The music is from (fairly sure) the movie Sunshine.

First 2015 post?

This is the same country that inspired 1984 and V For Vendetta, so it seems there's a long running propensity for criminal overreach.

No, AC is right. The degrees of US/ISIS ideologies 'wrongness' doesn't really matter, it's the fact that they are both rationalizing the acceptance of wrong. One will just have a much shorter time plummeting than the other.

Science can't hold a candle to someone who can't, or won't, appreciate critical thinking. Faith and religion beheads it.

You post AC for a reason, right?

Canasta is where it's at.

About a week ago i also upgraded the CPU in my laptop (Pentium something to core i5). Hooray computers!

My bitfenix phenom case just arrived an hour ago from new egg/lasership.

4790k on a gigabyte z97 matx, 16GB, gtx590 and 1.5TB ssd

"Until the American public stands up and demands"

I see this partial slogan bandied about all the time, that we only have ourselves to blame. How the fuck exactly do we stand up and demand? Most of us do already .. voting doesn't fix things. Peaceful protest doesn't fix things. Hell, the only real power we do have is w/ $, and that doesn't fix things. Snowden has done what few of us are capable of, mainly because we're peons, and it's still not fixing things.

"Until the American public stands up and demands" means the only real way things will happen will be through violence.

Completely agree. I'll quote myself for no other reason than I just 90sec ago stated the same thing earlier and you completely encapsulated how I feel. I have a feeling that there are quite a lot of us like this.

"We expect it from China because they are [more or less] (not us, so therefore) a potential enemy, like Russia, like latest Islamatyrant, blah blah.

(going US centric) We were raised to believe that the US was better than what we're finding out it's doing. We were taught to believe we are a shining beacon of freedom, democracy, that our way is the best way - or at least it's the best way done so far - because look at all of the failings we see around us.. we take the moral highground making us better than the tyrants who do the stuff that we despise, etc.

There are a lot of Snowdens out there.. not necessarily in what power or knowledge we have, but that those of us that feel everything instilled in us about our nation's greatness is turning out to be complete bullshit."

We expect it from China because they are [more or less] (not us, so therefore) a potential enemy, like Russia, like latest Islamatyrant, blah blah.

(going US centric) We were raised to believe that the US was better than what we're finding out it's doing. We were taught to believe we are a shining beacon of freedom, democracy, that our way is the best way - or at least it's the best way done so far - because look at all of the failings we see around us.. we take the moral highground making us better than the tyrants who do the stuff that we despise, etc.

There are a lot of Snowdens out there.. not necessarily in what power or knowledge we have, but that those of us that feel everything instilled in us about our nation's greatness is turning out to be complete bullshit.

The 80s were the worst thing to ever happen to us.

'It's basically an all-you-can-eat buffet and we're the fat guys. The sizzlers trying to narrow the front door so we can't get in.'

Who cares? That's the point of a buffet.

Charging by usage is an invented pricing scheme pure and simple. It costs no more or less for Comcast to have data running over a line (not even the cost of electricity.. once it's on it's on). I can leave my TV on 24/7/365 (100% usage) and pay the exact same amount if I had left it off for an entire year. Hell, I could add 5 more TVs (each with their own box) and leave those on year round and it would still do nothing to my bill [outside of the boxes].

Also, the T3 comparison is nowhere near valid. Bandwidth costs close to nothing. With a T3 you're basically building your own infrastructure for that access, which is where the cost comes. Comcast already owns the infrastructure.

CompUSA (retail location) sold store brand CD-R and DVD-R discs that were top and bottom plastic layered, the printed labeling on top almost feels like an extremely thin felt. I've got at least a dozen CD-Rs (roughly half music, the other half *ahem, tsk tsk* mostly fps games) from the mid-late 90s that I burned in college still reading like a champ.