It's not just to fuck with darkies and commies any more.
This also from an interview Merkel gave to public German TV yesterday:
A solution must be found to the Ukraine crisis that does not hurt Russia and which the Ukrainian people must choose for themselves, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sunday.
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"There must be dialogue. There can only be a political solution. There won't be a military solution to this conflict," she said.
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On Saturday, her vice chancellor Sigmar Gabriel had suggested that establishing a federal Ukraine was the only viable solution to the crisis pitting Kiev against pro-Russian separatists.Merkel said that if Ukraine opted to rejoin the Eurasian Union with Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia, then Europe would not make "a huge conflict" out of it.
Especially the last point is clearly a big step back from the earlier all out "Ukraine is EU" position.
Additionally to the economic side, pressure on Merkel also grows because there is more and more doubt, even in German mainstream media, about the veracity of the Ukrainian propaganda and about the destruction of flight MH17. Why is there is no news about it? Is there a coverup (in German)?
You see what you want to see.
Just one point: Africa is in the aftermath of Colonial destruction and neon-colonial extraction. That has far more relevance than the practice of religion.
All people on earth are made of the same mixture of inclinations and inspirations. The mental proposition of a theology does little to change this, but provides one framework for justifying how desires are fulfilled.
God's grace arrives as a mystical occurrence, not the mental and emotional identification with theological proposition. "Morality" is how one behaves towards the creation, so that the opportunity to recognise the arrival of this grace is not clouded, or missed. Nobody can direct God, all are at the quality of absolute mercy. That is the root of real humility - the moral virtue from which all others are sustained.
Angela is not saying this anymore. Russia as resources and markets is necessary for an Industrial Germany. A de-industrialized US? Not so much...
The Kiev government are a coalition of hyper-rich oligarchs, wielding explicitly fascist militia. It is like Goldman Sachs running a country with the help of Blackwater and the KKK. The US is involved to own the gas-pipe to Europe. Look at where Joe Biden's son is, and what he is doing.
As to a WMD Neo-Con-Job?
The NATO commander making accusation, and touting photos no one has seen? He declared Saddam's WMD as "fact".
The NYT "reporter" putting this into public record? Co-author with Judith Miller on the famous lies of 2003.
I have so little control, posing from my phone..
all taxes have to be included in prices
It's the government's fault that U.S. companies don't do that, not companies'. Most countries have a single unified tax structure. A store can set a price, and advertise that price inclusive of taxes nationwide.
The U.S. is an amalgam of tax-governing bodies. The States can set their own sales tax. The counties can set their own sales tax. The cities can set their own sales tax. Consequently, the sales tax rate differs, sometimes from city to city. A store sets a price and advertises that price + taxes, it's correct for one locale, incorrect everywhere else. The only way to advertise a "correct" price is without taxes. Not because the price varies or because they're trying to hide the final price from you, but because the tax rate varies.
There are currently close to 10,000 different sales tax rates in the U.S. With more states trying to impose sales tax on Internet purchases, it's actually becoming a barrier to entry for small businesses trying to start up Internet sales. The sales tax rates can change at any time if some local governing body decides to change it, so you have to either watch daily for new tax rate changes, or hire someone to do it for you (but you still have to pay if they make a mistake). Amazon tried to harmonize sales taxes in the U.S. because of this, but the States were more interested in casting it as "protecting brick and mortar stores from unfair Internet competition" than addressing the real problem.
The best solution (other than a harmonized sales tax) would be if the Federal government set up a website listing the ~10,000 different tax rates, and forced states and local governments to update their entry in the site before a sales tax rate was "official". Businesses could then just download all the different tax rates every night and be sure they're charging the correct sales tax.
and if you buy something you have all kinds of rights (two week period to send stuff back/cancel contracts
That's the case for nearly everything in the U.S. too. In fact most shops have 30-90 day return policies.
two year warranty on physical items and such) that cannot be taken away by ToSs.
Warranties are just insurance policies. Just because the law forces companies to provide them to everyone does not mean they're free. Their cost is rolled into the price of the item you're buying.
In general, insurance is not worth it (otherwise someone wouldn't be selling it to you). It makes sense to insure items whose prices are so high it'd be difficult for you to replace (e.g. cars, houses, maybe appliances depending on your income level). But for items costing a few hundreds of dollars or less, you actually save money by just replacing the things which break rather than taking out an insurance policy/requiring a warranty for them. This is why larger companies and organizations self-insure rather than buying insurance for things like mailed packages and fleet cars. You'll notice the more expensive items like large appliances and cars already come with multi-year warranties exceeding what's required by EU law. That's because being an insurance policy on something that's difficult for the buyer to afford to replace, it's additional profit for the manufacturer to provide the 5- or 10-year warranty and raise the price accordingly.
The one place warranties do help is setting a baseline for product durability. i.e. It weeds out products which are so shabbily made it'll break after a few months. The cost of providing warranty service is so high the manufacturer goes back and redesigns the product to be more durable. At least usually that's how it works. Sometimes it doesn't (e.g. hard drives, where manufacturers can refurbish enough drives returned under warranty to replace new drives which fail during their warranty period). But overall, very few products I've encountered are that shabbily made (in fact the only one I can think of was a portable DVD player made by a company which went bankrupt anyway a few months later, so I would've been out the warranty even if I'd bought it in the EU).
Same EXACT crew who declared Iraqi WMD confirmed fact.
How many times will you be neo-conned, by the "bogey-man dictator" ploy?
There is no good solution to any of this, both governments will be pushing to the end. Ukrainian government doesn't want to lose a large chunk of territory and Russian government doesn't want to let go now, since the loss will be seen as weakness and there is a huge interest in controlling the gas supplying line to Europe. Putin's reaction to Ukraine attempts to become part of NATO was going to be met with this type of violent reaction from Putin, who doesn't want to see NATO missile launchers even closer to the western border. AFAIC the American hands are all over this one, trying hard to create yet another distraction from its failing economy. Putin was easy to manipulate to start the war, but how do you end this war? A war with Russia can turn nuclear, so that is why there are no Americans or British or German or Canadian or other visible troops there yet.
Putin has a war now that everybody understands Russia is leading, but at the same time it is not an openly declared war, you can say it is an open secret war. Putin cannot win against the West but West doesn't want to fight a real shooting war with Russia either.
Stalemate. The only losers are the people who are forced into it on all sides, be it death due to bombing or bullets or sickness or be it economic sanctions (which by the way are not declared against 'others', economic sanctions are declared against your own. So economic sanctions imposed by Putin 'against West' are actually economic sanctions by Putin against Russians, it is just that the propaganda is strong, economic education and understanding is low and there is a tribal thing going on there as well).
USA provoked another conflict that may not end and definitely will not end well, good job. Putin is throwing fresh meat into the meat grinder, good job. Ukrainians are stuck between these two, like so many others before it, too bad.
AFAIC the only quick way out of this is for Putin to be assassinated or for Ukraine to give up and for the West to fuck off. All of these are unfortunate, but the alternatives do include a possibility of a nuclear war.
Right? The 'oldies' really are the 'goodies' in gaming, as it turns out.
Well... let's not go overboard here. Even the most nostalgic X'er will admit that the 2600's graphics looked like total ass, even in 1980, and 98% of Atari 2600 games have almost zero enduring fun value. Seriously, play 'em for 5 minutes for the first time in 20 years, and the last minute before you hit reset will seem to LAST for 20 years.
Well, besides Circus Atari & Warlords (the original 4-player "party game"). It's kind of ironic that two of the 2600's least graphically-sophisticated games ended up among the small canon of unique 2600 games that are still kind of fun and have never really been improved upon on other platforms.
It's really a shame Colecovision's short-sighted licensing deals and messy bankruptcy left their games covered in the legal equivalent of toxic sludge that nobody will ever be able to scrub away cheaply enough to make a $24.95 embedded Colecovision-in-a-(joy)stick with the dozen or so most popular games ever viable.
Many are under the false impression that ability to drive a car without government interference is a privilege and not a human right. These people are wrong, owning a car is not a right (as in nobody owes you a car), however if you own a car and you drive the car on private property then ability to drive the vehicle is not a privilege that government should be able to revoke. Driving a car on private property is an agreement between you (the driver) and the private property owner/operator. Getting in between the private property owner/operator and car owner/driver is in violation of your human rights. It is a violation of private property right, violation of freedom of association, violation of freedom to attempt and make your living, by the way, without interference by the State.
The real problem is of-course existence of so called 'public roads'. First automotive roads were private and many are private now and there should be no public roads at all, but to the extent that they exist, the rules and licensing that happens on the State level should only be applicable to those roads.
Would it be trivial to design a drive that can be switched into a double-speed half-capacity mode?
There's a word for it... "Velociraptor".
There's even a word for a drive that's "triple" speed... "Cheetah".
In any case, you wouldn't decrease the capacity on account of the faster rotational speed... you'd just use a faster DSP capable of doing its thing in less than half the time as a slower drive. From what I recall, the Cheetah's storage density per platter was basically the same as any other 2.5" drive.
SSDs obviously made the highest-performance spinning disks almost irrelevant, but personally, I used to think it would have been awesome if Seagate had taken the Cheetah platform, added two more independent sets of actuators and read/write heads, and wired it all up to look like 3 SCSI drives with sequential SCSI IDs so you could have single-drive RAID-5 performance in a luggable laptop (think: inch-thick Alienware/Sager/Clevo) or SFF desktop. Heat would be an issue... but really, a Cheetah didn't throw off any more heat than the mini-PCIe discrete video cards found in some gamer/mobile-workstation laptops now. In MY laptop, at least, the GPU's cooling system is bigger than the CPU's.
One thing I'd LOVE to see, and even think there's a market for, would be a single-platter drive suitable for mounting in the optical bay of mobile workstation laptops (say, 120mm diameter, 7mm or thinner). I rarely use optical discs, but having another 4tb or so that's always with me would be nice to have. Basically, it would be 7mm thick Quantum Bigfoot from the late 90s... and Jesus, with that much diameter per platter, just imagine how many terabytes you could pack into a multi-platter drive that fully-consumed a 5.25" quarter-height drive bay. It's almost scary to think about something like a 256-tb 5.25" single-bay hard drive.
I'm also kind of surprised that nobody ever made a thin-but-3.5" drive for laptops (which would obviously need a larger drive bay... but modern laptops, even thin ones, have SHOCKING amounts of horizontal acreage under the keyboard that could easily be put to good use for bigger cheap drives).
Customers must pay more if they exceed limits â" but it's not a cap,
That's fine with me, if they'll also give me a refund if I don't reach my limit. After all, fair's fair, right? They estimate how much data I'll use when I sign up, and if I exceed it they charge me extra, if I don't reach it they charge me less.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman
