The standard criminal gun, at least in my area, is a small 9mm like the highpoint 9mm. I actually used to own one of those guns and can tell you you could write your name with that gun from 80 feet easily as it was VERY accurate. The only guns I know of that being 80 feet away would save you would be the "Saturday night Specials" some of the scummier ones carry, your average 25 auto (in fact that is pretty much 25 caliber in a nutshell) ain't gonna hit shit unless you are close enough to shake hands, same with the pocket 22 or 38. maybe its different in NYC, i don't know, but in my area the standard gun is the 9mm, there has been too many gangsta movies featuring the 9mm for them to carry anything else, also the ammo for the 9mm is quite cheap.
So unless they are very stoned/drunk or are carrying what the local cops call the "stupid shit" guns thanks to the fact you not only have to be with handshake distance but they are known to jam and fail (which means they are gonna seriously stomp the shit out of you for carrying that stupid shit, hence the name) 80 feet really isn't gonna give you much protection. Sure they may not have enough skill to pull off a killing shot but anywhere you get hit with a 9mm is still gonna hurt.
I take it you've never had to really deal with cops then? Thanks to the byzantine labyrinth that is our current law books that old Ayn Rand bit about criminals is sadly VERY much true and any cop at any time can just fuck with you for ANY reason and then apply one of a dozen ready made "I just wanted to fuck with him so here is my bullshit excuse" like disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, they have about a half a dozen standard 'pull out in case you want to be a douchebag' excuses. I should know because i still have an inch and a half scar around my left ear after giving a ride to a black baptist minister in MS and running into a cop who said, and I quote "Fucking niggers and God damned hippies, i don't know which one I hate worse". he used the disturbing the peace one which was later dropped but it was made clear a half a dozen cops that weren't anywhere near there would be happy to testilie that we were disturbing the peace along with half a dozen other charges if we dared say shit.
So if you don't think this will horribly be abused you obviously haven't been paying attention lately friend, just look at the Taser. So far we've seen them taster old folks and those in diabetic comas and just for shits and giggles taser one over and over until they were actually smoldering. If you want to see a hotbed of corruption and truly vicious bastards go to ANY police station. Most of the decent guys have bailed thanks to the combo of low pay and having to deal with fellow cops that join for the "fun" of cracking heads, again I should know as i had a friend who was a damned good cop, went out of his way to help folks and try to be nice, after going through nearly half a dozen depts he ended up taking a job driving a truck because he got tired of seeing all the new recruits that got into it to be "bullies with badges' his words. Instead of blowing cash on yet another tech toy that will be abused we need to raise police salaries but tie that to performance and be quick to fire the corrupted and the vicious. Nowadays they can be truly animalistic but unless they do something incredibly stupid (like that one that bragged on his FB that Training day was his "how to" manual) they will at worse get passed to another precinct, like what the Catholics did to fiddly priests.
Respect has to be earned and so has trust. Look up "the largest gang in America" to see over an hour of cops being truly monsterous and then realize that more than 80% of the cops in that video doing evil shit are still on the job and then think about whether you would trust them with something like this where if the settings are wrong you could probably give someone cancer. I know that one I ran into would be happily frying niggers and hippies (and probably Mexicans and Jews and any non WASP) while laughing his ass off.
So you answer is "everyone go to hell except cave 76!" only substitute democrats. damned shame to see party loyalty lead to willful blindness like that. BTW before you call me a dirty conservative just as the right yells dirty socialist funnily enough I actually AM a socialist, fourth generation. My grandfather was actually a card carrying one during the depression.
But you see unlike you I see rotten shit as rotten shit, it doesn't suddenly become ice cream because the person has a D after their title. The EXACT SAME dirty bullshit pulled by Dubya is being pulled by Obama, the ONLY difference is who is cashing the checks THAT IS ALL. And guys like you excusing them because they have the correct letter after their name is frankly why nobody gets held to higher standards anymore. look at Obama, the man broke damned near every. single. promise. he made on the trail yet i bet you just can't wait to vote for him and would never vote for a third party even though you know in your heart Obama is just as dirty as Dubya, he's just dirty for big media, unions, and the 'green" bunches whereas Dubya was dirty for the megacorps, big oil, and the MIC. Same bullshit, just a different label. Don't forget if the net gets royally screwed thanks to SOPA/PIPA that the VP is a card carrying shill for big media, or that the week before Obama went in gas was at $1.86 and it hasn't dropped below $3 since he got there, which is seriously hurting the poor. but that's okay, we can all ride those mythical buses driven by unicorns that Al "Hey' where's my limo? i gotta get back to my house so big it has an indoor basketball court" Gore said we should be riding to help pay for his crap&trade scam. Sorry friend but a scam is a scam, bullshit is bullshit, and lies are lies, whether they have a D or a R by their title.
Well you sir are coming off as a bit of a loonie and more than a little stalkerish, is that REALLY how you wish to be seen? its not like we aren't grown ups here and can judge for ourselves what is bullshit and what's not, marketing bullshit is pretty easy to spot BTW as they always fall for "buzzword bingo" like synergy or in the example you keep posting "seamless experience' which if that doesn't just scream marketing bullshit i don't know what does.
But you see the problem with guys like you is you encourage the REALLY batshit to take up you claims, such as my own personal stalker whose been following me a couple of months now. he posted in this thread BTW, not once but twice counting AC posting, see if you can spot him. he is convinced that I'm actually a "M$ Ninja" secretly hidden in a "warroom" in Redmond, which is extra funny since i've never been west of OKC, and that I "have a file on him" and an "Agenda to destroy FOSS and freedom' along with kill kittens or something, who can understand the truly batshit. Now he has it in my head I'm old Pete, aka APK, even though old Pete and i had a pretty nasty row last year until we finally agreed to disagree and we still frankly can't agree on shit, but old APK pointed out one of his "Linux magically protects you from viruses' posts was bullshit so now he MUST be me.
So you see friend, pointing out bullshit once is fine, following them around? make YOU look like the douchebag. Don't worry friend with phrases like seamless experience it isn't like he isn't as easy to spot as Bozo at an Amish wake, his own language trips him up. but when you stalk like that you embolden the REAL nutjobs that are frankly killing/. like a cancer, the ones that treat OSes like religions and anyone who doesn't parrot the party line as heretics. The shills? We can deal with them easy enough, like I said their own love of buzzword bingo gives them away, but its the crazies that are frankly ruining the site for everybody as nobody can have a simple discussion about any subject with militant fanbois and perception bubbles. BTW don't label me a shill for using perception bubble, I prefer to use blatant circlejerk but I was told perception bubble was nicer and i'm trying to be more sophisticated in my phrases and shit, kay? But do you REALLY want to see this site become another Kuroshin, where nothing but trolls and crazies hang anymore because the loonies ran everyone else off? Shilling by ANY group is easy enough to ignore, but the crazy flag waving and perception bubble simply ruins any chance at a dialog and makes it pointless to continue
. Its like the difference between someone handing you a flier for some company and someone jumping in your face and yelling '"fuck you muthafucker!", one is easy to simply ignore while the other one turns posts into endless dick waving. Hell look at the posts below you friend, how quickly they went from having constructive arguments to being the equivalent of Halo teabagging. all civility went right out the window, all the militant dick wavers saw you as a "fellow traveler' and joined in, nothing really more can be posted because the civility is gone and everyone moved on. IS that REALLY what you wanted to accomplish? i hope not, but that was the result.
That is like saying "And and and...they could possibly maybe burn down your house ZOMFG!" when in reality I've had to call MSFT more times than i can count from customers that thought they could 'fix it on their own" and ended up reinstalling a bunch of times and NEVER was a bit of hassle involved. Frankly the fine print could say you have to watch Steve Ballmer do a nekkid dance but that don't matter, what matters is what actually happens when you activate and frankly I have NEVER had a single legal key rejected by them, not ever.
If they suddenly start rejecting keys THEN you'll have a point, but what the EULA says don't mean shit if they don't actually enforce which as i've seen time and time again they don't. Hell I even saw an interview with Ballmer once where he said something like "I couldn't care less about some kid passing a copy of Windows XP, what i care about is that boat coming from Malaysia with counterfeit WinXP boxes so good i can't tell them from our product". So if he feels that way about pirates I REALLY doubt he's gonna suddenly tell the guys on the phones to be douchebags to the people that are actually buying their product. Hell I even called them once for a machine a guy brought in that had an XP key yet wouldn't activate, turned out some brainiac put on a copy of XP Corporate. they gave me a good key and just told me to tape the new number over the old XP sticker so it would be there for ID, easy peasy.
Actually if you look at the numbers yahoo is number one or number two in worldwide webmail, and I can tell you from my little shop that the vast majority of home users that come through my door have their homepage set to yahoo.com. That is one thing Yahoo has done right, while you or I might think its a cluttered POS talking to ordinary folks Yahoo has taken the place of the morning paper, they fire up Yahoo and check the local and national headlines, check the weather and their horoscope, all the things folks did with their morning paper they now do with Yahoo.
As for the MSFT deal it shows me TWO things: One Yang is an arrogant ass since he turned down an offer that was more than twice the highest yahoo stock has EVER traded at, and two it shows me Steve Ballmer is right up there with the Pepsi guy at Apple for being the biggest dipshit CEO. offering $33 for Yahoo, what are you nuts? He probably could have bought the only two bits worth anything to MSFT, the webmail and the searches, for less than a quarter of that and let yang have the portal. Instead Ballmer gets a case of the stupids and offers insane money, which yang being just as dumbshit turned down. If I was a Yahoo shareholder i'd have wanted yang's head for that dumbshit move, just look at the stock now, what's it trading at, $13? And MSFT offered $33? Stupid.
Don't feel bad bonch, I got accused of shilling for saying IE is shit. I still haven't figured out how saying something is shit is a positive endorsement for it, maybe its rapper lingo or something, hell if I know.
As for TFA watch how quickly i get modded down by FOSS zealots and their giant perceptual bubble, ready? Hey FOSSies, its just MSFT copying Apple again, so quit getting your panties in a wad, okay? you can't put anything on an iPad but iOS and this is THE EXACT SAME DEAL. There will be NO CHANGE when it comes to X86, in fact part of the "designed for Windows 8" specs state that they MUST allow the secure boot to be disabled, the only place its different is the ARM chips which as many have pointed out will probably be heavily subsidized by MSFT who don't want "Hey turn that $299 Windows 8 tablet into a $500 Android tablet!" posts all over the net 3 weeks after it comes out.
And I know this will piss you off, get ready for it....DON'T BUY IT...is that REALLY so hard? why the hell is it any business of yours what MSFT does with chips they contracted out for, or with OEMs they are paying to build their designs? it isn't like you don't have more choices than EVER before, you've got Apple, Google, RIM,, there is X86/64, ARM,MIPS, hell you got choices coming out your asses, so WTF are you bitching for? Vote with your wallet okay? But just because YOU don't like doesn't mean you get to tell ME or anyone else what device we should buy or what features it should have. If I was gonna buy one of these things, which I'm not BTW, I wanna try one of those $70 Android Indian pads the net has been buzzing about, but if I did and was actually gonna use this for real work I'd WANT it locked down, because if its one thing we've seen its that these things are giant targets for the malware guys! look at Android it seems like every other day we are reading of some exploit.
But in the end you have not a damned thing to bitch about in mobile. Android is switching between first and second place constantly, there are a bazillion different hacked droid ROMs out there you can play with, life is good man so why get your panties in a wad for a device you would NEVER buy in a million years anyway? And if you are buying Windows devices to get the trialware price breaks and then loading Linux YOU are a damned hypocrite and part of the problem, as there are many guys like System76 busting their asses trying to support you and if you don't buy from them and support Linux then you're just being assholes and have NO right to complain about the numbers showing Windows share being so high because you are part of those numbers!
But now you have no excuses, you can buy damned near any device you want running Linux, so vote with your wallet and let everyone else vote with theirs, okay? if the world likes what you have it'll win, if not then that simply means you aren't listening to the people and giving them what they want, simple as that. But bitching about Win 8 ARM not letting you boot Linux when most of you wouldn't piss on a Win 8 anything is just bitching for the sake of being a bitch and more than a little pointless, okay? Nobody is taking anything "away" from you if you would have never bought it in the first place, and ARM chips are about as different from x86 as night is to day, with ARM everything is custom chips whereas x86 will run any old thing. If you want freedom? you've got the droid, have fun, I'll be joining you when those $70 Droid tablets hit just for shits and giggles. But when MSFT is paying for a device let them design it however they wish.
Then we should fund a study and put the issue to rest, don't you think? Seems simple and logical enough to me, but as you would see if you actually tried it you would be labeled a monster for even THINKING of checking such a thing out, because "it's racist" to say anything other than everyone is exactly the same, no matter what race, sex, or environment they came from. Why everyone can be rocket scientists with the right education!
Do i think they are right or wrong? Honestly I have no idea, but I think ANY question shouldn't be considered taboo to ask and that was what i was pointing out. look at how many are now pushing young girls take careers in math, what if they simply don't want it? What if they would prefer language? Well that doesn't matter because girls are just boys with penises turned inside out, which BTW once upon a time medicine taught as truth. I simply think anything that helps us to learn more about the human condition should be available for serious study, and that "PC" belongs in politic and not in science. Don't you agree?
Its actually quite simple...follow the money. cap and trade will make certain insiders BILLIONS by basically taking a percentage of the wallets of every man, woman, and child in the west so naturally anything that threatens that paycheck like say debate isn't allowed. Before this turns into rep VS dem or oil VS whatever I'd point out this has NOTHING to do with parties and EVERYTHING to do with insiders. just as Cheney made out like a bandit with Halliburton and Iraq so to is friends of Obama making out like bandits on free money from Uncle Sam for dubious "green tech". Solydra was just the tip of a rotten iceberg, one of the Kennedy kids got over a billion interest free for the company he is on the board of and that company has NEVER made a single cent and in their last 2 years has lost 20 million on 10 million in sales. Nobody with a brain would ever give a company with that kind of record that kind of money but it didn't have squat to do with investment, it had to do with good old boys getting their kickbacks for supporting the POTUS. The green fund has so far shelled out nearly 20 billion dollars in US taxpayer money and 19 of the top 20 getting checks were...drumroll...big donors to the president's election campaign!
The sad part is science has gotten hijacked by big money on all sides. any researcher that comes up with a finding that threatens the big paydays these corps are looking at will see their funding dry up and blow away so its safer to stay with the bandwagon. Instead of science being used to find out the truth its being used to support an agenda and that goes for BOTH sides of the aisle. How anybody can sort truth from propaganda anymore is anyone's guess but frankly i wouldn't trust scientists on either side of this debate to tell me if it was raining outside, there is just too many checks being passed around. In a way it reminds me of how the politicians all jumped on the eugenics bandwagon in the early twentieth century so suddenly we had all these scientific papers "proving" that you could tell things like IQ simply by race or the shape of the nose. Now it seems total insanity but if you tried to go against it when its was accepted you were treated like a whacko.
TRUE science should welcome debates and studies as that is how we revise theories and find out new things, after all a closed mind simply can't learn new concepts. look at how Einstein wasted the last 20 years of his life trying to disprove quantum mechanics as it just didn't fit with his view of the universe, going so far as to make his "God doesn't play dice" remark trying to ridicule it. Now we have seen that with things like quantum entanglement things we take for granted in the macro universe simply don't play by the same rules at the quantum level. Would we have ever learned such things if they would have been called "Einstein deniers"? Who knows, but I REALLY don't like how much politics is getting entangled in science.
Well in my case its more like "fire up browser, disable security settings, log in, find game buy" which makes more than a little inelegant, it makes it a royal PITA. And its not like having tabs is some rare and hard to do thing ya know, hell even IE has middle click open new tab now and has had it for a couple of versions. If they want us to keep buying they have to above all make it EASY, the easier the better, and that is NOT easy, its irritating. Gabe said it best when he said to the effect that "pirates are your competitors offering a better product" but if he doesn't watch it the non Valve publishers are gonna ruin Steam and take away the sole reason for going to them over TPB, and that's ease of use. I want to be able to just go down the sale list, slap any game i see in the cart and NOT have to worry about getting Starfucked or GFWLed or some other nasty. Having a simple icon that indicates there is third party DRM isn't too much to ask for, is it?
Sadly I know what you say is true, look at how they have practically blacklisted those scientists that published a study that showed Asians were smarter than whites and whites smarter than blacks. Now if one were to look at that with logic instead of emotion one would probably conclude it had to do with environment and available food sources. the Asians had rougher living conditions in the mountains of Asia than the northern plains of Europe, the whites had a rougher winter climate in the plains of Europe than the warm fertile lands of Africa, therefor the need for brains simply wasn't as needed for survival because the food wasn't as scarce. Simple, logical, but not allowed because it isn't "PC" to say anything other than all races are exactly the same except for skin tone, or that males and females are the exact same except for different genitalia.
Its sad that science despite our supposedly "enlightened" societies still can't tackle truly tough questions about the human animal without having to follow political correctness and dogma. Look at the hate and stink caused by anyone that says the climate could be affected by anything other than AGW, they are called names and accused of being "plants" of some nefarious group when the simple fact is we live on an incredibly complex planet that has had some seriously huge changes long before man could affect squat, see the medieval warming period or the little ice age for just two examples. Does that mean we shouldn't strive to be cleaner? of course not if for no other reason than smog is bad on the lungs, but that doesn't mean one should send the entire society back to the dark ages to 'save the planet" (while making several of those screaming about AGW instant billionaires) either. It means we should do what ALL good science should do, we should study, discuss, ask questions and search for answers.
its just a shame that heresy has been replaced with political correctness as there is still quite a bit we need to learn about the human animal to better understand ourselves but when there are questions you simply aren't allowed to ask then our progress is stifled.
I never understood why people refuse to believe something could ever be the case because its labeled as a stereotype, lets take the goldigger example. Women have a biological imperative to find a mate capable of supporting her offspring, we see this behavior in just about every species out there, so why do we think the human female would be ANY different in this regard? Its like a study i read not too long ago (it was in a mag, sorry as i have NO clue which one) that had the results of a study that showed women's taste in men changed based on whether or not they were on birth control or had the ability to have children. those that couldn't have children or were on birth control favored softer, gentler "teddy bear" or pretty boy types, those that were fertile and not on birth control favored the rougher, more masculine "bad boy" types. The conclusion is pretty obvious, as far as evolution goes the stronger more dominant male is more likely top of the food chain and therefor better able to provide for her offspring. the fact that this doesn't hold true in modern society doesn't magically undo 20,000 years of evolution.
And I'll probably get hate for pointing this out but if nationally its the same as locally its true, you see more blacks in sports because they are practicing voluntary eugenics and breeding for athletic ability. I was the tutor for most of the HS football team and their parents made no bones about it, they chose their mates based on athletic ability. One was quite proud that after 2 years of searching he was able to woo a top track and field star, their kids were constantly at the top of every athletic roster and three out of their four children got full scholarships based on their skills on the field (the fourth went MMA) and they were quite proud of that and bragged quite often. love frankly had nothing to do with their initial selection, it was all based on athletic skill.
As for TFA most women simply don't care for geekier jobs, does that make them stupid? Nooo, it simply means that it doesn't appeal to them. They will kick a guy's ass when it comes to verbal languages or anything where being able to read body language comes into play such as negotiator, I've also found women make better cops and are able to more often diffuse a situation without needing violence. this whole "women and men are equal so there numbers should be equal" is a fallacy that assumes a female is simply a male with different genitalia and nothing could be further from the truth, just as a man might be able to lift more but a woman will be more agile so too is there jobs where it will appeal to a woman's natural abilities and some that will appeal to a man's. That doesn't mean that the women are being run off or are incapable of doing the job, simply that they don't want it. I don't see anything sexist in simply acknowledging we are different.
Did you try getting those games on GOG? I've found for older funky games you really can't beat good old games, out of the nearly 50 titles I've bought so far from them, going back to the early 90s, that there was exactly ONE game that didn't work and i knew from having owned it previously what I was getting into. Apparently whomever coded i76 had its timing based around the Pentium chips that were out then because anything faster screws up the scripted events, but thanks to the excellent GOG community I was able to slap on a patch they cooked up and get the game up and running. Considering my main OS is Win 7 HP X64 the fact that all these games will run just shows how much work the GOG guys put into their releases as many were released before 64 bit computing was even a thought, hell some of them like BLOOD and Redneck Rampage were even before Win9x becoming the dominant game platform. So give them a try, they even have 3 or 4 free games you can download once you sign up just to give it a spin, they are really great at getting funky older games to run.
As for TFA the sad part is even though I haven't bought a single Ubisoft game since Butcher Bay I'm sure they'll just put down any losses to piracy and bribe the politicians for ever more draconian measures. Its what i call "PPT math" in that they'll look at console sales and bring their bribed congress critters a PPT and say "See if you'll look at this slide it says we sold X on consoles which means we should have sold X+Y counting PCs and since we didn't it must be teh ebil pirates ZOMFG!" while ignoring the fact many of us simply won't touch ANYTHING by Ubisoft no matter if you sold it for a buck. me personally I've had to change out too many new DVD burners because the customer got Starfucked and the burner was thrown into PIO mode and fried. That kind of bullshit along with Ubisoft being the absolute worst when it comes to screwing their customers have simply made sure i won't buy nor pirate a single Ubisoft title, I won't allow that trash on my system.
But I'm sure thanks to PPT math i'll be listed as a pirate along with anyone else that doesn't buy this so it'll be used as an excuse to push even nastier laws. Its one of those "too big to fail, heads i win tails you lose" kinda things and it sucks, but we've seen it time and time again, companies that think their shit don't stink and no matter how badly they treat their customers if they don't get the sales they believe they are entitled to it MUST be those ebil pirates.
Your drivers DO NOT WORK which after 20 damned years you better try something friend, if not an ABI (which BTW, Apple, MSFT, OS/2, BSD, Solaris, what do these have in common? A stable ABI. If its such a bad idea how come everyone else but YOU have them. think linus is smarter than the entire planet?) then you better find something because I can take any bog standard box and use apt-dist-upgrade and watch it puke all over its own drivers and DIE HARD. Hell i'll be happy to post a link to an article from a 10 year plus Linux server admin that is now looking at Macs, why? Because openSUSE puked on itself when upgraded and killed itself. BTW the ONLY article you can post or citation you can post here against an ABI is a RELIGIOUS article by a kernel dev that goes so far as to say "I hope those that use non free drivers have broken systems!" so his goal is NOT to have a solid functional system but to push the FOSS agenda, full stop. Finally look at the numbers, here i'll give you a link now notice how you are being beaten by JavaME, a garbage cell phone OS that is on Fred's and Family Dollar $10 Tracphones, why is that? After 20 years that's the BEST you can do? Retailers won't touch it, no OEM except Dell will carry it (and they won't give you their figures because i'd bet my last dollar they are losing money on every Ubuntu sale) and numbers can't lie friend, they are what they are.
The FOSS community has become IMHO a perfect example of "perception bubble" where everything is happy and gay and no problems must ever be pointed out. You say your OS doesn't need an ABI, then what would YOU do about the OS puking on itself with every. single. apt dist upgrade hmmm? The other guys added an ABI because they didn't want their drivers puking but if you have another way I'd sure like to hear it. here I am in the start of the great XP dieoff and I'm having to scramble to find a source for Win 7 Starter simply because i can't find a single distro that doesn't kill itself when you upgrade the thing and the length of support is too lousy to keep on the same version. The average length of Windows OEM is 11 years, XP-2001-2014, Win 7-2009-2020, I can't even find a FOSS OS that will give you 6 years of reliable updates without shelling out more than the most expensive version of Windows. if you don't like the way i talk sorry chuck, this is called frustration from being constantly lied to for years. I get told 'Linux is ready for the desktop" yet when i try it it dies only to get told I either will have to teach my customers to be unix admins (the cost of training will be MORE than a copy of Windows) or that i must be "doing it wrong" despite the fact that apt-dist-upgrade is not really something one CAN do wrong. the only wrong i'm seeing is the information being placed here by FOSS users who should say "Linux is ready for the desktop*" (*-if you provide free lifetime support or have the skills to diagnose and troubleshoot unix systems) which cuts out 99% of the population and the numbers reflect that. numbers don't lie friend, its not a conspiracy, its that your product simply doesn't work in the home market, not even a little bit. linux is great on servers, kicks ass in embedded, horrible on the desktop.
Shouldn't we really just call TFA "Hey guess what? Ubisoft is again proving they are douchebags" and call it a day though? Lets face it whenever we hear of a company leading the way in assraping the customers it is ALWAYS Ubisoft. They destroyed DVD burners with Starforce, they were the first that i know of to burn customers by making their games have an always on internet connection, now they are the first to have NASTY hardware based customer screwing. When it comes to being giant pricks ALWAYS count on Ubisoft.
BTW if any of the Valve guys are reading this? We need to talk bro. I want, nay DEMAND that you put an easy to see mark that lets me know without clicking on the main page and scrolling to the bottom some sort of sign that a game contains DRM above what Steam has so i can avoid it. The whole point of Steam is ease of use yet you are letting the publishers fuck that up by hiding the "this game contains extra DRM" shit at the bottom of the main page. i don't want to go to the main page when I'm browsing sales, okay? So far in the past month and a half i got stuck with GFWL and TAGES by not having an easy way to spot that shit when browsing the sales. if I have to go click on every. single. link with NO way to open new tabs in your client? my purchases are gonna go waaaay down dudes. So fix that shit, come up with an icon that says "This has extra DRM, maybe a red and white stop sign looking thing, just to let your customers know. I'm sure the publishers will bitch but you know what? let 'em. Remember these same douchenozzles would be happy to see you go under and just go to Origin and its your CUSTOMERS you need to be watching out for, not pricks like Ubisoft.
Also make a way for me to "ban" publishers from my view. There were several games during the Steam sale i got excited about only to click on it and find out its a Ubisoft game with extra DRM shit so I wasted my time, time i could have been looking at titles that i would actually buy. I don't want any Ubisoft, i won't buy any Ubisoft, so why not make a simple preference page that lets me banhammer them from my purchasing pages? Remember Valve the ONLY reason you are rolling in swimming pools filled with cash is that you made Steam easier than piracy, but if you make it a royal PITA to buy games there its not like we don't have PTB where we don't have to deal with phone home and other horseshit.
BTW for all the complaints and comparisons to Windows activation? I have NEVER had MSFT refuse an activation on a legit key EVAR. Hell the machine I'm typing this on is a Win 7 HP I installed in OCT 09 when i built the thing and I have changed out every. single. piece. of the hardware, and I do mean EVERY piece. the HDDs, the RAM, the graphics card,the PSU, the motherboard, and the CPU. The ONLY original piece left is the case yet I've only had to reactivate ONE time and that was when i switched out the ECS motherboard and quad CPU for an Asrock and 6 core Thuban. it took less than 5 seconds and went without a hitch. Working at my little shop I've had to call MSFT plenty of times when someone royally boned their PC and installed multiple times trying to "fix it" (Lord save us from those that know just enough to be dangerous) and it took me less than 5 minutes in every case. i'd say "The guy messed up his install and kept trying to fix it himself before bringing it to the shop" and the person on the line would be "Okay,put in this code" and that was it. No hassles, no bullshit, no muss nor fuss.
But I won't have a game that i can't switch hardware with so i don't care if this game is the second coming it won't be coming anywhere near my PC.How much you want to bet this will be in the top five of PTB downloads, along with Diablo III? After all Ubisoft thought that they'd have piracy stopped cold with the always on Assassins Creed and it took the Fairlight guys less than a month to have a 100% functional version. just more proof that often the pirate version is the better version as they don't have to deal with this horseshit.
I say as far as TV there shouldn't be a way to even label it AS piracy if they are showing it OTA. After all if you can get it for absolutely free why should they give a crap if I don't have the time to watch it at say Wed at 8PM? If they would just let us watch when we have the time I wouldn't need to fricking format shift would I? It also ignores the fact that seeing a show, be it OTA or BT can get a person interested enough to buy. I have the almost complete Whedon collection* which probably cost close to $1000 along with a couple of sideshow collectible figures from Buffy that my late sister got me as bookends simply because I was able to download a couple of episodes of BtVS off of eMule. When Buffy was on the air there wasn't a station in this area with a strong enough signal to actually watch it and frankly if I hadn't downloading a couple of episodes and got hooked on the writing I would have NEVER bought it based on the description. I mean a show based on a bad movie with the guy from the Taster's Choice commercials and a soap actress as stars? Doesn't sound even a tiny bit appealing to me, but after seeing a few episodes i got hooked on the witty dialog and ended up getting the complete box set along with the Angel and Firefly set so that's a $1000 they would have never gotten otherwise.
As for TFA frankly I don't see how anyone can predict batshit. With serial killers we've seen everything in this country from a sexual sadist clown (Gacy) to one that was killing the same girl over again (Bundy) to a guy that thought the neighbor's dog was giving him orders (Son of Sam) to a nutbar collecting slaves for the afterlife (Zodiac). If its one thing we've learned about these freaks its that like a virus there is always some new mutation and there is as many reasons for them doing it as there are stars in the sky. I have to wonder how much of these "patterns" are simply trying to find meaning where none exists? it seems we humans really don't like things that are unpredictable and out of control and that pretty much describes serial killers.
What's a midge? As for skeeters you should go to the delta sometime, they come in bunches so thick they look like a black cloud. Makes the fish fat though, i've seen them literally jumping out of the water to grab a big mouthful when they are flying just above a creek. As far as roaches ANY big city, i don't care how far north you go, will have huge bastards. Down here it stays warm enough most of the time the roaches stay outside where there is plenty of leaf matter to feed on and they actually don't get that big, the other bugs prey on them too much. the only time you see any big roaches is when there is a flood and the old ones come out the storm tunnels looking for higher ground.
And you can keep the cold friend, as I always say "You can get under a shade tree with some sweet tea, or turn on your AC, but when its 20 degrees outside there is NOTHING you can do to keep from freezing your balls off." Give me a nice warm climate where there is tons of fresh fruits in the farmer's markets and slow cooked BBQ and I'm a happy camper.
That is why I suggested his local mom&pop as that is the perfect place to find older hardware like that. That said the non "cap plague' P3s are starting to go now simply because the caps dry out and pop, that is what happened to my very last SFF P3. But since the "great XP dieoff" is in full swing I have no doubt his local shop has some Celeron or even better Sempron office boxes and you can usually underclock those quite easily. this would give him the benefits of newer hardware with better caps and also give him low power. Something like a socket 754 Sempron is dirt cheap and would be more than enough power for the task at hand, they could even have it also work as a file server to keep Sunday School lessons on.
Its a small valley situated between two mountains, the Ozarks is full of them. Truly gorgeous up in that area and because you can't farm in a holler easily (too many trees, too hilly) you can own quite a bit of land dirt cheap. And for the guy that said you get mosquitoes the size of B52? that's the delta NOT the Ozarks. In fact because there is so little standing water you almost never see mosquitoes in that area.
I'd say its genuine when there are months where every single posting i place anywhere on the net (I'm the same UID pretty much everywhere, if you see a post by Hairyfeet anywhere its me) will almost instantly be followed up by a post that reads 'Die you fat fucker die". Like I said you can look up old APK who also posts as APK everywhere he goes, the loonie that stalks me has been stalking him for a couple of months now because he has convinced himself that ANYBODY that disagrees with him "must be hairyfeet" so even though APK and myself have never agreed on shit or even hang out in the same places other than/. (APK hangs out on CNet and Infoworld, i hang out on Ars and OSNews) he has been getting the same "Die fat fucker die' posts wherever he goes.
But I don't think its true our tastes have changed, at least not with me, as I have NO problem is someone passionately believes in a subject but I have NEVER subscribed to the BS that something is "right" 100% because of an ideology, be it communism, capitalism, or in the case of/. FOSSism. Like I said we USED to have a 100+ comment post on the advantages or disadvantages of say NTFS VS EXT2 or a top down VS community managed projects and while collars would be heated the discussions were civil and on point, now we get +5 mods for putting a post that says "Use Linux" in the middle of a post on say the new iPad, WTF? What does that have to do with ANYTHING in TFA? answer not a damned thing, its just the trolls have been given free reign and all groupthink gets plus moderation.
I think the other poster nailed it on not allowing modpoints to be targeted at specific individuals, such as if you modbomb the same person multiple times you should be banned from moderation (I would say banned from the site but that would be harder to pull) but I would go one further and say if this person uses their modpoints to consistently troll a particular subject they should likewise be banned from modding. When i have modpoints I purposely stay away from FOSS articles simply so that no one can accuse me of bias, but if every. single. time. a person gets mod points they head straight for the same sections over and over its pretty obvious they are using modpoints to modbomb. I bet if an admin were to look at the modding for my own posts they'd see that while upmods are all over the place there is one IP address that downmods me week after week, well it don't take kojack to crack the case of the modbomber stalker now does it?
in the end I've noticed that while the sites you name don't give a crap there are plenty of others like Ars and OSNews that do and show it CAN be stopped, the admins simply have to care. And I'd argue that 2 years of solid declines month after month shows that the readership is simply getting tired of "perceptual bubbles" which is what I've been told to replace 'fanboi circle jerks' with but in the end the results are the same, a handful of parrots spewing groupthink constantly to karma whore a few accounts so they can get enough modpoints to modbomb. i mean look at Mikey 500+ accounts, if that don't show the system is broken i don't know what does. I mean the guy has made over 500 accounts with the same name and an incremental number, how hard is it to spot he's a troll?
Don't forget the Brits had in the mosquito an aircraft that could be made in a piano factory by unskilled labor that was faster than most German planes which required metals they quickly ran out of. the Brits with their navy and aircraft production wouldn't have fallen to the Nazis easily and Sealion was never seriously considered because the Luftwaffe never could gain air supremacy over Britain.
For those that say "We had to get involved in WWII for freedom!" I'd suggest reading Herbert Hoover's biography, its online now and a pretty interesting read. he was tightly involved in the halls of power at that time and documents how it didn't matter to FDR that the people didn't want war, he frankly didn't give a fuck and wanted in Europe BAD so he did everything he could to start shit. there is even a line directly quoted from FDR in the book that is something to the effect of "We'll tighten the noose around the japs and spit on their honor until they have no choice but to fight back and then I'll be given free reign". Remember this is the same POTUS that was gonna gut the SCOTUS and load it with judges of his choosing until they bowed to his desires and pushed the commerce clause well past any sane rationalization so he got his "New deal" programs passed.
Exactly. if you want to be close to nature come to a state like AR, where its lush green wherever you see and land is cheap so you can own your own holler and have as much nature as you desire. my GF's family own their own holler up in the Ozarks and i just love going up there to spend a week because i can sit on the front porch and enjoy my lunch while watching a herd of deer graze not 60 feet from my seat. Of course you gotta watch the squirrels on the back patio, the grandkids have fed them so much they park their little fat asses on the back patio not 10 feet from you and if you don't throw them a snack they start chattering at you like they are saying "Hey asshole, i'm right here looking all cute and shit and STILL no nuts, WTF? what's a squirrel gotta do to get some of those raisins man?". If its something they really love like dried fruits or cashews you can just stretch your hand out palm up and they will come pick the fruits right out of your hand.
Its really beautiful country with miles and miles of unspoiled wilderness you can enjoy, fishing, hunting, whitewater rafting, or just being lazy with an inner-tube and a cold one on a lazy Sunday afternoon, its just nice. It also only snows a couple of days a year and almost never sticks except on the mountain tops so its a hell of a lot nicer even in the winter than something like Nome. how them folks live in that kind of cold is just beyond me, hell you have people dressing like Eskimos if it drops below freezing here and its a lovely 62 degrees f right now, light breeze, just wonderful. i'll take that over freezing my nads off any day of the week!
Oh I agree, the local foodbank is doing their inventory on a couple of offlease i threw together for them and some of the stories just make you sick at your stomach, people that worked their asses off only to get stomped on by the system. Everyone is just a single illness away from being destitute yet both the Dems and Reps pander to the rich with ever more tax breaks and attacks to make free medical care some socialist bogeyman when medical bills are the #1 reason folks lose it all. I have a cousin that has to live on a lousy $700 a month in SSI when he is more than smart enough and has the skills to easily be a computer tech or even run his own shop, but he's in a catch 22 where his medicine that allows him to walk costs $96,000 a year (no shit, its more than $9,000 a dose and he gets it every 4 weeks) so if he works he loses his medicine which would leave him unable to work.
But I don't know if its the same in your area but in my area a single pot bust means you will NEVER get anything above manual labor and we are up to our asses in illegals now. The part that will piss you off is I know a gal that is a state social worker and she's about to quit simply because the bosses force her to give crazy benefits to illegals! An American family will get less than 1/4th what she gives to illegals and when she complained she was told that its political and to STFU. So the whole system is royally fucked and copper stealing is just a symptom of a larger disease, our sliding towards being a third world country.
Look up the minerals under Afghanistan friend, its a fricking motherload of untapped mines just waiting to be exploited by Halliburton and friends! Sorry friend but there hasn't been a war since WWII (which FDR ignored the will of the people and purposely started shit with both Germany and Japan despite the majority wanting to stay the hell out of it and by doing so I'd argue he helped the USSR become the powerhouse it became by not letting Germany and the Russians kill each other) that somebody up high wasn't making some mad money on. Hell look at Vietnam, the CIA made out like bandits thanks to Air America and drug smuggling and bell made out by selling very expensive disposable Hueys.
Its actually VERY simple friend and so old Ike warned us about it in the 50s. The MIC got used to making mad profits thanks to WWII and once it was over wasn't about to give up those crazy piles of cash, and many other corps had found ways to make mad profits during wars, everything from securing mineral rights to the OSS/CIA smuggling ops. For these people it doesn't matter how many peasants or soldiers die as long as they can get their cut of the pie. Do you think Bell saw Vietnam as a failure? It sold more choppers at huge markups so it was a rousing success as far as they were concerned. Now that the MSM is owned by a handful other than the occasional WikiLeak your news is about as real as USSR Pravda anymore and they have whole teams that do nothing but make up bullshit to justify the next profit grab, look at how many "ZOMFG Iran Burns Babies!" type stories you'll be seeing in the coming weeks. After all "Iran did 9/11" according to a circuit court which means they are the next target on profitpaloza!
Its still a political story, its just one where they have a single piece of tech in there which does NOT make it a tech story. They could just as easily do the same thing with mercs (and probably do I wonder how many "suicide" and "accidental" deaths of those that mouthed off weren't someone taking care of a problem) but this is all about the political implications of having a government that can kill anyone at anytime. Well guess what? Its been that way for many years now, you piss the wrong official off its trivial to use you CC history to make a damned accurate schedule of where you are gonna be and when, you could have an accident, suicide, failed car jacking, the possibilities of making someone that pisses you off go bye bye when you have THAT level of political power is staggering, look at the Stasi which is what I'd argue those in power ultimately want.
But all of that is political, its the insiders deciding which direction they want to steer the land under their control. Just sticking the word drone in it doesn't make it a tech story anymore than that hit on the Iranian nuke scientist was a tech story because the mine they used was magnetic. We have sections for a REASON people, its so those of us that don't want to deal with sections don't have to and sticking stories where they don't belong just breaks the whole thing.
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The standard criminal gun, at least in my area, is a small 9mm like the highpoint 9mm. I actually used to own one of those guns and can tell you you could write your name with that gun from 80 feet easily as it was VERY accurate. The only guns I know of that being 80 feet away would save you would be the "Saturday night Specials" some of the scummier ones carry, your average 25 auto (in fact that is pretty much 25 caliber in a nutshell) ain't gonna hit shit unless you are close enough to shake hands, same with the pocket 22 or 38. maybe its different in NYC, i don't know, but in my area the standard gun is the 9mm, there has been too many gangsta movies featuring the 9mm for them to carry anything else, also the ammo for the 9mm is quite cheap.
So unless they are very stoned/drunk or are carrying what the local cops call the "stupid shit" guns thanks to the fact you not only have to be with handshake distance but they are known to jam and fail (which means they are gonna seriously stomp the shit out of you for carrying that stupid shit, hence the name) 80 feet really isn't gonna give you much protection. Sure they may not have enough skill to pull off a killing shot but anywhere you get hit with a 9mm is still gonna hurt.
I take it you've never had to really deal with cops then? Thanks to the byzantine labyrinth that is our current law books that old Ayn Rand bit about criminals is sadly VERY much true and any cop at any time can just fuck with you for ANY reason and then apply one of a dozen ready made "I just wanted to fuck with him so here is my bullshit excuse" like disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, they have about a half a dozen standard 'pull out in case you want to be a douchebag' excuses. I should know because i still have an inch and a half scar around my left ear after giving a ride to a black baptist minister in MS and running into a cop who said, and I quote "Fucking niggers and God damned hippies, i don't know which one I hate worse". he used the disturbing the peace one which was later dropped but it was made clear a half a dozen cops that weren't anywhere near there would be happy to testilie that we were disturbing the peace along with half a dozen other charges if we dared say shit.
So if you don't think this will horribly be abused you obviously haven't been paying attention lately friend, just look at the Taser. So far we've seen them taster old folks and those in diabetic comas and just for shits and giggles taser one over and over until they were actually smoldering. If you want to see a hotbed of corruption and truly vicious bastards go to ANY police station. Most of the decent guys have bailed thanks to the combo of low pay and having to deal with fellow cops that join for the "fun" of cracking heads, again I should know as i had a friend who was a damned good cop, went out of his way to help folks and try to be nice, after going through nearly half a dozen depts he ended up taking a job driving a truck because he got tired of seeing all the new recruits that got into it to be "bullies with badges' his words. Instead of blowing cash on yet another tech toy that will be abused we need to raise police salaries but tie that to performance and be quick to fire the corrupted and the vicious. Nowadays they can be truly animalistic but unless they do something incredibly stupid (like that one that bragged on his FB that Training day was his "how to" manual) they will at worse get passed to another precinct, like what the Catholics did to fiddly priests.
Respect has to be earned and so has trust. Look up "the largest gang in America" to see over an hour of cops being truly monsterous and then realize that more than 80% of the cops in that video doing evil shit are still on the job and then think about whether you would trust them with something like this where if the settings are wrong you could probably give someone cancer. I know that one I ran into would be happily frying niggers and hippies (and probably Mexicans and Jews and any non WASP) while laughing his ass off.
So you answer is "everyone go to hell except cave 76!" only substitute democrats. damned shame to see party loyalty lead to willful blindness like that. BTW before you call me a dirty conservative just as the right yells dirty socialist funnily enough I actually AM a socialist, fourth generation. My grandfather was actually a card carrying one during the depression.
But you see unlike you I see rotten shit as rotten shit, it doesn't suddenly become ice cream because the person has a D after their title. The EXACT SAME dirty bullshit pulled by Dubya is being pulled by Obama, the ONLY difference is who is cashing the checks THAT IS ALL. And guys like you excusing them because they have the correct letter after their name is frankly why nobody gets held to higher standards anymore. look at Obama, the man broke damned near every. single. promise. he made on the trail yet i bet you just can't wait to vote for him and would never vote for a third party even though you know in your heart Obama is just as dirty as Dubya, he's just dirty for big media, unions, and the 'green" bunches whereas Dubya was dirty for the megacorps, big oil, and the MIC. Same bullshit, just a different label. Don't forget if the net gets royally screwed thanks to SOPA/PIPA that the VP is a card carrying shill for big media, or that the week before Obama went in gas was at $1.86 and it hasn't dropped below $3 since he got there, which is seriously hurting the poor. but that's okay, we can all ride those mythical buses driven by unicorns that Al "Hey' where's my limo? i gotta get back to my house so big it has an indoor basketball court" Gore said we should be riding to help pay for his crap&trade scam. Sorry friend but a scam is a scam, bullshit is bullshit, and lies are lies, whether they have a D or a R by their title.
Well you sir are coming off as a bit of a loonie and more than a little stalkerish, is that REALLY how you wish to be seen? its not like we aren't grown ups here and can judge for ourselves what is bullshit and what's not, marketing bullshit is pretty easy to spot BTW as they always fall for "buzzword bingo" like synergy or in the example you keep posting "seamless experience' which if that doesn't just scream marketing bullshit i don't know what does.
But you see the problem with guys like you is you encourage the REALLY batshit to take up you claims, such as my own personal stalker whose been following me a couple of months now. he posted in this thread BTW, not once but twice counting AC posting, see if you can spot him. he is convinced that I'm actually a "M$ Ninja" secretly hidden in a "warroom" in Redmond, which is extra funny since i've never been west of OKC, and that I "have a file on him" and an "Agenda to destroy FOSS and freedom' along with kill kittens or something, who can understand the truly batshit. Now he has it in my head I'm old Pete, aka APK, even though old Pete and i had a pretty nasty row last year until we finally agreed to disagree and we still frankly can't agree on shit, but old APK pointed out one of his "Linux magically protects you from viruses' posts was bullshit so now he MUST be me.
So you see friend, pointing out bullshit once is fine, following them around? make YOU look like the douchebag. Don't worry friend with phrases like seamless experience it isn't like he isn't as easy to spot as Bozo at an Amish wake, his own language trips him up. but when you stalk like that you embolden the REAL nutjobs that are frankly killing /. like a cancer, the ones that treat OSes like religions and anyone who doesn't parrot the party line as heretics. The shills? We can deal with them easy enough, like I said their own love of buzzword bingo gives them away, but its the crazies that are frankly ruining the site for everybody as nobody can have a simple discussion about any subject with militant fanbois and perception bubbles. BTW don't label me a shill for using perception bubble, I prefer to use blatant circlejerk but I was told perception bubble was nicer and i'm trying to be more sophisticated in my phrases and shit, kay? But do you REALLY want to see this site become another Kuroshin, where nothing but trolls and crazies hang anymore because the loonies ran everyone else off? Shilling by ANY group is easy enough to ignore, but the crazy flag waving and perception bubble simply ruins any chance at a dialog and makes it pointless to continue
. Its like the difference between someone handing you a flier for some company and someone jumping in your face and yelling '"fuck you muthafucker!", one is easy to simply ignore while the other one turns posts into endless dick waving. Hell look at the posts below you friend, how quickly they went from having constructive arguments to being the equivalent of Halo teabagging. all civility went right out the window, all the militant dick wavers saw you as a "fellow traveler' and joined in, nothing really more can be posted because the civility is gone and everyone moved on. IS that REALLY what you wanted to accomplish? i hope not, but that was the result.
That is like saying "And and and...they could possibly maybe burn down your house ZOMFG!" when in reality I've had to call MSFT more times than i can count from customers that thought they could 'fix it on their own" and ended up reinstalling a bunch of times and NEVER was a bit of hassle involved. Frankly the fine print could say you have to watch Steve Ballmer do a nekkid dance but that don't matter, what matters is what actually happens when you activate and frankly I have NEVER had a single legal key rejected by them, not ever.
If they suddenly start rejecting keys THEN you'll have a point, but what the EULA says don't mean shit if they don't actually enforce which as i've seen time and time again they don't. Hell I even saw an interview with Ballmer once where he said something like "I couldn't care less about some kid passing a copy of Windows XP, what i care about is that boat coming from Malaysia with counterfeit WinXP boxes so good i can't tell them from our product". So if he feels that way about pirates I REALLY doubt he's gonna suddenly tell the guys on the phones to be douchebags to the people that are actually buying their product. Hell I even called them once for a machine a guy brought in that had an XP key yet wouldn't activate, turned out some brainiac put on a copy of XP Corporate. they gave me a good key and just told me to tape the new number over the old XP sticker so it would be there for ID, easy peasy.
Actually if you look at the numbers yahoo is number one or number two in worldwide webmail, and I can tell you from my little shop that the vast majority of home users that come through my door have their homepage set to yahoo.com. That is one thing Yahoo has done right, while you or I might think its a cluttered POS talking to ordinary folks Yahoo has taken the place of the morning paper, they fire up Yahoo and check the local and national headlines, check the weather and their horoscope, all the things folks did with their morning paper they now do with Yahoo.
As for the MSFT deal it shows me TWO things: One Yang is an arrogant ass since he turned down an offer that was more than twice the highest yahoo stock has EVER traded at, and two it shows me Steve Ballmer is right up there with the Pepsi guy at Apple for being the biggest dipshit CEO. offering $33 for Yahoo, what are you nuts? He probably could have bought the only two bits worth anything to MSFT, the webmail and the searches, for less than a quarter of that and let yang have the portal. Instead Ballmer gets a case of the stupids and offers insane money, which yang being just as dumbshit turned down. If I was a Yahoo shareholder i'd have wanted yang's head for that dumbshit move, just look at the stock now, what's it trading at, $13? And MSFT offered $33? Stupid.
Don't feel bad bonch, I got accused of shilling for saying IE is shit. I still haven't figured out how saying something is shit is a positive endorsement for it, maybe its rapper lingo or something, hell if I know.
As for TFA watch how quickly i get modded down by FOSS zealots and their giant perceptual bubble, ready? Hey FOSSies, its just MSFT copying Apple again, so quit getting your panties in a wad, okay? you can't put anything on an iPad but iOS and this is THE EXACT SAME DEAL. There will be NO CHANGE when it comes to X86, in fact part of the "designed for Windows 8" specs state that they MUST allow the secure boot to be disabled, the only place its different is the ARM chips which as many have pointed out will probably be heavily subsidized by MSFT who don't want "Hey turn that $299 Windows 8 tablet into a $500 Android tablet!" posts all over the net 3 weeks after it comes out.
And I know this will piss you off, get ready for it....DON'T BUY IT...is that REALLY so hard? why the hell is it any business of yours what MSFT does with chips they contracted out for, or with OEMs they are paying to build their designs? it isn't like you don't have more choices than EVER before, you've got Apple, Google, RIM,, there is X86/64, ARM,MIPS, hell you got choices coming out your asses, so WTF are you bitching for? Vote with your wallet okay? But just because YOU don't like doesn't mean you get to tell ME or anyone else what device we should buy or what features it should have. If I was gonna buy one of these things, which I'm not BTW, I wanna try one of those $70 Android Indian pads the net has been buzzing about, but if I did and was actually gonna use this for real work I'd WANT it locked down, because if its one thing we've seen its that these things are giant targets for the malware guys! look at Android it seems like every other day we are reading of some exploit.
But in the end you have not a damned thing to bitch about in mobile. Android is switching between first and second place constantly, there are a bazillion different hacked droid ROMs out there you can play with, life is good man so why get your panties in a wad for a device you would NEVER buy in a million years anyway? And if you are buying Windows devices to get the trialware price breaks and then loading Linux YOU are a damned hypocrite and part of the problem, as there are many guys like System76 busting their asses trying to support you and if you don't buy from them and support Linux then you're just being assholes and have NO right to complain about the numbers showing Windows share being so high because you are part of those numbers!
But now you have no excuses, you can buy damned near any device you want running Linux, so vote with your wallet and let everyone else vote with theirs, okay? if the world likes what you have it'll win, if not then that simply means you aren't listening to the people and giving them what they want, simple as that. But bitching about Win 8 ARM not letting you boot Linux when most of you wouldn't piss on a Win 8 anything is just bitching for the sake of being a bitch and more than a little pointless, okay? Nobody is taking anything "away" from you if you would have never bought it in the first place, and ARM chips are about as different from x86 as night is to day, with ARM everything is custom chips whereas x86 will run any old thing. If you want freedom? you've got the droid, have fun, I'll be joining you when those $70 Droid tablets hit just for shits and giggles. But when MSFT is paying for a device let them design it however they wish.
Then we should fund a study and put the issue to rest, don't you think? Seems simple and logical enough to me, but as you would see if you actually tried it you would be labeled a monster for even THINKING of checking such a thing out, because "it's racist" to say anything other than everyone is exactly the same, no matter what race, sex, or environment they came from. Why everyone can be rocket scientists with the right education!
Do i think they are right or wrong? Honestly I have no idea, but I think ANY question shouldn't be considered taboo to ask and that was what i was pointing out. look at how many are now pushing young girls take careers in math, what if they simply don't want it? What if they would prefer language? Well that doesn't matter because girls are just boys with penises turned inside out, which BTW once upon a time medicine taught as truth. I simply think anything that helps us to learn more about the human condition should be available for serious study, and that "PC" belongs in politic and not in science. Don't you agree?
Its actually quite simple...follow the money. cap and trade will make certain insiders BILLIONS by basically taking a percentage of the wallets of every man, woman, and child in the west so naturally anything that threatens that paycheck like say debate isn't allowed. Before this turns into rep VS dem or oil VS whatever I'd point out this has NOTHING to do with parties and EVERYTHING to do with insiders. just as Cheney made out like a bandit with Halliburton and Iraq so to is friends of Obama making out like bandits on free money from Uncle Sam for dubious "green tech". Solydra was just the tip of a rotten iceberg, one of the Kennedy kids got over a billion interest free for the company he is on the board of and that company has NEVER made a single cent and in their last 2 years has lost 20 million on 10 million in sales. Nobody with a brain would ever give a company with that kind of record that kind of money but it didn't have squat to do with investment, it had to do with good old boys getting their kickbacks for supporting the POTUS. The green fund has so far shelled out nearly 20 billion dollars in US taxpayer money and 19 of the top 20 getting checks were...drumroll...big donors to the president's election campaign!
The sad part is science has gotten hijacked by big money on all sides. any researcher that comes up with a finding that threatens the big paydays these corps are looking at will see their funding dry up and blow away so its safer to stay with the bandwagon. Instead of science being used to find out the truth its being used to support an agenda and that goes for BOTH sides of the aisle. How anybody can sort truth from propaganda anymore is anyone's guess but frankly i wouldn't trust scientists on either side of this debate to tell me if it was raining outside, there is just too many checks being passed around. In a way it reminds me of how the politicians all jumped on the eugenics bandwagon in the early twentieth century so suddenly we had all these scientific papers "proving" that you could tell things like IQ simply by race or the shape of the nose. Now it seems total insanity but if you tried to go against it when its was accepted you were treated like a whacko.
TRUE science should welcome debates and studies as that is how we revise theories and find out new things, after all a closed mind simply can't learn new concepts. look at how Einstein wasted the last 20 years of his life trying to disprove quantum mechanics as it just didn't fit with his view of the universe, going so far as to make his "God doesn't play dice" remark trying to ridicule it. Now we have seen that with things like quantum entanglement things we take for granted in the macro universe simply don't play by the same rules at the quantum level. Would we have ever learned such things if they would have been called "Einstein deniers"? Who knows, but I REALLY don't like how much politics is getting entangled in science.
Well in my case its more like "fire up browser, disable security settings, log in, find game buy" which makes more than a little inelegant, it makes it a royal PITA. And its not like having tabs is some rare and hard to do thing ya know, hell even IE has middle click open new tab now and has had it for a couple of versions. If they want us to keep buying they have to above all make it EASY, the easier the better, and that is NOT easy, its irritating. Gabe said it best when he said to the effect that "pirates are your competitors offering a better product" but if he doesn't watch it the non Valve publishers are gonna ruin Steam and take away the sole reason for going to them over TPB, and that's ease of use. I want to be able to just go down the sale list, slap any game i see in the cart and NOT have to worry about getting Starfucked or GFWLed or some other nasty. Having a simple icon that indicates there is third party DRM isn't too much to ask for, is it?
Sadly I know what you say is true, look at how they have practically blacklisted those scientists that published a study that showed Asians were smarter than whites and whites smarter than blacks. Now if one were to look at that with logic instead of emotion one would probably conclude it had to do with environment and available food sources. the Asians had rougher living conditions in the mountains of Asia than the northern plains of Europe, the whites had a rougher winter climate in the plains of Europe than the warm fertile lands of Africa, therefor the need for brains simply wasn't as needed for survival because the food wasn't as scarce. Simple, logical, but not allowed because it isn't "PC" to say anything other than all races are exactly the same except for skin tone, or that males and females are the exact same except for different genitalia.
Its sad that science despite our supposedly "enlightened" societies still can't tackle truly tough questions about the human animal without having to follow political correctness and dogma. Look at the hate and stink caused by anyone that says the climate could be affected by anything other than AGW, they are called names and accused of being "plants" of some nefarious group when the simple fact is we live on an incredibly complex planet that has had some seriously huge changes long before man could affect squat, see the medieval warming period or the little ice age for just two examples. Does that mean we shouldn't strive to be cleaner? of course not if for no other reason than smog is bad on the lungs, but that doesn't mean one should send the entire society back to the dark ages to 'save the planet" (while making several of those screaming about AGW instant billionaires) either. It means we should do what ALL good science should do, we should study, discuss, ask questions and search for answers.
its just a shame that heresy has been replaced with political correctness as there is still quite a bit we need to learn about the human animal to better understand ourselves but when there are questions you simply aren't allowed to ask then our progress is stifled.
I never understood why people refuse to believe something could ever be the case because its labeled as a stereotype, lets take the goldigger example. Women have a biological imperative to find a mate capable of supporting her offspring, we see this behavior in just about every species out there, so why do we think the human female would be ANY different in this regard? Its like a study i read not too long ago (it was in a mag, sorry as i have NO clue which one) that had the results of a study that showed women's taste in men changed based on whether or not they were on birth control or had the ability to have children. those that couldn't have children or were on birth control favored softer, gentler "teddy bear" or pretty boy types, those that were fertile and not on birth control favored the rougher, more masculine "bad boy" types. The conclusion is pretty obvious, as far as evolution goes the stronger more dominant male is more likely top of the food chain and therefor better able to provide for her offspring. the fact that this doesn't hold true in modern society doesn't magically undo 20,000 years of evolution.
And I'll probably get hate for pointing this out but if nationally its the same as locally its true, you see more blacks in sports because they are practicing voluntary eugenics and breeding for athletic ability. I was the tutor for most of the HS football team and their parents made no bones about it, they chose their mates based on athletic ability. One was quite proud that after 2 years of searching he was able to woo a top track and field star, their kids were constantly at the top of every athletic roster and three out of their four children got full scholarships based on their skills on the field (the fourth went MMA) and they were quite proud of that and bragged quite often. love frankly had nothing to do with their initial selection, it was all based on athletic skill.
As for TFA most women simply don't care for geekier jobs, does that make them stupid? Nooo, it simply means that it doesn't appeal to them. They will kick a guy's ass when it comes to verbal languages or anything where being able to read body language comes into play such as negotiator, I've also found women make better cops and are able to more often diffuse a situation without needing violence. this whole "women and men are equal so there numbers should be equal" is a fallacy that assumes a female is simply a male with different genitalia and nothing could be further from the truth, just as a man might be able to lift more but a woman will be more agile so too is there jobs where it will appeal to a woman's natural abilities and some that will appeal to a man's. That doesn't mean that the women are being run off or are incapable of doing the job, simply that they don't want it. I don't see anything sexist in simply acknowledging we are different.
Did you try getting those games on GOG? I've found for older funky games you really can't beat good old games, out of the nearly 50 titles I've bought so far from them, going back to the early 90s, that there was exactly ONE game that didn't work and i knew from having owned it previously what I was getting into. Apparently whomever coded i76 had its timing based around the Pentium chips that were out then because anything faster screws up the scripted events, but thanks to the excellent GOG community I was able to slap on a patch they cooked up and get the game up and running. Considering my main OS is Win 7 HP X64 the fact that all these games will run just shows how much work the GOG guys put into their releases as many were released before 64 bit computing was even a thought, hell some of them like BLOOD and Redneck Rampage were even before Win9x becoming the dominant game platform. So give them a try, they even have 3 or 4 free games you can download once you sign up just to give it a spin, they are really great at getting funky older games to run.
As for TFA the sad part is even though I haven't bought a single Ubisoft game since Butcher Bay I'm sure they'll just put down any losses to piracy and bribe the politicians for ever more draconian measures. Its what i call "PPT math" in that they'll look at console sales and bring their bribed congress critters a PPT and say "See if you'll look at this slide it says we sold X on consoles which means we should have sold X+Y counting PCs and since we didn't it must be teh ebil pirates ZOMFG!" while ignoring the fact many of us simply won't touch ANYTHING by Ubisoft no matter if you sold it for a buck. me personally I've had to change out too many new DVD burners because the customer got Starfucked and the burner was thrown into PIO mode and fried. That kind of bullshit along with Ubisoft being the absolute worst when it comes to screwing their customers have simply made sure i won't buy nor pirate a single Ubisoft title, I won't allow that trash on my system.
But I'm sure thanks to PPT math i'll be listed as a pirate along with anyone else that doesn't buy this so it'll be used as an excuse to push even nastier laws. Its one of those "too big to fail, heads i win tails you lose" kinda things and it sucks, but we've seen it time and time again, companies that think their shit don't stink and no matter how badly they treat their customers if they don't get the sales they believe they are entitled to it MUST be those ebil pirates.
Your drivers DO NOT WORK which after 20 damned years you better try something friend, if not an ABI (which BTW, Apple, MSFT, OS/2, BSD, Solaris, what do these have in common? A stable ABI. If its such a bad idea how come everyone else but YOU have them. think linus is smarter than the entire planet?) then you better find something because I can take any bog standard box and use apt-dist-upgrade and watch it puke all over its own drivers and DIE HARD. Hell i'll be happy to post a link to an article from a 10 year plus Linux server admin that is now looking at Macs, why? Because openSUSE puked on itself when upgraded and killed itself. BTW the ONLY article you can post or citation you can post here against an ABI is a RELIGIOUS article by a kernel dev that goes so far as to say "I hope those that use non free drivers have broken systems!" so his goal is NOT to have a solid functional system but to push the FOSS agenda, full stop. Finally look at the numbers, here i'll give you a link now notice how you are being beaten by JavaME, a garbage cell phone OS that is on Fred's and Family Dollar $10 Tracphones, why is that? After 20 years that's the BEST you can do? Retailers won't touch it, no OEM except Dell will carry it (and they won't give you their figures because i'd bet my last dollar they are losing money on every Ubuntu sale) and numbers can't lie friend, they are what they are.
The FOSS community has become IMHO a perfect example of "perception bubble" where everything is happy and gay and no problems must ever be pointed out. You say your OS doesn't need an ABI, then what would YOU do about the OS puking on itself with every. single. apt dist upgrade hmmm? The other guys added an ABI because they didn't want their drivers puking but if you have another way I'd sure like to hear it. here I am in the start of the great XP dieoff and I'm having to scramble to find a source for Win 7 Starter simply because i can't find a single distro that doesn't kill itself when you upgrade the thing and the length of support is too lousy to keep on the same version. The average length of Windows OEM is 11 years, XP-2001-2014, Win 7-2009-2020, I can't even find a FOSS OS that will give you 6 years of reliable updates without shelling out more than the most expensive version of Windows. if you don't like the way i talk sorry chuck, this is called frustration from being constantly lied to for years. I get told 'Linux is ready for the desktop" yet when i try it it dies only to get told I either will have to teach my customers to be unix admins (the cost of training will be MORE than a copy of Windows) or that i must be "doing it wrong" despite the fact that apt-dist-upgrade is not really something one CAN do wrong. the only wrong i'm seeing is the information being placed here by FOSS users who should say "Linux is ready for the desktop*" (*-if you provide free lifetime support or have the skills to diagnose and troubleshoot unix systems) which cuts out 99% of the population and the numbers reflect that. numbers don't lie friend, its not a conspiracy, its that your product simply doesn't work in the home market, not even a little bit. linux is great on servers, kicks ass in embedded, horrible on the desktop.
Shouldn't we really just call TFA "Hey guess what? Ubisoft is again proving they are douchebags" and call it a day though? Lets face it whenever we hear of a company leading the way in assraping the customers it is ALWAYS Ubisoft. They destroyed DVD burners with Starforce, they were the first that i know of to burn customers by making their games have an always on internet connection, now they are the first to have NASTY hardware based customer screwing. When it comes to being giant pricks ALWAYS count on Ubisoft.
BTW if any of the Valve guys are reading this? We need to talk bro. I want, nay DEMAND that you put an easy to see mark that lets me know without clicking on the main page and scrolling to the bottom some sort of sign that a game contains DRM above what Steam has so i can avoid it. The whole point of Steam is ease of use yet you are letting the publishers fuck that up by hiding the "this game contains extra DRM" shit at the bottom of the main page. i don't want to go to the main page when I'm browsing sales, okay? So far in the past month and a half i got stuck with GFWL and TAGES by not having an easy way to spot that shit when browsing the sales. if I have to go click on every. single. link with NO way to open new tabs in your client? my purchases are gonna go waaaay down dudes. So fix that shit, come up with an icon that says "This has extra DRM, maybe a red and white stop sign looking thing, just to let your customers know. I'm sure the publishers will bitch but you know what? let 'em. Remember these same douchenozzles would be happy to see you go under and just go to Origin and its your CUSTOMERS you need to be watching out for, not pricks like Ubisoft.
Also make a way for me to "ban" publishers from my view. There were several games during the Steam sale i got excited about only to click on it and find out its a Ubisoft game with extra DRM shit so I wasted my time, time i could have been looking at titles that i would actually buy. I don't want any Ubisoft, i won't buy any Ubisoft, so why not make a simple preference page that lets me banhammer them from my purchasing pages? Remember Valve the ONLY reason you are rolling in swimming pools filled with cash is that you made Steam easier than piracy, but if you make it a royal PITA to buy games there its not like we don't have PTB where we don't have to deal with phone home and other horseshit.
BTW for all the complaints and comparisons to Windows activation? I have NEVER had MSFT refuse an activation on a legit key EVAR. Hell the machine I'm typing this on is a Win 7 HP I installed in OCT 09 when i built the thing and I have changed out every. single. piece. of the hardware, and I do mean EVERY piece. the HDDs, the RAM, the graphics card,the PSU, the motherboard, and the CPU. The ONLY original piece left is the case yet I've only had to reactivate ONE time and that was when i switched out the ECS motherboard and quad CPU for an Asrock and 6 core Thuban. it took less than 5 seconds and went without a hitch. Working at my little shop I've had to call MSFT plenty of times when someone royally boned their PC and installed multiple times trying to "fix it" (Lord save us from those that know just enough to be dangerous) and it took me less than 5 minutes in every case. i'd say "The guy messed up his install and kept trying to fix it himself before bringing it to the shop" and the person on the line would be "Okay,put in this code" and that was it. No hassles, no bullshit, no muss nor fuss.
But I won't have a game that i can't switch hardware with so i don't care if this game is the second coming it won't be coming anywhere near my PC.How much you want to bet this will be in the top five of PTB downloads, along with Diablo III? After all Ubisoft thought that they'd have piracy stopped cold with the always on Assassins Creed and it took the Fairlight guys less than a month to have a 100% functional version. just more proof that often the pirate version is the better version as they don't have to deal with this horseshit.
I say as far as TV there shouldn't be a way to even label it AS piracy if they are showing it OTA. After all if you can get it for absolutely free why should they give a crap if I don't have the time to watch it at say Wed at 8PM? If they would just let us watch when we have the time I wouldn't need to fricking format shift would I? It also ignores the fact that seeing a show, be it OTA or BT can get a person interested enough to buy. I have the almost complete Whedon collection* which probably cost close to $1000 along with a couple of sideshow collectible figures from Buffy that my late sister got me as bookends simply because I was able to download a couple of episodes of BtVS off of eMule. When Buffy was on the air there wasn't a station in this area with a strong enough signal to actually watch it and frankly if I hadn't downloading a couple of episodes and got hooked on the writing I would have NEVER bought it based on the description. I mean a show based on a bad movie with the guy from the Taster's Choice commercials and a soap actress as stars? Doesn't sound even a tiny bit appealing to me, but after seeing a few episodes i got hooked on the witty dialog and ended up getting the complete box set along with the Angel and Firefly set so that's a $1000 they would have never gotten otherwise.
As for TFA frankly I don't see how anyone can predict batshit. With serial killers we've seen everything in this country from a sexual sadist clown (Gacy) to one that was killing the same girl over again (Bundy) to a guy that thought the neighbor's dog was giving him orders (Son of Sam) to a nutbar collecting slaves for the afterlife (Zodiac). If its one thing we've learned about these freaks its that like a virus there is always some new mutation and there is as many reasons for them doing it as there are stars in the sky. I have to wonder how much of these "patterns" are simply trying to find meaning where none exists? it seems we humans really don't like things that are unpredictable and out of control and that pretty much describes serial killers.
(*didn't get Dollhouse, never cared for it)
What's a midge? As for skeeters you should go to the delta sometime, they come in bunches so thick they look like a black cloud. Makes the fish fat though, i've seen them literally jumping out of the water to grab a big mouthful when they are flying just above a creek. As far as roaches ANY big city, i don't care how far north you go, will have huge bastards. Down here it stays warm enough most of the time the roaches stay outside where there is plenty of leaf matter to feed on and they actually don't get that big, the other bugs prey on them too much. the only time you see any big roaches is when there is a flood and the old ones come out the storm tunnels looking for higher ground.
And you can keep the cold friend, as I always say "You can get under a shade tree with some sweet tea, or turn on your AC, but when its 20 degrees outside there is NOTHING you can do to keep from freezing your balls off." Give me a nice warm climate where there is tons of fresh fruits in the farmer's markets and slow cooked BBQ and I'm a happy camper.
That is why I suggested his local mom&pop as that is the perfect place to find older hardware like that. That said the non "cap plague' P3s are starting to go now simply because the caps dry out and pop, that is what happened to my very last SFF P3. But since the "great XP dieoff" is in full swing I have no doubt his local shop has some Celeron or even better Sempron office boxes and you can usually underclock those quite easily. this would give him the benefits of newer hardware with better caps and also give him low power. Something like a socket 754 Sempron is dirt cheap and would be more than enough power for the task at hand, they could even have it also work as a file server to keep Sunday School lessons on.
Its a small valley situated between two mountains, the Ozarks is full of them. Truly gorgeous up in that area and because you can't farm in a holler easily (too many trees, too hilly) you can own quite a bit of land dirt cheap. And for the guy that said you get mosquitoes the size of B52? that's the delta NOT the Ozarks. In fact because there is so little standing water you almost never see mosquitoes in that area.
I'd say its genuine when there are months where every single posting i place anywhere on the net (I'm the same UID pretty much everywhere, if you see a post by Hairyfeet anywhere its me) will almost instantly be followed up by a post that reads 'Die you fat fucker die". Like I said you can look up old APK who also posts as APK everywhere he goes, the loonie that stalks me has been stalking him for a couple of months now because he has convinced himself that ANYBODY that disagrees with him "must be hairyfeet" so even though APK and myself have never agreed on shit or even hang out in the same places other than /. (APK hangs out on CNet and Infoworld, i hang out on Ars and OSNews) he has been getting the same "Die fat fucker die' posts wherever he goes.
But I don't think its true our tastes have changed, at least not with me, as I have NO problem is someone passionately believes in a subject but I have NEVER subscribed to the BS that something is "right" 100% because of an ideology, be it communism, capitalism, or in the case of /. FOSSism. Like I said we USED to have a 100+ comment post on the advantages or disadvantages of say NTFS VS EXT2 or a top down VS community managed projects and while collars would be heated the discussions were civil and on point, now we get +5 mods for putting a post that says "Use Linux" in the middle of a post on say the new iPad, WTF? What does that have to do with ANYTHING in TFA? answer not a damned thing, its just the trolls have been given free reign and all groupthink gets plus moderation.
I think the other poster nailed it on not allowing modpoints to be targeted at specific individuals, such as if you modbomb the same person multiple times you should be banned from moderation (I would say banned from the site but that would be harder to pull) but I would go one further and say if this person uses their modpoints to consistently troll a particular subject they should likewise be banned from modding. When i have modpoints I purposely stay away from FOSS articles simply so that no one can accuse me of bias, but if every. single. time. a person gets mod points they head straight for the same sections over and over its pretty obvious they are using modpoints to modbomb. I bet if an admin were to look at the modding for my own posts they'd see that while upmods are all over the place there is one IP address that downmods me week after week, well it don't take kojack to crack the case of the modbomber stalker now does it?
in the end I've noticed that while the sites you name don't give a crap there are plenty of others like Ars and OSNews that do and show it CAN be stopped, the admins simply have to care. And I'd argue that 2 years of solid declines month after month shows that the readership is simply getting tired of "perceptual bubbles" which is what I've been told to replace 'fanboi circle jerks' with but in the end the results are the same, a handful of parrots spewing groupthink constantly to karma whore a few accounts so they can get enough modpoints to modbomb. i mean look at Mikey 500+ accounts, if that don't show the system is broken i don't know what does. I mean the guy has made over 500 accounts with the same name and an incremental number, how hard is it to spot he's a troll?
Don't forget the Brits had in the mosquito an aircraft that could be made in a piano factory by unskilled labor that was faster than most German planes which required metals they quickly ran out of. the Brits with their navy and aircraft production wouldn't have fallen to the Nazis easily and Sealion was never seriously considered because the Luftwaffe never could gain air supremacy over Britain.
For those that say "We had to get involved in WWII for freedom!" I'd suggest reading Herbert Hoover's biography, its online now and a pretty interesting read. he was tightly involved in the halls of power at that time and documents how it didn't matter to FDR that the people didn't want war, he frankly didn't give a fuck and wanted in Europe BAD so he did everything he could to start shit. there is even a line directly quoted from FDR in the book that is something to the effect of "We'll tighten the noose around the japs and spit on their honor until they have no choice but to fight back and then I'll be given free reign". Remember this is the same POTUS that was gonna gut the SCOTUS and load it with judges of his choosing until they bowed to his desires and pushed the commerce clause well past any sane rationalization so he got his "New deal" programs passed.
Exactly. if you want to be close to nature come to a state like AR, where its lush green wherever you see and land is cheap so you can own your own holler and have as much nature as you desire. my GF's family own their own holler up in the Ozarks and i just love going up there to spend a week because i can sit on the front porch and enjoy my lunch while watching a herd of deer graze not 60 feet from my seat. Of course you gotta watch the squirrels on the back patio, the grandkids have fed them so much they park their little fat asses on the back patio not 10 feet from you and if you don't throw them a snack they start chattering at you like they are saying "Hey asshole, i'm right here looking all cute and shit and STILL no nuts, WTF? what's a squirrel gotta do to get some of those raisins man?". If its something they really love like dried fruits or cashews you can just stretch your hand out palm up and they will come pick the fruits right out of your hand.
Its really beautiful country with miles and miles of unspoiled wilderness you can enjoy, fishing, hunting, whitewater rafting, or just being lazy with an inner-tube and a cold one on a lazy Sunday afternoon, its just nice. It also only snows a couple of days a year and almost never sticks except on the mountain tops so its a hell of a lot nicer even in the winter than something like Nome. how them folks live in that kind of cold is just beyond me, hell you have people dressing like Eskimos if it drops below freezing here and its a lovely 62 degrees f right now, light breeze, just wonderful. i'll take that over freezing my nads off any day of the week!
Oh I agree, the local foodbank is doing their inventory on a couple of offlease i threw together for them and some of the stories just make you sick at your stomach, people that worked their asses off only to get stomped on by the system. Everyone is just a single illness away from being destitute yet both the Dems and Reps pander to the rich with ever more tax breaks and attacks to make free medical care some socialist bogeyman when medical bills are the #1 reason folks lose it all. I have a cousin that has to live on a lousy $700 a month in SSI when he is more than smart enough and has the skills to easily be a computer tech or even run his own shop, but he's in a catch 22 where his medicine that allows him to walk costs $96,000 a year (no shit, its more than $9,000 a dose and he gets it every 4 weeks) so if he works he loses his medicine which would leave him unable to work.
But I don't know if its the same in your area but in my area a single pot bust means you will NEVER get anything above manual labor and we are up to our asses in illegals now. The part that will piss you off is I know a gal that is a state social worker and she's about to quit simply because the bosses force her to give crazy benefits to illegals! An American family will get less than 1/4th what she gives to illegals and when she complained she was told that its political and to STFU. So the whole system is royally fucked and copper stealing is just a symptom of a larger disease, our sliding towards being a third world country.
Look up the minerals under Afghanistan friend, its a fricking motherload of untapped mines just waiting to be exploited by Halliburton and friends! Sorry friend but there hasn't been a war since WWII (which FDR ignored the will of the people and purposely started shit with both Germany and Japan despite the majority wanting to stay the hell out of it and by doing so I'd argue he helped the USSR become the powerhouse it became by not letting Germany and the Russians kill each other) that somebody up high wasn't making some mad money on. Hell look at Vietnam, the CIA made out like bandits thanks to Air America and drug smuggling and bell made out by selling very expensive disposable Hueys.
Its actually VERY simple friend and so old Ike warned us about it in the 50s. The MIC got used to making mad profits thanks to WWII and once it was over wasn't about to give up those crazy piles of cash, and many other corps had found ways to make mad profits during wars, everything from securing mineral rights to the OSS/CIA smuggling ops. For these people it doesn't matter how many peasants or soldiers die as long as they can get their cut of the pie. Do you think Bell saw Vietnam as a failure? It sold more choppers at huge markups so it was a rousing success as far as they were concerned. Now that the MSM is owned by a handful other than the occasional WikiLeak your news is about as real as USSR Pravda anymore and they have whole teams that do nothing but make up bullshit to justify the next profit grab, look at how many "ZOMFG Iran Burns Babies!" type stories you'll be seeing in the coming weeks. After all "Iran did 9/11" according to a circuit court which means they are the next target on profitpaloza!
Its still a political story, its just one where they have a single piece of tech in there which does NOT make it a tech story. They could just as easily do the same thing with mercs (and probably do I wonder how many "suicide" and "accidental" deaths of those that mouthed off weren't someone taking care of a problem) but this is all about the political implications of having a government that can kill anyone at anytime. Well guess what? Its been that way for many years now, you piss the wrong official off its trivial to use you CC history to make a damned accurate schedule of where you are gonna be and when, you could have an accident, suicide, failed car jacking, the possibilities of making someone that pisses you off go bye bye when you have THAT level of political power is staggering, look at the Stasi which is what I'd argue those in power ultimately want.
But all of that is political, its the insiders deciding which direction they want to steer the land under their control. Just sticking the word drone in it doesn't make it a tech story anymore than that hit on the Iranian nuke scientist was a tech story because the mine they used was magnetic. We have sections for a REASON people, its so those of us that don't want to deal with sections don't have to and sticking stories where they don't belong just breaks the whole thing.