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Over the years, I've used a number of monitors. My first monitor was rather small - maybe 12 or 13 inches. Black and white CRT thing, just like an ancient black and white television. I resisted upgrading to a color monitor, but the wife insisted, and we got something about 15 inches. All was good, for a long time. Then, I needed a decent monitor in a place where there was really no room to put a huge ass monitor. Enter the first LED screen. Wow - I saw colors on that LED that I didn't know existed. So, I was good for years with a nice 15" LED monitor. Then, I inherited a 19" Dell monitor. When I plugged it in, things got easier to read, so I used it. Then, I got the bright idea of using BOTH monitors! I can do whatever I'm doing on the big monitor, and keep my email and system monitors on the smaller screen. That worked nicely for quite a long while. It never bothered me that the videos and movies I might watch were cramped into half the space they were intended to fill.

Well - now the larger monitor started showing signs of age. Strange phenomenon that were never meant to happen convinced me that it might be wise to upgrade, before the monitor just crapped out. Talked to my kid, and he told me what to look for. Dithered for a couple weeks over the size I wanted. Finally went with a screen that supports 1080p. And, bearing in mind that two screens are nice, I bought two of them.

Alright, they aren't "state of the art". I wasn't willing to spend a thousand dollars on monitors, after all. But, HOLY SHIT! I can have two browsers open, all my system monitors, a file manager, qbittorrent, a calculator, email, and still have lots of room on the desktop! The movies? Hell, I can see the texture of people's skin! Pretty awesome.

It's a whole new world on my computer.

Black Friday 2015

Laptops

• $99: 11.6 inch Chromebook, Best Buy
• $300: Core i3, 15.6 inch, Best Buy
• $140: Celeron, 15.6 inch, Best Buy

Storage

• $100: 4 TB Western Digital My Book external hard drive, Best Buy
• $100: 4 TB Toshiba Canvio external hard drive, Office Max and Office Depot
• $120: 5 TB Seagate external hard drive, Costco
• $120: 5 TB Toshiba Canvio external hard drive, Office Max and Office Depot
• $40: 1 TB Seagate portable hard drive, Staples
• $200: SanDisk Ultra II 2.5" SSD 960GB, Newegg

Consoles

• $300: Dell Home & Office Black Friday: Xbox One Gears of War: Ultimate Edition Bundle Plus Fallout 4 & Extra Controller
• $300: Target Black Friday: 500GB Xbox One Console w/ Gears of War Digital Download Code + $60 Target Gift Card

Categories

• Blank Media (CDs, DVDs)
• USB Flash Drives
• Hard Drives

Articles

Best Laptops: Holiday 2015
Best SSDs: Holiday 2015

irc.anonops.com/6697

Haven't been on IRC for quite a long while - looking around in #opisis and #opparis - as expected, it's rather dead in there. #opparis seems to be hunting and reporting twitter accounts, and I'm wondering if it's worth opening an account.

There is an article in the Guardian called Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here's why.

The premise seems to be that government running a budget surplus leads to contraction in the private sector i.e. recession. Therefore, austerity will continue to make things worse for us.

The reasoning is very simple, perhaps simplistic.

You may be objecting at this point: but why does anybody have to be in debt? Why can’t everybody just balance their budgets? Governments, households, corporations … Everyone lives within their means and nobody ends up owing anything. Why can’t we just do that? Well there’s an answer to that too: then there wouldn’t be any money. This is another thing everybody knows but no one really wants to talk about. Money is debt.

I understand that people may borrow money to invest in e.g. a business where they might need to buy machinery and to pay staff before the profits start to roll in, and that hopefully the profits will be large enough to pay back the load and to make a living, but that's where my small brain gives up.

What is the rest of the story?

Also, note the graph of house prices.

Update: here come the sub-prime mortgages again. Only this time we, the public, have to bail out the banks when it all goes horribly wrong. Remember how they changed the law after the last crisis, so that the same terrible fate would not befall the banks again.

Didn't watch this time. Ben Carson sure is popular isn't he?

Wikipedia
Fireworks Fly In Unruly Third GOP Presidential Debate
Four Republicans Battle For Attention At Undercard Debate
PolitiFact

Bizarre, campy song explains China's 13th 5-year plan
Song (low information content)

Five-year plans of China
Timeline

The following link is broken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library/
Symptom: A / is added to the URL.
Possible Reason: URL tag not parsed correctly.

The Link should be to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library

Uses of Force Abroad 1798-2015, and More from CRS

A newly updated tabulation of U.S. military actions has been prepared by the Congressional Research Service, up to and including the October 14, 2015 deployment of 90 U.S. troops to Cameroon. The CRS listing does not include covert actions, disaster relief operations or training exercises. See Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2015, October 15, 2015.

[other CRS reports listed at source]

The PDF is 38 pages.

Congressional Research Service

The UK's descent into fascism accelerated today when Home Secretary Theresa May introduced a McCarthyist witch-hunt against "extremists" of all kinds in the public sector.

In other news, David Cameron has positioned the UK as China's best friend in the West ahead of all other countries. He had to promise never to speak to the Dalai Lama ever again though, to be best friends with China

Amnesty International and other groups concerned with human rights issues in China are expected to protest in St James' Park on Tuesday and it is expected that there will also be a pro-China protest.

The Guardian and Channel 4 News each report about a young British mother who went to the "Islamic State" to join her jihadi husband (a former Guantánamo Bay detainee) but changed her mind, describing life there as, "not my cup of tea."

The gangster mentality that she encountered amongst other women and the squalid living conditions that the jihadi wives and children had to endure were not to her liking, so she and the children fled where they were held in Syria near the Turkish border by a gang of smugglers who needed strong convincing that she wasn't an ISIS supporter.

She claims she went there to try to talk some sense into her husband, to plead with him to come home. She wants to come back to the UK, but what fate awaits her?

Last year Sir Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police and policing lead for the government's Prevent counter-terrorism strategy, warned that Britons returning from Syria would be stopped at the border and face arrest.

How could anyone be so naive, at the age of 33 and having had five children? And living in the UK where we still just about have free speech and the freedom of the press? How could you possibly not know what it would be really like? How could you voluntarily take five innocent, defenceless children willingly and knowingly into a war zone?