have you ever sat 16 hours in front of a computer with basically 95% of that time trying to type commands and move and click a mouse?

do you have any idea what that does to you?

i do, because i have been playing video games since i was 5.
i am 36 now.
most of the games i played didn't cause lasting harm and only one other game had me playing day and night, until i found warcraft 3, and it's expansion frozen throne.
but just one game was so addictive i'd have jitters trying to sit still and not play.
just one game left me not feeling hungry even if i hadn't ate in 14 hours.
just one game did i wrack my brain over what games i had failed my team at to the tune of sleeping 2 hours a night effectively.
just one game where i smashed the discs to because then i wouldn't play until a week later when i replaced the discs.
just one game had me physically destroy 7 keyboards and cause me to kick a computer case causing a short that powered it down, and i had to hammer at the case to get it to work and not short again.
yup frozen throne had me so hard i couldn't do anything else.
what 5% of gamers find this game? the one they can't play without. it nearly killed me. it is a game so fast paced i literally double my heart rate and double the blood pressure in my veins. i can see how gamers who haven't found the game they can't put down might not get how one game can change the course of ones life, but most gamers just play less addictive ones that are still fun but not 'addictive' enough to cause harm.
anyways games movies books etc. they all affect you but the level and extent of change varies.

three hdmi 1080p monitors in 24" resolution for $130 per screen and a $120 gpu (ati 7770) and two display port mini to hdmi adaptors and a decent computer will do just fine for most people and be a fraction of the price because it's standard screen size. if the 7770 isn't fast enough for gaming then a r9 280x is only $300 and is 4 times faster than the 7770. i still play old games though, so there are many models for me to chose from. technically i don't do multi screen except to play back blurays to a 40" hdtv. but i don't have the room for them, and if i were to game with multiple screens i would likely use 3 40" tv sets ($300-400 on sale compared to $700 per screen for monitors) rather than pay for 'only' monitors. but 24" is plenty big. i use 1080p on my best laptop which has a 17.3" display but if i had room for 3 screens i would definitely go big, on a budget. and i am not sensitive to flicker, from crts, florescent lights and other flickery things have never ever bothered me so latency and refresh rates don't apply to me to be willing to spend more for something that doesn't bother me.

"1) Spend little on R&D for an electric vehicle. Sell it just cheap enough (at a loss if you have to) to meet the minimum requirement. Whine about it.
2) Put some effort and investment in developing an electric car that people will actually want with a manufacturing cost that leads to a price people are willing to pay. Refine the design over time so that it becomes that profit center that saves your bacon when the bottom inevitably drops out of the IC car market as the cost of gas heads toward the stratosphere."

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die with 10 billion cars and lots where they simply store and refuse to sell 'normal' cars it is crazy. if the resources to build the cars wasn't used building them just to scrap 12 years later because selling them at a loss is unthinkable... and god forbid any auto plants get shutdown because too many car makers are making too many cars world wide. all that iron all that coal to make steel all those factories cranking out cars faster than ever with not one person on the 'sustainable' track of thinking, you know like shutting plants down, or having 4 day weeks and only 2 8 hour shifts instead of those factories. and now every car has a touchscreen tablet built in. and most of them will never be turned on.

what makes you think anyone still uses internet explorer. inflated botnet numbers from microsoft? oh wait windows 8 by default has about 20 automatically refreshing tabs with internet explorer. between win8 and botnets the traffic is skewed.

android is proof that open source and 'free software' are a far cry from each other, and it tracks a lot of data while i have yet to hear of free software containing adware.

soda stream uses chemically altered sugar. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose

" It is manufactured by the selective chlorination of sucrose (table sugar), which substitutes three of the hydroxyl groups with chlorine."

supposedly the chlorine doesn't detach as the substance doesn't break down in the digestive system. but they also said aspartame was good for you and it wasn't and i recall saccharine was used for a while until it started giving rats cancer.

instead of cherry picking just one state, why not cherry pick 30 states. http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rprts05p0510pr.cfm sure only 77% repeated within 5 years... but hell i was messed up for 20+ years and nothing worked until i was diagnosed and medicated. sure i didn't 'break' many laws and was only in police care until they could transport me to psychwards etc. and they were trying to help me. i would say they did good, because now i am stable and i'm a heavy streaming media user, rather than a heavy torrent user, now... though sometimes only torrents have things due to stupid unfair approaches to copyright... like licensing movies and tv content from separate parties and thus not having the movies available when the tv series is available... and i need to see the movie to understand how the storyline is from the tv series... (like movie 10 of the anime one piece) and keep in mind one piece has 600+ tv episodes with more to come and it doesn't make sense to just watch the anime without the movies because the movies make more sense (but except movie 10 are all non canaon of the manga or anime) if crunchyroll had the movies i would watch it there of course, but they don't and piracy is something many many people do, from radio mixtapes to vhs copying to dvd ripping most people have circumvented copyright if they had the resources to have a device but not the income to own content. so great i don't have to pirate movies because i can afford to stream them and i don't mind waiting for netflix or amazon or crunchyroll or don't mind hulu ads but when these sites only get partial content i have few options buying the movies off amazon is one possibility but at $20 a movie it then conflicts with my entertainment budget of $100 a month. anyways, i do have quite a backlog of movies to watch, and i easily spend $100 a month on entertainment so i probably sound pretty vain but i was taught that sharing is a good thing. that people are supposed to share the good parts of their life to others in hope they too lead an enjoyable life. copyright shouldn't be seen as a way to make the world a better place because it doesn't. it makes sharing a harder process and i don't always like the 'hyped' content for instance i spent $20 of my entertainment budget on the first 5 books of game of thrones(kindle edition) and have only gotten through the first chapter, so far. and if it doesn't get better it will be not very high on my list of things to do. if i had pirated the books i probably would have deleted them by now. as it is i feel obligated to keep the ebook until i finish the first book, because i know sometimes it takes authors a while to get a good storyline rolling.

yeah and they're more likely to binge drink if their wives aren't drunks too. but i am speculating on that..

the more marriages in KY the more fishing boat drownings! clearly rednecks who cant swim don't go fishing unless they have a wife!

for live events there is this neat thing called 'multicast' where you beam the same stream in one broadcast signal to as many customers as needed. multicast is way underutilized but it does get used for the big live streams. live streams can only be paused if buffering on the client end allows it. streams from non live media use a lot more bandwith as each user needs to hold open a stream can pause it (though with flash the stream will time out) etc. but flash only has a 10 megabyte buffer and defaults to a single megabyte. anyways google seems to be able to do it, as do netflix hulu crunchyroll etc.

so where does noscript fit into this?

where do iceweasel and seamonkey fit in?

oh hey and why the windows bias? i run a small but diverse network with certain devices with certain router ports etc to protect and divide my network from misbehaving software or hardware. and yes i realize google makes something like $500 per year per person with tracked information.

and what if you've pulled the plug on everything electric in your home (including the fridge) and they still have 'coincidence' events? also i never told anyone but had 2 movies on a mental queue and 2 on a written list, and just when you switch from one provider to another you see all 4 movies in 4 days after the install event?

i've been in the hospital for having paranoia.

i wont get into the details but half the time it seems like things are going my way, and the other half it feels like my mind is a quantum spaghetti of useless first world problems.

back to the movies, they are chosen between 30-60 days prior to transmission, so someone has a plan. my plan was to wing it and be honest. tbh i feel like i only do the things i like doing and get depressed and then feel dumb for being depressed when i know so many things are going 'right' for me.

one thing i hate about linux/slashdot is people assume you're a hacker. and i am not. my most impressive hack was taking a boot floppy to a p120 laptop get into an unencrypted drive open the shadow password file and take a user account's password and pasted it into roots hash. essentially giving me root again, sure i forgot the password to root which is why i did it, but it is only technically legal to hack your own computer which might be why bill gates called the computer menu 'my computer'

i wandered off topic ah well

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB
in my timeline windows 98se was the first wide spread use of usb technology. a full 2 years before apple decided to add usb, based on your '5 year' timetable. personally i thought usb 1.1 too slow, and while i did eventually buy a 4 port powered hub, the main thing i used usb for was joysticks and mice, at the time you got 2 usb ports on a computer, and so when printers went usb i had to get one to have 3 usb ports. also digital cameras and scanners both went usb, and then i needed 5 ports... and then i quit using printers and scanners, but then external hdds were cheapest backup options, then flash memory came out and those eat usb ports for breakfast... connecting a whole lot of them is easy and sometimes it is nice to have several pluged in for various uses... luckily motherboards come with 6-12 ports for decent desktop computers, and some laptops have 4 usb ports which then means using a powered hub, because now bluray burners, cell phones, wifi/ethernet dongles, flash memory, mouse, hdds, etc etc etc. unplugging things is possible but not ideal.

c'mon humans aren't really really smart. we can process a lot of video using the same technology as old graphics chips, they simply do not remember the video but rather work like a shorthand court reporter, trying to remember the most important info in a non graphic memory way. and since that data works in a consistent way, there are ways to trick the brain... i recently rewatched the star trek the next generation on netflix (they missed a few episodes) and i remembered a surprisingly large number of episodes but even so there were tons of things i missed, things i notice now. like global warming warnings in the show, and other deep messages including how computers with massive power requirements might work. they had flash memory (iso linerar chips) tablets and a super computer the size of a small cube. they also hinted that perhaps computers existed before modern times, which is just speculation. humans invented math aids like the abacus and slide rule long before calculators existed. there is also a hint that 'universal resource location' and 'hypertext' ideas may have been brewing before fast computers existed. the things we do with computers especially smartphones is amazing, but i sometimes wonder if the 'idiot' box (tv set) is really informing people anymore or if it ever was more than a mind control device, by passive immersion of the populous with a government/corporate propaganda machine... and hense an idiot box which should be assumed is to cause reactions that ensure the powers that be stay in charge or at least minimize the ability of an 'uninitiated' person from ever holding power or wealth.

"Slashdot are a bunch of sellouts now. There is so much popup bullshit all over the screen, I think i'm done with Slashdot."

slashdot looks better with noscript and the original layout options. of course you deny slashdot the ability to run scripts in your browser that way which imo is good.

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/deforest/deforest.html
along with seasonal co2 levels
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
the first url shows where active forests are mostly the northern hemisphere. the second shows how winter co2 spikes globally as measured as far away from humanity as you can get. deforestation without replanting is unsustainable since the industrial revolution global forest have been 50% cleared. this is in 200 years of deforestation, another 200 and even the best efforts to replant forests will be irreversible, as charts show this will cause temperature rising and water resources dwindling as freshwater is pumped out of aquifers for human and crop consumption. animals don't use nearly as much water as humans do. so if more and more people are born more and more drought will hit especially as heat rises. which will lead to humans airconditioning more and more, which will raise the temperature.

no the 'system' is not perfect and capitalism doesn't 'solve' global warming at best it makes companies greenwash the public and it is clear that unrestricted growth will lead to the extinction of humans, unless something is done, and i don't trust humans to do this on their own. computers need to do it and have the respect for creating a better world through more efficient recognition of real problems and real solutions.

the cia can't even break their own cyper on the walk in front of their building. really. i blame human anger and weak minded politicians.