The US debt problem is *entirely* an artificial political construction.
Exactly this. The "debt crisis" is an ideological argument used to further conservative aims. Pick an issue, austerity measures, public spending cutbacks, welfare "reform" (read: destruction), loss of working rights (in the name of a 'competitive workforce'), anti union legislation. You name it, they all, at some point or another, invoke the spectre of this enormous debt crisis. They throw figures around, a trillion dollars here, ten trillion there, and it doesn't really mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything except for as a tool to further their ends by way of warping debate and fuelling the apocalyptic visions that spew out over the airwaves day after day after fucking day. Here in the UK we have a government that buys hook line and sinker into the whole rotten edifice. They seem to have no conscience at all, happy to slash and burn at every slither of public spending they can possibly at all, regardless of human cost. They argue that their scorched earth austerity measures are a road to recovery, even though our economy has tanked into a double dip recession with no recovery in sight.
They don't understand, or more likely, it doesn't fit their fuck-the-poor ideological mindset, that for an economy to recover people need to have some fucking money to spend.
Being decent and honorable isn't worth shit if the institution they work for is monstrous.
That's what it boils down to, at the end of the day. They internalised the profits and externalised the losses as best they could. They would have blown that bubble up for eternity if they could have, and paid no heed to the consequences. They want every cent you have, no less. Regulation kept them in chains, and now those chains are broken.
What we've witnessed is 30 years of large financial institutions gradually being allowed to do exactly what the fuck they want. Naturally, the monster devoured so much, so greedily, and took such monumental risks that it took merely a few years of true excess for it to ignite the biggest world slump since 1929. It didn't learn from then, it didn't repent or change its ways, and you can be sure as hell that it hasn't learned now. The devastation it wrought will happen again and again, simply because destruction is all it knows.
In light of that grim reality, who gives a toss how decent they are as individuals.
PS: A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about how this guy intends to use it. He's not talking about seeding torrents or installing programs on a fucking tape drive.
I think he means using it as for storing and occasionally reading old torrents or films or whatever, but instead of using a disk drive wants to use a tape drive with a disk drive like FS, so he can burn a linux CD or watch a movie from time to time. It's not a bad idea. It'll cost less than disk drives and still be reasonably durable.
HP do a LTFS which if I remember correctly treats the tape as a normal drive.
The way to do it would be to treat it as much as an archive as possible. Too many read/writes will wear out the tape in no time at all. If all you are thinking of having is a few tapes which have old torrents of films or things you would occasionally access, there shouldn't be much of an issue beyond the obvious seek times. Be prepared to have your tapes wear out and keep a good supply of cartridges and a second drive.
The obvious benefit is cost. Buy second hand. I buy second hand QICs and they are very cheap indeed, and LTO kit isn't much different.
I dumped my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 for Realtek ALC888 and never looked back. I never heard such clarity until I went with this onboard chipset.
The SB Live uses two different DACs for front and rear channels, and the consensus is that the DAC for the rear channels sounds significantly better than the front. I had a Live 5.1 and this was the case for me too (though I ditched it for an M-Audio Revolution a while back - great sounding card, woeful drivers).
If anyone is curious, try the kX Project drivers on Windos (*nix you can swap it in alsa).
Backup tapes were designed precisely for the problem you have. LTO-5 tapes are about 1.5TB, if I remember right. Stored correctly they shouldn't give any problems when you come to retrieve whatever is backed up. Most archiving efforts use backup tape, and they can't all be wrong:)
The Illuminatus Trilogy was brilliant, and his SchrÃdinger's Cat Trilogy was pretty awesome too. I guess there's better writers out there, and more prolific ones, but there's something thought provoking about his work. For me , they allow you to see the world differently and they make you ask questions. RIP RAW.
MS these days often reminds me of a crow. It looks at things (in this case Apple) and says "I want the shiny!" In this case the shiny is wads and wads of cash. They'll fuck it up though, they always do. Like a crow, Microsoft doesn't have the foggiest idea how to make its own shiny.
It didn't do it with the Zune and the later Windows phones, after first pissing away the opportunity to create a successful smartphone platform way back in the Windows Mobile days, when the iPhone was but a glint in SJ's eye.
They may think they're being awfully clever flipping off the OEMs they've been in business with for 20 years, but when Windows 8 and the tablets go up in flames they'll come crawling back.
...where the difference between a valid viewpoint and an astroturfed attempt to hornswaggle you out of your own money and political power has shrunk to the imperceptible.
Fortunately, most attempts at astroturfing are hopelessly incompetant. I saw one recently here who was almost certainly turfing for Microsoft and he was called out time and time again.
We live in an age where in marketing circles subtlety and tact are deemed to be completely redundant. No-one takes the effort (or rather, pays the going rate) to actually create plausible, human and difficult to detect astroturfing efforts.
Going back to about 2001, every couple of years when I've upgraded, I've tried to see if I can actually run a game on the fucker.
I've tried it on a Pentium II 350mhz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a Celeron 2.6ghz, a P4 3ghz with a x1950 radeon. Tried it today on my old dual xeon and its still nowhere near smooth with Gt4.
Last week on the big Steam summer sale I picked up copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum for $4 and KoTOR (I lost my discs years ago and have been wanting another play-through) for $2. The system works. And works far better for every level from the developers to the consumers. The only people is does not serve better are parasitic rent seekers like GameStop.
I take exception to the idea that Steam is better for consumers. WIth physical media, I buy the game, I own the disk, and then I'm responsible for what I do with it. I've got originals of games from 1995 on CD.
With Steam, I give up:
- Physical ownership of the game medium.
- The ability just to install it standalone w/o client software.
- Control of patches and updates.*
- The ability to resell or transfer ownership.
- Guaranteed access to the game.
Valve might seem all nice now, but what if in 5 years time they go the Origin route and start ditching game support? Or jacking prices because they own a virtual monopoly on game distribution? I can see both happening one day. Dominent market positions get abused.
Steam might grant a little convenience, but takes a lot of control. Is it worth it? Hardly.
Older Steam games are cheap only because Valve decide they are. In the second hand market, it's because the market values it at that price. At the risk of sounding like a wanky free-marketeer, I'd rather have the latter. Yes Valve set prices based on demand, but with Steam the ball is entirely in their court.
* I own Saints Row 2 on Steam. Every time it updates to current, the game becomes hideously unstable on my machine. Stopping it from patching is nigh on impossible.
Inevitable really. With a large service sector comes services. Services like having a kitchen installed or a carpet laid. I don't see it as a bad thing, if anything it shows a marginal increase in living standards.
As an aside, all these rose tinted submissions are getting silly. Before long it'll be "Slashdot. News for reactionaries, stuff used to be better."
It just means using another fake name, or a fake g+ / fb account if necessary. Your move, google.
I doubt this is about spam or astroturfing or trolls anyway. It'll be about making advertising space on YT worth more. That's mostly why Facebook et al. do it.
It's quite a condemnation of our times that the erosion of anonymity on the Internet hasn't been from from oppressive governments or vicious laws (both exist after all) but mainly instead fucking advertising.
Hardly surprising really that just after the IPO the numbers start flatling. It seemed obvious to me that the IPO was simply to cash in while the going was good, rather than to move on from there.
There's no sustainability in social networking, and I imagine the smart money knew that already. I imagine the people who invested in it were the same ones who thought that the housing market would never crash.
Grab an old box, stick some hard drives in it with some sort of RAID, encrypt the partitions and use rsync or similar for backing things up. Want extra redundancy? Use a USB drive or buy a cheap old tape drive off ebay.
Forward SSH to it and you have "Cloud Storage". This really isn't a new concept.
This is exactly the sort of shit that happened with Hoover's FBI. More and more resources and power are granted to the point where the organisation can effectively be above the law, especially local or state rulings.
This is the result of 11 years of the "war on terror". These sort of behemoth power structures were inevitable.
Slashdot Mirror
The US debt problem is *entirely* an artificial political construction.
Exactly this. The "debt crisis" is an ideological argument used to further conservative aims. Pick an issue, austerity measures, public spending cutbacks, welfare "reform" (read: destruction), loss of working rights (in the name of a 'competitive workforce'), anti union legislation. You name it, they all, at some point or another, invoke the spectre of this enormous debt crisis. They throw figures around, a trillion dollars here, ten trillion there, and it doesn't really mean anything.
It doesn't mean anything except for as a tool to further their ends by way of warping debate and fuelling the apocalyptic visions that spew out over the airwaves day after day after fucking day. Here in the UK we have a government that buys hook line and sinker into the whole rotten edifice. They seem to have no conscience at all, happy to slash and burn at every slither of public spending they can possibly at all, regardless of human cost. They argue that their scorched earth austerity measures are a road to recovery, even though our economy has tanked into a double dip recession with no recovery in sight.
They don't understand, or more likely, it doesn't fit their fuck-the-poor ideological mindset, that for an economy to recover people need to have some fucking money to spend.
'Most bankers are decent, honorable people,'
Being decent and honorable isn't worth shit if the institution they work for is monstrous.
That's what it boils down to, at the end of the day. They internalised the profits and externalised the losses as best they could. They would have blown that bubble up for eternity if they could have, and paid no heed to the consequences. They want every cent you have, no less. Regulation kept them in chains, and now those chains are broken.
What we've witnessed is 30 years of large financial institutions gradually being allowed to do exactly what the fuck they want. Naturally, the monster devoured so much, so greedily, and took such monumental risks that it took merely a few years of true excess for it to ignite the biggest world slump since 1929. It didn't learn from then, it didn't repent or change its ways, and you can be sure as hell that it hasn't learned now. The devastation it wrought will happen again and again, simply because destruction is all it knows.
In light of that grim reality, who gives a toss how decent they are as individuals.
Demonoid was a decent site.
The Sedo link returns a 404, so much for that submission.
PS: A lot of people seem to have the wrong idea about how this guy intends to use it. He's not talking about seeding torrents or installing programs on a fucking tape drive.
I think he means using it as for storing and occasionally reading old torrents or films or whatever, but instead of using a disk drive wants to use a tape drive with a disk drive like FS, so he can burn a linux CD or watch a movie from time to time. It's not a bad idea. It'll cost less than disk drives and still be reasonably durable.
HP do a LTFS which if I remember correctly treats the tape as a normal drive.
The way to do it would be to treat it as much as an archive as possible. Too many read/writes will wear out the tape in no time at all. If all you are thinking of having is a few tapes which have old torrents of films or things you would occasionally access, there shouldn't be much of an issue beyond the obvious seek times. Be prepared to have your tapes wear out and keep a good supply of cartridges and a second drive.
The obvious benefit is cost. Buy second hand. I buy second hand QICs and they are very cheap indeed, and LTO kit isn't much different.
Or more likely, end in mediocrity.
I dumped my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 for Realtek ALC888 and never looked back. I never heard such clarity until I went with this onboard chipset.
The SB Live uses two different DACs for front and rear channels, and the consensus is that the DAC for the rear channels sounds significantly better than the front. I had a Live 5.1 and this was the case for me too (though I ditched it for an M-Audio Revolution a while back - great sounding card, woeful drivers).
If anyone is curious, try the kX Project drivers on Windos (*nix you can swap it in alsa).
Backup tapes were designed precisely for the problem you have. LTO-5 tapes are about 1.5TB, if I remember right. Stored correctly they shouldn't give any problems when you come to retrieve whatever is backed up. Most archiving efforts use backup tape, and they can't all be wrong :)
The Illuminatus Trilogy was brilliant, and his SchrÃdinger's Cat Trilogy was pretty awesome too. I guess there's better writers out there, and more prolific ones, but there's something thought provoking about his work. For me , they allow you to see the world differently and they make you ask questions. RIP RAW.
while MS is trying to position IE as a great browser again.
I can't remember anyone ever saying IE was great.
MS these days often reminds me of a crow. It looks at things (in this case Apple) and says "I want the shiny!" In this case the shiny is wads and wads of cash. They'll fuck it up though, they always do. Like a crow, Microsoft doesn't have the foggiest idea how to make its own shiny.
It didn't do it with the Zune and the later Windows phones, after first pissing away the opportunity to create a successful smartphone platform way back in the Windows Mobile days, when the iPhone was but a glint in SJ's eye.
They may think they're being awfully clever flipping off the OEMs they've been in business with for 20 years, but when Windows 8 and the tablets go up in flames they'll come crawling back.
...where the difference between a valid viewpoint and an astroturfed attempt to hornswaggle you out of your own money and political power has shrunk to the imperceptible.
Fortunately, most attempts at astroturfing are hopelessly incompetant. I saw one recently here who was almost certainly turfing for Microsoft and he was called out time and time again.
We live in an age where in marketing circles subtlety and tact are deemed to be completely redundant. No-one takes the effort (or rather, pays the going rate) to actually create plausible, human and difficult to detect astroturfing efforts.
Going back to about 2001, every couple of years when I've upgraded, I've tried to see if I can actually run a game on the fucker.
I've tried it on a Pentium II 350mhz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a Celeron 2.6ghz, a P4 3ghz with a x1950 radeon. Tried it today on my old dual xeon and its still nowhere near smooth with Gt4.
Oh well, sometime in the next decade, maybe.
Finding new ways to spy on people is something we seem to be really good at here in the UK
No.
Last week on the big Steam summer sale I picked up copies of Batman: Arkham Asylum for $4 and KoTOR (I lost my discs years ago and have been wanting another play-through) for $2. The system works. And works far better for every level from the developers to the consumers. The only people is does not serve better are parasitic rent seekers like GameStop.
I take exception to the idea that Steam is better for consumers. WIth physical media, I buy the game, I own the disk, and then I'm responsible for what I do with it. I've got originals of games from 1995 on CD.
With Steam, I give up:
- Physical ownership of the game medium.
- The ability just to install it standalone w/o client software.
- Control of patches and updates.*
- The ability to resell or transfer ownership.
- Guaranteed access to the game.
Valve might seem all nice now, but what if in 5 years time they go the Origin route and start ditching game support? Or jacking prices because they own a virtual monopoly on game distribution? I can see both happening one day. Dominent market positions get abused.
Steam might grant a little convenience, but takes a lot of control. Is it worth it? Hardly.
Older Steam games are cheap only because Valve decide they are. In the second hand market, it's because the market values it at that price. At the risk of sounding like a wanky free-marketeer, I'd rather have the latter. Yes Valve set prices based on demand, but with Steam the ball is entirely in their court.
* I own Saints Row 2 on Steam. Every time it updates to current, the game becomes hideously unstable on my machine. Stopping it from patching is nigh on impossible.
I was expecting something that mimicked the original way these cards were read. Anyone can take a photo of a punchcard :)
I dunno, teachers are paid pretty well for the months they actually work. Often near $25-30+ an hour.
Isn't that something to work towards though, instead of something to deride?
Why does it always have to be a race to the bottom?
Sorry, but they do.
Inevitable really. With a large service sector comes services. Services like having a kitchen installed or a carpet laid. I don't see it as a bad thing, if anything it shows a marginal increase in living standards.
As an aside, all these rose tinted submissions are getting silly. Before long it'll be "Slashdot. News for reactionaries, stuff used to be better."
Perhaps I'll believe it when I see products that say "Made in USA" on the bottom. For now, i'll keep my weary cynicism.
It just means using another fake name, or a fake g+ / fb account if necessary. Your move, google.
I doubt this is about spam or astroturfing or trolls anyway. It'll be about making advertising space on YT worth more. That's mostly why Facebook et al. do it.
It's quite a condemnation of our times that the erosion of anonymity on the Internet hasn't been from from oppressive governments or vicious laws (both exist after all) but mainly instead fucking advertising.
Hardly surprising really that just after the IPO the numbers start flatling. It seemed obvious to me that the IPO was simply to cash in while the going was good, rather than to move on from there.
There's no sustainability in social networking, and I imagine the smart money knew that already. I imagine the people who invested in it were the same ones who thought that the housing market would never crash.
Grab an old box, stick some hard drives in it with some sort of RAID, encrypt the partitions and use rsync or similar for backing things up. Want extra redundancy? Use a USB drive or buy a cheap old tape drive off ebay.
Forward SSH to it and you have "Cloud Storage". This really isn't a new concept.
This is exactly the sort of shit that happened with Hoover's FBI. More and more resources and power are granted to the point where the organisation can effectively be above the law, especially local or state rulings.
This is the result of 11 years of the "war on terror". These sort of behemoth power structures were inevitable.
great. who am I going to get to exorcise the virus from my power supply unit now?
For $30 an hour I will, just wire me your bank details and I'll do the required rituals remotely, I've got the pentagram and candles already.