Linux Mint was always the easiest for me to setup and use. If I remember correctly it's from France so it can skirt US copyright law and install all the graphics and media drivers you need. Sometimes other versions make you hunt them down.

Quote from: Biggie Smiles on June 12, 2024, 04:48:14 PM911 was no different than pearl harbor in my mind. They needed to rally Americans to a cause and those buildings were aging and had already outlived their usefulness in terms of profitability -- it was time to light the proverbial match and launch an insurance claim.

And to loot all the gold reserves out from the vaults beneath. Or so the eyewitness accounts have it. The subway tunnels were used to transport that entire store of wealth out with an armed cordon to keep nosy civilians from getting too close. And who knows where it went? Not me, that's for sure.

I can't speak with any authority in terms of the profitability of the buildings themselves, but everything else you've mentioned is pretty much bang on the money. There was a memo circulating the upper echelons of the military within a week that was basically a laundry list of nations in the Middle East the US were going to declare war on. Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Iran... I forget the others, but the list was somewhere around a dozen names that the US military brass were going to use 9/11 as the pretext to go in all guns blazing.

Displacing the persons in said countries to go.... well, you can guess where.

Quote from: Biggie Smiles on June 12, 2024, 04:48:14 PM20 years later Afghanistan got 89 billion in advanced weaponry to use against us whenever it is that our young boys are forced to meet them once again on the sandy battlefields of a place they know nothing about.

Pittance, all things considered, though I'm sure the Afghani warlords were stoked as fuck for the resale price they got from Vladimir Putin for their largesse. Essentially making Joe Bidet guilty of funding both sides of the Russo/Ukraine fracas. Funny, if it were Trump doing it then the media would be shrieking for his immediate castration.

Quote from: JOE on June 13, 2024, 12:44:01 AMSo getting back onto topic Biggie Smiles Bigly & @knows things, what in your opinions are the best, most user friendly Linux distros as an alternative to Windows?

I'm not repeating myself, fuckhead. If you couldn't read my post the first time around I'm not inclined to keep smashing your oblong melon into the sink to shake the map of Thiel's cum out of your eyeballs.

So getting back onto topic Biggie Smiles Bigly & @knows things, what in your opinions are the best, most user friendly Linux distros as an alternative to Windows?

Quote from: knows things on June 12, 2024, 04:39:27 PMPretty much. Which cast everything that came after in a wholly different light than the media was attempting to push. I opened my eyes a good deal wider after that night, so to speak. I mean fuck Michael Moore documentaries, I went full on Dylan Avery with that shit. Dug deep, came up with answers that made a lot of people very hurt and angry.

Heh, I was talking with an owner of one of the BDSM clubs in New York after the fact. A 1%-er... he told me some of the crazy shit that was going down in NY in the aftermath. Like the time police pulled him over, ostensibly to search his car under the pretext of his being a potential terroriist. During the ensuing search, he was instructed to sound his horn. According to the officer, reports of car bombs being wired to car horns were a thing.

The club owner looked over at the bridge support he was parked next to... for one of the bridges crossing the Hudson and commented "are you sure that's a good idea?"

"Just do it" came the reply.

I've said it before... people are stupid. Or complicit. Either way it doesn't matter, the end result is still the same.

911 was no different than pearl harbor in my mind. They needed to rally Americans to a cause and those buildings were aging and had already outlived their usefulness in terms of profitability -- it was time to light the proverbial match and launch an insurance claim.

and that's exactly what they did.. and scarified 3000 lives in the process... but hey, 20 years later Afghanistan got 89 billion in advanced weaponry to use against us whenever it is that our young boys are forced to meet them once again on the sandy battlefields of a place they know nothing about.

Quote from: Biggie Smiles on June 12, 2024, 03:29:37 PMI remember that too. He did not have the look of a man totally stunned by such devastating news.

And he stayed there through storytime. Your country is under attack and you don't want to scare 25 kids in a classroom by abruptly getting up and leaving when there's a crisis of this magnitude going on? Bullshit.

he knew it was controlled and had been carefully protracted and therefore had no need of a sense of urgency

Pretty much. Which cast everything that came after in a wholly different light than the media was attempting to push. I opened my eyes a good deal wider after that night, so to speak. I mean fuck Michael Moore documentaries, I went full on Dylan Avery with that shit. Dug deep, came up with answers that made a lot of people very hurt and angry.

Heh, I was talking with an owner of one of the BDSM clubs in New York after the fact. A 1%-er... he told me some of the crazy shit that was going down in NY in the aftermath. Like the time police pulled him over, ostensibly to search his car under the pretext of his being a potential terroriist. During the ensuing search, he was instructed to sound his horn. According to the officer, reports of car bombs being wired to car horns were a thing.

The club owner looked over at the bridge support he was parked next to... for one of the bridges crossing the Hudson and commented "are you sure that's a good idea?"

"Just do it" came the reply.

I've said it before... people are stupid. Or complicit. Either way it doesn't matter, the end result is still the same.

Quote from: knows things on June 12, 2024, 05:43:52 AMI caught something similar in the 9/11 coverage... a journalist reporting on the collapse of WTC building 7... 20 minutes before it actually fell. No shit, it was in frame behind the journo for the entire live cross. Had I been quicker off the mark, I might have loaded a tape in the VCR.

The one that really got me though was the footage of George Bush reading to the class. I'll never forget the visceral reaction I had when the aide leaned in to inform George of the news. Seeing Bush's eye movements... I thought "you bastard... you knew this was coming. The "archival footage" that's on the public record now... I don't believe it's the same. I've seen it surface a few times and his reaction is not the same as I remember watching it live on television.

But hey, when you gotta lie your way into a war, you gotta lie your way into a war, right? Right.

I remember that too. He did not have the look of a man totally stunned by such devastating news.

And he stayed there through storytime. Your country is under attack and you don't want to scare 25 kids in a classroom by abruptly getting up and leaving when there's a crisis of this magnitude going on? Bullshit.

he knew it was controlled and had been carefully protracted and therefore had no need of a sense of urgency

Here's yer kinda guy Biggie Smiles Bigly Smiles:


He kinda reminds me of that Mad as Hell Guy, only he's directing his rage at Windows 11.

Quote from: Lokmar on June 10, 2024, 07:59:38 PMHell, I remember watching CNN for weeks before the Iraq invasion in the early 90's. CNN showed the Iraqi military convoys lined up at the Syrian border waiting to take shit Saddam didnt want discovered or captured out of Iraq. You cant find that broadcast footage anywhere.

I caught something similar in the 9/11 coverage... a journalist reporting on the collapse of WTC building 7... 20 minutes before it actually fell. No shit, it was in frame behind the journo for the entire live cross. Had I been quicker off the mark, I might have loaded a tape in the VCR.

The one that really got me though was the footage of George Bush reading to the class. I'll never forget the visceral reaction I had when the aide leaned in to inform George of the news. Seeing Bush's eye movements... I thought "you bastard... you knew this was coming. The "archival footage" that's on the public record now... I don't believe it's the same. I've seen it surface a few times and his reaction is not the same as I remember watching it live on television.

But hey, when you gotta lie your way into a war, you gotta lie your way into a war, right? Right.

Quote from: Biggie Smiles on June 10, 2024, 10:57:34 AMSame thing is happening in pretty much all areas with the advent of an AI model running on quantum computing They can erase and completely rewrite history to their own liking in a matter of minutes. Across the entirety of the internet.

Today you can google your eyes out for something which proves with any level of certainty Trump is a racist. You'll find nothing. Tomorrow that might not be the case when they begin to erase actual history in favor of a prefabricated one constructed by AI

I tell all my friends to get ahold of any many paper books and stuff on independent media as they can because this is coming. Watch.

I've been saying it too. Also to maintain a network blind computer where tomorrows deletions might be archived today. Although I am fully cognisant the veracity of such archives will likely be questioned, be they of a geopolitical or sociopolitical nature, I am also aware that an unprotected movie, music or game collection could be decimated overnight if stored locally on a machine with a connection to the internet. The simple solution being to store it behind the Ultimate Firewall of an unconnected Windows 7 machine and only copy across that which you need using flash and/or optical media.

I have terabytes of stuff stored, the backups of which exist yet in a military grade waterproof case with faraday shielding. It may survive a Carrington event, it may not, but I'm hopeful.

As for books, there's not a great deal I would preserve, though I have a few titles. One might surprise a few people here; an 1888 print of the Catholic Bible. I find it mildly amusing myself, being an avowed agnostic and all. But I nonetheless think it a text that ought be preserved against the sorts of bullshit that beset our society today. And who knows; maybe one day I might find myself a believer in more than just the message it contains within. I also prize my copy of the 2018 Shorter Oxford English dictionary, one of the last editions to be printed before definitions to words like "vaccine" were altered to make them more MRNA friendly. It's my reference to a time before Clown World went completely sideways and started eating its own culture.

Quote from: Biggie Smiles on June 10, 2024, 10:57:34 AMSame thing is happening in pretty much all areas with the advent of an AI model running on quantum computing They can erase and completely rewrite history to their own liking in a matter of minutes. Across the entirety of the internet.

Today you can google your eyes out for something which proves with any level of certainty Trump is a racist. You'll find nothing. Tomorrow that might not be the case when they begin to erase actual history in favor of a prefabricated one constructed by AI

I tell all my friends to get ahold of any many paper books and stuff on independent media as they can because this is coming. Watch.

Hell, I remember watching CNN for weeks before the Iraq invasion in the early 90's. CNN showed the Iraqi military convoys lined up at the Syrian border waiting to take shit Saddam didnt want discovered or captured out of Iraq. You cant find that broadcast footage anywhere.

Quote from: Biggie Smiles on June 10, 2024, 10:57:34 AMI tell all my friends to get ahold of any many paper books and stuff on independent media as they can because this is coming. Watch.

Seems AI is also slowly wiping out much of the consumer software too Biggie Smiles Bigly. Getting harder to buy traditional versions of software & mostly everything is going subscriber only. Trying to get what remains of the good stuff while we can still get it. Companies dont want you to own the software or perpetual type anymore and prefer the consumer pays for their subscriber only model.

Quote from: R. on June 10, 2024, 10:50:34 AMPretty much. And the longer it's left to run on that model, the less availability of people there will be to understand the specific hardware and configuration required to put together an alternative to the Microsoft option. You're seeing the same thing in the scientific and engineering communities with the academic shift away from training people in Fortran - before much longer no-one will understand how any of this shit works and there'll be no option but to take the wildest and wooliest arrangements on faith. "Trust the Science" in other words.

Should make your average shyster happy I suppose.

Same thing is happening in pretty much all areas with the advent of an AI model running on quantum computing They can erase and completely rewrite history to their own liking in a matter of minutes. Across the entirety of the internet.

Today you can google your eyes out for something which proves with any level of certainty Trump is a racist. You'll find nothing. Tomorrow that might not be the case when they begin to erase actual history in favor of a prefabricated one constructed by AI

I tell all my friends to get ahold of any many paper books and stuff on independent media as they can because this is coming. Watch.