Fumesucker
Fumesucker's Journal
Ray Lewis: The major problem with policing in the United States begins before an officer is hired
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/homepage/Ex-Philly_police_captain_blasts_American_policing.htmlFormer Capt. Ray Lewis was in Ferguson, Mo., this week, demonstrating in uniform against the decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown.
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The major problem with policing in the United States begins before an officer is hired, he said. Every recruit is put through a battery of tests, including the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test which is supposed to assess psychological fitness.
"One of the aspects of a personality is a degree of sensitivity and compassion," he said. "Unfortunately, they do not hire those people that score high on sensitivity. They reject them believing those people will quit because they can't handle the blood and guts on the street. They view that as wasted training money.
"What they don't realize is that hiring the insensitive individual is going to result in brutality cases, and when those cases go to court, that's where they lose millions," Lewis said. "It's pennywise and pound foolish."
From two minutes and twenty seven seconds to nineteen seconds: A Boot Time Odyssey
It got cold early here this year and I spent a couple of days inside playing with the computer, my internet connection got cut off for almost a full day so I had a lot of free time I would normally spend online figuring out ways to speed up my more-sluggish-than-it-should-be computer.
So I have a Dell Optiplex 755 with Quad core processor at 2.66 Ghz, 8 GB of RAM, a 1 GB PCIe x16 video card and a 160 GB SATA HD, not top of the line by today's standards but for surfing the web and playing video, home theater type stuff, maybe run Flight Simulator or rFactor a bit and do some image and video editing it's more than adequate when it's running right.
The computer had been getting really sluggish, a two minute and twenty seven second boot up (remember Win 7 Ultimate 64 bit=big), I have a tendency to try out a lot of new software and I get slack on doing a backup before, lazy, forget, in a hurry or what have you and what at one time felt like a pretty snappy computer had become really slow, uninstalling things was a hit or miss proposition, sometimes it would speed things up and other times it would slow them down.
When I first got the computer it came with the OS loaded but no install discs so I immediately made a backup image of the OS drive and carefully archived it. Rummaging through a few junk computers in the storage shed I found another 160 GB SATA drive and I installed that and restored the backup copy of my original OS disc to it. Somewhere along the line I have found a nice little utility package called Glary Utilities 5 that when it is installed includes a routine that automatically measures boot time. Glary Utilities tells me that with a fresh install on this 160 GB disc boot up takes one minute and two seconds. That's quite a difference and the computer feels at least that much faster in use as well.
But that's not the end of it, since I had a fresh copy on a HD and a confirmed backup I thought I'd play with things a bit to see if I could speed the system up even more. Glary Utilities has a defragmenter with an optimizing option that moves older files and larger files to the end of the hard drive which speeds up loading the OS for reasons I'm not entirely clear on. It also has a boot time defragmenter that will defragment the portions of your drive it is not safe to defrag while Windows is running.
After playing around with all this for about four or five hours including figuring out what tools to use and rebooting the computer a bunch of times I got my system down to thirty seven second boot as reported by Glary and it felt even quicker than it did with the fresh install before optimization.
Now this is with the 160 GB drive which is older technology and kind of slow. I also have a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda drive that's somewhat newer tech and quicker so I used EaseUS free Partition Master software to migrate the OS on the 160 GB to the 500 GB drive. After the migration and a little more cleaning up with the defrag option the very same computer that took two minutes and twenty seven seconds to boot now takes twenty nine seconds to boot the same OS, Windows 7 Ultimate.
I wrote the above a couple of weeks ago and was going to post it then but at that point I had already ordered a hardware speed-up option that had not arrived, a 32 GB Sandisk ReadyCache SSD and I decided to wait and see what that did for my system before I put it up. So anyway, with the Sandisk installed and the dedicated and proprietary to Sandisk ExpressCache software downloaded and installed my boot time is now down to nineteen seconds, that's over seven times faster than when I started.
Not only does the OS boot quicker, everything feels dramatically faster, websites that crawled on the screen before now practically snap up and programs that took an interminable wait are now there in a just a few seconds, my computer feels significantly better than when I got it.
How the M$M would cover Ferguson if it were happening in another nation
http://www.vox.com/2014/8/15/6005587/ferguson-satire-another-country-russia-china"We must use all means at our disposal to end the violence and restore calm to the region," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in comments to an emergency United Nations Security Council session on the America crisis.
The crisis began in August in Ferguson, a remote Missouri village that has been a hotbed of sectarian tension. State security forces shot and killed an unarmed man, which regional analysts say has angered the local population by surfacing deep-seated sectarian grievances. Regime security forces cracked down brutally on largely peaceful protests, worsening the crisis.
In response, ancient American tradition called for the gathering of a community tribal council known as a "grand jury" to weigh the case. On November 24, it announced there would be no charges against the responsible security forces. The stunning decision, which reflects the opaque and mysterious nature of the "grand jury" tradition, further outraged the already despondent local populace.
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A Volkswagen Golf. With 400 horsepower and AWD.
http://jalopnik.com/the-volkswagen-golf-r-400-is-much-much-faster-than-a-9-1660948880
Along with their delicious 300 horsepower and probably not U.S.-bound Golf R SportWagen, VW showed off the Golf R 400 at the LA Auto Show. Having seen it in person, I can tell you that it's properly batshit fucking crazy, and of all the cars I've seen today it's the one I most want to steal and hoon.
There's a lot to like here, like the shimmery metallic silver paint, the boxed-out fender flares, the six-speed manual (!!!) gearbox, the Recaro seats, and the neon yellow trim everywhere, including the engine. Including the engine. So magical.
The Golf R 400 is slated for production, but no word on whether it will come to the U.S. or not. I think you and I both know the answer to that. The Germans think we're all idiots in America (have you driven our Passat lately?) but we aren't. Well, a lot of us are, but some of us are alright.
CBS releases pic of Darren Wilson's injuries in the struggle with Michael Brown
Evidently razor burn is a life threatening injury.
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/537089185258414080
Thinking about upgrading my hard drive to a hybrid unit with the built in SSD
I have a Dell Optiplex 755 tower with a 2.66 Ghz quad core and 8GB RAM running Windows 7 Ultimate. The boot times with my current 160GB HD are long enough now that I have a lot of software installed that I avoid shutting down the computer quite a bit, would a hybrid HD help with the boot times?
Here is one of the drives I'm considering.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178339&SortField=0&SummaryType=0&PageSize=10&SelectedRating=-1&VideoOnlyMark=False&IsFeedbackTab=true#scrollFullInfo
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Member since: Sat Mar 29, 2008, 10:11 PMNumber of posts: 45,851