“Enjoy the once in century experience of empire collapse from the first row, go sightseeing to ‘once grand but now little more than decrepit and fast fading façades’ and return home with a warm ‘at least it’s not us’ feeling (return trip might be from El Salvador) unlike the poor sods who live in the place”

They’re gonna Ratchet Effect the shit out this!

Well, that’s definitelly going to solve the fall in Tourism problem in the US /s

The EU is now talking about doing what the US was already doing more than a decade ago when Snowden Revelations came out.

And don’t get me started on things like the relative ratios of “death by police” and percentage of people in prision (to mention just the things related to the use of force in policing) between America and Europe.

The EU is at least a decade behind the US in creeping autoritarianism and a lot of that shit has been imported from the US (including the new style far right, which amongst other things was set-up with money from American billionaires which Steve Bannon brought to Europe years ago very openly to “create far right parties” and is ideologically fed by American money using social media which for example paid Cambridge Analitica to use Facebook to fuel Brexit).

In this turn of the Wheel of History, the equivalent of Nazism is spreading out from America.

Personally I’ve been boycotting travel to the US or even just with a transfer in the US since the PATRIOT act.

Already over a decade ago I very purposefully chose Canada (highly recommended, by the way) for a month vacationing in North America rather than the US.

The writting has been on the wall for this shit ever since they allowed the TSA to start confiscating traveller’s mobile phones and computers way back in Bush’s day - the main difference with the current administration compared to the previous ones is that they’re open about what they’re looking for.

Mate, I’m not the person who answered your original comment.

I just saw you making claims about somebody else making fallacious statements when in fact it was you who started with a big fat fallacy and then bitched and moaned about how they were the ones being fallacious when somebody else countered it by pointing out that at least one of the points of “evidence” that you yourself presented for Mr. Krugman’s “pretty good track record” (whatever the fuck such vague and ill-defined expression means) was in fact a Swedish Central Bank Prize For Economics In Honor Of Alfred Nobel, which is commonly misportrayed as a genuine Nobel Prize - even by Krugman himself - when it is no such thing.

Of all the things to use to claim somebody has a “pretty good track record”, him having something he himself calls a Nobel Prize which is not in fact a Nobel Prize actually weakens that point rather than strengthens it, as it casts suspicion on his honesty.

As it so happens for a while I had a lot of exposure to Mr. Krugman’s opinions - on and after the 2008 Crash, when I in fact worked in the same Industry as he did - and in my opinion he was often full of shit and all over the place, at least back then, and a pretty good illustration of the caricatural Economist “who has predicted 10 of the last 2 downturns”. One could say that he likes to throw shit at the wall, wait to see what sticks and then claim he was a genius for spotting it.

I’ll repeat myself: had you not started with an Appeal To Authority in your original post and absent all those words of praise for the person making that point, just let the logic of the point speak for itself, you would have been better off.

Since you went for an Appeal to Authority as the very first paragraph of your comment, a response that trashes that person’s authoritative credentials is logic in the very context you created and thus not an Ad Hominum.

Without that first paragraph on your post you would’ve been right to claim Ad Hominum.

Well, yeah, automated ultra-fast untiring shameless liars can do way more swindling of people than human politicians and are probably far better at it since they can interact with people one-on-one and swindle in a target-specific way, unlike politicians which relly on mass spreading of their declarations and the halo effect for their mass swindling.

And found out filmset scenarios are filled with tricks that make it seem one thing to viewers whilst being something else, just like 3D worlds in games.

The mouse driver is already part of the OS in Window and Linux.

That shit you complain about is the Adverts Delivery & Private Data Capture application.

Fucking Fascist!

The way one designs hardware in is to optimize for the most common usage scenario with enough capacity to account for the peak use scenario (and with some safety margin on top).

(In the case of silent power sources they would also include lower power leakage in the common usage scenario so as to reduce the need for fans, plus in the actual physical circuit design would also include things like airflow and having space for a large slower fan since those are more silent)

However specifically for power sources, if you want to handle more power you have to for example use larger capacitors and switching MOSFETs so that it can handle more current, and those have more leakage hence more baseline losses. Mind you, using more expensive components one can get higher power stuff with less leakage, but that’s not going to happen outside specialist power supplies which are specifically designed for high-peak use AND low baseline power consumption, and I’m not even sure if there’s a genuine use case for such a design that justifies paying the extra cost for high-power low-leakage components.

In summary, whilst theoretically one can design a high-power low-leakage power source, it’s going to cost a lot more because you need better components, and that’s not going to be a generic desktop PC power source.

That said, I since silent PC power sources are designed to produce less heat, which means have less leakage (as power leakage is literally the power turning to heat), even if the with the design having been targetted for the most common usage scenario of that power source (which is not going to be 15W) that would still probably mean better components hence lower baseline leakage, hence they should waste less power if that desktop is repurposed as a NAS. Still won’t beat a dedicated ARM SBC (not even close), but it might end up cheap enough to be worth it if you already have that PC with a silent power source.

When I had my setup with an ASUS EEE PC I had mobile external HDDs plugged to it via USB.

Since my use case was long-term storage and feeding video files to a Media TV Box, the bandwidth limit of USB 2.0 and using HDDs rather than SDDs was fine. Also back then I had 100Mbps ethernet so that too limited bandwidth.

Even in my current setup where I use a Mini-PC to do the same, I still have the storage be external mobile HDDs and now badwidth limits are 1Gbps ethernet and USB 3.0, which is still fine for my use case.

Because my use case now is long term storage, home file sharing and torrenting, my home network is using the same principles as distributed systems and modern microprocessor architectures: smaller faster data stores with often used data close to were its used (for example fast smaller SDDs with the OS and game executables inside my gaming machine, plus a torrent server inside that same Mini-PC using its internal SDD) and then layered outwards with decreasing speed and increasing size (that same desktop machine has an internal “storage” HDD filled with low use files, and one network hop from it there’s the Mini-PC NAS sharing its external HDDs containing longer term storage files).

The whole thing tries to balance storage costs and with usage needs.

I suppose I could improve performance a bit more by setting up some of the space in the internal SDD in the Mini-PC as a read/write cache for the external HDDs, but so far I haven’t had the patience to do it.

I used to design high performance distributed computing systems and funnilly enough my home setup follows the same design principles (which I had not noticed until thinking about it now as I wrote this).

Yeah, different hardware is designed for different use cases and generally won’t work as well for other use cases, which is also why desktops seldom make for great NAS servers (their fans will also fail from constant use, plus their design spec is for much higher power usage so they have a lot more power waste even if trottled down).

That said my ASUS EEE PC lasted a few years on top of a cabinet in my kitchen (which is were the Internet came into my house so the router was also there) with a couple of external HDDs plugged in, and that’s a bit of a hostile environment (because some of the particulates from cooking, including fat, don’t get pulled out and end up accumulating there).

At the moment I just have a Mini-PC on my living room with a couple of external HDDs plugged in that works as NAS, TV Media Box and home server (including wireguard VPN on top of a 1Gbps connection, which at peak is somewhat processor intensive). It’s an N100 and the whole thing has a TDP of 15W so the fan seldom activates. So far that seems to be the best long term solution, plus it’s multiple use unlike a proprietary NAS. It’s the some of the best €140 (not including the HDDs) I’ve ever spent.

Stuff designed for much higher peek usage tend to have a lot more waste.

For example, a 400W power source (which is what’s probably in the original PC of your example) will waste more power than a lower wattage on (unless it’s a very expensive one), so in that example of yours it should be replaced by something much smaller.

Even beyond that, everything in there - another example, the motherboard - will have a lot more power leakage than something designed for a low power system (say, an ARM SBC).

Unless it’s a notebook, that old PC will always consume more power than, say, an N100 Mini-PC, much less an ARM based one.

True for notebooks. (For years my home NAS was an old Asus EEE PC)

Desktops, on the other hand, tend to consume a lot more power (how bad it is, depends on the generation) - they’re simply not designed to be a quiet device sitting in a corner continuously running a low CPU power demanding task: stuff designed for a lot more demanding tasks will have things like much bigger power sources which are less efficient at low power demand (when something is design to put out 400W, wasting 5 or 10W is no big deal, when it’s designed to put out 15W, wasting 5 or 10W would make it horribly inefficient).

Meanwhile the typical NAS out there is running an ARM processor (which are known for their low power consumption) or at worse a low powered Intel processor such as the N100.

Mind you, the idea of running you own NAS software is great (one can do way more with that than with a proprietary NAS, since its far more flexible) as long as you put it in the right hardware for the job.

Theoretically the sites would have to block all IP addresses of all cloud providers, including massive ones such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, because people in Wisconsin can just run VPN Server software - which is side of the VPN were the network connections exit the encrypted tunnel and enter the Internet - in a container or virtual machine inside one those to have their own personal (or shared with whomever they want) VPN.

Similarly they would have to block all exit IPs of most companies because somebody in Winsconsin might be using the VPN of the company remotelly go to their company network and via that network access those sites and which point the connection will probably appear as originating from one of the company’s routers because of NAT.

The way the VPN technology works, theoretically every single IP address on the internet might be an exit point of a VPN which is being used by somebody in Winsconsin to access one of those sites, since one can even run VPN Server software on a mobile phone or Raspberry Pi.

Theoreticaly those sites have to block every single IP address which might directly or indirectly be used that way.

This law is completelly insane.

Given that the only way for those websites to block VPN traffic is to block the IP addresses of all known VPN exit points, what you would see is first the commercial VPN providers regularly rotating those IP addresses of their VPN server exit points, and second people simply setting up their own VPN servers software in rented VPS machines in cloud providers anywhere in the World to run their own personal VPN.

You don’t really need a full blown remote session, just a VPN server in a machine (physical or virtual) with an IP address which isn’t yet blocked by such a site.

Now, the sites might try and block this by only allowing in connections from blocks of addresses which are known to belong to ISPs (which would theoretically only be direct connections from individuals, so not using a VPN), but that’s way less reliable than merelly lists of IP addresses of the VPN servers of big providers, plus it would block thing such as the entirety of Amazon AWS.

Ok, so basically when your computer uses a VPN it just connects to a VPN server over the Internet using an encrypted TCP/IP or UDP/IP connection. On your computer side all your connections to the Internet just get shoved into that encrypted tunel instead of going directly into the whole wide world from your own network connection - so nobody but that server sees those connections - whilst on the VPN server side they’re recieved from that encrypted tunel and then exit to the whole wide world from that VPN server as if they’re connections initiated by that server not by your own machine, so to the whole world they look like connections coming from the VPN server machine.

Nations with nation-wide firewalls can try and block VPN by blocking the actual encrypted network connections to VPN servers (there are ways to recognize those, but there also ways to disguise them), but for websites to block them (which is what this legislation demands) the websites have to block the actual VPN servers since the websites can only see connections to them which seem to originate in those servers, not traffic elsewhere on the Internet such as the encrypted connections from VPN customers to VPN servers.

Now, there are lists of the IP addresses of the exit points of VPN providers (generally the VPN server internet address), which are the IP addresses were the traffic of somebody using that VPN enters the Internet, so to try to comply with this legislation those sites would start by blocking all traffic from any of those IP addresses - remember those websites don’t know were the traffic coming from a VPN server to that website really comes from, so they can’t tell traffic from people in Wisconsin using that VPN server from traffic from people elsewhere using it, hence have to block everything from it to catch everybody from Winsonsin.

This would affect everybody anywhere in the World using those exit points of those VPN providers.

Then there’s the problem that the legislation applies to all VPNs, not just commercial VPN providers serving retail customers, meaning that the websites would also theoretically have to block VPN servers from business VPNs (and given how the networks of many large companies work, that might mean blocking the entire company) as well as things like schools using VPNs and, even more entertaining, VPNs set up by individuals by, for example, renting a Virtual Private Server or physical server and installing a Linux there running their own VPN server software or even installing the VPN server software on something like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, which means they might have to block every single IP address of any provider of servers space anywhere in the World (as any Wisconsian could, theoretically, over the Internet rent a cheap VPS in, say, Malasia, and install a Linux with running the VPN server software in it) as well as of all AWS and Azure servers since again any Wisconsian could theoretically run VPN server software hosted in one of those providers.

The whole things is insane as fuck and would have some trully fucked up implications for any website that tried to comply, as well as for anybody anywhere in the world using VPNs who might want to access such sites.

If I understood it correctly, per that legislation and given how the technology works, adult sites would have to block everybody coming to them from a known VPN exit point, not matter where the user actually is (because a site can’t really tell were a user actually is when they’re behind a VPN) to comply with it, meaning that it would impact everybody everywhere in the World using a VPN.

De facto Wisconcin’s legilslature is trying to imposed their will not only on those who live in Wisconsin, not only on those who live anywhere in the US but on those who live anywhere in World.