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Why on EARTH do financial institution's sites load so SLOWLY in a web browser?

I've dealt with 5 different institutions, that maintain web sites. (believe it or not, there are some that still do not have websites!)

The bank that I am currently with generally takes 30 to 45 seconds to load their pages. Granted, I'm in the middle of Outback, Nowhere, and my ISP really sucks. But, I can browse the web, and pages load in a couple seconds. On a bad day, pages I visit frequently might take as much as 10 seconds. And, of course, on a really bad day, I just give up and read a book. But, the bank's pages on a good day take as long or longer to load as other pages take on bad days.

Now, I've never made even the slightest attempt to scan or analyze any bank's web page. There are so many horror stories. Customer Helpy Helperton sends an email, "You web site is insecure and misconfigured." and the very same day, the FBI is kicking down his door, hauling him and his computers off to jail and/or impoundment.

How the hell do you even get the message across, without risking prison?

What the hell are they doing wrong? Not enough bandwidth? Not enough memory on the servers? An excess of (probably ineffective) security? Or, do they do this on purpose, to ensure you can't hack them quickly?

Seriously, I've not yet seen a bank or credit union web site that is any more responsive than a tree sloth.

Or, is it me? Does NoScript and other security stuff slow me down when I visit their sites?

I'd sure like to know what's going on, but again, I'm afraid to even try to inspect their web sites. (That presuming that I'm smart enough to learn anything from the analysis.)

Comments?

Guys, I lurve arguing with you lot dearly but when I look at my message box and it says I have 35 messages from comment replies after taking a two hour nap, that's just too many to bother with. Anything over 20 and I'm probably just going to skip replying to any of them. My apologies.

I suppose that I had more than half the bits and pieces of this story, but I never managed to put them together like Caleb T. Martin has done.

http://www.mintpressnews.com/truth-syria-manufactured-war-independent-country-2/216688/

Education, health care and national rebirth
The independent nationalist Syrian government, now being targeted by Western foreign policy, was born in the struggle against colonialism. It took decades of great sacrifice from the people of Syria to break the country free from foreign domination — first by the French empire and later from puppet leaders. For the last several decades, Syria has been a strong, self-reliant country in the oil-rich Middle East region. It has also been relatively peaceful.

Since winning its independence, Syria’s Baathist leadership has done a great deal to improve the living standards of the population. Between 1970 and 2009, the life expectancy in Syria increased by 17 years. During this time period infant mortality dropped dramatically from 132 deaths per 1,000 live births to only 17.9. According to an article published by the Avicenna Journal of Medicine, these notable changes in access to public health came as a result of the Syrian government’s efforts to bring medical care to the country’s rural areas.

A 1987 country study of Syria, published by the U.S. Library of Congress, describes huge achievements in the field of education. During the 1980s, for the first time in Syria’s history, the country achieved “full primary school enrollment of males” with 85 percent of females also enrolled in primary school. In 1981, 42 percent of Syria’s adult population was illiterate. By 1991, illiteracy in Syria had been wiped out by a mass literacy campaign led by the government.

The name of the main political party in Syria is the “Baath Arab Socialist Party.” The Arabic word “Baath” literally translates to “Rebirth” or “Resurrection.” In terms of living standards, the Baathist Party has lived up to its name, forging an entirely new country with an independent, tightly planned and regulated economy. The Library of Congress’ Country Study described the vast construction in Syria during the 1980s: “Massive expenditures for development of irrigation, electricity, water, road building projects, and the expansion of health services and education to rural areas contributed to prosperity.”

Compared to Saudi-dominated Yemen, many parts of Africa, and other corners of the globe that have never established economic and political independence, the achievements of the Syrian Arab Republic look very attractive. Despite over half a century of investment from Shell Oil and other Western corporations, the CIA World Factbook reports that about 60 percent of Nigerians are literate, and access to housing and medical care is very limited. In U.S.-dominated Guatemala, roughly 18 percent of the population is illiterate, and poverty is rampant across the countryside, according to the CIA World Factbook.

What the Western colonizers failed to achieve during centuries of domination, the independent Syrian government achieved rapidly with help from the Soviet Union and other anti-imperialist countries. The Soviet Union provided Syria with a $100 million loan to build the Tabqa dam on the Euphrates River, which was “considered to be the backbone of all economic and social development in Syria.” Nine-hundred Soviet technicians worked on the infrastructure project which brought electricity to many parts of the country. The dam also enabled irrigation throughout the Syrian countryside.

More recently, China has set up many joint ventures with Syrian energy corporations. According to a report from the Jamestown Foundation, in 2007 China had already invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” in Syria in efforts to “modernize the country’s aging oil and gas infrastructure.”

These huge gains for the Syrian population should not be dismissed and written off, as Western commentators routinely do when repeating their narrative of “Assad the Dictator.” For people who have always had access to education and medical care, it is to trivialize such achievements. But for the millions of Syrians, especially in rural areas, who lived in extreme poverty just a few decades ago, things like access to running water, education, electricity, medical care, and university education represent a huge change for the better.

Like almost every other regime in the crosshairs of U.S. foreign policy, Syria has a strong, domestically-controlled economy. Syria is not a “client state” like the Gulf state autocracies surrounding it, and it has often functioned in defiance of the U.S. and Israel. It is this, not altruistic concerns about human rights, that motivate Western attacks on the country.

Half a century ago I was reading a book by Isaac Asimov. I don’t remember what book, but I know it wasn’t I, Robot because I looked last night and it wasn’t in that book. But in the book, whichever one it was, Dr. Asimov wrote about the origin of the word “robot”; a story by Karel Capek titled R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots.
        I searched every library I had access to, looking for this story, for years. I finally gave up.
        Then a few weeks ago I thought of the story again. I have no idea what triggered that thought, but it occurred to me that there was no internet back then, and since the book was so old, it would probably be at Gutenberg.org.
        It was! I downloaded it, and to my dismay it was written in Czech. So I fed it to Google Translate.
        Thirty five years ago when I was first learning how computers work and how to program them, I read of a program the US government had written to translate Russian to English and back. To test it, they fed it the English phrase “the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Then they fed the Russian translation back in. The re-conversion to English read “The wine is good, but the meat is spoiled.”
        I figured that in the decades since their first efforts at machine translation, it would do a better job.
        I figured wrong. What came out of Google Translate was gibberish. It does a good job of translating single words; paper dictionaries have done this well for centuries. But for large blocks of text, it was worthless.
        When I first saw the Czech version I could see that it was, in fact, not a novel, but a stage play. I kept looking, and found an English language version translated by an Australian. It’s licensed under the Creative Commons, so I may add it to my online library.
        Wikipedia informed me that the play was written in 1920, and a man named Paul Selver translated it into English in 1923. So I searched Gutenberg for “Paul Selver” and there it was! However, it was in PDF form. Right now I’m at the tail end of converting it to HTML.
        After reading it I realized that this story was the basis for every robot story written in the twentieth century, and its robots aren’t even robots as we know robots today. Rather, they were like the “replicants” in the movie Blade Runner—flesh and blood artificial people. That movie, taken from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? would have actually been a sequel to R.U.R., had R.U.R. ended differently.
        The Terminator was R.U.R. with intelligent mechanical robots instead of artificial life. Their aim, as the “robots” in Kapek’s story, is to destroy all humans.
        Asimov said that his robots were an answer to Frankenstein and R.U.R. He thought the very idea was ridiculous, so he made his own robots inorganic and mechanical rather than organic, and added his “three laws of robotics”. His laws weren’t physical laws like the inability of anything to travel faster than light, but legislation; similar to Blade Runner, where the artificial people weren’t allowed on Earth. In a few of his books, like The Caves of Steel, robot use on Earth is strictly limited and controlled and people hate them.
        I thought Asimov had the first mechanical, non-magical robots, but I was wrong. There were fictional mechanical robots before Asimov was born. The first US science fiction dime novel was Edward S. Ellis’ 1865 The Steam Man of the Prairies, with a giant steam powered robot.
        One thing that put me off about this play (besides the fact that it’s a play, which is far better watched than read) was that the original story was written in a language I don’t understand. That’s why I don’t read Jules Verne; his stories were written in French, and I don’t speak that language, either.
        I dislike translations because I used to speak Spanish well, according to South American tourists, and a smattering of Thai. And I’m a reader. It’s more than just the story, it’s how it’s written. There are word plays and idioms that are impossible to translate. For instance, a beautiful English phrase that uses alliteration would lose its beauty in any translation. And, there are no boring stories, only boring storytellers. I suspect that Kapek may have been an excellent writer, but Selver wasn’t, to my mind. Little of the dialog seemed believable to me.
        But in the case of this story, even the poor translation (Wikipedia informs me it’s abridged) is worth reading, just for the context it places all other robot stories in.
        It will be at mcgrewbooks.com soon.

Got to say, the green look on the site is actually *really* nice. If it was a few shades darker though, we'd be too close that the site that shall not be named.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/26/us/politics/trump-health-care-conservatives-congress.html?_r=0

WASHINGTON — Whenever a major conservative plan in Washington has collapsed, blame has usually been fairly easy to pin on the Republican hard-liners who insist on purity over practicality.

But as Republicans sifted through the detritus of their failed effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, they were finding fault almost everywhere they looked.

President Trump, posting on Twitter on Sunday, saw multiple culprits, including the renegade group of small-government conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus and outside groups like the Club for Growth. Those groups, which do not always work placidly together, had aligned against the president and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the ultimate symbol of their dismay with the entrenched ways of the capital. At the same time, some saw the president as pointing a finger at Mr. Ryan when Mr. Trump urged his Twitter followers on Saturday to tune in to a Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro, who went on to call for Mr. Ryan’s resignation.

For eight years, those divisions were often masked by Republicans’ shared antipathy toward President Barack Obama. Now, as the party struggles to adjust to the post-Obama political order, it is facing a nagging question: How do you hold together when the man who unified you in opposition is no longer around?

(f) Suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by President
Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate. Whenever the Attorney General finds that a commercial airline has failed to comply with regulations of the Attorney General relating to requirements of airlines for the detection of fraudulent documents used by passengers traveling to the United States (including the training of personnel in such detection), the Attorney General may suspend the entry of some or all aliens transported to the United States by such airline.

___________________________________

There you have it, boys and girls. Trump has the authority to ban just about anyone from entering the United States, for almost any reason. It's the constitution. It's the law. Section 212(f) of the INA, 8 U.S.C. 1182(f)

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

The court really has no jurisdiction over Trump's executive order. If the court asserts jurisdiction, any judge who find against Trump is acting unconstitutionally. Any judge who finds and acts against Obama's executive order should be disbarred, and removed from the bench. It's really that simple.

Now, you want to know who DOES have authority to dispute and over rule Trump's executive order? Do you need to be told who has that authority? I'm certain that some of you special snowflakes do have to be told. CONGRESS has that authority. CONGRESS can override an executive order. If congress reaches a consensus that the president is acting improperly, then congress can take one of several actions, up to, and including, voting on an act to over rule the president's executive order.

Liberal judges don't want you to understand constitutional law. They don't want you to look up the law. The law supports Trump's executive order. No judge has the authority to over rule an executive order. No citizen or non-citizen of this country has standing to sue Trump's executive order. Only CONGRESS holds the authority to force the president to recall, or rescind, or cancel an executive order.

IF - and I stress IF - congress should pass an act changing the law, and dictating who may and who may not enter the country, and the president should act contrary to the law passed by congress, THEN, congress would have the authority to impeach the president.

Have you noticed? No judge has the authority to impeach the president. Only congress can do that.

Trump can thumb his nose at those judges who have ruled against him. He could conveivably have them arrested, and charged with any number of crimes. Charges of treason may even be justified.

How many people remember that the president appoints federal judges - but no judge can appoint a president?

Of course, it is nothing new for liberal judges to usurp the law of the land.

Discussion, please. Let's see just how far out in left field some of us can get.

That link, again - https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1182

So I finally got too fedup with the modern breakage that is called desktop environments on Linux, grabbed the source code to CDE, and compiled it. I *finally* have an environment that works with multimonitor without being complete crap. After a bit fiddling with the X defaults database, it's quite usable.

Imgur Proof (warning, high resolution)

Honestly, compared to MOST of the other DEs I've used, this is damn heaven at the moment. With a bit of work to get to support XDG groups, some app fixing, and a little polish, CDE probably could wipe the floor as far as usability goes.

Alright, I'll confess.

In 1978, our ship docked in Venice, Italy. Docked nearby was a Russian tour ship. Little did we boots realize that the tour ship was a cover for something far more important.

Our crew was formed into ranks, and marched over to the tour ship our first night in port. We were all hypnotized by Russia's Hypnotoad, and given the agenda of the future. Russia was preparing, already, to cave in on the Cold War. But, they were also preparing their revenge.

During the briefing, we learned that the Russians had a tame Orangutan in a sleeper cell in New York. The Orangutan was to be Russia's "Trump card", so to speak. All of us were informed that the Orangutan would one day run for President of the United States, and that we would recognize him when the time came.

Almost all American servicemen were briefed between the years of 1970 and 2010. And, all of us veterans were prepared to vote Trump when the time came. A lot of civilians, too, of course, but all of us veterans voted Trump. Well, except for a few whose hypnosis didn't work very well.
__________________

Alright, I was shooting for funny. My story isn't really all that funny though. What's REALLY FUNNY is, a lot of progressives will believe my bullshit story. Yeah, there WAS a Russian cruise ship in Venice. That's where this story's connection with reality begins and ends.

There is a web store which proclaims "shopping is entertainment." Well, it's time for me to rant about something that completely ruins the entertainment value, that being when the vendor can't be bothered to tell you the most important information about the product.

One example is coil springs for automotive suspensions. Springs aren't rocket science. There are only a handful of specifications that differentiate one set from another. Things like length, diameter, and spring rate. But it seems the vast majority of springs are advertised without this information. Instead they include some generic marketing crap about "improved handling" and "sporty ride height." So you really don't have a clue what you're getting unless you obtain the springs and measure them yourself.

A second example is video cards. The problem here is that the manufacturers can and do put whatever random memory chips they have available on the PCB, even if it results in a card that is hopelessly crippled by terrible memory performance.

Let's say that you have a low-end GPU with 4 pixel pipelines at 500MHz. 4x500MHz is 2,000,000,000 pixels that could be filled under optimal conditions. A pixel is 32 bits (RGBA) so that means you would need at least 8GB/sec of memory bandwidth to support this fill rate. This is completely ignoring the fact that you would need to access memory for other reasons like reading texture data or Z-buffer or whatever. It's the bare minimum. If you have less than that then part of the GPU's capability is just going to waste.

There are a lot of cards like this floating around, that have DDR2 instead of GDDR3, DDR3 instead of GDDR5, or half the memory bus is left unconnected. And it can be hard to identify the stinkers unless you get the part numbers from the memory chips and check their datasheet, or at least run GPU-Z on it.