps cable and when I have to use IE on a customer's PC its like going back to dialup, its just sooooooo slow. As I found out with QTWeb it isn't IE's fault either, its as you say and so damned many third parties being called that just drag the whole thing down. That is why as a service to my customers the first thing I do is install a browser with ABP, first it was FF, now The Dragon, but in either case compared to running without adblock its like a breath of fresh air. I don't really worry about scripts though as I've found that NS tends to me more trouble than its worth, where you have to reload a page a dozen times trying to guess which script will let the content you want work whereas with Comodo SecureDNS built into the browser any nasty scripts get shut down by comodo and between that and ABP killing the ads i'm a happy camper.
Then you must be a baby then because in the 70s when it first came out that was the selling point, they even had ads for cable that would show how many hours of commercials you'd get in an average day while the cable user got to watch all these shows with NO ads. Then came the superstations with a few ads, then the niche channels like Ha! that had even MORE ads, then they all started putting logos on the scene and that was replaced by commercials running across the bottom and now its just adtastic.
What I don't get is why they gotta rehash the SAME ones over and over AND OVER like Joust, Pong, Frogger, Defender, when there was tons of cool and quirky ones that haven't be run so deep into the ground its right next to fucking dinosaur bones. like how about Vanguard? That was fun. or Pleiades? that was fun too, or Outlaw? And how about not just mining old arcade games, but what about old PC games as well? Its not like mobile phones don't have more than enough juice now to run the graphics in something like Grim Fandango or Redneck Rampage.
I'm just so damned sick of them just creating this rehashed crap strictly for some sense of nostalgia that is long gone as anybody that played any of the originals are probably just as damned sick as i am of these rehashes. Don't just give us the same crap, hell how about Ladybug? Or anybody remember the rollerball football game with the Xs and Os for players? that was a blast. I mean seriously is anybody really want Pong rehash number 328?
Dude watch this movie review to get a taste of the future. yes its a bad movie but that's not the point, the point is its pretty much a 2 and a half hour commercial with a plot loosely woven around it. the main character uses a VIAO laptop and desktop while talking on his Sony phone and carries his Sony MP3 player while going on a Royal Caribbean Cruise (complete with long pan shot to show off the boat) while drinking his Pepto Bismal while talking about the Dunkin Donuts account. We're not just talking product placement here friend, we are talking about full blown commercials woven into the movie so you are bombarded with what is obviously product shilling.
Riiight, because all those CEOs are gonna give up their coke and hooker bonuses so they don't have to stick it to the consumer...oh wait, that's not what they do, they simply jack up the price! I hate to break the news to ya sparky but even in areas where there is supposedly competition we have seen what happens is companies simply collude to raise prices together. Every time the government tries to stick it to a corp thanks to globalism if they don't raise prices they simply move but there is no way in hell they are gonna just eat the cost as that would cut into profits and with Wall Street being Vegas with nicer clothes if you do that then your stock takes a nosedive.
Whether you like it or not any gouging of the corps just ends up being dumped on the back of the poor consumer. Hell in my own area the working poor simply can't even have Internet as the cableco and teleco have been matching each others price raises one for one so now the cheapest usable Internet (I don't consider a WISP that offers 512Kb down with towers that go down for days at a time really usable and even that is $60 a month and a $125 hookup fee) is $75 a month and that is if you can even get it as even though its a college town and the city has grown by over a third neither the cableco nor the teleco have moved a single inch as far as coverage in over a decade.
This is why we need to nationalize the lines and open them up to REAL competition as what we have here in the states now is a bad joke unless you live in one of the megacities. We already paid 200 billion to have the nation wired for high speed and all we got in return is a Goatse from the corps so we should demand they pay the money back with interest in 90 days or we take the lines. if they want a monopoly? We'll give them a decade on every house they run FTTH, 25 if those homes previously had no service. Because the whole "greed is good" mantra that has infected this country like a cancer has killed any chance of getting anything vital like nationwide broadband done by private corps, hell they don't even upgrade their own systems and instead simply slap caps and other crap on instead of increasing capacity.
While I haven't needed business cards in awhile (too overworked as it is) I always liked to use the little "mini-CD" business cards myself, because not only did folks remember them but at least then you could hand them something useful. The ones for the last band i was with had two tracks that didn't make it onto the album along with links to the website and for the shop it had AV and malware scanners that could be run from the disc along with a nice little launcher that gave the contact info as well as links to useful FOSS software like open office and Firefox. That way they at least got something useful out of the deal instead of just some card they'd toss or forget about.
Cute but this is a REALLY bad thing as if this gets out websites could use this to detect ABP and block content until you allow them to spam you with ads. Personally and considering how many pieces of malware comes from ads a website has to PROVE they are worthy of showing me ads before I allow them. If you wish to be given an ABP exception you should have to have an appeal on your site where you explain what makes your advertising trustworthy, explain what ads are and are not allowed and if you state a good case i'll be happy to add an exception and i'm sure many others will as well.
Lets face it guys, we really wouldn't need extensions like ABP if the ad companies hadn't turned into giant douchebags. can't infect a system with a plain text ad, but the companies wanted more "attention grabbing" ads so we have what we have now where you pretty much HAVE to use an adblocker just to surf the web with your sanity intact. Try spending an hour surfing the web with a browser with ZERO adblocking like QTWeb portable and see just how bad its gotten, its just amazing how much shit they throw up on the screen nowadays. We've ended up in a war with the advertisers who want to snatch your sound and wave their dicks in your face and guys like in TFA showing sites how to make sure you get Gostse'd by the advertisers is SO not good.
That is why you should use glass that is hand rolled in an oxygen free environment by Brazilian women (Cuban women are best of course, as the cigar rolling experience gives them a more even pressure but the stupid embargo keeps us from having truly perfect cables) and then throw them away twice a year. You see the problem with the sapphire is you aren't taking into account the atomic decay which will slowly but surely cause atomic gaps in the crystal structure and those gaps work like microscopic potholes for the bits to fall in.
Then of course there is the other gotcha nobody thinks about...electricity! The best electricity comes from a purified oxygen free silver line run straight off the nearest nuclear plant which ideally should be less than 1 mile away, the closer the better of course, but that isn't practical for most as there are only so many homes next to nuclear plants so in a pinch a Monster brand generator running pure ethanol with a very short pure silver line running into a bank of silver zinc batteries (make sure you get 99.9% pure on both the silver AND the zinc though, some unscrupulous companies will skimp on the quality of the zinc) will keep the electrons from sagging so that they will have the purest amperage when feeding your bits down the optical line.
All I know is my grandma had precog three times in her life. the first time she begged my mom not to go riding with these other kids as something bad would happen, she and the other kids blew her off and an hour later the car was nearly cut in half when a drunk slammed them into a semi. luckily nobody died but the injuries were severe and they spent a good 6 months in the hospital. 6 years later again she begs them not to go, 3 of them including my mom refuse to go and the car they were supposed to be in blew a tire going around a steep curve, 3 dead and 1 mangled including the driver decapitated and finally the last time it happened she called my cousin's mom and begged her not to let her son out which by that time everyone had heard what happened when she said "don't go" so naturally she told her son he wasn't going anywhere and why but Mike thought she was full of shit and snuck out with his buddies to go on a beer run. They were missing for 4 days before someone finally found the wreck, they had been using a seldom traveled on back road they weren't real familiar with and missed a curve. the driver was cut in half, the guy in the back seat was throw so hard against the ceiling he snapped his neck, the guy in the front passenger had his left arm sliced off below the elbow and had bled to death trying to crawl up the embankment and finally my cousin was thrown through the window and pinned under the front of the car where the pressure against his lower abdomen was so great his kidneys and lower intestines basically died for lack of blood, he lived 3 days before finally succumbing to organ failure.
So all I know is if one of the females in my family (it was always the females that got "those feelings" never the males) called and said "I have a bad feeling, you shouldn't go out" my ass is staying parked friend.
Meh the future is gonna be embedded ads that you simply can't escape. You'll see the characters drinking Coke while using their iPhone and driving their Ford Explorer to the Taco Bell. As for cable doing this if the other cablecos are like mine they pretty much have you over a barrel anyway so its not like there is anything you can do about it. Between the major networks having their shows in Windows 7 Media Center (which I'm sure MSFT paid a pretty penny for) and Hulu I haven't even bothered to hook my basic cable up to my PC yet i'm still paying for the damned thing because they have it priced in their contracts so you get screwed if you don't take the crap.
So in the end it doesn't matter if they stick in more commercials (remember when the whole selling point of cable was commercial free TV?) or jack the price or whatever, because you'll take it simply because you got no choice. in my area its 12Mbps cable with bundling bullshit or 2Mbps DSL run by the evil empire known as AT&T, aka "STFU about the lousy quality bitch or we'll leave you on hold for another 4 hours" so it isn't like there is a damned thing I can do about any wallet raping anyway. man what I wouldn't give for real competition and just a big fat dumb pipe. While EU and Asia are getting these sweet huge pipes we are getting the short bus to the information superhighway. Pretty much MSFT has nailed what is the only "innovation" we have here in the USA anymore, all the new and exciting ways the megacorps can steal your wallets.
Tell me friend, do you blame Bush too? Because they are just too sides to the same coin ya know, in fact Obama has really not done much of anything but copy Bush. More wars, more spending, hell those are ALL pages out of Dubya's playbook. What is sad to me is that you simply can't see the truth, but let me leave you with some words of wisdom uttered by the late great Bill Hicks "I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling BOTH puppets!". As Jessie Ventura put it in "The Obama deception" which BTW if you haven't seen it you should, as well as the one before it on Bush, "What you have in politics now is just like pro wrestling, they make a bunch of noise to distract you , make believe like they hate each other, and then when the cameras aren't rolling they go have lunch together. Its all just a scam".
Uhhh...you DO realize that MSFT went into the black with the X360 more than 2 years ago, yes? And that other than advertising its been pretty much gravy ever since? or that MSFT is making a HELL of a lot more money off of the X360 than just the sales of consoles thanks to XBL and licenses? Finally I would point out that the Xbox is the one example i can think of where MSFT actually sat a goal and accomplished it with flying colors. what did Ballmer say with the release of the original Xbox? "We want the living room" and what did the X360 give him? It gave him the living room on a silver platter. It has tons of content on XBL, it is so simple to stream from the Win 7 desktop to the X360 frankly your grandma can do it, after one complete failure after another the Xbox was a shining example that they could actually accomplish a goal.
FYI here is a citation showing that the Xbox division saw a 1.32 BILLION dollar profit for 2011. if that is a failure I'd like two please if you don't mind.
Hey, I'll have you know girls LOVE the bass player buddy! Its not our fault them damned whiny guitarist and pretty boy singers keep getting in our way and hogging all the spotlight! Oh and ladies? just remember those whiny little guitarists are all rush rush rush and singers will fight you for the mirror, but we bass players are great with our fingers and now how to build a nice slow groove. Just sayin, something to think about. Just don't think about it around me as my Cherokee princess is liable to scalp my ass. Word of advice fellas, ain't nothing more scary than a NAP (Native American Princess) with a case of the green eyed monster, talk about feeling like Custer!
Oh and as for earplugs? can't wear 'em, they throw the tone off so damned bad it makes me literally trip over my own fingers. I really need the full range of the 5 string to be able to groove and with the earplugs you lose the low mids, it sounds like you are trying to play while you have water in your ears, so not fun. I've learned not to stand anywhere near the crash and to put my bass amp cocked off to the side instead of blasting at me and instead have a custom mix in a monitor so I can control the volume a little better.
Because developers suck? Sorry devs, but you do. You have been going "meh, throw more cycles and RAM at it" for years and years. Why in the fuck do even browsers have to suck so damned much memory? Hell everything now sucks so much more than they did in 06, that's why I have hung on so tightly to my copy of Office 2K, you can LO 3.x and Office 2K10 because they are both bloaty the whale compared to my beloved Office 2K which BTW STILL opens the latest Office files thanks to the compatibility pack. Hell the only thing that has kept any PC that isn't a quad from being buried under bloat is the rise of netbooks, those sub 2GHz dual cores with 5400RPM drives and for the most part limited RAM (I stuffed 8Gb of RAM into mine, overkill? Yes but it was on sale) means they can't just throw more cycles at it.
As for TFA frankly why SHOULD Microsoft come out with a new one now? their sales are still damned good, they are making a royal mint off of licensing and the XBL, the economies of scale have let them drop the prices to practically nothing for the units and refurbs are everywhere and practically given away they are so cheap, and finally its a dead economy. Frankly MSFT would have to be nuts to come out with a new one now while still riding so high in the saddle. if anyone needs to come out with a new one its Sony, its obvious the PS3 is the big loser this round and the cell was a bad idea, hell I'd argue it was the Saturn all over again, which for those that have forgotten their history the Saturn was the much more powerful machine on paper too but it was a royal bitch to program for and keep its multiple chips fed, sound familiar?
I just have to wonder if Sony won't go the way of Sega. they have been bleeding money for years, the Vita, with its Vita cards and Vita memory and Vita connectors is precisely the WRONG product to come out with when everyone and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy has pads and cell phones, and the costs to develop a next gen console is frankly insane. Finally with IBM no longer working on new cell chips they are stuck on dead end tech whereas MSFT can just slap a bigger and faster PPC into theirs and still have backwards compatibility which is another area that hurt Sony this round. While i really hope they stay in the game as I'm a BIG believer in competition being the best thing for a market I just don't see how Sony can continue to just hemorrhage money like that. Maybe they should take a page from Valve who has been hinting they might release a Steam console? Sony could save a ton by going COTS and they could just slap say an AMD 8 core with an AMD GPU and have a pretty powerful console that will have the economies of scale already since AMD will be having CPUs and GPUs cranked out for the PC market.
Well I'd say for free AV both it and Comodo IS are very very good, although Comodo IS is free for BOTH home and business use so if you are installing on a business machine and don't want to run afoul of the license use Comodo, otherwise its a taste thing. Both have excellent sandboxing which REALLY helps with the clueless users and combined with win 7 and Comodo Dragon makes for a pretty damned hard to infect system.
Now watch those that have convinced themselves i must be an "M$ Ninja!" have their heads completely screwed...MSE sucks. Pretty much the only thing its really good for is geeks that are following best practices and really only want something light they can use to scan downloaded files with and that's about it. Since I had some time to kill a few months back and some offlease machines i was gonna have to wipe anyway i decided to have my own little AV shootout, with a clean install of WinXP running as admin (wanted to test the AV and not the OS) and tried MSE, Avast, and Comodo. While both Avast and Comodo actually stopped infected topsites from loading MSE? Really didn't care, hell it let any site with any old crap just run, no problem. Now when it came to catching infected downloaded files? all three were equal, but when it came to stopping drivebys MSE never once threw up a single red flag. After running a bunch of different crapsites and topsites and pretty much clicking all over the place I booted into a WinXp LiveCD and used it to run several scans, nothing was found on the Avast and Comodo runs but it detected a handful of trojan downloaders on the MSE run. Now I didn't try rebooting to see if those trojans were actually running on the system or if MSE had just let them be dumped into the temp folders but frankly the fact that MSE let them get that far at all really didn't give me the warm fuzzys.
So if you know what you are doing and are observing best practices? well MSE is fine in that case, i use it myself on my gamer machine. But if there is anybody that is gonna be using the machine who may not think before clicking, or simply isn't very knowledgeable about protecting yourself on the web? Well then either Avast or Comodo IS are both really good choices. Again when it came to the other metrics like RAM, CPU, etc both Comodo and Avast were pretty close to one another so its more of a taste thing as both did really well. But its nice to see Avast looking out for its users, good job Avast.
I'm sorry friend, but you are only getting half the sound because you only have it half right. you see you are forgetting about the bits man, its ALL about the bits which is why you need to have full optical everything and only buy Monster cables because every millimeter that the music has to travel on them crappy copper wires its losing bits to friction, so even though your FLAC has all the bits on the drive you are losing bits in the playing!
I think what audiophiles like TFA just don't seem to get is exactly that, the crap speakers we've been using since the turn of the last century. VERY few people have systems that would even qualify as low end audiophile, most are frankly just barely above crap if not crap. My home system is a 1980s cheap Korean home stereo with a couple of 10 inchers, does anyone REALLY think I'm gonna miss something by not using FLAC? or on the shitty earbuds on my MP3 player or that $30 2.1 system I use at work?
Then there is the other elephant in the room, how so many of us have listened at ear bleeding levels and gone to rock concerts and frankly just don't have that great a range left anyway. I've been playing bass for 30+ years now, guess where they always stick the bass player? Right next to the crash. Between that and my love of powerful bass amps i doubt i could hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 if you put a gun to my head.
Oh but I think you're wrong about FLAC because for 99.99% of the users out there MP3 is "good enough" and the whole point when you give away songs is that you want them HEARD and most people don't know WTF FLAC is or what it will play in, but MP3 is universal, it'll play in anything from that $10 thumbstick MP3 player at the checkout of the Walgreen's to the most expensive audio decks. if folks want better they are welcome to buy my CD, at $10 for 14 songs its not like we gouge on the things.
Insightful, really? Might as well have just posted 'Use Linux!" as that would have gotten a +5 I'm sure for the fanboi perception bubbles we have here. Hell i don't even own a console but how can anybody say the consoles are "going to be obsolete and replaced by some other POS the year after" when if anything its the VERY LONG LIFE of the current gen that has held back PC gaming? Not that I can blame Sony and MSFT as we ARE in a recession after all and MSFT is riding high this round so why should they rush? Plenty of people seem to be happy with their system, sales are good, if it ain't broke.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but when i look at games like Just Cause II and the Bioshock series and the FEAR series and HL 2 games I have to wonder if we are reaching the point that games like PCs are "good enough" and are becoming a case of diminishing returns on graphics. I mean there is only so much bling bling bullshit you can look at while dodging hellfire raining down on your ass, I know that in the above games never did i have an instance where the graphics took me out of the game and ultimately isn't that what matters? that there is enough suspension of disbelief we can just enjoy the experience? Frankly how many games have you played lately that THIS description would fit "Killer graphics but sucky game"? Personally I'd take Far Cry I or even No One Lives Forever II or Freelancer level graphics for a kick ass story, characters I care about, a good weapon system, great balance, and levels that are interesting. In a way i hope the X360 and PS3 last another couple of years as maybe, just maybe, if the devs can't just keep piling on bling they'll have to spend those resources elsewhere like on what i just mentioned. One can hope.
So if I submit a patch and they don't jump to it fast enough to suit me i can then pwn them consequence free? Don't think that is how it works friend. I would link to the former Google employee's "Why i quit Google" over on OSNews but since they guy took a job at MSFT nobody would read it anyway, but it is looking more and more like what he posted was correct. he said in the beginning they were an engineering company that made cool stuff that you could then sell ads on, he likened it to making a top rated show which then lets you make good money off its advertising because it is a quality show. but according to him the whole mood at google changed after FB showed up and started cutting into their business, suddenly all the cool engineering stuff was dropped unless it had the magical word "social" attached and it went from "How can we make this cool thing?" to "How can we monetize this and/or tie this in with our social schema". He said after trying to get his kid to use Google+ she finally told him "Its not about a product, its about people and the people just aren't there" and that was the cluebat that smacked him that the current direction was full of fail.
Sadly we have seen this happen time and time again, where a company gets tunnel vision and all the things that made them great go right down the shitter for this all consuming obsession with some market they can't seem to penetrate. We are seeing the same thing with MSFT at this very moment with mobile, as MSFT literally wastes billions of dollars chasing a market where none of their strengths come into play and its obvious they are going nowhere. Expect to see more dirty plays like this from Google as they get more and more desperate to get a footing into the social market because they feel threatened by FB just as MSFT feels threatened by Apple. Again sad to see, both companies were great in the niches they had but instead of focusing on what made them great, Google on the cloud and making cool ways to access it and MSFT on the desktop and business server roles instead they will alienate customers chasing a market that simply doesn't fit. i wonder how many have walked away from Google after the privacy changes? Bet its not a trivial number as there are a lot of geeks that care about privacy and influence those around them, just as i saw google recommend years ago so too am i seeing sites like duckduckgo recommended now. again its a shame but once a company develops tunnel vision it seems like its damned near impossible to get them to just stop.
Actually a friend in the sate crime lab that works the CP section says that a good 85%-95% of the ones they see are what he calls "Social retards" and are about as non dangerous as one could possibly get yet they are the ones given the most time, even over those that have actually raped children! he said the signs are obvious, most have little to no real contact with the outside world, no friends, no sense of what is appropriate and what isn't (one even had a CP screensaver on his fricking laptop for the love of Pete) and most have never even had a conversation with a woman much less actually had sex. he said it becomes an addiction, their taste becomes more twisted as they become more isolated, until in the end they are literally consuming Gbs a day of CP just to even get it up. He said with therapy these guys could be treated and are in fact no danger to society, but because they all end up having a "collector impulse" as he calls it they get found with spindles filled with nothing but beast and CP porn so they get on average 60 years.
So if we were to do as he suggests and put those 85%+ in therapy he and his team could be freed up to go after actual child rapists, but because they often cross state lines prosecutors don't want them wasting time chasing them as they can't get credit for the bust and use it to advance their careers. yet again another case of just doing 'something" that doesn't work or is even productive, all for the sake of politics. Frankly the whole system is so diseased and sick we need to throw it out and start over, its just to self serving, corrupted, and foul.
This is why capitalism is ultimately doomed, just as communism and fascism and all the other isms failed. The simple fact is that thanks to technology the people here right now, much less those just being born? Well about 40% of those are simply not needed, their labor is no longer required thanks to automation and technology. We are playing IQ musical chairs when the average IQ is barely 100 and more and more simply won't get a seat.
In the old days one who couldn't pass college could work in a factory and feed themselves and their families but not anymore, those jobs are gone to Asia where the corps can pollute to their evil heart's content. and soon even college won't help, I was talking to the dean of our local college and he figures about 35% simply won't find a job in their field once they graduate, no matter what field they choose. there is simply more labor than is required and thanks to H1-Bs the market is even more skewed thanks to stuffing the channel with even more workers. Hell I'd argue about 40% of the low end jobs in the USA are being subsidized by the American taxpayer as "make work" for example if you go to work at Walmart one of the first training videos you will be shown is how to apply for food stamps! Now how many think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they wouldn't automate many of those jobs, nothing about stocking or scanning products that couldn't be done by machine. Same thing with fast food, its all a limited choice set anyway and that kind of assembly line work, using pre measured ingrediants in a line, hell you'd probably cut down on waste and screwups by just making the entire thing automated. you'd just slap the money or CC in the machine, push a couple of buttons and the food would pop out of a slot.
So we simply have to face the facts that capitalism is coming to an end and look ahead to a replacement, otherwise that end could be quite violent. Much of what we saw during the Arab Springs could easily happen here as we have "jobless recoveries" which is just a code word for "The rich are living like Gods while everyone else suffers" which of course breeds hatred and contempt. We simply have to accept the very basis of the entire system, trading labor for capital, simply no longer works. What do you do with those millions upon millions who simply don't have the IQ required to become doctors and lawyers? hell 25% of lawyers graduating can't find jobs as we have more lawyers than jobs now. In the end we simply have to face the fact that we are quickly approaching half a billion people in the USA and with just current technology we could get by just fine on 100 million, maybe less. What do you do with the other 400 million? without consumers our service economy collapses, do you pay them to just buy shit and watch TV? Do you make up "make work" jobs where they do some pointless task simply so they can get a check? Even in IT we are seeing the coming of smart gear that can take care of itself and call a parts monkey when something breaks, construction they are already testing a road building machine that uses GPS, no real humans needed there, and houses can be prefabricated.
So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed? we need to think of something or its gonna get nasty. The minorities are already looking at 25%+ unemployment and the whites won't be far behind, there are simply too many people and not enough work. What do you do? put them in camps? False flag an attack that can wipe out large numbers of them? Just leave them in the street to starve or create huge crime zones? gotta do something as time is running out folks, the tech just keeps getting smart while the average person stays the same or even gets dumber.
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I only use my Gmail for a spamdump and don't use it for anything else, so what EXACTLY am I missing here? In what way, shape, or form is a Google account supposed to "help" me in any way? I have ABP so frankly i don't care how accurate their ads are as i never see the damned things, don't use social crap (only use FB to log into sites i don't give a crap about) so no need got Google+, sow hat exactly is great and wonderful about a Google account? if I closed mine tomorrow i could just have a Hotmail spamdump just as easy, it doesn't really matter who gets all the website registration spam and I prfer yahoo for real mail, so what great thing am i missing out on?
As for TFA that's why I use Yahoo Search now, damned SEOs ruin Google search results playing buzzword bingo with keywords. I've found Yahoo Search (yes i know the backend is Bing but I hate the Bing UI, the Yahoo UI is nicer IMHO) actually lets me find what i want without SEO spam. Sure its classic functionality by obscurity in that the SEOs don't pound bing's engine like they do Google, but as long as it works i couldn't care less.
But if they didn't how could Sen Porkman and Congressman Kickbackus waste money like drunks in vegas and throw away billions on useless military shit? I mean look at the F35, stealth makes it both a lousy fighter (lack of engagement time due to no external fuel tanks and lack of firepower due to no missile hardpoints) AND a lousy bomber (both the fuel and hardpoints problems) so you'll end up with the F15 having to babysit the damned thing so it don't get its ass kicked, then of course there is the Ford carrier, we already have TEN to the next largest countries TWO but hey, who cares if we are ass deep in red ink,gotta show our military muscles right?
Frankly we could probably lower taxes AND pay for our social programs if we just got rid of really dumb shit. Get rid of the dumbass F35 for more F15s and add some stealth eagles if you want something "stealth", fix the damned border so we aren't wasting billions in law enforcement and security theater when a terrorist could literally drive a rider truck with a bomb right across the border and into any city they wanted, get rid of all the loopholes that let corps like GE pay ZERO taxes on billions in profits, tax the living shit out of the speculators that are constantly flipping stocks and instead reward actual long term investment so that companies can actually do things that will grow their businesses without fear that the speculators will tank their stock price, basically bring common fucking sense back into the system because lord knows we are severely lacking in it ATM.
I truly believe that even though I am atheist that there are a handful of companies that are truly evil. That they are run by those that take sick delight in causing real suffering and misery upon their fellow human beings, your Goldman Sachs, your Halliburton, your Monsanto, companies that if they could increase their profits 15% by throwing live babies in a meat grinder they would. I don't see how anyone can not believe in real evil when seeing these pigs living like kings off of the misery and suffering they have caused with zero remorse. Hell if I walked into any of those companies and saw actual demons in three piece suits going to meetings like Wolfram & hart frankly I wouldn't even be surprised, these companies do nothing but profit from suffering.
But you seem to forget we had the draft for ages and the rich simply either went to college or some reserve unit in some cushy location like Dubya in Alabama. The 1% may cause the misery but they aren't about to let their delicate selves get dirty like the peasants. look how many chickenhawks are pushing for a war with Iran, notice how none of their kids are in harm's way?
Sadly it WILL change, but only after you see the rich fleeing the country like the fall of Saigon after the whole thing falls apart. Even an 8th grader with 2 economics classes can see the situation is simply unsustainable, you have nearly half a billion people and all the factories were sent overseas. As Huckabee pointed out even our military can't function anymore without CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) and we make less tech now than we did in 1975! if you have a strong stomach you might want to look at these numbers and realize that they are over 2 years old and the downward trends they are listing have accelerated since that time. How anyone can believe that there is any other path in our future but an Arab Spring is beyond me, because the poor simply aren't gonna go crawl off into a corner and slowly starve like they did in the depression. Things are gonna get ugly, I believe after the student loan bubble bursts followed by the stock market bubble you'll see US money become practically worthless and at that time their little red VS blue distractions simply won't placate the masses anymore. If the conspiracy theorists are right they are building "FEMA camps" for just this eventuality, some nice out of the way concentration camps to put the teeming masses. But nobody is gonna put up with camps thanks to the Germans so when that happens will be when the shooting starts.
Well it all comes down to balancing price VS performance. i mean sure if you have Bill Gate's money the best thing to do would be to remove the wires completely and have supercooled lasers transmit the bits at the speed of light, which of course keeps you from losing bits as the atoms are kept from bouncing by the subfreezing temps and the energy of the laser keeps them tightly packed an on track, but sadly such perfection is simply out of the price range of all but the top 0.01% so we mere mortals have to make due with what we can get. But thanks to the great work of companies like Monster we can have nearly 80% of the sound quality of laser transmission at only 50% of the cost! they should probably get a Nobel prize for their humanitarian work, bringing such great sound to the masses and all.
Painful isn't it? I swear i have 12mbps cable and when I have to use IE on a customer's PC its like going back to dialup, its just sooooooo slow. As I found out with QTWeb it isn't IE's fault either, its as you say and so damned many third parties being called that just drag the whole thing down. That is why as a service to my customers the first thing I do is install a browser with ABP, first it was FF, now The Dragon, but in either case compared to running without adblock its like a breath of fresh air. I don't really worry about scripts though as I've found that NS tends to me more trouble than its worth, where you have to reload a page a dozen times trying to guess which script will let the content you want work whereas with Comodo SecureDNS built into the browser any nasty scripts get shut down by comodo and between that and ABP killing the ads i'm a happy camper.
Then you must be a baby then because in the 70s when it first came out that was the selling point, they even had ads for cable that would show how many hours of commercials you'd get in an average day while the cable user got to watch all these shows with NO ads. Then came the superstations with a few ads, then the niche channels like Ha! that had even MORE ads, then they all started putting logos on the scene and that was replaced by commercials running across the bottom and now its just adtastic.
What I don't get is why they gotta rehash the SAME ones over and over AND OVER like Joust, Pong, Frogger, Defender, when there was tons of cool and quirky ones that haven't be run so deep into the ground its right next to fucking dinosaur bones. like how about Vanguard? That was fun. or Pleiades? that was fun too, or Outlaw? And how about not just mining old arcade games, but what about old PC games as well? Its not like mobile phones don't have more than enough juice now to run the graphics in something like Grim Fandango or Redneck Rampage.
I'm just so damned sick of them just creating this rehashed crap strictly for some sense of nostalgia that is long gone as anybody that played any of the originals are probably just as damned sick as i am of these rehashes. Don't just give us the same crap, hell how about Ladybug? Or anybody remember the rollerball football game with the Xs and Os for players? that was a blast. I mean seriously is anybody really want Pong rehash number 328?
Dude watch this movie review to get a taste of the future. yes its a bad movie but that's not the point, the point is its pretty much a 2 and a half hour commercial with a plot loosely woven around it. the main character uses a VIAO laptop and desktop while talking on his Sony phone and carries his Sony MP3 player while going on a Royal Caribbean Cruise (complete with long pan shot to show off the boat) while drinking his Pepto Bismal while talking about the Dunkin Donuts account. We're not just talking product placement here friend, we are talking about full blown commercials woven into the movie so you are bombarded with what is obviously product shilling.
Riiight, because all those CEOs are gonna give up their coke and hooker bonuses so they don't have to stick it to the consumer...oh wait, that's not what they do, they simply jack up the price! I hate to break the news to ya sparky but even in areas where there is supposedly competition we have seen what happens is companies simply collude to raise prices together. Every time the government tries to stick it to a corp thanks to globalism if they don't raise prices they simply move but there is no way in hell they are gonna just eat the cost as that would cut into profits and with Wall Street being Vegas with nicer clothes if you do that then your stock takes a nosedive.
Whether you like it or not any gouging of the corps just ends up being dumped on the back of the poor consumer. Hell in my own area the working poor simply can't even have Internet as the cableco and teleco have been matching each others price raises one for one so now the cheapest usable Internet (I don't consider a WISP that offers 512Kb down with towers that go down for days at a time really usable and even that is $60 a month and a $125 hookup fee) is $75 a month and that is if you can even get it as even though its a college town and the city has grown by over a third neither the cableco nor the teleco have moved a single inch as far as coverage in over a decade.
This is why we need to nationalize the lines and open them up to REAL competition as what we have here in the states now is a bad joke unless you live in one of the megacities. We already paid 200 billion to have the nation wired for high speed and all we got in return is a Goatse from the corps so we should demand they pay the money back with interest in 90 days or we take the lines. if they want a monopoly? We'll give them a decade on every house they run FTTH, 25 if those homes previously had no service. Because the whole "greed is good" mantra that has infected this country like a cancer has killed any chance of getting anything vital like nationwide broadband done by private corps, hell they don't even upgrade their own systems and instead simply slap caps and other crap on instead of increasing capacity.
While I haven't needed business cards in awhile (too overworked as it is) I always liked to use the little "mini-CD" business cards myself, because not only did folks remember them but at least then you could hand them something useful. The ones for the last band i was with had two tracks that didn't make it onto the album along with links to the website and for the shop it had AV and malware scanners that could be run from the disc along with a nice little launcher that gave the contact info as well as links to useful FOSS software like open office and Firefox. That way they at least got something useful out of the deal instead of just some card they'd toss or forget about.
Cute but this is a REALLY bad thing as if this gets out websites could use this to detect ABP and block content until you allow them to spam you with ads. Personally and considering how many pieces of malware comes from ads a website has to PROVE they are worthy of showing me ads before I allow them. If you wish to be given an ABP exception you should have to have an appeal on your site where you explain what makes your advertising trustworthy, explain what ads are and are not allowed and if you state a good case i'll be happy to add an exception and i'm sure many others will as well.
Lets face it guys, we really wouldn't need extensions like ABP if the ad companies hadn't turned into giant douchebags. can't infect a system with a plain text ad, but the companies wanted more "attention grabbing" ads so we have what we have now where you pretty much HAVE to use an adblocker just to surf the web with your sanity intact. Try spending an hour surfing the web with a browser with ZERO adblocking like QTWeb portable and see just how bad its gotten, its just amazing how much shit they throw up on the screen nowadays. We've ended up in a war with the advertisers who want to snatch your sound and wave their dicks in your face and guys like in TFA showing sites how to make sure you get Gostse'd by the advertisers is SO not good.
That is why you should use glass that is hand rolled in an oxygen free environment by Brazilian women (Cuban women are best of course, as the cigar rolling experience gives them a more even pressure but the stupid embargo keeps us from having truly perfect cables) and then throw them away twice a year. You see the problem with the sapphire is you aren't taking into account the atomic decay which will slowly but surely cause atomic gaps in the crystal structure and those gaps work like microscopic potholes for the bits to fall in.
Then of course there is the other gotcha nobody thinks about...electricity! The best electricity comes from a purified oxygen free silver line run straight off the nearest nuclear plant which ideally should be less than 1 mile away, the closer the better of course, but that isn't practical for most as there are only so many homes next to nuclear plants so in a pinch a Monster brand generator running pure ethanol with a very short pure silver line running into a bank of silver zinc batteries (make sure you get 99.9% pure on both the silver AND the zinc though, some unscrupulous companies will skimp on the quality of the zinc) will keep the electrons from sagging so that they will have the purest amperage when feeding your bits down the optical line.
All I know is my grandma had precog three times in her life. the first time she begged my mom not to go riding with these other kids as something bad would happen, she and the other kids blew her off and an hour later the car was nearly cut in half when a drunk slammed them into a semi. luckily nobody died but the injuries were severe and they spent a good 6 months in the hospital. 6 years later again she begs them not to go, 3 of them including my mom refuse to go and the car they were supposed to be in blew a tire going around a steep curve, 3 dead and 1 mangled including the driver decapitated and finally the last time it happened she called my cousin's mom and begged her not to let her son out which by that time everyone had heard what happened when she said "don't go" so naturally she told her son he wasn't going anywhere and why but Mike thought she was full of shit and snuck out with his buddies to go on a beer run. They were missing for 4 days before someone finally found the wreck, they had been using a seldom traveled on back road they weren't real familiar with and missed a curve. the driver was cut in half, the guy in the back seat was throw so hard against the ceiling he snapped his neck, the guy in the front passenger had his left arm sliced off below the elbow and had bled to death trying to crawl up the embankment and finally my cousin was thrown through the window and pinned under the front of the car where the pressure against his lower abdomen was so great his kidneys and lower intestines basically died for lack of blood, he lived 3 days before finally succumbing to organ failure.
So all I know is if one of the females in my family (it was always the females that got "those feelings" never the males) called and said "I have a bad feeling, you shouldn't go out" my ass is staying parked friend.
Meh the future is gonna be embedded ads that you simply can't escape. You'll see the characters drinking Coke while using their iPhone and driving their Ford Explorer to the Taco Bell. As for cable doing this if the other cablecos are like mine they pretty much have you over a barrel anyway so its not like there is anything you can do about it. Between the major networks having their shows in Windows 7 Media Center (which I'm sure MSFT paid a pretty penny for) and Hulu I haven't even bothered to hook my basic cable up to my PC yet i'm still paying for the damned thing because they have it priced in their contracts so you get screwed if you don't take the crap.
So in the end it doesn't matter if they stick in more commercials (remember when the whole selling point of cable was commercial free TV?) or jack the price or whatever, because you'll take it simply because you got no choice. in my area its 12Mbps cable with bundling bullshit or 2Mbps DSL run by the evil empire known as AT&T, aka "STFU about the lousy quality bitch or we'll leave you on hold for another 4 hours" so it isn't like there is a damned thing I can do about any wallet raping anyway. man what I wouldn't give for real competition and just a big fat dumb pipe. While EU and Asia are getting these sweet huge pipes we are getting the short bus to the information superhighway. Pretty much MSFT has nailed what is the only "innovation" we have here in the USA anymore, all the new and exciting ways the megacorps can steal your wallets.
Tell me friend, do you blame Bush too? Because they are just too sides to the same coin ya know, in fact Obama has really not done much of anything but copy Bush. More wars, more spending, hell those are ALL pages out of Dubya's playbook. What is sad to me is that you simply can't see the truth, but let me leave you with some words of wisdom uttered by the late great Bill Hicks "I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart....hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling BOTH puppets!". As Jessie Ventura put it in "The Obama deception" which BTW if you haven't seen it you should, as well as the one before it on Bush, "What you have in politics now is just like pro wrestling, they make a bunch of noise to distract you , make believe like they hate each other, and then when the cameras aren't rolling they go have lunch together. Its all just a scam".
Uhhh...you DO realize that MSFT went into the black with the X360 more than 2 years ago, yes? And that other than advertising its been pretty much gravy ever since? or that MSFT is making a HELL of a lot more money off of the X360 than just the sales of consoles thanks to XBL and licenses? Finally I would point out that the Xbox is the one example i can think of where MSFT actually sat a goal and accomplished it with flying colors. what did Ballmer say with the release of the original Xbox? "We want the living room" and what did the X360 give him? It gave him the living room on a silver platter. It has tons of content on XBL, it is so simple to stream from the Win 7 desktop to the X360 frankly your grandma can do it, after one complete failure after another the Xbox was a shining example that they could actually accomplish a goal.
FYI here is a citation showing that the Xbox division saw a 1.32 BILLION dollar profit for 2011. if that is a failure I'd like two please if you don't mind.
Hey, I'll have you know girls LOVE the bass player buddy! Its not our fault them damned whiny guitarist and pretty boy singers keep getting in our way and hogging all the spotlight! Oh and ladies? just remember those whiny little guitarists are all rush rush rush and singers will fight you for the mirror, but we bass players are great with our fingers and now how to build a nice slow groove. Just sayin, something to think about. Just don't think about it around me as my Cherokee princess is liable to scalp my ass. Word of advice fellas, ain't nothing more scary than a NAP (Native American Princess) with a case of the green eyed monster, talk about feeling like Custer!
Oh and as for earplugs? can't wear 'em, they throw the tone off so damned bad it makes me literally trip over my own fingers. I really need the full range of the 5 string to be able to groove and with the earplugs you lose the low mids, it sounds like you are trying to play while you have water in your ears, so not fun. I've learned not to stand anywhere near the crash and to put my bass amp cocked off to the side instead of blasting at me and instead have a custom mix in a monitor so I can control the volume a little better.
Because developers suck? Sorry devs, but you do. You have been going "meh, throw more cycles and RAM at it" for years and years. Why in the fuck do even browsers have to suck so damned much memory? Hell everything now sucks so much more than they did in 06, that's why I have hung on so tightly to my copy of Office 2K, you can LO 3.x and Office 2K10 because they are both bloaty the whale compared to my beloved Office 2K which BTW STILL opens the latest Office files thanks to the compatibility pack. Hell the only thing that has kept any PC that isn't a quad from being buried under bloat is the rise of netbooks, those sub 2GHz dual cores with 5400RPM drives and for the most part limited RAM (I stuffed 8Gb of RAM into mine, overkill? Yes but it was on sale) means they can't just throw more cycles at it.
As for TFA frankly why SHOULD Microsoft come out with a new one now? their sales are still damned good, they are making a royal mint off of licensing and the XBL, the economies of scale have let them drop the prices to practically nothing for the units and refurbs are everywhere and practically given away they are so cheap, and finally its a dead economy. Frankly MSFT would have to be nuts to come out with a new one now while still riding so high in the saddle. if anyone needs to come out with a new one its Sony, its obvious the PS3 is the big loser this round and the cell was a bad idea, hell I'd argue it was the Saturn all over again, which for those that have forgotten their history the Saturn was the much more powerful machine on paper too but it was a royal bitch to program for and keep its multiple chips fed, sound familiar?
I just have to wonder if Sony won't go the way of Sega. they have been bleeding money for years, the Vita, with its Vita cards and Vita memory and Vita connectors is precisely the WRONG product to come out with when everyone and their cat and their cat's squeaky toy has pads and cell phones, and the costs to develop a next gen console is frankly insane. Finally with IBM no longer working on new cell chips they are stuck on dead end tech whereas MSFT can just slap a bigger and faster PPC into theirs and still have backwards compatibility which is another area that hurt Sony this round. While i really hope they stay in the game as I'm a BIG believer in competition being the best thing for a market I just don't see how Sony can continue to just hemorrhage money like that. Maybe they should take a page from Valve who has been hinting they might release a Steam console? Sony could save a ton by going COTS and they could just slap say an AMD 8 core with an AMD GPU and have a pretty powerful console that will have the economies of scale already since AMD will be having CPUs and GPUs cranked out for the PC market.
Well I'd say for free AV both it and Comodo IS are very very good, although Comodo IS is free for BOTH home and business use so if you are installing on a business machine and don't want to run afoul of the license use Comodo, otherwise its a taste thing. Both have excellent sandboxing which REALLY helps with the clueless users and combined with win 7 and Comodo Dragon makes for a pretty damned hard to infect system.
Now watch those that have convinced themselves i must be an "M$ Ninja!" have their heads completely screwed...MSE sucks. Pretty much the only thing its really good for is geeks that are following best practices and really only want something light they can use to scan downloaded files with and that's about it. Since I had some time to kill a few months back and some offlease machines i was gonna have to wipe anyway i decided to have my own little AV shootout, with a clean install of WinXP running as admin (wanted to test the AV and not the OS) and tried MSE, Avast, and Comodo. While both Avast and Comodo actually stopped infected topsites from loading MSE? Really didn't care, hell it let any site with any old crap just run, no problem. Now when it came to catching infected downloaded files? all three were equal, but when it came to stopping drivebys MSE never once threw up a single red flag. After running a bunch of different crapsites and topsites and pretty much clicking all over the place I booted into a WinXp LiveCD and used it to run several scans, nothing was found on the Avast and Comodo runs but it detected a handful of trojan downloaders on the MSE run. Now I didn't try rebooting to see if those trojans were actually running on the system or if MSE had just let them be dumped into the temp folders but frankly the fact that MSE let them get that far at all really didn't give me the warm fuzzys.
So if you know what you are doing and are observing best practices? well MSE is fine in that case, i use it myself on my gamer machine. But if there is anybody that is gonna be using the machine who may not think before clicking, or simply isn't very knowledgeable about protecting yourself on the web? Well then either Avast or Comodo IS are both really good choices. Again when it came to the other metrics like RAM, CPU, etc both Comodo and Avast were pretty close to one another so its more of a taste thing as both did really well. But its nice to see Avast looking out for its users, good job Avast.
I'm sorry friend, but you are only getting half the sound because you only have it half right. you see you are forgetting about the bits man, its ALL about the bits which is why you need to have full optical everything and only buy Monster cables because every millimeter that the music has to travel on them crappy copper wires its losing bits to friction, so even though your FLAC has all the bits on the drive you are losing bits in the playing!
I think what audiophiles like TFA just don't seem to get is exactly that, the crap speakers we've been using since the turn of the last century. VERY few people have systems that would even qualify as low end audiophile, most are frankly just barely above crap if not crap. My home system is a 1980s cheap Korean home stereo with a couple of 10 inchers, does anyone REALLY think I'm gonna miss something by not using FLAC? or on the shitty earbuds on my MP3 player or that $30 2.1 system I use at work?
Then there is the other elephant in the room, how so many of us have listened at ear bleeding levels and gone to rock concerts and frankly just don't have that great a range left anyway. I've been playing bass for 30+ years now, guess where they always stick the bass player? Right next to the crash. Between that and my love of powerful bass amps i doubt i could hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 if you put a gun to my head.
Oh but I think you're wrong about FLAC because for 99.99% of the users out there MP3 is "good enough" and the whole point when you give away songs is that you want them HEARD and most people don't know WTF FLAC is or what it will play in, but MP3 is universal, it'll play in anything from that $10 thumbstick MP3 player at the checkout of the Walgreen's to the most expensive audio decks. if folks want better they are welcome to buy my CD, at $10 for 14 songs its not like we gouge on the things.
Insightful, really? Might as well have just posted 'Use Linux!" as that would have gotten a +5 I'm sure for the fanboi perception bubbles we have here. Hell i don't even own a console but how can anybody say the consoles are "going to be obsolete and replaced by some other POS the year after" when if anything its the VERY LONG LIFE of the current gen that has held back PC gaming? Not that I can blame Sony and MSFT as we ARE in a recession after all and MSFT is riding high this round so why should they rush? Plenty of people seem to be happy with their system, sales are good, if it ain't broke.
I don't know, maybe its just me, but when i look at games like Just Cause II and the Bioshock series and the FEAR series and HL 2 games I have to wonder if we are reaching the point that games like PCs are "good enough" and are becoming a case of diminishing returns on graphics. I mean there is only so much bling bling bullshit you can look at while dodging hellfire raining down on your ass, I know that in the above games never did i have an instance where the graphics took me out of the game and ultimately isn't that what matters? that there is enough suspension of disbelief we can just enjoy the experience? Frankly how many games have you played lately that THIS description would fit "Killer graphics but sucky game"? Personally I'd take Far Cry I or even No One Lives Forever II or Freelancer level graphics for a kick ass story, characters I care about, a good weapon system, great balance, and levels that are interesting. In a way i hope the X360 and PS3 last another couple of years as maybe, just maybe, if the devs can't just keep piling on bling they'll have to spend those resources elsewhere like on what i just mentioned. One can hope.
So if I submit a patch and they don't jump to it fast enough to suit me i can then pwn them consequence free? Don't think that is how it works friend. I would link to the former Google employee's "Why i quit Google" over on OSNews but since they guy took a job at MSFT nobody would read it anyway, but it is looking more and more like what he posted was correct. he said in the beginning they were an engineering company that made cool stuff that you could then sell ads on, he likened it to making a top rated show which then lets you make good money off its advertising because it is a quality show. but according to him the whole mood at google changed after FB showed up and started cutting into their business, suddenly all the cool engineering stuff was dropped unless it had the magical word "social" attached and it went from "How can we make this cool thing?" to "How can we monetize this and/or tie this in with our social schema". He said after trying to get his kid to use Google+ she finally told him "Its not about a product, its about people and the people just aren't there" and that was the cluebat that smacked him that the current direction was full of fail.
Sadly we have seen this happen time and time again, where a company gets tunnel vision and all the things that made them great go right down the shitter for this all consuming obsession with some market they can't seem to penetrate. We are seeing the same thing with MSFT at this very moment with mobile, as MSFT literally wastes billions of dollars chasing a market where none of their strengths come into play and its obvious they are going nowhere. Expect to see more dirty plays like this from Google as they get more and more desperate to get a footing into the social market because they feel threatened by FB just as MSFT feels threatened by Apple. Again sad to see, both companies were great in the niches they had but instead of focusing on what made them great, Google on the cloud and making cool ways to access it and MSFT on the desktop and business server roles instead they will alienate customers chasing a market that simply doesn't fit. i wonder how many have walked away from Google after the privacy changes? Bet its not a trivial number as there are a lot of geeks that care about privacy and influence those around them, just as i saw google recommend years ago so too am i seeing sites like duckduckgo recommended now. again its a shame but once a company develops tunnel vision it seems like its damned near impossible to get them to just stop.
Actually a friend in the sate crime lab that works the CP section says that a good 85%-95% of the ones they see are what he calls "Social retards" and are about as non dangerous as one could possibly get yet they are the ones given the most time, even over those that have actually raped children! he said the signs are obvious, most have little to no real contact with the outside world, no friends, no sense of what is appropriate and what isn't (one even had a CP screensaver on his fricking laptop for the love of Pete) and most have never even had a conversation with a woman much less actually had sex. he said it becomes an addiction, their taste becomes more twisted as they become more isolated, until in the end they are literally consuming Gbs a day of CP just to even get it up. He said with therapy these guys could be treated and are in fact no danger to society, but because they all end up having a "collector impulse" as he calls it they get found with spindles filled with nothing but beast and CP porn so they get on average 60 years.
So if we were to do as he suggests and put those 85%+ in therapy he and his team could be freed up to go after actual child rapists, but because they often cross state lines prosecutors don't want them wasting time chasing them as they can't get credit for the bust and use it to advance their careers. yet again another case of just doing 'something" that doesn't work or is even productive, all for the sake of politics. Frankly the whole system is so diseased and sick we need to throw it out and start over, its just to self serving, corrupted, and foul.
This is why capitalism is ultimately doomed, just as communism and fascism and all the other isms failed. The simple fact is that thanks to technology the people here right now, much less those just being born? Well about 40% of those are simply not needed, their labor is no longer required thanks to automation and technology. We are playing IQ musical chairs when the average IQ is barely 100 and more and more simply won't get a seat.
In the old days one who couldn't pass college could work in a factory and feed themselves and their families but not anymore, those jobs are gone to Asia where the corps can pollute to their evil heart's content. and soon even college won't help, I was talking to the dean of our local college and he figures about 35% simply won't find a job in their field once they graduate, no matter what field they choose. there is simply more labor than is required and thanks to H1-Bs the market is even more skewed thanks to stuffing the channel with even more workers. Hell I'd argue about 40% of the low end jobs in the USA are being subsidized by the American taxpayer as "make work" for example if you go to work at Walmart one of the first training videos you will be shown is how to apply for food stamps! Now how many think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they wouldn't automate many of those jobs, nothing about stocking or scanning products that couldn't be done by machine. Same thing with fast food, its all a limited choice set anyway and that kind of assembly line work, using pre measured ingrediants in a line, hell you'd probably cut down on waste and screwups by just making the entire thing automated. you'd just slap the money or CC in the machine, push a couple of buttons and the food would pop out of a slot.
So we simply have to face the facts that capitalism is coming to an end and look ahead to a replacement, otherwise that end could be quite violent. Much of what we saw during the Arab Springs could easily happen here as we have "jobless recoveries" which is just a code word for "The rich are living like Gods while everyone else suffers" which of course breeds hatred and contempt. We simply have to accept the very basis of the entire system, trading labor for capital, simply no longer works. What do you do with those millions upon millions who simply don't have the IQ required to become doctors and lawyers? hell 25% of lawyers graduating can't find jobs as we have more lawyers than jobs now. In the end we simply have to face the fact that we are quickly approaching half a billion people in the USA and with just current technology we could get by just fine on 100 million, maybe less. What do you do with the other 400 million? without consumers our service economy collapses, do you pay them to just buy shit and watch TV? Do you make up "make work" jobs where they do some pointless task simply so they can get a check? Even in IT we are seeing the coming of smart gear that can take care of itself and call a parts monkey when something breaks, construction they are already testing a road building machine that uses GPS, no real humans needed there, and houses can be prefabricated.
So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed? we need to think of something or its gonna get nasty. The minorities are already looking at 25%+ unemployment and the whites won't be far behind, there are simply too many people and not enough work. What do you do? put them in camps? False flag an attack that can wipe out large numbers of them? Just leave them in the street to starve or create huge crime zones? gotta do something as time is running out folks, the tech just keeps getting smart while the average person stays the same or even gets dumber.