Actually, it talks about transistor density per unit cost - as long as manufacturing continues to improve and drive down costs, Moore's law will continue beyond the physical limitations of transistor density (stuff will continue to get cheaper even if it doesn't get 'faster').
I don't understand why most people focus on the maximizing transistor density part when 99% of applications call for minimizing cost.
7-1? Citation please. Doing a quick Google search shows the opposite to be true (Democrats outspent Republicans overall), but not by anywhere near that level.
Please, Russ Feingold is the epidemy of a career politician. Of course he's non-partisan - he went with whatever serves him and his career the best - just like McCain who co-sponsored that horrible 'campaign finance reform' bill. That's why he was voted out - people are tired of being fed lip service by these scum bags on both sides of the isle.
Could you please explain to me how the law struck down in the CU decision is anything but censorship? So now, for the first time in about a decade, people other than the political parties and the government approved media can support a candidate before an election. How is that a bad thing? That the ACLU, NRA, NAACP, AARP, etc can actually voice the opinion of their members before an election is great. Or you'd rather only be allowed to hear what the Republicans, Democrats, CNN, Fox News, etc have to say? Or are you seriously going to argue that the voice of an individual means more than jack shit in a democratic republic of ~300 million people and we don't need to form groups to get our messages across? The campaign reform act had nothing to do with keeping out special interests, and everything to do with protecting the establishment. Please lay off the kool-aid - censorship is always bad, regardless of who you're censoring.
And contrary to what Predsident Obama says, these private corporations were allowed to spend all they wanted before this law was passed in 2002. About half of the states have also always allowed it in state and local elections. Amazingly, we got this far without the restriction, and it seems the power of special interests has only increased under its influence. (Not saying it is at fault, just that it doesn't actually do what it's marketed to do)
Furthermore, even with the law on the books, it only had the affect of raising the price of admission on political speech - those big evil corporations you're so afraid of could easily afford to set up PACs to work around the law, while non-profits that depend on small contributions from the People were shut out.
Oh, and there is no "conservative majority" in the SCOTUS. There are 4 liberals, 4 conservatives, and Justice Kennedy who is very moderate and often unpredictable. The only amazing thing about the decision is 4 justices actually supported the federal government censoring private parties.
The (hopefully) obvious solution is to abolish the drug prohibition all together. I would bet the total societal cost (in terms of both financial cost and loss of human life and productivity) of the drug war has far exceeded the costs ever possible in a society where all drugs were manufactured and distributed legally. I would also bet cultural pressure to avoid the use of certain kinds of drugs would be far more effective than the current legal pressure to avoid the use of almost all drugs.
They probably should also legalize and regulate prostitution while they're at it.
As others have mentioned, an FPGA would be the way to go. This would also take care of the DMCA issue - some type of open digital video capture project could sell FPGA based capture cards to encode non-HDCP DVI/HDMI video sources, and thus not violate the DMCA. Since the FPGA is easily software upgradeable, the end-user could update it after purchase to also decode HDCP much like how libdvdcss is handled today.
The biggest benefit is not for piracy (99% of pirates wouldn't bother and would just download the content instead) but rather to allow one to capture and encode digital HD video from their cable box for a home media server setup. It's unfortunate that such a practice isn't protected by fair use since it is a perfectly legitimate use case.
The biggest problem with Flash on Android is the lack of FlashBlock - visiting a site with multiple Flash ads is total hell.
Then there's embedded YouTube videos - playing them with Flash sucks compared to using the YouTube app and it seems to force you to watch embedded videos with Flash. I've yet to figure out how to get it to allow me to fall back to the YouTube app.
My solution is to uninstall Flash, and only install it as I really need it. Even then, it's iffy if Flash will work when I need it.
While I wish I could share your optimism, I'm afraid the DC Circuit is fighting the uphill battle on this one. I admit I haven't read much about this decision yet, but my reading about the DC decision made me a bit uneasy.
Unfortunately, police have long been able to watch people in public space without a warrant, and there is significant legal precedent giving them power to do so.
Furthermore, the DC Circuit creates an entirely new test stating that surveillance over any extended period of time is a 4th Amendment search and requires a search warrant. IIRC, their decision was that while a single given action by the police may be legal, a combination of actions are not. This is totally new and unprecedented, and while I agree with it completely, it will be up the the SCOTUS to support this new precedent and make it the law of the land.
Our only hope here may be an action of Congress. That is, of course, unlikely as the political machines and the media have the electorate happily distracted with other, pointless 'hot-button' topics while our rights are slowly eroded away.
Go with a Rigol. I use a low-end 2 channel 100MHz Tek at work, and a 2 channel 100Mhz Rigol at home - I honestly like the Rigol much more, even though it was only a fraction of the cost. I feel with the Teks they try to make it clear that it is a low end scope.
If you have $2k to spend, you can not just get a brand new Rigol scope, but also a good bench-top power supply and perhaps an arbitrary wave form generator - everything the home CE needs to get started.
There are a lot actually, starting with the ACLU and the NRA. The People do lobby congress to great success - they just do it as groups in order to pool resources.
The problem of course is not the lobbying (it is a constitutionally protected right after all), it's the politicians who care more about getting a steak dinner, a Rolex, and a blow job than doing what's best for their constituents and their country.
A 'corporation' is nothing more than a tax definition. When it comes to the rights of the people in a group, it falls under the right to assemble. There is plenty of supreme court precedence making it very clear that people retain their rights as a group - regardless of how their group is defined by tax code.
If you don't like it, you can petition congress to amend the constitution to repeal, or heavily modify, the 1st amendment. Something tells me that won't go over too well with most Americans.
So you also agree that corporations like the ACLU and the NRA should not be allowed to speak? We should all be required to fight for our rights as individuals?
No, corporations being allowed to lobby is not the problem - corrupt, scum bag politicians who lie to their voters and side with whoever gives them the most blow jobs are the problem. The problem is we live in a society where private businesses need to pull this crap to stay competitive because that's just how the game is played. Maybe if the people we elected actually cared about those who elected them, this wouldn't be an issue.
Any American gun owner can tell you that tritium is NOT banned in the US - tritium makes for great night sights and is a common addition for home defense weapons.
Exactly. Instead of using existing laws and the FTC to squeeze ISPs for possible abusive monopoly practices, they've instead decided to further expand the FCC. Now our wonderful government has the power to give the go-ahead nod to any filtering the lobbyists want. What people need to realize is that any law suits against ISPs regarding unfair business practices will have even less traction now as long as there is some remote nexus to illegal file sharing.
I just don't understand these people - you complain about lobbying, but you support laws and policies that make lobbying more beneficial. NN is a great idea in the land of rainbows and unicorns, but in the land of bureaucracy and politics NN is just another empty promise to get your votes while also lining the pockets of those in power.
Huh, what? I have Comcast internet, and believe me, I have as much of a burning hatred for that company as the next guy, but they definitely do NOT filter or throttle bit torrent. I use it constantly and test it regularly and have not seen any sign of outside interference. Please hate on Comcast, but don't make shit up.
First off, I have both a Droid and a 32GB iPod Touch. Frankly, I like the touch on the Droid better than the iPod - I find it more responsive and more accurate when playing the same game or browsing the web on both devices. It may just be my perception, but I simply find myself becoming less aggravated with the Droid's touch screen than the iPod's.
While I don't have the iPod with me right now, I do have my Droid and was able to try this experiment. I used an app called 'Simply Draw' and was not able to repeat their results. Every time I try, I get lines that are as straight as my finger can make them. I have yet to produce lines like those in the article no matter how hard I try - even using multi-touch to draw 2 lines at once works perfectly.
One problem I have noticed with the Droid that may be the cause here is the touchscreen is very sensitive to noisy power supplies. Using a cheap wall charger has a HUGE impact on the accuracy of the touch screen. I'm guessing Motorola didn't use any ferrites on the USB signals, allowing high frequency noise from an external supply to negatively impact the device. I suspect placing a ferrite on the USB cable near the phone end would minimize this issue, but have yet to try it myself. Instead, I just use quality chargers.
I think you're taking tablets too literally; this has absolutely nothing to do with tablets. The point here is Freescale, a semiconductor manufacturer (and not a system OEM), built a tablet device to show off their SoC designs to OEMs. It is a reference design and nothing more - actual OEM developers use it as a guide to see how to best implement Freescale's products.
The point here is Freescale is advertising to OEMs "Hey look how easy and cheap it is to develop with our product". This is not aimed at you, and they don't care if you want a tablet or not. They only care that you probably want a small, portable, yet fairly powerful device (be it a netbook, tablet, smartphone, whatever) that could be implemented with their products.
And why did they choose a tablet you ask? It's easier to build, plain and simple. No hinge, no moving parts - just bolt an LCD to a PCB board and put it in an enclosure and you have CES worthy development board.
You're missing the key point that the contract price includes cellular service. If you buy the phone outright, you don't get service. The service costs much more (and has greater profit margins) than the phone, which is why carriers are willing to subsidize phones like this.
I personally don't understand why anyone (in the US at least) would want to buy a phone out of contract. You're almost always guaranteed to pay more for the phone compared to taking the contract, even if you decide to bail and pay the ETF.
They've also refused to disclose their raw data, or even a list of what data they used. They've gone as far as ignoring FOIA requests to the point where NASA will soon be facing litigation. They can open-source all the algorithms they want, but without showing their data, it's completely useless.
So no, the criticisms have only been answered for those who are not serious in hearing the real answers.
Yes, it's not unheard of to destroy raw data, but a list of what data was used and how is usually maintained. This way, someone else can collect the same raw data again and verify the original results.
The big problem with the CRU is they've failed to even disclose a list of exactly what data was used and what they did with that data. This makes it impossible to verify their results. It should also be noted that this info is required for publication in most journals, but they have managed to get published (most of the time) without it anyway. After all, if you can't peer-review their work, what's the point of a peer-reviewed publication? This is the heart of the controversy - not just a few leaked emails.
The Ubuntu version (and I assume the OS X version) use OpenGL solely for the menus and overlays. VDPAU is used for decoding video on the GPU, and it works exceptionally well.
Up until now though, this meant Windows users were SOL when it came to hardware accelerated video decoding - I'm guessing DirectX gives them this functionality.
The amusing part though is that the original project (XMBC) used DirectX since it only ran on the original XBox, and the XBMC project ported to OpenGL to support other platforms.
Other than the CRU and NASA, who else publishes this data? I was under the impression they were the only two generating global temperature data sets and neither has been willing to show all of their work.
When you have a minute though, you should update the Wikipedia page to add your list of the many independent sources.
I'm convinced PC World has it out for the Droid and has only been carrying negative articles about it. This article is particularly misleading. First of all, the unlimited phone data plan IS unlimited - it's the tethering, WAN card, Mifi, etc plans that are limited to 5GB a month. Just head over to the Verizon website and check out the fine print. Now the catch is if they think you're tethering without a tether plan (which is really easy to do) they'll charge you for tethering. So if you use 10GB a month of phone data (which, lets be honest here, is not realistic using just your phone) they'll hit you for tethering.
Next, the $15 a month for Exchange is if you're an enterprise customer. I'm not really sure what that means - if they host the account for you, or handle some extra securtity stuff, or what - but if you're just average Joe user with your own personal account, you won't need to pay it. There is no problem using Exchange with the regular personal data plan.
These facts can easily be confirmed by checking out Verizon's website, but the boys over at PCWorld are too busy making out with their iPhones to do any fact checking.
You are 100% correct, but unfortunately we've pissed on the constitution long ago to give the federal government unchecked power. The commerce clause has been so thoroughly exploited over the years that there is just about nothing the feds can't do. Just look at the war on drugs as one fine example of out-of-control government with no regard for the constitution. Remember how the constitution had to be amended to prohibit alcohol? Not anymore, that's just an antiquated inconvenience. The worst part is that most Americans think (and are perfectly OK with) that the feds can do whatever they want and no longer question their abuse of power.
Personally, I don't see how this bill is anything but a boon for insurers. What people fail to realize is that many Americans, especially the young and healthy, don't WANT health insurance. I know I don't. But I soon may be forced by the government to buy a product I don't want. Yeah, you can make the insurance companies take on those with preexisting conditions, but they'll just use it as a reason to jack up rates for everyone else. But yeah, if you're gonna fix healthcare, fix HEALTHCARE, don't just force everyone to buy products from those who are lining your pockets.
Sounds like a combination of a bad cable modem and/or poor torrent configuration and not a case of throttling. Torrents use a lot of simultaneous connections, and it's not uncommon for modems to crash when trying to handle so many connections. At the very least, the connections may be thrashing your modem or router to the point of near unresponsiveness. You should limit the maximum number of connections your torrent client uses - start with 10 and work your way up until you start to have problems. Or head over to SBHacker and load some better firmware on your modem.
That info is outdated as it is referring to EVDO Rev. 0. Both Verizon and Sprint are now 100% Rev. A, which peaks out around 3Mbps with a typical speed of about 1Mbps. This puts it on par with the average HSDPA roll out in the US. You should also note that EVDO Rev. A uplink maxes out around 1.8 Mbps whereas HSDPA is limited to only 384kbps.
That's non-sense. 1xEVDO Rev. A is capable of 3 Mbps and all of Verizon's network uses this technology - I'm pretty sure that falls in the the understanding of what is 3G. In actual practice though, Verizon's network supplies a pretty consistent 1 Mbps connection all across the country, which is about 4x faster than the maximum theoretical throughput of an EDGE network.
Furthermore, the fact that WCDMA is very inflexible and depends on 5 MHz channels means that in the few places that there actually is service, you are less likely to be able to use it because there are fewer channels serving fewer clients. Go ask any iPhone user about the fantastic reliability of AT&T's 3G network. WCDMA just doesn't fare well in markets where the use of wireless spectrum isn't dictated by government mandate as it is in the EU. Also AT&T has yet to even deploy HSPA+ on a large scale to the best of my knowledge, so to say that they're service is that much faster (although it is slightly faster) is just wrong.
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Actually, it talks about transistor density per unit cost - as long as manufacturing continues to improve and drive down costs, Moore's law will continue beyond the physical limitations of transistor density (stuff will continue to get cheaper even if it doesn't get 'faster').
I don't understand why most people focus on the maximizing transistor density part when 99% of applications call for minimizing cost.
7-1? Citation please. Doing a quick Google search shows the opposite to be true (Democrats outspent Republicans overall), but not by anywhere near that level.
Please, Russ Feingold is the epidemy of a career politician. Of course he's non-partisan - he went with whatever serves him and his career the best - just like McCain who co-sponsored that horrible 'campaign finance reform' bill. That's why he was voted out - people are tired of being fed lip service by these scum bags on both sides of the isle.
Could you please explain to me how the law struck down in the CU decision is anything but censorship? So now, for the first time in about a decade, people other than the political parties and the government approved media can support a candidate before an election. How is that a bad thing? That the ACLU, NRA, NAACP, AARP, etc can actually voice the opinion of their members before an election is great. Or you'd rather only be allowed to hear what the Republicans, Democrats, CNN, Fox News, etc have to say? Or are you seriously going to argue that the voice of an individual means more than jack shit in a democratic republic of ~300 million people and we don't need to form groups to get our messages across? The campaign reform act had nothing to do with keeping out special interests, and everything to do with protecting the establishment. Please lay off the kool-aid - censorship is always bad, regardless of who you're censoring.
And contrary to what Predsident Obama says, these private corporations were allowed to spend all they wanted before this law was passed in 2002. About half of the states have also always allowed it in state and local elections. Amazingly, we got this far without the restriction, and it seems the power of special interests has only increased under its influence. (Not saying it is at fault, just that it doesn't actually do what it's marketed to do)
Furthermore, even with the law on the books, it only had the affect of raising the price of admission on political speech - those big evil corporations you're so afraid of could easily afford to set up PACs to work around the law, while non-profits that depend on small contributions from the People were shut out.
Oh, and there is no "conservative majority" in the SCOTUS. There are 4 liberals, 4 conservatives, and Justice Kennedy who is very moderate and often unpredictable. The only amazing thing about the decision is 4 justices actually supported the federal government censoring private parties.
The (hopefully) obvious solution is to abolish the drug prohibition all together. I would bet the total societal cost (in terms of both financial cost and loss of human life and productivity) of the drug war has far exceeded the costs ever possible in a society where all drugs were manufactured and distributed legally. I would also bet cultural pressure to avoid the use of certain kinds of drugs would be far more effective than the current legal pressure to avoid the use of almost all drugs.
They probably should also legalize and regulate prostitution while they're at it.
As others have mentioned, an FPGA would be the way to go. This would also take care of the DMCA issue - some type of open digital video capture project could sell FPGA based capture cards to encode non-HDCP DVI/HDMI video sources, and thus not violate the DMCA. Since the FPGA is easily software upgradeable, the end-user could update it after purchase to also decode HDCP much like how libdvdcss is handled today.
The biggest benefit is not for piracy (99% of pirates wouldn't bother and would just download the content instead) but rather to allow one to capture and encode digital HD video from their cable box for a home media server setup. It's unfortunate that such a practice isn't protected by fair use since it is a perfectly legitimate use case.
The biggest problem with Flash on Android is the lack of FlashBlock - visiting a site with multiple Flash ads is total hell.
Then there's embedded YouTube videos - playing them with Flash sucks compared to using the YouTube app and it seems to force you to watch embedded videos with Flash. I've yet to figure out how to get it to allow me to fall back to the YouTube app.
My solution is to uninstall Flash, and only install it as I really need it. Even then, it's iffy if Flash will work when I need it.
While I wish I could share your optimism, I'm afraid the DC Circuit is fighting the uphill battle on this one. I admit I haven't read much about this decision yet, but my reading about the DC decision made me a bit uneasy.
Unfortunately, police have long been able to watch people in public space without a warrant, and there is significant legal precedent giving them power to do so.
Furthermore, the DC Circuit creates an entirely new test stating that surveillance over any extended period of time is a 4th Amendment search and requires a search warrant. IIRC, their decision was that while a single given action by the police may be legal, a combination of actions are not. This is totally new and unprecedented, and while I agree with it completely, it will be up the the SCOTUS to support this new precedent and make it the law of the land.
Our only hope here may be an action of Congress. That is, of course, unlikely as the political machines and the media have the electorate happily distracted with other, pointless 'hot-button' topics while our rights are slowly eroded away.
Go with a Rigol. I use a low-end 2 channel 100MHz Tek at work, and a 2 channel 100Mhz Rigol at home - I honestly like the Rigol much more, even though it was only a fraction of the cost. I feel with the Teks they try to make it clear that it is a low end scope.
If you have $2k to spend, you can not just get a brand new Rigol scope, but also a good bench-top power supply and perhaps an arbitrary wave form generator - everything the home CE needs to get started.
There are a lot actually, starting with the ACLU and the NRA. The People do lobby congress to great success - they just do it as groups in order to pool resources.
The problem of course is not the lobbying (it is a constitutionally protected right after all), it's the politicians who care more about getting a steak dinner, a Rolex, and a blow job than doing what's best for their constituents and their country.
A 'corporation' is nothing more than a tax definition. When it comes to the rights of the people in a group, it falls under the right to assemble. There is plenty of supreme court precedence making it very clear that people retain their rights as a group - regardless of how their group is defined by tax code.
If you don't like it, you can petition congress to amend the constitution to repeal, or heavily modify, the 1st amendment. Something tells me that won't go over too well with most Americans.
So you also agree that corporations like the ACLU and the NRA should not be allowed to speak? We should all be required to fight for our rights as individuals?
No, corporations being allowed to lobby is not the problem - corrupt, scum bag politicians who lie to their voters and side with whoever gives them the most blow jobs are the problem. The problem is we live in a society where private businesses need to pull this crap to stay competitive because that's just how the game is played. Maybe if the people we elected actually cared about those who elected them, this wouldn't be an issue.
Any American gun owner can tell you that tritium is NOT banned in the US - tritium makes for great night sights and is a common addition for home defense weapons.
Exactly. Instead of using existing laws and the FTC to squeeze ISPs for possible abusive monopoly practices, they've instead decided to further expand the FCC. Now our wonderful government has the power to give the go-ahead nod to any filtering the lobbyists want. What people need to realize is that any law suits against ISPs regarding unfair business practices will have even less traction now as long as there is some remote nexus to illegal file sharing.
I just don't understand these people - you complain about lobbying, but you support laws and policies that make lobbying more beneficial. NN is a great idea in the land of rainbows and unicorns, but in the land of bureaucracy and politics NN is just another empty promise to get your votes while also lining the pockets of those in power.
Huh, what? I have Comcast internet, and believe me, I have as much of a burning hatred for that company as the next guy, but they definitely do NOT filter or throttle bit torrent. I use it constantly and test it regularly and have not seen any sign of outside interference. Please hate on Comcast, but don't make shit up.
First off, I have both a Droid and a 32GB iPod Touch. Frankly, I like the touch on the Droid better than the iPod - I find it more responsive and more accurate when playing the same game or browsing the web on both devices. It may just be my perception, but I simply find myself becoming less aggravated with the Droid's touch screen than the iPod's.
While I don't have the iPod with me right now, I do have my Droid and was able to try this experiment. I used an app called 'Simply Draw' and was not able to repeat their results. Every time I try, I get lines that are as straight as my finger can make them. I have yet to produce lines like those in the article no matter how hard I try - even using multi-touch to draw 2 lines at once works perfectly.
One problem I have noticed with the Droid that may be the cause here is the touchscreen is very sensitive to noisy power supplies. Using a cheap wall charger has a HUGE impact on the accuracy of the touch screen. I'm guessing Motorola didn't use any ferrites on the USB signals, allowing high frequency noise from an external supply to negatively impact the device. I suspect placing a ferrite on the USB cable near the phone end would minimize this issue, but have yet to try it myself. Instead, I just use quality chargers.
I think you're taking tablets too literally; this has absolutely nothing to do with tablets. The point here is Freescale, a semiconductor manufacturer (and not a system OEM), built a tablet device to show off their SoC designs to OEMs. It is a reference design and nothing more - actual OEM developers use it as a guide to see how to best implement Freescale's products.
The point here is Freescale is advertising to OEMs "Hey look how easy and cheap it is to develop with our product". This is not aimed at you, and they don't care if you want a tablet or not. They only care that you probably want a small, portable, yet fairly powerful device (be it a netbook, tablet, smartphone, whatever) that could be implemented with their products.
And why did they choose a tablet you ask? It's easier to build, plain and simple. No hinge, no moving parts - just bolt an LCD to a PCB board and put it in an enclosure and you have CES worthy development board.
You're missing the key point that the contract price includes cellular service. If you buy the phone outright, you don't get service. The service costs much more (and has greater profit margins) than the phone, which is why carriers are willing to subsidize phones like this.
I personally don't understand why anyone (in the US at least) would want to buy a phone out of contract. You're almost always guaranteed to pay more for the phone compared to taking the contract, even if you decide to bail and pay the ETF.
They've also refused to disclose their raw data, or even a list of what data they used. They've gone as far as ignoring FOIA requests to the point where NASA will soon be facing litigation. They can open-source all the algorithms they want, but without showing their data, it's completely useless.
So no, the criticisms have only been answered for those who are not serious in hearing the real answers.
Yes, it's not unheard of to destroy raw data, but a list of what data was used and how is usually maintained. This way, someone else can collect the same raw data again and verify the original results.
The big problem with the CRU is they've failed to even disclose a list of exactly what data was used and what they did with that data. This makes it impossible to verify their results. It should also be noted that this info is required for publication in most journals, but they have managed to get published (most of the time) without it anyway. After all, if you can't peer-review their work, what's the point of a peer-reviewed publication? This is the heart of the controversy - not just a few leaked emails.
The Ubuntu version (and I assume the OS X version) use OpenGL solely for the menus and overlays. VDPAU is used for decoding video on the GPU, and it works exceptionally well.
Up until now though, this meant Windows users were SOL when it came to hardware accelerated video decoding - I'm guessing DirectX gives them this functionality.
The amusing part though is that the original project (XMBC) used DirectX since it only ran on the original XBox, and the XBMC project ported to OpenGL to support other platforms.
Other than the CRU and NASA, who else publishes this data? I was under the impression they were the only two generating global temperature data sets and neither has been willing to show all of their work.
When you have a minute though, you should update the Wikipedia page to add your list of the many independent sources.
I'm convinced PC World has it out for the Droid and has only been carrying negative articles about it. This article is particularly misleading. First of all, the unlimited phone data plan IS unlimited - it's the tethering, WAN card, Mifi, etc plans that are limited to 5GB a month. Just head over to the Verizon website and check out the fine print. Now the catch is if they think you're tethering without a tether plan (which is really easy to do) they'll charge you for tethering. So if you use 10GB a month of phone data (which, lets be honest here, is not realistic using just your phone) they'll hit you for tethering.
Next, the $15 a month for Exchange is if you're an enterprise customer. I'm not really sure what that means - if they host the account for you, or handle some extra securtity stuff, or what - but if you're just average Joe user with your own personal account, you won't need to pay it. There is no problem using Exchange with the regular personal data plan.
These facts can easily be confirmed by checking out Verizon's website, but the boys over at PCWorld are too busy making out with their iPhones to do any fact checking.
You are 100% correct, but unfortunately we've pissed on the constitution long ago to give the federal government unchecked power. The commerce clause has been so thoroughly exploited over the years that there is just about nothing the feds can't do. Just look at the war on drugs as one fine example of out-of-control government with no regard for the constitution. Remember how the constitution had to be amended to prohibit alcohol? Not anymore, that's just an antiquated inconvenience. The worst part is that most Americans think (and are perfectly OK with) that the feds can do whatever they want and no longer question their abuse of power.
Personally, I don't see how this bill is anything but a boon for insurers. What people fail to realize is that many Americans, especially the young and healthy, don't WANT health insurance. I know I don't. But I soon may be forced by the government to buy a product I don't want. Yeah, you can make the insurance companies take on those with preexisting conditions, but they'll just use it as a reason to jack up rates for everyone else. But yeah, if you're gonna fix healthcare, fix HEALTHCARE, don't just force everyone to buy products from those who are lining your pockets.
Sounds like a combination of a bad cable modem and/or poor torrent configuration and not a case of throttling. Torrents use a lot of simultaneous connections, and it's not uncommon for modems to crash when trying to handle so many connections. At the very least, the connections may be thrashing your modem or router to the point of near unresponsiveness. You should limit the maximum number of connections your torrent client uses - start with 10 and work your way up until you start to have problems. Or head over to SBHacker and load some better firmware on your modem.
That info is outdated as it is referring to EVDO Rev. 0. Both Verizon and Sprint are now 100% Rev. A, which peaks out around 3Mbps with a typical speed of about 1Mbps. This puts it on par with the average HSDPA roll out in the US. You should also note that EVDO Rev. A uplink maxes out around 1.8 Mbps whereas HSDPA is limited to only 384kbps.
That's non-sense. 1xEVDO Rev. A is capable of 3 Mbps and all of Verizon's network uses this technology - I'm pretty sure that falls in the the understanding of what is 3G. In actual practice though, Verizon's network supplies a pretty consistent 1 Mbps connection all across the country, which is about 4x faster than the maximum theoretical throughput of an EDGE network.
Furthermore, the fact that WCDMA is very inflexible and depends on 5 MHz channels means that in the few places that there actually is service, you are less likely to be able to use it because there are fewer channels serving fewer clients. Go ask any iPhone user about the fantastic reliability of AT&T's 3G network. WCDMA just doesn't fare well in markets where the use of wireless spectrum isn't dictated by government mandate as it is in the EU. Also AT&T has yet to even deploy HSPA+ on a large scale to the best of my knowledge, so to say that they're service is that much faster (although it is slightly faster) is just wrong.