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Call data is not recorded unless and until a warrant is authorized. The government does not have access and the companies don't store it without legal process telling them to (caveat for any content recorded for a business purpose - voicemail for example). Emails and other data, on the other hand, are stored. Not by the government, but by the email provider. Serve them with a warrant and you get past and (with proper authorization) future content.

Baby Jesus knows I tried spelling it and checking the spelling and googling it and then I gave up.

He was wondering what someone would use an RT for. Even though my tablet is capable of running x86 applications, I mainly use the Metro environment, which is what someone with an RT would use, and gave some examples of what I use it for.

I canceled my Comcast because I got fed up with dealing with them and just paid my neighbors to barrow their internet. After I graduated I moved back into my parents house who have AT&T. Our current coverage with ATT costs my parents close to $100/month for internet and phone and its only 6 mbs. A few weeks ago they received a letter from ATT saying that our bandwidth will be reduced to 3 mbs and our bill will be reduced to $60/month. I talked to a comcast rep who told me that he would give me internet (25 mbs) and phone for $30/month.

Spoiler tags don't work in this subreddit. This is the usual code for it on subreddit's where it's allowed. [spoiler text](/spoiler) This doesn't work The show is also old as hell and studies have shown that spoilering a show, movie, etc. doesn't have much detriment to your enjoyment.

Better than dealing with the lady who insisted that an outstanding work order to bury a cable would necessarily affect my connection from being intermittent, when the issue had been happening for several weeks before they replaced said cable, prompting that work order to even exist. She then proceeded to say "Sir what are you not understanding?" in an extremely condescending tone. Last straw, I get this shit, you don't, don't try to tell me otherwise. At that point, I tell her that that's not how cables work, and when I asked for her supervisor, she hung up on me. You better believe I had Comcast pull that call the next day. That day, I called Verizon and switched to FIOS. Vowed never to use Comcast again. I had to get it in Chicago, though, when I moved out here. They recently decided they wanted to raise my bill 40(FORTY!) dollars a month = $480 a year. Yeah, no, not OK. RCN just started offering service in my building, so I switched and I'm extremely happy with their service. Renewed vow against Comcast. Doesn't help I get exit interviews once a week, even though I switched like 2 months ago.

Meh. Comcast probably didnt give them enough stuffs to stay in their good graces. Baltimore and the People's Republic of Merlin are fairly corrupt. [A D- as a grade from a public integrity group.]( There's a lot of lol moments to be seen. [Sheila Dixon](

1 Home Security Myth: Lock your doors People can actually pick locks and defeat this measure, so why bother? (

Not everyone works the same way. The new interface complements your style when using computers just as much as it hinders the style that others use. I tried the new interface and I didn't appreciate being pulled out of whatever I was doing on my desktop and into a full screen menu. It got in the way and slowed my work down more than anything. So I looked for third party software to restore the functionality of the UI closer to Windows 7.

What doesn't have high chance of going badly wrong? Not paying taxes would mostly caused even bigger uproar and held rest of the country as a hostage. And I don't actually think you could find your way out of your 2 party system, even with support of 50% Americans. Guns and revolt also seems like totally nuts idea (in my post I meant it mostly as a sarcasm, cause revolt is number one argument of pro-gun people) as your absurdly large military force would probably easily thwarted any attempt if it would sided with government and not people. And if military joined said revolution, you probably wouldn't need a gun anyway.

From the farmer to the end user, there are a few studies that show that ethanol has a higher carbon footprint compared to using fossil fuels. There are a few showing the opposite! With ethanol, the amount of energy required to run farm machinery, transport the matter, and then process it needs to be considered. With oil, the drilling rigs, trucks etc are considered. There was a study that actually compared the results of all the studies. Too bad I don't remember the conclusion. Let's call it a tie. Using a cellulosic feedstock requires more energy input than a corn feedstock since you need more of it and it's also a more complex process to convert it to ethanol. Cellulosic ethanol isn't feasible in my opinion. The process is more difficult than corn ethanol. I don't think we've perfected the process yet, but a big drawback with any type of ethanol production is that the distillation of ethanol and water is extremely energy intensive and capital intensive. At the end of the day you're still pumping CO2 into the atmosphere by burning ethanol. It's more expensive and worse for the environment than oil. So what is the advantage? It's renewable and potential locally made.

I'd imagine that would make it pretty difficult to sell now. Selling an account is against Twitter's ToS and i'td be pretty obvious now if he sold it, with how much exposure it has.

Hi, I also work in service provider networking. I too think that trying to build non-local mesh networks is dumb, or at least dumb if you're expecting anything that behaves comparably to the modern Internet. If you're going to disregard the opinions of anyone who has professional ties to Big Internet, you're going to be disregarding the opinions of anyone who has the experience actually doing this sort of shit.

It's not the routing method that is the issue - even if there was 0 overhead and every connection had a perfect route, the issue is in hardware. If a consumer router has 1 GB(yte)/s bandwidth, this is your bottleneck. However, most routers have listed Gb(it)/s rates - or 1/8 the amount. The reddit server likely uses 5-6 GB/s bandwidth at peek times. Meaning you would need at least 6 routers in the immediate area of the server handling no other traffic, which really means more like 20-30 routers all with their own independently connected paths through the network that don't bottle neck anywhere. A mesh network is great for low bandwidth applications (text chat for example), but horrendous for much else - unless every user has 5ish grande in networking hardware sitting in their garage to act as a node. Wireless also has it's own problems - interfierience. There is a finite number of routers that can sit in the same area without experiencing massive negative results. So just throwing more hardware at the problem doesn't make it go away, and can actually further reduce the available bandwidth or greatly increase latency and as a result time outs.

What happens when the phone loses power? nothing. normally the blocks are held on by permanent magnets. when you want to remove a block an electromagnet turns on polarized opposite to the permanent magnet, canceling out the field of the permanent magnet.

Here is the law]( Article 12: Service provider must keep the information about the subscribers and services provided up-to-date. The information must be kept for three years and be available to the authorized law enforcement agencies in article #3 remotely 24/7. It's effective starting from January 2006. It's the foundation for SORM-3. The previous SORM-2 was based on the law from 90s and it does not require remote access. Even though the SORM-3 foundation law is in effect it's FSB that actually declares the implementation deadline. It took five years just to write technical specifications, then it took a year or two to create the hardware and then the providers are pushing back because they have to pay for the upgrade from SORM-2 to SORM-3.

It's always nice to generalize isn't it? Make life easier. Of course you omit the fact that you're a redditor yourself and that this idea of redditors trusting Russia is pretty unfounded.

Qwest is on my permanent shitlist. The sales guy told me mom that her new cellphone would work in Mexico, and if it didn't then she could cancel her plan, no problem. The phone didn't work in Mexico. Oh, they let her cancel. They also charged her $200 for ending her contract early. I don't remember if she paid it off immediately, or if she made them wait, but she did pay it. A year later, a collection agency tries to collect on the $200 again. She hunted down the copy of her bank statement that showed that she paid. Next year it happens again, only now the banking statement is so far in the past that she can't get her bank to produce another copy from the archives.

My basic assumption is all buyers in the market are rational who have performed a cost-benefit analysis on all options and have settled on the best value proposition. I realize this basic assumption is crap because your average buyer is nowhere near aware of what options even exist (outside of GS5 and iPhone). And neither is your average buyer anywhere near rational, especially with smartphones which are often equated to this generations' car - that one personal effect that shows off your personality.

Without sharing all the details on our business plan (because I'm not certain I'm allowed to "publish" our pricing) I can say that our numbers were similar. We have 10 lines, all smartphones (a mix of android and iPhone 4s's) and two iPads with cell service. Six of our lines are tether-capable, and four of our employees regularly go over their data limits ($10 additional per 1 GB of data over 5GB). We did need to have two "sets" of plans, because the business groups also max out at 5 lines (tablets don't count, iirc). We buy new phones on contract prices, so those numbers aren't taken into account, but for just the plans, we would have paid roughly the same amount for 10 GBs of monthly data, while we were using close to 30 GBs each month. Each month would have come with roughly $200 in overages. Without sharing data, we pay for 50 GB's, plus usually another $30-$40 for overages. If we make the math easy, and say $150 a month in overages, over two years that's $3600, which more than makes up the difference between your two plans. Also consider, you spent 2960 on devices when you could have spent $1000 if you paid the contract price. Sadly, paying the Iron Price isn't an option yet. You saved money in part because you reduced your data cap from 15 GB to 10GB, and you don't go over. Consider that, all other things being equal, you're saving roughly 21% of your bill over 2 years, but you're buying 33% less data. Also note that I didn't account for activation charges. Those are bullshit upfront charges intended to trick you into getting on to their Next plans. If you look at the official AT&T calculations, they count the activation charge twice, because they are adding the activation charge of your next phone. You pay that charge if you want to switch back to a contract, and you won't pay that charge if you want to switch to one of the Next plans. So obviously everyone ought to look at their own situations and pick the best plan for them. But do your homework, and read the fine print (which obviously you did).

I worry that if we force-combine the idea of Title II with Net Neutrality, the nuance of these two positions are permanently lost and they each become weaker. They're two different things. I, for example, am very pro Net Neutrality but against Title II as a path there. Especially because Title II doesn't ban fast lanes - it only guarantees that fast lanes must be available fairly to all players. Also, we can "reel in" companies by enacting programs that better encourage competition. When you enact Title II, you basically put an end to capex-based investment growth and startup competition because the ability to make money and asses risk in a common carrier regulatory environment is extremely difficult. And I know there's little competition now, but it'll get worse. Not better. Plus, when you're Title II, you have to ask the FCC for permission to grow/change/adjust. It's not like Europe or Asia. We have a very different system of core infrastructure development that isn't likely to see an overhaul anytime soon. So be prepared with Title II for new innovation in the network to come very slowly.

I propose the branding of a term to define what net neutrality is fighting against – this would simplify the concept by providing an opposing side. “Stop Net Partisanship” – the separation of online traffic into tiers where Internet service providers create preference for sites that serve their own agenda, usually through monetary gain Then rebrand net neutrality as a fight for equality, freedom and liberty - keep the name though, as it is recognizable. Net Neutrality – “Freedom of the web, equality for all.” Make clear the most important elements of net neutrality so that the general public understands what is at stake: Entry Equality: companies, groups, and people of all backgrounds have the same opportunity for site creation on the net Liberty for Choice: page popularity determined by preference of internet users, not by wealth Internet Transparency: freedom of information in that all ideas, beliefs, knowledge, etc. is accessible on the web and is given preference only by the users, not the provider

much rather keep, net neutrality. But open internet is ok. a lot of people have heard the term net neutrality already, just a ton still dont understand what it means and why it is important. saying "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" and someone saying "never heard of apples" it doesnt help further the idea to say "ok lets call them red oranges instead".. no you need to tell them why eating fruit is good for you. My fear is rebranding will set up back. The new term will have to filter into the publics consciousness and then we will have to teach them what it means. and some people who sorta know net neutrality, will be suspicious over the rebranding. I'd rather educate on the term net neutrality. I do think we need to stop talking of fast lanes and talk more of taxes and toll booths, and double payments. thats WHAT NEEDS TO BE REBRANDED. some people here "fast lanes" and think thats AWESOME. MY landlord loves her cat videos.. and sometimes youtube glitches and slows down which has nothing to do with her bandwith but she went and got the fastest anyways despite me telling her how it was and how i can fix it somewhat.. She would jump at supporting fast lanes for "major services" like youtube. now she has another site he likes, a guy who takes massive picts of birds.I try to tell her, despite he pays his internet bill, and she pays hers, every isp in the country wants to charge him another fee, so their own customers can see his work, which they can do right now, without that fee.. and while youtube can afford the "fast lane" taxes, he might not be able to, and he might be regulated to the slow lanes. and days when his page lows slow, do to net "weather"(er problems not on her end) will be the norm, and not rare.(not really but see as cameras can take even higher res, if he is regulated to the slow lane he might not be able to share without slowing down his site)

I sometimes use the word "retard" as in "they're trying to retard the internet." I believe that the internet could be the savior of mankind. There are more people on earth than forever before and we are depleting and misusing our resources. This is not a sustainable trend and may cause large portions of our population to die off. The Internet could change that as it allows people to communicate faster and wider than ever before. It could allow us to crowd source our worldly problems and solve them with greater efficiency. The Internet could, in the future, allow humanity to act as a whole, or at least more united than it is currently, to overcome global resource and climate problems while continuing to flourish and expand. We could save the environment, create jobs, be healthier, feed the children, continue to innovate, and all do those other great things simultaneously. We just need better networking. Individual humans can't move mountains and rivers but organised systems of humans can. The collective action of all of those systems of humans could be seen as a larger organism. Currently that organism isn't quite self-aware. It is divided. Many of its members are malnourished and unhappy. If the cells of your body acted nations and companies do toward each other you'd be pretty sick. Autoimmune diseases come to mind. The meta-human needs to become aware of itself as an entity before it can control it's behavior. Currently we are in the early development of this meta-human. It's got a decent body and the nerve tissue is starting to come online. It would be great if that meta-human grows up healthy and can make decisions and think properly. By inhibiting the free and fast flow of communication through the net we are, I believe, damaging the future cognitive abilities of our greater self. Fetal alcohol syndrome could be an analogy. That's why net neutrality is important. I believe that this growth and meta-decision making is inevitable in some form or another. It's going to happen. If we Americans don't choose to join in the rest of humanity will and leave us behind. Our Internet would be unable to make decisions and incite action at the rate and quality of other systems and we would be out-competed. We the People of America will have a defective next-level mind if we continue to strangle the flow of our Internet. We would be retarded. Retarded is no-longer a politically correct term but it may be exactly the word for the job. It is shocking and crass and nobody want's thier child to be retarded. It's an attention-getter. It could help people make the connection between an internet system and a conscious mind with a single word. I hope that made sense in some way, I am by no means a scholar on the topic but I think I'm decent at pattern recognition and extrapolation.

That's a limitation imposed for safety. I know it's not a winning idea, but I'd rather see an exchange of ideas take place to extend progress. It's what the internet is about after all: connecting people so we can talk more, share mode, trade more, know more, etc. I think the real problem here is that the current business model guns for two objectives: squeezing a stone for profit and giving those who pay an advantage. The concept behind my idea is that we need to make it clear that the internet in its entirety is a type of transportation, just like driving or flying. There are idiosyncrasies riddled throughout, but the core concept is what needs to be defended right now. Think of it like your power company. Would it ever make sense for your neighbour to get charged a different rate? A counter argument: consider postal companies, priority shipping costs extra, generally due to the increased service demand(less waiting). Why can't the concept be applied to the internet? Response: The money spent applying the same concepts to network traffic would be much better spent upgrading the infrastructure, since prioritization eats up overhead, adding more lanes means better efficiency for everyone.

I'm sorry, but the reality of the situation is it's the responsibility of the people proposing a bill to sell the idea to both fellow congresspeople and the their constituents at large. Unfortunately the bulk of the population don't know enough about the internet to easily digest arguments, and sadly an even larger number just don't care enough to do research. For both parties they need to be told WHY they should care and WHY they should vote on the issue, and frankly you can't rely on having a lot of time to do this. In magic pixie land where everyone researches every issue and makes informed votes, certainly this is a terrible waste of time. But in the present grimy reality, the contingent of votes that swing an issue can be won by simply phrasing the idea. Being able to present your idea quickly, concisely, and effectively is absolutely vital to winning, especially against a vested opponent using the same tactics. Frankly I see this as a good sign, that proponents of Net Neutrality care enough about the issue that they're getting practical , it shows me they're prepping for a potentially real fight as opposed to limply discussing the issue and saying "oh no we lost how sad" when the inevitable happens.

Frame it in a similar manner to power generation/distribution (the power grid). Net neutrality is "everyone shares the same power lines", but at the same time, "everyone is also free to CHOOSE their own power provider". The MOST EXPENSIVE part of any internet service is the last-mile (the cable that goes into the back of your house and connects to cable company on the other end). The reason for this is primarily the difficulty in acquiring right-of-way to actually string wires around people's neighborhoods. That "difficulty" is what allows the cable companies to push out any thought of a competitor in most markets. Take that away from them. Seperating (and "commercializing" with rate increase restrictions similar to obamacare insurers) the actual "last mile internet" grid would make "internet traffic passthru" companies significantly more profitable, while somewhat socializing the largest expense (at minimal but nonzero profit margin).

I’d say the term “Net Neutrality” is very poorly defined. The FCC says [this]( > The principle of the Open Internet is sometimes referred to as "net neutrality." Under this principle, consumers can make their own choices about what applications and services to use and are free to decide what lawful content they want to access, create, or share with others. This openness promotes competition and enables investment and innovation. This is pretty ambiguous though. Consumers will generally have a choice regardless of what the content provider is paying in costs. “Fastlane” Net Neutrality is the proposed set of policies in front of the FCC right now. These policies prohibit “commercially unreasonable” agreements between ISPs and content providers and require that the Internet not sustain any harm with these agreements. However, these policies would allow for a “Fastlane” assuming that it is “commercially reasonable” to the content provider. [Here]( is the document proposing these policies. As it stands now, the FCC is considering these policies as compatible with net neutrality. Advocates will suggest that content providers sponsoring a “Fastlane” will get a new pipe separated from other traffic. Because completely new access was given to the sponsor, the service level for other content providers is improved because the traffic of the sponsor has been removed. While the Fastlaned traffic would have a service guarantee with a minimum level of throughput and speed. This would mean consumers could reduce their service plans and still get adequate video streaming because video streaming is subsidized for the provider. Opponents of this suggest that ISPs would have no reason to create a new pipe for sponsors and that these deals will cannibalize the “Slowlane”. They also feel that the subjective nature of what is “commercially reasonable” will be abused and harm the ability of new startups to compete with established providers. Paid Peering Net Neutrality is currently how the internet functions now. Content providers* will pay for a fee based on the amount of data they push into a network. If a content provider wants to push significantly more data into a network than their network is accepting, content provider will pay a fee for the asymmetric peering. This process does not prioritize data inside the network, but allows data to easily enter it, making it faster for the end user. [Streaming Media Blog]( does a much better job of explaining this. Advocates claim that content providers are responsible for covering the cost of any interconnect deals they make based on the amount of data they are sending. The cost of the deal should be decided exclusively on the amount of data they are moving and the practicality of peering. *Content providers normally hire out a 3rd party transit provider. I’m saying “content provider” because the content provider chooses to hire a transit provider. Strong Net Neutrality is the idea that peering large networks should be free for the content provider because it benefits both parties. Advocates suggest that ISPs should provide any data the end user requests. Costs of transporting the data should be covered by the end user’s service plan. Netflix is an advocate and has a [nice blog post]( on this. I’ve also heard people use net neutrality in some other weird contexts that don’t really relate. But they definitely add to the confusion. People sometimes confuse the right to be forgotten law as a violation to net neutrality in the EU. Others will suggest that the government regulating intellectual property and child porn is a violation of net neutrality. Neither of which relate to the problem at hand here. Because net neutrality can mean so many things, even [Comcast can claim]( to be a supporter of it.

It is an American politician asking for help rebranding something she can take to the American congress. She isn't taking it to the UN. You start by getting one thing passed before tackling the next hurdle. Adding "for the whole world" adds an extreme amount of complications that could halt the whole process to begin with. Especially with our congress that hasn't done jack shit but try to sue the president.

But the opposition is taking the term under it's wing. Using it even to get persuade people to their side. You're right that it is also a generational barrier. But HOW do you get them to bother being educated about it? You can't just throw information at someone who doesn't care. That is another reason why it would require a better catch phrase. "Net neutrality" might not spark any interest, but "data discrimination" might.

People don't want a calm and reasonable argument about policy, people would rather have the s*** scared out of them. net neutrality as a brand is failing because fairness, ... technology, blah blah ... zzz... sorry i almost fell asleep typing it. The target audience is not people who are reasonable and tech savvy. Those people already believe in net neutrality. We need to appeal to people who don't care about technology, and/or do not care about reasoning. Possible target audiences: Conservative Christians People who hate regulations Casual internet users For the conservative christians out there, those who probably vote republican and think ISPs are run by the hand of Jesus, need to be scared. They're already scared by nature (they think a man in the sky will burn them if they look at porn) so we need to appeal to fear. Fear that somebody bad is out to get them. Who do these folks fear the most? Satan. What do these people associate with Satan? Porn, drugs, basically any vice you can think of. So we need to tell them: big porn companies are going to pay for faster internet to get their kids illegal drug dealers and prostitutes on Silk Road are going to pay for fast internet access and ruin their families Satan will use his money to buy all the best internet and leave nothing for Jesus Even though people who hate regulations are going to hate this no matter what, there's one thing that unites everybody: people hate paying money. By saying that amazon, facebook and other services are going to shut down or force people to pay money will get people riled up. We may not have evidence one way or the other, but if we start a rumor it will have an impact. This has worked in the past. People sent out chain mails that were forwarded all over the internet in 1999 saying Congress was going to tax email. It was a total lie, but it got people riled up. People spread the word. After receiving that email in their mailbox they googled it (like i did) and they found out more about it, or they just blindly believed it and forwarded it to their friends. Either way, the message got out. So, those are my strategies for rebranding Net Neutrality. It's a multi-pronged approach, and it stretches the truth a little, but that's what makes good marketing. Honesty, unfortunately, does not sell t-shirts. You know what sells? "Swag" t-shirts. What person with actual swag would wear a t-shirt saying "swag"? Sometimes you have to stretch the truth to get someone's attention.

that's really just one part of tor. you can have websites that are just inside the tor network, places like silk road. but you can also use tor to browse the regular old internet. except now all of your activity is anonymized through the tor network. let's say your wife is fairly savvy with computers and she works at your isp or something. she doesn't like you watching porn. so what you can do if you're ultra paranoid is open up your tor browser or go into the tor network and surf through youporn or redtube or whatever to your hearts content. you'll send packets into the tor network that says "hey gimme the stuff that's on youporn sincerely me_at_address_whatever" tor network wraps your request in multiple envelopes, sends that letter off to the first random relay in the tor network, that relay opens it up finds another envelope that says send me to random person2 inside the tor network, this goes on a number of times until someone opens the envelope that tells them to send it to a random exit node. the exit node gets the envelope opens it up and reads "hey gimme that stuff that's on youporn.com sincerely me_at_address_whatever" the exit node goes off to youporn grabs the info on the website, wraps that up in a bunch of envelopes and sends it off to some random person in the tor network. process repeats until someone opens it up and reads "hey this is the youporn website info, send this to me_at_address_whatever" they send that back to you, and boom now you have the front page of youporn. you click on a video, and that sends a request into the tor network asking "hey gimme the info from this youporn website with this link" process repeats. that's what it looks like from the inside, now your crazy overly attached wife working at your isp however, will only see that you sent a bunch of packet requests to some random people who happen to be in the tor network. for all she knows you're exchanging emails for cookie recipes.

So, they go around the world, dig out every single cable ever laid ever (additional ever) and shut down every single local ISP and guard/trash their devices. Then yes, that would be an option for local networks. Otherwise, the cables are all there, rebuilding it is little effort if there is no active police/military presence that knows how to prevent what you are trying to do.

Actually, having worked in the telecommunications business, the costs are heavy on the sales and administrative side. The costs for equipment are capital costs, and while a particular area may be paid for, they are always upgrading somewhere, so there is a steady flow of equipment costs too. Looking at their financials, I should invest. 16B in Revenue Cost of Service: 4.7B, So that is the expense of the network. 25% of revenue Selling and Admin 6.3B, so like I said, more in admin than equipment. Another 2B in other, this could be ammortization of equipment, not sure if that was included in cost of service or not $700M in taxes. They had some other financial things (dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not an accountant) leaves them with $2.5B in Profit, pretty good, just over 15% of their revenue, so pretty nice if you can get, but not really price gouging either. EDIT: Microsoft is 19% of Revenue, Amazon lost money Exxon is 11% of Revenue, But they have 75% of revenue going into cost of service. Facebook is 25% of Revenue

There are a few things wrong in all this. The people complaining are responding to more than the shirt. They are making a tacky shirt into an avatar for an issue. The ire directed at this scientist is not commensurate with the tackiness of the shirt, and I feel very bad for anyone whose clothing comes to represent something like this. But on the same token the issue that people are complaining about is absolutely a real issue. My younger, less sympathetic, straight white male between the ages of 18 and 49 self would have chosen this opportunity to decry political correctness run amok. In recent years, I've seen how some women (my wife, friends, colleagues, etc) are marginalized by small degrees particularly in traditionally dude-ified fields, and I can understand where some people get frustrated and angry in a diffuse kind of way. Every so often, someone sees something that attracts more attention than the background level bullshit that they put up with on a day-to-day basis, and all of that accreted suffering pours out.

And it's thinking like this that continues to bury it. Look, we all know the US Government (and most governments around the world, for that matter) is a sputtering carcass of its former self, ripe with corruption and often utterly incompetent. Our democracy is broken, we know. But here is a chance for us to possibly affect some sort of change. We, the people, outnumber the government 500,000:1 and if we all believe in this and act on it, it just might work. But this mentality of "the government is broken already, I'm just going to eat chips and sit on my couch and watch the world collapse" is not going to help anyone (least of all your couch). What if we all actually call our representatives, what if we all actually go out into the streets, what if we can all actually change this? It's important to remain hopeful.

One deals with money. One deals with actual people being oppressed. It's easy to point to internment or Jim Crow laws and claim them to be oppressive and terrible. It's much harder to point to something like Citizen's United which, having the benefit of a politically coercive name, deals with something you can't touch and isn't tangible. Sure, it's easy to pick up a dollar bill but when you think about money what you're really thinking about is the principle behind money, which is trust. If you were to ask someone on the street which one seems worse, free flow of money or internment/Jim Crow laws you'd most likely get the response claiming internment or Jim crow laws is worse. This is why Citizen's United is probably the worst case ruling in US history. It's insidious and masks the manipulation and corruption it enables with the thinker's imagination of being in the position of the CEO who could use Citizen's United to further their own subjective social morays. Which is why things like Jim Crow laws and forcible oppression never last. It's easy to rally behind causes that aim to degrade those kinds of practices. The most insidious form of oppression is convincing someone that a specific policy or idea is in their best interest when it's actually not. That's politics and you can always pick out the clever politicians by looking at how they word their proposed legislation - usually this comes in forms of legislation developed by think tanks who employ psychologists, behaviorists, and lawyers. Mind, language, and behavior. On a tangent; I have a personal belief this is why philosophy has been so demonized and pointed to as irrelevant. At its heart the science of philosophy is a search for wisdom which translates into the search for understanding. You can further extrapolate that along with understanding comes the ability to critically reason. So when you hear someone say "philosophy is irrelevant" what they're really saying is "critical reason is irrelevant". The only reason someone would claim critical reason is irrelevant is if they fear not being able to manipulate others. Sorry about the wall of text :/

That's pretty interesting, especially how much people pay annually. It kind of makes me depressed thinking about it lol. I probably waste so much money on my phone that I could be putting towards something else. I use T-mobile's PayAsYouGo with a Sidekick Plan. It's 15¢/minute and $1/day for unlimited e-mail, texting, IM and Web Browsing. I typically spend $40/month, which is saving me tons more than when I was using VirginMobile (the only other PayAsYouGo which is good in my area...yes, I live in the mountains.) The phone was pretty worth it, I think. I really like it anyhow. I'm glad I got it over the G1--which is pretty, don't get me wrong! I just don't think I'd use most of the features. I was going to get an iPhone, and then I found out AT&T is awful in my area, so I went with getting the iPod Touch instead. It's so far my favorite MP3 player. :) I just wish it had camera and mic capability like the iPhone has. Honestly, though? If it cost me less in the long-run and if the coverage were wider I'd have stayed with VirginMobile. I miss my Kyocera Wild Card. :( It was a way cute little qwerty phone. Up the road I think I'm gonna get the Sidekick LX with an actual plan. T-mobile has better coverage in my area than VirginMobile, and one of the only really solid things about using cellphones with plans is it helps you build up credit when you have none. Edit: Probably

I agree, but some of that is better with the new BBs. The new BB app store takes care of #1 and part of #3 (it's not quite as good as apple's, but it's getting much better) Pocketbook is mostly crap, but with googlesync on top of it, it's not too shabby... I don't really use my address book on my computer too much though, so it's not a huge issue for me. The Storm media player is hands down better than the 8830, and it's actually pretty respectable overall. Movies look amazing on that screen too. I almost got an iPhone, but I didn't want to leave VZW for ATT because... well... it's ATT and they were going to charge me more than VZW for less features (plus everyone I know is on VZW = free calling/txt). Once the iPhone comes over to VZW I'm going to have a big decision to make on what to get as my next phone. But who knows, maybe the Storm 2 will surprise some people.

You asked, so here goes: By breaking an article into small segments on multiple pages, it does a couple things. Most importantly, it keeps any ads that appear on the site "above the fold". In other words, since the page isn't very long, all of the ads will actually be visible on the page immediately upon loading. That explains why there is such a small amount of it per page, but why so many pages? It's simple, really. Again, we're back to increasing overall page views, but even more important than that, it allows a whole lot of ads to be loaded per user. See, there are two main methods of web ad placement: cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-impression (CPM - the "M" in this case referring to the Roman numeral as pricing is based on blocks of 1,000). Personally, I think that CPM is a waste of money on the web because there is no guarantee that the user will even see the ad let alone click on it (hence the short pages - a way to "guarantee" that the user has a chance to see the ad without scrolling). CPC is a much better way to go about it because the ad will still load (thereby essentially getting impressions for free) and you can track what users do once they click on the ad and come to your site ... but I digress. By having more ads load per user via more page views, not only is a client's ad more likely to be seen (a supposed benefit to the client) but it also means that their prepaid impressions are eaten up faster (a definite benefit to the website). As far as the pricing being different on different pages of an article - it just depends on their pricing structure. All ad prices are variable based on how targeted you want to be with your content. Say, for instance, that you work for a tourism bureau marketing your city online as a vacation destination. So you go to, say, TripAdvisor.com to purchase ads. Now you have a couple choices. You can advertise ROS (run-of-site), content targeted, or geo-targeted. ROS just means that your ad can turn up in any ad space on the site at any time during your campaign. That's almost always the cheapest option as there is no targeting involved. But let's say that you have a rival destination where you want your ads to show up specifically. Those would be content-targeted ads and therefore more expensive. In addition, you can geo-target users based on where they physically are located to display ads for your destination to them. I'm sure that sites that have multi-page articles probably have at least a two-level ad pricing structure with the landing page of the article being more valuable than the interior pages (after all, a large percentage will bounce after the landing page). There are other factors that can affect pricing such as demographics. But really, once you started getting that targeted, your potential pool gets so small that it's hardly worth it (and it can get REALLY expensive if you get too carried away). So there you go. It's all very interesting and you start to see why websites work the way that they do - especially when their entire business model is based on ad revenue.

downlink data speeds can hit 100 megabits per second" Oh my, excess data charges. If you take one of Australia's wireless plans, with a "cap" of 200 megabytes and excess of 25 cents per megabyte: (200 megabytes) / (100 (megabits per second)) = quota gone in 16 seconds Run this connection at full speed for 1 minute, and you have excess charges of $137.50, on top of your monthly fee of $29.95

As far back as the 1950s, John von Neumann, the mathematician, is said to have talked about a “singularity” — an event in which the always-accelerating pace of technology would alter the course of human affairs. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge, a science fiction writer, computer scientist and math professor, wrote a research paper called “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era.” With the genesis of the idea of 'singularity' it gave the human hive mind a tangible, if not ultimate, goal of technology. Up until the notion entered the colloquial there wasn't a goal for technology. A life extended here, work made easier there, etc.. As for "basis in reality": Look back 10 years That is only in desktop PC components, however, the technology to make the current hardware has also progressed exponentially, and it is not only used to make PC hardware. Think of death as a curable disease. Before the advent of modern medicine todays curable disease were accepted as just part of life in the same way we view death today. Also, what better motivator is there? As for "...or is it basically just a religion focused on avoiding the fear of death?" There is no dogma, or rituals so it's not a religion. But, I know what you're getting at. Is it just a self-delusion like all religions are? Well, to answer that you have to be willing to give up a lot of tribal loyalties of thinking. There are a unimaginable amount of obstacles, tangible ones though, that will have to be overcome before we get anywhere close to singularity. Problems with technology that hasn't even been invented, or even imagined yet. For instance: Artificial Intelligence (AI). We don't even have a way to teach (program) a computer to learn in the human fashion, yet. But after that, there is the problem of giving meaning to the data, otherwise it's just a big difference engine. That's is just one of the many aspirations of humanities thinkers towards singularity. I hope that answers your question.

Yeah, it may just be. But that is with a track record of the storm and storm 2 which pretty much sucked as well as the bolds, which are good - for a targeted audience. Even if is their best phone, its still half as fast and half the screen resolution as every other flagship phone out right now. If RIMM really wants to get back in the game, they need to take the great thing coming from phones from apple, htc, samsung, motorola etc, and add the thing they are great with - keyboards, BBM, enterprise-related integration - and come up with a true superphone. You tell me the torch has 512-768 MB ram, a 800x400+ resolution screen AND a blackberry keyboard and I'll be willing to forgo their subpar app selection but as of now, their one useful feature for me (a student) is having a nice keyboard, which frankly, with the advent of swype and other alernatives to crappy virtual keyboards, combined with being on AT&T makes me not even think about lusting for or even considering wanting it.

I agree that sites like Facebook (and Reddit) are constantly at risk of becoming a thing of the past. Just look what happened to Digg--a couple bad moves in a short period of time, and now Reddit has assumed the social news throne. But the reasoning here is far from convincing. The fact that this author called the AOL disaster is irrelevant; these are different companies and the internet is very different from the way it was in 2000. Furthermore, the News Corp. acquisition of MySpace bombed because the site then stagnated. The new management invested nothing in improving and changing the product until it was too late. Finally, [Facebook is profitable. VERY profitable.]( So, all those points about pretending to be profitable are rubbish.

The point is that the deaf are completely ignored when it comes to our accessibility to basic things. Nobody says it would be fine if a shop discriminated against black people or gay people; the counterargument of "just don't shop there" is abhorred by anyone but the most hardcore Randroid. So why does the "just don't use (that service)" discount the accessibility needs of the deaf?

That is an open legal question. It does at least to some degree but I am not an expert on ADA law so I'm not sure how it falls out. There is a rule of civil procedure that binds the lawyer who filed this case that says the case is "warranted by existing law or by a nonfrivolous argument for extending, modifying, or reversing existing law or for establishing new law." F. R. Civ. Pro. 11(b)(2). If this rule is violated the lawyer can be sanctioned up to and including the loss of his license to practice law.

Apple didn't "win." This title is misleading because Apple took out an injunction against Samsung selling their tablet in Europe. An injunction is a temporary measure that has immediate effect; a judge will usually grant an injunction if it maintains the status quo. If Samsung had already been selling their tablet, the injunction would probably not have been granted.

If Windows has well-written drivers, the libraries don't fuck up. Even Windows Vista is stable and secure if the drivers are, which is the whole reason people were having bad experiences with it when it first came out (hint: Windows 7 uses these same drivers). On a Hackentosh, if the available drivers are funky the whole thing is as well. On Ubuntu, same deal. Windows has a fucktonne of cash poured into it to make sure it's as stable as it can be, which is good considering it's most often used in a corporate environment.

Who cares? Apple ripped off alt-Tabbing, which is a great idea (technically it's been available for a long, long time through 3rd-party, even pre-OSX, and I think Apple actually bought it from a 3rd party OSX developer, like Cover Flow). It took them awhile, but they also took resizing from any window border in Lion finally. In the original iPhone keynote Jobs talked about bringing the mouse to computers as a revolution by Apple, but it was a Xerox invention they bought. Surface by Microsoft was actually developed in part by a good friend I went to high school with, it's not like Bill Gates just dreamed it up one day. If companies borrow things from each other or push each other to improve I don't see what the big deal is. If Dell came out with a laptop that looked and was built almost exactly like a MacBook, that's one thing, but if Apple design pushes Dell to refine their designs in the same vein, great. Makes things better for everyone. EDIT:

Just because he wrote a statement that HIS Administration wont use it, doesn't mean future Administrations wont, also that statement doesn't make it any less of a law, its just something he put in there to cover his ass and if he redacts that statement there's nothing wrong with that. Imagine if Newt wins these elections, do you really think he wont use these powers to full effect? The fact that this law (lobbied by private security firms) is even in existence when there's problems like the School System, Medicare, Unemployment, and Health Insurance just shows how corrupt and bought our government really is.

It is because 0 based counting only makes sense for arrays in computer science. If I have three distinct items, most people would say item #1, item #2, and item #3. Arrays in C and other computer languages are really an abstraction of computer memory. An array access such as A[k] means "an object of size s bytes at location A + ks", so A[0] is accessing memory stored at A + 0, A[1] is accessing memory stored at A + s, A[2] is storing A + 2s and so on. It just became convention to have arrays start at 0 because it is closer to the machine, but other languages such as Lua start arrays with 1.

I posted this in the other Paperman thread... but I'd like to say it again. Maybe I'm hoping it will be a catalyst. Maybe I just want to get it off my chest. I don't really know, honestly. Sigh... This film does something to me when I watch it, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel. I'm a decent guy. A seven out of ten, if we're going by numerical ratings. I'm attractive, I'm intelligent, I'm successful enough to take care of myself, and I'm in a relationship with a beautiful, intelligent girl. Yet, something in this animation pulls at my heartstrings and makes me draw parallels to my own life. It makes me dream of a day when something magical happens to me, throwing all of my routines and comforts into an upset... an upset that's somehow guaranteed to change my life for the better. Maybe it's the character design. The guy looks a bit like me, and the girl... well, those eyes and those mannerisms evoke a sense of longing in me. Maybe it's the job the guy holds, or his obvious desire to do something more meaningful with his life. Maybe it's just the touch of the inexplicable passing through his life... that amazing moment when he encounters something that his educated, skeptical mind can't explain. I'm projecting, of course. Still. I dream.

IGN is a bunch of idiots. Their article is totally wrong on the key point there. The game IS an MMO, in the context of its network needs/demands. The game servers run much of the simulation, feeding that data back to the client. It's not just "connect to see if you have a valid license", the gameplay logic is on the servers. Just like WoW or some other MMO RPG. Sure, it's doing the DRM thing as well -- just like WoW does. But it's also moving a lot of data back and forth from the servers, and relying on them to make the game work. They've said that they had to do this to make the simulation work. I can't say how true that might be, I don't know how their simulation core engine scales or runs. But from what I've seen, it really doesn't seem all that massively complex. EA sucks for not making clear what people were getting in their purchase. SimCity has a long legacy of being a single player game, and most people would expect they'd get just that. The fact that they didn't communicate this, and the fact that EA didn't have a clue how to scale up server farms for what was effectively an MMO launch, is totally and 100% their failure. The game itself isn't bad; I've been able to play it without problems early in the mornings. There are some design decisions I don't care for (the size of a city being one), but the regional concept, as implemented, is decent. The game doesn't let you build New York City... but it does allow you to build a economic & tourist powerhouse like lower Manhattan, which doesn't have the resources to maintain itself, and set it up to suck services from working class, industrial towns like Queens or the Bronx. The satellites provide power, sewage, workforce, affordable housing, and industry so that the "star" gets to be all pristine and nice. Pretty realistic.

Co-op is generally accomplished on consoles / televisions by removing large areas of game rendering / changing aspect ratio; which means you are customarily playing together at one of the following: Combined screen, with restricted camera control Side-by-side using 8x9 ratio Top-bottom using 32x9 ratio Top-bottom using 32x9 ratio and drastically increased FOV to compensate; rare due to hardware limitations and lack of resolution. The screen real estate for televisions isn't as large as you think it is either, around 20-25% for a 50" vs two 24.6" computer monitors. They also have the severe gaming disadvantage of large input delays by comparison; most standard LCD/LED televisions have 30-50ms lag times for color picture as compared to 5ms for monitors, which equates to an additional layer of frustration when playing high speed games(amplified by internet latency where applicable). Cost-for-cost the difference aren't great for PC towers anymore either. Decent towers / monitor / peripherals that outperform current generation consoles by leaps and bounds cost around $700, corresponding to $1400~ for two person co-op. Good color profile 50" televisions, console and similar peripherals regularly pass this amount.

I usually just lurk, but I made an account because I have some firsthand experience working for AOL. I'm not a long-time employee or anything, but I was hired as a freelance photographer and writer when Patch was first getting started. I made about $12,000 in two months from my AOL checks doing rather minimal work. If there was any doubt in your mind left that AOL is a poorly-run company, let me help you with that. I was paid to visit local businesses, photograph their exteriors, and interview employees to get information about the business. Then I would upload the information about the business (hours of operation, is the dress casual, formal?, do they have a website?, etc.) and the photos. I was paid $12.50 per listing. That's $100 for eight listings. A reasonable salary given the amount of work required if done correctly. When I started, I tried to do a good job. Taking good photos at careful angles, and always going in and trying to get people to cooperate. But getting people to cooperate was hard. I didn't have a uniform or a card or anything, so a lot of people were suspicious, even though it's essentially free advertising for their business. So I said "Fuck it. I'm here to make money." I stopped going inside and I stopped taking good pictures. I would drive to a strip mall with my camera and walking quickly around the parking lot, snap several pictures of each store front. This would take about ten minutes, at most, and I would have the photos for about 20 businesses. Boom, that's $250. Then when I got home, I would figure out what each business was and put all the information together. I could see the hours of operation in the photos usually, and really, is one nail salon really that different from the next? Did I really need to go inside and try to explain to some vietnamese or korean who barely speaks English what the fuck Patch.com is? I wouldn't say I did a bad job, but I was definitely cutting corners. Each listing had a ton of fields to complete, but I didn't have to fill all of them out to complete the listing. If I had the hours, a basic one paragraph description that told what the business was, and a couple other basic fields like "category," it was fine and I got my $12.50. That whole process took me between 1-5 minutes for each business, to write a shitty paragraph and upload my shitty pictures. The part that took me the longest was getting organized. Each night I would plot out where I was going to drive the next day and try to do everything as efficiently as possible. Once I made more than a grand in one day. I think I worked maybe seven hours. I was a little surprised when I got my first big check. "Why isn't everyone doing this?," I wondered. "This is the easiest job I've ever had." The only bad part is occasionally people would come out of the businesses and hassle me, but taking pictures in a parking lot is legal and I wasn't doing anything wrong so I just ignored them. Time is money. Anyway, my manager who assigned my listings (I either talked to her by phone or email) loved me because I was getting so many listings done so quickly (and shittily). The people who edited my listings almost never sent them back to be revised either. I never got direct proof of it, but I got the impression that everyone was under a lot of pressure to basically get everything done as quickly as possible. As a result, it was my behavior that was rewarded: lazy, greedy behavior. I saw a way to make some easy money and the faster and shittier I worked, the more money I got. At first I felt bad, but once I saw there were multiple levels of employees vetting my work, I didn't feel bad anymore. If they want to overpay me to deliver a shitty product, well, it's their money, and I'm more than happy to deliver.

Oh, its absolutely a shitty tactic. But here's the thing, and this is really the most important thing about why I never want to go to work for a large corporation, now matter how much money someone offers me, no matter the title, the benefits, the location: No one gives a shit about you . You are expendable. You are just another person who can provide a service so that someone much further up the food chain can make money. No matter how hard you work, you can be replaced in 15 minutes. You can program in 15 different languages, are conversant across OSx, Windows, and a dozen different Linux distros? Guess what, give me the weekend, I can find 15 qualified applicants who can do it too, and they'll take $4k less a year than you are. And no one gives a shit about you. All they want to do is make money . Great big green piles of it, entire countries worth of cash. They'll buy your company for pennies on the dollar, outsource every 4 people to one guy in India, cut your pay until they do it, lay you off, have the company go bankrupt because of a loan they took out with your pension fund as collateral, and when the whole enterprise goes pear-shaped, they'll walk away with a million dollar check for all their hard work. They use that tactic because it works . It lets them retain people for way longer than they would have if they told you what was really going on, and when they lay you off, they'll spin it as streamlining and reducing waste and overhead. We're selling the same product, for the same amount, so without raising the price of our product, our profits will skyrocket. Hell, if we work it right, we can actually CUT the cost enough to significant raise volume, and we'll make money so fast we'll run out of stupid ways to spend it. Now, whats it going to be? [Employee morale]( or [gold tile in the renovated bathroom?](

So the "fun" "cool" auto journey of the future involves my car becoming a small space without a bathroom full of strangers who've been selected for me by a computer? I fully agree with the author that "smart cars" will make make roads safer, quicker, and cleaner. I also think they'll make people more productive. All reasons why I'm very much for the rise of these things on the road. But, I also like driving - many other people like driving. I also like using my time in the car as a period to decompress between work and home - many people like doing this as well. Me turning my car into a glorified form of public transport is neither fun nor cool to me; better for the earth and easier on the wallet sure - that's why I carpool - but not fun.

I'm going to respond to you shortly using only hurricane Katrina as an example in the micro and branch out from there. I'm on a phone right now, so I can't do the rest justice. I would like to hit on your statement about "especially with the internet". This is the single most dangerous thing imaginable. You've heard, I'm sure, of state run media. One could almost make an argument that cnn, fox, msnbc are state run. They have very specific political agendas. Let's use /r/politics as an example. Knowing that political offices such as the RNC and DNC have massive amount of resources dedicated to social media, can you trust what is "important" (upvoted)? As a simple guy with a website, I'm fully capable of setting up hundreds if reddit accounts and have a huge sway on what articles (of a political nature) are pushed forward. Now add resources such as communications experts, project planning, psychologist, etc to the mix. Any office is capable of making significant social outcry or prioritization. Back to out current example. If one was to take this sub reddit for their news, you would never know that the presidents approval ratings are lower than president bush at this point in their tenure. You wouldn't know that the ACA favorable vs. unfavorable is net unfavorable. How many folks in here know that teslas credit rating was down graded? I mean hell, people here still think baby boomers are retiring!!! 55+ account for most of the countries job gains for over five years. Under 55 is still negative! Has anyone here seen empirical data showing that length or recession is tied to government intervention? These are but a few examples of social media manipulation.

I work with products that replace mineral wool, which also is harmless as glass, but when made into micro strands of glass wool can go deep into your lungs and never come out. Hence your body will absorb it into tissue and you can get chronic lung irritation seemingly without an apparent cause. Then I read that most anything, even saw dust, if small enough, can do the same and become carcinogenic. Not sure if that was a peer-reviewed source, but

I think Hardware isn't their main driver. Sure they make stuff like chromecast, and android tablets, but these aren't necessarily offerings designed to sell themselves. These are offerings to sell other google products. Chromecast is cheap as heck, but it's mostly designed to sell other google products like android and youtube by making it easy to stream to your tv. There aren't a whole lot of products that you can really say make chromecast awesome by itself aside from using chrome to stream a tab (such as with this Android is on everything, but the cost to manufacture a device with it is free from what I've heard and the OS is opensource. though they have to pass a compatibility test in order to include google play legally. Google probably doesn't make a whole lot of money on it directly. They have google play store, and google apps integration for that. Chrome is a browser they release for free. There's chrome webstore but I don't know how much they make on that, in addition to chromebooks and chromeboxes. I imagine they probably invest in chrome because it gets more people online to view ads and use google services. I include this with hardware because chromecast/chromebook/chromebox/chromebox for business (actually a Video conference box for google hangouts so I don't know what chromebox for business has to do with chrome) Motorola is being sold off to lenovo so I don't know how well this will impact google besides the fact that Google was losing money on Motorola [Nest is something Google bought recentlyish]( so I guess this counts as hardware. My guess is this was either to compound existing android tablets, or increase data collection, for sales and ads. e.g It's cold outside, so put more ads about hot things and vacations to a tropical resort. Otherwise maybe it was a purchase for talent/brains.

While I understand everyone's frustrations they "missed the deadline" and are paying millions to keep support there are some things you are really skipping over. I work for another state agency that has hardly patch any of its windows XP machines. Did we know about it ahead of time? hell yeah. Why is it taking so long? We have way too many programs that run on XP that can't just be ran on Windows 7 without a MAJOR patch and then testing it on Win7. This also means we have to do security testing all over again. Then you have different types of images (an image is a set up of the OS with some programs, drivers and settings already installed) created, each of which need security testing, checks retesting, pilots to make sure all your tests work, tweaking the image, re-piloting the image which can take a few months each time. Now times that by 10-15 images for each department who needs special features that others don't need or would mess up their programs. Oh and this is ignoring the fact that there is not one standard physical computer. over the years you get an upgraded model that has a different GFX card here, a different MOBO there which you have to account for in EACH image. Did I mention how much it would cost to just push out a non working image to every computer on the deadline? it may cost them 30 million to keep support while they work on an image, but it may cost them 10x that amount in lost work, fixing broken programs, the cost of extra help desk workers to deal with the calls of angry workers. Some of the programs I support MUST be running 24/7 and just pushing a broken image would cost us federal income and probably fines. Finally just HOW are you going to get this image onto 30,000 computers with NO issues? lots and LOTS of testing, and it's not like you have a field tech go to each of these computers and waist an hour at each computer installing and moving the old XP profile (user documents) to windows 7 so you run it from a server, think how long it would take to push 468.75 Terabytes of just the computer IMAGE data not including the data that was backed up to the server with user data.

This putz is complaining that he can't buy 100 watt light bulbs any more? Is he legally retarded?! The CFLs in all three of my bedrooms don't even equal that. Cripes, my quad core i5 uses half that. And he wants multiple 100W bulbs. And my CFLs have been running since ~2007; the first only burned out in late March 2014. I think he's a little behind the times. CFLs do not start up slowly; they're instant on now. CFLs have comparable color to incandescent; and you have the option to buy different 'colors'. He complains that LEDs 'gaslight' you, that they fade with time. With a 25,000 hour life time, that means you'll have a bulb thats going to last 2.85 years before its outputs fades to 70% of original. An IC bulb would burn out several times during that same three years, requiring you to place it each time. And at 100W compared to the LEDs ~10W, you'd burn through a shit load of electricity to boot.

I know the guy in Maryland that received death threats for trying to sell these. He is a huge 2A proponent, and a nice guy as well. Why all the hate? Two reasons: Electronics in guns will fail when you need them. The red dot will fade, or the gun won't fire at all because the watch is not on your arm or the batteries are dead. The later makes the gun useless in the case of a "smart gun". I have no problem with ayone buying one but... Anti-gun folks will then say, why DON'T you want a gun that only you can shoot? Isn't that better? Isn't that safer? The reason people don't want this tech widely adopted is that, sooner or later, it will be dictated by law by politicians. Just like muzzle locks or trigger locks or microstamping or licenses or mandated storage requirements... basically, any number of restrictions that don't solve the problem of crime but makes politicians feel like they did something to prevent it.

Sometimes unabashed aggression helps. Not when it's unwarranted. You have a varying opinion of politics from other people, and on this forum (and outside of it), it's a minority opinion. If and when you choose to speak of your political philosophies, you must accept two things: First: you are, by default, the embodied representation of your political platform. Since you are the one expressing it's views, the way in which you present your views will reflect on others opinions of not only yourself, but also your platform. Second: you will be judged on your character. Your level of respect and dignity will be judged as much, if not more so, then your actual words or overall message. Your point, valid as it may or may not be, will be blatantly ignored if it comes across as an aggressive attack. Thus people won't give your message, or your platform, the attention and consideration that it may rightly deserve. This is especially frustrating for me to hear coming from an anarchist, because I truly believe that anarchy will never be successful if it is not deeply rooted in a foundation of giving, compassion, and altruism. Aggressive dickishness does not reflect highly on the idea of anarchy. It seems to be at completely separate ends of the spectrum. Change your tone, adjust your approach, see what happens.

Peering is necessary because some internet sites or routes generate more traffic than the regular infrastructure can handle. Think of it like this: a delivery is contracted by a city to handle all their mail. Normally, they use ordinary transport networks to handle all the demand, but sometimes there's a lot of traffic generated by one particular source - Amazon, perhaps. So, rather than clogging up the roads with Amazon trucks, delaying their own packages in the process, Amazon can set up a dedicated distribution network. One way they can do this is by contracting another company, who has a distribution hub ready on the outskirts of the city with a direct line to the delivery company - this is what Netflix attempt to do by peering with Cogent and Level 3, for service to Verizon users and others. Alternatively, they can work with the delivery company to build a new distribution link - this is what has happened with TWC. Now, the issue at hand is who should pay. To make this scenario analogous, we should add that all people in the city who want deliveries must pay a monthly fee, and the agreement is that they can get whatever they want delivered for that fee (perhaps there's a monthly cap, and they're limited to stuff arriving at an advertised rate, say three packages per day) OK, but the problem was Amazon's packages were only getting through at the rate of one per day, due to congestion. So the customers aren't getting what they paid for. But the delivery company says that, since Amazon gets more customers when it can deliver more packages, they should pay for the dedicated link between Amazon and the city, rather than anything else. In another city, Verizonopolis, the mayor even refused to beef up their infrastructure for their delivery company and the third-party distribution hub that Amazon had chosen to use to get around the problem there. Amazon thinks this is unfair; its customers already pay for the products it delivers, and they pay the subscription fee to get 3 packages delivered every day, so why should they have to pay - and pass the costs on - just to get that advertised service?

His "argument" (now edited) was that people who stream and download content with bandwidth they pay for arent having to pay more than he does- someone who simply trolls on reddit and reads the sunday afternoon funnies whilst getting paid to shill through technology news. This is why he "doesnt agree with net neutrality".

The ISPs have shitty networks that they refuse to upgrade because that would mean they couldn't keep as many billions of dollars. So when their networks get a lot of data transfer going on (which is requested from us, the users who PAY them for X MB/s service) their network gets backed up and we at the end start seeing access to the ENTIRE internet die off. It's like a congested toll road, we're all paying to be on it. We get mad, call the ISP and they tell us to fuck off because they have a local monopoly. So anyway, since their network is a piece of trash and they won't fix it they came up with a "better" solution to avoid their customers losing access to the entire internet and wasting the 5cents an hour it costs for them to pay a foreign guy to tell you to fuck off (they're really trying to stay profitable here! /s) - they install devices that inspect the data being transferred and if that data is on a list they made, which includes sites like Netflix and Youtube, you know the sites that people actually use a lot, then the network biases the "blockage" to those websites. They then tell these websites they should pay to have that blockage cleared up (i.e. pay us again for the job our customers already supposedly pay us for). This would be like if you PAID, got on the toll road to drive from Little City A to Big City B with a bunch of other people who are going to a bunch of other locations, and someone came on the freeway and asked each of you "where are you going?" and if you answered "Big City B" they pull you off to the side of the road and tell you you have to wait (while everyone else gets to go). They then claim that Big City B is hogging all their toll road space and should pay them to build extra lanes (which of course would not always be dedicated to Big City B).

Keep in mind, speed!=bandwidth. Think of bandwidth as the number of lanes on a highway, and the speed as the speed limit which cars can travel. More lanes mean more capacity for data, more speed means individual data packets get there faster. This is why you can't stick a Comcast home service on the end of a big corporate office and expect it to work, even if you're paying for the 100mbps (residential) service. Our ISPs can increase the speed limit all day until they've maxed out the top rated speed of their equipment, up to 10gbps in many cases, but they really need to invest in their infrastructure to increase capacity. It's not particularly difficult, and its not like they can't afford it - they would just rather Netflix, other content providers, the government and consumers foot the bill instead of them.

I think you've got things backwards. mbps is a measure of bandwidth, not speed. 100mbps means that every second, 100 megabits of data can pass through the line. Speed, properly termed as latency, is the one ISPs have a hard time controlling because it is determined by how far and how many routers your data has to pass through before it gets from the server to your computer. You very well could run a Comcast home service to a corporate office as long as the line provided adequate bandwidth and up time. The speed will vary wildly depending on where the data is coming from.

If it doesn't save them money then why would they do it? Well, I can think of lots of reasons why they would do it even if it didn't save them money. If the other option was to continue to allow ISPs to funnel all their traffic down routes that were too congested to properly handle all their traffic. I mean, maybe that's not what's going on, but that's certainly the gist of all the articles I've read on the matter. >There are plenty of other options available. Like what? I thought the entire point was that individual ISPs were essentially holding their end users hostage in order to negotiate higher rates. If it works how you keep saying it works, then ok, they're paying less. But I still haven't seen any proof of that aside from the fact that you keep saying "that's how it works" Look, you sound like you know a lot about this subject. Probably more than me, I'll concede. But the argument that Netflix wouldn't have signed the deal unless it was cheaper holds absolutely no water at all because I think they would have signed a deal that lost them money if it meant that their customers could receive better service and they could raise the rates in order to make up for it. I'm not saying I know for sure that that's what happened, but you continuing to say they wouldn't have done it doesn't make any sense to me. Just to

the current monopolistic companies will have to break down and start providing the fast speeds at low prices they should be, or another company/structure of ISP (local municipal services) will become the rule rather than the exception. or their lobbies get enough power to influence congress and the FCC to pass laws protecting their infrastructure and preventing competition. you can't have any competition when its illegal to have any! >The higher-ups at those companies can't be complete idiots, can they? you are assuming the people that run these companies are idiots. Sometimes, they are. Usually they're not. You must remember, their actions seem logical to them given their interests. Their interests are: Minimizing overhead- which means minimizing maintenance (providing subpar customer service), and not implementing new infrastructure, and not maintaining it properly either (old modems and equipment). Maximize profit- not build new infrastructure, charge a ton for existing service, turn customer service into upsell department. They are doing their best given the system and their business interests. The best means lobbying a ton, and making sure there can be no competition and that they have free reign over content and distribution. >quite clear that the court of public opinion has already ruled against them. its quite clear that public opinion doesn't matter, money is far more important, especially in terms of passing legislation. if there is literally NO other option for a large number of people, big telecom can do whatever they want regardless of public opinion. If public opinion actually mattered to these companies (or in general) they wouldn't ever even proposed such laws, nor would they provide such shitty customer service and such high prices. They might make more money by providing better service, lower prices, better coverage, more options, etc.... But that is not a sure thing. Imagine playing a board game. You could choose to either follow the rules and do your best at the game. But if you had the option to change the rules in your favor, you wouldn't do so?

As a veteran user of this game, I have to say, the point of minecraft isn't to just install a shit ton if mods and dick around. It's a rather simplistic game. Granted, they may not have majorly changed how convenient things are, but they have still done quite a bit. Maybe they should take advice from mod makers. Maybe the coding is trash, and needs to be redone, without java. Minecraft doesn't have the same objective as any other game. In fact, it doesn't have the same objective for the gamers. There are many ways to go about playing minecraft, modded, multiplayer, classic, etc. The gamer can decide what to do with the game. Mojang will not do anything to stop it. They almost encourage it. If Microsoft is handed the deed to minecraft, sure, they might benefit off having it for their own phones. It might increase sales, but it won't be much. You may have heard of some issues with minecraft servers and Mojang recently. Mojang is trying to stop servers from selling the ability to use game mechanics. One would think that makes sense, no problems should occur, it's mojang's game and those server owners agreed when they bought the game. It wasn't that simple, it seems. There is a major controversy about it still.(IIRC) Think what would happen(maybe not) if Microsoft banned mods and instead had dlc. Imagine telling 100 million people that they have to play minecraft your way, or pay. These gamers might have a few issues. Way

Make a car that is 80% and people find fault with. Or make a car that is 95% that people accept it's faults as personal preference? Which do you think will be better on sales? Another question for you - release a car 'on time' with technical problems that result in massive recalls. Or delay and be 'late' and fix as many as you find? I'm thinking delays are inevitable. And we should accept that target dates get pushed back, especially when you are pushing boundaries with a type of tech. New hardware has problems and flaws. That is a reality. We might have done an internal combustion engine to death with alterations and so on - but we still screw it up from time to time. Especially if we alter the layout of the components looking to squeeze more efficiency out of it. This type of research and development runs into problems - and I would rather it be worked out BEFORE the product goes to market whenever possible, rather then running into a brake failure, or similar that results in numerous deaths and injuries. And if I was an investor - I would doubly want to know the company is working on problems. Stating "During testing we ran into a safety flaw. We are correcting the issue before going to full scale production" tells me a company cares about safety of it's products. When a company delays a product - it tells me they care to make it right the first time.

new lights and stop signs Several decades ago, in my young and foolish driver stage, I was driving way, way too fast down a winding back road I had driven hundreds of times before. I see a new sign, saying "Stop sign ahead." I thinks to myself, "Myself? Why is that sign there? There are no stop signs on this winding back road, which is why I can comfortably go well above even freeway speeds here." After which I drove through the new stop sign they'd recently installed in order to slow down people like me. Fortunately, as you might have guessed, I didn't die in a senseless high-speed collision.

I'd be very hesitant to throw out claims like that, especially considering the vast majority of what google has been working on in regards to its cars is image analysis. Now, in sunny day conditions, Visual Light spectrum cameras, much like people, can see things miles away. Unfortunately in low light conditions, visual light is about as useful as tits on a bull. So the solution is to use an IR camera when it's night. Great, now the resolutions way down. Double great, now any ambient light (street lights, house lights) is going to cause washout periods, effectively rendering the vehicle blind. Triple great, the passive IR cameras that can see far enough to be driving at highway speeds cost more than most people's cars. So using an IR camera is right out. Then someone says, "Hey, why don't we just use an IR distance sensor array, you know, like the things a lot of people already have in their cars for collision detection". Great solution, they're cheap and have been in use for years. Their response is non linear, meaning a hell of a lot more cycles are going to have to be spent determining whether the object in-front of the car is moving or stationary, and limited to a couple of hundred meters, but lets assume that's all worked out. Now the issue is that they're line of sight, and can only detect what is directly in front of them. Now hills become an issue. Bends in a country road where a driver could potentially see through the treeline/over the fence, but the sensors might not. Will it be able to see things on the side of the road, like this deer? Lets assume all the issues above are worked out. The car is now goddamn Hiemdall, it sees all but it can't know all. It sees the deer at the side of the road. How will it interpret it? Will it slam on the brakes, expecting it to jump into the middle of the road? Will it simply slow down? Deer stand pretty still, what if it thinks its a funny shaped tree or a deer lawn ornament?

Some providers make their routers have a [second network]( which is completely separate from your private network. This separate network can then be used by anyone, provided they have valid login details as provided by the providers. This separate network doesn't use up your data, and the router is setup in such a way that it prioritises your private networks speed. At its absolute worst you are talking about a couple of dollars of power usage by your router. There are estimates floating around online that this costs you $10 worth of power per year, but this is calculated in a ridiculous way. They look at the idle power usage and full load power usage of a router, calculate the difference and put a price on it. So it would cost $10 dollars if the following criteria are met: You never use your wifi. Multiple other people continuously use your wifi. These other people use your wifi to its full load. These other people do this 24/7.

You said Title II doesn't do anything. It does. It gives the FCC teeth. More specifically it would allow them to enforce the FCC definition of broadband so overprovisioning on artificially max capped total bandwidth would be better. It would be better because you could sue them in addition to the FCC. So when all of the sudden they slam one of the nodes down connecting to Cogent or Level 3 to <4 Mbps they lose. This is the real reason they fear this. You also leave out that if handled like it was with roaming (from the FCC link) your router would choose the priority because it has built in QoS. This also makes their point dumb in that they could just release rental routers/modems with built in QoS that are scaled against what uses the most bandwidth. They have that option and refuse to use it. Verizon in 2010 agreed to a sunset provision with all of these things and against what they later did~ "Verizon is the lone stakeholder pushing the FCC to add a "sunset provision" to net-neutrality rules, causing the regulations to vanish after two years." "Tom Tauke, Verizon executive vice president of public affairs, policy and communications: “The stated objective of this initiative – an open Internet – is not at issue.” “In fact, we are the only major ISP that has publicly embraced non-discrimination obligations for both its wireline and wireless broadband Internet access services. We are walking the talk. We are doing so because we believe this is good for our customers and good for our business.”" Now they are against it and sued? By the way the reason Title II is being pushed is because of juristiction. If they don't have that they have no teeth. "Since the FCC had previously classified broadband providers as "information services" and not "telecommunications services," they could not be regulated as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. Therefore, the FCC Open Internet Order 2010 regulations, which could only be applied to common carriers, could not be applied to broadband providers. The court upheld the transparency order of the FCC Open Internet Order 2010, which it found was not contingent upon network operators being classified as common carriers." This had been warned about ~14 years ago~ when they promised they wouldn't use it like this~ (worth the read) The biggest icing on the cake? Verizon claimed it was a common carrier when the RIAA copyright troll lawyers came around in 2004. "Verizon filed a number of defences including the “common carrier” defence. Here the company argued that it should not have to police its subscribers because it merely provides the ‘pipe’ through which data flows and this data can be both legal and illegal. The District Court of Appeals agreed with Verizon that it should not have to suffer the consequences of acting solely as a conduit for communications whose content it did not and could not control." Oh and did you miss where state and local governments already paid above top dollar for all this?

The best reason to not do that (and the reason Google's pushing away from SD cards as well, despite not making nearly as much money as Apple off of it) is that the quality and speed of SD cards are almost impossible to ensure. Even a fast SD card (class 10) only has to do 10MB/sec sequential to get that rating, compared to 100-200MB/sec on most modern phones' internal storage. People are also notorious for buying the cheapest version of things when they don't think it matters, so class 2 cards (only 2MB/sec!) are likely pretty common. There was serious outrage when Google removed the ability for people to move apps to their SD card, but really it was a big UX improvement. If you're loading 1GB of data to start a game, it'll take maybe 10 seconds off of the internal storage, which is already a long time; on even a fast SD card, it could take two minutes. Nobody will like that, and of course a lot of people will be unreasonable and blame Google or Android for being awful, even though it's entirely their fault. SD cards also fail much more often than internal storage does, and intermittent failures aren't unheard of. Again, people will get really frustrated at the phone or the OS, and not think to check the SD card. Even if they realize that the card was the problem, it's a much worse experience than having everything on the internal storage and it "just working". Also, supporting removable storage makes the software a lot more complex. How do you deal with moving apps to the SD card? How do you deal with moving an app's data to the SD card? What do you tell the user if the SD card is removed or damaged? There are a lot of variables that make it much more complex to deal with for both the user and the developers.

These OS updates aren't "hulking beasts" they are just not optimized for 3 year old hardware. Apple knows most phone users will upgrade within 2-3 years so it actually doesn't affect these people. In addition to this there is nothing saying a user must upgrade their OS. Apple merely makes an effort to make the option available. In some cases Apps will require a new OS but this rests solely on features chosen by the developer and has little to do with Apple. There is no reason the company should strain resources more than it already has on making the OS run well on an outdated device. Now I do understand the displeasure that some consumers feel that this practice is a bit of a scam but it is a shame that a company that provides updates for three year old hardware is getting flack for making it easy for consumers to optionally update. Hell, my 3 year old G'Nex was abandoned (partly because TI left mobile) a bit more than a year after release. Anyone who dares takes steps to update it (at least until the driver issues got worked out) were greeted with serious bugs.

It really already fits under the existing regulatory framework. If you 'hack' your standard ICE car so that it no longer functions safely or with the appropriate emissions controls it won't pass inspection and won't be allowed on the road. You can of course do whatever you want on private property. So really all we need to to here is update the inspection process to verify the software load as well. Which isn't that big a stretch in most places since they already hook it up to a computer to verify the OBDII information.

All the solar that's produced throughout the day is not stored. We put so much pressure on utilities to add utility scale solar storage that isn't commercially viable yet. If utilities bought the current expensive and inefficient utility-grade energy storage, the price for that technology will be spread to the utility customers. The customers will be angry about the raised rates and the utilities will then have additional customer pressure. The reality is that when the sun goes down the best bang for your buck technology is natural gas. Its much cheaper than renewables and will be a good bridge technology as we wait for storage technology to become more efficient. I think that the regulators focus shouldn't be how much renewable or traditional energy is produced, but how much carbon reduction is taking place. If we spent $2 billion on storage and renewables but would of gotten twice the carbon reduction benefit by spending those funds on energy efficiency then we should invest our funds on whatever lowers our carbon rate.

I have an office in Shanghai, and it's cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Even the chairman's office is that way. Indoor climate control is regulated in China (or so I've been told), and there's a wide temperature range that is considered normal for working conditions. Like the lady in the picture, when it's cold out, I wear a coat. when it's really cold out, I also wear longjohns, a hat, and gloves. They even make mouspads that have a blanket over them, sometimes heated by USB power. Some of them even look like a cat, and it looks like you have your hand up the cat's butt when you're using it, but that's tangent to the discussion. The writer of this article doesn't seem to be aware that cold working conditions are normal and expected in China. Funny that the author had to try to make some comment about working conditions. Actually, this is probably a pretty sweet job for a young person. There's no way to ever know, but i wonder if the idea of farming app store ratings like this originated in the east or in the west. Of course, the people doing the work are in Asia, but isn't it just a logical extension of asking all your friends to give your restaurant a positive review on yelp? I'm willing to consider that a western marketing department cooked this up, and it's not just another case of chinese people trying to trick us innocent westerners.

Let's math this out. I have a slightly above average home usage of 1000 kWh a month. I want to go solar. No net metering in my state, so I can only build as much solar panels as I can consume on site. Currently that would mean a 2.9 KW system to ensure I consume all that is produced as it's produced. This system would cost ~7700 dollars today to install and save me 720 a year on my electric bill. This is in PA, where the sun doesn't cooperate much. Still pretty good break even point at 11 years with 30 year panels now. Now lets add a 10kWh battery. Let's say all up cost is 5 grand after installation, peripherals, taxes, etc. My daily solar consumption now went from 11.5 to 22.5kWh a day. This means I can instead build a 5.65KW system plus this battery. The entire system would cost 20,000 and provide a savings of 1400 a year in electricity from the grid. =/ So it's just not there yet for those of us without much sun. There isn't enough profit in the panels for the larger system you can put in from a 10kWh battery to pay for the battery plus extra (yet). I'll do the math later for Arizona sun levels, and see what price panel installations need to get to for this battery to be profitable.

One of the big advantages to home-size batteries is that they make wind and solar power feasible. At the moment, the biggest drawback those two forms of energy have is intermittency: the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow exactly in sync with our consumption, so we're either wasting energy when we have it or don't have it when we need it. Batteries allow us to store all that extra energy we might get at noon for use when it's actually needed at 9 pm and the lights are out.

Ahhhhhh, that explains it. District heating is wonderfully efficient, particularly when it's actually the waste-heat from a generation process-- but more importantly, your heating doesn't show up in your electric usage. In the US, most heat is produced at the home, whether gas or electric. If you take out AC and heat, you'd find very similar usage in the US, but many US folks' numbers include both.

Why does everyone hate Steorn so much? Did they scam people out of money with this failed technology? As I understood it, they said "no investor until the vetting process is complete, so we don't even appear to be scamming anyone." I, personally, was rooting for their technology to work. Even if it somehow extracted energy from earths gravity and magnets or something, still it would mean great energy potential, something the whole world could use. And as long as they sincerely thought they were on to something, go for it! I'd prefer see tons of awesome technologies proposed with a higher fail rate, than fewer with less overall technological advantages.

Something few people have mentioned is a Sony Walkman. If you want a simple player with phenomenal sound quality and a (somewhat) customizable equalizer, a Walkman is a great start. Depending on what you are used to, music can either be added through drag and drop or through Windows Media Player. Some of the shortcomings include limited format support (all of the main formats, however no support for FLAC or Ogg), and playlists can only be added through Windows Media Player (at least with my 2 year old A816). If you have videos, they will need to be converted (same setting as the iPod Nano). If you want a player that is a bit more complex, along with great sound quality, a Cowon iAudio 9 (or a used 7) is also a great choice. While the Walkman will have a more solid feel, the Cowon will allow you to better customize the equalizer and will accept a much larger range of formats (No Apple ones, so please check that out). Both are small players with a lot of great functionality. Sony's Site for the S series Walkman Cowon's Site (it will not go specifically to the iaudio 9)

It's worth noting that today, Microsoft is still the largest third party employer of Mac OS programmers, due to Office. The Flash/iPhone OS stuff gets all the press, but here's an even weirder conundrum: The current Apple / Adobe feud is much more interesting I think, especially considering the deprecation of Mac OS X's Carbon C APIs (no 64-bit for C) in Snow Leopard, which Adobe Photoshop is deeply tied to. Apple is slowing moving Mac OS X into pure Objective-C / Cocoa / NextStep territory, and leaving every bit of the original Classic / Original Mac code behind. What's even more interesting is that iTunes is based on this "Classic Mac Code", so it's also affected by this 32-bit deprecation, unless apple makes 64-bit versions of only the parts of Carbon that iTunes uses... or rewrites iTunes in Cocoa, but then how do you make iTunes xplatform.... It's an interesting paradox that hasn't been made clear.

The second edition of the OED, published in 1989 and consisting of twenty volumes, contains more than 615,000 entries, and the third, available online, is expanding all the time, with batches of 2,500 new and revised words and phrases being added in regular quarterly updates." From the Oxford English Dictionary website. There's a series of different work counts available [here]( that go into variations between dictionaries. You seem to be referring to the inclusion of differences in meaning, which most of the sites I checked refer to as "senses" of a word. Between words like "set" which have dozens of definitions, and obscure words that are part of proper English but not used in everyday conversation, the figure revises upward from 600,000 to over a million words. According to the wikipedia page on chinese language: >The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters, and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms. If we were to use a straight comparison between english and chinese, we could probably use the 370,000 definitions from their largest conceptual dictionary and compare it to the 615,000 entries in the OED.

That article says (and the Daily Mail implies): > "But there really is no threshold of low dose being OK. Any dose of X-rays produces some potential risk." That's generally used as the risk model for radiation; it's called "linear no-threshold." and extrapolating down to lower does, where you don't definitively know what the effects are. It's pretty widely accepted that this is not really accurate for all the obvious reasons; but it is assumed to be boundingly conservative, so in the absence of generally accepted best-estimate model, it's used by regulators and health physicists . So what does science indicate is really true? Well, there is some evidence that small doses of radiation are actually beneficial, as they cause more rapid cellular regeneration. This is called the "hysteresis model." Probably even more widely agreed is that there actually is some threshold. [This picture]( again, gives some ideas as to what people think.

Current Microsoftie here (but posting on a throwaway account, because I like my job :p) Anyway, I find this news a bit humiliating. Microsoft is great when it's just getting on with the day-to-day business of making neat software, but every once in a while the fuckers upstairs with the suits decide that we need to do shit like this to be more competitive, and then they act confused when nobody likes us. For all their talk of being an "ethical company" and a "good corporate citizen", they don't see anything wrong with suing a competitor to make our own products look more attractive. And honestly? Of the other devs here that I've talked to, nobody really likes software patents, not even the people that have them. We get a nice bonus if we get a patent filed, and another bonus a few years down the road if it's actually granted, but even with that we find the whole system pretty sketchy.

I use both, Gmail for work and Yahoo Mail for my main email. Gmail's conversation view is brilliant. And on the other hand, I like Yahoo Mail's tabbed interface. Which, you may look at and say browsers already have tabs, why do you need tabs in your tabs? Memes aside, you don't, but I like being able to switch between my inbox, the email I'm reading, and the one I'm drafting without having to navigate back, forward, back, back, forward. Also with AdBlock and GreaseMonkey I've gotten rid of all that clutter.

You're talking about one of the largest multinational corporations trying to make their brand a necessity for being on the net. I know full well what products and services they offer. That's how I also know that there are superior alternatives (at least for me) to use in the place of everything you mentioned. I do not believe that the point of being on the internet is to generate someone money for the privilege of seeing their page. I remember all too well what it was like when it was a privilege to have even one person look at ones page, and I find that internet superior. Ecommerce is fine for many, but for some others it's ruined the internet. I respect your choosing to use and enjoy google's products, but having seen what their business model is, and the way in which they've capitalized on the data harvested from virtually the entire western internet as they rose from nothing to their current dominant position over the last 12 years makes me think that the bigger they grow, the more intrusive they'll be, so that they may sell your marketing data in even more creative ways.

Yep - Facebook has some serious flaws with regard to a lack of established policies pertaining to locked / disabled / removed accounts and Pages. As one example, they've got very specific guidelines on business promotions undertaken on Facebook Pages. These include such things as requiring that any contest or giveaway (where people have to enter for a chance at something) be administered entirely via a Facebook app, and not using anything like the page's wall, or any other core Facebook functions. It's clearly stated that pages can be disabled due to violations of that policy. However, you see companies like Chipotle (with over 1.25 million 'Likes') regularly holding promotions like that with impunity. This leaves smaller companies with a difficult choice: either follow the letter of the law and operate at a disadvantage to competitors who are not, or just do what everyone else is doing and run the very real chance of losing their Page - which usually represents a very real business investment. Then you get to the issues brought up in today's Ars article - which is that anyone can file a false infringement claim on a page, after which it's automatically taken down, with no real recourse beyond taking costly legal action against the original complainant, who may or may not have provided any legitimate contact information on that complaint.

I think you'll find that the problem many companies have with the internet lies with their business models. Most businesses rely on some level of interaction with the general public in order to do business. Retailers and service providers have used things such as direct mailings or T.V. in the past, and because these mediums are not owned by the consumer, they had an easy time of it. Mailings come to your house whether you want them to or not, and due to the revolving door nature of the business, it is likely impossible to remove your address from their databases. Television, too, is an easy medium for businesses to control. Content is broadcast passively, and the advertisers need only to have a business relationship with the networks to get their content into your home. You really have no choice in the matter. The best you can do is fast forward through the commercials, and you can only do that if you pre-record the show. Que the internet. The "magic box" the consumer is using is no longer a passive projection. They own it, and they have a right to control what happens on it. This leads to the invention of things like AdBlockPlus, which render passive advertising null and void. Active advertising via unsolicited mailings can be thwarted by spam filters, leaving advertisers two favourite tricks obsolete. In addition to this, sharing content is now easier than ever. Now if someone called the police and said "My neighbor just gave a copy of a VHS tape to his friend!" they would likely be met with a pregnant silence and a reply along the lines of "So?" However, copying a video or other data is now easier than it used to be, and getting that copy to someone is easier too. What's more, there is no loss of quality in the copying. With their two favourite methods of reaching the consumer rendered obsolete, and what they see as a new threat looming on the horizon, it is easy to see why digital media companies are so apprehensive about the internet. They have yet to monetize it effectively, and file-sharing presents them with a new bogeyman they can use to rabble-rouse in the legislatures, just as they did with CD-copying and tape-recording before it. It is clear why so many media companies are afraid. What is not clear is why so few have chosen to follow the lead of the few successful pioneers and adapt to the new environment.

I don't care because: 1) I'm not doing anything illegal 2) I'm in the EU, so if they ever tried to use any information about me, they'd likely have a few problems regarding privacy, which the EU does take kinda seriously. So what if they know what my name is and what I look like, it doesn't even matter to me. I'm an ugly fooker anyway, so the joke's on them :P On the other hand, this kind of spying can be quite bad for the people who live in the US, as it can be used to ruin their lives. Such systems can and will be abused, even if they were initially well intended. Protesting against such things should not make anyone a pedobear terrorist pirate either -- it is our democratic right to approve/disapprove of government actions as we see fit. The amount of data they track must be huge, so I can only imagine they automatically flag people based on certain keywords -- and then if you get automatically flagged (which I'm quite sure can happen very easily if you're a troll), they specifically spy on you in a 'legal' way (perhaps by asking the judge in the next door office to issue a warrant because you said 'That Iranian food I just had was the bomb!') <-- In fact, you guys aren't suffering just spying -- you also have censorship... a friend of mine tried to make a similar post as the thing I just quoted while being on a US proxy and facebook denied to post it at all , but when posted through a european facebook server, it posted just fine.

No, they were not terrorists. With all due respect your head is up your ass. A terrorist specifically targets civilians to spread fear and oppression. Whereas the revolutionary army and associated militiamen used what would be called guerrilla and saboteur tactics against the British Army and Navy. In all wars there are civilian casualties but that does not make the armies involved terrorist. Yes civilians loyal to the crown were persecuted to an extent during the american revolution, but this behavior was not endorsed by the founding fathers, as they were politically and militarily motivated to encourage union between Americans.

Seventh is a symbolic number as in "the seventh son of the seventh son" and a circuit is the booking schedule that comedians follow.

I'm not trying to sound like a fucking professional are you daft? A four year old can say things without knowing what they mean or why what's being said is important, they're like parrots real good at repeating shit. I can say Mitt Romney is a mother fucking scum sucking piece of shit idiot and mean it because I have evidence to back up those claims. Also, I never said I can do whatever I feel like doing and you can't stop me. I said I can say whatever I want whenever I want which in this country (USA) is mostly true, especially in public and especially on the internet.

100 years? Don't be silly. Do you have any idea what the world will be like in 100 years? Let alone the technology we will have that will look like magic to us today? I give handheld laser weapons 40 years or less. Actually scratch that. 40 years before the military uses it as standard, I say they have existed for years and have only been experimental because they cost too much to be produced for the military to use up until now. What do you think they do with hundreds of billions of dollars (that they declare to the public) in research? Make more accurate glocks, or higher resolution satellites and call it a day? Also what I find funny is that most people think fusion technology has not been up in running for years as well, waiting to be sold to the first lucky corporation who wins the auction when oil money has been squeezed to the last drop who then pretends to be inventors or is just frankly, allowed to patent such technology if they do actually figure it out on their own. Sometimes reddit, I swear you think only you have foresight and that those with hundreds of billions of dollars of funding for research don't. A little less naiveness and a little more realism for breakfast would be healthy.