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In case you didn't RTFA, or see the post by morgan_greywolf up above, http://static.arstechnica.com/ASUSCPUClockWidget.jpg

There's a turbo button for that.

Who needs a big red "Turbo" button, when you have that uber-cool big red "Turbo" speedometer-thingie?

I don't see any manipulation unless these companies were making an a lot of money over the manufacturing cost of the sets... Technology improves and most of the time the new technology costs more money to implement. People need jobs and something to work on, so they spend their time improving the technology. I hardly doubt it's some grand conspiracy.

here! here! I agree. I mean, just look at ATI and NVIDIA, they both make high end graphics cards that are extremely expensive because of TECHNOLOGY! And, of course, I mean, they wouldn't collude to fix prices right!? http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/07/new-documents-could-show-evidence-of-nvidia-ati-price-fixing.ars

Oh why are you so irate about the rootkits?

"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it."

--quote Thomas Hesse, President Sony Global Digital Business, concerning the Sony Rootkit fuckup.

Sadly, he's right. Most don't know, don't care and only see what they want to see. Sure, they'll cry afterwards when the whole thing blows up in their face and blame Sony, the world and of course those evil pirates for it, but they don't care, don't listen and most of all, don't want to know.

In the case of today, I would guess:

the competitor is Microsoft

and

the partners are Verizon (more) and TV networks (for content)

Just when I caved and bought my 58-plasma, now they're gonna make it obsolete? Will this work on existing TVs?

Not likely. I don't know the technical details but I know that NO consumer TV is geared to decode a 120hz stream, which is the key for 3D.

But obsolete is a relative term. If you mean can't access under 1% of newly released media, this likely won't happen. According to Ars Technica there is downward compatibility on BluRay discs, and fallback on players.

They promised to never do it again, except in certain situations. This includes "judicial orders", so this means that if a government outlaws a book, they can not only prohibit future sales, but also make existing copies disappear. It also means that a copyright conflict could still cause a book to be removed, but only after a judge orders it.

I thought it was PHP/Python, my apologies if I read wrong.

Apache got screwed in 07, back when this came around.

What do I mean by this? Well have you noticed how there has been endorsement of the apache license for proprietary software as of late? Basically anything proprietary that is labeled open source will be due to apache license compatibility? That's not to promote apache, that's to dilute it. MS-PL is an easy example of that.

I must stress that I don't believe it's all roses for the music industry. They're facing harder times, to be sure. But the devil of those hard times are in the details.

The RIAA-sourced chart brit74 linked to is rather misleading. It shows just what the RIAA wants; look at that big huge glob that represents the glory year of 1999! It must be horrible for them to look at that tapering edge that represents 2008 and wistfully wonder what could have been if things just kept waxing instead of waning. But the chart hides more important information. Namely, exactly what were the sales outside those halcyon years bookending 1999?

Finding those numbers aren't easy. Part of it, like a lot of these things, is getting representative data - not just the RIAA's data. One attempt at that is Nielsen which published it's numbers for 2008. Some articles based on that:

http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/01/music-sales-up-10-in-2008-thanks-to-downloads-and-vinyl.ars

http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/2009-01-01-soundscan-numbers_N.htm

It's hard to find exact matches to compare; apples to apples. But for a "failing" industry, there's a heck of a lot of sales going on. The common theme seems to be that the higher-profit album market is disappearing as consumers and retailers are spending less and less attention on it.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/06/iphone-3g-whats-in-a-two-year-price.ars

That's where I got the 2 year price of an iphone.

Such metrics are almost always worthless. And such is the case here. Their methodology is fundamentally flawed, and you can't fix flawed methodology by just getting more of it.

Ars Technica notes, 'The company tracks OS and browser use among "member sites" that use Net Applications' tracking services, which the company says encompasses data from some 160 million users per month. This means that the only OS and browser numbers being tracked are those from users who specifically visit those member sites, which include the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and InformationWeek. If specific demographics of users—like, say, Linux users—don't tend to read those types of sites, they are going to be underrepresented, and similarly, other demographics may be overrepresented.

It obviously could be the case that Chrome is used by people more likely to use those "member sites" than people who use Safari.

Unfortunately, Ars Technica then writes, 'That being said, browser metrics such as these aren't worthless. Even though they may be an inaccurate way to make comparisons between operating systems, they provide a good picture when it comes to trends within a specific OS. For example, Net Applications tracked the Mac OS at 7.3 percent at the end of 2007 and 9.63 percent at the end of 2008, showing more than a 2.6 percentage point jump in only a year for the Mac. In this sense, it doesn't matter if Mac users tend to visit the Wall Street Journal's website more than Linux users. The trend is clearly showing that Mac users, with all their unique browsing habits, are growing steadily.'

That's obviously false, because it doesn't take into account the fact that demographics can trend from year to year (perhaps the WSJ introduced a new, and popular, Mac-specific section on their web site).

But the market has already decided that price wins against features

The statistics disagrees with your datum.

Oh... let's see: JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT

Apple spent a fortune protecting the DRM in iTunes - as I said, they were protecting THEIR right to dictate what device iTunes music plays on. They are every bit as much in favour of DRM as Microsoft and Intel, and the big content companies. The only people who doubt it are the idiot Apple superfans who try to rewrite history.

P.S. you are a cretin.

Very interesting points.

As I understand, Ubuntu plans to add support for paid apps in their Software Center. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/11/good-karma-ars-reviews-ubuntu-910.ars/8

A revenue sharing system on Software Center sales could give computer sellers a serious reason to promote Ubuntu.

I have been modded to "Offtopic" for the main reply which talked about the referenced article's spelling and grammar.

I was trying to make a point about how easy it is to be distracted from the topic (as in "goes badly" in the article's title "When religion and games intersect--and how it often goes badly") by extraneous issues (like spelling and grammar, or religion.)

It obviously takes more than just a few lines to impress my fellow /. mods :)

* Results in a huge number of open windows, most of which you don't want to use.

I can't speak for GNOME, but in Mac OS (back when it was spatial) you could simply hold the Command key while opening an item to automatically close its parent folder. That solves that problem nicely, assuming GNOME's implemented a key for it.

* At the end, you have a crapload of open windows to close

Same as the first point.

* Each new window open in a slightly different location, meaning your mouse pointer is no longer over the same part of the interface.

Each window will open at the same location and size it was last time you saw it (which is the whole point of spatial) meaning that if you've engaged the spatial portion of your brain, you'll probably already have the mouse pointer there before the OS even finishes rendering it... your brain knows exactly where the window will appear, and probably exactly where the icon you want to click is in its vast store of spatial memory, so you can use your computer at an almost subconscious level.

This is the entire point of implementing a spatial file browser in the first place.

(That all said, I can't speak to the quality of GNOME's implementation-- you can easily botch a spatial implementation, ala Windows 95. Mac Classic's was good though.)

* There's no "Back" or "Up" buttons - to go to the previous or parent folder you must hunt out the desired window by mouse (or use Alt-Tab).

In Mac Classic, you could Command-click the title bar of a window to show a menu of its parent windows. Or, if you want to use the parent, you could simply not close it when you open the child window in the first place.

* No one-click navigation to just view a folder then go back (I use the back button on my mouse constantly).

What does "go back" mean in this context? You could program a mouse button to close the frontmost window, which would be similar to "going back" (I suppose?).

The fact that you think in terms like "go back" means you need to forget a *lot* about browser-based file systems before you can really start using the spatial one fully. I have the opposite problem-- I learned on a spatial system, so browser systems drive me *batty*.

* Once you close an un-wanted window, there's no way to get back to it (it if suddenly becomes wanted) short of re-opening every window between wherever your shortcut opens Nautilus, and that location.

Well, if you want it, don't close it in the first place. Duh?

I'm not sure how to respond to that, or how it's any different in a browser-based file system?

* There's no easy way to jump from one part to a widely separated part of the filesystem (technically a feature of tree view, common in browser-view file managers).

You could just make a shortcut/alias/whatever your OS calls it. Again, duh? Spatial file systems still have shortcuts, you know.

So... what *is* the reasoning for spatial view?

The average person's spatial memory is much faster and more reliable than their rote memory.

To me it's nothing but a hassle, a slowdown in the process, and cluttering of the screen/taskbar, and an inconvenience to those of us used to very rapid navigation using the mouse alone.

That's because you're so used to a browser-based file system that you can't break your old habits and give a spatial one a real chance. Which is fine-- the two concepts aren't necessarily mutually-exclusive, and could in theory be implemented side-by-side in the same file manager.

(See, for example, this series of articles at Ars which both explains/defends the spatial concept, and outlines exactly how it can live alongside a browser-based file system: http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2003/04/finder.ars )

As for your mouse problem, I can't help you. When I need to rapidly navigate something on my computer I put my left hand on the keyboard so it can fire off shortcuts while I'm mousing with my right. That's typically how computers are designed to be operated... if I'm only using the mouse, almost by definition, I'm doing something more casual.

Linux On The Desktop has been an unachieved goal for about a decade now and it seems it's stuck with unreliable drivers. Especially graphics- and wireless drivers are notoriously in this regard, where every version offers some new surprises regarding errors and lack of stability.

However, having a stable ABI won't be the magic solution to this. A lot (if not most) of the problems encountered on one platform with a stable ABI (Windows) seem to be related to buggy drivers. A more recent example: http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2008/03/vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.ars

And even an open source driver doesn't guarantee quality. For at least a year now, drivers for Intel's graphics cards have been the source of a lot of problems on the desktop (see http://www.linuxtoday.com/developer/2009081702335OSHWKN). And I'm not even mentioning the various buggy ALSA drivers that have been a plague for linux desktop users in the past.

Taking these two observations, one can state that we cannot trust hardware companies nor kernel developers to produce quality and stable drivers. Both parties cannot and/or will not test against many possible hardware and software combinations. Kernel developers do not have the resources and I don't believe companies will invest a lot of effort as well (especially not for such a small market-share)

Microsoft seems to know about this problem and offers the WHQL driver-certification to ensure a certain driver quality. I don't know what qualifies for such a certification but I won't be surprised they have a huge amount of resources available for testing various (popular?) hardware and software combinations. But again, even Microsoft cannot cover nearly all the bases.

So what does that leave Desktop Linux? In my opinion, if it really wants to be better than Windows in terms of delivered quality and offer a smooth and stable environment, it needs to control the hardware offer as well. It's Apple's little public secret: the reason why their software is perceived to be so stable and seamless, is because you don't have to fiddle around with drivers. Plus, the OS guys can actually test the delivered system pretty thoroughly because of the limited variations in hardware.

The way I see it Canonical should have released a Ubuntu laptop bundled with hardware that is well-tested to work with the current available drivers. But also release their OS for use on other hardware, but without the guarantee that everything will work as good as on the offered hardware. They had a good shot at this with their Dell deal roughly one or two years ago but it seems they dropped the ball on that. Even the Dell guys made the remark that it was getting pretty difficult to find quality drivers for some components (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NTkxOA). From the outside it seems that Canonical only was interested in delivering the OS part and didn't really pay any attention to the complete product. The end result was a 'nice try', but riddled with problems regarding hibernation, wireless and dual-monitor support, not exactly trivial pieces of functionality on a laptop. I don't know if their current offerings are any better, but a bad first impression is pretty hard to make up for.

Ars tells it better though:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/public-pressure-stops-bbcs-hdtv-drm-drive-for-now.ars

Its a little late to complain, or otherwise tell Ofcom what you think, but the link to the initial consultation letter is here: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/ifi/tvlicensing/enquiry/

You can still write to ofcom concerning this matter, but bear in mind there will (probably) be a further consultation when the BBC responds.

Open consultations can be found: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/?open=Yes&sector=Broadcasting%20-%20TV

Don't go into a deep hibernation just yet

"in order to use patents as weapons."

I wish I had the balls to make random baseless claims. Clearly you must have seen the future being a wizard and all...

Well then, you shouldn't have let Microsoft's company nurse cut them off just so you could post here. If you're dishonest enough to shill for Bill, take it a step further and just tell him you're shilling and take the money and stop posting here. It saves you work and save our time. If you're shilling for ideological reasons and not getting compensated then maybe it's time to take up a more socially redeeming hobby than shilling.

Microsoft has using software patents offensively for years. The suit over FAT and the suit against TomTom are just two examples from this year. A quick trip to Google will show you more from this year and many other years. If not Google, then Cuil.

The modified driver model was set in stone about two years before Vista's release. This was all verified information. You could boot the early milestones of Longhorn very early on and get limited graphics and sound support from beta drivers.

Yet by the time of the release date, Nvidia, Creative Labs, and a half dozen other companies had such severe issues that they collectively caused the vast majority of bluescreens reported. Realtek, Creative, Nvidia and others were all publicly shamed into providing better support, and were dragged kicking and screaming into providing decent drivers.

Creative for example used Windows Vista as an opportunity to deny people access to features on their cards and sell people the same card over again, but with the features enabled.

Your other complaints are valid, but poor driver support is not one of them. They told everyone the spec and gave the hardware folks earlier and more frequent builds than anyone else.

Some of us are put off by the fact that it is deliberately designed to be annoying. I hold the admin password on my kids' Vista laptop, and I can confirm that they suceeded completely.

Here is the Ars article from time past on the subject of just why Google decided on the ASL instead of the GPL:

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/11/why-google-chose-the-apache-software-license-over-gplv2.ars

Ars Technica had an article about a hidden framework that Apple was developing before Apps hit with 2.0. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/12/pastrykit-best-iphone-web-app-library-you-never-heard-about.ars

Actually looks pretty cool and could allow more web-based apps.

I still think that local apps will be preferreable. The thing is that a lot of apps are only useful on the web, so the concerns about not being able to access them w/o a net connection are baseless. Not all apps, but there's lots of social networking apps and others that need networks.

Do this many people really not want truly guilty people caught and prosecuted?

Guilty of what and at the expense of what? Could you cite specific examples, as you seem so eager to chastise others for failing to provide?

I don't want people truly guilty of possessing marijuana to be caught and prosecuted. I don't want people truly guilty of indulging in whimsical fantasies involving fictional characters to be caught and prosecuted. I don't want people truly guilty of copyright infringement to be caught and prosecuted. Had this been some years ago I would not have wanted people truly guilty of being gay to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of sexting to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of being mistaken for a terrorist to be shot on the London Underground. I do not want people truly guilty of possessing a knife to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of breast feeding to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of disobeying school authorities to be caught and prosecuted.

Aside from that, I'd rather rot in prison than have some moron telling me that my privacy is less important than their fishing expedition for child pornography or bomb making recipes. Note from that article a detective is quoted as saying "Unless you tell us we're never gonna know... What is anybody gonna think?". I'd rather be water-boarded than cooperate with that sort of pond life. If a detective wants me to cooperate then they will need a better reason than 'we hope you're guilty of something, let us pry into your private life or we will presume the worse'.

If you haven't guessed, I'm not by definition a 'law-abiding' citizen. Were laws in perfect alignment with my principles then I would still only be law abiding by circumstance, not choice. I'd feel much safer around a person who doesn't try to kill me because they choose not to than someone who is just abiding by the law. So, here's me. Sticking it to the man. And proud of it. With long hair. But not a hippy.

Do this many people really not want truly guilty people caught and prosecuted?

Guilty of what and at the expense of what? Could you cite specific examples, as you seem so eager to chastise others for failing to provide?

I don't want people truly guilty of possessing marijuana to be caught and prosecuted. I don't want people truly guilty of indulging in whimsical fantasies involving fictional characters to be caught and prosecuted. I don't want people truly guilty of copyright infringement to be caught and prosecuted. Had this been some years ago I would not have wanted people truly guilty of being gay to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of sexting to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of being mistaken for a terrorist to be shot on the London Underground. I do not want people truly guilty of possessing a knife to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of breast feeding to be caught and prosecuted. I do not want people truly guilty of disobeying school authorities to be caught and prosecuted.

Aside from that, I'd rather rot in prison than have some moron telling me that my privacy is less important than their fishing expedition for child pornography or bomb making recipes. Note from that article a detective is quoted as saying "Unless you tell us we're never gonna know... What is anybody gonna think?". I'd rather be water-boarded than cooperate with that sort of pond life. If a detective wants me to cooperate then they will need a better reason than 'we hope you're guilty of something, let us pry into your private life or we will presume the worse'.

If you haven't guessed, I'm not by definition a 'law-abiding' citizen. Were laws in perfect alignment with my principles then I would still only be law abiding by circumstance, not choice. I'd feel much safer around a person who doesn't try to kill me because they choose not to than someone who is just abiding by the law. So, here's me. Sticking it to the man. And proud of it. With long hair. But not a hippy.

Non-hacked game banning

The 3rd party peripherals, those are just a pure money grab. There's no reason for the drives to cost as much as they do other than Microsoft wanting to exploit lock-in.

Third party knock off brands usually sent straight China.

So, what you are saying is they are made by the same guys making the OEM battery for your laptop (but without the OEM sticker on it)?

They don't work as well and in some cases can even cause damage.

Oh, yes, you are saying they are made by the same guys, because that sounds like Sony batteries to me.

The $20 cell phone appeals to the poor, elderly and disabled. Not the most promising market for the advertiser.

One of the reasons the poor are poor is because they ARE a prime target, and sucker for, advertising. I'll throw out Blue Hippo as an example: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/11/like-taking-candy-computers-from-a-baby-the-poor.ars.

Microsoft stole Plurk's design and code. Not the Chinese. Not the Americans.

Nice try. Microsoft outsourced its coding to a Chinese company, THEY stole the source code and design. Quoting from Ars Technica:

The debacle with Juku is an indication that the software giant needs to either stop outsourcing its various small projects (unlikely to happen anytime soon), or come up with a better way to cross-check its code.

This is a CHINESE malaise, not a Microsoft one. Half of the huge Chinese websites out there rely on stealing content and code theft to launch. Blaming Microsoft because they are the largest target is trendy, but misleading.

Microsoft stole Plurk's design and code. Not the Chinese. Not the Americans.

Nice try. Microsoft outsourced its coding to a Chinese company, THEY stole the source code and design. Quoting from Ars Technica:

The debacle with Juku is an indication that the software giant needs to either stop outsourcing its various small projects (unlikely to happen anytime soon), or come up with a better way to cross-check its code.

This is a CHINESE malaise, not a Microsoft one. Half of the huge Chinese websites out there rely on stealing content and code theft to launch. Blaming Microsoft because they are the largest target is trendy, but misleading.

The French Government really seem to get the hang of OSS every depeartment seems focused on using OSS like their entire justice department going ubuntu http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/03/french-police-saves-millions-of-euros-by-adopting-ubuntu.ars and unlike the Germans(+1 million failed projects) or Dutch(going Microsoft everywhere despite promises and even laws(!) to go open source) etc they actually seem to be making progress

Or have you seen the price of Windos "converge" in any meaningful way? Have you missed the article a few stories down about price fixing in the LCD market? The many other examples of price manipulations?

Have you read about netbooks? Originally Microsoft did not even want to sell Windows XP anymore because they wanted to boost Windows Vista sales numbers. Asus releasing the Linux Eee PC netbook was enough for forcing Microsoft to not only continue selling Windows XP, but lowering the price enough to be competitive with the Linux desktops. Market distortions are older than dirt. The "father" of capitalism, Adam Smith, wrote The Wealth of Nations as a protest against mercantilism economics. He specifically mentions cartels as things to be avoided. Also notice that unlike the Windows Vista release, the number of Microsoft promotional offers, rebates, etc, increased a lot for the Windows Vista 7 release meaning they are in fact lowering the product ASP even if they do not specifically say so. Even "official" retail prices dropped.

The thing about this patent is that "price information" itself is manipulated. Your price information is meaningless to me, because I can not get it.

The more users there are, the higher the chance price information will leak out. Microsoft does not exactly run a business amenable to these tactics. You are also assuming resale of product is impossible. Most businesses I know running highly differentiated pricing schemes do services, not products.

Alternatively we come to a more honest world where everyone realises that pretty much everyone looks at porn.

Yeah. Reminds me of this story about a study of porn consumption. They couldn't find people that never looked at porn for the control group...

Nothing can stop the analog hole for noninteractive video. It is always possible to camcord the screen, and an MPAA representative actually recommended it. The only surefire way to plug the analog hole is to make video games instead of movies.

It's mostly a bit of 2-4 wrapped in a fancy GUI.

Here's some action packed screenshots of the tool in action. See page 2 for action packed screenshots of doing it from the command line instead.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/12/-the-usb-flash-drive.ars

http://arstechnica.com/science/guides/2009/11/the-complicated-truth-behind-scientific-findings.ars

It's hard to even explain seemingly obvious scientific truisms when it takes a 300 year history lesson on one topic.

Mostly the court said the defense sucked and they WOULD have been receptive to such fair use tactics but the defense didn't help them out there.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/how-team-tenenbaum-missed-a-chance-to-shape-p2p-fair-use-law.ars

This isn't something that applies to all future cases.

Still, Google keeps introducing interesting new technologies based on open standards, open sourcing them, and making data export easy (just look at the new "dowload all" button on GDocs)[1]

So what? Why are we so quick to absolve Google simply because they throw around "open source" all over? I just finished reading how Google bought EtherPad only to shut it down.

But that's OK, they're going to open source the code. Yes, it's good for Google--they get to make their Wave platform work. Yes, it's good for AppJet--they make some money.

But is it good for the EtherPad users? I'm not hearing that. Google isn't putting all the features of EtherPad into Wave. It just does some cool things they wanted. EtherPad users were only appeased after they were first outraged by the initial transition proposal. The rest? Dumped. Sure, someone can come along and rebuild it themselves, but does that actually happen? Are highly-skilled, creative developers going to glom on to owning and developing code for this when the next thing is out there?

I will admit, I was a Google fanboy for a long time. They really seemed genuine about "do no evil". But the comparison above with Microsoft and IBM ten years before seems all too predictive of Google in the next ten years. Apparently there is nothing new under the sun and everything comes full circle and only with age do you gain the perspective to see it. It's no fun being old. I want to be young and naive again.

I'd also heard that since so many states have opted 'out', I think CA was one of them...the current administration was thinking of trying to make some changes to make it more palatable.

Personally, I hope they can the whole damned thing...what are they going to do, really ban people from entire states for not having a real id drivers license?

also: http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/12/commonjs-effort-sets-javascript-on-path-for-world-domination.ars

Hmmm. IBM's cell processor was killed two weeks ago. ... coincidence? Intel dragged along enough HPC customers to get the the Cell processor out of the market. Mission Accomplished. Itanium made promises it didn't keep for 5+ years, but the promises of Intel alone were enough to kill Sparc and Alpha. Intel's MO is to promise just enough to kill the competition without having to deliver a viable product until well into the future.

I guess ars didn't think of this when they said that the movie industry won't go down like the music industry did.

"Western Union secretly siphoned to AP's [Associated Press] general agent Henry Nash Smith the telegraph correspondence of key Democrats during the struggle. Smith, in turn, relayed this intelligence to the Hayes camp with instructions on how to proceed. On top of that, AP constantly published propaganda supporting the Republican side of the story. Meanwhile, Western Union insisted that it kept "all messages whatsoever . . . strictly private and confidential." Tilden supporters weren't fooled. By the end of the debacle -- [Rutherford] Hayes having won the White House -- they called AP "Hayessociated Press."

Anyway, I would feel better if beleaguered NBC was being bought by a company a little less awful. A typical Comcast "service" center looks like the visitor's lounge at a prison, bullet-proof glass and everything. This is the company that will have editorial control over NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.

"Western Union secretly siphoned to AP's [Associated Press] general agent Henry Nash Smith the telegraph correspondence of key Democrats during the struggle. Smith, in turn, relayed this intelligence to the Hayes camp with instructions on how to proceed. On top of that, AP constantly published propaganda supporting the Republican side of the story. Meanwhile, Western Union insisted that it kept "all messages whatsoever . . . strictly private and confidential." Tilden supporters weren't fooled. By the end of the debacle -- [Rutherford] Hayes having won the White House -- they called AP "Hayessociated Press."

Anyway, I would feel better if beleaguered NBC was being bought by a company a little less awful. A typical Comcast "service" center looks like the visitor's lounge at a prison, bullet-proof glass and everything. This is the company that will have editorial control over NBC, MSNBC, and CNBC.

I am going to ignore your comments about Google cars, Google voice, and the others because the do not make sense and are not worth it.
I never said I was gurneteed a 5 Mb line. I have accepted that it will be less than 5 Mb 99.9% of the time. My point, which you cannot seem to grasp, is that how is it right for the ISP to disconnect me for using the service that they sold me. If I am having an impact on other people the the telco is at fault not me. I is not a "not my problem" sort of thing it is a "they are selling this promise to all these people and cannot possibly support all of them" thing.

How am I willfully abusing the design of the ISP if I am using TCP/IP, the problem again, is that they over sold the bandwidth.

the forces of the market economy will not fix this. Those forces are driven by greed and nothing else. All of the problems that we have had come back to one thing, lack of ethics, from selling loans to people that could not pay, to selling derivatives that nobody know the value, it was all about money.

A free market economy will always end the same way. I have yet to find anybody that can admit that Standard Oil and System Bell were good things and that is what happens in an unregulated market.

You really should read the article from yesterday: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/how-the-robber-barons-hijacked-the-victorian-internet.ars/2

I wonder where you got it from.

There is not, and has never been, any concept of 'fair use' in US copyright law.

Citation proves otherwise. End of story.

I have already admitted that I am not a legal expert. I am not about to go earn a law degree in order to debate on Slashdot, and I am not trying to argue what entails fair use, or how it is implemented. I am simply attacking the erroneous claim that fair use does not exist in law. Misinformation like that is just what overzealous copyright and IP proponents would like the public to think, and it fits well with their long-established pattern of revising history to suit their own interests.

First this happened:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-sues-tomtom-over-fat-patents-in-linux-based-device.ars

Then this happened:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/tomtom-sues-microsoft-back-for-patent-infringement.ars

In the end they both settle and drop their lawsuits.

First this happened:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/02/microsoft-sues-tomtom-over-fat-patents-in-linux-based-device.ars

Then this happened:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/tomtom-sues-microsoft-back-for-patent-infringement.ars

In the end they both settle and drop their lawsuits.