Yep that royal PITA $2200 top o' the line gamer PC I just finished is just cheap shit, why if folks wanted that they'd go to Worst Buy! I live right next to a fricking college rolling with daddy's girls and boys with jags and gold CCs and most of them just bought the iPhone 4 instead and I haven't yet saw an iPad in the wild yet. i heard they are big on the coast.
Or maybe....juuust maybe, you snotty ass coast dwellers buy different shit than everyone in the flyover states? look up Apple's numbers for the flyover states, go on, I DARE YOU. You'll find out Apple sells in NY, LA, Miami, and that is pretty much it. The phone sold because AT&T didn't have any competition for the longest time, so if you wanted an AT&T phone that wasn't shit you got an iPhone. If Apple is all that why aren't they the number 1 PC brand with a bullet? I'll tell you why because they are a niche product which sells big on the coasts and that's about it.
Look up the numbers for droid and be prepared to shit yourself as it is stomping the dog shit out of Apple and HARD. Apple may come up with a cool idea but thanks to the droid it don't take long before others come out with plenty of competition, and most folks don't care about paying an extra 100%+ to have a shiny Apple logo or to have to use iTunes for everything.
And yes I sold netbooks all through the iPad one because it was as I said it was too damned big which while it may have sold on the coasts frankly in the flyover states nobody knew what to make of it. Too big to fit in a pocket, yet too underpowered to replace a laptop. The new droids at 7 inch are the perfect size, easy to pop in a purse or glovebox, easier to read than a cell, and at a price you can give them to your kids as well as pick one up for yourself.
So mark my words Apple fanboi, and watch them come true: In 24 months or less iPad will be just another niche product like the Mac. They've probably got about that long to sell to the fanbois and those that were using the Touch, and for the Android market and feature lists to catch up. After that? Well lets just say Steve better be back in charge and whipping off that "next new thing" because thanks to droid people are gonna look at their pads the same way they do their phones...disposable. You'll also notice that Droid phones have already started overtaking IPhone. See that is what happens when competition happens, crazy markups just don't fly and "good enough" is often all folks need. Just ask Steve what happened when Windows 3.1 came out, he'll tell you it is kinda like what you are about to see. It started off slow, built up steam, and then WHAM! Apple was stuck in the dumps praying for Steve to come and save them.
I do! He is Google's Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and gasp! surprise! he doesn't like Google's competition. I Mean seriously, what are the odds? I mean he and the company that pays him big fat checks actually agree! Of course the fact he cooked up a good idea 40 years ago makes him an expert on competition now, just as Senator McSellout and the rest of congress keep passing those *.A.A written laws because they really have the people's interests at heart and those big fat bribes....err...campaign contributions, are just a lovely coincidence!
C'mon dude, next you're gonna try to sell us that Ballmer is an expert on Linux code and we should take his word on Linux infringement because the guy has no reason to bullshit, right?
The reason the whole antitrust bullshit don't matter is VERY simple, okay? MSFT rules the desktop and most likely always will but the world isn't just desktops anymore just as once upon a time the world revolved around the IBM mainframe and while IBM still owns the mainframe market (hell are there even any other mainframe builder left?) that market is just a small slice to a MUCH bigger pie.
So frankly I'm glad its about to be over, maybe then MSFT can start bundling an AV instead of every OEM coming with trialware crap. Hell even in my little shop in the middle of nowhere the hot thing that everyone is asking about ain't laptops or desktops, but those CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) Cruz Micro 4Gb pads I just started picking up. They're cheap, have easier to read screens than a phone, simple to use, sure they ain't setting speed records but for web surfing they are fine and most importantly they are fun and a hell of a lot easier to carry around than a netbook.
MSFT missed the boat, the fat lady is down the street looking up where to get a sandwich or her new pad. Acting like they are the big bad is like saying the market is controlled by IBM. Hey maybe this means Linux guys can stop writing "M$" and acting like it is 1998?...Naaah
Funny thing that, it is yet another case where the pirate version is better! Seriously why MSFT doesn't hire the guy that makes the "tiny" versions of their OS is beyond me, frankly they make even the embedded versions look like pigs in comparison. We are talking 64Mb on XP Sp3, with a good 90% of the regular software running fine, and 512Mb of RAM for Vista and 7 and both flying low on any old 2Ghz P4!
As for the TFA, how is the GPU in the thing? Can it run flash? Because I hate to break the news to Google but Joe and Jane average want their FaceBook games, not to mention trying to explain to them that it isn't a "baby laptop" and thus should be able to run anything a regular laptop does only slower. It will probably appeal to some geeks and Google fanbois, along with the DIY crowd if they sell the hardware cheaply, but I don't know how much of the public will jump onto a "rent to never own" plan on a machine if it can't run their Farmville. I swear those FB games are becoming like benchmarks for the non geek crowd. You don't know how many folks that come into my shop that judge their machines by how well or poorly FB games run.
Hey you better be nice you damned dirty canuck, not only do you have oil we may need to liberate to run our Canyoneros but we down here in the USA ain't forgotten that blatant act of terrorism you did to us! I'm of course talking about how you let that damned she harpy Celine Dion out of her cage to come shrieking down like some sort of frozen banshee with its hideous voice causing brown notes all over the damned place!
You're just lucky we have been too busy trying to decide whether to declare war on Australia to deal with your sorry asses! Damned Australians, making us all confused. First we help them out by saving their asses in WWII, so they give us some Foster's and the best damned movie of the 70s, the magnum opus Mad Max, so we think they are trying to be friends! I mean sure they sent Olivia Newton John, but we figured they were blinded by her cuteness just like we was so that can be forgiven. What can NOT be forgiven was that two fisted punch to the balls, namely Paul Hogan and Yahoo "OMFG shoot me Young Einstein has stolen my will to live!" Serious. WTF Australia? What did we ever do to you? Didn't we give you good shit in WWII just like we did the limeys?
So I say Canada only gets the ChromeOS netbooks if they play nothing but Celine Dion at full volume until they admit they are sorry and send a strike team to corral that that harpy. Then together we'll take her and Newton John along with 100 tons of raw sewage and threaten to dump it on Sydney until they say they are sorry and pay reparations for letting Yahoo Serious loose upon the planet! You KNOW that wasn't right, you KNEW that idiot wasn't funny, and you did it anyway, you damned criminals! That shit was so bad even Cheney wouldn't use it on terrorists as even HE wasn't that cruel, and we were supposed to be allies!
Which brings up what I REALLY want to know....how much just to buy the bloody thing? Surely it'll have to be pretty damned cheap when i can get Droid pads starting at like $115 and you just know once these things have been in the wild a little bit some FOSS hacker is is gonna ricer the fuck out of it and THAT will be worth playing around with. I mean look at how many DIY hacks came out for those first EEE netbooks, they had everything from touch screens to 3G wired into those suckers!
So please Google say the thing is gonna be cheap, preferably in the $100 range. At that price you're welcome to play with whatever data I generate until i figure out which DIY plan I want to fuck with, otherwise I'll probably get one of those cheapo Cruz pads to fuck with. And yes i know they are CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) but from watching my customers with the things the important thing is its fun to futz with and from the looks of it for basic web surfing and ebooks it works just fine. So if Google will give me an ultra light for around the same price I'm game, but paying $240 for the thing when I can just get a pad? Nope, if I'm paying for it I want to be able to futz around.
Well I figured you would use something like a foam which could be brought up in powdered form and mixed in space. Also from what I understand it is the little bastards that can be really dangerous as it is nearly impossible to track all the little chunks and a screw hitting you at 50,000 miles per hour can seriously ruin your day. I like your idea on the larger objects and together with my "tar baby" idea would probably get a large amount of debris out of there. I also agree with the other poster that our country was at its peak when taxes on the 1%ers were 70% since it forced them to invest rather than hoarde, but with the multinationals and scum like the Kock bros bribing left and right short of the USA pulling an Egypt the odds the 1%ers will ever see their taxes even hit 30% is non existent.
Oh and don't you love how I was modded down for daring to say tar baby, when those of us that actually grew up with the Uncle Remus stories simply saw it at face value, a ball of tar shaped into a little person as a trap? If anyone had actually bothered to read the story instead of knee jerking they would have saw it didn't have a damned thing to do with racism, it was based on southern customs and being slighted. Briar rabbit said hello to the tar baby and when it didn't return his greeting he saw it as an insult and attempted to punch it for its rudeness and got stuck. It is also a perfect analogy for what I'm describing, a ball of gel or goo that would absorb the small debris by simply sitting there and getting hit.
Riiiight, because refusing to support a lose coalition of Islamic courts run by thugs whose answer to pretty much everything was 'Jihad!' makes the US the bad guys. In case you haven't noticed radical Islamists aren't exactly nice folks and you sure as hell can't blame the Ethiopians for not wanting jihadist neighbors.
Like it or not too damned much trade goes through those waters to allow radical Islam to control them. If the US Navy has their hands tied with too much bullshit it is time to call in the mercs. It ain't pretty but then again neither is Islam and we can't afford to have international shipping held hostage by pirates or the jihadists. Whether you wish to accept it or not fundamentalist Islam is run by thugs that refuse to acknowledge your right to exist as anything other than a Muslim and handing waters crucial to international shipping to a bunch of sharia courts ruled by warlords would have been even worse than what we have now. At least the pirates are in it for the cash, the islamists would treat it as a holy war.
UCAVs. A combo of Firescouts and Predators armed with Mavericks and 20mm cannons can cover a hell of a lot of sea and should be able to find out if that mayday is for empty ocean or a pirate vessel.
Sadly I'm gonna have to agree with the others that dropping the pirates is pretty much the best bet unless someone wants to roll the tanks on Somalia. When you actually have a "pirate stock exchange" where you can kick in money to buy RPGs and AK47s in return for a percentage of the loot they rob? You can give up any kind of deterrence short of sinking the boats.
Uhhh...accounts are free, so what is with all the ACs? It is starting to feel like a *chan here, with a good 70% or more comments AC. As for your "mindstate" test? in no particular order: Not sure about JFK because they haven't released all the info yet, the laser reflectors should tell anyone that Apollo did land on the moon, Elvis is dead, still can't figure out how two planes took out three towers on 9/11 or how you get three towers to fall straight down when it is a royal bitch to pull that off even with controlled demolition, enough for you? Oh and Obama was born in America but probably does have a few skeletons he don't want found (like all politicians).
As for why they haven't done so? More and more have, just look up how many Android devices won't allow you to use your own ROMs or update the things with unapproved ROMs. There is also the whole "EEE" thing, as in "embrace, extend, extinguish" which I believe we are getting around to the last E right about now. Google devs have stopped trying to commit their changes to the kernel, now they are closing off Honeycomb.
Now a question for YOU good sir: If they are NOT gonna end up TiVoing the thing then why not allow GPL V3? After all even GPL V3 says they don't have to hand the world the code, simply everyone that buys a device is allowed access to the source. Also GPL V3 was made by RMS to close down "TiVo tricking" which RMS rightly saw was an end run around GPL, because if you look at the entire reason for the GPL in the first place it was because RMS lost functionality when MIT got a new printer and he was refused the source so he could fix the problem himself and thus the GPL was born.
So other than TiVo tricking why not allow GPL V3? As other have pointed out this does NOTHING for all the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) out there, and if anything makes it worse as they'll simply continue to keep cranking out 2.0 tablets and using the Android name to drive sales, so why?
A final little note to all those complaining about the CCC: Perhaps as hackers you just have a different definition as to what is good? Because right now I've got a hot little seller in the Cruz Micro 4Gb tablet. While most here would think it is shitty for running Android 2.0 with just 256Mb of RAM and 4Gb of space, frankly my customers love the thing. It started when I ordered one for a neighbor and mushroomed as she has gone around showing off the thing. Sure it isn't an iPad but who gives a shit? For reading eBooks, playing tunes, and light web surfing it works just fine and at $150 while making me a little profit it is turning out to be quite popular. Hell watching her play with the thing I might get one myself just for playing with.
Personally AC I hope you're right but I bet you're wrong. As we have seen time and time again corps love control damned near as much as profits, and thanks to TiVo every company using Android has a "ignore GPL free" card, and by closing it Google can hard code any kind of "phone home" or data mining they desire, and as we all know data mining is Google's bread and butter. As a final prediction let me say this: It will start with the phones, followed quickly by the tablets. I still believe this is a "feeler" to gauge public reaction and when Google doesn't see pitchforks they WILL close it down for good, probably in 4.0 if not earlier.
While this may be true, something has seriously been bothering me lately, maybe someone here at/. can explain...WTF is it with the obvious MSFT shills here lately? Did they get a deal on that HB Gary Fed software or something?
I just don't get it. I mean sure the WinPhone ain't doing so hot, but the X360 is a hit and fulfilled its stated goal to get MSFT out of the office and into the living room, Windows 7 frankly rocks, and this is from someone who hung onto Win2K and XP X64 because frankly I thought their consumer OSes were lame, and last numbers I saw had fully two thirds of new servers being sold with WinServer and WinSBS Server was racking up the numbers. So WTF? The obvious shilling now makes NO sense, and just turns folks off. So why do it?
As for TFA this is something else that I think deserves a WTF and that is JavaScript and the current way we are doing things. Sites like FB are twisting JScript in ways it was never designed and now that we are starting to make real process on killing drive bys with low rights mode and getting rid of those damned "hey lets run as admins!" XP boxes now everyone wants to run third party web code bare metal? WTF?
Maybe with all this Web 3.0 crud we really ought to think about starting over with a new design built from top to bottom with security in mind. Maybe something with multiple isolation layers and least permissions, because there ought to be some way other than NoScript or hoping everything will stay in the sandbox to make it so everyone can have their FB games and bling bling without going through another ActiveX mess all over again. Perhaps instead of calling content from all over the web just to render a single page only allow code to be kept in a "time out room" on the server serving the web pages in such a way that the browser can do malware scans before calling it?
I'm just a humble PC fixit guy, not a security expert so I can't give you the answers, only ask the questions. But it seems to me there ought to be a way to allow people to have things like hardware acceleration without just running everything or blocking everything. Sandboxes to me always felt like a band aid on a bullet wound, and we tell folks not to run untrusted.exe files they trip over yet we are supposed to trust all the ads and flash and everything else, often which isn't even controlled by the website admin? It just doesn't seem like the right way to be going about this. Am I crazy?
Thanks but my karma is just fine. What you could do for me though is be sure to speak up supporting free speech for those that is easy to vilify, like the guy that wrote the "pro pedo" book. I have talked about this not only online but whenever anyone brought that up in public, no matter what the initial looks they gave me because after I explained why we MUST stand up for those people they saw the light.
Just remember they NEVER take your rights away because you said something popular, they take your rights away by using the villain as the scapegoat. The guy that wrote the pro pedo book had no pics of kids, not accused of touching kids, he simply wrote his thoughts down and formed them into a book. To arrest someone for that is about as clear a definition of thoughtcrime as one can get and because few would stand for him then when the next book comes around it could be against AGW or critical of some leader or any other subject.
As my grandfather taught me with the Illinois Nazis we MUST stand up for the rights of the villain to speak, because it is through the villain that we ALL lose our rights. So next time you hear someone bashing a person's right to speak because they don't approve of the subject matter please speak up! I've found that sadly most folks simply don't realize what a danger to all such actions cause, and too many like my grandfather fought and suffered for the rights of both the hated and the loved to let their voices be heard.
Uh huh, I'd say the REAL goal is a slow but sure march towards TiVoization which I said would happen for...oh about a year now. Once Google said they wouldn't allow any GPL V3 (which RMS wrote to specifically keeping companies from TiVoing GPL software) I figured it was only a matter of time.
You watch these early moves are 'feelers" to see how big of a stink it causes in places other than Linux forums. When Google sees the fanbois are all onboard and making with the excuses and Joe Consumer frankly doesn't care they trot out a nice "its for security!" statement (probably timed right after some Android malware hits the news) and it'll be code signing or eFuses all the way.
As much as I don't agree with RMS on...well hell pretty much everything, he was right on this. Once TiVo showed the corps how to run right around GPL V2 it became for all intents and purposes useless. Anybody using GPL V2 now might as well be using BSD or PD for all the "freedom" it protects now. After all what good is the code if you aren't allowed to modify it or run it on the device for which its intended?
I just hope moves like this teach the community two important lessons: 1.-There is no such thing as a "friendly" corp. They can come up with little slogans like do no evil, they can make shiny devices, it frankly doesn't matter what they do, because if it comes down to making more money and/or gaining more power or not fucking you? Well bend over pal, because here it comes. 2.- GPL V2 needs to be dumped ASAP and replaced with GPL V3, because as it is using GPL V2 is simply giving corps your labor for free while they don't have to give you ANYTHING in return. eFuses and code signing cost almost nothing and gives the corp all the control of proprietary while at the same time gaining all the effort that has been put into embedded Linux by the community.
Yep I live in a dry county and I'd say they are a perfect example of how sin laws NEVER work and a free market will simply route around them like with a black market.
I know in my "dry" county there is at least two bootleggers in every neighborhood and most don't give a crap if you're 16 as long as you've got cash, and the cops don't say squat either as they don't want to drive 60 miles round trip just to get a 6 pack after work and they know they can get it at cost from the bootlegger (instead of the 40% markup) as long as they don't go busting the bootlegger, so we end up with MORE alcohol than if they would have simply made the county wet, and of course worse underage drinking since bootleggers don't card. Sadly since the chief source of money in this county is the local Xian college good luck ever getting it repealed.
As for TFA frankly I don't care where the hell that judge is from, it is DAMNED NICE to see a judge showing some common sense and standing up for something as important to this country as free speech. Bravo sir, and even if the Kock bros (spelling intentional) manage to bribe someone on appeals you should at least be commended for standing up for what is right. As for whether that PETA satire should have been busted, absolutely not. We should ALWAYS support free speech, period. Same as even though I don't believe or support his opinions I believe the one that wrote that "pro pedo" book should NOT have been busted for putting his thoughts on paper.
For as my grandfather taught me when I asked if he was mad at those Illinois Nazis for wanting to march after he had a wall dropped on him by Nazis in the closing days of WWII "No we should support their right to speak, even when what they say is hateful or evil, as it is what made this country great. There nobody was allowed to speak out against those brownshirts, but here we can counter protest and debate and speak our minds. That is what freedom is all about." He taught me that freedom is NEVER "free to agree with me only" and that to have a healthy society one had to tolerate ALL free speech and open debate, lest we end up as close minded and locked down as they were. Smart man my grandfather and I'm sure he would approve of this ruling whole heartedly.
I always thought a variation on the old Uncle Remus "tar baby" story would clean up a lot of the small fast junk in the higher orbits most sats aren't using.
Basically you'd have Aerogel or some other thick possibly glue like substance surrounded by a one way penetrable plastic membrane. You'd leave it up there for four or five years, letting the thing get filled with more and more crap, and then once its orbit had been cleaned to general satisfaction a couple of small rockets could de-orbit it into the Pacific where it would burn up on re-entry.
But the problem with ANY solution is currently we have a "tragedy of the commons" situation where there really isn't any penalty for making a mess and trying to get the nations currently putting up birds (which more and more join into that group each year) to split the bill is nearly impossible.
So while I believe a solution CAN be found (after all the USA went from barely being able to get a rocket off the ground to the moon in 10 years) the problem is getting the peoples of Earth to pony up the $$$. Hell maybe someone can talk China into going for it as a prestige thing. We here in the USA are broke as a joke so I don't see us doing much more than hitching rides with the Russians for probably another decade, maybe two.
Uhhh...I said one that works and those things most certainly DO NOT. I've tried those generic converters and 1.-almost never work on Windows 7, XP 32 only and 2.- have such a high latency they are pretty much only good for transferring files like to an old PDA. if you try one of those on a controller it will be push button............in game reaction.
As for my supposed "rant" go read the MSFT buys Skype threads and enjoy a good laugh. The Linux guys are practically shitting their pants because they know this means "no more soup for you!" because it doesn't matter if MSFT gives it away or continues to support it, as for as FLOSSies go it will ALWAYS be "M$" and they would rather have a half assed broken worthless "solution" than ever take a thing for Redmond. Oh well more for the other 99.95% of the planet eh?
Oh so fucking bullshit. I'm sorry but the fanboi horseshit in this place is getting a little deep. What MSFT tried to do with Java is EXACTLY what Google is trying to do now to Java and yet you see the fanbois tripping over their own damned feet trying to get in line to be Google Apologists!
And in case you ain't notice there are these two little words called "vertical integration" which everybody in their damned dog is doing right now. Just look at how Apple ties everything to iTunes, even crap like Safari that the user would have no need of just to load some tunes on his iPod, or how Google is spamming the living shit out of Chrome worse than Google Toolbars. What MSFT needs is vertical integration because customers want simple and the way you give them simple is to tie everything together nice and neat so everything talks to everything and to steal an Apple meme it "all just works".
What you are gonna see with Skype is integration everywhere and it'll probably make them a ton! Replace your business VoIP services with a bundled Skype WinServer backend, all with nice little GPOs and controls for OUs so any MCSE can control the whole smash, have Skype on your X360 at home and your WinPhone in your pocket, probably with a nice little plugin for Windows 7 that gives you features based on which version you have, such as business features for those on Win Pro, and maybe even a deal with someone like Cisco like what AT&T has for their mini cell base stations to have Skype routers for home and business, everything together all nice and neat.
Finally as for Linux support? If the businesses scream for it they may keep it but in the end they will probably let it wither on the vine and why the hell shouldn't they? Linux users last I checked were something like maybe 1% of the market (hell according to this even Java ME beats Linux) and Linux users are notorious for being "free as in we'll never spend a damned dime" so why the hell would MSFT bother with that market? Especially after not only giving.NET as a standard, not only giving a legally binding community promise that would ensure they'd get laughed out of court if they tried anything, but after all that even invited the head Mono guy to developer conferences to give lectures and STILL after 11 years it is looked at as some trap that is just taking a really really REALLY long time to spring?
In the end Linux just isn't a good market unless you are gonna TiVo some hardware and want an OS for free (MSFT don't need one) or you want to try to scrape by selling support (with their profits MSFT don't need the chicken scratch). Because despite all the talk of "support us and we'll support you!" the Linux guys are frankly a bunch of cheapskate hypocrites. Despite RH giving back more code than all the other Linux bunches COMBINED a good two thirds last I saw the numbers of web servers out there are running CentOS, which BTW was started by a company that wanted to sell hardware but were too damned greedy to even buy the RH licenses their hardware needed, and despite AMD doing EXACTLY what the community asked of them and giving every spec and code not nailed down the community tripped over themselves to this day to recommend Nvidia.
So I'm sorry Linux guys, and if you want to waste mod points go right ahead as I have more karma than God, but I got to call it as I see it. Unless you want to just snatch shit away from the community doing the TiVo trick in the end Linux just ain't worth the trouble, especially for anything by MSFT. The users are paranoid, have a seriously bad attitude and sense of elitism that they don't have the numbers to back up, and you KNOW anything owned by MSFT even if they gave it away would be treated like poison, even if the community has to recommend a piss poor pile of hacked together bullshit to "kinda sorta but not really' give you the same functionality. Frankly MSFT would have to be nuts to bother wasting resources on the Linux client.
Ya know what? Lets forget that it had the fully auto crossbow, or the fact that it had the cheesiest lame ass Dracula since "Pimp Drac" in Blade 3, now what is its "Mission Impossible" helicopter jump in a tunnel bullshit moment is the God damned clock scene. I mean no slow mo or anything and that damned clock takes like 23 damned minutes to go from the first chime of midnight to the last? Give me a fucking break! I actually thought for a minute I was watching some Airplane style parody and that they were gonna show Frankenstein taking 20 to have a snack while looking at his watch and flipping off the fucking clock!
I'm sorry but that movie started lame and it just went downhill minute by minute. If you don't have your suspension of disbelief jump out your body and bitch slap you for trying to get it to swallow that horseshit then yours must be broken or heavily medicated dude.
Good Lord, can the fanbois kiss the Google ass ANY more? Seriously? The funny as fucking hell part is despite all the screams of "Its a trap" I bet my last dollar if Google released 'Google Mono" every damned Linux nerd would be jumping on that shit and talking it up like it is the fricking second coming! Its kinda sad that when you look at the amount of data collected on everybody by Google, compared to that Ballmer looks like a really sweaty Care bear.
As for Skype? Give me a fucking break! if you think MSFT is gonna spend some 8 billion fricking dollars just to kill a product with 663 million users you are some kinda stupid. MSFT is gonna bundle the hell out of that shit and make a ton! Skype on the X360, Skype from your WinPhone at any Wifi hotspot, Skype from your Windows 7 (and if you want all the extras get Win 7 Pro and we'll give you a ton of Skype business extras!) and it will ALL be tied together nice and neat, so you can switch from one to the other. This is one of the moves along with snatching Nokia that actually make sense, as MSFT needs vertical integration like Apple has on its mobile products and Skype along with DirectX for gaming could be damned good selling points for Windows Mobile. It is just smart business.
As for TFA you want to find tons of that weird shit you need to hit your local Goodwill along with those places selling items from storage compartments. I love to go check them places out and you'd be surprised how many wild and weird pieces of PC history ends up in those places for like a dollar. Now if I could just find a damned good affordable Gameport and serial to USB adapter I'd be a happy camper. I've not got enough time to be DIYing USB connections on those things, and the amount of badass flight sticks and other cool controllers out there for cheap because of serial or gameport connections is just nuts. Anybody know of a good gameport or serial to USB that actually works pretty good on Win 7?
I can already name something where 100Mb/s is too slow...cloud computing. If we are gonna be moving everything to the cloud you are gonna be talking massive amounts of data flying back and forth and just backups can get pretty damned huge and take awhile at 100Mb/s.
Of course the big "gotcha" nobody is mentioning is that the ISPs are gonna cap the shit out of everybody so bad it won't matter what speed you have, you'll never be able to use it. If we don't get some sort of net neutrality and regulations so they can't charge 1000% profit on raw data you're gonna end up with sub 30Gb caps and $2.50 a Gb overage charges.
Oh yeah its getting pretty bad here in AR, with lots of 4 point quakes when there was never anything bigger than a 1.2 or so. Of course if my buddy that has been working with some of the wildcatters is right it may turn into a total free for all, as he says the rumor is one of the groups may have hit an OK sized deposit of oil in the west of the state but its deep.
I hate to think what kind of a mess it'll make if it turns out that is true, we are too damned close to the New Madrid fault for people to just be fucking around with deep drilling, and if it is oil you know all bets on safety will be off as they hit the hell out of it.
I agree while it was a stupid boom boom fest it really doesn't rate the "OMFG why did I watch THAT?" that others here are chiming in with. Now Van Helsing on the other hand, or the biological attack from Australia also known as Young Einstein? Those two along with Grease II should be put down as torture under the Geneva convention!
But whether or not there have been any court rulings about downloading does sound like a legit question in my mind. While I don't know about the BT protocol I DO know that the old Fasttrack and edonkey networks had "leecher" mods floating around that would Dload but never Uload.
Now since there is one thing I know and that just about any software can be hacked I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to rig up some sort of "leecher mod" or in some other fashion block Uloads while allowing Dloads even if you got shitty throughput. Also there are all those "Rapidshare" style sites where one can download without sharing shit as well as Usenet.
So has any court made any rulings on Downloads? Seems like a legit question to me and one which I don't know the answer to, I'm sure others here can chime in and let us know.
Oh get real! What would happen is "ooops, lost the logs, what a fucking shame" like how the prosecution deleted the victims phone in the above case and how the judge refused to allow an expert to testify that the guy's computer was hacked.
Lets be honest folks, if they want to fuck you they aren't gonna let a silly thing like evidence get in the way. Hell there is a guy on death row in Texas right now where the DNA shows he didn't do it so the prosecutor just said "Well he didn't rape her, he must have just came along and killed her". Why? Just because it was Tuesday?
Anyone who has paid attention to our courts can come up with plenty of cases that are so full of shit you don't see how the prosecutor doesn't break into a shit eating grin from the level of bullshit they try to pass over on the jury. I remember one from my home state where pretty much everyone knew a cop had taken this guy out, most likely because he had caught the cops doing a dope deal, so they simply got the medical examiner to say that he committed suicide. Yeah by beating the shit out of himself, shooting himself three or four times, and THEN throwing himself off a bridge just to make sure. Same as how the prosecutor refused to listen to the engineer that testified that the two teens he ran over on the track were covered in a police tarp at the time and instead got the medical examiner to rule that the kids must have been so stoned on pot they just happened to fall asleep on the track and not get woke up by that train bouncing the living hell out of the tracks, or the ear splitting whistle. Uh huh.
The only way you are gonna get a truly fair trial in this country is if you got the $$$ to hire you a land shark to fight for you, otherwise you're fucked. That is of course if you actually make it to trial, because they can easily decide you are 'resisting arrest" and hit you with that "less lethal" taser...ohh about a dozen times or so. I guess twitching can legally be considered a form of resisting?
Look up "the largest gang in America" on YouTube and tell me how many rights you actually have now, because from what I saw the only real 'right" you have is to get the living shit beat out of you if you look at a cop funny, followed by being charged for making his knuckles sore pounding your ass. And if the local yokels can get away with that much, just imagine how much more a fed can get away with, such as TFA or worse.
Not bad but their prices kinda suck compared to Amazon. Frankly between Amazon and GOG (I only buy on Steam when they are having a crazy sale, like their HL2:Ep2 for $2 deal) I'm frankly up to my ass with games right now.
I even had to pick up a new 1Tb drive (BTW now that Hitachi and Samsung have sold out you might want to keep an eye out at Newegg and Tigerdirect, they've been having some crazy sales on Hitachi and Samsung drives. I got a Samsung 1Tb Ecodrive last week for $47 at Newegg with free shipping!) just to give me enough space to not have to delete games I hadn't gotten around to playing when I got new ones.
Frankly it has never been a better time to be a PC gamer, I've been building kick ass multimedia gaming PCs for customers for under $500 that play just about anything you can throw at them on their 1080p TVs, you can pick up HD48xx cards for like $60 if you shop around, AMD quads and HDDs are beyond cheap, and places like Amazon and GOG have so many killer games under $10 that in the case of Amazon I've often found it cheaper to throw in a killer game or two just to get the supersaver shipping. For PC gamers it really don't get much better than we've got it right now.
Uh huh...BTW where the hell have you been for the past 80 years or so? The FBI have always been jack booted thugs going back to their very formation! look up COINTELPRO and see how they have gone so far as to execute Americans on American soil for daring to speak views that weren't on the FBI's approved list of things Negroes were allowed to say at the time.
Anybody that expects the FBI to be anything BUT jack booted attack dogs really haven't been paying attention, just as anybody that thought Nobama would be any different than McSame obviously hadn't been following the money. We lost this country decades ago the only difference now is the greedy swine at the top have gotten so ballsy they don't even pretend to give a fuck about things like the constitution anymore.
But as others have said sooner or later we'll have our very own Egypt and things will get real ugly. I'm betting when China dumps their dollars and starts a worldwide dollar dump and the US dollar is worth about as much as a buck in Zimbabwe the excrement WILL hit the bladed cooling device. My guess is a lot of rich folks will be doing their impersonation of the fall of Saigon complete with helicopters taking off of roofs to escape the hordes. The real question will be what comes after which I kinda feel sorry for the rest of the planet then because as we saw in Europe a militant nation with massive unemployment and a shitload of weapons tends to get nasty to those around them. Hell we even have the pre-made groups to persecute, just replace Jews and Gypsy with Mexicans and H1-Bs.
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Yep that royal PITA $2200 top o' the line gamer PC I just finished is just cheap shit, why if folks wanted that they'd go to Worst Buy! I live right next to a fricking college rolling with daddy's girls and boys with jags and gold CCs and most of them just bought the iPhone 4 instead and I haven't yet saw an iPad in the wild yet. i heard they are big on the coast.
Or maybe....juuust maybe, you snotty ass coast dwellers buy different shit than everyone in the flyover states? look up Apple's numbers for the flyover states, go on, I DARE YOU. You'll find out Apple sells in NY, LA, Miami, and that is pretty much it. The phone sold because AT&T didn't have any competition for the longest time, so if you wanted an AT&T phone that wasn't shit you got an iPhone. If Apple is all that why aren't they the number 1 PC brand with a bullet? I'll tell you why because they are a niche product which sells big on the coasts and that's about it.
Look up the numbers for droid and be prepared to shit yourself as it is stomping the dog shit out of Apple and HARD. Apple may come up with a cool idea but thanks to the droid it don't take long before others come out with plenty of competition, and most folks don't care about paying an extra 100%+ to have a shiny Apple logo or to have to use iTunes for everything.
And yes I sold netbooks all through the iPad one because it was as I said it was too damned big which while it may have sold on the coasts frankly in the flyover states nobody knew what to make of it. Too big to fit in a pocket, yet too underpowered to replace a laptop. The new droids at 7 inch are the perfect size, easy to pop in a purse or glovebox, easier to read than a cell, and at a price you can give them to your kids as well as pick one up for yourself.
So mark my words Apple fanboi, and watch them come true: In 24 months or less iPad will be just another niche product like the Mac. They've probably got about that long to sell to the fanbois and those that were using the Touch, and for the Android market and feature lists to catch up. After that? Well lets just say Steve better be back in charge and whipping off that "next new thing" because thanks to droid people are gonna look at their pads the same way they do their phones...disposable. You'll also notice that Droid phones have already started overtaking IPhone. See that is what happens when competition happens, crazy markups just don't fly and "good enough" is often all folks need. Just ask Steve what happened when Windows 3.1 came out, he'll tell you it is kinda like what you are about to see. It started off slow, built up steam, and then WHAM! Apple was stuck in the dumps praying for Steve to come and save them.
I do! He is Google's Chief Internet Evangelist for Google and gasp! surprise! he doesn't like Google's competition. I Mean seriously, what are the odds? I mean he and the company that pays him big fat checks actually agree! Of course the fact he cooked up a good idea 40 years ago makes him an expert on competition now, just as Senator McSellout and the rest of congress keep passing those *.A.A written laws because they really have the people's interests at heart and those big fat bribes....err...campaign contributions, are just a lovely coincidence!
C'mon dude, next you're gonna try to sell us that Ballmer is an expert on Linux code and we should take his word on Linux infringement because the guy has no reason to bullshit, right?
The reason the whole antitrust bullshit don't matter is VERY simple, okay? MSFT rules the desktop and most likely always will but the world isn't just desktops anymore just as once upon a time the world revolved around the IBM mainframe and while IBM still owns the mainframe market (hell are there even any other mainframe builder left?) that market is just a small slice to a MUCH bigger pie.
So frankly I'm glad its about to be over, maybe then MSFT can start bundling an AV instead of every OEM coming with trialware crap. Hell even in my little shop in the middle of nowhere the hot thing that everyone is asking about ain't laptops or desktops, but those CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) Cruz Micro 4Gb pads I just started picking up. They're cheap, have easier to read screens than a phone, simple to use, sure they ain't setting speed records but for web surfing they are fine and most importantly they are fun and a hell of a lot easier to carry around than a netbook.
MSFT missed the boat, the fat lady is down the street looking up where to get a sandwich or her new pad. Acting like they are the big bad is like saying the market is controlled by IBM. Hey maybe this means Linux guys can stop writing "M$" and acting like it is 1998? ...Naaah
Funny thing that, it is yet another case where the pirate version is better! Seriously why MSFT doesn't hire the guy that makes the "tiny" versions of their OS is beyond me, frankly they make even the embedded versions look like pigs in comparison. We are talking 64Mb on XP Sp3, with a good 90% of the regular software running fine, and 512Mb of RAM for Vista and 7 and both flying low on any old 2Ghz P4!
As for the TFA, how is the GPU in the thing? Can it run flash? Because I hate to break the news to Google but Joe and Jane average want their FaceBook games, not to mention trying to explain to them that it isn't a "baby laptop" and thus should be able to run anything a regular laptop does only slower. It will probably appeal to some geeks and Google fanbois, along with the DIY crowd if they sell the hardware cheaply, but I don't know how much of the public will jump onto a "rent to never own" plan on a machine if it can't run their Farmville. I swear those FB games are becoming like benchmarks for the non geek crowd. You don't know how many folks that come into my shop that judge their machines by how well or poorly FB games run.
Hey you better be nice you damned dirty canuck, not only do you have oil we may need to liberate to run our Canyoneros but we down here in the USA ain't forgotten that blatant act of terrorism you did to us! I'm of course talking about how you let that damned she harpy Celine Dion out of her cage to come shrieking down like some sort of frozen banshee with its hideous voice causing brown notes all over the damned place!
You're just lucky we have been too busy trying to decide whether to declare war on Australia to deal with your sorry asses! Damned Australians, making us all confused. First we help them out by saving their asses in WWII, so they give us some Foster's and the best damned movie of the 70s, the magnum opus Mad Max, so we think they are trying to be friends! I mean sure they sent Olivia Newton John, but we figured they were blinded by her cuteness just like we was so that can be forgiven. What can NOT be forgiven was that two fisted punch to the balls, namely Paul Hogan and Yahoo "OMFG shoot me Young Einstein has stolen my will to live!" Serious. WTF Australia? What did we ever do to you? Didn't we give you good shit in WWII just like we did the limeys?
So I say Canada only gets the ChromeOS netbooks if they play nothing but Celine Dion at full volume until they admit they are sorry and send a strike team to corral that that harpy. Then together we'll take her and Newton John along with 100 tons of raw sewage and threaten to dump it on Sydney until they say they are sorry and pay reparations for letting Yahoo Serious loose upon the planet! You KNOW that wasn't right, you KNEW that idiot wasn't funny, and you did it anyway, you damned criminals! That shit was so bad even Cheney wouldn't use it on terrorists as even HE wasn't that cruel, and we were supposed to be allies!
Which brings up what I REALLY want to know....how much just to buy the bloody thing? Surely it'll have to be pretty damned cheap when i can get Droid pads starting at like $115 and you just know once these things have been in the wild a little bit some FOSS hacker is is gonna ricer the fuck out of it and THAT will be worth playing around with. I mean look at how many DIY hacks came out for those first EEE netbooks, they had everything from touch screens to 3G wired into those suckers!
So please Google say the thing is gonna be cheap, preferably in the $100 range. At that price you're welcome to play with whatever data I generate until i figure out which DIY plan I want to fuck with, otherwise I'll probably get one of those cheapo Cruz pads to fuck with. And yes i know they are CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) but from watching my customers with the things the important thing is its fun to futz with and from the looks of it for basic web surfing and ebooks it works just fine. So if Google will give me an ultra light for around the same price I'm game, but paying $240 for the thing when I can just get a pad? Nope, if I'm paying for it I want to be able to futz around.
Well I figured you would use something like a foam which could be brought up in powdered form and mixed in space. Also from what I understand it is the little bastards that can be really dangerous as it is nearly impossible to track all the little chunks and a screw hitting you at 50,000 miles per hour can seriously ruin your day. I like your idea on the larger objects and together with my "tar baby" idea would probably get a large amount of debris out of there. I also agree with the other poster that our country was at its peak when taxes on the 1%ers were 70% since it forced them to invest rather than hoarde, but with the multinationals and scum like the Kock bros bribing left and right short of the USA pulling an Egypt the odds the 1%ers will ever see their taxes even hit 30% is non existent.
Oh and don't you love how I was modded down for daring to say tar baby, when those of us that actually grew up with the Uncle Remus stories simply saw it at face value, a ball of tar shaped into a little person as a trap? If anyone had actually bothered to read the story instead of knee jerking they would have saw it didn't have a damned thing to do with racism, it was based on southern customs and being slighted. Briar rabbit said hello to the tar baby and when it didn't return his greeting he saw it as an insult and attempted to punch it for its rudeness and got stuck. It is also a perfect analogy for what I'm describing, a ball of gel or goo that would absorb the small debris by simply sitting there and getting hit.
Riiiight, because refusing to support a lose coalition of Islamic courts run by thugs whose answer to pretty much everything was 'Jihad!' makes the US the bad guys. In case you haven't noticed radical Islamists aren't exactly nice folks and you sure as hell can't blame the Ethiopians for not wanting jihadist neighbors.
Like it or not too damned much trade goes through those waters to allow radical Islam to control them. If the US Navy has their hands tied with too much bullshit it is time to call in the mercs. It ain't pretty but then again neither is Islam and we can't afford to have international shipping held hostage by pirates or the jihadists. Whether you wish to accept it or not fundamentalist Islam is run by thugs that refuse to acknowledge your right to exist as anything other than a Muslim and handing waters crucial to international shipping to a bunch of sharia courts ruled by warlords would have been even worse than what we have now. At least the pirates are in it for the cash, the islamists would treat it as a holy war.
UCAVs. A combo of Firescouts and Predators armed with Mavericks and 20mm cannons can cover a hell of a lot of sea and should be able to find out if that mayday is for empty ocean or a pirate vessel.
Sadly I'm gonna have to agree with the others that dropping the pirates is pretty much the best bet unless someone wants to roll the tanks on Somalia. When you actually have a "pirate stock exchange" where you can kick in money to buy RPGs and AK47s in return for a percentage of the loot they rob? You can give up any kind of deterrence short of sinking the boats.
Uhhh...accounts are free, so what is with all the ACs? It is starting to feel like a *chan here, with a good 70% or more comments AC. As for your "mindstate" test? in no particular order: Not sure about JFK because they haven't released all the info yet, the laser reflectors should tell anyone that Apollo did land on the moon, Elvis is dead, still can't figure out how two planes took out three towers on 9/11 or how you get three towers to fall straight down when it is a royal bitch to pull that off even with controlled demolition, enough for you? Oh and Obama was born in America but probably does have a few skeletons he don't want found (like all politicians).
As for why they haven't done so? More and more have, just look up how many Android devices won't allow you to use your own ROMs or update the things with unapproved ROMs. There is also the whole "EEE" thing, as in "embrace, extend, extinguish" which I believe we are getting around to the last E right about now. Google devs have stopped trying to commit their changes to the kernel, now they are closing off Honeycomb.
Now a question for YOU good sir: If they are NOT gonna end up TiVoing the thing then why not allow GPL V3? After all even GPL V3 says they don't have to hand the world the code, simply everyone that buys a device is allowed access to the source. Also GPL V3 was made by RMS to close down "TiVo tricking" which RMS rightly saw was an end run around GPL, because if you look at the entire reason for the GPL in the first place it was because RMS lost functionality when MIT got a new printer and he was refused the source so he could fix the problem himself and thus the GPL was born.
So other than TiVo tricking why not allow GPL V3? As other have pointed out this does NOTHING for all the CCC (Cheapo Chinese Crap) out there, and if anything makes it worse as they'll simply continue to keep cranking out 2.0 tablets and using the Android name to drive sales, so why?
A final little note to all those complaining about the CCC: Perhaps as hackers you just have a different definition as to what is good? Because right now I've got a hot little seller in the Cruz Micro 4Gb tablet. While most here would think it is shitty for running Android 2.0 with just 256Mb of RAM and 4Gb of space, frankly my customers love the thing. It started when I ordered one for a neighbor and mushroomed as she has gone around showing off the thing. Sure it isn't an iPad but who gives a shit? For reading eBooks, playing tunes, and light web surfing it works just fine and at $150 while making me a little profit it is turning out to be quite popular. Hell watching her play with the thing I might get one myself just for playing with.
Personally AC I hope you're right but I bet you're wrong. As we have seen time and time again corps love control damned near as much as profits, and thanks to TiVo every company using Android has a "ignore GPL free" card, and by closing it Google can hard code any kind of "phone home" or data mining they desire, and as we all know data mining is Google's bread and butter. As a final prediction let me say this: It will start with the phones, followed quickly by the tablets. I still believe this is a "feeler" to gauge public reaction and when Google doesn't see pitchforks they WILL close it down for good, probably in 4.0 if not earlier.
While this may be true, something has seriously been bothering me lately, maybe someone here at /. can explain...WTF is it with the obvious MSFT shills here lately? Did they get a deal on that HB Gary Fed software or something?
I just don't get it. I mean sure the WinPhone ain't doing so hot, but the X360 is a hit and fulfilled its stated goal to get MSFT out of the office and into the living room, Windows 7 frankly rocks, and this is from someone who hung onto Win2K and XP X64 because frankly I thought their consumer OSes were lame, and last numbers I saw had fully two thirds of new servers being sold with WinServer and WinSBS Server was racking up the numbers. So WTF? The obvious shilling now makes NO sense, and just turns folks off. So why do it?
As for TFA this is something else that I think deserves a WTF and that is JavaScript and the current way we are doing things. Sites like FB are twisting JScript in ways it was never designed and now that we are starting to make real process on killing drive bys with low rights mode and getting rid of those damned "hey lets run as admins!" XP boxes now everyone wants to run third party web code bare metal? WTF?
Maybe with all this Web 3.0 crud we really ought to think about starting over with a new design built from top to bottom with security in mind. Maybe something with multiple isolation layers and least permissions, because there ought to be some way other than NoScript or hoping everything will stay in the sandbox to make it so everyone can have their FB games and bling bling without going through another ActiveX mess all over again. Perhaps instead of calling content from all over the web just to render a single page only allow code to be kept in a "time out room" on the server serving the web pages in such a way that the browser can do malware scans before calling it?
I'm just a humble PC fixit guy, not a security expert so I can't give you the answers, only ask the questions. But it seems to me there ought to be a way to allow people to have things like hardware acceleration without just running everything or blocking everything. Sandboxes to me always felt like a band aid on a bullet wound, and we tell folks not to run untrusted .exe files they trip over yet we are supposed to trust all the ads and flash and everything else, often which isn't even controlled by the website admin? It just doesn't seem like the right way to be going about this. Am I crazy?
Thanks but my karma is just fine. What you could do for me though is be sure to speak up supporting free speech for those that is easy to vilify, like the guy that wrote the "pro pedo" book. I have talked about this not only online but whenever anyone brought that up in public, no matter what the initial looks they gave me because after I explained why we MUST stand up for those people they saw the light.
Just remember they NEVER take your rights away because you said something popular, they take your rights away by using the villain as the scapegoat. The guy that wrote the pro pedo book had no pics of kids, not accused of touching kids, he simply wrote his thoughts down and formed them into a book. To arrest someone for that is about as clear a definition of thoughtcrime as one can get and because few would stand for him then when the next book comes around it could be against AGW or critical of some leader or any other subject.
As my grandfather taught me with the Illinois Nazis we MUST stand up for the rights of the villain to speak, because it is through the villain that we ALL lose our rights. So next time you hear someone bashing a person's right to speak because they don't approve of the subject matter please speak up! I've found that sadly most folks simply don't realize what a danger to all such actions cause, and too many like my grandfather fought and suffered for the rights of both the hated and the loved to let their voices be heard.
Uh huh, I'd say the REAL goal is a slow but sure march towards TiVoization which I said would happen for...oh about a year now. Once Google said they wouldn't allow any GPL V3 (which RMS wrote to specifically keeping companies from TiVoing GPL software) I figured it was only a matter of time.
You watch these early moves are 'feelers" to see how big of a stink it causes in places other than Linux forums. When Google sees the fanbois are all onboard and making with the excuses and Joe Consumer frankly doesn't care they trot out a nice "its for security!" statement (probably timed right after some Android malware hits the news) and it'll be code signing or eFuses all the way.
As much as I don't agree with RMS on ...well hell pretty much everything, he was right on this. Once TiVo showed the corps how to run right around GPL V2 it became for all intents and purposes useless. Anybody using GPL V2 now might as well be using BSD or PD for all the "freedom" it protects now. After all what good is the code if you aren't allowed to modify it or run it on the device for which its intended?
I just hope moves like this teach the community two important lessons: 1.-There is no such thing as a "friendly" corp. They can come up with little slogans like do no evil, they can make shiny devices, it frankly doesn't matter what they do, because if it comes down to making more money and/or gaining more power or not fucking you? Well bend over pal, because here it comes. 2.- GPL V2 needs to be dumped ASAP and replaced with GPL V3, because as it is using GPL V2 is simply giving corps your labor for free while they don't have to give you ANYTHING in return. eFuses and code signing cost almost nothing and gives the corp all the control of proprietary while at the same time gaining all the effort that has been put into embedded Linux by the community.
Yep I live in a dry county and I'd say they are a perfect example of how sin laws NEVER work and a free market will simply route around them like with a black market.
I know in my "dry" county there is at least two bootleggers in every neighborhood and most don't give a crap if you're 16 as long as you've got cash, and the cops don't say squat either as they don't want to drive 60 miles round trip just to get a 6 pack after work and they know they can get it at cost from the bootlegger (instead of the 40% markup) as long as they don't go busting the bootlegger, so we end up with MORE alcohol than if they would have simply made the county wet, and of course worse underage drinking since bootleggers don't card. Sadly since the chief source of money in this county is the local Xian college good luck ever getting it repealed.
As for TFA frankly I don't care where the hell that judge is from, it is DAMNED NICE to see a judge showing some common sense and standing up for something as important to this country as free speech. Bravo sir, and even if the Kock bros (spelling intentional) manage to bribe someone on appeals you should at least be commended for standing up for what is right. As for whether that PETA satire should have been busted, absolutely not. We should ALWAYS support free speech, period. Same as even though I don't believe or support his opinions I believe the one that wrote that "pro pedo" book should NOT have been busted for putting his thoughts on paper.
For as my grandfather taught me when I asked if he was mad at those Illinois Nazis for wanting to march after he had a wall dropped on him by Nazis in the closing days of WWII "No we should support their right to speak, even when what they say is hateful or evil, as it is what made this country great. There nobody was allowed to speak out against those brownshirts, but here we can counter protest and debate and speak our minds. That is what freedom is all about." He taught me that freedom is NEVER "free to agree with me only" and that to have a healthy society one had to tolerate ALL free speech and open debate, lest we end up as close minded and locked down as they were. Smart man my grandfather and I'm sure he would approve of this ruling whole heartedly.
I always thought a variation on the old Uncle Remus "tar baby" story would clean up a lot of the small fast junk in the higher orbits most sats aren't using.
Basically you'd have Aerogel or some other thick possibly glue like substance surrounded by a one way penetrable plastic membrane. You'd leave it up there for four or five years, letting the thing get filled with more and more crap, and then once its orbit had been cleaned to general satisfaction a couple of small rockets could de-orbit it into the Pacific where it would burn up on re-entry.
But the problem with ANY solution is currently we have a "tragedy of the commons" situation where there really isn't any penalty for making a mess and trying to get the nations currently putting up birds (which more and more join into that group each year) to split the bill is nearly impossible.
So while I believe a solution CAN be found (after all the USA went from barely being able to get a rocket off the ground to the moon in 10 years) the problem is getting the peoples of Earth to pony up the $$$. Hell maybe someone can talk China into going for it as a prestige thing. We here in the USA are broke as a joke so I don't see us doing much more than hitching rides with the Russians for probably another decade, maybe two.
Uhhh...I said one that works and those things most certainly DO NOT. I've tried those generic converters and 1.-almost never work on Windows 7, XP 32 only and 2.- have such a high latency they are pretty much only good for transferring files like to an old PDA. if you try one of those on a controller it will be push button............in game reaction.
As for my supposed "rant" go read the MSFT buys Skype threads and enjoy a good laugh. The Linux guys are practically shitting their pants because they know this means "no more soup for you!" because it doesn't matter if MSFT gives it away or continues to support it, as for as FLOSSies go it will ALWAYS be "M$" and they would rather have a half assed broken worthless "solution" than ever take a thing for Redmond. Oh well more for the other 99.95% of the planet eh?
Oh so fucking bullshit. I'm sorry but the fanboi horseshit in this place is getting a little deep. What MSFT tried to do with Java is EXACTLY what Google is trying to do now to Java and yet you see the fanbois tripping over their own damned feet trying to get in line to be Google Apologists!
And in case you ain't notice there are these two little words called "vertical integration" which everybody in their damned dog is doing right now. Just look at how Apple ties everything to iTunes, even crap like Safari that the user would have no need of just to load some tunes on his iPod, or how Google is spamming the living shit out of Chrome worse than Google Toolbars. What MSFT needs is vertical integration because customers want simple and the way you give them simple is to tie everything together nice and neat so everything talks to everything and to steal an Apple meme it "all just works".
What you are gonna see with Skype is integration everywhere and it'll probably make them a ton! Replace your business VoIP services with a bundled Skype WinServer backend, all with nice little GPOs and controls for OUs so any MCSE can control the whole smash, have Skype on your X360 at home and your WinPhone in your pocket, probably with a nice little plugin for Windows 7 that gives you features based on which version you have, such as business features for those on Win Pro, and maybe even a deal with someone like Cisco like what AT&T has for their mini cell base stations to have Skype routers for home and business, everything together all nice and neat.
Finally as for Linux support? If the businesses scream for it they may keep it but in the end they will probably let it wither on the vine and why the hell shouldn't they? Linux users last I checked were something like maybe 1% of the market (hell according to this even Java ME beats Linux) and Linux users are notorious for being "free as in we'll never spend a damned dime" so why the hell would MSFT bother with that market? Especially after not only giving .NET as a standard, not only giving a legally binding community promise that would ensure they'd get laughed out of court if they tried anything, but after all that even invited the head Mono guy to developer conferences to give lectures and STILL after 11 years it is looked at as some trap that is just taking a really really REALLY long time to spring?
In the end Linux just isn't a good market unless you are gonna TiVo some hardware and want an OS for free (MSFT don't need one) or you want to try to scrape by selling support (with their profits MSFT don't need the chicken scratch). Because despite all the talk of "support us and we'll support you!" the Linux guys are frankly a bunch of cheapskate hypocrites. Despite RH giving back more code than all the other Linux bunches COMBINED a good two thirds last I saw the numbers of web servers out there are running CentOS, which BTW was started by a company that wanted to sell hardware but were too damned greedy to even buy the RH licenses their hardware needed, and despite AMD doing EXACTLY what the community asked of them and giving every spec and code not nailed down the community tripped over themselves to this day to recommend Nvidia.
So I'm sorry Linux guys, and if you want to waste mod points go right ahead as I have more karma than God, but I got to call it as I see it. Unless you want to just snatch shit away from the community doing the TiVo trick in the end Linux just ain't worth the trouble, especially for anything by MSFT. The users are paranoid, have a seriously bad attitude and sense of elitism that they don't have the numbers to back up, and you KNOW anything owned by MSFT even if they gave it away would be treated like poison, even if the community has to recommend a piss poor pile of hacked together bullshit to "kinda sorta but not really' give you the same functionality. Frankly MSFT would have to be nuts to bother wasting resources on the Linux client.
Ya know what? Lets forget that it had the fully auto crossbow, or the fact that it had the cheesiest lame ass Dracula since "Pimp Drac" in Blade 3, now what is its "Mission Impossible" helicopter jump in a tunnel bullshit moment is the God damned clock scene. I mean no slow mo or anything and that damned clock takes like 23 damned minutes to go from the first chime of midnight to the last? Give me a fucking break! I actually thought for a minute I was watching some Airplane style parody and that they were gonna show Frankenstein taking 20 to have a snack while looking at his watch and flipping off the fucking clock!
I'm sorry but that movie started lame and it just went downhill minute by minute. If you don't have your suspension of disbelief jump out your body and bitch slap you for trying to get it to swallow that horseshit then yours must be broken or heavily medicated dude.
Good Lord, can the fanbois kiss the Google ass ANY more? Seriously? The funny as fucking hell part is despite all the screams of "Its a trap" I bet my last dollar if Google released 'Google Mono" every damned Linux nerd would be jumping on that shit and talking it up like it is the fricking second coming! Its kinda sad that when you look at the amount of data collected on everybody by Google, compared to that Ballmer looks like a really sweaty Care bear.
As for Skype? Give me a fucking break! if you think MSFT is gonna spend some 8 billion fricking dollars just to kill a product with 663 million users you are some kinda stupid. MSFT is gonna bundle the hell out of that shit and make a ton! Skype on the X360, Skype from your WinPhone at any Wifi hotspot, Skype from your Windows 7 (and if you want all the extras get Win 7 Pro and we'll give you a ton of Skype business extras!) and it will ALL be tied together nice and neat, so you can switch from one to the other. This is one of the moves along with snatching Nokia that actually make sense, as MSFT needs vertical integration like Apple has on its mobile products and Skype along with DirectX for gaming could be damned good selling points for Windows Mobile. It is just smart business.
As for TFA you want to find tons of that weird shit you need to hit your local Goodwill along with those places selling items from storage compartments. I love to go check them places out and you'd be surprised how many wild and weird pieces of PC history ends up in those places for like a dollar. Now if I could just find a damned good affordable Gameport and serial to USB adapter I'd be a happy camper. I've not got enough time to be DIYing USB connections on those things, and the amount of badass flight sticks and other cool controllers out there for cheap because of serial or gameport connections is just nuts. Anybody know of a good gameport or serial to USB that actually works pretty good on Win 7?
I can already name something where 100Mb/s is too slow...cloud computing. If we are gonna be moving everything to the cloud you are gonna be talking massive amounts of data flying back and forth and just backups can get pretty damned huge and take awhile at 100Mb/s.
Of course the big "gotcha" nobody is mentioning is that the ISPs are gonna cap the shit out of everybody so bad it won't matter what speed you have, you'll never be able to use it. If we don't get some sort of net neutrality and regulations so they can't charge 1000% profit on raw data you're gonna end up with sub 30Gb caps and $2.50 a Gb overage charges.
Oh yeah its getting pretty bad here in AR, with lots of 4 point quakes when there was never anything bigger than a 1.2 or so. Of course if my buddy that has been working with some of the wildcatters is right it may turn into a total free for all, as he says the rumor is one of the groups may have hit an OK sized deposit of oil in the west of the state but its deep.
I hate to think what kind of a mess it'll make if it turns out that is true, we are too damned close to the New Madrid fault for people to just be fucking around with deep drilling, and if it is oil you know all bets on safety will be off as they hit the hell out of it.
I agree while it was a stupid boom boom fest it really doesn't rate the "OMFG why did I watch THAT?" that others here are chiming in with. Now Van Helsing on the other hand, or the biological attack from Australia also known as Young Einstein? Those two along with Grease II should be put down as torture under the Geneva convention!
But whether or not there have been any court rulings about downloading does sound like a legit question in my mind. While I don't know about the BT protocol I DO know that the old Fasttrack and edonkey networks had "leecher" mods floating around that would Dload but never Uload.
Now since there is one thing I know and that just about any software can be hacked I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to rig up some sort of "leecher mod" or in some other fashion block Uloads while allowing Dloads even if you got shitty throughput. Also there are all those "Rapidshare" style sites where one can download without sharing shit as well as Usenet.
So has any court made any rulings on Downloads? Seems like a legit question to me and one which I don't know the answer to, I'm sure others here can chime in and let us know.
Oh get real! What would happen is "ooops, lost the logs, what a fucking shame" like how the prosecution deleted the victims phone in the above case and how the judge refused to allow an expert to testify that the guy's computer was hacked.
Lets be honest folks, if they want to fuck you they aren't gonna let a silly thing like evidence get in the way. Hell there is a guy on death row in Texas right now where the DNA shows he didn't do it so the prosecutor just said "Well he didn't rape her, he must have just came along and killed her". Why? Just because it was Tuesday?
Anyone who has paid attention to our courts can come up with plenty of cases that are so full of shit you don't see how the prosecutor doesn't break into a shit eating grin from the level of bullshit they try to pass over on the jury. I remember one from my home state where pretty much everyone knew a cop had taken this guy out, most likely because he had caught the cops doing a dope deal, so they simply got the medical examiner to say that he committed suicide. Yeah by beating the shit out of himself, shooting himself three or four times, and THEN throwing himself off a bridge just to make sure. Same as how the prosecutor refused to listen to the engineer that testified that the two teens he ran over on the track were covered in a police tarp at the time and instead got the medical examiner to rule that the kids must have been so stoned on pot they just happened to fall asleep on the track and not get woke up by that train bouncing the living hell out of the tracks, or the ear splitting whistle. Uh huh.
The only way you are gonna get a truly fair trial in this country is if you got the $$$ to hire you a land shark to fight for you, otherwise you're fucked. That is of course if you actually make it to trial, because they can easily decide you are 'resisting arrest" and hit you with that "less lethal" taser...ohh about a dozen times or so. I guess twitching can legally be considered a form of resisting?
Look up "the largest gang in America" on YouTube and tell me how many rights you actually have now, because from what I saw the only real 'right" you have is to get the living shit beat out of you if you look at a cop funny, followed by being charged for making his knuckles sore pounding your ass. And if the local yokels can get away with that much, just imagine how much more a fed can get away with, such as TFA or worse.
Not bad but their prices kinda suck compared to Amazon. Frankly between Amazon and GOG (I only buy on Steam when they are having a crazy sale, like their HL2:Ep2 for $2 deal) I'm frankly up to my ass with games right now.
I even had to pick up a new 1Tb drive (BTW now that Hitachi and Samsung have sold out you might want to keep an eye out at Newegg and Tigerdirect, they've been having some crazy sales on Hitachi and Samsung drives. I got a Samsung 1Tb Ecodrive last week for $47 at Newegg with free shipping!) just to give me enough space to not have to delete games I hadn't gotten around to playing when I got new ones.
Frankly it has never been a better time to be a PC gamer, I've been building kick ass multimedia gaming PCs for customers for under $500 that play just about anything you can throw at them on their 1080p TVs, you can pick up HD48xx cards for like $60 if you shop around, AMD quads and HDDs are beyond cheap, and places like Amazon and GOG have so many killer games under $10 that in the case of Amazon I've often found it cheaper to throw in a killer game or two just to get the supersaver shipping. For PC gamers it really don't get much better than we've got it right now.
Uh huh...BTW where the hell have you been for the past 80 years or so? The FBI have always been jack booted thugs going back to their very formation! look up COINTELPRO and see how they have gone so far as to execute Americans on American soil for daring to speak views that weren't on the FBI's approved list of things Negroes were allowed to say at the time.
Anybody that expects the FBI to be anything BUT jack booted attack dogs really haven't been paying attention, just as anybody that thought Nobama would be any different than McSame obviously hadn't been following the money. We lost this country decades ago the only difference now is the greedy swine at the top have gotten so ballsy they don't even pretend to give a fuck about things like the constitution anymore.
But as others have said sooner or later we'll have our very own Egypt and things will get real ugly. I'm betting when China dumps their dollars and starts a worldwide dollar dump and the US dollar is worth about as much as a buck in Zimbabwe the excrement WILL hit the bladed cooling device. My guess is a lot of rich folks will be doing their impersonation of the fall of Saigon complete with helicopters taking off of roofs to escape the hordes. The real question will be what comes after which I kinda feel sorry for the rest of the planet then because as we saw in Europe a militant nation with massive unemployment and a shitload of weapons tends to get nasty to those around them. Hell we even have the pre-made groups to persecute, just replace Jews and Gypsy with Mexicans and H1-Bs.