I've been wondering, does the ReadyNAS understand the various Apple audio formats (notably AAC, i.e. ".m4a")? These work if you're running SlimServer on a Mac, but AFAIK it uses QuickTime to transcode the AAC -- so I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if it worked on the ReadyNAS.
Obviously if nobody would buy the high-end phones, the manufacturers wouldn't make them.
"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact" --Arthur Conan Doyle.
That may be true, but I don't think it's the only possible conclusion. It seems just as likely to me that the problem manufacturers such as Nokia are attempting to solve is that "just-a-phone" phones have become a commodity, and nobody likes to sell into a commodity market... or at least not high-overhead companies that are used to high profit margins. So they're expending their war chests trying to create (and capture) a value-added, high-fashion, high-margin market. Quite possibly they are willing to take a loss for quite some time in the effort to do this, because the other alternative (embracing the commodity market) looks like death for them.
In this scenario, current consumer demand has little to do with the introduction of the combination phone, camera and turnip twaddler. The vendor throws together whatever random bunch of features they can fit on a chip (and get approved by a marketing executive), puts it out there with a glitzy advertising campaign and a lot of Flash on their web site, and crosses their fingers. Note that the marketing executive has every motivation to take risks and none to conserve resources -- if the product catches on big time, the exec is a hero. If it flops, the exec might get spanked, or not. If the exec does nothing and the company manufactures commodities, well, they can lay off their entire marketing staff, can't they?
Supply and demand, you know.
...works over the long term, not the short term.
This article seems to me to be at least tangentially related, insofar as it says something about the guys calling the shots in Helsinki.
It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world!
(Bluetooth of course has nothing to do with where you can use it.)
If only that were true. The world uses four bands. Nokia for some reason likes to market 850/1800/1900 MHz phones (sorry, "devices") in the U.S.A. and 900/1800/1900 in Europe. I wish someone there would wake up and realize that if you have to build two versions with different frequencies for different markets, then it's not a "world phone"! I guess that's where the "pretty much" in your comment comes into play.
This is more than just a theoretical problem. There are countries which have little or no GSM infrastructure other than 900 MHz (much of the Middle East, for example) so U.S. Nokia "world" phones don't work there at all. I bet European "world" phones get pretty bad coverage in parts of the U.S. that are served by 850 MHz. AFAICT, Motorola is the only vendor [*] who realizes that "world" means quad-band, and unfortunately Motorola has never learned that the UI matters. (Of course Nokia seems to be forgetting that lesson as fast as they can so maybe a window is opening for Moto).
[*] Other than vendors of PDA-type phone devices, who mostly seem to have a clue.
Of course not. I was simply disagreeing with a common fallacy -- that the Web is the Internet. That's not to say the Web isn't important. Duh, of course it is. But so are other applications, do I really have to list them?
This is admittedly tangential to the original topic of which group of venal self-serving politicians should control an international resource they don't even understand. But isn't Slashdot all about going off on tangents?
If the IRS would actually come out with a method of E-Filing that does not require third party involvement, they would go a long way towards elimenating this type of problem.
Or, for that matter, you could file on paper, for cheaper. In an ideal world, you'll be sufficiently under-withheld that you don't have to worry about getting a refund anyway, removing the only rational reason to e-file.
Filing on paper is still legal (as long as you prepare your own return, anyway).
In other words, he doesn't need that cash unless there is something we don't know about.
For almost everyone, the slogan "you can never be too rich or too thin" applies. Well, I don't know about the thin part, but there aren't very many people (the well-paid included) who just don't feel like having an additional $19k.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting by the "something we don't know about".
there's no way his wife would let him drive her around in a focus over a boxster
I don't know about him, but I would venture to guess that you're not.
The sort that gets the price difference back in cash. Which is what the grandparent implied he got ("I decided to have extra cash and a Ford Focus.")
Let's see... cars.com says roughly $19k for a top-end Focus and about $38k for a bottom-end Boxter (both invoice). Yes, I think a lot of people would like to have the $19k pocket money.
I wish Apple would pull their head out of their asses and let others publish with AAC
'Course, Apple's not stopping anyone from using AAC. It's DRM'd AAC ("FairPlay") which is the problem. If Real were willing to sell music without DRM, they'd have no problem. (No problem from Apple anyway -- instead they'd probably have a RIAA problem, sigh.)
In theory, yes. But as the article you cite goes on to point out,
prosecution of the Golden State's ban on big SUVs isn't what you'd call robust. In fact, it's a contender for the least enforced traffic regulation in America.
The author goes on to interview several public officials who had no idea heavy SUVs are technically excluded from some roads, and who couldn't care less once it's been explained to them. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for weight limits to erase large SUVs from the roads.
Seems to me that the majority of your message supports the premise that the NSF did pretty much the right thing. They got out of the general-purpose network business, which is much of what your message complains of. Some might argue that they did it late, but that's up for debate and the fact remains that they did it. The NAPs were a way to try to ensure that the Internet (which was, at one point, pretty NSFNET-centric) didn't break during transition. It may look a bit Mickey Mouse ten years later, but at the time, it represented responsible stewardship. The Internet didn't break; one may view this as success.
Read up on the NSF's NAP proposal in case you have any doubt.
I was at Merit working in the NSFNET engineering group when the NAP thing was going on. Somewhat later, I worked (briefly) at an RBOC subsidiary (AADS) that had responsibility for operating one of the NAPs. From my perspective I didn't see a great deal of cronyism at work. (Even if there had been, if the goal had been for the RBOCs to secure some kind of Internet monopoly, the strategy wasn't very effective, was it?)
This was an attempt to give the regional Bells the monopoly on running peer points
Only two of the four NAPs were operated by RBOCs (SF and Chicago, by PacBell and AADS respectively). The other two were operated by Sprint (Pennsauken) and MFS (MAE-E). At the time, there were not that many players both able and willing to offer the facilities required for an exchange point, so if anything the number of RBOCs involved seems low.
This is pretty far offtopic, but this calls for a response:
the Commercial Internet Exchange, who fought against the NSFNET's plans for an Internet monopoly grant to the regional Bell operating companies and ANS, an IBM and MCI venture
The part of my brain this history is stored in hasn't been accessed for a while, but suffice it to say that the above is only one, fairly debatable, perspective on Internet history.
Here's a half-decent capsule history of the NSFNET which provides a different (more accurate, from my keyhole) spin. The tag line of the article is "The National Science Foundation's enlightened management of the NSFNET facilitated the Internet's first period of explosive public growth." Which is pretty accurate as happy-talk goes.
The NSFNET was a good thing. The CIX was (in retrospect) a good thing. Figuring out how to move the Internet from being largely taxpayer-funded to being primarily commercial was a good thing. It certainly wasn't painless or without friction, but it was driven mostly by people of good will, not smoke-filled rooms where evil government bureaucrats were plotting to grant monopolies to their bell-head cronies.
The CIX, at the outset, wasn't a "fight against a monopoly". It was a way for folks to move commercial traffic between their networks without making inappropriate use of the taxpayer-funded NSFNET.
BTW there should be TWO tickets, one for the voter and one for the official record. That way the voter can visually confirm his vote got recorded OK and perhaps come back during a recount to verify.
As others have adequately pointed out already, a voter-retained receipt is probably a bad idea due to the risk of coercion, etc. There's a reason we've never (AFAIK) had such things.
But regardless of the number of receipts printed, all of them should be visually inspected by the voter, and deposited by the voter into a separate ballot box, just like I do now with my hand-marked ballot. Clearly, any printed receipt I don't visually inspect could say anything, and is of no more probative value than a purely electronic record.
Apple is certainly using BMW Pricing to attract a "large disposable income" crowd
That would seem to be a better strategy than marketing to the "no disposable income" crowd. Kind of like John Dillinger's answer when asked why he robbed banks. "That's where the money is."
I guess you weren't on the east coast of the US during the blackout last August. Most cell phones didn't work - probably due to overload. But POTS worked (at least in NJ), but not if you had only cordless phones. God help anyone who had an actual emergency during the blackout.
Here in MI, cell sites dropped like flies after the first few hours. However, what was interesting was that a lot of people lost POTS after the first 12 hours or so. These are people with good old-fashioned wired phones, not cordless. I've never heard a good explanation for why -- presumably it was because they were served from a CO which didn't have adequate backup facilities. Or I suppose their service could have been routed through a distance extender without good backup. In any event, the point is that you can't 100% rely on POTS working during a power outage, although it is certainly more robust than cellular.
My DSL never went out during the August outage, BTW.
I notice that few people seem to have picked up on the fact that the remote no longer comes with the 40GB one, another of the cost-cutting measures
Good catch, I hadn't. OTOH, folks I know who have 3G iPods tell me they generally don't use their remotes much or at all. I have a 1G iPod and haven't ever felt the lack of the remote. So, limited evidence suggests that maybe this was a good decision on Apple's part -- cut cost by unbundling a feature few people use. Too bad they don't sell the remote sans earbuds, though.
While I am often at odds with the Republican Party, they have never compared any of their political foes to Adlof Hitler.
Perhaps not, but neither has MoveOn (yes, I do think there's a difference between a contest submission from a member of the public and a position endorsed by the MoveOn organization). And the Republicans have compared their political foes to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, which is right up there on the old hate-o-meter. Support for both statements from the very article you cited:
Wes Boyd, president of the group's Voter Fund, said in a statement the ad was one of more than 1,500 submissions that were posted on the Web site www.bushin30seconds.org for the public to view and comment on.
"None of these was our ad, nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund," he said. "They will not appear on TV. We do not support the sentiment expressed in the two Hitler submissions."
But he also said the ads should be contrasted with the 2002 Senate elections and the Republican use of images of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to attack incumbent Democratic senators.
For example, Republican Saxby Chambliss ran an ad against Sen. Max Cleland, a Georgia Democrat who lost three limbs serving in Vietnam, that used bin Laden's and Saddam's faces to criticize a Cleland vote on homeland security. The ad was later edited to remove their visages.
Or, you can make apps without doing it the old fashioned way. In Squeak, you can draw up your GUI, composing it with widgets out of the Morphic Toolbox, and then adding scripts. When this button is clicked, do this or that. Etc. There are some good tutorials for this newer way of making programs.
Newer than what? The quoted text could just as well describe, say, AppleScript Studio. Or Hypercard, for that matter. Or a cast of dozens of others.
What I don't really get is why they have friggin microphones on space traveling vehicles?
They don't. TFA to the rescue again:
Each time a dust particle hit Cassini, the impact produced a puff of plasma--a tiny cloud of ionized gas. Cassini's Radio and Plasma Wave Science (RPWS) instrument was able to count these clouds; there were as many as 680 puffs per second. "We converted these into audible sounds that resemble hail hitting a tin roof," says Gurnett, the intrument's principal investigator.
In other words, the sound is a representation of other data, slightly akin to false color images as an earlier poster pointed out.
I can understand that it's a cheap thing to just throw in there
I don't think anything with mass is cheap to add to a space probe. I don't recall what the per-kilo launch costs are for one of those things, but it's not small.
Off by one (order of magnitude)
on
Saturn Hailstorm
·
· Score: 2, Informative
so the speed of them hitting it is somewhere in the hundreds range to the thousand range.
You don't give units, but assuming you're talking MPH you're off by an order of magnitude. TFA sez:
they plowed into the spacecraft at a relative speed of approximately 20 km/s. That's 45,000 mph!
So my question.. In the original comic, does the webbing actually come from his body, or is it an invention of Peter Parkers?
It's an invention. He carries extra cans of web fluid on his belt (under his outfit) and swaps them into his wrist-mounted web shooters as needed. To be honest, I think the "it's just a super power" explanation is less implausible.
As I recall, the original comic also makes a big deal about him inventing the white lenses in his mask.
why was there a huge fuss about Google using a parsing engine to do the same?!
AFAIK this is the first case law on the subject, and up until now everyone assumed the courts would rule the other way. In other words, up until today most people assumed that it was a violation of the law for ISPs to read email.
Now that the First Circuit has ruled otherwise, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Of course, if the ISP's terms of service indicate they won't read your email, you've still got civil law on your side, anyway. For what that's worth.
I've been contemplating one of these screens, but never wanted to commit because I couldn't just slap in a KVM for my other machines
Actually, you can. I'm using a CompuCable ADC/DVI KVM at this very moment -- one ADC in, one DVI+USB in, ADC out. I don't see a part number on it, but it shouldn't be hard to find. They provide all the various ADC and DVI combinations you might expect.
Worth keeping in mind even given the new displays -- it might be possible to pick up one of the (still very nice) older ones at a close-out price.
So you don't want to have duplicate files in your computer(s)? Well, leave only the copy that works in each machine! Duh!
Er... as you pointed out yourself, the issue is that as of 4.6, iTunes won't play the Hymn'd files, and other devices (my SliMP3 for instance) will only play the Hymn'd files. So there is no such thing as one single "copy that works in each machine." For this reason, Hymn vs. iTunes is not just a problem for pirates, but for anyone who wants to drive both iTunes and (other player) from one library.
all things being equal, wouldn't you go with the airline that offered free WiFi at the airport?
All things being equal, yes. However in the airline industry, things generally aren't equal.
First, many people (myself included) live near an airport which is the hub of a dominant carrier. I can fly an airline other than the dominant one... if I want to take a connecting flight instead of a direct one, with a more inconvenient schedule. The dominant carrier takes full advantage of its position, but what's the little guy to do? I for one wouldn't choose to fly a longer, less convenient route just to save a few bucks on WiFi at the gate. Some lucky souls actually have the choice of multiple airports, but most of us don't.
Second, at terminals that aren't dominated by a single carrier, the various airlines' gates are commingled. There's nothing to stop me from walking from my gate to within 150' of another gate whose airline does offer WiFi, and using it. Yeah, they could block that by, oh, requiring you to authenticate with some credential they print on your boarding pass, but what are the chances of that? It turns the service from a very-low-cost gimme into something that's a lot more expensive to manage. You wouldn't do that for something you're not getting direct revenue from.
Slashdot Mirror
runs SlimServer out to my Squeezebox
I've been wondering, does the ReadyNAS understand the various Apple audio formats (notably AAC, i.e. ".m4a")? These work if you're running SlimServer on a Mac, but AFAIK it uses QuickTime to transcode the AAC -- so I'd be (pleasantly) surprised if it worked on the ReadyNAS.
"There is nothing as deceptive as an obvious fact" --Arthur Conan Doyle.
That may be true, but I don't think it's the only possible conclusion. It seems just as likely to me that the problem manufacturers such as Nokia are attempting to solve is that "just-a-phone" phones have become a commodity, and nobody likes to sell into a commodity market... or at least not high-overhead companies that are used to high profit margins. So they're expending their war chests trying to create (and capture) a value-added, high-fashion, high-margin market. Quite possibly they are willing to take a loss for quite some time in the effort to do this, because the other alternative (embracing the commodity market) looks like death for them.
In this scenario, current consumer demand has little to do with the introduction of the combination phone, camera and turnip twaddler. The vendor throws together whatever random bunch of features they can fit on a chip (and get approved by a marketing executive), puts it out there with a glitzy advertising campaign and a lot of Flash on their web site, and crosses their fingers. Note that the marketing executive has every motivation to take risks and none to conserve resources -- if the product catches on big time, the exec is a hero. If it flops, the exec might get spanked, or not. If the exec does nothing and the company manufactures commodities, well, they can lay off their entire marketing staff, can't they?
Supply and demand, you know.
...works over the long term, not the short term.
This article seems to me to be at least tangentially related, insofar as it says something about the guys calling the shots in Helsinki.
It has tri-band GSM and it has Bluetooth. That means I can use it pretty much anywhere in the world!
(Bluetooth of course has nothing to do with where you can use it.)
If only that were true. The world uses four bands. Nokia for some reason likes to market 850/1800/1900 MHz phones (sorry, "devices") in the U.S.A. and 900/1800/1900 in Europe. I wish someone there would wake up and realize that if you have to build two versions with different frequencies for different markets, then it's not a "world phone"! I guess that's where the "pretty much" in your comment comes into play.
This is more than just a theoretical problem. There are countries which have little or no GSM infrastructure other than 900 MHz (much of the Middle East, for example) so U.S. Nokia "world" phones don't work there at all. I bet European "world" phones get pretty bad coverage in parts of the U.S. that are served by 850 MHz. AFAICT, Motorola is the only vendor [*]
who realizes that "world" means quad-band, and unfortunately Motorola has never learned that the UI matters. (Of course Nokia seems to be forgetting that lesson as fast as they can so maybe a window is opening for Moto).
[*] Other than vendors of PDA-type phone devices, who mostly seem to have a clue.
Of course not. I was simply disagreeing with a common fallacy -- that the Web is the Internet. That's not to say the Web isn't important. Duh, of course it is. But so are other applications, do I really have to list them?
This is admittedly tangential to the original topic of which group of venal self-serving politicians should control an international resource they don't even understand. But isn't Slashdot all about going off on tangents?
Repeat after me, HTML/HTTP != The Internet.
If the IRS would actually come out with a method of E-Filing that does not require third party involvement, they would go a long way towards elimenating this type of problem.
Or, for that matter, you could file on paper, for cheaper. In an ideal world, you'll be sufficiently under-withheld that you don't have to worry about getting a refund anyway, removing the only rational reason to e-file.
Filing on paper is still legal (as long as you prepare your own return, anyway).
In other words, he doesn't need that cash unless there is something we don't know about.
For almost everyone, the slogan "you can never be too rich or too thin" applies. Well, I don't know about the thin part, but there aren't very many people (the well-paid included) who just don't feel like having an additional $19k.
I'm not sure what you're suggesting by the "something we don't know about".
there's no way his wife would let him drive her around in a focus over a boxster
I don't know about him, but I would venture to guess that you're not.
Not everyone is status-obsessed.
The sort that gets the price difference back in cash. Which is what the grandparent implied he got ("I decided to have extra cash and a Ford Focus.")
Let's see... cars.com says roughly $19k for a top-end Focus and about $38k for a bottom-end Boxter (both invoice). Yes, I think a lot of people would like to have the $19k pocket money.
I wish Apple would pull their head out of their asses and let others publish with AAC
'Course, Apple's not stopping anyone from using AAC. It's DRM'd AAC ("FairPlay") which is the problem. If Real were willing to sell music without DRM, they'd have no problem. (No problem from Apple anyway -- instead they'd probably have a RIAA problem, sigh.)
The author goes on to interview several public officials who had no idea heavy SUVs are technically excluded from some roads, and who couldn't care less once it's been explained to them. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for weight limits to erase large SUVs from the roads.
Seems to me that the majority of your message supports the premise that the NSF did pretty much the right thing. They got out of the general-purpose network business, which is much of what your message complains of. Some might argue that they did it late, but that's up for debate and the fact remains that they did it. The NAPs were a way to try to ensure that the Internet (which was, at one point, pretty NSFNET-centric) didn't break during transition. It may look a bit Mickey Mouse ten years later, but at the time, it represented responsible stewardship. The Internet didn't break; one may view this as success.
Read up on the NSF's NAP proposal in case you have any doubt.
I was at Merit working in the NSFNET engineering group when the NAP thing was going on. Somewhat later, I worked (briefly) at an RBOC subsidiary (AADS) that had responsibility for operating one of the NAPs. From my perspective I didn't see a great deal of cronyism at work. (Even if there had been, if the goal had been for the RBOCs to secure some kind of Internet monopoly, the strategy wasn't very effective, was it?)
This was an attempt to give the regional Bells the monopoly on running peer points
Only two of the four NAPs were operated by RBOCs (SF and Chicago, by PacBell and AADS respectively). The other two were operated by Sprint (Pennsauken) and MFS (MAE-E). At the time, there were not that many players both able and willing to offer the facilities required for an exchange point, so if anything the number of RBOCs involved seems low.
This is pretty far offtopic, but this calls for a response:
the Commercial Internet Exchange, who fought against the NSFNET's plans for an Internet monopoly grant to the regional Bell operating companies and ANS, an IBM and MCI venture
The part of my brain this history is stored in hasn't been accessed for a while, but suffice it to say that the above is only one, fairly debatable, perspective on Internet history.
Here's a half-decent capsule history of the NSFNET which provides a different (more accurate, from my keyhole) spin. The tag line of the article is "The National Science Foundation's enlightened management of the NSFNET facilitated the Internet's first period of explosive public growth." Which is pretty accurate as happy-talk goes.
The NSFNET was a good thing. The CIX was (in retrospect) a good thing. Figuring out how to move the Internet from being largely taxpayer-funded to being primarily commercial was a good thing. It certainly wasn't painless or without friction, but it was driven mostly by people of good will, not smoke-filled rooms where evil government bureaucrats were plotting to grant monopolies to their bell-head cronies.
The CIX, at the outset, wasn't a "fight against a monopoly". It was a way for folks to move commercial traffic between their networks without making inappropriate use of the taxpayer-funded NSFNET.
BTW there should be TWO tickets, one for the voter and one for the official record. That way the voter can visually confirm his vote got recorded OK and perhaps come back during a recount to verify.
As others have adequately pointed out already, a voter-retained receipt is probably a bad idea due to the risk of coercion, etc. There's a reason we've never (AFAIK) had such things.
But regardless of the number of receipts printed, all of them should be visually inspected by the voter, and deposited by the voter into a separate ballot box, just like I do now with my hand-marked ballot. Clearly, any printed receipt I don't visually inspect could say anything, and is of no more probative value than a purely electronic record.
Apple is certainly using BMW Pricing to attract a "large disposable income" crowd
That would seem to be a better strategy than marketing to the "no disposable income" crowd. Kind of like John Dillinger's answer when asked why he robbed banks. "That's where the money is."
I guess you weren't on the east coast of the US during the blackout last August. Most cell phones didn't work - probably due to overload. But POTS worked (at least in NJ), but not if you had only cordless phones. God help anyone who had an actual emergency during the blackout.
Here in MI, cell sites dropped like flies after the first few hours. However, what was interesting was that a lot of people lost POTS after the first 12 hours or so. These are people with good old-fashioned wired phones, not cordless. I've never heard a good explanation for why -- presumably it was because they were served from a CO which didn't have adequate backup facilities. Or I suppose their service could have been routed through a distance extender without good backup. In any event, the point is that you can't 100% rely on POTS working during a power outage, although it is certainly more robust than cellular.
My DSL never went out during the August outage, BTW.
I notice that few people seem to have picked up on the fact that the remote no longer comes with the 40GB one, another of the cost-cutting measures
Good catch, I hadn't. OTOH, folks I know who have 3G iPods tell me they generally don't use their remotes much or at all. I have a 1G iPod and haven't ever felt the lack of the remote. So, limited evidence suggests that maybe this was a good decision on Apple's part -- cut cost by unbundling a feature few people use. Too bad they don't sell the remote sans earbuds, though.
Perhaps not, but neither has MoveOn (yes, I do think there's a difference between a contest submission from a member of the public and a position endorsed by the MoveOn organization). And the Republicans have compared their political foes to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, which is right up there on the old hate-o-meter. Support for both statements from the very article you cited:
Or, you can make apps without doing it the old fashioned way. In Squeak, you can draw up your GUI, composing it with widgets out of the Morphic Toolbox, and then adding scripts. When this button is clicked, do this or that. Etc. There are some good tutorials for this newer way of making programs.
Newer than what? The quoted text could just as well describe, say, AppleScript Studio. Or Hypercard, for that matter. Or a cast of dozens of others.
They don't. TFA to the rescue again:
In other words, the sound is a representation of other data, slightly akin to false color images as an earlier poster pointed out.
I can understand that it's a cheap thing to just throw in there
I don't think anything with mass is cheap to add to a space probe. I don't recall what the per-kilo launch costs are for one of those things, but it's not small.
You don't give units, but assuming you're talking MPH you're off by an order of magnitude. TFA sez:
So my question.. In the original comic, does the webbing actually come from his body, or is it an invention of Peter Parkers?
It's an invention. He carries extra cans of web fluid on his belt (under his outfit) and swaps them into his wrist-mounted web shooters as needed. To be honest, I think the "it's just a super power" explanation is less implausible.
As I recall, the original comic also makes a big deal about him inventing the white lenses in his mask.
why was there a huge fuss about Google using a parsing engine to do the same?!
AFAIK this is the first case law on the subject, and up until now everyone assumed the courts would rule the other way. In other words, up until today most people assumed that it was a violation of the law for ISPs to read email.
Now that the First Circuit has ruled otherwise, it'll be interesting to see what happens.
Of course, if the ISP's terms of service indicate they won't read your email, you've still got civil law on your side, anyway. For what that's worth.
I've been contemplating one of these screens, but never wanted to commit because I couldn't just slap in a KVM for my other machines
Actually, you can. I'm using a CompuCable ADC/DVI KVM at this very moment -- one ADC in, one DVI+USB in, ADC out. I don't see a part number on it, but it shouldn't be hard to find. They provide all the various ADC and DVI combinations you might expect.
Worth keeping in mind even given the new displays -- it might be possible to pick up one of the (still very nice) older ones at a close-out price.
So you don't want to have duplicate files in your computer(s)? Well, leave only the copy that works in each machine! Duh!
Er... as you pointed out yourself, the issue is that as of 4.6, iTunes won't play the Hymn'd files, and other devices (my SliMP3 for instance) will only play the Hymn'd files. So there is no such thing as one single "copy that works in each machine." For this reason, Hymn vs. iTunes is not just a problem for pirates, but for anyone who wants to drive both iTunes and (other player) from one library.
all things being equal, wouldn't you go with the airline that offered free WiFi at the airport?
All things being equal, yes. However in the airline industry, things generally aren't equal.
First, many people (myself included) live near an airport which is the hub of a dominant carrier. I can fly an airline other than the dominant one... if I want to take a connecting flight instead of a direct one, with a more inconvenient schedule. The dominant carrier takes full advantage of its position, but what's the little guy to do? I for one wouldn't choose to fly a longer, less convenient route just to save a few bucks on WiFi at the gate. Some lucky souls actually have the choice of multiple airports, but most of us don't.
Second, at terminals that aren't dominated by a single carrier, the various airlines' gates are commingled. There's nothing to stop me from walking from my gate to within 150' of another gate whose airline does offer WiFi, and using it. Yeah, they could block that by, oh, requiring you to authenticate with some credential they print on your boarding pass, but what are the chances of that? It turns the service from a very-low-cost gimme into something that's a lot more expensive to manage. You wouldn't do that for something you're not getting direct revenue from.