guilty until proven innocent.

oh, and we don't care if you try to defend yourself, we've already made up our mind.

the US lawmakers are a bunch of spoiled children....

interesting point.

banks are not voted on, not representative, no checks and balances (lol) and they are not answerable to the population on anything they do.

so WHY are we leaving matters of legality to banks? they are not legal institutions and should not have 'boycott' power!!

you know, I wish the joker (in the movie) did slice lehey's throat. its a bad thing to say, but since he's not a very nice person, I don't feel bad about wishing harm on him.

damn. the american system of 'justice' is such a laughing stock. we now seem to be the world's most powerful banana republic...

why do banks get to pick and choose who to do business with?

sounds like we need to SCRAP the banking system and start all over, if this is truly the case. too much depends on the ability to move money around, in this world, and banks can basically kill you (pretty much literally, over time, of course) if they want to.

this is NOT RIGHT. its unamerican, its anti-freedom, its unacceptable.

keep fueling the revolution, boys. sooner or later, y'all will be up against the wall.

# sudo ln -s /dev/null /dev/google

its not just governments. I used to live at an apartment complex and when I was there, they signed a 5 or even 10 year technology contract with a cable company, exclusively. they wired our building and we had to buy service from them. zero choice in the matter.

what was funny (not ha-ha funny) was that in the middle of silicon valley, we had some of the worst service I've ever seen. 20 years ago I moved from boston to the bay area and stereo tv was pretty common at the time, and yet our pay-tv (mtv was semi watchable at that time) was all in mono and the vendor would not upgrade since he signed a many-year contract and had no MOTIVATION to upgrade anything!

silicon valley and we could not get stereo encoded tv shows. that's just an example and I'm sure its long since been changed by now, but this shows what you get when you sign exclusive contracts that last many years with someone who clearly does not want to invest one penny more than he has to.

even if townships allow multiple isp's in, apartment complexes still sign contracts with just one vendor and you are stuck with them for years and years.

regular people have no say in this. the only say you have is to put up your own sat dish (for tv, at least) and have that ugly thing take up your personal balcony space. as for internet, you have pacbell dsl (which is now dog-slow by modern standards) and you have one cable co that will service your area. that's it.

and its been this way since, well, forever. for as long as mainstream broadband has been around, at least.

and the various governments (this is not about the US, its about the new trend, or rather the new-found ability in mankind to truly neutralize all privacy and secret communications) are all addicted to this drug.

they can't give it up. they have a monkey on their back.

the stingrays are the gateway drug; and it soon is not enough and you want more. you want ALL the wireless and wired datacomms traffic.

we should shift our war-on-drugs effort to the real drug that is invading everyone's lives, though due to no fault of their own.

and again, this is not about the US or its agencies. do you really believe your own government is not wanting or having the ability to do this, as well?

this is about mankind and one of his worst weaknesses.

we should make a 'teaching moment' from this and disallow ourselves this ability. just like we really can't handle the responsibility of nukes, as a people, we can't handle THIS much power, either.

no one should have it. and yes, I truly mean NO ONE. you give it to one, and the rest want it (both good guys and bad guys).

will we use this as a teaching moment and make some change for the better?

well, I'm over 50 and have no hope left for us, as a species. we have proven we can't handle this level of responsibility. I don't expect change, but I do expect people to at least SEE what's going on and to try to work around it without giving up, entirely.

to show how much variation there is, I am also in the bay area and I have a year of 'intro deal' pricing where its less than $50 for 100meg down and 10meg up. no shit, either; I do get those speeds.

well, one caveat. I run openvpn almost 7x24 and this pisses comcast off, even though they won't ever say it. I get disconnected almost every hour on the hour. I work around it with my own form of creative network mgmt (...) and I'm annoyed by them, but its not stopping me.

note, when I don't run my vpn, I don't see the disconnects coming. strange, huh?

anyway, when the intro 12mo deal is over, I'll have to find some other service. there isn't much else to pick from! I once had clear.com (clearwire) - a semi-4g usb 'mifi' dongle that would give me acceptable connectivity without any house wiring. when I was short-term renting, that did the trick. neat little dongle, too. maybe I'll look into that again.

I just need to leave comcast (when my year is up) for 3mos, then I can reset the clock, get a new intro pkg and start again, but this time it probably will only be a 6mo special.

if you don't play these games, you get stuck for over $100/mo!

THIS is why comcast needs to be bitchslapped. and the others, too, but in my area, comcast is the only choice you get.

silicon valley - where we pretty much DID invent the internet - and we have a single vendor to pick from. sigh ;(

but they feel no pain, like people. no ability to show remorse or ethics or shame.

they can't be jailed and they are almost never punished in any meaningful way.

they have all the good things we, people have; but none of the bad things.

"gee, dad, when I grow up, I want to be a corporation!"

update: why didn't I try the simple thing, first? sigh. do a full uninstall, then install the new and this does not carry over previous 'settings'. it seems that even installing the new one over my older one was not so great. had to do a full remove and then add.

but after that, all is well! amazing. none of the problems I had are now there. loading an mkv file can take a long time over ac-rated wifi (sometimes 10 secs of the screen just sitting there, no status or anything) but then the video plays and from then on, its fine.

random positioning no longer shows the blockiness or buffering problem. playing dvd files is now fine and hd files continue to be fine.

wow. so, the 'trick' I'm glad to say, is simple. full uninstall and then fresh install. I should have known, sigh.

but really glad that it was not something other than 'bad settings'.

thanks for the idea.

but if win media player can play dvd data files perfectly, I'm thinking the video layer is fine as it is, and its vlc's buffering or queueing that seems broken.

if you FF to skip across compressed video, it will take some settle time to deblock, but on vlc it takes an absurd amount of timeto do that on mkv and mp4. and on dvd files, it never seems to play well, no matter what.

very odd that 'hard' files (such as hd) play with clocklike perfection and yet the lower res, lower bandwidth 'easy' files give such a hard time.

lately, I'm having a lot of trouble with vlc on win7. not sure why.

when I use wired ethernet, things seem fine (source of data is my nas box). I can play hd files that were downloaded (...) and those play great, even at 1920/120hz native refresh.

BUT - if I dare play a dvd with a video_ts style standard folder, even local playback shows lots of blockiness. I can copy the files to my local ssd and it still acts that way. playing dvd should be EASIER than high def mkv or mp4, right? so what's going on?

system is i7 haswell with onboard intel video. the system is fine, it can handle any hd file I throw at it. well, ok, one problem that might be related; if I skip around on the file, it takes forever to resync and unblock the blockiness. its like the deltas (non i-frames) are staying out of sync and there's no resync ability. 10 seconds or more, later, the file fixes itself (the player, that is) and the hd video looks great again.

that blockiness never seems to go away on pure dvd filesets.

I wonder what's going on? I'm pretty sure I was able to play 'simple dvd's about a year ago, but lately its unusable. if I feed that video_ts folder to win media player (included on win7) it plays as perfectly as a hardware based dvd player would, flawless. and yet, vlc chokes badly on dvd style data.

anyone see that on the last few builds? I don't know when things broke but I'm interested in finding a player that WILL work for all formats and is stable enough to use. win media player is great for the codecs it supports but there are too many it won't read and work with, hence my use of vlc.

I don't bother with vlc on linux on my htpc since the video system is still not as good as win7 is. still too much tearing compared to the perfect video I get from 7 (I hate saying that, too, but its true).

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.