Sorry but you are wrong, and here is why: Everyone and their dog has ever growing piles of media. Even those that don't keep movies on their drives (which more and more are, being able to have a media library on your netbook or use your desktop as an HTPC by streaming to your new net enabled TV is nice) I've found coming to me for HDD upgrades simply because they are running out of space on all those 200Gb and 300Gb hard drives. they have videos of their families, tons of pictures, software up the wazoo, that space goes damned quick my friend.
Lets be honest folks, the ONLY reason anyone is mentioning SSDs is because the HDD manufacturers put all their eggs in a single Bangkok basket and had the basket go floating down the street. Before the stupidity with the flood I was getting 1Tb drives for $36 and 2Tb drives for $56. i'm sorry but NO SSD comes even close to those numbers, not in any way shape or form. By the time you can get a 1Tb SSD for that price we'll have 10Gb HDDs (Seagate and WD have both written papers about quadrupling capacity with new nanotech) for $90.
Finally as I got to see first hand from some of my gamer customers whose data went "poof!" the ONLY reason SSDs are getting cheap is that they are abandoning SLC for MLC and thanks to the insane failure rates as Jeff Atwood pointed out MLC drives really have to be judged on a "hot/crazy" scale as the hot speed come with crazy failure rates. I had 4 gamer customers go SSD, the fastest drives, no expense spared, not a single one made it past the 2 year mark. Hell I have 20gb HDDs that still run fine, what I'll do with them I have no clue but the data is still there.
So if you have the money to have spares, don't give a shit about your data or have a REAL HDD to back up constantly then yes, SSDs can work. but dealing with everyday folks I can tell you backups? Is like pulling teeth with most folks and while I can often get the data off a failing HDD with a failed SSD you are SOL unless you happen to have an electron microscope handy. all it'll take is a few horror stories of Suzy losing their late mother's pictures to kill any desire for SSDs QUICK.
Hell you watch, the HDD manufacturers get their collective shit back together and you'll be seeing $200 barebones and $300 netbooks with huge drives again and nobody but geeks and benchmark addicts will give SSD a second thought. For the average Joe it is ALWAYS about the numbers and bigger is ALWAYS better.
Its a shame you posted AC as you'll probably never see this but you DO know there are cracks out there for damned near every steam game, yes? And frankly I've NEVER heard of them revoking anything on anyone unless they were SERIOUSLY being a douchenozzle, like using wallhacks or other low life chickenshit cheats which frankly ruin the game for everyone. I actually WANT someone to keep little pricks from waving their little weiners in my face, thanks ever so. If they kick my ass because they are better? Fine and dandy, age does catch up to us all. But when they win because of a fucking aimbot or wall hack it just makes sure I don't go back and will most likely not buy another game in that series.
And it'll be me that'll be laughing at YOU sir, as I have NO doubt our good friends the pirates will simply release a "steam last version kill switch" that will simply throw the games into offline mode and tell them to no longer call home. Hell knowing the pirates they'll probably hack together a server matchmaking service while they are at it, they are pretty good at shit like that, just look at the "unofficial" WoW servers out there. I have no doubts if Gabe ever pulls the plug the pirates will make my $1 games run just fine, thanks for the concern. Meanwhile unlike YOU if you are pirating (because I hate to break the news to ya but many of the newer DRMs on the discs you buy at Amazon DO have an online activation or registration so you ARE in the same boat, you just paid more) you don't get the MP, you don't get the patches autoupdated, you don't get access to the DLC, you get none of the extras. That makes Steam a FTW in my book.
I'd say the bigger problem is what to do with all the people now that capitalism has nearly run its course and will simply no longer function as a system except for the top 10%.
Think about it: What IS capitalism? At its core it is trading labor for capital, simple right? But what if your labor is simply no longer required? What do you do then? Are you gonna pack all the manual laborers up and ship them to China and India? I doubt very much they'd take them. What we have here now is something simply never before seen in our history. With each previous technological advance we we empowering the workers to make more with less, now we are REPLACING workers and unlike in previous leaps there simply isn't new jobs being created to give those workers thrown out of a job. What we have is a giant game of IQ musical chairs and more and more simply won't have a seat. What do you do with them? do you put them in camps? Take away their reproductive rights? what?
I truly believe capitalism like every other ism before it has simply run its course. the depression we are starting in will simply get worse because in the end all these millions of workers simply are no longer required. the machines never get sick or tired, don't need medical care or insurance and increasingly they don't even need skilled workers to maintain them, they simply need a few "parts monkeys" that can do what the machines tell them to do. I got a nice view of what it is like helping a neighbor who is computer illiterate. Most likely he will end up homeless simply because he can't compete, even if I give him computer skills at 47 frankly his odds of finding a job are virtually non-existent now. What do we do with all these people?
What I don't understand about the whole DRM mess is this: Why hasn't somebody brought up the bigger question which is why force a tech THAT DOES NOT WORK and ONLY pisses off the people PAYING you?
Look at all the DRM bullshit they put on video, has that stopped a SINGLE video from showing up on TPB before it was even released? NO! yet they expect me to jump through hoops and either take DRM that doesn't work on my system or buy a DVD, rip said DVD, transcode said DVD into a format I can use.......or I can just go to TPB, see where this is heading friends?
Frankly the ONLY DRM I've seen done "right" is Steam, just give me my game Valve and get the fuck out of the way, thanks. They give you value for your money, have a nice little chat client that makes it easy to get everyone together for a match, have the easy gift thing for dealing with my boys, don't bitch if I need to back up or move the folder, its all easy peasy. Why the fuck can't the other bunches learn?
I agree with Gabe from Valve, piracy is a classic case of you not serving the customers. Just like in TFA the stupid publishers are so hung up on piling on the DRM which has NEVER worked, will NEVER work, not in a bazillion years, because the pirates are ALWAYS smarter than them, so in the end the only one the DRM bites in the ass is the guy actually trying to pay them. It is like the media companies are all run by the PHB from Dilbert...argh!
An even better question, what is gonna keep them from just changing the old "we lost the files" FOIA bullshit to "Ooopsie. somebody wiped a drive!" FOIA bullshit? If they are gonna go digital we need a ROCK SOLID way to make sure they don't pull shit like the last one did with sending all their email through the RNC so they could be conveniently "lost".
Frankly I don't see why they would bother with the firmware. Has anybody seen the new Windows drivers for some of the HP and Lexmark consumer printers? Man what a POS! And they ALL set themselves up open permissions on the firewall so they can "call home' to try to sell you more shit.
If I was the malware guys I'd be aiming at the printer drivers, people expect their printers to have a bunch of crap with them anymore, hell i doubt they'd even notice one more service with HP or LX at the front of it.
Well they have a good reason to as this NSFW poster illustrates. Personally I don't see why DeBeer's don't just cut out the bullshit and make that the slogan. I'm sure many of us would appreciate the honesty.
You're both spoiled! I had 4Mb and only 2Mb on the card and thought I was kicking! Funny now when I have 8Gb on my netbook and the same on my desktop to think about how I spent more for a tiny couple of Mb of RAM back then than I did for my whole netbook now. I'll never forget though the first time I loaded up my Voodoo in my spanking new 133Mhz and loaded Unreal, I swear me and my friends just watched that opening demo for ages going "ooooh!". Man we were easily entertained back then.
as for TFA I never understood why getting a random number always seemed to be so hard, just take all the scores off the sports page, multiple by that last winning powerball numbers, then divide by how many pepperonis you got on your last pizza. Easy peasy!
I thought it was a apple whoring google kissing microsoft bashing fanboi infested retarded system....did I miss a meeting? they should really post these things up on the main page so we know who we are supposed to be bashing this week. Some of us have lives you know.
Congrats, you were the only one who picked up on the reference. One guy said The Stand and good old Captain Trips, but in that scenario a guy snuck under the fence and went by car. But when I read TFA all I could picture in my head was David Morse and that vicious little smile as he boarded the plane.
Yep, not a college kid as one of the posters suggested but I live down the street from a college. Plenty of bright eager young men and women more than happy to make a few bucks and this kind of repetitive work is just perfect for a college kid.
You feel good at helping a kid earn a few bucks to buy their sweetie a gift and not having to do a boring job, they are happy to earn a little extra cash that doesn't involve washing dishes or busing tables, its a win/win as I see it.
Class actions are even worse! The lawyers get huge paydays while the victims get a coupon towards their next purchase with the company that screwed them just adding insult to injury!
As for TFA let me guess...another slap on the wrist? In the past decade any power the regulatory agencies had has been taken away or bought out by bribery. I doubt very seriously you'll ever see another big court case like the MSFT one in the 90s, Citizens United saw to that. These slaps on the wrist are just the cost of doing business now and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if the supermegacorps have a "STFU fund" set up just for dealing with those "pesky" rules and regs.
Sorry old dude but in case you missed the memo we're broke as a joke and China has all teh monies. The entire USA is being run by a handful of banksters and politicians that spend on pointless BS like an 11th aircraft carrier while going through borrowed money like its free.
Expecting the USA to take the "lead" on anything but killing brown people and kissing Israel's booty (thanks to the "Jesus won't come back! Come back Jesus, come back!" brigade) at this point is like wishing Patton would rise from the grave and teach our military how to not get bogged down in bullshit. it just ain't gonna happen friend, sorry.
While this is a well thought out post, you are missing the point, although I do think its funny I got a "+1 Troll" as that is a new one for me.
The point was the way the community acts with regards to certain companies that they have already decided are "good" or "evil". If Google was to print Android manuals with the blood of dead kittens and send the community a Goatse Xmas card they would be tripping over themselves to explain away their "quirky sense of humor" whereas if one of the "evil" companies were to bump them in the street they'd be screaming "ZOFG get the pitchforks!"
Your UID is low enough you've had to have been here for awhile RTFA, you can't tell me you haven't noticed this. When Google said they weren't gonna release the source for 3 the apologists practically RAN to their keyboards to write these huge apology posts, whereas oracle buys a GPLed program, just like what Google did when they hired developers to turn the Linux kernel into Android, and the screams of theft rang high into the night!
I'd say a good reason to avoid GPL and why companies treat GPL is an "infection" is because trying to predict which side of the good/evil coin is gonna land is frankly impossible. I mean who would have thought a company could cook up a slogan like "do no evil" and have the community practically singing its praises when it has about as much meaning in the actual world as "think different"?
Hell here's a better idea nobody has thought of...hire a college kid, throw him a few bucks and have him help you. lets a kid earn a little extra Xmas money, certainly quicker than having to write a bunch of scripts, and its a nice thing to do for Xmas.
While I enjoyed The Stand I was thinking Twelve Monkeys myself, which ended with the carrier waving the vial in front of a TSA agent before getting on a plane for another country, knowing that by the time he was killed by it he would have spread it across the planet.
Uhhh...you DO realize that everything you said ALSO applied to Oracle, yes? Did the community just go "Okay Larry, whatever you say!"? Nope they forked it.
Either the rules are the same for everyone or they are aren't really rules are they? It always amazes me how those that are fanboys of one company or another can come up with logic hoops to explain away the exact same shit they had a fit about from another company. Not saying you are or aren't a fanboy, but the logic in that statement as a refute to his comment about Oracle just doesn't hold water.
Yeah here is the first photo I came across with a Yahoo Search, the thing looks like snow on the water. I kinda doubt that all the flash in the world is gonna make that look like the old Mutual of Omaha videos.
The problem as I see it is we in the west can't really do shit. if we try to without China and India getting involved all we do is commit economic suicide while they just crank out the pollution. unless we in the west are ready to tell the money men to fuck right off and adopt a true isolationist stance and refuse to trade with those that pollute then all we do with scams like cap and trade is export the pollution while handing out checks to the big companies for sending it all overseas.
Bah Goldman Sachs has been playing the whole field since right after the civil war and there is a revolving door between GS and the halls of power. That bunch has their fingers in some many nasty deals I'd expect to see demons in 3 piece suits walking the halls like at Wolfram & Hart. The handful at the top are smart enough to not have their names in the papers, they just use names like Goldman Sachs to be a front for all their little games.
Soros is a bit player compared to the old money, and politicians are just the dancing clowns, meant to keep us busy arguing about stupid shit. The real old money power brokers get enough inside information straight from the politicians and their fronts like GS that it doesn't matter if one government tanks or not, they have a nice "heads I win, tails you lose" setup going on. Must be nice to be able to gamble and make all the gains private and the losses public like that.
"You know why we haven't detected any aliens? why we haven't picked up broadcasts of I Love Lucy starring three headed people? Its because of this, they get to this point in their evolution and then they destroy themselves"..The Outer Limits: Final Exam
In that episode it was a cold fusion bomb but the sentiment is the same. With technological progress comes increased danger and if one makes a leap or breakthrough in one place then as you pointed out others are already on that path, and as the technology becomes easier and cheaper and the knowledge more widely available all it takes is one nut with a cause and the right technological know how to create a recipe for a worldwide holocaust.
Imagine just getting on a plane while carrying this superflu in say London? How far would you have it spread before you were no longer able to continue?
What I think is funny, and kinda sad, is how this will go on and on about "left VS right" when frankly neither one would piss on you if you were on fire. Bill Hicks nailed it when he said "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart......hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling both puppets!
Frankly it really doesn't matter anymore if left OR right is in control because the ultramegacorps are simply too powerful and the system too corrupt.Why do you think it hasn't mattered whether it was Bush or Obama, because both were/are dancing to the same tune! Bush handed out to his oil buddies, Obama is handing out to his buddies in green tech, SSDD. Bush kissed the MIC booty and got us involved in wars we had no business in, Obama kisses the MIC booty and gets us involved with a war we had no business being in, again SSDD. The faces change but the lobbyists don't.
In the end BOTH sides will stuff their snouts into the trough and guzzle everything they can until there isn't a dime left to steal and the whole thing collapses and then BOTH sides will run from the trough squealing like the little piggies that they are, doing their damnedest to make sure its THEIR ass that doesn't end up being turned into bacon. Meanwhile the banks and ultramegacorps will laugh and play with their money like Scrooge fricking McDuck.
Actually I DO encode my own files and I'm afraid it is YOU sir whose ignorance is showing because only a handful of players will play MKV and NONE of them, not a single one, supports the entire spec for less than $200. Most support only the low baseline codec spec, including those "DivX HD" units you have mentioned. I have tried them and frankly they are shit. I can get a better picture with better file size with Xvid and the ONLY gain I have seen for MKV is the ability to have multiple subs, but since i don't watch fansubs I really don't care.
Sure if you want to buy a $200 unit that is basically an ARM PC in a case it'll play, but at that point why not just get an HTPC? Hell its less than $50 more and supports more formats. until you can show me where you can get new units for less than $80 a pop that completely support the MKV spec I'm gonna have to say MKV doesn't cut it. I can buy sub $80 units all day long that support MP4 and AVI up to 1080p with ZERO skipping or dropped frames, again the only ones I've seen supporting MKV for less than $150 support baseline ONLY.
Well I say a good judge of whether something works or not is how they function when they have their idea of utopia, and as we have seen countries that are pure Muslim and run everything based on Sharia are total hellholes with NO freedoms except the freedom to be a good little drone.
I'm sure I'll get hate for daring to point out PC bullshit IS bullshit but the numbers don't lie and if anyone wants the citations I'll be happy to provide them. You look at any chart and the more Muslims a place has? The more violent it becomes. Muslims just don't play well with others and the fact they refuse to even hear a lecture that goes against Islamic teachings really don't surprise me, this is the same bunch that went apeshit and rioted over fucking cartoons. Can you imagine if Christians rioted every time there was a Jesus cartoon? South Park would have probably caused cities to burn!
Sooner or later the west is gonna have to accept there is NO "religion of peace" when it comes to Islam, that is a total lie. Islam simply doesn't play well with others, Muslims simply don't respect the rights of others to believe as they will, and you will NEVER see Christians or any other group for that matter treated as an equal in a Sharia country. The sooner we accept this and accept that a path of appeasement is a path of subjugation the better off the west will be. Look at the EU and how Sharia ghettos are springing up all over the place, is that REALLY how we want things to be here?
Nice to see I'm not the only one who got burnt. BTW didn't you just love their little "challenge" where to "prove" their DRM didn't burn drives you had to fly to Russia or some other middle of nowhere place on your own dime and have it burn a drive in conditions that would NEVER happen IRL, such as a perfectly clean machine with ONLY a single Ubisoft program installed?
I saw enough bricked drives I actually started telling folks "don't buy Ubisoft games unless you want to throw away your burners' because that damned starforce bricked drives like mad! Didn't know it was trying to hack the firmware though, just figured it was throwing the drives into PIO mode like SecuROM+Safedisc does. Every time a customer comes in and says 'My burner only works REAL slow and is throwing errors" I know exactly the cause, its SecuROM+Safedisc on the same system. POS DRM garbage code.
Let me see if I can guess the plot....scientists trying to control nature create a lightning monster which terrorizes a small town (that just so happens to look like Toronto) until a D list actor comes along and saves the day? Oh and there MUST be at least one instance of the cop saying "I'm getting too old for this shit" as I think that's a law now.
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Sorry but you are wrong, and here is why: Everyone and their dog has ever growing piles of media. Even those that don't keep movies on their drives (which more and more are, being able to have a media library on your netbook or use your desktop as an HTPC by streaming to your new net enabled TV is nice) I've found coming to me for HDD upgrades simply because they are running out of space on all those 200Gb and 300Gb hard drives. they have videos of their families, tons of pictures, software up the wazoo, that space goes damned quick my friend.
Lets be honest folks, the ONLY reason anyone is mentioning SSDs is because the HDD manufacturers put all their eggs in a single Bangkok basket and had the basket go floating down the street. Before the stupidity with the flood I was getting 1Tb drives for $36 and 2Tb drives for $56. i'm sorry but NO SSD comes even close to those numbers, not in any way shape or form. By the time you can get a 1Tb SSD for that price we'll have 10Gb HDDs (Seagate and WD have both written papers about quadrupling capacity with new nanotech) for $90.
Finally as I got to see first hand from some of my gamer customers whose data went "poof!" the ONLY reason SSDs are getting cheap is that they are abandoning SLC for MLC and thanks to the insane failure rates as Jeff Atwood pointed out MLC drives really have to be judged on a "hot/crazy" scale as the hot speed come with crazy failure rates. I had 4 gamer customers go SSD, the fastest drives, no expense spared, not a single one made it past the 2 year mark. Hell I have 20gb HDDs that still run fine, what I'll do with them I have no clue but the data is still there.
So if you have the money to have spares, don't give a shit about your data or have a REAL HDD to back up constantly then yes, SSDs can work. but dealing with everyday folks I can tell you backups? Is like pulling teeth with most folks and while I can often get the data off a failing HDD with a failed SSD you are SOL unless you happen to have an electron microscope handy. all it'll take is a few horror stories of Suzy losing their late mother's pictures to kill any desire for SSDs QUICK.
Hell you watch, the HDD manufacturers get their collective shit back together and you'll be seeing $200 barebones and $300 netbooks with huge drives again and nobody but geeks and benchmark addicts will give SSD a second thought. For the average Joe it is ALWAYS about the numbers and bigger is ALWAYS better.
Its a shame you posted AC as you'll probably never see this but you DO know there are cracks out there for damned near every steam game, yes? And frankly I've NEVER heard of them revoking anything on anyone unless they were SERIOUSLY being a douchenozzle, like using wallhacks or other low life chickenshit cheats which frankly ruin the game for everyone. I actually WANT someone to keep little pricks from waving their little weiners in my face, thanks ever so. If they kick my ass because they are better? Fine and dandy, age does catch up to us all. But when they win because of a fucking aimbot or wall hack it just makes sure I don't go back and will most likely not buy another game in that series.
And it'll be me that'll be laughing at YOU sir, as I have NO doubt our good friends the pirates will simply release a "steam last version kill switch" that will simply throw the games into offline mode and tell them to no longer call home. Hell knowing the pirates they'll probably hack together a server matchmaking service while they are at it, they are pretty good at shit like that, just look at the "unofficial" WoW servers out there. I have no doubts if Gabe ever pulls the plug the pirates will make my $1 games run just fine, thanks for the concern. Meanwhile unlike YOU if you are pirating (because I hate to break the news to ya but many of the newer DRMs on the discs you buy at Amazon DO have an online activation or registration so you ARE in the same boat, you just paid more) you don't get the MP, you don't get the patches autoupdated, you don't get access to the DLC, you get none of the extras. That makes Steam a FTW in my book.
I'd say the bigger problem is what to do with all the people now that capitalism has nearly run its course and will simply no longer function as a system except for the top 10%.
Think about it: What IS capitalism? At its core it is trading labor for capital, simple right? But what if your labor is simply no longer required? What do you do then? Are you gonna pack all the manual laborers up and ship them to China and India? I doubt very much they'd take them. What we have here now is something simply never before seen in our history. With each previous technological advance we we empowering the workers to make more with less, now we are REPLACING workers and unlike in previous leaps there simply isn't new jobs being created to give those workers thrown out of a job. What we have is a giant game of IQ musical chairs and more and more simply won't have a seat. What do you do with them? do you put them in camps? Take away their reproductive rights? what?
I truly believe capitalism like every other ism before it has simply run its course. the depression we are starting in will simply get worse because in the end all these millions of workers simply are no longer required. the machines never get sick or tired, don't need medical care or insurance and increasingly they don't even need skilled workers to maintain them, they simply need a few "parts monkeys" that can do what the machines tell them to do. I got a nice view of what it is like helping a neighbor who is computer illiterate. Most likely he will end up homeless simply because he can't compete, even if I give him computer skills at 47 frankly his odds of finding a job are virtually non-existent now. What do we do with all these people?
What I don't understand about the whole DRM mess is this: Why hasn't somebody brought up the bigger question which is why force a tech THAT DOES NOT WORK and ONLY pisses off the people PAYING you?
Look at all the DRM bullshit they put on video, has that stopped a SINGLE video from showing up on TPB before it was even released? NO! yet they expect me to jump through hoops and either take DRM that doesn't work on my system or buy a DVD, rip said DVD, transcode said DVD into a format I can use.......or I can just go to TPB, see where this is heading friends?
Frankly the ONLY DRM I've seen done "right" is Steam, just give me my game Valve and get the fuck out of the way, thanks. They give you value for your money, have a nice little chat client that makes it easy to get everyone together for a match, have the easy gift thing for dealing with my boys, don't bitch if I need to back up or move the folder, its all easy peasy. Why the fuck can't the other bunches learn?
I agree with Gabe from Valve, piracy is a classic case of you not serving the customers. Just like in TFA the stupid publishers are so hung up on piling on the DRM which has NEVER worked, will NEVER work, not in a bazillion years, because the pirates are ALWAYS smarter than them, so in the end the only one the DRM bites in the ass is the guy actually trying to pay them. It is like the media companies are all run by the PHB from Dilbert...argh!
An even better question, what is gonna keep them from just changing the old "we lost the files" FOIA bullshit to "Ooopsie. somebody wiped a drive!" FOIA bullshit? If they are gonna go digital we need a ROCK SOLID way to make sure they don't pull shit like the last one did with sending all their email through the RNC so they could be conveniently "lost".
Frankly I don't see why they would bother with the firmware. Has anybody seen the new Windows drivers for some of the HP and Lexmark consumer printers? Man what a POS! And they ALL set themselves up open permissions on the firewall so they can "call home' to try to sell you more shit.
If I was the malware guys I'd be aiming at the printer drivers, people expect their printers to have a bunch of crap with them anymore, hell i doubt they'd even notice one more service with HP or LX at the front of it.
Well they have a good reason to as this NSFW poster illustrates. Personally I don't see why DeBeer's don't just cut out the bullshit and make that the slogan. I'm sure many of us would appreciate the honesty.
You're both spoiled! I had 4Mb and only 2Mb on the card and thought I was kicking! Funny now when I have 8Gb on my netbook and the same on my desktop to think about how I spent more for a tiny couple of Mb of RAM back then than I did for my whole netbook now. I'll never forget though the first time I loaded up my Voodoo in my spanking new 133Mhz and loaded Unreal, I swear me and my friends just watched that opening demo for ages going "ooooh!". Man we were easily entertained back then.
as for TFA I never understood why getting a random number always seemed to be so hard, just take all the scores off the sports page, multiple by that last winning powerball numbers, then divide by how many pepperonis you got on your last pizza. Easy peasy!
I thought it was a apple whoring google kissing microsoft bashing fanboi infested retarded system....did I miss a meeting? they should really post these things up on the main page so we know who we are supposed to be bashing this week. Some of us have lives you know.
Congrats, you were the only one who picked up on the reference. One guy said The Stand and good old Captain Trips, but in that scenario a guy snuck under the fence and went by car. But when I read TFA all I could picture in my head was David Morse and that vicious little smile as he boarded the plane.
Yep, not a college kid as one of the posters suggested but I live down the street from a college. Plenty of bright eager young men and women more than happy to make a few bucks and this kind of repetitive work is just perfect for a college kid.
You feel good at helping a kid earn a few bucks to buy their sweetie a gift and not having to do a boring job, they are happy to earn a little extra cash that doesn't involve washing dishes or busing tables, its a win/win as I see it.
Class actions are even worse! The lawyers get huge paydays while the victims get a coupon towards their next purchase with the company that screwed them just adding insult to injury!
As for TFA let me guess...another slap on the wrist? In the past decade any power the regulatory agencies had has been taken away or bought out by bribery. I doubt very seriously you'll ever see another big court case like the MSFT one in the 90s, Citizens United saw to that. These slaps on the wrist are just the cost of doing business now and I frankly wouldn't be surprised if the supermegacorps have a "STFU fund" set up just for dealing with those "pesky" rules and regs.
Sorry old dude but in case you missed the memo we're broke as a joke and China has all teh monies. The entire USA is being run by a handful of banksters and politicians that spend on pointless BS like an 11th aircraft carrier while going through borrowed money like its free.
Expecting the USA to take the "lead" on anything but killing brown people and kissing Israel's booty (thanks to the "Jesus won't come back! Come back Jesus, come back!" brigade) at this point is like wishing Patton would rise from the grave and teach our military how to not get bogged down in bullshit. it just ain't gonna happen friend, sorry.
While this is a well thought out post, you are missing the point, although I do think its funny I got a "+1 Troll" as that is a new one for me.
The point was the way the community acts with regards to certain companies that they have already decided are "good" or "evil". If Google was to print Android manuals with the blood of dead kittens and send the community a Goatse Xmas card they would be tripping over themselves to explain away their "quirky sense of humor" whereas if one of the "evil" companies were to bump them in the street they'd be screaming "ZOFG get the pitchforks!"
Your UID is low enough you've had to have been here for awhile RTFA, you can't tell me you haven't noticed this. When Google said they weren't gonna release the source for 3 the apologists practically RAN to their keyboards to write these huge apology posts, whereas oracle buys a GPLed program, just like what Google did when they hired developers to turn the Linux kernel into Android, and the screams of theft rang high into the night!
I'd say a good reason to avoid GPL and why companies treat GPL is an "infection" is because trying to predict which side of the good/evil coin is gonna land is frankly impossible. I mean who would have thought a company could cook up a slogan like "do no evil" and have the community practically singing its praises when it has about as much meaning in the actual world as "think different"?
Hell here's a better idea nobody has thought of...hire a college kid, throw him a few bucks and have him help you. lets a kid earn a little extra Xmas money, certainly quicker than having to write a bunch of scripts, and its a nice thing to do for Xmas.
While I enjoyed The Stand I was thinking Twelve Monkeys myself, which ended with the carrier waving the vial in front of a TSA agent before getting on a plane for another country, knowing that by the time he was killed by it he would have spread it across the planet.
Uhhh...you DO realize that everything you said ALSO applied to Oracle, yes? Did the community just go "Okay Larry, whatever you say!"? Nope they forked it.
Either the rules are the same for everyone or they are aren't really rules are they? It always amazes me how those that are fanboys of one company or another can come up with logic hoops to explain away the exact same shit they had a fit about from another company. Not saying you are or aren't a fanboy, but the logic in that statement as a refute to his comment about Oracle just doesn't hold water.
Yeah here is the first photo I came across with a Yahoo Search, the thing looks like snow on the water. I kinda doubt that all the flash in the world is gonna make that look like the old Mutual of Omaha videos.
The problem as I see it is we in the west can't really do shit. if we try to without China and India getting involved all we do is commit economic suicide while they just crank out the pollution. unless we in the west are ready to tell the money men to fuck right off and adopt a true isolationist stance and refuse to trade with those that pollute then all we do with scams like cap and trade is export the pollution while handing out checks to the big companies for sending it all overseas.
Bah Goldman Sachs has been playing the whole field since right after the civil war and there is a revolving door between GS and the halls of power. That bunch has their fingers in some many nasty deals I'd expect to see demons in 3 piece suits walking the halls like at Wolfram & Hart. The handful at the top are smart enough to not have their names in the papers, they just use names like Goldman Sachs to be a front for all their little games.
Soros is a bit player compared to the old money, and politicians are just the dancing clowns, meant to keep us busy arguing about stupid shit. The real old money power brokers get enough inside information straight from the politicians and their fronts like GS that it doesn't matter if one government tanks or not, they have a nice "heads I win, tails you lose" setup going on. Must be nice to be able to gamble and make all the gains private and the losses public like that.
"You know why we haven't detected any aliens? why we haven't picked up broadcasts of I Love Lucy starring three headed people? Its because of this, they get to this point in their evolution and then they destroy themselves"..The Outer Limits: Final Exam
In that episode it was a cold fusion bomb but the sentiment is the same. With technological progress comes increased danger and if one makes a leap or breakthrough in one place then as you pointed out others are already on that path, and as the technology becomes easier and cheaper and the knowledge more widely available all it takes is one nut with a cause and the right technological know how to create a recipe for a worldwide holocaust.
Imagine just getting on a plane while carrying this superflu in say London? How far would you have it spread before you were no longer able to continue?
What I think is funny, and kinda sad, is how this will go on and on about "left VS right" when frankly neither one would piss on you if you were on fire. Bill Hicks nailed it when he said "Well I believe the puppet on the left shares MY beliefs, well I believe the puppet on the right has MY interests at heart......hey wait a minute, there's one guy controlling both puppets!
Frankly it really doesn't matter anymore if left OR right is in control because the ultramegacorps are simply too powerful and the system too corrupt.Why do you think it hasn't mattered whether it was Bush or Obama, because both were/are dancing to the same tune! Bush handed out to his oil buddies, Obama is handing out to his buddies in green tech, SSDD. Bush kissed the MIC booty and got us involved in wars we had no business in, Obama kisses the MIC booty and gets us involved with a war we had no business being in, again SSDD. The faces change but the lobbyists don't.
In the end BOTH sides will stuff their snouts into the trough and guzzle everything they can until there isn't a dime left to steal and the whole thing collapses and then BOTH sides will run from the trough squealing like the little piggies that they are, doing their damnedest to make sure its THEIR ass that doesn't end up being turned into bacon. Meanwhile the banks and ultramegacorps will laugh and play with their money like Scrooge fricking McDuck.
Actually I DO encode my own files and I'm afraid it is YOU sir whose ignorance is showing because only a handful of players will play MKV and NONE of them, not a single one, supports the entire spec for less than $200. Most support only the low baseline codec spec, including those "DivX HD" units you have mentioned. I have tried them and frankly they are shit. I can get a better picture with better file size with Xvid and the ONLY gain I have seen for MKV is the ability to have multiple subs, but since i don't watch fansubs I really don't care.
Sure if you want to buy a $200 unit that is basically an ARM PC in a case it'll play, but at that point why not just get an HTPC? Hell its less than $50 more and supports more formats. until you can show me where you can get new units for less than $80 a pop that completely support the MKV spec I'm gonna have to say MKV doesn't cut it. I can buy sub $80 units all day long that support MP4 and AVI up to 1080p with ZERO skipping or dropped frames, again the only ones I've seen supporting MKV for less than $150 support baseline ONLY.
Well I say a good judge of whether something works or not is how they function when they have their idea of utopia, and as we have seen countries that are pure Muslim and run everything based on Sharia are total hellholes with NO freedoms except the freedom to be a good little drone.
I'm sure I'll get hate for daring to point out PC bullshit IS bullshit but the numbers don't lie and if anyone wants the citations I'll be happy to provide them. You look at any chart and the more Muslims a place has? The more violent it becomes. Muslims just don't play well with others and the fact they refuse to even hear a lecture that goes against Islamic teachings really don't surprise me, this is the same bunch that went apeshit and rioted over fucking cartoons. Can you imagine if Christians rioted every time there was a Jesus cartoon? South Park would have probably caused cities to burn!
Sooner or later the west is gonna have to accept there is NO "religion of peace" when it comes to Islam, that is a total lie. Islam simply doesn't play well with others, Muslims simply don't respect the rights of others to believe as they will, and you will NEVER see Christians or any other group for that matter treated as an equal in a Sharia country. The sooner we accept this and accept that a path of appeasement is a path of subjugation the better off the west will be. Look at the EU and how Sharia ghettos are springing up all over the place, is that REALLY how we want things to be here?
Nice to see I'm not the only one who got burnt. BTW didn't you just love their little "challenge" where to "prove" their DRM didn't burn drives you had to fly to Russia or some other middle of nowhere place on your own dime and have it burn a drive in conditions that would NEVER happen IRL, such as a perfectly clean machine with ONLY a single Ubisoft program installed?
I saw enough bricked drives I actually started telling folks "don't buy Ubisoft games unless you want to throw away your burners' because that damned starforce bricked drives like mad! Didn't know it was trying to hack the firmware though, just figured it was throwing the drives into PIO mode like SecuROM+Safedisc does. Every time a customer comes in and says 'My burner only works REAL slow and is throwing errors" I know exactly the cause, its SecuROM+Safedisc on the same system. POS DRM garbage code.
Let me see if I can guess the plot....scientists trying to control nature create a lightning monster which terrorizes a small town (that just so happens to look like Toronto) until a D list actor comes along and saves the day? Oh and there MUST be at least one instance of the cop saying "I'm getting too old for this shit" as I think that's a law now.