Nooooo, they kinda weren't. Do you think that after SIX YEARS of being completely shut out of the OEM market AMD only lost 1.25 billion? Oh please! If you figured up the amount of profits Intel made off the OEMs in that period of time Intel STILL made out like bandits while passing the costs of all those crappy P4s, with their higher electricity and cooling costs, right on to us.
No for Intel this was simply a cost for doing business, and would have been like telling MSFT if they would have just cut Netscape a check they could go right back to business as usual. I would also point out that Intel is STILL rigging their compilers, they just put a little "FYI" in the docs, buried half a dozen pages in IIRC. But if you take the latest compiler release and run the resulting code you'll find it will run a good 35-45% faster if it has the "Genuine Intel" flag on the CPU even if you fake the flag on an AMD chip.
So tell me how is that not worthy of antitrust proceedings?
You know that is one of the things MSFT really should be given credit for, because DirectX "just works". It is even nicer in Win 7 (don't know if it is equally true with Vista) as it is trivial to download and install DirectX 9 (they have a light edition installed but for some older games you really need the full version) and it will live happily beside DirectX 11, only being called on older games that don't support the newer DirectX features.
It makes it nice for me as I can fire up a copy of NOLF II and have it all render beautifully even on Win 7 X64 and then go straight from that to Just Cause II and have all the purty my HD4850 (DX10.1 card) can crank out, and nice for my customers as they just stick in the disc and it all "just works".
There is a lot of things you can bitch about MSFT for but frankly I'm damned grateful for backwards compatibility. With BC I don't have to keep a bunch of old machines running various versions for old code, it all plays nicely on my latest and greatest while still letting me run the newest games and software.
As for TFA from what I understand the problem with Khronos and OpenGL is CAD. Just as ubergeeks here love to complain about the "cruft" in Windows (but I bet they'd scream their asses off if their mission critical Win32 code wouldn't run on anything past XP) so too have Khronos been bending over backwards but instead of gaming its CAD that they keep the old code for. So I can see why programmers would want to just use DirectX if they are making games, as DX has been from its inception primarily a gaming API with extras for video, networks, audio, etc while OpenGL seems to be pretty much centered around CAD right now, at least that is what I got from reading the stink here over the last release.
Maybe instead of bothering with OpenGL game developers should just donate a little time or money to Wine or Cedega? They seem to be making some pretty good strides on the gaming front and frankly gamers don't care what kind of API a game has as long as it "just works" and I have to give the Wine guys credit, they have been getting pretty good in that regard.
So you advocate that the poor shouldn't have access to local, state, and federal services then? Because in case you ain't noticed pal the new buzzword is "paperless government" and that means when a poor person need assistance they are often told "Go to www. and fill out the forms". I know this as a fact as I have several folks who can't afford Internet in my building (we have only two carriers here, with a price of $99 a month for DSL and $129 for cable, and that is WITH a two year contract) so if I didn't help out?
Well I guess those dirty poor folks need to go stand on a corner with a tin cup or even better go crawl off and die, huh PNutt?
Don't forget company cast offs. Once word got out I rebuild for poor folks plenty of local businesses give me a ring when they are getting ready to cast off their old models. i pick them up, since nearly all have an XP Pro sticker I used a stripped down XP Pro image I have, load them up with free software like LO and Comodo dragon, and sell them dirt cheap. this lets me pay for the gas hauling the things and lets poor folks have cheap computers.
I just had 4 PCs, average 1.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM walk out the door the other day. I keep a cheap USB keyboard/optical mouse combo for $10 and if they need a monitor I point them to a shop down the road that has 15 inch CRTs for $25. So for $60 they have a full PC, with full AV, loaded with software, and is ready for the net. Now that the latest refresh is starting I'm seeing more late model P4s so it is even better for the poor folks.
There are plenty of us guys helping out folks where we can. I got into it by accident myself. A former teacher gave me a call and asked as a personal favor if I'd look at a box for a poor student. This poor girl was trying to do her classwork on a 30Mhz (you read that right, not a typo, and this was in 05) with Win3.1. She was hoping to get another year out of this hand me down before giving it to her kid. she looks at me practically ready to cry and says "Can you fix it?" I knew I couldn't let the gal down.
I pick up the box and say "Sure, follow me" and when we're walking out I hear Shaun tell her "See? I told you he could fix it" I wanted to laugh and say "If you only knew what I was gonna do". I walked out to my truck and said "Where are you parked? well back your car over here by my truck". and when she did I popped the trunk and sat her old box in the back and pulled out two 1.4Ghz boxes I had gotten from an office job. I wiped and reinstalled them on the spot so the head of the company could see no data was leaving the building, I have automated install discs anyway so no biggie, and I was able to let them run while building out his new systems.
She started going "No no no...I don't have any money to buy PCs!" but I told her "Relax they are 100% free and fully loaded. I just don't have the room for them at the shop so you'll be doing me a favor" Well sure enough she starts bawling like a baby then. I loaded her up a couple of 15 inch CRTs, keyboards, and a couple of good ball mice that came with the systems. i heard back from Shaun like a year later than not only had she graduated and had a good job now but she made sure to pass those PCs on to someone else needy at the school.
So yeah there are a lot of poor folks with "hand me downs" and I'm sure that while SOME of them end up in botnets the ones me and the other shop guys throw together ain't in that category. I always give them a fully patched system, with full AV, and a nicer free browser like Firefox or Kmeleon or Dragon. done right a 1.5Ghz P4 can easily do basic office and Internet tasks quite well to this very day and when you see the folks light up at all the free software and the fact they can afford a decent running machine? Makes all the hassle worth it.
Because I don't read ads and when TFA has a good 75-85% of the text being what Wikipedia calls "Peacock words" aka bullshit? Well I don't sit around reading pop ups on my customers boxes either. If they want us to read TFA how about not making it a slashvertisement, huh?
I think you're wrong, and here is why: While everyone else was dealing with 300MHz PCs that were struggling with some of Win98s features I had 100Mhz running it just fine, when everyone was saying "You'd be nuts to run XP on less than 1GHz" I had it running great on a 400MHz, even now I'm playing with a version of Windows 7 that runs like a champ on a 1.4GHz with 512Mb of RAM. What do all these systems had in common? Instead of running a generic OS they were running one that was tailored for the system which gave it a hell of a boost.
All you'd have to do is recompile Android for the hardware and do the same to the software that came with the thing. Since Android is FOSS you can also tell anyone that wants to put apps in your market what flags they'll need to use to compile or give you source so you could compile it for the system. We spent many a year getting real work done on machines a HELL of a lot slower than a 1.4GHz CPU with 512Mb of RAM and they were snappy. The same thing could be done here, it just takes a little more work at design time. I'd say one of the failings of the lower priced tablets is they are throwing vanilla Android on it and generic OSes just don't work on lower spec'd hardware.
Then you could do like dell during their heyday, sell units where you are making $8-$9 a unit and sell millions of them. You sell 20 million units and are making $9 a unit? that is some good scratch right there and nothing to sneeze at. Then once you have the brand well known like ASUS you start selling all kinds of units at different price points.
And you're a total fucktard, see how that works? Now name this mythical "unhackable" system pal. cells? Hacked. Consoles? Hacked. All the various popular OSes? Hacked. If you would have bothered to read my post instead of getting all butthurt you'd have read the same thing security guys have been proving for years.
1.-There is no such thing as an unhackable system, all it takes is time, will, and knowledge, and the time can be cut down by increasing knowledge of the system which can be gained from this wonderful tool we call the Internet.
2.-if you have physical access to the box? you are already 90% of the way there. That is because with physical access one can hack right into the board itself, by using a flash drive or as in TFA tying directly into the board itself.
So before you go slinging insults why don't you put up or shut up, huh? Lets see that unhackable system pal. because I got news for ya it doesn't exist and any moron who watches some of the webcasts from events like black hat would know why, it is because there are a hell of a lot of low level coders out there that live, eat, and breathe hacking. You point to a system and say "unhackable"? They are gonna do whatever it takes to break in, and they will sparky, they will.
Which I would argue simple wouldn't have happened if Intel hadn't bribed OEMs and rigged their compiler so that pretty much the only OEM AMD chips you were allowed for nearly a half a dozen years were bottom of the line Semprons/Durons. I mean when you have one of the CEOs admit that the Intel kickbacks were so good they were "like cocaine" and Dell had several quarters during the price wars where the ONLY profits were in the form of Intel kickbacks? It stinks and Intel should have been busted for antitrust.
As for TFA? i'm sure its just a rebrand, a smart idea for a rebrand I'd argue, but just a rebrand. I think we are down to only three, maybe four memory makers now, right? I'm sure one of them offered AMD a good deal to partner with them. If the chips are made to the same quality as Radeon GPUs I'd have no problem using them, especially if they begin listing which boards it is certified to work well with. It amazes me that in this day and age I'll still come across RAM that doesn't follow JEDEC with a bunch of funky timings.
So good luck AMD on your new venture, maybe you should get in contact with Tigerdirect to see about adding Radeon RAM to their AMD kits? Now if you'll excuse me I have to go set up a time to call Tigerdirect with a customer. It seems some dumbass there on their last "$199 AMD quad core!" deal fucked up and paired a 65w board with a 95w CPU. Oh well they are being good about it, just said for me to contact them with the customer who ordered it and they'll be happy to give him a label for free RAM shipping and they'll have a new board out ASAP.
Actually she is also a less talented less attractive Bette Midler, as Gaga even went so far as to rip off Midler's old "Mermaid in a wheelchair' bit. Gaga kinda reminds me of old Carlos Menstealia in that all she does is rip off other artists and does their bits for people that haven't heard the original, kinda like how Dennis Leary's first few years were nothing but "Bill Hicks greatest hits" right down to the Jim Fixx joke and of course Menstealia who rips off everybody..
Meh, maybe this is just what we have come to, where you don't even do a parody or homage, you just do references, like how the (insert scary/epic/disaster) movies simply point out something from another movie and that's supposed to be funny, Gaga just does other people's bits and that is supposed to be "talent".
But that doesn't make any sense, as you MIGHT get a half a second of useful data that way before it hits something or bounces under a chair or whatever. Also I doubt you'd get even 8 seconds before it was useless if you did it that way. I mean did you look at the thing? The camera is dead center front, so unless you shot it directly AT the bad guy in most situations I doubt you'd get even a second's worth of useful data.
But I can see this might be useful if you put a chute on its rear as that would point the camera straight down upon the battlefield area and give you a pretty good view of the streets and alleys below if this thing can get any height at all. If you are dealing with a house you'd be better off with that "Throwing bot" they were showing off recently where you just threw it through a window and it would always land on its wheels and be ready to recon. It was small enough the controller and bot fit easily in a pack and was designed for what you just described.
At the very least they ought to make a chute deployment optional, perhaps by having a dial one could twist on the base that would have it deploy the chute if in the correct position. Because if there goal really is looking inside of houses this design is just stupid IMHO. You just won't get enough real data to be of any real use.
Besides it isn't like this just magically opened a way to exploit an OS that had never ever been exploited in the past. Ya see, this is what I don't get about the whole fanboyism thing, the divorce from reality. News Flash: ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS CAN BE EXPLOITED!!!
A wise person once said the only way to make a truly unhackable computer was to lock it in a safe and drop it in a hole and that is the truth. No matter how smart the guys that write the OS think they are there is somebody smarter out there and if they want to dedicate the time and energy they WILL find a way in, I don't care if it is cell, desktop, or server, I don't care if it is made by Apple, MSFT, or some Linux group. All it takes is will and knowledge and time and the knowledge and time parts get shorter all the time thanks to this little thing we called the Internet allowing those that want to hack to have plenty of places to learn.
As for TFA any security person will tell you that if you have access to the hardware you are 90% of the way there. I doubt Apple really cares much about this since it seems like to big of a PITA for the average Apple customer. Most folks aren't gonna be cooking up special cables and cracking the case just to jailbreak the thing.
But this does illustrate something I don't get about Apple, which is why they don't just do like Sony did with OtherOS before they screwed the pooch and take away the incentive to hack it in the first place? Just have a relatively simple way to call up a menu that says "By clicking here you give up your warranty in return for jailbreaking the device. Once chosen this CANNOT BE UNDONE" and then let the customer decide if they want to break it or not?
What I don't get is why they wouldn't have it deploy a chute at the top of the arc like launching a flare designed to light up a battlefield (sorry don't know the tech term for it) so that one would actually get a useful amount of time after launch? And on the upside it would give something to distract the bad guys whom I'm sure would look up with a serious WTF look on their faces as to why they were launching a flare and why it was a dud.
Uhhh...dude? didn't read what I wrote huh? No dual, 1.2Ghz single. Most folks are single tasking on one of those so duals are pointless. you could also use the cheaper (resistive?) screen, again folks won't expect an iPad for $150.
You see all you need is to hit "good enough". Not great, not second coming of iJesus, just "good enough". Folks see that PC sales are slowing down and going "Tablets are killing them!" and that is simply bullshit. I should know, I sell and fix the things all day long. It is simply for the vast majority a dual core with 2Gb of RAM is "good enough" and they see no reason to replace it.
You could do absolutely the same thing and come in at a $150 price point. 512Mb of DDR3 is dirt cheap, so is 2gb of NAND. Add a 1024x800 screen along with a wifi chip and MicroSD slot and you'd be good to go. Nobody is gonna expect 3D gaming, or HD video. put a stripped down browser that will load basic web pages (add $30 if you want one with a flash decoder chip), play MP3s, and read eBooks. That's all, that's it. I bet my last dollar that just like the EEE it would be a game changer simply because for what the masses want to do it would be good enough.
Actually I learned it from a very nice black woman I went to school with, Dru. She told me "You just have to accept that like there is white folks and dirty white trash there is black folks and low down dirty niggers and we HATE niggers just as much as any white folks!" like she said "I have worked hard all my life, wasn't nothing given to me. I have two kids BY MY HUSBAND and we have worked hard to teach them to strive to get ahead, just as we have. But I have to work twice as hard because if they have ever hired a nigger? They won't want to hire me because they are afraid. Afraid I may be a nigger too". She actually had to keep a POS car that she would use only when she had to visit a relative in the ghetto. why? Because they would steal everything that wasn't nailed down if she drove a good car!
And I read your link and frankly I was not even the slightest bit surprised at any of it. what you have is a large segment of society that have simply decided that the ONLY law they will have is the law of the jungle, nothing more. look at the attendance records for state fairs, you'll see they are all dying out. Why? The "thug life!"ers. They have figured out state fairs are looting and robbing havens so everyone avoids them to stay away from the "thug life!"ers who show up in mass like in WI to do some wholesale looting and robbing.
I wish ya luck with your problem APK I really do. Like I said get your ass a big old mutt from the pound, preferably a nice big mature Heinz 57 that needs a good home ASAP. You can have the biggest gun in the world and "thug life!"ers will keep right on coming until you kill their ass. But a big old mutt, its hair on end and its gums slicked back? that's primal, that works better on them that any gun. Like I said Old Jack guarded my mom's place for a decade and not a SINGLE break in or theft, and now his daughter does the same. Once the word gets out you have a mean old mutt? They WILL leave you alone.
But sadly you are now a prime example of what Dru talked about, because if you have any sense at all, which I'm sure you do, you will never rent to one of them again no matter how nice they act! As you found out they have learned nobody wants "Thug life!"ers so they pretend to be regular folks...until they get in. Then comes the tearing shit up, the robbing, the beating, the acting like wild animals. You simply can't let them have nice things, because if you gave them a palace for absolutely free they would have it turned into a piss smelling pile of trash before you knew it. Its sad but true my friend, sad but true.
Question: what makes you think those out of the country will be ANY better? in case you haven't noticed you have a good chunk of the countries out there censoring left and right, "for the childrenz!" of course, and the other half have either signed treaties with the USA or are probably being pressured to as we speak.
You see that is the problem with these cartels, in that just like mob cartels they have NO jurisdictional limits to their power. Just as they paid off OUR elected officials? so too can they pay off the officials of other nations.
No what needs to happen is they get busted under the same laws as organized crime like RICO. After all you have a group of companies conspiring to fix prices, to lock competition out of the markets (why do you think every DJ in the country plays the same shit? Because they will be FIRED if they play anything that isn't on the approved playlist. And if you aren't owned by a cartel member? you ain't getting on the list friend) and to bribe officials even as they lie both in print/radio/TV and under oath. I'd say these groups are about as classic a case for RICO as one can get, but good luck since Citizens United means they don't even have to be sneaky about the bribes!
In the end just like our unjust drug laws what we need is to get the masses to completely ignore it. Their laws simply cannot work if nobody agrees to follow them. Perhaps a mass "download day" where everyone hits every form of P2P to grab creative commons media? And have everyone do this every week, just snatch at random constantly so they can't tell who is doing legitimate protests and who is actually downloading their ill gotten gains (which if you've seen a new artist contract like I have you'd know it is legalized theft, pure and simple) so they can't enforce this stupid BS law.
You joke but I think you just hit the nail square on the head on how to unseat the iPad. What they need to do is cook up a reasonably performing (I'd say 1.2Ghz ARM single with 512Mb of RAM and a couple of Gb of storage) pad and sell it in the $150 range, probably with Android.
The thing I've noticed is perfect will nearly always be defeated by "good enough" if that good enough is substantially cheaper. I'd say the sweet spot for a mass market pad would be right on or as close to $150 as you can get and then you can always charge extra for a 3G module add on or do various tie ins with carriers.
There are a LOT of folks out there (me included) that wouldn't mind playing with a pad but at current prices for anything usable simply aren't worth it to them, but the $150 price point is close to "impulse buy" territory. And just look at how netbooks jump started the entire laptop field and changed the game, going from uber expensive to decent laptops in the $300 range? the same can be done with tablets, it just needs someone to do a EEE with the form factor.
Better idea, take the money out of the big shitty banks and put it in your local small bank or co-op. With my little bank if some eTailer tries to double dip I can walk in and say "Hey Karen, guess what? Someone double dipped when I ordered a part online" and she'll say "ooohhh...don't you just HATE that? That happened to my husband a couple of weeks back! let me just punch in some stuff...is this it? Okay let me wipe that...here you go! It'll take about 5 minutes for the changes to filter through the system". Then I say thanks Karen and go on my merry way. I even use my debit online simply because my bank has me covered and never says boo when it comes to fixing mistakes.
So I'd say the better advice would be to take your money out of these "Walmart banks" where they wouldn't piss on you if they were on fire and instead stick with the small banks and co-ops. My little bank gave out loans to local businesses all through the "credit crisis" because they knew the folks they were lending to, and by doing so they didn't get hurt. They also didn't play on the stock market like it was Vegas with better suits and so while everyone else was tight on cash my little bank was bragging they had 300 million ready to be loaned to small businesses.
In some cases smaller simply is better and banking would be one of those.
Oh I agree but we also at the same time have to call bullshit when we see it. There is NEVER an excuse to live like a damned animal. look at Gandhi, The Brits treated his people worse than dogs, but did they suddenly go "Thug life baby!" and start acting like wild apes? FUCK NO! They organized and stood up for their rights! We went from "I have a dream" to "Nothin but a g thang baby" and we should call it like it is, a large section of a race refusing to obey even the most basic rules of civilized society and instead living like rabid apes.
What gets to me is you CAN NOT be nice to them, because they don't even have enough damned sense not to shit where they eat. You rent them a nice place? They trash it. You give them a nice neighborhood? they spray graffiti everywhere while pissing in the alleys and throwing trash all over the street. there is a DAMNED GOOD REASON why you see "white flight" and it ain't because of racist attitudes, it is because they are so damned violent and destructive a white would be insane to live next to them!
That is why folks are just gonna have to accept the truth, there is whites and white trash, and there is blacks and niggers. We have black folks downstairs, really nice hard working folks that just wanted a decent place to live they could afford. the FIRST THING they did when they saw niggers trying to move in was run them off by keeping the law on their doorstep 24/7. When I asked Mr Miller what was up he said 'The last thing this building needs is some god damned niggers tearing the place up". No truer words have been spoken. And I was more than happy to help the man when he ran off some white trash because scum is scum is scum. Just because you are poor doesn't mean you have to live like a filthy animal!
We need to accept that when someone has NO intention of following even the most basic rules of society, the right of your fellow man not to be terrorized by them, then they need to be treated just as they are acting, like animals! The "Thug Life!"ers have been destroying neighborhoods, having a half a dozen illegitimate kids they never pay for, stealing from everyone around them, and basically acting like animals for a good 30 years now, it is time to wake up and say "If you refuse to follow even the most basic rules of society then you need to be in a cage" and leave them there.
And while I believe that the BS of illegals and outsourcing needs to come to a screeching halt, and those that supported such treasonous acts lined up against the wall and shot, hell I'll even volunteer to be on the firing squad, that doesn't change the fact that even when times were good and there was plenty of jobs the "thug Life!"ers were tearing shit up and screaming "That's RACIST!" if you dared to point out that their neighborhoods year after year AFTER YEAR are ALWAYS in the top 10 for rapes, robberies, murders, vandalism, etc. look up "20 worst neighborhoods in America" and see what color they are. guess what? NOT A SINGLE ONE is White or even Latino. They are ALL black.
I'm sorry but bullshit. If someone lives on welfare and food stamps? Fine and dandy, everyone can have a bad run. that does NOT give them the right to RAPE, ROB, and MURDER okay? And THAT is what you are excusing. Go look up the WI state fair which is what we are talking about. You'll see why it is so easy for racists to make monkey jokes because frankly what you will see on the videos is NOTHING LESS than pure animal behavior.
So frankly I don't give a shit about your Karl Marx BS, and I'm a socialist. Your right to act like an animal ends when they infringe on the rights of others and all this PC bullshit like yours is doing is making excuses for those that have completely given up even the most basic of rules of civilized society and intend to live like wild animals in a law of the jungle manner.
I know a lot of poor smokers and they simply switched to the filtered cigars when the prices got nuts. At a pack a day that is $75 a month or $900 a year. Not anywhere close to what you are quoting friend. Sadly in some neighborhood it is getting cheaper to smoke dope than it is to smoke cigarettes. Didn't we learn anything from prohibition?
As for the Comcast thing? Good luck folks. I know plenty of poor and older folks that tried to get the naked AT&T DSL and for all intents and purposes it don't exist. by the time they got done tacking on fees and requirements and hoop jumping most gave up. I don't think I ever met anyone that actually managed to get it. When the government makes them offer something like this they make sure the bullshit and flaming hoops are so high that you'll just give up. Yeah good luck folks.
Actually, and I can't remember who said this, maybe some here can, but I remember reading how the odds that SETI would find squat would be so low as to be non-existent simply because there is only a teeny tiny window if you use our world as a model because one progresses from "blasting EM everywhere" to highly localized signals that don't go anywhere so quickly.
Look at how quickly we went from nothing to analog "blast EM everywhere" to tight digital sat signals. What 100 years? In space time that would be less time than a girl's little squeaky fart. So even if there were tens of thousands of races out there, and they all used the same EM bands we did the amount of time their signal was sent out into the cosmos was so damned tiny you would have to watch the entire sky simultaneously to have any hope at all and even then it would be teeny tiny odds. it is like a blind man trying to find a needle in Nebraska and the needle is moved randomly.
So while I thought the golden records were fine, hell it didn't really cost much to throw those on a ship we were launching anyway, I have to wonder if our limited resources wouldn't be better spent in studying our own solar system instead of hunting for ET. Hell even if we found ET it isn't like we could do a damned thing about it, the distances are simply too great. But if folks are willing to put up the cash because they are looking for ET? More power to ya, free country and all that.
Uhhh...we're broke, it case you haven't heard. We have THREE wars going on now, an infrastructure falling apart, and at every turn you got the teabaggers, many of whom signed a "Never raise taxes, I don't give a fuck WHAT happens" pledge cockblocking at every turn.
I mean sure it'd be nice if we could afford science, hell I'd like to cut the military budget a good 40%, bring our boys home, kill the F35, and use that money to fund R&D to bring us back on top INCLUDING space tech, but that ain't gonna happen as long as we got teabaggers flinging shit everywhere like rabid monkeys and going "Give teh rich more MONIES LOL!"
ya know, never has a name been more apropos than that.......teabaggers. Because they sure as hell remind me of those little 14 year old Halo shitheads. But to fund space (and bridges, and SS/Medicare/Medicaid) you actually need this thing called...oh what is it? Oh yeah money which the teabaggers would happily see the country go third world before ever making a rich man pay a dime. Remember the one who is bringing them the pledges to sign is none other than Grover Norquist, Mr "I want to drown government in the bathtub" himself. you think we can afford anything but bombs as long as THESE bozos are around? As if!
No teh math freak was giving us the classic liberal "Its teh system keeping teh black man down!" bullshit and I wanted to let him know it was indeed bullshit. i know plenty of good black folks that got the fuck away from the ghettos, busted their asses in school, got a decent education, started businesses or worked their way up, same as everybody else. the "Its teh system!" white guilt bullshit hurts the blacks as much as the whites as it just gives excuses to the "thug life"ers.
"Oh its not the fact i'm slinging dope while carrying a 9mm with tats all over myself, nope its teh man keepin teh black man down!" horseshit. Sure it isn't easy to be a poor black but ya know what? it ain't easy to be poor PERIOD. that is why you have to at least try, not be a lazy piece of trash.
But yeah get a mutt, a mutt is better than a 9mm any day, I've had both I should know. I'm sure if you hit the local pound you'll find a nice mature dog, get a mature one, NOT a pup. He'll be more grateful to be given a decent home and the adult will be more fiercely territorial than a pup. Pup takes awhile to train too, and it sounds like you need the help ASAP. Just feed him scraps, let him see what turf is his, and I swear it won't even take two weeks before that mutt will be guarding whats his. Bonus if you can find a nice big shaggy one, collie or wolfdog, they are smart as hell and a lot more scary when that fur comes up!
So get ya a mean old mutt, be sure to feed him a burger when he tears one of those "thug life!"ers a new asshole, he'll learn his job damned quick. I bet you my last dollar they won't try that shit again but once, and they damned well WILL regret it!
Because having a hot babe you want to bang be your wingman in a bar is just.....well weird? The reason Apollo and Starbuck worked well together was Apollo could be kind of a stick in the mud so Stabuck would come and bail his ass out with the jokes, as a good wingman should. Hot babe? not only will hot babe make it worse but it will make dude in trouble look even MORE lame, not less.
As for TFA... attachments are bad mmmkay? what sucks is how many years have we been trying to drum this into users heads? I know I have since the days of Win 95 and Outhouse Excrement. I have actually sat beside a user and said "DO NOT open that password protected zip, are you nuts? Its a virus!" only to get told "Awww you worry too much! Its from my BFF Kim see? She wouldn't do that" and damned if she didn't do EXACTLY what the email told her to with me practically trying to throw myself in front of the keyboard. That is why as a PC repairman i have this face as my standard face every. single. day.
Actually I think if you want to see our future, look to Libya. They think their F16s will save them? Got news for them, the National Guard got stingers and are made up of guess what? poor folks. They said when the shit hit the fan in Libya military bases were passing out guns like candy, i think the same will happen here only it will be the national Guard doing the handing out. Hell you can build a technical out of any machine shop in the USA, just take the weapon off the tripod, weld some mounts in the back of any Ford or Chevy truck and voila!
You got the militias loading up like WWIII is scheduled for Tuesday, you got soldiers taking oaths against the government. My oldest in pre med openly wonders if he'll get to graduate med school before the bombs start falling. If they think the poor will just go silently into that good night? Boy are they in for a shock.
But you should be a little more specific, it isn't healthcare you want to blame it is BIG PHARMA, who spend a full 80% of their costs on ads and who are making as much as 6000% profit on life saving drugs. that isn't profits that's extortion. My mom was an RN for nearly 40 years and spent more time on the phone trying to get help for the poor than anything else. She even once "lost" a patient for four days just so a terminal man could die in a cool hospital bed rather than on a couch in a 113f trailer with no power. I've known docs that have made drugs go "poof" so some poor person wouldn't go without, a pharmacist that had drugs shipped in from South America, there are a lot of good folks in healthcare and most of them are getting fucked just like everybody else.
But I know what you mean, working my little shop it really wouldn't take much to take me out. One extra bill, one too many client droughts, there but for the grace of God go I.
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Nooooo, they kinda weren't. Do you think that after SIX YEARS of being completely shut out of the OEM market AMD only lost 1.25 billion? Oh please! If you figured up the amount of profits Intel made off the OEMs in that period of time Intel STILL made out like bandits while passing the costs of all those crappy P4s, with their higher electricity and cooling costs, right on to us.
No for Intel this was simply a cost for doing business, and would have been like telling MSFT if they would have just cut Netscape a check they could go right back to business as usual. I would also point out that Intel is STILL rigging their compilers, they just put a little "FYI" in the docs, buried half a dozen pages in IIRC. But if you take the latest compiler release and run the resulting code you'll find it will run a good 35-45% faster if it has the "Genuine Intel" flag on the CPU even if you fake the flag on an AMD chip.
So tell me how is that not worthy of antitrust proceedings?
You know that is one of the things MSFT really should be given credit for, because DirectX "just works". It is even nicer in Win 7 (don't know if it is equally true with Vista) as it is trivial to download and install DirectX 9 (they have a light edition installed but for some older games you really need the full version) and it will live happily beside DirectX 11, only being called on older games that don't support the newer DirectX features.
It makes it nice for me as I can fire up a copy of NOLF II and have it all render beautifully even on Win 7 X64 and then go straight from that to Just Cause II and have all the purty my HD4850 (DX10.1 card) can crank out, and nice for my customers as they just stick in the disc and it all "just works".
There is a lot of things you can bitch about MSFT for but frankly I'm damned grateful for backwards compatibility. With BC I don't have to keep a bunch of old machines running various versions for old code, it all plays nicely on my latest and greatest while still letting me run the newest games and software.
As for TFA from what I understand the problem with Khronos and OpenGL is CAD. Just as ubergeeks here love to complain about the "cruft" in Windows (but I bet they'd scream their asses off if their mission critical Win32 code wouldn't run on anything past XP) so too have Khronos been bending over backwards but instead of gaming its CAD that they keep the old code for. So I can see why programmers would want to just use DirectX if they are making games, as DX has been from its inception primarily a gaming API with extras for video, networks, audio, etc while OpenGL seems to be pretty much centered around CAD right now, at least that is what I got from reading the stink here over the last release.
Maybe instead of bothering with OpenGL game developers should just donate a little time or money to Wine or Cedega? They seem to be making some pretty good strides on the gaming front and frankly gamers don't care what kind of API a game has as long as it "just works" and I have to give the Wine guys credit, they have been getting pretty good in that regard.
So you advocate that the poor shouldn't have access to local, state, and federal services then? Because in case you ain't noticed pal the new buzzword is "paperless government" and that means when a poor person need assistance they are often told "Go to www. and fill out the forms". I know this as a fact as I have several folks who can't afford Internet in my building (we have only two carriers here, with a price of $99 a month for DSL and $129 for cable, and that is WITH a two year contract) so if I didn't help out?
Well I guess those dirty poor folks need to go stand on a corner with a tin cup or even better go crawl off and die, huh PNutt?
Don't forget company cast offs. Once word got out I rebuild for poor folks plenty of local businesses give me a ring when they are getting ready to cast off their old models. i pick them up, since nearly all have an XP Pro sticker I used a stripped down XP Pro image I have, load them up with free software like LO and Comodo dragon, and sell them dirt cheap. this lets me pay for the gas hauling the things and lets poor folks have cheap computers.
I just had 4 PCs, average 1.6GHz with 512Mb of RAM walk out the door the other day. I keep a cheap USB keyboard/optical mouse combo for $10 and if they need a monitor I point them to a shop down the road that has 15 inch CRTs for $25. So for $60 they have a full PC, with full AV, loaded with software, and is ready for the net. Now that the latest refresh is starting I'm seeing more late model P4s so it is even better for the poor folks.
There are plenty of us guys helping out folks where we can. I got into it by accident myself. A former teacher gave me a call and asked as a personal favor if I'd look at a box for a poor student. This poor girl was trying to do her classwork on a 30Mhz (you read that right, not a typo, and this was in 05) with Win3.1. She was hoping to get another year out of this hand me down before giving it to her kid. she looks at me practically ready to cry and says "Can you fix it?" I knew I couldn't let the gal down.
I pick up the box and say "Sure, follow me" and when we're walking out I hear Shaun tell her "See? I told you he could fix it" I wanted to laugh and say "If you only knew what I was gonna do". I walked out to my truck and said "Where are you parked? well back your car over here by my truck". and when she did I popped the trunk and sat her old box in the back and pulled out two 1.4Ghz boxes I had gotten from an office job. I wiped and reinstalled them on the spot so the head of the company could see no data was leaving the building, I have automated install discs anyway so no biggie, and I was able to let them run while building out his new systems.
She started going "No no no...I don't have any money to buy PCs!" but I told her "Relax they are 100% free and fully loaded. I just don't have the room for them at the shop so you'll be doing me a favor" Well sure enough she starts bawling like a baby then. I loaded her up a couple of 15 inch CRTs, keyboards, and a couple of good ball mice that came with the systems. i heard back from Shaun like a year later than not only had she graduated and had a good job now but she made sure to pass those PCs on to someone else needy at the school.
So yeah there are a lot of poor folks with "hand me downs" and I'm sure that while SOME of them end up in botnets the ones me and the other shop guys throw together ain't in that category. I always give them a fully patched system, with full AV, and a nicer free browser like Firefox or Kmeleon or Dragon. done right a 1.5Ghz P4 can easily do basic office and Internet tasks quite well to this very day and when you see the folks light up at all the free software and the fact they can afford a decent running machine? Makes all the hassle worth it.
Because I don't read ads and when TFA has a good 75-85% of the text being what Wikipedia calls "Peacock words" aka bullshit? Well I don't sit around reading pop ups on my customers boxes either. If they want us to read TFA how about not making it a slashvertisement, huh?
I think you're wrong, and here is why: While everyone else was dealing with 300MHz PCs that were struggling with some of Win98s features I had 100Mhz running it just fine, when everyone was saying "You'd be nuts to run XP on less than 1GHz" I had it running great on a 400MHz, even now I'm playing with a version of Windows 7 that runs like a champ on a 1.4GHz with 512Mb of RAM. What do all these systems had in common? Instead of running a generic OS they were running one that was tailored for the system which gave it a hell of a boost.
All you'd have to do is recompile Android for the hardware and do the same to the software that came with the thing. Since Android is FOSS you can also tell anyone that wants to put apps in your market what flags they'll need to use to compile or give you source so you could compile it for the system. We spent many a year getting real work done on machines a HELL of a lot slower than a 1.4GHz CPU with 512Mb of RAM and they were snappy. The same thing could be done here, it just takes a little more work at design time. I'd say one of the failings of the lower priced tablets is they are throwing vanilla Android on it and generic OSes just don't work on lower spec'd hardware.
Then you could do like dell during their heyday, sell units where you are making $8-$9 a unit and sell millions of them. You sell 20 million units and are making $9 a unit? that is some good scratch right there and nothing to sneeze at. Then once you have the brand well known like ASUS you start selling all kinds of units at different price points.
And you're a total fucktard, see how that works? Now name this mythical "unhackable" system pal. cells? Hacked. Consoles? Hacked. All the various popular OSes? Hacked. If you would have bothered to read my post instead of getting all butthurt you'd have read the same thing security guys have been proving for years.
1.-There is no such thing as an unhackable system, all it takes is time, will, and knowledge, and the time can be cut down by increasing knowledge of the system which can be gained from this wonderful tool we call the Internet.
2.-if you have physical access to the box? you are already 90% of the way there. That is because with physical access one can hack right into the board itself, by using a flash drive or as in TFA tying directly into the board itself.
So before you go slinging insults why don't you put up or shut up, huh? Lets see that unhackable system pal. because I got news for ya it doesn't exist and any moron who watches some of the webcasts from events like black hat would know why, it is because there are a hell of a lot of low level coders out there that live, eat, and breathe hacking. You point to a system and say "unhackable"? They are gonna do whatever it takes to break in, and they will sparky, they will.
Which I would argue simple wouldn't have happened if Intel hadn't bribed OEMs and rigged their compiler so that pretty much the only OEM AMD chips you were allowed for nearly a half a dozen years were bottom of the line Semprons/Durons. I mean when you have one of the CEOs admit that the Intel kickbacks were so good they were "like cocaine" and Dell had several quarters during the price wars where the ONLY profits were in the form of Intel kickbacks? It stinks and Intel should have been busted for antitrust.
As for TFA? i'm sure its just a rebrand, a smart idea for a rebrand I'd argue, but just a rebrand. I think we are down to only three, maybe four memory makers now, right? I'm sure one of them offered AMD a good deal to partner with them. If the chips are made to the same quality as Radeon GPUs I'd have no problem using them, especially if they begin listing which boards it is certified to work well with. It amazes me that in this day and age I'll still come across RAM that doesn't follow JEDEC with a bunch of funky timings.
So good luck AMD on your new venture, maybe you should get in contact with Tigerdirect to see about adding Radeon RAM to their AMD kits? Now if you'll excuse me I have to go set up a time to call Tigerdirect with a customer. It seems some dumbass there on their last "$199 AMD quad core!" deal fucked up and paired a 65w board with a 95w CPU. Oh well they are being good about it, just said for me to contact them with the customer who ordered it and they'll be happy to give him a label for free RAM shipping and they'll have a new board out ASAP.
Actually she is also a less talented less attractive Bette Midler, as Gaga even went so far as to rip off Midler's old "Mermaid in a wheelchair' bit. Gaga kinda reminds me of old Carlos Menstealia in that all she does is rip off other artists and does their bits for people that haven't heard the original, kinda like how Dennis Leary's first few years were nothing but "Bill Hicks greatest hits" right down to the Jim Fixx joke and of course Menstealia who rips off everybody..
Meh, maybe this is just what we have come to, where you don't even do a parody or homage, you just do references, like how the (insert scary/epic/disaster) movies simply point out something from another movie and that's supposed to be funny, Gaga just does other people's bits and that is supposed to be "talent".
But that doesn't make any sense, as you MIGHT get a half a second of useful data that way before it hits something or bounces under a chair or whatever. Also I doubt you'd get even 8 seconds before it was useless if you did it that way. I mean did you look at the thing? The camera is dead center front, so unless you shot it directly AT the bad guy in most situations I doubt you'd get even a second's worth of useful data.
But I can see this might be useful if you put a chute on its rear as that would point the camera straight down upon the battlefield area and give you a pretty good view of the streets and alleys below if this thing can get any height at all. If you are dealing with a house you'd be better off with that "Throwing bot" they were showing off recently where you just threw it through a window and it would always land on its wheels and be ready to recon. It was small enough the controller and bot fit easily in a pack and was designed for what you just described.
At the very least they ought to make a chute deployment optional, perhaps by having a dial one could twist on the base that would have it deploy the chute if in the correct position. Because if there goal really is looking inside of houses this design is just stupid IMHO. You just won't get enough real data to be of any real use.
Besides it isn't like this just magically opened a way to exploit an OS that had never ever been exploited in the past. Ya see, this is what I don't get about the whole fanboyism thing, the divorce from reality. News Flash: ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS CAN BE EXPLOITED!!!
A wise person once said the only way to make a truly unhackable computer was to lock it in a safe and drop it in a hole and that is the truth. No matter how smart the guys that write the OS think they are there is somebody smarter out there and if they want to dedicate the time and energy they WILL find a way in, I don't care if it is cell, desktop, or server, I don't care if it is made by Apple, MSFT, or some Linux group. All it takes is will and knowledge and time and the knowledge and time parts get shorter all the time thanks to this little thing we called the Internet allowing those that want to hack to have plenty of places to learn.
As for TFA any security person will tell you that if you have access to the hardware you are 90% of the way there. I doubt Apple really cares much about this since it seems like to big of a PITA for the average Apple customer. Most folks aren't gonna be cooking up special cables and cracking the case just to jailbreak the thing.
But this does illustrate something I don't get about Apple, which is why they don't just do like Sony did with OtherOS before they screwed the pooch and take away the incentive to hack it in the first place? Just have a relatively simple way to call up a menu that says "By clicking here you give up your warranty in return for jailbreaking the device. Once chosen this CANNOT BE UNDONE" and then let the customer decide if they want to break it or not?
What I don't get is why they wouldn't have it deploy a chute at the top of the arc like launching a flare designed to light up a battlefield (sorry don't know the tech term for it) so that one would actually get a useful amount of time after launch? And on the upside it would give something to distract the bad guys whom I'm sure would look up with a serious WTF look on their faces as to why they were launching a flare and why it was a dud.
Uhhh...dude? didn't read what I wrote huh? No dual, 1.2Ghz single. Most folks are single tasking on one of those so duals are pointless. you could also use the cheaper (resistive?) screen, again folks won't expect an iPad for $150.
You see all you need is to hit "good enough". Not great, not second coming of iJesus, just "good enough". Folks see that PC sales are slowing down and going "Tablets are killing them!" and that is simply bullshit. I should know, I sell and fix the things all day long. It is simply for the vast majority a dual core with 2Gb of RAM is "good enough" and they see no reason to replace it.
You could do absolutely the same thing and come in at a $150 price point. 512Mb of DDR3 is dirt cheap, so is 2gb of NAND. Add a 1024x800 screen along with a wifi chip and MicroSD slot and you'd be good to go. Nobody is gonna expect 3D gaming, or HD video. put a stripped down browser that will load basic web pages (add $30 if you want one with a flash decoder chip), play MP3s, and read eBooks. That's all, that's it. I bet my last dollar that just like the EEE it would be a game changer simply because for what the masses want to do it would be good enough.
Actually I learned it from a very nice black woman I went to school with, Dru. She told me "You just have to accept that like there is white folks and dirty white trash there is black folks and low down dirty niggers and we HATE niggers just as much as any white folks!" like she said "I have worked hard all my life, wasn't nothing given to me. I have two kids BY MY HUSBAND and we have worked hard to teach them to strive to get ahead, just as we have. But I have to work twice as hard because if they have ever hired a nigger? They won't want to hire me because they are afraid. Afraid I may be a nigger too". She actually had to keep a POS car that she would use only when she had to visit a relative in the ghetto. why? Because they would steal everything that wasn't nailed down if she drove a good car!
And I read your link and frankly I was not even the slightest bit surprised at any of it. what you have is a large segment of society that have simply decided that the ONLY law they will have is the law of the jungle, nothing more. look at the attendance records for state fairs, you'll see they are all dying out. Why? The "thug life!"ers. They have figured out state fairs are looting and robbing havens so everyone avoids them to stay away from the "thug life!"ers who show up in mass like in WI to do some wholesale looting and robbing.
I wish ya luck with your problem APK I really do. Like I said get your ass a big old mutt from the pound, preferably a nice big mature Heinz 57 that needs a good home ASAP. You can have the biggest gun in the world and "thug life!"ers will keep right on coming until you kill their ass. But a big old mutt, its hair on end and its gums slicked back? that's primal, that works better on them that any gun. Like I said Old Jack guarded my mom's place for a decade and not a SINGLE break in or theft, and now his daughter does the same. Once the word gets out you have a mean old mutt? They WILL leave you alone.
But sadly you are now a prime example of what Dru talked about, because if you have any sense at all, which I'm sure you do, you will never rent to one of them again no matter how nice they act! As you found out they have learned nobody wants "Thug life!"ers so they pretend to be regular folks...until they get in. Then comes the tearing shit up, the robbing, the beating, the acting like wild animals. You simply can't let them have nice things, because if you gave them a palace for absolutely free they would have it turned into a piss smelling pile of trash before you knew it. Its sad but true my friend, sad but true.
Question: what makes you think those out of the country will be ANY better? in case you haven't noticed you have a good chunk of the countries out there censoring left and right, "for the childrenz!" of course, and the other half have either signed treaties with the USA or are probably being pressured to as we speak.
You see that is the problem with these cartels, in that just like mob cartels they have NO jurisdictional limits to their power. Just as they paid off OUR elected officials? so too can they pay off the officials of other nations.
No what needs to happen is they get busted under the same laws as organized crime like RICO. After all you have a group of companies conspiring to fix prices, to lock competition out of the markets (why do you think every DJ in the country plays the same shit? Because they will be FIRED if they play anything that isn't on the approved playlist. And if you aren't owned by a cartel member? you ain't getting on the list friend) and to bribe officials even as they lie both in print/radio/TV and under oath. I'd say these groups are about as classic a case for RICO as one can get, but good luck since Citizens United means they don't even have to be sneaky about the bribes!
In the end just like our unjust drug laws what we need is to get the masses to completely ignore it. Their laws simply cannot work if nobody agrees to follow them. Perhaps a mass "download day" where everyone hits every form of P2P to grab creative commons media? And have everyone do this every week, just snatch at random constantly so they can't tell who is doing legitimate protests and who is actually downloading their ill gotten gains (which if you've seen a new artist contract like I have you'd know it is legalized theft, pure and simple) so they can't enforce this stupid BS law.
You joke but I think you just hit the nail square on the head on how to unseat the iPad. What they need to do is cook up a reasonably performing (I'd say 1.2Ghz ARM single with 512Mb of RAM and a couple of Gb of storage) pad and sell it in the $150 range, probably with Android.
The thing I've noticed is perfect will nearly always be defeated by "good enough" if that good enough is substantially cheaper. I'd say the sweet spot for a mass market pad would be right on or as close to $150 as you can get and then you can always charge extra for a 3G module add on or do various tie ins with carriers.
There are a LOT of folks out there (me included) that wouldn't mind playing with a pad but at current prices for anything usable simply aren't worth it to them, but the $150 price point is close to "impulse buy" territory. And just look at how netbooks jump started the entire laptop field and changed the game, going from uber expensive to decent laptops in the $300 range? the same can be done with tablets, it just needs someone to do a EEE with the form factor.
Better idea, take the money out of the big shitty banks and put it in your local small bank or co-op. With my little bank if some eTailer tries to double dip I can walk in and say "Hey Karen, guess what? Someone double dipped when I ordered a part online" and she'll say "ooohhh...don't you just HATE that? That happened to my husband a couple of weeks back! let me just punch in some stuff...is this it? Okay let me wipe that...here you go! It'll take about 5 minutes for the changes to filter through the system". Then I say thanks Karen and go on my merry way. I even use my debit online simply because my bank has me covered and never says boo when it comes to fixing mistakes.
So I'd say the better advice would be to take your money out of these "Walmart banks" where they wouldn't piss on you if they were on fire and instead stick with the small banks and co-ops. My little bank gave out loans to local businesses all through the "credit crisis" because they knew the folks they were lending to, and by doing so they didn't get hurt. They also didn't play on the stock market like it was Vegas with better suits and so while everyone else was tight on cash my little bank was bragging they had 300 million ready to be loaned to small businesses.
In some cases smaller simply is better and banking would be one of those.
Oh I agree but we also at the same time have to call bullshit when we see it. There is NEVER an excuse to live like a damned animal. look at Gandhi, The Brits treated his people worse than dogs, but did they suddenly go "Thug life baby!" and start acting like wild apes? FUCK NO! They organized and stood up for their rights! We went from "I have a dream" to "Nothin but a g thang baby" and we should call it like it is, a large section of a race refusing to obey even the most basic rules of civilized society and instead living like rabid apes.
What gets to me is you CAN NOT be nice to them, because they don't even have enough damned sense not to shit where they eat. You rent them a nice place? They trash it. You give them a nice neighborhood? they spray graffiti everywhere while pissing in the alleys and throwing trash all over the street. there is a DAMNED GOOD REASON why you see "white flight" and it ain't because of racist attitudes, it is because they are so damned violent and destructive a white would be insane to live next to them!
That is why folks are just gonna have to accept the truth, there is whites and white trash, and there is blacks and niggers. We have black folks downstairs, really nice hard working folks that just wanted a decent place to live they could afford. the FIRST THING they did when they saw niggers trying to move in was run them off by keeping the law on their doorstep 24/7. When I asked Mr Miller what was up he said 'The last thing this building needs is some god damned niggers tearing the place up". No truer words have been spoken. And I was more than happy to help the man when he ran off some white trash because scum is scum is scum. Just because you are poor doesn't mean you have to live like a filthy animal!
We need to accept that when someone has NO intention of following even the most basic rules of society, the right of your fellow man not to be terrorized by them, then they need to be treated just as they are acting, like animals! The "Thug Life!"ers have been destroying neighborhoods, having a half a dozen illegitimate kids they never pay for, stealing from everyone around them, and basically acting like animals for a good 30 years now, it is time to wake up and say "If you refuse to follow even the most basic rules of society then you need to be in a cage" and leave them there.
And while I believe that the BS of illegals and outsourcing needs to come to a screeching halt, and those that supported such treasonous acts lined up against the wall and shot, hell I'll even volunteer to be on the firing squad, that doesn't change the fact that even when times were good and there was plenty of jobs the "thug Life!"ers were tearing shit up and screaming "That's RACIST!" if you dared to point out that their neighborhoods year after year AFTER YEAR are ALWAYS in the top 10 for rapes, robberies, murders, vandalism, etc. look up "20 worst neighborhoods in America" and see what color they are. guess what? NOT A SINGLE ONE is White or even Latino. They are ALL black.
I'm sorry but bullshit. If someone lives on welfare and food stamps? Fine and dandy, everyone can have a bad run. that does NOT give them the right to RAPE, ROB, and MURDER okay? And THAT is what you are excusing. Go look up the WI state fair which is what we are talking about. You'll see why it is so easy for racists to make monkey jokes because frankly what you will see on the videos is NOTHING LESS than pure animal behavior.
So frankly I don't give a shit about your Karl Marx BS, and I'm a socialist. Your right to act like an animal ends when they infringe on the rights of others and all this PC bullshit like yours is doing is making excuses for those that have completely given up even the most basic of rules of civilized society and intend to live like wild animals in a law of the jungle manner.
I know a lot of poor smokers and they simply switched to the filtered cigars when the prices got nuts. At a pack a day that is $75 a month or $900 a year. Not anywhere close to what you are quoting friend. Sadly in some neighborhood it is getting cheaper to smoke dope than it is to smoke cigarettes. Didn't we learn anything from prohibition?
As for the Comcast thing? Good luck folks. I know plenty of poor and older folks that tried to get the naked AT&T DSL and for all intents and purposes it don't exist. by the time they got done tacking on fees and requirements and hoop jumping most gave up. I don't think I ever met anyone that actually managed to get it. When the government makes them offer something like this they make sure the bullshit and flaming hoops are so high that you'll just give up. Yeah good luck folks.
Actually, and I can't remember who said this, maybe some here can, but I remember reading how the odds that SETI would find squat would be so low as to be non-existent simply because there is only a teeny tiny window if you use our world as a model because one progresses from "blasting EM everywhere" to highly localized signals that don't go anywhere so quickly.
Look at how quickly we went from nothing to analog "blast EM everywhere" to tight digital sat signals. What 100 years? In space time that would be less time than a girl's little squeaky fart. So even if there were tens of thousands of races out there, and they all used the same EM bands we did the amount of time their signal was sent out into the cosmos was so damned tiny you would have to watch the entire sky simultaneously to have any hope at all and even then it would be teeny tiny odds. it is like a blind man trying to find a needle in Nebraska and the needle is moved randomly.
So while I thought the golden records were fine, hell it didn't really cost much to throw those on a ship we were launching anyway, I have to wonder if our limited resources wouldn't be better spent in studying our own solar system instead of hunting for ET. Hell even if we found ET it isn't like we could do a damned thing about it, the distances are simply too great. But if folks are willing to put up the cash because they are looking for ET? More power to ya, free country and all that.
Uhhh...we're broke, it case you haven't heard. We have THREE wars going on now, an infrastructure falling apart, and at every turn you got the teabaggers, many of whom signed a "Never raise taxes, I don't give a fuck WHAT happens" pledge cockblocking at every turn.
I mean sure it'd be nice if we could afford science, hell I'd like to cut the military budget a good 40%, bring our boys home, kill the F35, and use that money to fund R&D to bring us back on top INCLUDING space tech, but that ain't gonna happen as long as we got teabaggers flinging shit everywhere like rabid monkeys and going "Give teh rich more MONIES LOL!"
ya know, never has a name been more apropos than that.......teabaggers. Because they sure as hell remind me of those little 14 year old Halo shitheads. But to fund space (and bridges, and SS/Medicare/Medicaid) you actually need this thing called ...oh what is it? Oh yeah money which the teabaggers would happily see the country go third world before ever making a rich man pay a dime. Remember the one who is bringing them the pledges to sign is none other than Grover Norquist, Mr "I want to drown government in the bathtub" himself. you think we can afford anything but bombs as long as THESE bozos are around? As if!
No teh math freak was giving us the classic liberal "Its teh system keeping teh black man down!" bullshit and I wanted to let him know it was indeed bullshit. i know plenty of good black folks that got the fuck away from the ghettos, busted their asses in school, got a decent education, started businesses or worked their way up, same as everybody else. the "Its teh system!" white guilt bullshit hurts the blacks as much as the whites as it just gives excuses to the "thug life"ers.
"Oh its not the fact i'm slinging dope while carrying a 9mm with tats all over myself, nope its teh man keepin teh black man down!" horseshit. Sure it isn't easy to be a poor black but ya know what? it ain't easy to be poor PERIOD. that is why you have to at least try, not be a lazy piece of trash.
But yeah get a mutt, a mutt is better than a 9mm any day, I've had both I should know. I'm sure if you hit the local pound you'll find a nice mature dog, get a mature one, NOT a pup. He'll be more grateful to be given a decent home and the adult will be more fiercely territorial than a pup. Pup takes awhile to train too, and it sounds like you need the help ASAP. Just feed him scraps, let him see what turf is his, and I swear it won't even take two weeks before that mutt will be guarding whats his. Bonus if you can find a nice big shaggy one, collie or wolfdog, they are smart as hell and a lot more scary when that fur comes up!
So get ya a mean old mutt, be sure to feed him a burger when he tears one of those "thug life!"ers a new asshole, he'll learn his job damned quick. I bet you my last dollar they won't try that shit again but once, and they damned well WILL regret it!
Because having a hot babe you want to bang be your wingman in a bar is just.....well weird? The reason Apollo and Starbuck worked well together was Apollo could be kind of a stick in the mud so Stabuck would come and bail his ass out with the jokes, as a good wingman should. Hot babe? not only will hot babe make it worse but it will make dude in trouble look even MORE lame, not less.
As for TFA... attachments are bad mmmkay? what sucks is how many years have we been trying to drum this into users heads? I know I have since the days of Win 95 and Outhouse Excrement. I have actually sat beside a user and said "DO NOT open that password protected zip, are you nuts? Its a virus!" only to get told "Awww you worry too much! Its from my BFF Kim see? She wouldn't do that" and damned if she didn't do EXACTLY what the email told her to with me practically trying to throw myself in front of the keyboard. That is why as a PC repairman i have this face as my standard face every. single. day.
Actually I think if you want to see our future, look to Libya. They think their F16s will save them? Got news for them, the National Guard got stingers and are made up of guess what? poor folks. They said when the shit hit the fan in Libya military bases were passing out guns like candy, i think the same will happen here only it will be the national Guard doing the handing out. Hell you can build a technical out of any machine shop in the USA, just take the weapon off the tripod, weld some mounts in the back of any Ford or Chevy truck and voila!
You got the militias loading up like WWIII is scheduled for Tuesday, you got soldiers taking oaths against the government. My oldest in pre med openly wonders if he'll get to graduate med school before the bombs start falling. If they think the poor will just go silently into that good night? Boy are they in for a shock.
But you should be a little more specific, it isn't healthcare you want to blame it is BIG PHARMA, who spend a full 80% of their costs on ads and who are making as much as 6000% profit on life saving drugs. that isn't profits that's extortion. My mom was an RN for nearly 40 years and spent more time on the phone trying to get help for the poor than anything else. She even once "lost" a patient for four days just so a terminal man could die in a cool hospital bed rather than on a couch in a 113f trailer with no power. I've known docs that have made drugs go "poof" so some poor person wouldn't go without, a pharmacist that had drugs shipped in from South America, there are a lot of good folks in healthcare and most of them are getting fucked just like everybody else.
But I know what you mean, working my little shop it really wouldn't take much to take me out. One extra bill, one too many client droughts, there but for the grace of God go I.