> maybe that's because there isn't much difference between the two.
Especially in the Internet biz. For 99% of customers the choice is between a huge bloated government granted and regulated monopoly telco and the almost as bloated government grated and regulated cable company. Then there is a couple of wireless options here and there most of which are owned and operated by the monopoly telco and will never deliver enough bandwidth to matter.
But the bigger problem with the FCC is the newspeak. Whenever progs open their piehole words come out but they don't mean what normal people assume they mean. "Freedom is Slavery" "Ignorance is Power" "Ministry of Truth" "Network Neutrality" You can bet your last dollar that the absolute last thing the FCC has in mind is "Neutrality".
Hopefully the courts will knock this one down as fast as the last attempts by the FCC to exceed their mandate.
> in theory, this stops piracy; in practice, it stops homebrow / third party
No, it doesn't even stop it "in theory'. Take an Xbox360 game to China and have them make you a million bit for bit copies and they will happily run on a stock Xbox360. Same for DVD movies, make a bit for bit copy on a commercial press and they play just fine. They get a small advantage against small scale copying because commercially available DVD blanks have the CSS blocks burned out during manufacturing. Which is all they need, a small nudge against end users and a big ol fig leaf to cover up their real intent behind the encrypted disc.
No, what is being 'protected' (read restricted) is selling games/movies without cutting the vendor in for a taste. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony demand a hefty per copy fee to sell on their platform. In the case of DVDs what is being bought by the studios is the knowledge that the Region Coding will stop most players from watching a movie taken outside it's intended viewing area. But again, it has nothing to do with copying. The just say that because even many people who violate copyright from time to time believe it is wrong and thus can't work up a lot of moral outrage when rights holders claim they are trying to prevent unauthorized copies. Or bluntly, they lie their asses off.
If they were really concerned with copies instead of control they would put a lot more effort into individual keying of each copy. Several methods have been proposed over the years, none get adopted. Embedding RFID in the media, barcodes with serial numbers on the inner ring, etc. They don't really care. So long as They can collect the per copy fees from all of the legit sales they could care less about adding cost to protect the game developers from cheap bookleg copies. Just like the movie studios really don't care about the occasional full scale bootleg operation nearly as much as they fear those legit $1 per copy movies sold in India (usually with English audio as a option because it is the only language everyone will understand there) making their way onto eBay for $2.50.
> The most effective way to deal with a mob is > to kill every last one of them.
Not at all, waste of worker bees at any rate.
Almost every 'mob' is composed of two groups, rabble rousers and rabble. Cull out the community organizers and no more mobs. Cops have been dealing with riots (mostly potential riots) for decades by going after the organizers first. No they can't arrest everyone, but they rarely have to, take out the dozen ringleaders and the mob disperses.
Another attack, especially in this case, is on the widely believed notion that stuff on the net is anonymous. A few high profile trackdowns and arrests work wonders to educate the gullible fools who get sucked into something like Anonymous believing they can 'stick it to the man' and be anonymous, thus escaping the wrath of 'the man.'
> No insurance at all is just as good as catastrophic > insurance if you're poor.
Simplify to "No insurance is as good as insurance if you are poor."
If someone with a pot to piss in refuses to purchase medical insurance they will get the same medical care they would if they had it and the same as a poor person receives, more or less. The difference is a person with a pot to piss in loses the pot. If you are poor you don't have a pot to piss in and thus nothing to lose.
And this is the crux of the problem. As a society we have decided that hospitals must treat anyone who shows up at an emergency room. So the poor know that if they let the problem fester a bit they will get treated and the odds of dying isn't that much worse than going in at the first sign of trouble. (the cost is of course much greater) So they make the rational decision that cable TV, an Xbox360, a cell phone and/or driving a better car are a wiser use of their limited funds.
Not sure how we can rejigger the incentives to make the poor move buying some basic medical insurance a higher priority.
> An unwavering faith in the "free market" is the equivalent > of any other type of religious zealotry.
Except of course the small matter that the degree that markets are free in a society almost perfectly correlates to the general wealth of that society and to a pretty good extent to its political freedom. So except for the evidence you are 100% correct. But you should be sure to ignore the evidence when making your own narrow minded zealot remarks.
> So why are they almost universally opposed to gay mariage?
I'm agnostic and opposed, what does that make me? How about literate?
English, Motherf**kers! Every human language has a word and a set of social practices that match up with the word "marriage." It is usually flexible enough to cover M-FF and M-F(n) groupings along with M-F pairings but until a few years ago the notion the word/idea included M-M and F-F pairings was an alien idea. A couple of legislatures have passed laws to redefine the word and while I'd vote nay I have no major objection if a majority rules the other way. Where I do have a great anger that burns with the heat of a thousand suns is when judges redefine an existing word. For if they can get away with that there is no effective limit on their power. All who attempt it should be removed from tne bench on the grounds of failing to understand the English language.
> How is forcing your religious or moral views on others > NOT the embodiment of hatred?
If this isn't the stupidist thing I read today, the winner will almost certainly make my head asplode.:)
Almost every law promulgated by every civilization in history is a codification of the consensus view of religious or moral views. So unless you are an anarchist you are either a total moron or know you are speaking untruth to advance a moral argument of your own. And any moral argument that can only win by lying......
You can take the pure libertarian stance that any law that restricts what consenting adults do is wicked and I have a fair amount of sympathy with that. But that would only be a good argument against sodomy laws, not marriage law which by definition affect all members of a society and are a fit subject for legislation.
> The base station is a long way down, and even at maximum transmit power > the connection is too unreliable for voice.
No, do the math. 30,000 feet of empty air vs a mile of urban environment. The problem is a cell in a plane throws a very clear signal to every tower for miles around; All of which try to reply, hilarity ensues. And in the days of analog cell service there were only a couple hundred channels usable from any one cell site (to allow overlap) so a planeload of idiots trying to make calls would present a moving cellphone jammer to the system. And with digital the problem is only a little less horrible. The root of the problem is the cell network was conceived as a 2D environment and the problem of the Z axis's existence was left undefined.
It is also a limited run prototype intended to seed the developer market. If Google puts a stupid Atom into the production hardware I'll lose all respect for them. It runs one application and one plugin. It is ported to ARM as is Flash. Intel hopes to someday (maybe even next year... yeah right) get idle power consumption down to under a watt. You can get some pretty nice ARM SoC solutions that top out at a watt. And that is for everything but the backlight, not just the CPU. These prototypes are three fracking pounds. If that is anything like what is going to ship Google can pack it in now and save everyone the bother.
Not to mention that if it ships with Intel Inside the pricetag is going to be right in with the modern Windows based netbooks and again, why bother? If they aren't planning to deliver them at retail to end users for $200 in WiFi or free with a 3G data plan then again, Google is far less savy than I have been giving them credit for. To hit those pricepoints ARM is the only option. Intel has no plans to offer a SoC solution anytime in the next couple of years and there are multiple ARM based solutions shipping that have CPU+GPU+3G+WiFi+Bluetooth+Power on the same chip and you can get SoC+RAM+FLASH on a very small module.
> I don't want console blanking and I never found a reliable userspace solution to turn it off...
Man setterm.
Specifically, add setterm -powersave off to something like rc.local and forget about it. Sure as hell beats using a custom kernel vs your distro's better maintained one just for that. Of course if you are running a custom kernel anyway, guess one more patch doesn't hurt anything.
And reach even more to get to Esc to get between insert and command mode? On a modern keyboard you can live in insert mode most of the time since movement, insert/delete, etc. all have hard keys. The embedded movement keys were the bees' knees on an ancient terminal lacking in cursor keys but we have better stuff now.
> Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program and can't be modified?
Don't bet on that last bit. I'm totally stoked about Chrome but not because I actually want such a retarded thing. How long have we been waiting for ARM based netbooks? Just when it looked like the Year of Linux on the Netbook was here and would soon abandon the power guzzling Atom for a more sensible ARM, Wintel threw its weight around and netbooks vanished. Hint: if it isn't cheap, small, light, flash based and netcentric it ain't a netbook. What the marketing folks are branding as netbooks these days are three pounds plus and have hard hard drives loaded with Windows. Well now here comes ARM based hardware just waiting to get repurposed to running a more general purpose netbook environment. And rooted it will be, just like every Android product has been rooted.
> I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys > on the PC keyboard that there are presently.
So to please uneducated non computer users who don't own or use computers, we who do know how to use all the keys on a modern keyboard should be forced to endure a crippled user interface. Lemme guess, Obama voter.
Trust me, every key is needed with the possible exception of caps and num lock. Numlock is just there as a legacy from the old 84 key keyboard and could be eliminated... except a lot of things glommed on to it as a an unneeded key that could be repurposed. Same for scroll lock, lots of KVM boxes use scroll lock to switch displays.
> Annoys the snot out of my wife and kids, but that's hardly my problem.
So you are doing it wrong just to annoy people? Childish. Easy enough to only have the unusual keymapping when you are logged in and leave the system default alone.
> IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.
Useless keys are very valuable if you think outside the box. Map it to a compose key. Or use it as a special key for things like virtual machines instead of having to make do with chording a bunch of the buckybits. Of course if one is stuck on stupid (i.e. Windows) then there probably isn't much use for a useless key.
Several. One important one is foot traffic. How many Americans go abroad for medical care when the poo hits the fan? A few go to get drugs the FDA is dragging its feet on. IN other words only when the government gets in the way. Now how many foreigners head here when they are ill?
> We do not have the highest lifespans, nor the lowest infant > mortality, what are you basing this on?
Liars love statistics. But statistics rarely actually lie. It is in how they are used and misrepresented. For example many countries simply don't count very premature babies we routinely save as 'births' in their statistics but because we don't save 100% we show a lot more 'infant mortality' for trying. We also have a bigger spread in socioeconomic conditions in our population than Western Europe. Yes in our Democrat Party Strongholds we have somewhat higher infant mortality but in the rest of the country it is pretty rare. Kinda unfair to assign blame to the medical profession for more general problems in society isn't it? Same for lifespan. To the extent medicine can extend lifespan we are #1. But again doctors can't cure the drug war, gangs, drunk driving, suicide, extreme poverty, etc.
That is in the Preamble. The Constitution grants specific powers, that taken in whole are deemed by the Founders, to promote the "General Welfare". It can't be read as a general grant of authority to do anything that a politician claims promotes the general welfare. If that were the intended meaning they could have just stopped the document at the Preamble and saved a lot of sweating it out in Philidelphia without the benefit of air conditioning in the middle of summer.
> or in other words, full power to create entitlements.
Most certainly not. The word welfare didn't carry that additional definition when the Constitution was written. Sorry, you do not have the 'Right' to be made happy by enslaving your neighbor. You only have the Right to Persue Happiness.
> The army clause has been interpreted to allow an Air Force
Actually it would be more like the Navy with the heavy focus on big expensive things that require a highly trained force to maintain in readiness for war. Of course the modern mechanized army meets that description as well. A rare case where tech really does render the original Constitution outdated. We should correct it the right way instead of ignoring the problem.
> Because that's what the capitalist economic model is all about.
No, this is because the ISPs are now government granted and regulated monopolies. In a free market there would be dozens of companies competing like crazy for your dollar and as costs fell rates would follow.
Because it was the government doing it they did it stupidly when they broke up AT&T all those years ago. So it again and get it right. Break up the phone AND cable companies. The part with the natural monopoly stays a government regulated monopoly and has the physical plant; the head end/CO and the wires going out to subscribers homes. The other half escapes the regulators and competes evenly with as many new entrants as want to provide dialtone, video and Internet over the regulated wires on a equal footing.
Which is priced based on a typical user. And guess what? There probably isn't a 100-1 difference in the usage between bus pass holders like there is in Internet usage.
> Or a pay as you go police service?
That is a service more comparable to an insurance model. How many times do you WANT to use the police? Never. It is always because a) something beyond your control happened or b) something within your control that you failed to do.
> Pay as you go public library?
Everyone concedes that public libraries are essentially income transfer. Giving everyone some level of access to information has been decided to be something we want to do as a society. Whether it is a good idea or not is certainly something reasonable people could debate in the political arena. Saying this as someone who works for a public library btw so I'm probably a bit biased.
> Pay as you go medical care, which has worked so well in the USA?
Actually, we have the best system even though it isn't a pure capitalist one now. And most everyone has now realized it gets worse from here unless we can pull a miracle and repeal Obamacare.
> Pay as you go mail delivery (as opposed to sending mail) ?
And this one is why I bothered to reply since it does bring up a very good point. In the postal service it is strictly sender pays and there are consequences. We pretty much accept the spam because the sender pays and most thinking people understand they are the ones keeping the postal service afloat, 1st class mail certainly isn't expensive enough to keep the system going and volume is dropping. If most consumers end up on a receiver pays Internet model it will trigger massive changes, most of which few people are thinking about. Get ahead of that curve and one could get filthy rich.
Now people don't care how massive a pageview is unless it is on a smartphone and those currently tend to get special pages anyway. If the viewer is paying for bandwidth it won't be long until browsers begin indicating what a page is using. Now a web designer thinks nothing of embedding 100K of Javascript just to animate buttons and similar frippary. Ram in as many banner ads as possible to maximize revenue and who cares how optimized they are! Flash ads? Sure! Nope, not if the viewer is paying. If we aren't careful things will get crazy. Advertisers will try to make deals with ISPs so that their bits don't count but if the user's tools for estimating usage don't have a way to share that information it won't help. Scamming and fraud will run rampant.
They might be pushing for it. But they have been pissed since the Internet appeared. What changed is Netflix and Hulu appeared. Pirates were always in the nethogs category; annoying but a managable problem. Now they face the prospect of EVERYONE becoming a nethog and blowing up the oversubscription model that has defined consumer Internet since it began. Every BD Player and most DVD players these days have an ethernet jack on em. Most higher end television sets are Internet enabled now. Something must give. We can argue about what needs to change but keeping things as they were isn't an option anymore.
>Except internet access is generally not considered "utility"..
Eh? Find me an consumer level Internet provider these days that ISN'T a government regulated utility operating under a government granted monopoly? The little Mom & Pop ISP is long dead.
> nor is internet access based on a consumable resource.
Yes it is, just not in the same way as the electric company having to buy a trainload of coal to provide the power to your PC. All current Internet plans marketed to end users is based on over subscribing the bandwidth. Go price a T1. Now compare and contrast to a 1.5Mbps DSL line.
The T1 is symetrical while DSL is designed to lock you into a content consumption model. You also tend to get a good SLA on the T1. More importantly DSL service is almost always limited (either spelled out or they just silently throttle the hogs) while you can nail that T1 up all month and they don't care. In fact if your throughput drops below the rated speed your SLA will often kick in and refund cash to you. Compare the bills though. Yes that SLA adds some to the sticker shock but most of the difference is they are pricing the T1 expecting you to bang the heck out of it.
Sorry, you lose. Not only at Constitutional Law but at parsing English.
Material in the headings is mostly syntatic sugar anyway. Progs love to grab snatches of text out of context to read the Constitution as allowing them to do whatever the heck they want. But if you actually READ the thing it says something quite different. Your ilk reads it as saying the Feds can do ANYTHING "Necessary and Proper" by taking those three words and standing them on their own. To one who can actually read it says they can pass any law that is "necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers..." We read the whole sentence in context with the whole document. In other words they can pass laws to execute the enumerated powers, not anything they think proper. Were the headings removed and only the enumerated lists left the prose would suffer and the courts wouldn't have some helpful text explaining the reasoning behind the powers to imply further limits, but the legitimate powers granted would be pretty much identical.
> Which means I spend more on some sort of flat rate that the gp would call "marxist"
Not all flat rates are bogus. Yes there IS a cost involved with just having an electric meter. The electric company has to maintain the fixed infrastructure to service a customer regardless of usage. The billing department's expenses are pretty much fixed per account, etc. There are fixed regulatory fees to pay, etc. When the fixed portion is so high though you should be a bit suspicious that they haven't bribed some politicians to let em hose ratepayers or the politicians aren't imposing 'Robin Hood' surcharges to subsidize the rates of preferred groups. First be sure you aren't on the electric company's rate leveling plan as it will screw with the numbers big time.
> The total amount used shouldn't be the only factor.
Probably not. And even electricity is some areas is priced that way. If we had a free market in Internet service it would work itself out soon enough.
Too bad we don't have anything like one. In one corner we have The Phone Company, a huge bloated government granted monopoly so old and senile it almost let the Internet slip through its fingers. So tied to the government it is difficult to see where the government stupid ends and the corporate idiocy begins. In the other is the new scrapy upstart cable monopolies, not quite as tied to the government but desperate to fix that defect. Circling the two lumbering behemoths are a few hopelessly out of their league wireless providers... ignoring the majority who are just divisions of The Phone Company.
Wireless isn't going to meet the demands of broadband hidef content, probably won't ever even handle YouTube on smartphones. And forget sat, latency kills.
Like every utility, customers are eventually going to be paying fees that relate to their usage of the resource. I know this is an alien concept for you younger slashdot users who only know the world your marxist prof has taught you about but consider this a learning experience. Deal with it.
When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair. Either you have the low usage customers subsidizing the net hogs or you price the service where the low usage customers simply cannot justify the service. Or the government meddles and makes things go from bad to worse.
Lets examine the rest of the utility world. Do we have flat rate electricity? No. Do we have flat rate water? No. We sometimes have flat rate sewer but more often it is tied to water consumption on the assumption that most of your water eventually goes down the drain.
We do tend to have flat rate cable because a) until recently it would have been hard to meter and b) it doesn't cost the cable company more if you watch more. On Demand changes that model and guess what, most on demand programming carries a charge. But the biggest pushback against paying for cable by usage is the advertisers wouldn't like people getting into the habit of switching off unless they were actually paying attention and it would end useless (often bundled) channels being able to collect fees per set when nobody was watching.
So yes, if you are using more of a scarce resource you should expect to pay more. This is econ 101, which I realize is a scarce skill here but ignorance of reality doesn't mean you can ignore it.
> Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for? Maybe GM is on to something...
It made economic sense for Microsoft and Sony to sell at a loss because there was other revenue streams available to make up the initial loss. They get about $10 per game sold even if it isn't one of their own. Lose $100 on the console, sell ten games over the life of it and you are good. Factor in that they KNOW the production cost will drop quickly and it makes more sense. Finally add in the battle for market share angle and it makes enough economic sense that the shareholders aren't going to want blood and souls at the next stockholders' meeting.
None of those arguments are available to GM pissing away tax dollars subsidizing yuppies who want bragging rights for being greener than thou. Selling a Volt today at a loss doesn't open up any future revenue streams. The biggest cost is batteries and they are going to slowly drop in cost whether GM build the Volt now or when they are economically viable. And unless you count the market share of unprofitable green cars (ALL hybrids are currently selling at a loss with the possible recent exception of the Prius) as something valuable there isn't a market share building angle to justify it. It is pure politics.
Slashdot Mirror
> maybe that's because there isn't much difference between the two.
Especially in the Internet biz. For 99% of customers the choice is between a huge bloated government granted and regulated monopoly telco and the almost as bloated government grated and regulated cable company. Then there is a couple of wireless options here and there most of which are owned and operated by the monopoly telco and will never deliver enough bandwidth to matter.
But the bigger problem with the FCC is the newspeak. Whenever progs open their piehole words come out but they don't mean what normal people assume they mean. "Freedom is Slavery" "Ignorance is Power" "Ministry of Truth" "Network Neutrality" You can bet your last dollar that the absolute last thing the FCC has in mind is "Neutrality".
Hopefully the courts will knock this one down as fast as the last attempts by the FCC to exceed their mandate.
> in theory, this stops piracy; in practice, it stops homebrow / third party
No, it doesn't even stop it "in theory'. Take an Xbox360 game to China and have them make you a million bit for bit copies and they will happily run on a stock Xbox360. Same for DVD movies, make a bit for bit copy on a commercial press and they play just fine. They get a small advantage against small scale copying because commercially available DVD blanks have the CSS blocks burned out during manufacturing. Which is all they need, a small nudge against end users and a big ol fig leaf to cover up their real intent behind the encrypted disc.
No, what is being 'protected' (read restricted) is selling games/movies without cutting the vendor in for a taste. Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony demand a hefty per copy fee to sell on their platform. In the case of DVDs what is being bought by the studios is the knowledge that the Region Coding will stop most players from watching a movie taken outside it's intended viewing area. But again, it has nothing to do with copying. The just say that because even many people who violate copyright from time to time believe it is wrong and thus can't work up a lot of moral outrage when rights holders claim they are trying to prevent unauthorized copies. Or bluntly, they lie their asses off.
If they were really concerned with copies instead of control they would put a lot more effort into individual keying of each copy. Several methods have been proposed over the years, none get adopted. Embedding RFID in the media, barcodes with serial numbers on the inner ring, etc. They don't really care. So long as They can collect the per copy fees from all of the legit sales they could care less about adding cost to protect the game developers from cheap bookleg copies. Just like the movie studios really don't care about the occasional full scale bootleg operation nearly as much as they fear those legit $1 per copy movies sold in India (usually with English audio as a option because it is the only language everyone will understand there) making their way onto eBay for $2.50.
> The most effective way to deal with a mob is
> to kill every last one of them.
Not at all, waste of worker bees at any rate.
Almost every 'mob' is composed of two groups, rabble rousers and rabble. Cull out the community organizers and no more mobs. Cops have been dealing with riots (mostly potential riots) for decades by going after the organizers first. No they can't arrest everyone, but they rarely have to, take out the dozen ringleaders and the mob disperses.
Another attack, especially in this case, is on the widely believed notion that stuff on the net is anonymous. A few high profile trackdowns and arrests work wonders to educate the gullible fools who get sucked into something like Anonymous believing they can 'stick it to the man' and be anonymous, thus escaping the wrath of 'the man.'
> No insurance at all is just as good as catastrophic
> insurance if you're poor.
Simplify to "No insurance is as good as insurance if you are poor."
If someone with a pot to piss in refuses to purchase medical insurance they will get the same medical care they would if they had it and the same as a poor person receives, more or less. The difference is a person with a pot to piss in loses the pot. If you are poor you don't have a pot to piss in and thus nothing to lose.
And this is the crux of the problem. As a society we have decided that hospitals must treat anyone who shows up at an emergency room. So the poor know that if they let the problem fester a bit they will get treated and the odds of dying isn't that much worse than going in at the first sign of trouble. (the cost is of course much greater) So they make the rational decision that cable TV, an Xbox360, a cell phone and/or driving a better car are a wiser use of their limited funds.
Not sure how we can rejigger the incentives to make the poor move buying some basic medical insurance a higher priority.
> An unwavering faith in the "free market" is the equivalent
> of any other type of religious zealotry.
Except of course the small matter that the degree that markets are free in a society almost perfectly correlates to the general wealth of that society and to a pretty good extent to its political freedom. So except for the evidence you are 100% correct. But you should be sure to ignore the evidence when making your own narrow minded zealot remarks.
> So why are they almost universally opposed to gay mariage?
I'm agnostic and opposed, what does that make me? How about literate?
English, Motherf**kers! Every human language has a word and a set of social practices that match up with the word "marriage." It is usually flexible enough to cover M-FF and M-F(n) groupings along with M-F pairings but until a few years ago the notion the word/idea included M-M and F-F pairings was an alien idea. A couple of legislatures have passed laws to redefine the word and while I'd vote nay I have no major objection if a majority rules the other way. Where I do have a great anger that burns with the heat of a thousand suns is when judges redefine an existing word. For if they can get away with that there is no effective limit on their power. All who attempt it should be removed from tne bench on the grounds of failing to understand the English language.
> How is forcing your religious or moral views on others
> NOT the embodiment of hatred?
If this isn't the stupidist thing I read today, the winner will almost certainly make my head asplode. :)
Almost every law promulgated by every civilization in history is a codification of the consensus view of religious or moral views. So unless you are an anarchist you are either a total moron or know you are speaking untruth to advance a moral argument of your own. And any moral argument that can only win by lying......
You can take the pure libertarian stance that any law that restricts what consenting adults do is wicked and I have a fair amount of sympathy with that. But that would only be a good argument against sodomy laws, not marriage law which by definition affect all members of a society and are a fit subject for legislation.
> The base station is a long way down, and even at maximum transmit power
> the connection is too unreliable for voice.
No, do the math. 30,000 feet of empty air vs a mile of urban environment. The problem is a cell in a plane throws a very clear signal to every tower for miles around; All of which try to reply, hilarity ensues. And in the days of analog cell service there were only a couple hundred channels usable from any one cell site (to allow overlap) so a planeload of idiots trying to make calls would present a moving cellphone jammer to the system. And with digital the problem is only a little less horrible. The root of the problem is the cell network was conceived as a 2D environment and the problem of the Z axis's existence was left undefined.
> Because that's an Atom device, not ARM.
It is also a limited run prototype intended to seed the developer market. If Google puts a stupid Atom into the production hardware I'll lose all respect for them. It runs one application and one plugin. It is ported to ARM as is Flash. Intel hopes to someday (maybe even next year... yeah right) get idle power consumption down to under a watt. You can get some pretty nice ARM SoC solutions that top out at a watt. And that is for everything but the backlight, not just the CPU. These prototypes are three fracking pounds. If that is anything like what is going to ship Google can pack it in now and save everyone the bother.
Not to mention that if it ships with Intel Inside the pricetag is going to be right in with the modern Windows based netbooks and again, why bother? If they aren't planning to deliver them at retail to end users for $200 in WiFi or free with a 3G data plan then again, Google is far less savy than I have been giving them credit for. To hit those pricepoints ARM is the only option. Intel has no plans to offer a SoC solution anytime in the next couple of years and there are multiple ARM based solutions shipping that have CPU+GPU+3G+WiFi+Bluetooth+Power on the same chip and you can get SoC+RAM+FLASH on a very small module.
> I don't want console blanking and I never found a reliable userspace solution to turn it off ...
Man setterm.
Specifically, add setterm -powersave off to something like rc.local and forget about it. Sure as hell beats using a custom kernel vs your distro's better maintained one just for that. Of course if you are running a custom kernel anyway, guess one more patch doesn't hurt anything.
> Why not use i and s? Less reaching that way.
And reach even more to get to Esc to get between insert and command mode? On a modern keyboard you can live in insert mode most of the time since movement, insert/delete, etc. all have hard keys. The embedded movement keys were the bees' knees on an ancient terminal lacking in cursor keys but we have better stuff now.
> Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program and can't be modified?
Don't bet on that last bit. I'm totally stoked about Chrome but not because I actually want such a retarded thing. How long have we been waiting for ARM based netbooks? Just when it looked like the Year of Linux on the Netbook was here and would soon abandon the power guzzling Atom for a more sensible ARM, Wintel threw its weight around and netbooks vanished. Hint: if it isn't cheap, small, light, flash based and netcentric it ain't a netbook. What the marketing folks are branding as netbooks these days are three pounds plus and have hard hard drives loaded with Windows. Well now here comes ARM based hardware just waiting to get repurposed to running a more general purpose netbook environment. And rooted it will be, just like every Android product has been rooted.
> What does anyone need the Insert key for?
You poor deprived fool. Ins toggles between insert and overstrike in Vi/Vim. Use it most days. You obviously need better tools.
> I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys
> on the PC keyboard that there are presently.
So to please uneducated non computer users who don't own or use computers, we who do know how to use all the keys on a modern keyboard should be forced to endure a crippled user interface. Lemme guess, Obama voter.
Trust me, every key is needed with the possible exception of caps and num lock. Numlock is just there as a legacy from the old 84 key keyboard and could be eliminated... except a lot of things glommed on to it as a an unneeded key that could be repurposed. Same for scroll lock, lots of KVM boxes use scroll lock to switch displays.
> Annoys the snot out of my wife and kids, but that's hardly my problem.
So you are doing it wrong just to annoy people? Childish. Easy enough to only have the unusual keymapping when you are logged in and leave the system default alone.
> IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.
Useless keys are very valuable if you think outside the box. Map it to a compose key. Or use it as a special key for things like virtual machines instead of having to make do with chording a bunch of the buckybits. Of course if one is stuck on stupid (i.e. Windows) then there probably isn't much use for a useless key.
> What metric are you basing it on?
Several. One important one is foot traffic. How many Americans go abroad for medical care when the poo hits the fan? A few go to get drugs the FDA is dragging its feet on. IN other words only when the government gets in the way. Now how many foreigners head here when they are ill?
> We do not have the highest lifespans, nor the lowest infant
> mortality, what are you basing this on?
Liars love statistics. But statistics rarely actually lie. It is in how they are used and misrepresented. For example many countries simply don't count very premature babies we routinely save as 'births' in their statistics but because we don't save 100% we show a lot more 'infant mortality' for trying. We also have a bigger spread in socioeconomic conditions in our population than Western Europe. Yes in our Democrat Party Strongholds we have somewhat higher infant mortality but in the rest of the country it is pretty rare. Kinda unfair to assign blame to the medical profession for more general problems in society isn't it? Same for lifespan. To the extent medicine can extend lifespan we are #1. But again doctors can't cure the drug war, gangs, drunk driving, suicide, extreme poverty, etc.
> general welfare of the United States
That is in the Preamble. The Constitution grants specific powers, that taken in whole are deemed by the Founders, to promote the "General Welfare". It can't be read as a general grant of authority to do anything that a politician claims promotes the general welfare. If that were the intended meaning they could have just stopped the document at the Preamble and saved a lot of sweating it out in Philidelphia without the benefit of air conditioning in the middle of summer.
> or in other words, full power to create entitlements.
Most certainly not. The word welfare didn't carry that additional definition when the Constitution was written. Sorry, you do not have the 'Right' to be made happy by enslaving your neighbor. You only have the Right to Persue Happiness.
> The army clause has been interpreted to allow an Air Force
Actually it would be more like the Navy with the heavy focus on big expensive things that require a highly trained force to maintain in readiness for war. Of course the modern mechanized army meets that description as well. A rare case where tech really does render the original Constitution outdated. We should correct it the right way instead of ignoring the problem.
> Because that's what the capitalist economic model is all about.
No, this is because the ISPs are now government granted and regulated monopolies. In a free market there would be dozens of companies competing like crazy for your dollar and as costs fell rates would follow.
Because it was the government doing it they did it stupidly when they broke up AT&T all those years ago. So it again and get it right. Break up the phone AND cable companies. The part with the natural monopoly stays a government regulated monopoly and has the physical plant; the head end/CO and the wires going out to subscribers homes. The other half escapes the regulators and competes evenly with as many new entrants as want to provide dialtone, video and Internet over the regulated wires on a equal footing.
> How bout a pay as you go monthly bus pass?
Which is priced based on a typical user. And guess what? There probably isn't a 100-1 difference in the usage between bus pass holders like there is in Internet usage.
> Or a pay as you go police service?
That is a service more comparable to an insurance model. How many times do you WANT to use the police? Never. It is always because a) something beyond your control happened or b) something within your control that you failed to do.
> Pay as you go public library?
Everyone concedes that public libraries are essentially income transfer. Giving everyone some level of access to information has been decided to be something we want to do as a society. Whether it is a good idea or not is certainly something reasonable people could debate in the political arena. Saying this as someone who works for a public library btw so I'm probably a bit biased.
> Pay as you go medical care, which has worked so well in the USA?
Actually, we have the best system even though it isn't a pure capitalist one now. And most everyone has now realized it gets worse from here unless we can pull a miracle and repeal Obamacare.
> Pay as you go mail delivery (as opposed to sending mail) ?
And this one is why I bothered to reply since it does bring up a very good point. In the postal service it is strictly sender pays and there are consequences. We pretty much accept the spam because the sender pays and most thinking people understand they are the ones keeping the postal service afloat, 1st class mail certainly isn't expensive enough to keep the system going and volume is dropping. If most consumers end up on a receiver pays Internet model it will trigger massive changes, most of which few people are thinking about. Get ahead of that curve and one could get filthy rich.
Now people don't care how massive a pageview is unless it is on a smartphone and those currently tend to get special pages anyway. If the viewer is paying for bandwidth it won't be long until browsers begin indicating what a page is using. Now a web designer thinks nothing of embedding 100K of Javascript just to animate buttons and similar frippary. Ram in as many banner ads as possible to maximize revenue and who cares how optimized they are! Flash ads? Sure! Nope, not if the viewer is paying. If we aren't careful things will get crazy. Advertisers will try to make deals with ISPs so that their bits don't count but if the user's tools for estimating usage don't have a way to share that information it won't help. Scamming and fraud will run rampant.
> It's the MIAA and RIAA that are pushing for it.
They might be pushing for it. But they have been pissed since the Internet appeared. What changed is Netflix and Hulu appeared. Pirates were always in the nethogs category; annoying but a managable problem. Now they face the prospect of EVERYONE becoming a nethog and blowing up the oversubscription model that has defined consumer Internet since it began. Every BD Player and most DVD players these days have an ethernet jack on em. Most higher end television sets are Internet enabled now. Something must give. We can argue about what needs to change but keeping things as they were isn't an option anymore.
>Except internet access is generally not considered "utility"..
Eh? Find me an consumer level Internet provider these days that ISN'T a government regulated utility operating under a government granted monopoly? The little Mom & Pop ISP is long dead.
> nor is internet access based on a consumable resource.
Yes it is, just not in the same way as the electric company having to buy a trainload of coal to provide the power to your PC. All current Internet plans marketed to end users is based on over subscribing the bandwidth. Go price a T1. Now compare and contrast to a 1.5Mbps DSL line.
The T1 is symetrical while DSL is designed to lock you into a content consumption model. You also tend to get a good SLA on the T1. More importantly DSL service is almost always limited (either spelled out or they just silently throttle the hogs) while you can nail that T1 up all month and they don't care. In fact if your throughput drops below the rated speed your SLA will often kick in and refund cash to you. Compare the bills though. Yes that SLA adds some to the sticker shock but most of the difference is they are pricing the T1 expecting you to bang the heck out of it.
> The Necessary and Proper clause:
Sorry, you lose. Not only at Constitutional Law but at parsing English.
Material in the headings is mostly syntatic sugar anyway. Progs love to grab snatches of text out of context to read the Constitution as allowing them to do whatever the heck they want. But if you actually READ the thing it says something quite different. Your ilk reads it as saying the Feds can do ANYTHING "Necessary and Proper" by taking those three words and standing them on their own. To one who can actually read it says they can pass any law that is "necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers..." We read the whole sentence in context with the whole document. In other words they can pass laws to execute the enumerated powers, not anything they think proper. Were the headings removed and only the enumerated lists left the prose would suffer and the courts wouldn't have some helpful text explaining the reasoning behind the powers to imply further limits, but the legitimate powers granted would be pretty much identical.
> Which means I spend more on some sort of flat rate that the gp would call "marxist"
Not all flat rates are bogus. Yes there IS a cost involved with just having an electric meter. The electric company has to maintain the fixed infrastructure to service a customer regardless of usage. The billing department's expenses are pretty much fixed per account, etc. There are fixed regulatory fees to pay, etc. When the fixed portion is so high though you should be a bit suspicious that they haven't bribed some politicians to let em hose ratepayers or the politicians aren't imposing 'Robin Hood' surcharges to subsidize the rates of preferred groups. First be sure you aren't on the electric company's rate leveling plan as it will screw with the numbers big time.
> The total amount used shouldn't be the only factor.
Probably not. And even electricity is some areas is priced that way. If we had a free market in Internet service it would work itself out soon enough.
Too bad we don't have anything like one. In one corner we have The Phone Company, a huge bloated government granted monopoly so old and senile it almost let the Internet slip through its fingers. So tied to the government it is difficult to see where the government stupid ends and the corporate idiocy begins. In the other is the new scrapy upstart cable monopolies, not quite as tied to the government but desperate to fix that defect. Circling the two lumbering behemoths are a few hopelessly out of their league wireless providers... ignoring the majority who are just divisions of The Phone Company.
Wireless isn't going to meet the demands of broadband hidef content, probably won't ever even handle YouTube on smartphones. And forget sat, latency kills.
Like every utility, customers are eventually going to be paying fees that relate to their usage of the resource. I know this is an alien concept for you younger slashdot users who only know the world your marxist prof has taught you about but consider this a learning experience. Deal with it.
When the usage levels between users can be more than 100 to 1 it can't be fair. Either you have the low usage customers subsidizing the net hogs or you price the service where the low usage customers simply cannot justify the service. Or the government meddles and makes things go from bad to worse.
Lets examine the rest of the utility world. Do we have flat rate electricity? No. Do we have flat rate water? No. We sometimes have flat rate sewer but more often it is tied to water consumption on the assumption that most of your water eventually goes down the drain.
We do tend to have flat rate cable because a) until recently it would have been hard to meter and b) it doesn't cost the cable company more if you watch more. On Demand changes that model and guess what, most on demand programming carries a charge. But the biggest pushback against paying for cable by usage is the advertisers wouldn't like people getting into the habit of switching off unless they were actually paying attention and it would end useless (often bundled) channels being able to collect fees per set when nobody was watching.
So yes, if you are using more of a scarce resource you should expect to pay more. This is econ 101, which I realize is a scarce skill here but ignorance of reality doesn't mean you can ignore it.
> Then again, didn't the PS3 and Xbox 360 cost more to make at launch time than they were selling for? Maybe GM is on to something...
It made economic sense for Microsoft and Sony to sell at a loss because there was other revenue streams available to make up the initial loss. They get about $10 per game sold even if it isn't one of their own. Lose $100 on the console, sell ten games over the life of it and you are good. Factor in that they KNOW the production cost will drop quickly and it makes more sense. Finally add in the battle for market share angle and it makes enough economic sense that the shareholders aren't going to want blood and souls at the next stockholders' meeting.
None of those arguments are available to GM pissing away tax dollars subsidizing yuppies who want bragging rights for being greener than thou. Selling a Volt today at a loss doesn't open up any future revenue streams. The biggest cost is batteries and they are going to slowly drop in cost whether GM build the Volt now or when they are economically viable. And unless you count the market share of unprofitable green cars (ALL hybrids are currently selling at a loss with the possible recent exception of the Prius) as something valuable there isn't a market share building angle to justify it. It is pure politics.