the republicans are liars, plain and simple. they say they are for a free market but they only mean a free hand for big business.

you have to be able to read their 'talking points' and interpret them in a way that removes their spin.

the party of 'small government' would have no business being in your bedroom, spying on your data comms and telling you who you can marry and who you can not. they lie when they say they are for small government.

the democrats also lie. but they are not standing in the way of the free internet, its all about the republicans, this time. they seem to live in another world than the rest of us. the rest of us realize that special lock-in deals limit all of our choices and that the internet is too important to let big companies make all the rules.

http://everist.org/eevblog/201...

I have no idea if this is true or not. interesting read. and its plausible, given how deep corporate secrets are these days and how those in charge LOVE to have backdoors into your systems.

wish someone would confirm this. without confirmation, its just a rumor.

posting it here for the slight chance an AC might confirm this with actual first-hand info.

in this day and age, only the foolish and brainwashed want and encourage religious views.

the rest of us understand that this bronze-age bit of illogic has no place in the modern world. we know all the religious statements about creation and the universe to be wrong. we can see the self-inconsistencies in all major religions' books. to this day, there is still no solid proof on the existence of any kind of god.

the religious right speaks out of emotion and ignorance. you can't convince them or even reach them, intellectually. its not even worth the effort. once a mind is closed, its closed off. there is just no way to reason with those who think their god is real and all others are fake. (the difference between an athiest and a christian is that the athiest believes in one less god than the christian does).

christianity, like most organized religions, keeps its motivation mostly secret. its not about gods and being 'saved', but it has always been about control and power over fellow mankind. look at the power structures and you'll understand that this is the real reason for all religions. its not about giving anyone any kind of 'truth', its about manipulation, control, wealth and power. PERIOD.

why can't it be both?

fallacy of exclusion, and all.

I was surprised to find out that the video system on the i7 (not sure about i3) can run at full 1920 @120hz! when I connected a brand new vizio (39" iirc), I saw both the win7 panel and the display menus say it was syncing at 120hz.

that's way beyond what blueray can do. in fact, hdmi is not really spec'd for 1920@120hz unless you use dual link cables (or a single hdmi 1.4 cable). BD players don't yet support this, I don't think.

besides, I boycott bd. I hate sony, I will avoid giving them any money if I can avoid it and I get my content online in 'easy' mp4 and mkv format. the quality of modern rips at 120hz playback is quite impressive and unexpected for me since I was not sure the 120hz was real (lower end vizios use a backlight faking scheme to get 120 but mid end versions are actual 120hz refresh, no faking at all).

that's not a lot of money. you get to use the case again and again, as long as you keep with a mini-itx format, you can upgrade for years and still use the same case. to me, there's value in that.

plus, silence is golden ;) if you have never used a 100% silent pc, you have no idea what you are missing. even the smallest whirring fan can be heard in a quiet room.

recently, I was cleaning up my garage and I found all the pci cards (etc) that I bought over the years. I found my first 'high end' pci card, an s3-968 4meg video card that I paid over $400 for, nearly 20 years ago. we forget that computers used to cost a LOT! now, they are mostly dirt cheap. $200 for a case that will let me watch movies and listen to music in full peace and quiet is easily worth 'half of that video card' that I bought so many years ago.

even going back just 10 years, the famous lian li cases were well over $100 for the aluminum mid tower and that did not include the $50-$100 you'd pay for a good psu.

today, on that fanless system, the psu fits inside the atx power socket and is just a small board (pico-psu) and those can be gotton for under $50.

gig-e: onboard. video: onboard. disk i/o: onboard. sound: onboard. just need a mobo, disk, mem and cpu.

when I look back at where we've been the past 20 or so years, I really don't mind the very low prices we now pay for very fast computer hardware. the case is on the pricey side, but its not outrageous, really, and there is solid value in removing all noise from the computer.

a nice fanless i7 (haswell) build, with the magic being a heatpipe heatsink case and a 45w i7 chip:

https://farm8.staticflickr.com...

search for streacom fc8 as the case. then, stay under 65w (to be safe) and you can be fully fanless.

for htpc use, there is NO reason to ever have a fan, again. even the i3 has a 35w chip that works just fine for movies and desktop stuff.

and now that everyone 'knows' the nsa has exceeded their charter, the problem will be fixed and all will return to normal.

no? you don't agree?

neither do I! we'll NEVER be able to know, for sure, if they have disbanded, continued or even increased their hidden powers.

they can say 'ok, you caught us, we'll start following the law again' but even congresscritters won't know for sure. anyone who does know for sure, will NOT be telling us any truth about it, either.

so, what do you have from this? complete and permanent lack of trust in the three letter agencies in the US, and the equivalent ones overseas in pretty much every country.

why even talk about this anymore? those that have this power won't ever give it up, we will continue to be kept in the dark and nothing will change for the better.

cat is out of the bag, won't get back in and now we all have to live with cats, everywhere. so to to speak.

world war 2? really??

ok, let me turn your argument against you. the way history happened, and the side that we're on, yeah, the ability to decypher german messages helped us win.

but suppose we lost? suppose it was them that decyphered OUR important messages and suppose that freedom lost out when our private messages were understood by the germans.

see, the analogy only 'works' for you when it happens to correlate with the desired outcome. bad guy did something wrong, you caught him because you can read his messages. USA USA USA!f

but, not so fast. it could very easily be the other way around. I'm sure it has been, too, but that its not made public. the fact that foreign countries can pick up and decode our private messages surely have hurt us in the past and continue to hurt us.

the solution is clear, if you understand the above. everyone gets to have privacy or no one has it, not even governments and those who think that they are above the laws that the rest of us have to live by.

if you get privacy, we should have it. and that means that you don't get to break it! or, if you argue for that, then we demand symmetry. and I'm SURE you won't want that!

fallacy of omission, right there.

probably a few of them would not be ABLE to get ANY healthcare if they had 'pre-existing' conditions. at least they did get rid of that big problem!

I have a PEC that made it (past tense!) very hard to get private insurance, so this is an issue near and dear to my heart. I know I won't have a low price on my insurance, but I will at least be able to GET SOME AT ALL.

for those that don't have PEC's, you will never know the pain of being rejected, for no fault of your own, simply because you were unlucky.

prices go up and obamacare is NOT there to stop or help with that.

how can it? with this near-religion we have about bowing down to 'free markets', the gov won't ever force the HC companies to have reasonable prices and limit the price increases. they SHOULD step in, but the republicans would throw yet another fit and since they're mostly in control now, we won't get anything else out of this system until a new guard comes in.

of course, you are IGNORING the fact that every single year, prices of HC go up and this was before obama was even in office.

perhaps that's why you are marked TROLL. people realize that 'costs going up' is nothing that any president can do anything about. especially with the blockades that stand in his way of doing ANYTHING for the regular common people of america.

I have a t420s - business grade laptop that I bought for personal use. its what everyone else had at my previous job, they were reliable, they were well built (they really are, even to the level of having a plastic spill-protector layer over the motherboard, inside the case. nice touch.)

the business grade laptops didn't have this spyware installed and they would probably not risk their business customers.

consumers: they are fuckable. we can screw them and we don't care. no one respects 'consumers' anymore anyway. if we get pissed off, so what; we are only shopping based on lowest price and not loyalty so some other schmo will come along and find we have a low price and buy our stuff. they do not care about return customers. almost no one does anymore, which is quite a shame.

would I buy another lenovo? probably not. the thing that annoyed me the most about my t-laptop is that it has a blacklist and refuses to accept a pci-e card of MY choice (ac wireless, for example). you have to buy the branded lenovo version and it has to come WITH the laptop or it will be blacklisted in the bios. I found a 3rd party hack for the bios to remove the blacklist but now, technically, I can't truly trust my bios anymore. I have no certain idea what the 3rd party did to remove the blacklist. maybe nothing bad, but who knows!

so, lenovo business lappies are locked down and that sucks. consumer grade ones are full of crapware and the company does not respect you in the least.

maybe that really is a good reason to stop buying lenovo, for ANY reason. hardware is nice, and I loved having a 3 button mouse on the bezel, but maybe I'm done with this company, at this point.

he says: "The feedback from users was that it wasnâ(TM)t useful"

what the users REALLY said was more like: "you compromised our security, you installed spyware and didn't tell us about it or provide the option to opt-out, your uninstaller did not fully uninstall it and we now have to wipe and fully reinstall, costing us all lots of time and money, since a gaping security hole was opened up and god knows what came thru that hole before we knew abou it."

ceo-speak really is an amazing language to learn. its all about lies and deceipt, but it sure is a 'skill' one has to learn to be a top ceo these days.

a lot of noise comes from oscillating windings in chokes and coils found in dc/dc converters. they often 'sing' under load, on cheap boards. ie, ALL boards for consumer grade gear are cheap boards, today.

one of my lcd displays has a really noisy dc/dc. you can hear the physical whine it makes across the room.

so, there's physical noise but also electrical noise. in some cases, I have been told that ssd's throw more has on the 5v dc psu bus than spinning drives do! I find that amazing (in a bad way).

noise on the dc bus is not something the user would normally care about; but coil whine is something that most people can hear.

it should not matter if its a linux iso or not.

the issue is: they have no need or right to look inside our packets.

ANY of our packets.

I'm not going to split hairs about society's current view toward IP rights. its a rathole that is not productive to dive into.

just leave it at: my data is my data, I will use it as I see fit and all I ask of you is to route it to the right ip addresses and route return traffic back to me. PERIOD.

I don't want them caching. if they want to try, be my guest, but I don't WANT it and I'm just fine with getting data from the real source each and every time I request it.