Re:how banks sees the culture
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Matter
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· Score: 1
Marx postulated limited or no scarcity of at least basic necessities as a requirement for communism. In "The German Ideology" he explicitly stated that he believed in the case of a revolution in a country where there were not enough resources to satisfy basic necessities "the same shit would just happen all over again" (paraphrased), and so far every country with a self proclaimed communist rebel movement successfully overthrowing the government have satisfied that prediction to the letter.
The point being that if there is a significant amount of need, there is a far stronger drive to take from someone else, thereby creating inequalities, which result in a class based society, which according to Marx is the entire basis for the state. Without scarcity, on the other hand, he believed the need for the state disappears, and as Lenin wrote, the state will just "wither away".
In my opinion, any significant levels of scarcity will always result in rigid power structures, with varying levels of chaos depending on how complete the control of the ruling power is. That effectively precludes communism from being a viable option for a society that can't meet enough needs of it's population to make sharing without power grabs possible. Marx saw that very clearly at least by the 1870's, probably before. Unfortunately Lenin did not, and early started promoting ideas that broke with Marx in very central aspects (such as on the question of whether Russia was mature enough to handle a socialist revolution - Marx and Engels pointed to the US as the best prospect due to it's level of development - and the idea that farmers had enough in common with the proletariat to fall down on their side, which turned out not to hold when the Bolcheviks got nearly no support outside the large cities after the April revolution)
The "standard sense" of what communism means just so happens to bear no relations to it's theoretical basis.
To me, the Culture fits much better with plain Marxist communism or "council communism" than with anarcho-communism - there IS political structures and hierarchies in the Culture, such as Special Circumstances and Contact.
As for the Culture's "imperialism", to me it seems like it's described as essentially well intentioned, but often bungled, because the Culture on one hand has a genuine desire to spread it's ideas, but on the other hand often fail to understand all aspects of the culture they deal with. Contrary to the typical imperialist, though, the Culture shows remorse and a desire to correct past mistakes, and doesn't seek to expand for power - groups or individuals are free to leave the Culture at any time, and many do. The Culture spreads their culture, not an empire. It may be cultural imperialism, but in the books Banks have written so far at least, it's cultural imperialism with a good reason: They genuinely DO have more respect for the individual and for freedom than their counterparts.
The idea of a rebellion against a society like that is pretty comical. How would you do it? Nobody would stop you from taking ships and going off by yourself. Nobody would stop you from taking territory as long as you have the support of those living there. This is supported by the mention of several splinter groups, as well as the lack of a central government - you are part of the Culture by virtue of dealing with them, and exchanging ideas and resources and people with them, not by being ruled by anyone. You'd face resistance if you instead of being a "freedom fighter" become a terrorist or warlord and start trying to subject others to your whims.
Re:Excession and Look to Windward?
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Matter
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· Score: 1
I believe the point was simply to do it outside of the Culture's range of influence. The aliens in question knowing full well they had been significantly infiltrated by the Culture in the past. Large parts of the book is devoted to exactly how hard getting the explosive past the Culture would be, and so it happened to be somewhere they thought they could hide, nothing more.
You assume incorrectly. Back in the 80's there might've been some truth to it. The typical limit today is 1m+ erase cycles (not writes) per erase unit, and a typical large flash units will have many thousand erase units. With a reasonably sized modern unit with proper wear leveling you can write tens of MB/s sustained for more than a decade and still not start seeing failures due to wear. That's without the system keeping a reserve to remap failing units.
You do realize those "1 penny" offers are pure scams with extortionate delivery charges, right? When it looks too good to be true it usually is, and all that.
I do think the GP overstated the case quite a bit, but even cheap flash units have an expected number of erase cycles (NOT writes - it's NEVER been writes that's the issue, but the number of ERASES of each erase unit) in the 1 million+ range. One thing worth noting is that in a typical flash system you will not erase ANY units until the disk is near full - you can do incremental writes to the same erase unit until it's full, and you'll remap blocks so subsequent writes to the "same block" will be written to a free block.
On a unit of a few GB you'll have at least thousands of erase units, so even pretty basic wear leveling on low end flash units will mean you'll never experience any problems. Add to that that flash rarely dramatically fails (you'll usually start seeing problems with bits that don't get erased on individual erase units that are getting close to failure, so if your system checks for that and keeps a reserve it can quietly take the offending block out of use before any read/write errors occur), and you can rely on flash, probably more so than a normal harddisk. Flash failure modes are essentially trivial to avoid and far less of a problem than with normal harddisks.
I've had many harddrives fail on me, but I've used various embedded systems using flash and never managed to wear out a flash chip. Properly designed flash based SSD's can/will be a big step up in terms of reliability.
Performance on SSD's can be scaled more or less linearly by building the SSD with more chips and writing in parallel. Of course you want each individual chip to be fast too, but expect SSD read/write speeds to go up fast as the volume manufactured keeps growing. As someone else said, the performance on current SSD's is a result of what the market wants. The more SSDs are used as harddisk replacements rather than compact removable storage the more you'll see market pressure growing for higher performing units.
Since when did the US matters at all when it comes to cellphones? The US has been lagging in cellphone penetration and rollouts of new services for years, and has long since been overtaken in terms of absolute number of phones too.
Because of (lack of) availability. If you're a business traveller in the US, for example, you will likely find yourself regularly in places where only a few expensive providers have hotspots. When I was traveling regularly to SFO last year, for example, I frequently paid $10 I think it was for a day pass even though I was only at the airport for 2-3 hours. $10 is still cheap compared to the salary I was paid to sit there and do nothing if I didn't have internet access.
And that meant I had to drag out my credit card. If I could have it billed straight to my cellphone subscription I would've loved it. And in fact, I could've, except for the times when I forgot to re-enable my UK T-Mobile hotspot account, but I'd still need to keep the login details with me and go through a login procedure instead of just plugging in my USB modem.
Face it, most people aren't picking their providers based on roaming costs, and most people that use roaming extensively abroad are business travelers, who WILL pay extra for the convenience.
My guess is that this will sell iPOD's to a huge number of people that haven't bothered before. The actual sales of Beatles tracks may only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of increased revenue for Apple on this one.
That's because cats are perceptive enough to know whether there's anything in that direction worthy of their interest long before you point, and so they're just wondering why you're playing that stupid game. Dogs on the other hand will run after an imaginary object you pretend to throw.
If you think a cat can't learn or be trained you simply haven't been around many cats. It's not that common for cats to learn to open/close doors, operate light switches etc. for example, just by observation. We used to have a cat that would desperately stretch for door handle for the patio doors when it wanted to get in or out. They were far too high up, but it clearly understood the connection between the handle and the door being opened without any training. The dog, on the other hand, who was big enough that it would've easily been able to get at the door handles, never made any sign of seeing the connection.
Most dog breeds give affection to almost anyone that feeds them or is otherwise involved in caring for them, and a lot of dogs give affection to anyone. If a cat shows affection to you, you know it actually has made a choice to be nice to you, because cats will happily ignore you or treat you like nothing if they want to even if you're the one that feed them and cater to their every needs.
When I was (much) younger, my parents did the stupid mistake of getting a 17kg beast of a dog while we had a cat. The dog was very gentle, but got extremely excited about other animals and had a tendency to charge them so that it could get to them to lick them all over as quickly as possible. He never tried harming any animals he got close to.
That worked very well with my brothers rabbits (who simply got annoyed and walked away after a while). Not so much with the cat, who'd become a real sissy after having been beaten around the ears by his mother regularly as a kitten (she used to hide behind the curtains and jump out and hit his head - real motherly love, but then she was a crazed killing machine, leaving a trail of dead animals wherever she went). The cat promptly moved out and in under the house, and for a couple of years would only come inside when the dog was locked away or outdoors.
Which lead to ridiculous things like my parents heating cat food in the microwave every evening during the winter because they felt sorry for the cat they'd driven out of the house.. Microwaved cat food STINKS.
When he finally got used enough to the dog, and the dog finally learned not to run after him at first sight, they eventually ended up with an uneasy truce.
I don't doubt cats and dogs can live together nicely, but for anyone who wants to try: Don't get an overexcited dog that's five times the size of your cat and expect it to go very well. I still wonder what my parents were thinking...
Norway has a similar system: birthdate + 5 digits. The number itself identifies only your birthdate and gender. However it's used as an unique key for the passport registers, taxes, bank accounts etc.. The register used for tax purposes also contains the current address of every Norwegian citizen living in Norway (and the foreign address of any Norwegian citizen still paying tax to Norway for whatever reason).
The number is never meant to be sufficient for identification, and I've never seen it used as such in cases where there's a high fraud risk. When dealing with your bank, for example, you'll need to present an ID document. Many of those ID documents will have your national id number printed on it, to tie your identity to the number.
It does potentially allow a lot of databases to be combined. However, at the same time Norway has some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world, and they are strictly enforced. In reality the cases of abuse have been extremely limited.
Yes, it does mean that if you want to "disappear" from the government you can't legally do so - you risk a fine, though in reality the odds of being fined are small (if you evade taxes and they come looking for you and don't find you at your stated residence, perhaps, but then you're already in bigger trouble). Presumably if you badly want to hide from the government, a fine isn't really going to stop you.
Yes, it also means the government have an easier job tieing your national id to your bank accounts and other registers to get a larger picture. However you'll find that in countries like the UK, that doesn't have a national ID number (yet), the government have become very sophisticated in terms of matching up data about people based on addresses. I know for a fact that HM Revenue & Customs (UK equivalent of the IRS) does this with a very high level of accuracy (same goes for financial institutions etc. - the assumption is that if they have your name and your last three years of addresses, they'll be able to build a continuous financial history, and it works extremely well without any kind of unique id number).
An id number is just a convenience. If someone wants to combine data on you from disparate sources, they WILL manage to find ways of matching up the data. The only "benefit" you get from not having an id number is that it's slightly harder. But you also run the risk that it's far easier to make a mistake and tie your data to someone elses in ways that cause you problems.
The id number is exactly the wrong thing to focus on. It's how data on you is combined, protected and analyzed that decide whether or not you have a privacy problem, not whether or not you have an id number. The id number just simplifies what's still a relatively trivial job of linking data together.
The issue of corporations having rights is really a legal fiction, done mainly as a legal matter of convenience, not out of moral or ethical principles. Morally, corporations should have no rights other than that possessed by the conglomeration of its stockholders.
If that became the case, most modern corporations would have to shut down or would collapse.
IBM (just to take an arbitrary name) as a corporation for example have a vast number of rights that are necessary for it to function as a business that NONE of it's shareholders have, or where their shareholders are not the right party to exercise that right. Just to give some examples:
IBM can market computers under the IBM trademark and in general use the name IBM for a lot of stuff. If their shareholders had this right, every single two-bit operation out there would buy a single IBM stock and start pushing out IBM clones with a nice IBM logo on it. I know I'd jump at the chance.
IBM can legally access the bank accounts their customers pay into. If IBM shareholders could do this, I'd empty IBM's accounts immediately. Unfortunately it wouldn't last very long as they'd go bankrupt damn quickly
IBM can legally enter contracts that binds the company as a whole to, for example, provide support services. IBM's shareholders _can_ do this, but IBM's shareholders aren't the ones that will be providing the service - IBM's employees are. Any IBM shareholder would be stupid to promise that IBM's employees would carry out this support, as the majority of shareholders may decide they'd leave you to fulfill the contract and have that employee do something else. Unless every shareholder had to sign every contract, this would be an issue, and if they did it'd be impossible to trade IBM's shares. If every shareholder had to authorize an agent to enter the contract on their behalf, it still wouldn't work, as the shareholder would still be on the hook personally for something they personally don't have control over.
If a corporation only have the rights of the individual shareholders what you have is a partnership without limited liability, which is certainly possible, but effectively prevent companies beyond a very small size from operating effectively or at all. Even in professions where partnerships are common (law firms etc.) most partnerships these days are limited liability partnerships, which are more or less corporations in terms of rights (in the UK for example, a limited liability partnership IS legally a "corporate body" just like corporations).
While it's certainly possible to make arguments for limiting the size of corporations or reducing their rights, without some level of rights beyond that of their shareholders a huge number of undertakings that corporations take on today would become next to impossible to manage.
One of the primary reasons beyond limited liability is the ability to create a business that survives the founder without disruption. Before incorporation became common, businesses often failed on the death of the founder because they were entirely dependent on the execution of the estate in a way that allowed on of the beneficiaries to continue operating the business. This had significant impact for example on employees, who might be left in limbo once the owner died, and certainly would have little to no protection
Another aspect is that it creates a better regulated way of separating the owners economy from that of the business, beyond just limiting or removing liability. In a small business with a small number of owners it might not be such a big problem if the accounts etc. were in the owners names, but the larger the business the more security everyone involved will want that their interests are protected, and that requires at a minimum that personal income and expenses are clearly separated from that of the busines.
That said, personally I believe corporations have been granted too wide ranging rights, but there's little doubt that the ability to incorporate is useful for society.
I have four tabs open, and I opened it's only about an hour ago, and it's already up to about 200MB. I've mostly switched to the latest Webkit beta because Firefox grows to ridiculous sizes on my machines - it easily gets to 1-2GB+ in less than a day of regular use. I've had the same problem on 2 Macbook's and a Linux box.
But for that to work the buyers needs to know which sellers are available that don't sell crap. When the profit margins are higher when you sell crap it means you have more money to effectively market your product and do whatever you can to shut out competition.
An unregulated free market only have a shot at working if everyone involved have perfect information about the market and are capable of sorting through that information.
Even then the market may favor solutions that make large subsets of the buyers unhappy simply because economies of scale may make it so much cheaper to satisfy the lowest common denominator and ignore the rest that the price gap for a seller trying to satisfy customers more might be too high to make it feasibly to compete with a better service, not because buyers don't want it, but because they want it at a price the seller can only achieve AFTER they get volume.
A "free market" is an oxymoron. If it's free of all regulation it won't remain free, as history has shown time and time again, because sooner or later someone gets enough of an upper hand to impose their own rules.
That's why Air is such an ingenious move. It's essentially about delivering a tool that'll let anyone writing web apps churn out desktop apps that are OS agnostic. While it won't help much in getting core Adobe apps onto OS X and Linux, with some luck it may take some mind share from Microsoft development tools from people who now can make use of their web development skills and get portability for free effectively by isolating them from the OS differences.
In Europe at least "liberal" parties are usually centrist or at least closer to the political centre than the conservative parties. It's pretty rare for a party with "liberal" in the name to be considered conservative here, though not that unusual for them to be considered right wing.
What if that one officer ends up getting shot? What if the house is quiet because everyone is tied up in the basement?
In this case they called the house back and talked to the owner, but thought he might be under duress when they spoke to him. THEN they sent the SWAT team.
Presumably the team who got sent out knew there was a chance it was a prank. It sucks, but it'd have sucked even more if an innocent family had gotten killed because they didn't take it seriously.
If I remember correctly the article also reveals the initial of his last name and either his birthday or roughly when his birthday is.
But frankly, this guy is going to end up in jail for a long time if the article is anything to go by - he kept phreaking even after he had agreed with the FBI to stop and be an informant. They gave him a second chance and he abused it again, and apparently he's still at it.
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The point being that if there is a significant amount of need, there is a far stronger drive to take from someone else, thereby creating inequalities, which result in a class based society, which according to Marx is the entire basis for the state. Without scarcity, on the other hand, he believed the need for the state disappears, and as Lenin wrote, the state will just "wither away".
In my opinion, any significant levels of scarcity will always result in rigid power structures, with varying levels of chaos depending on how complete the control of the ruling power is. That effectively precludes communism from being a viable option for a society that can't meet enough needs of it's population to make sharing without power grabs possible. Marx saw that very clearly at least by the 1870's, probably before. Unfortunately Lenin did not, and early started promoting ideas that broke with Marx in very central aspects (such as on the question of whether Russia was mature enough to handle a socialist revolution - Marx and Engels pointed to the US as the best prospect due to it's level of development - and the idea that farmers had enough in common with the proletariat to fall down on their side, which turned out not to hold when the Bolcheviks got nearly no support outside the large cities after the April revolution)
The "standard sense" of what communism means just so happens to bear no relations to it's theoretical basis.
To me, the Culture fits much better with plain Marxist communism or "council communism" than with anarcho-communism - there IS political structures and hierarchies in the Culture, such as Special Circumstances and Contact.
As for the Culture's "imperialism", to me it seems like it's described as essentially well intentioned, but often bungled, because the Culture on one hand has a genuine desire to spread it's ideas, but on the other hand often fail to understand all aspects of the culture they deal with. Contrary to the typical imperialist, though, the Culture shows remorse and a desire to correct past mistakes, and doesn't seek to expand for power - groups or individuals are free to leave the Culture at any time, and many do. The Culture spreads their culture, not an empire. It may be cultural imperialism, but in the books Banks have written so far at least, it's cultural imperialism with a good reason: They genuinely DO have more respect for the individual and for freedom than their counterparts.
The idea of a rebellion against a society like that is pretty comical. How would you do it? Nobody would stop you from taking ships and going off by yourself. Nobody would stop you from taking territory as long as you have the support of those living there. This is supported by the mention of several splinter groups, as well as the lack of a central government - you are part of the Culture by virtue of dealing with them, and exchanging ideas and resources and people with them, not by being ruled by anyone. You'd face resistance if you instead of being a "freedom fighter" become a terrorist or warlord and start trying to subject others to your whims.
I believe the point was simply to do it outside of the Culture's range of influence. The aliens in question knowing full well they had been significantly infiltrated by the Culture in the past. Large parts of the book is devoted to exactly how hard getting the explosive past the Culture would be, and so it happened to be somewhere they thought they could hide, nothing more.
You assume incorrectly. Back in the 80's there might've been some truth to it. The typical limit today is 1m+ erase cycles (not writes) per erase unit, and a typical large flash units will have many thousand erase units. With a reasonably sized modern unit with proper wear leveling you can write tens of MB/s sustained for more than a decade and still not start seeing failures due to wear. That's without the system keeping a reserve to remap failing units.
You do realize those "1 penny" offers are pure scams with extortionate delivery charges, right? When it looks too good to be true it usually is, and all that.
What are you doing on Slashdot? Seriously.
On a unit of a few GB you'll have at least thousands of erase units, so even pretty basic wear leveling on low end flash units will mean you'll never experience any problems. Add to that that flash rarely dramatically fails (you'll usually start seeing problems with bits that don't get erased on individual erase units that are getting close to failure, so if your system checks for that and keeps a reserve it can quietly take the offending block out of use before any read/write errors occur), and you can rely on flash, probably more so than a normal harddisk. Flash failure modes are essentially trivial to avoid and far less of a problem than with normal harddisks.
I've had many harddrives fail on me, but I've used various embedded systems using flash and never managed to wear out a flash chip. Properly designed flash based SSD's can/will be a big step up in terms of reliability.
Performance on SSD's can be scaled more or less linearly by building the SSD with more chips and writing in parallel. Of course you want each individual chip to be fast too, but expect SSD read/write speeds to go up fast as the volume manufactured keeps growing. As someone else said, the performance on current SSD's is a result of what the market wants. The more SSDs are used as harddisk replacements rather than compact removable storage the more you'll see market pressure growing for higher performing units.
Since when did the US matters at all when it comes to cellphones? The US has been lagging in cellphone penetration and rollouts of new services for years, and has long since been overtaken in terms of absolute number of phones too.
And that meant I had to drag out my credit card. If I could have it billed straight to my cellphone subscription I would've loved it. And in fact, I could've, except for the times when I forgot to re-enable my UK T-Mobile hotspot account, but I'd still need to keep the login details with me and go through a login procedure instead of just plugging in my USB modem.
Face it, most people aren't picking their providers based on roaming costs, and most people that use roaming extensively abroad are business travelers, who WILL pay extra for the convenience.
My guess is that this will sell iPOD's to a huge number of people that haven't bothered before. The actual sales of Beatles tracks may only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of increased revenue for Apple on this one.
That's because cats are perceptive enough to know whether there's anything in that direction worthy of their interest long before you point, and so they're just wondering why you're playing that stupid game. Dogs on the other hand will run after an imaginary object you pretend to throw.
If you think a cat can't learn or be trained you simply haven't been around many cats. It's not that common for cats to learn to open/close doors, operate light switches etc. for example, just by observation. We used to have a cat that would desperately stretch for door handle for the patio doors when it wanted to get in or out. They were far too high up, but it clearly understood the connection between the handle and the door being opened without any training. The dog, on the other hand, who was big enough that it would've easily been able to get at the door handles, never made any sign of seeing the connection.
Most dog breeds give affection to almost anyone that feeds them or is otherwise involved in caring for them, and a lot of dogs give affection to anyone. If a cat shows affection to you, you know it actually has made a choice to be nice to you, because cats will happily ignore you or treat you like nothing if they want to even if you're the one that feed them and cater to their every needs.
That worked very well with my brothers rabbits (who simply got annoyed and walked away after a while). Not so much with the cat, who'd become a real sissy after having been beaten around the ears by his mother regularly as a kitten (she used to hide behind the curtains and jump out and hit his head - real motherly love, but then she was a crazed killing machine, leaving a trail of dead animals wherever she went). The cat promptly moved out and in under the house, and for a couple of years would only come inside when the dog was locked away or outdoors.
Which lead to ridiculous things like my parents heating cat food in the microwave every evening during the winter because they felt sorry for the cat they'd driven out of the house.. Microwaved cat food STINKS.
When he finally got used enough to the dog, and the dog finally learned not to run after him at first sight, they eventually ended up with an uneasy truce.
I don't doubt cats and dogs can live together nicely, but for anyone who wants to try: Don't get an overexcited dog that's five times the size of your cat and expect it to go very well. I still wonder what my parents were thinking...
He didn't happen to be named Garfield, did he?
The number is never meant to be sufficient for identification, and I've never seen it used as such in cases where there's a high fraud risk. When dealing with your bank, for example, you'll need to present an ID document. Many of those ID documents will have your national id number printed on it, to tie your identity to the number.
It does potentially allow a lot of databases to be combined. However, at the same time Norway has some of the strictest data privacy laws in the world, and they are strictly enforced. In reality the cases of abuse have been extremely limited.
Yes, it does mean that if you want to "disappear" from the government you can't legally do so - you risk a fine, though in reality the odds of being fined are small (if you evade taxes and they come looking for you and don't find you at your stated residence, perhaps, but then you're already in bigger trouble). Presumably if you badly want to hide from the government, a fine isn't really going to stop you.
Yes, it also means the government have an easier job tieing your national id to your bank accounts and other registers to get a larger picture. However you'll find that in countries like the UK, that doesn't have a national ID number (yet), the government have become very sophisticated in terms of matching up data about people based on addresses. I know for a fact that HM Revenue & Customs (UK equivalent of the IRS) does this with a very high level of accuracy (same goes for financial institutions etc. - the assumption is that if they have your name and your last three years of addresses, they'll be able to build a continuous financial history, and it works extremely well without any kind of unique id number).
An id number is just a convenience. If someone wants to combine data on you from disparate sources, they WILL manage to find ways of matching up the data. The only "benefit" you get from not having an id number is that it's slightly harder. But you also run the risk that it's far easier to make a mistake and tie your data to someone elses in ways that cause you problems.
The id number is exactly the wrong thing to focus on. It's how data on you is combined, protected and analyzed that decide whether or not you have a privacy problem, not whether or not you have an id number. The id number just simplifies what's still a relatively trivial job of linking data together.
If that became the case, most modern corporations would have to shut down or would collapse.
IBM (just to take an arbitrary name) as a corporation for example have a vast number of rights that are necessary for it to function as a business that NONE of it's shareholders have, or where their shareholders are not the right party to exercise that right. Just to give some examples:
If a corporation only have the rights of the individual shareholders what you have is a partnership without limited liability, which is certainly possible, but effectively prevent companies beyond a very small size from operating effectively or at all. Even in professions where partnerships are common (law firms etc.) most partnerships these days are limited liability partnerships, which are more or less corporations in terms of rights (in the UK for example, a limited liability partnership IS legally a "corporate body" just like corporations).
While it's certainly possible to make arguments for limiting the size of corporations or reducing their rights, without some level of rights beyond that of their shareholders a huge number of undertakings that corporations take on today would become next to impossible to manage.
Another aspect is that it creates a better regulated way of separating the owners economy from that of the business, beyond just limiting or removing liability. In a small business with a small number of owners it might not be such a big problem if the accounts etc. were in the owners names, but the larger the business the more security everyone involved will want that their interests are protected, and that requires at a minimum that personal income and expenses are clearly separated from that of the busines.
That said, personally I believe corporations have been granted too wide ranging rights, but there's little doubt that the ability to incorporate is useful for society.
I have four tabs open, and I opened it's only about an hour ago, and it's already up to about 200MB. I've mostly switched to the latest Webkit beta because Firefox grows to ridiculous sizes on my machines - it easily gets to 1-2GB+ in less than a day of regular use. I've had the same problem on 2 Macbook's and a Linux box.
An unregulated free market only have a shot at working if everyone involved have perfect information about the market and are capable of sorting through that information.
Even then the market may favor solutions that make large subsets of the buyers unhappy simply because economies of scale may make it so much cheaper to satisfy the lowest common denominator and ignore the rest that the price gap for a seller trying to satisfy customers more might be too high to make it feasibly to compete with a better service, not because buyers don't want it, but because they want it at a price the seller can only achieve AFTER they get volume.
A "free market" is an oxymoron. If it's free of all regulation it won't remain free, as history has shown time and time again, because sooner or later someone gets enough of an upper hand to impose their own rules.
That's why Air is such an ingenious move. It's essentially about delivering a tool that'll let anyone writing web apps churn out desktop apps that are OS agnostic. While it won't help much in getting core Adobe apps onto OS X and Linux, with some luck it may take some mind share from Microsoft development tools from people who now can make use of their web development skills and get portability for free effectively by isolating them from the OS differences.
It's worth noting, since the parent didn't, that the Adam and Eve libraries (don't know if that includes Eve2) are opensource as part of the "Adobe Source Libraries". Adobe has quite a few other opensource projects as well.
In Europe at least "liberal" parties are usually centrist or at least closer to the political centre than the conservative parties. It's pretty rare for a party with "liberal" in the name to be considered conservative here, though not that unusual for them to be considered right wing.
In this case they called the house back and talked to the owner, but thought he might be under duress when they spoke to him. THEN they sent the SWAT team.
Presumably the team who got sent out knew there was a chance it was a prank. It sucks, but it'd have sucked even more if an innocent family had gotten killed because they didn't take it seriously.
But frankly, this guy is going to end up in jail for a long time if the article is anything to go by - he kept phreaking even after he had agreed with the FBI to stop and be an informant. They gave him a second chance and he abused it again, and apparently he's still at it.
Anyone who knows him will find out soon enough.