Ugh, another person mindlessly repeating "Security through obscurity!" like they know what it means.
If this were a cryptographic problem, then the "secret information" would be the exact locations of the marijuana producers. The decision to not publish it online is not "security through obscurity," it's the equivalent of not posting your SSN and bank account information on your Facebook.
The problem with that rule is that we probably have at least one person somewhere in this thread tree who thinks they're sufficiently without sin to start casting stones.
"A great rabbit stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)
"The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there anyone here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?'
"They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.'
"The rabbit says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant.'
"So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
"Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, 'Which of you is without sin! Let him cast the first stone.'
"The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
"As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.
"'Nor am I without sin,' he says to the people, 'But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.'
"So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deliverance.
"The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him."
-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the dead, p. 277-278
That's always true, though. If the reason you are waiting is because things will be cheaper in X months, you'll always be waiting. The right way to do things is to match your needs to the hardware capabilities, and pull the trigger when those capabilities fall into your budget range.
But that is the future of electric service, or haven't you heard of the smart grid? They want to charge different rates based on their costs, in the case of electricity they want to charge by time of day. ISPs are talking about charging based on their costs, which vary by time, destination and QoS.
What you're talking about is time-of-use rates, and the electric companies have been offering that for at least ten years--possibly more--in my area. The smart grid is something different: it's an attempt to match more variable sources of electricity--solar and wind especially, in contrast to gas and coal--with electricity demand by making the whole grid more capable of understanding the flows of power going through it from moment to moment.
And the smart grid is a whole different animal compared to the sort of paid traffic discrimination that Comcast is trying. The closest analogy I could see is if the power company suddenly started shutting down my refrigerator because they just merged with Burger King.
Mod parent up. This is the most insightful thing I've read all day on NN.
I'm a little annoyed by conservatives treating regulation as some sort of sin. Regulation prevents corporations from putting melanine in our milk, or floor sweepings in our sausages (both have happened in the past). Regulation (in theory) keeps companies from ripping us off left and right, and encourages competition.
Before government regulation began with Teddy Roosevelt in the twentieth century, we lived in what was known as the Gilded Age, where massive corporations stiffed competition and milked customers for money while giving little or nothing in return... sound familiar? We've been deregulating for thirty years, so it should come as little surprise we're entering a Second Gilded Age. We should have remembered that corporations can't regulate themselves; now we'll have to learn that lesson anew, or face the consequences.
Eli was a slacker teenager with absolutely no place on the ship, let alone as a stand in for an expert scientist.
Eli was their "The Last Starfighter" character: unwittingly trained by a videogame to be an expert in Ancient tech, supposedly second only to Rush in actual working Ancient knowledge (and apparently smarter). They spent the whole pilot playing up Eli as the guy to identify with, the nerdy Everyman character, and then they proceed to marginalize him for a large swath of episodes.
It didn't help that the whole "enemy of the season" thing became rather boring after a while, leading to the whole Anubis thing and followed by the Space Taliban in their flying toilet seats.
Eh, Anubis was sufficiently eipc and different, but I definitely agree that the "Space Taliban" was a big step backward. I felt I was watching a poor remake of the first couple of seasons: didn't we just get through the whole "We are here to get you to worship us as gods" thing? Do we really have to hit that same theme again, for another two seasons?
It's easy to be nonchalant about it when you don't like in Seoul. If war breaks out, Seoul will get hit by North Korean artillery nonstop. The other major concern is that China would get involved, and nobody wants to see the US and China going at it, either directly or via proxy. If it weren't for those two reasons, Kim Jong-il and co. would have been wiped out a long time ago. The only thing that could make those risks bearable would be if the alternative is an aggressive, uncontrollable nuclear state, and that's exactly what North Korea is becoming.
Nobody's on North Korea's side if they go to war, not even China. China's only interests in NK are, in order:
1) Prevent millions of North Korean refugees from flowing over the border to China (it's not like they're going to go to their other neighbor through all the robotic sentry guns.
2) Serve as a buffer between the pro-US South Korea and China's eastern border.
China will support Kim so long as he remains a posturing blowhard, but the moment he actually tries to invade--and triggers all those millions of refugees that China dreads flowing into their country--they'll turn their backs on him instantly.
It doesn't matter what levels of relative distrust I assign to Google or assign to you personally.
Google can do a lot more damage to me than you can.
Well, that rather depends on what volumes you assign to "you."
Dozens of zombie botnets around the world exist around the world, and consist of millions of compromised machines. All of these exist almost entirely because users are trusted to make the right decision with regard to program installation and access... and they're wrong often enough to get their machines infected.
The fact is these days even relatively knowledgeable users can't be expected to be able to easily vet the source code of every program they use, even when the source is available. When was the last time one of you audited the code for the entirety of your Linux install--or even just the kernel?--plus your Firefox/Chromium browser and Open/Libre Office? Have you manually combed through all the Javascript from every webpage you've browsed today, to make sure there are no exploits hidden in the code? Are you sure you haven't given a virus a backdoor into your system?
Maybe not trusting users by default is the right way to go. It's just an extension of the idea to not have everyone log in as Administrator/Superuser all the time, and instead differentiating between regular users and admins; you're just linking the Admin account to a physical switch on the hardware itself.
You can't do foreign policy without secret cables flying around. You can't fight wars without intelligence.
You can't have government accountability with state secrets. I'd rather have the government accountability.
I'd rather not limit the countries who can have effective diplomatic ties to the countries who are unafraid to murder someone who becomes politically inconvenient (Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, etc). Why do you suppose we haven't heard of any "leaks" from those countries? Are their diplomatic records so much more spotless than the US?
If US take pride of being the champion of democracy, would it be nice to start with their own practices? I mean, sort of leading by example?
I'm not sure what you mean here. Should we always tell everyone everything? Essentially conduct all state business with a bullhorn? Fire all our covert ops people, and broadcast everything? Keep no part of any state business private? Publish everyone's social security numbers, all the government's bank account information, the full travel itinerary of all state officials, even when they travel to warzones?
They US government might last a month before the leeches sucked it dry. Maybe.
i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees
By "it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees" you really mean "because bribing a government employee is harder than a corporate CIO," right?
Government agencies are looking to cut costs right now, given that their budgets are likely to be slashed in the coming years, and Google services are cheaper than rolling your own. Government IT workers are digging in their heels, both to preserve their jobs and to avoid having to be retrained, but the momentum these days in the public sector is going cheap, and that means Google.
For all the ranting about special interests and lobbying in the public sector, private companies have even less accountability. There is nothing preventing the MS sales rep from taking the company CIO on a complimentary golf game and getting an exclusive contract, even if Google or someone else could save the company millions.
Maybe its like the whole fry a frog theory. By releasing so much information all at once, we're likely to get more enraged and do something, but the steady release of information is likely to just warm us up to it and likely to get Wikileaks closed for good before it gets ot the more juicy stuff.
Ironically that whole "boil a frog" thing is exactly wrong. When you throw a frog into cold water and heat it up the frog starts to get uncomfortable and jumps out. Throw a frog into boiling water and its muscles are immediately paralyzed and the frog boils to death before it can recover.
Go figure, huh? Anyway, it doesn't really invalidate your real point; it just makes that particular metaphor really, really bad.
You can't do foreign policy without secret cables flying around. You can't fight wars without intelligence.
You can't have government accountability with state secrets. I'd rather have the government accountability.
I'd rather not limit the countries who can have effective diplomatic ties to the countries who are unafraid to murder someone who becomes politically inconvenient (Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, etc). Why do you suppose we haven't heard of any "leaks" from those countries? Are their diplomatic records so much more spotless than the US?
It would be trivial for Assange to filter information and only display leaks that would damage the country of his choice.
Wait, I thought everyone's problem with Assange is that he doesn't filter the leaks enough? That he irresponsibly bulk-releases everything instead of only releasing a tiny subset of "information the public really needs to know"?
You can't have it both ways, people.
"Everyone's" problem with Assange is that he is even less accountable than the groups he is pretending to be "open" about. He's selling information to news organizations, selectively filtering what content he releases according to policies which are anything but open, and, as far as many observers have been able to tell, seems to be deliberately working to undermine US interests in the world, at the exclusion of everyone else (where are the embarrassing leaks about EU members? China? Russia? Japan?).
This release from Wikileaks does nothing to create more openness in government. Nobody benefits from hearing about some diplomat's opinion about another country; all this does is annoy people. There's no deeper truth to be gained here, like there was from the release of the Pentagon's papers (which revealed some disturbing problems with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan); it's all just gossip.
Unfortunately it's also dangerous gossip. Example: the biggest bombshell in this data is the fact that--surprise!--nobody likes Iran, even the other Arabs. We all pretty much knew that already; nobody said it because it would just hurt its ruling party's feelings, and that's probably not a good idea considering Iran already sponsors suicide bombers and militant extremists around the world. Iran's prime minister is already frothing at the mouth and calling for more violence against the West as a result of this release; how much more money will be going to the Taliban and Al Queda because of that?
It may just be me, but how many people play 4 player split screens for games these days?
This is actually where Wii games shine. They can't do online multiplayer; heck, even connecting two Wii consoles that are in the same room is an enormous pain. The one thing they do well though is putting four people on the same console, playing the same game. It's one of the secrets to their success: all those party games and coop modes really sell the system to casual players.
Yeah? Then why does it cost $40 a month for 1.5 mbit service in Los Angeles? It's a county with 10 million people, and a population density twice that of South Korea, and yet I'm paying the same amount for service two orders of magnitude worse.
Face it, population density is not the determining factor here. The determining factor is the lack of meaningful competition, the fact that, despite the lack of explicit franchise agreements, the telcom and cable companies have collaborated to form a Nash equilibrium, to siphon as much money as possible for as little service as they can get away with.
1) Sandy Bridge doesn't exist yet, and won't until next year. It'll be great when it does exist, though.
2) The GP was probably talking about OpenCL support, which is generally lagging on Intel IGPs. Apple is into OpenCL in a big way, and the lack of OpenCL support was reportedly one of the reasons they stayed with the aging Core2s (paired with NVIDA GPUs) for the current generation of Macbook Air. Maybe we'll see OpenCL support next year with Sandy?
I kinda wish it did. I really like to support people who release games DRM-free (The Humble Indie Bundle was straight awesome), but since I haven't owned a Windows box since 2007, well, will I actually be able to play it?
What we have now is basically collusion between the major ISPs. The phone companies have all agreed that only one phone company will ever serve any particular area, and the cable companies have all agreed that only one cable company will ever serve any particular area, meaning that, for the majority of the area of the US, broadband customers have at most two choices.
For example, I have a choice of AT&T DSL or Time Warner cable, period. My parents live a five minute drive away and they have a choice of Verizon or Comcast, period. Verizon doesn't serve my area, despite the fact that they have hundreds of FIOS installations less than a mile from my house, and Time Warner doesn't serve my parents, despite the fact that they have a regional office less than a mile from their house.
This has nothing to do with government conspiring with business, and everything to do with too few players falling into a Nash Equilibrium: a state where nobody competes with anyone else, and instead work to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, another person mindlessly repeating "Security through obscurity!" like they know what it means.
If this were a cryptographic problem, then the "secret information" would be the exact locations of the marijuana producers. The decision to not publish it online is not "security through obscurity," it's the equivalent of not posting your SSN and bank account information on your Facebook.
Hah! Yeah, now I'm starting to wish /. has an "Edit post" button. :)
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
The problem with that rule is that we probably have at least one person somewhere in this thread tree who thinks they're sufficiently without sin to start casting stones.
"A great rabbit stands teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine, a speaker for the dead, has told me of two other rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)
"The rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears, and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. 'Is there anyone here,' he says to them, 'who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?'
"They murmur and say, 'We all know the desire. But, Rabbi, none of us has acted on it.'
"The rabbit says, 'Then kneel down and give thanks that God made you strong.' He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, 'Tell the lord magistrate who saved his mistress. Then he'll know I am his loyal servant.'
"So the woman lives, because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.
"Another rabbi, another city. He goes to her and stops the mob, as in the other story, and says, 'Which of you is without sin! Let him cast the first stone.'
"The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. Someday, they think, I may be like this woman, and I'll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her the way I wish to be treated.
"As they open their hands and let the stones fall to the ground, the rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman's head, and throws it straight down with all his might. It crushes her skull and dashes her brains onto the cobblestones.
"'Nor am I without sin,' he says to the people, 'But if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it.'
"So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deliverance.
"The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis, and when they veer too far they die. Only one rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So, of course, we killed him."
-Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the dead, p. 277-278
That's always true, though. If the reason you are waiting is because things will be cheaper in X months, you'll always be waiting. The right way to do things is to match your needs to the hardware capabilities, and pull the trigger when those capabilities fall into your budget range.
I wonder how long until the lawyers start raining down from the sky.
I don't remember if Mythbusters did an episode on starting/stopping the engine, but I do know it's a myth that starting and stopping the engine uses more gas than idling. It may have been true once, but electronic engine starters are pretty efficient these days.
But that is the future of electric service, or haven't you heard of the smart grid? They want to charge different rates based on their costs, in the case of electricity they want to charge by time of day. ISPs are talking about charging based on their costs, which vary by time, destination and QoS.
What you're talking about is time-of-use rates, and the electric companies have been offering that for at least ten years--possibly more--in my area. The smart grid is something different: it's an attempt to match more variable sources of electricity--solar and wind especially, in contrast to gas and coal--with electricity demand by making the whole grid more capable of understanding the flows of power going through it from moment to moment.
And the smart grid is a whole different animal compared to the sort of paid traffic discrimination that Comcast is trying. The closest analogy I could see is if the power company suddenly started shutting down my refrigerator because they just merged with Burger King.
Mod parent up. This is the most insightful thing I've read all day on NN.
I'm a little annoyed by conservatives treating regulation as some sort of sin. Regulation prevents corporations from putting melanine in our milk, or floor sweepings in our sausages (both have happened in the past). Regulation (in theory) keeps companies from ripping us off left and right, and encourages competition.
Before government regulation began with Teddy Roosevelt in the twentieth century, we lived in what was known as the Gilded Age, where massive corporations stiffed competition and milked customers for money while giving little or nothing in return... sound familiar? We've been deregulating for thirty years, so it should come as little surprise we're entering a Second Gilded Age. We should have remembered that corporations can't regulate themselves; now we'll have to learn that lesson anew, or face the consequences.
Eli was a slacker teenager with absolutely no place on the ship, let alone as a stand in for an expert scientist.
Eli was their "The Last Starfighter" character: unwittingly trained by a videogame to be an expert in Ancient tech, supposedly second only to Rush in actual working Ancient knowledge (and apparently smarter). They spent the whole pilot playing up Eli as the guy to identify with, the nerdy Everyman character, and then they proceed to marginalize him for a large swath of episodes.
It didn't help that the whole "enemy of the season" thing became rather boring after a while, leading to the whole Anubis thing and followed by the Space Taliban in their flying toilet seats.
Eh, Anubis was sufficiently eipc and different, but I definitely agree that the "Space Taliban" was a big step backward. I felt I was watching a poor remake of the first couple of seasons: didn't we just get through the whole "We are here to get you to worship us as gods" thing? Do we really have to hit that same theme again, for another two seasons?
It would have been nice if that at least addressed why the wormhole drive couldn't work to get them back home.
Maybe because they didn't have one? May as well ask why they don't just wire a ZPM or three into the gate and gate back home.
It's easy to be nonchalant about it when you don't like in Seoul. If war breaks out, Seoul will get hit by North Korean artillery nonstop. The other major concern is that China would get involved, and nobody wants to see the US and China going at it, either directly or via proxy. If it weren't for those two reasons, Kim Jong-il and co. would have been wiped out a long time ago. The only thing that could make those risks bearable would be if the alternative is an aggressive, uncontrollable nuclear state, and that's exactly what North Korea is becoming.
Nobody's on North Korea's side if they go to war, not even China. China's only interests in NK are, in order:
1) Prevent millions of North Korean refugees from flowing over the border to China (it's not like they're going to go to their other neighbor through all the robotic sentry guns.
2) Serve as a buffer between the pro-US South Korea and China's eastern border.
China will support Kim so long as he remains a posturing blowhard, but the moment he actually tries to invade--and triggers all those millions of refugees that China dreads flowing into their country--they'll turn their backs on him instantly.
It doesn't matter what levels of relative distrust I assign to Google or assign to you personally.
Google can do a lot more damage to me than you can.
Well, that rather depends on what volumes you assign to "you."
Dozens of zombie botnets around the world exist around the world, and consist of millions of compromised machines. All of these exist almost entirely because users are trusted to make the right decision with regard to program installation and access... and they're wrong often enough to get their machines infected.
The fact is these days even relatively knowledgeable users can't be expected to be able to easily vet the source code of every program they use, even when the source is available. When was the last time one of you audited the code for the entirety of your Linux install--or even just the kernel?--plus your Firefox/Chromium browser and Open/Libre Office? Have you manually combed through all the Javascript from every webpage you've browsed today, to make sure there are no exploits hidden in the code? Are you sure you haven't given a virus a backdoor into your system?
Maybe not trusting users by default is the right way to go. It's just an extension of the idea to not have everyone log in as Administrator/Superuser all the time, and instead differentiating between regular users and admins; you're just linking the Admin account to a physical switch on the hardware itself.
You can't do foreign policy without secret cables flying around. You can't fight wars without intelligence.
You can't have government accountability with state secrets. I'd rather have the government accountability.
I'd rather not limit the countries who can have effective diplomatic ties to the countries who are unafraid to murder someone who becomes politically inconvenient (Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, etc). Why do you suppose we haven't heard of any "leaks" from those countries? Are their diplomatic records so much more spotless than the US?
If US take pride of being the champion of democracy, would it be nice to start with their own practices? I mean, sort of leading by example?
I'm not sure what you mean here. Should we always tell everyone everything? Essentially conduct all state business with a bullhorn? Fire all our covert ops people, and broadcast everything? Keep no part of any state business private? Publish everyone's social security numbers, all the government's bank account information, the full travel itinerary of all state officials, even when they travel to warzones?
They US government might last a month before the leeches sucked it dry. Maybe.
i know government agencies have but that is mostly because it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees
By "it's a pain in the a$$ dealing with union employees" you really mean "because bribing a government employee is harder than a corporate CIO," right?
Government agencies are looking to cut costs right now, given that their budgets are likely to be slashed in the coming years, and Google services are cheaper than rolling your own. Government IT workers are digging in their heels, both to preserve their jobs and to avoid having to be retrained, but the momentum these days in the public sector is going cheap, and that means Google.
For all the ranting about special interests and lobbying in the public sector, private companies have even less accountability. There is nothing preventing the MS sales rep from taking the company CIO on a complimentary golf game and getting an exclusive contract, even if Google or someone else could save the company millions.
Maybe its like the whole fry a frog theory. By releasing so much information all at once, we're likely to get more enraged and do something, but the steady release of information is likely to just warm us up to it and likely to get Wikileaks closed for good before it gets ot the more juicy stuff.
Ironically that whole "boil a frog" thing is exactly wrong. When you throw a frog into cold water and heat it up the frog starts to get uncomfortable and jumps out. Throw a frog into boiling water and its muscles are immediately paralyzed and the frog boils to death before it can recover.
Go figure, huh? Anyway, it doesn't really invalidate your real point; it just makes that particular metaphor really, really bad.
You can't do foreign policy without secret cables flying around. You can't fight wars without intelligence.
You can't have government accountability with state secrets. I'd rather have the government accountability.
I'd rather not limit the countries who can have effective diplomatic ties to the countries who are unafraid to murder someone who becomes politically inconvenient (Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, etc). Why do you suppose we haven't heard of any "leaks" from those countries? Are their diplomatic records so much more spotless than the US?
It would be trivial for Assange to filter information and only display leaks that would damage the country of his choice.
Wait, I thought everyone's problem with Assange is that he doesn't filter the leaks enough? That he irresponsibly bulk-releases everything instead of only releasing a tiny subset of "information the public really needs to know"?
You can't have it both ways, people.
"Everyone's" problem with Assange is that he is even less accountable than the groups he is pretending to be "open" about. He's selling information to news organizations, selectively filtering what content he releases according to policies which are anything but open, and, as far as many observers have been able to tell, seems to be deliberately working to undermine US interests in the world, at the exclusion of everyone else (where are the embarrassing leaks about EU members? China? Russia? Japan?).
You look at their record. It may surprise people to know that the entire legislative agenda for the US Government is online, and has been for years. You want to see what your elected officials are doing? Look it up. Be informed.
This release from Wikileaks does nothing to create more openness in government. Nobody benefits from hearing about some diplomat's opinion about another country; all this does is annoy people. There's no deeper truth to be gained here, like there was from the release of the Pentagon's papers (which revealed some disturbing problems with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan); it's all just gossip.
Unfortunately it's also dangerous gossip. Example: the biggest bombshell in this data is the fact that--surprise!--nobody likes Iran, even the other Arabs. We all pretty much knew that already; nobody said it because it would just hurt its ruling party's feelings, and that's probably not a good idea considering Iran already sponsors suicide bombers and militant extremists around the world. Iran's prime minister is already frothing at the mouth and calling for more violence against the West as a result of this release; how much more money will be going to the Taliban and Al Queda because of that?
It may just be me, but how many people play 4 player split screens for games these days?
This is actually where Wii games shine. They can't do online multiplayer; heck, even connecting two Wii consoles that are in the same room is an enormous pain. The one thing they do well though is putting four people on the same console, playing the same game. It's one of the secrets to their success: all those party games and coop modes really sell the system to casual players.
You mean like South Korea? Population density: 1,271/sq mi
Los Angeles County: 2,427/sq mi
New York City: 5,435.7/sq mi
Why are our cities, with double or even quadruple the density, still stuck with speeds two orders of magnitude slower with higher costs?
Yeah? Then why does it cost $40 a month for 1.5 mbit service in Los Angeles? It's a county with 10 million people, and a population density twice that of South Korea, and yet I'm paying the same amount for service two orders of magnitude worse.
Face it, population density is not the determining factor here. The determining factor is the lack of meaningful competition, the fact that, despite the lack of explicit franchise agreements, the telcom and cable companies have collaborated to form a Nash equilibrium, to siphon as much money as possible for as little service as they can get away with.
1) Sandy Bridge doesn't exist yet, and won't until next year. It'll be great when it does exist, though.
2) The GP was probably talking about OpenCL support, which is generally lagging on Intel IGPs. Apple is into OpenCL in a big way, and the lack of OpenCL support was reportedly one of the reasons they stayed with the aging Core2s (paired with NVIDA GPUs) for the current generation of Macbook Air. Maybe we'll see OpenCL support next year with Sandy?
...on Linux?
I kinda wish it did. I really like to support people who release games DRM-free (The Humble Indie Bundle was straight awesome), but since I haven't owned a Windows box since 2007, well, will I actually be able to play it?
That hasn't been true for fourteen years. The Telecommunications Bill of 1996 made exclusive licenses illegal.
What we have now is basically collusion between the major ISPs. The phone companies have all agreed that only one phone company will ever serve any particular area, and the cable companies have all agreed that only one cable company will ever serve any particular area, meaning that, for the majority of the area of the US, broadband customers have at most two choices.
For example, I have a choice of AT&T DSL or Time Warner cable, period. My parents live a five minute drive away and they have a choice of Verizon or Comcast, period. Verizon doesn't serve my area, despite the fact that they have hundreds of FIOS installations less than a mile from my house, and Time Warner doesn't serve my parents, despite the fact that they have a regional office less than a mile from their house.
This has nothing to do with government conspiring with business, and everything to do with too few players falling into a Nash Equilibrium: a state where nobody competes with anyone else, and instead work to squeeze as much money out of customers as possible.