Something I think the so called "conspiracy theorists are nuts" mentality is hurting is America's ability to accept evidence of boring conspiracies, or to not think much of them when they come out. So-and-so embezzled a million bucks with custom software? Meh. Such-and-such company has been stealing from the population for decades? Meh. The NSA/FBI/ATF/IRS/whatever has been with their funding that's illegal? Meh. Oh, but if there was evidence that the government has puppet Presidents, or something like that... people would be interested.
And what makes you think harnessing the Earth's core energy is not ultimately unsustainable, either? In my mind's eye (and that's all anyone has at this point on this topic) the thermal energy from the Earth's core is, in essence, like a fire. You sap that heat and you are ultimately going to be taking more energy from the system, resulting in potentially screwing something up.
I haven't seen the ad you speak of (serious WTF city, if that's true), but I have seen a theme of several ads. This:
Almost all their recent TV ads are as lame as hell.
Does not hold true.
The ones I'm thinking of are the ones where they're basically 'hyping' Windows 7: "get things done faster" or some such tagline. They're basically selling the new 'Run' bar/dialog which is, IMO, the single best feature of W7. It really does as advertised, and the ads are good (largly because they're also educational to W7 users).
While China does not have 'traditional Christian values', Christians aren't the only group on this planet which places value on the traditional nuclear (and extended) family units. They probably see pornography as detrimental to matrimonial harmony. Chinese culture has also traditionally revered the role the mother has within a family unit, so it isn't likely just a "anti-porn for the sake of women" but for the sake of mothers.
It might also be due to the 1-child rule. Porn, in my experience, seems to add frustration and depression to the inability to acquire a woman for one's self. The desire to be with someone of the opposite sex isn't solely a sexual desire: it's inter-physical, too, and the lack of human touch while still having the sexual release can lead to unhealthy mental habits.
There is no shortage of women ready and willing to do whatever is required.
Um, really? When did China get an excess of women? Last I recall there is a significant female/male disparity in China, with there being so few women that most men have little to no hope of ever getting married or having children themselves.
The problem is that the so-called 'mild cases' of autism spectrum are treated as a problem - a huge problem - in schools.
Autism spectrum kids tend to float in the "social outcast" group, from my recollections and observations. They're the smart ones who have a hard time dealing with normal situations, so they make their own little worlds. They hang together. From what I've seen, the goth/punk/geek types tend to be one and the same, if not on an individual basis then as a group. But as groups (individual 'groups' as well as the whole), yes, they're the autistic ones.
I'm not talking about kids about ready to drop out of school: those seem to be an entirely different group of goth/punk/whatever. These are the "I'm because it's cool to be , and I'm cool enough to not be trendy" kids. Largely, I think they do it for the chicks.
Sure, it's cliquish bullshit, but these kids do stand out for reasons other than the way they dress: they're skeptical or critical of school authority, tend to obey rules only as far as they need to, do their school work only as much as needed to keep teachers off their back, and are typically already semi-experts in something interesting and technical by the time they're done with high school.
So, arguably, yes: they're a problem - for schools. They don't buy the party line, and do their own thing. For an institution which prides itself in one-thinking, this is kinda dangerous for the typical high school.
As a society, no: these people aren't a "problem". They're a huge asset. I'm not saying "embrace the geeks" - because I think that might actually degrade some of the skills autistic types develop as a result of their outside status - but they are an asset.
(My BIL, as well as several friends are high-functioning autistic spectrum types. Some of them quite obviously.)
I've heard this several times from tech friends who 'support' clueless users in one way or another: the common user is actually getting significantly more use out of W7 than they did with 8 years of XP. They're frequently saying "ah, I always wondered how to do that!"
Ironically, from what I've heard, one of the biggest boons allowing this to happen is the contextual run/search bar. People find out what it can do and they use it - for everything. Sure, it's similar to Spotlight and Beagle and a dozen other things that came before it - so what? It works, and the way it's built into the system, it works well. (The irony comes from the fact that the 'click-it-it's-easy-to-use Windows GUI' gets actual functionality from a CLI interface that invariably leads to increased productivity.)
Nixon would've gotten off scotch-free and we'd have never gone to war with the Nazis?
I, er... see your point? Hopefully it has something to do with government getting significantly more odious since those times, or the American people getting more worthless.
I mostly agree, but local positions can vary unnacceptably. People of all sorts of dogma take over areas and try to handle their local "issues". There needs to be accounting for local variation and their needs/desires, but overarching, fair rules need to be handed down through the monolith that we call government.
No, we don't want your accounting for local variations, thanks.
If you've got a problem with your local politics, you've got two options: vote or move.
If things get pushed down from diktat, we've got jackshit for options: there is no "my way or the highway" because it's the same 100 miles down the road due to the cancerous needs of buearacracy to expand their self-importance/scope of influence.
Smart people do not necessarily make moral or fair decisions. In fact, there's nothing morally distinctive between smart and stupid people (though in my experience, the smarter people I've known have been significantly more selfish, while so-called simpletons have been quite benevolent and thoughtful...)
Here's an idea: have "smart, well-informed people" making the big decisions is a good idea. But if that's the route you want to take, do it through education not through authoritarianism. "Do what I say, or else!" doesn't work with teenagers; it won't work with a great number of adults, either.
Having someone push your options down your throat from above is the cowardly approach of totalitarians. We (ie, most everyone if they'd sit down and think about it for half a second) don't want that in America. Call it "oversight" or whatever the hell you want, but what it boils down to is top-down control of everyday life. Intentions are often benevolent, but the ultimate result is usually otherwise.
The problem is that we ever tried to manage the country centrally in the first place.
Any network or systems administrator will tell you that managing a diverse set of systems centrally is difficult. The only way you can pragmatically do that is with uniform conformity through diktat.
Unless you want to verge into absolute dictatorship, managing many smaller systems centrally is difficult if not possible, leading to a lot of loose ends and bad ideas. The founding fathers realized this, which is part of the reason they went for "limited powers" in the Federal government. There's only so much that a single person or body of people can multitask.
Unfortunately, we've forgotten this reality many times in the past 200 years, leading to an excess of government. "Big government" has to be small out of necessity of self-preservation, or scope creep will grow it to a colossal, unsupportable size.
Think of government as a compute cluster, or cluster of clusters, if you will. If you send jobs off to a cluster, which then sends jobs off to a node, you're trying to balance the overall computation amongst all available systems so no one node/processor doesn't get overtly taxed. This is the opposite of a "we're here to help" federal government: all jobs go up to the process scheduler/dispatcher, and get stuck there, while the lower levels of government (state, county, local) largely ignore what are ultimately their own affairs (poverty, crime, unemployment, civil projects, etc.) because the Federal government "is here to help".
This is why community gardens often thrive, while government food subsidy/distributions are usually failures (in terms of results as well as costs). Local problems need to be dealt with locally.
People who don't know better seem to skimp on the power supplies more than anything else.
I can understand cheap boards; they'll (usually) last the useful life of the system provided they're not really crappy. But the power supply is existential: it's the heart of the system.
If it doesn't pump your electricity properly (at the correct rates and the like), your brain and various peripherals will die a slow death. Sometimes it is not so slow.
Invest in a decent power supply: it's worth it. It's probably the only part of a typical user computer I'd consider an investment, too, because it is an insurance policy (of sorts) on the parts. Buying a cheap power supply so you can get a UPS is backwards. Your components are still going to be getting crap power if the PSU is crap.
I've had a total of one power supply failure, 2 disk failures, and 0 peripheral/RAM/CPU/motherboard failures in the 12 years I've been buying my own parts to build systems.
The current PSU I've got in my main home computer is a Seasonic something or other (they, and Antec, I've found are very good). I'm amazed at how good this converter is: yes, it's got PFC and all those bells, which certainly help, but it delivers amazingly consistent power, evening out the voltage nicely. Hell, we had the power go out for long enough to stop the motor in the washing machine, make my wife's laptop go to battery, and kill the lights, and make my LCD lose power: the computer didn't turn off (and no, I'm not currently using a UPS). This little power supply caches enough power for a full second or so of operation while playing a CPU and graphics intensive game.
So yeah, paying $70 or more for a PSU does not seem unreasonable in the least. With PSUs, you're paying more so for quality than you are for advertised performance or anything like that, so throw down the cash.
But they have, on occasion, put themselves into the "this will be upgraded unless you remove it" stack. I've seen a half dozen places bitten by IE upgrades (7 and 8) they did not manually select themselves.
Chrome is an immature browser based on one of the newer rendering engines,
Uh, what? Webkit, the basis for Chrome, has been around since 1998 (then KHTML). As long ago as KDE 2, Konqueror (using KHTML) was a usable browsing alternative (2001?) and was better than Firefox for some time.
Apple took KHTML some time ago, forked it for Safari, and a lot of those forked changes got merged back into the engine. Google has since forked the project again, but the engine changes are still evolving and improving.
Honestly, Webkit is significantly more mature than the other browser engines now: it supports more architectures (and standards), is faster, more stable, and has better ground-up security.
I hit every single red light on the way home from work. Every. Single. Day. Sometimes twice, as one green light is too short to get through (allowing maybe 3 cars each time). People frequently run that light. I'm only 8 or so miles from work (just slightly too far to drive), and leaving late - or early - doesn't seem to help one damn bit. The drive regularly takes over half an hour.
The only time I'm able to take this route and not hit every light is when there is absolutely no traffic (IE I'm able to be the first one at a light consistently and there is at most one car going each direction within 100 feet) - and get lucky to arrive at the first light when it's green. This is either more than half an hour early (ie 7AM or so) or leave the office after dark (call it 8PM).
The sad thing is that this is a 'small city' of only around 60k people. It's just through a mountain pass, and everyone has to hit an X intersection area (actually more of two intersecting X's) to get anywhere (unless they're fortunate enough to live close enough, on the right side of the X's to where they need to go, to make it worthwhile). And the railroad tracks alongside one of those X roads doesn't help.
At any rate, traffic flow math = good. If you could vary the lights based on flow, it'd help immensely.
(To make matters worse, the last month of the summer is Tourist Season - punctuated nicely by Sturgis Bike Rally Week. This makes things... interesting.)
Let this be an example to all those anti-military types: don't let it be said that the US military (and by proxy, US gov't) never does anything good. It's arguable whether actual 'military' actions help anyone to some, but this is pretty indisputable. (Arguing "but they cause so much harm and this doesn't make full amends is a disingenious, intellectually dishonest argument.)
(It's OK; you're free to ignore all the medical and material advances which have helped not only save civilian lives, but have been used in many, many fields/industries. Likewise, you're free to ignore tremendous costs and efforts in creating precise munitions to reduce collateral damage.)
Yet, an iPad costs more than the average PC, and an iMac (the low-end Apple computer) well over twice the cost of PC hardware comparable to the low-end powerMac.
How much of those sales is pure profit to Apple? Compare that with Microsoft, which gets something like $25-35 per desktop (including corporate machines, which are CALed). You'd need something close to the actual numbers of sales to make income equity.
I can't speak for 10 years, but I know of a Linux server which has not only been online since May 30th, 2002, but has been running uninterrupted since then. Yes, it's had a couple reboots, of course. It's been running mail, web, and a handful of other services, publicly exposed.
Again, let me reiterate: it's an 8-year-old public facing Linux server. There's nothing uncommon about it - it's actually about as common as you can get with Linux from that era, being RedHat 7.3. The Apache binaries were compiled on April 9th, 2002 and the kernel was compiled on the 18th of the same month.
Microsoft's threat is that there is so very much out there targeting their OS; I don't care which is "more secure" innately: it doesn't matter, ultimately, unless someone is actually trying to take you out.
Yes, we all know that the p2o competitions see Apple's products getting taken out first. So what? Trivial amounts of data are contained there (and their numbers are far fewer) compared to the Windows machines out there. In the real world, it's like giving a person the option of going after a pot of gold behind a dozen footballers or a $10 bill behind a 5 year old: only those with few aspirations will tackle the child.
Meanwhile for Microsoft, it seems like the available Windows rootkits are getting significantly more capable. They're harder to notice, harder to locate and harder to remove - sometimes even infecting into the system disk's HPA.
While it might be relatively easy to avoid a slow moving canon set next to you, avoiding a 5" hole through your chest, a hail of game darts will, eventually, leave their mark. That's the situation Microsoft faces.
Personally, I don't feel like protecting someone from thousands of darts. I'd rather them try their own luck against the canon.
Also, Rome is in a pretty moderate climate: the temperature and humidity does not vary much throughout any given year. Compare this to conditions in, say, the Northeast US, Northern Europe, or even the Western US: the temperature varies significantly, and there is notably more moisture throughout the year - which will seep into the cement and contribute to its decay.
And terrorists would use over-ripe cantelopes to blow things up (or shoot people with roofing guns) if more effective alternatives were not available. In the 13th century they'd cut off people's heads (and governments would do same/similar) with swords; today, they do other things, because they're more effective.
The tools used are inconsequential; it's the actors we should be concerning ourselves with.
I get cable service to my house for something just short of $30/month - I don't pay much attention to the bills. It's pretty shoddy service as far as cable is concerned - only 5Mbit/2Mbit.
But it's under $30. For this cable installation they need to put in: * Reels of very expensive copper cable. * Fiber between neighborhoods. * Relay boxes/aggregators/whatever they call them in each neighborhood. * VoIP analog boxes on every house, whether they're using phone service or not.
All those trucks, cables, "installation specialists", etc. don't come cheap. Oh yeah, and there's no (significant) degradation to service from QoS or port blocking, either (port 80 works just fine).
Furthermore: it's not like it's just "install and forget" for them. They're constantly uprooting streets to put in new runs/replace old runs, upgrading infrastructure, and the like.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention... there's competition in this demographic, albeit just barely. But it exists. And both companies are quite profitable (and growing) despite the relatively small domain in which they operate.
So what's AT&T's beef that they can't provide Internet ('unlimited' but throttled bandwidth) at twice the cost, with a fraction of the necessary physical infrastructure? Somehow, I doubt maintaining a radio on top of a hill (or licensing the frequency) compares to the costs of landlines. If local radio stations can still afford to operate with only OTA ads, what's ATT's problem? The relative income from $50+/month subscribers is certainly higher than local radio ads.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh how is this obvious? I'm not sure how a 28-year-old radio signal could have anything to do with a trendy pop psych type show like Lost.
Yep. Hit this one on the head.
Something I think the so called "conspiracy theorists are nuts" mentality is hurting is America's ability to accept evidence of boring conspiracies, or to not think much of them when they come out. So-and-so embezzled a million bucks with custom software? Meh. Such-and-such company has been stealing from the population for decades? Meh. The NSA/FBI/ATF/IRS/whatever has been with their funding that's illegal? Meh. Oh, but if there was evidence that the government has puppet Presidents, or something like that... people would be interested.
And what makes you think harnessing the Earth's core energy is not ultimately unsustainable, either? In my mind's eye (and that's all anyone has at this point on this topic) the thermal energy from the Earth's core is, in essence, like a fire. You sap that heat and you are ultimately going to be taking more energy from the system, resulting in potentially screwing something up.
I haven't seen the ad you speak of (serious WTF city, if that's true), but I have seen a theme of several ads. This:
Almost all their recent TV ads are as lame as hell.
Does not hold true.
The ones I'm thinking of are the ones where they're basically 'hyping' Windows 7: "get things done faster" or some such tagline. They're basically selling the new 'Run' bar/dialog which is, IMO, the single best feature of W7. It really does as advertised, and the ads are good (largly because they're also educational to W7 users).
While China does not have 'traditional Christian values', Christians aren't the only group on this planet which places value on the traditional nuclear (and extended) family units. They probably see pornography as detrimental to matrimonial harmony. Chinese culture has also traditionally revered the role the mother has within a family unit, so it isn't likely just a "anti-porn for the sake of women" but for the sake of mothers.
It might also be due to the 1-child rule. Porn, in my experience, seems to add frustration and depression to the inability to acquire a woman for one's self. The desire to be with someone of the opposite sex isn't solely a sexual desire: it's inter-physical, too, and the lack of human touch while still having the sexual release can lead to unhealthy mental habits.
There is no shortage of women ready and willing to do whatever is required.
Um, really? When did China get an excess of women? Last I recall there is a significant female/male disparity in China, with there being so few women that most men have little to no hope of ever getting married or having children themselves.
The problem is that the so-called 'mild cases' of autism spectrum are treated as a problem - a huge problem - in schools.
Autism spectrum kids tend to float in the "social outcast" group, from my recollections and observations. They're the smart ones who have a hard time dealing with normal situations, so they make their own little worlds. They hang together. From what I've seen, the goth/punk/geek types tend to be one and the same, if not on an individual basis then as a group. But as groups (individual 'groups' as well as the whole), yes, they're the autistic ones.
I'm not talking about kids about ready to drop out of school: those seem to be an entirely different group of goth/punk/whatever. These are the "I'm because it's cool to be , and I'm cool enough to not be trendy" kids. Largely, I think they do it for the chicks.
Sure, it's cliquish bullshit, but these kids do stand out for reasons other than the way they dress: they're skeptical or critical of school authority, tend to obey rules only as far as they need to, do their school work only as much as needed to keep teachers off their back, and are typically already semi-experts in something interesting and technical by the time they're done with high school.
So, arguably, yes: they're a problem - for schools. They don't buy the party line, and do their own thing. For an institution which prides itself in one-thinking, this is kinda dangerous for the typical high school.
As a society, no: these people aren't a "problem". They're a huge asset. I'm not saying "embrace the geeks" - because I think that might actually degrade some of the skills autistic types develop as a result of their outside status - but they are an asset.
(My BIL, as well as several friends are high-functioning autistic spectrum types. Some of them quite obviously.)
I've heard this several times from tech friends who 'support' clueless users in one way or another: the common user is actually getting significantly more use out of W7 than they did with 8 years of XP. They're frequently saying "ah, I always wondered how to do that!"
Ironically, from what I've heard, one of the biggest boons allowing this to happen is the contextual run/search bar. People find out what it can do and they use it - for everything. Sure, it's similar to Spotlight and Beagle and a dozen other things that came before it - so what? It works, and the way it's built into the system, it works well. (The irony comes from the fact that the 'click-it-it's-easy-to-use Windows GUI' gets actual functionality from a CLI interface that invariably leads to increased productivity.)
Nixon would've gotten off scotch-free and we'd have never gone to war with the Nazis?
I, er... see your point? Hopefully it has something to do with government getting significantly more odious since those times, or the American people getting more worthless.
I mostly agree, but local positions can vary unnacceptably. People of all sorts of dogma take over areas and try to handle their local "issues". There needs to be accounting for local variation and their needs/desires, but overarching, fair rules need to be handed down through the monolith that we call government.
No, we don't want your accounting for local variations, thanks.
If you've got a problem with your local politics, you've got two options: vote or move.
If things get pushed down from diktat, we've got jackshit for options: there is no "my way or the highway" because it's the same 100 miles down the road due to the cancerous needs of buearacracy to expand their self-importance/scope of influence.
Smart people do not necessarily make moral or fair decisions. In fact, there's nothing morally distinctive between smart and stupid people (though in my experience, the smarter people I've known have been significantly more selfish, while so-called simpletons have been quite benevolent and thoughtful...)
Here's an idea: have "smart, well-informed people" making the big decisions is a good idea. But if that's the route you want to take, do it through education not through authoritarianism. "Do what I say, or else!" doesn't work with teenagers; it won't work with a great number of adults, either.
Having someone push your options down your throat from above is the cowardly approach of totalitarians. We (ie, most everyone if they'd sit down and think about it for half a second) don't want that in America. Call it "oversight" or whatever the hell you want, but what it boils down to is top-down control of everyday life. Intentions are often benevolent, but the ultimate result is usually otherwise.
The problem is that we ever tried to manage the country centrally in the first place.
Any network or systems administrator will tell you that managing a diverse set of systems centrally is difficult. The only way you can pragmatically do that is with uniform conformity through diktat.
Unless you want to verge into absolute dictatorship, managing many smaller systems centrally is difficult if not possible, leading to a lot of loose ends and bad ideas. The founding fathers realized this, which is part of the reason they went for "limited powers" in the Federal government. There's only so much that a single person or body of people can multitask.
Unfortunately, we've forgotten this reality many times in the past 200 years, leading to an excess of government. "Big government" has to be small out of necessity of self-preservation, or scope creep will grow it to a colossal, unsupportable size.
Think of government as a compute cluster, or cluster of clusters, if you will. If you send jobs off to a cluster, which then sends jobs off to a node, you're trying to balance the overall computation amongst all available systems so no one node/processor doesn't get overtly taxed. This is the opposite of a "we're here to help" federal government: all jobs go up to the process scheduler/dispatcher, and get stuck there, while the lower levels of government (state, county, local) largely ignore what are ultimately their own affairs (poverty, crime, unemployment, civil projects, etc.) because the Federal government "is here to help".
This is why community gardens often thrive, while government food subsidy/distributions are usually failures (in terms of results as well as costs). Local problems need to be dealt with locally.
People who don't know better seem to skimp on the power supplies more than anything else.
I can understand cheap boards; they'll (usually) last the useful life of the system provided they're not really crappy. But the power supply is existential: it's the heart of the system.
If it doesn't pump your electricity properly (at the correct rates and the like), your brain and various peripherals will die a slow death. Sometimes it is not so slow.
Invest in a decent power supply: it's worth it. It's probably the only part of a typical user computer I'd consider an investment, too, because it is an insurance policy (of sorts) on the parts. Buying a cheap power supply so you can get a UPS is backwards. Your components are still going to be getting crap power if the PSU is crap.
I've had a total of one power supply failure, 2 disk failures, and 0 peripheral/RAM/CPU/motherboard failures in the 12 years I've been buying my own parts to build systems.
The current PSU I've got in my main home computer is a Seasonic something or other (they, and Antec, I've found are very good). I'm amazed at how good this converter is: yes, it's got PFC and all those bells, which certainly help, but it delivers amazingly consistent power, evening out the voltage nicely. Hell, we had the power go out for long enough to stop the motor in the washing machine, make my wife's laptop go to battery, and kill the lights, and make my LCD lose power: the computer didn't turn off (and no, I'm not currently using a UPS). This little power supply caches enough power for a full second or so of operation while playing a CPU and graphics intensive game.
So yeah, paying $70 or more for a PSU does not seem unreasonable in the least. With PSUs, you're paying more so for quality than you are for advertised performance or anything like that, so throw down the cash.
Forgive me, I forgot a negation. If you'd quoted what I'd said instead of an excerpt that would have been evident.
Forced? No, they're not forced.
But they have, on occasion, put themselves into the "this will be upgraded unless you remove it" stack. I've seen a half dozen places bitten by IE upgrades (7 and 8) they did not manually select themselves.
Chrome is an immature browser based on one of the newer rendering engines,
Uh, what? Webkit, the basis for Chrome, has been around since 1998 (then KHTML). As long ago as KDE 2, Konqueror (using KHTML) was a usable browsing alternative (2001?) and was better than Firefox for some time.
Apple took KHTML some time ago, forked it for Safari, and a lot of those forked changes got merged back into the engine. Google has since forked the project again, but the engine changes are still evolving and improving.
Honestly, Webkit is significantly more mature than the other browser engines now: it supports more architectures (and standards), is faster, more stable, and has better ground-up security.
So Kirk's jilted speech - that's just him swapping out to disk?
Yes. This. THIS!
I hit every single red light on the way home from work. Every. Single. Day. Sometimes twice, as one green light is too short to get through (allowing maybe 3 cars each time). People frequently run that light. I'm only 8 or so miles from work (just slightly too far to drive), and leaving late - or early - doesn't seem to help one damn bit. The drive regularly takes over half an hour.
The only time I'm able to take this route and not hit every light is when there is absolutely no traffic (IE I'm able to be the first one at a light consistently and there is at most one car going each direction within 100 feet) - and get lucky to arrive at the first light when it's green. This is either more than half an hour early (ie 7AM or so) or leave the office after dark (call it 8PM).
The sad thing is that this is a 'small city' of only around 60k people. It's just through a mountain pass, and everyone has to hit an X intersection area (actually more of two intersecting X's) to get anywhere (unless they're fortunate enough to live close enough, on the right side of the X's to where they need to go, to make it worthwhile). And the railroad tracks alongside one of those X roads doesn't help.
At any rate, traffic flow math = good. If you could vary the lights based on flow, it'd help immensely.
(To make matters worse, the last month of the summer is Tourist Season - punctuated nicely by Sturgis Bike Rally Week. This makes things... interesting.)
(The crappy intersection in question:
Let this be an example to all those anti-military types: don't let it be said that the US military (and by proxy, US gov't) never does anything good. It's arguable whether actual 'military' actions help anyone to some, but this is pretty indisputable. (Arguing "but they cause so much harm and this doesn't make full amends is a disingenious, intellectually dishonest argument.)
(It's OK; you're free to ignore all the medical and material advances which have helped not only save civilian lives, but have been used in many, many fields/industries. Likewise, you're free to ignore tremendous costs and efforts in creating precise munitions to reduce collateral damage.)
A car is more secure than a unicycle.
I dunno, man.
Have you ever heard of someone having their unicycle broken into? Yeah, neither have I.
Yet, an iPad costs more than the average PC, and an iMac (the low-end Apple computer) well over twice the cost of PC hardware comparable to the low-end powerMac.
How much of those sales is pure profit to Apple? Compare that with Microsoft, which gets something like $25-35 per desktop (including corporate machines, which are CALed). You'd need something close to the actual numbers of sales to make income equity.
No wonder Apple has impressive market numbers.
I can't speak for 10 years, but I know of a Linux server which has not only been online since May 30th, 2002, but has been running uninterrupted since then. Yes, it's had a couple reboots, of course. It's been running mail, web, and a handful of other services, publicly exposed.
Again, let me reiterate: it's an 8-year-old public facing Linux server. There's nothing uncommon about it - it's actually about as common as you can get with Linux from that era, being RedHat 7.3. The Apache binaries were compiled on April 9th, 2002 and the kernel was compiled on the 18th of the same month.
Microsoft's threat is that there is so very much out there targeting their OS; I don't care which is "more secure" innately: it doesn't matter, ultimately, unless someone is actually trying to take you out.
Yes, we all know that the p2o competitions see Apple's products getting taken out first. So what? Trivial amounts of data are contained there (and their numbers are far fewer) compared to the Windows machines out there. In the real world, it's like giving a person the option of going after a pot of gold behind a dozen footballers or a $10 bill behind a 5 year old: only those with few aspirations will tackle the child.
Meanwhile for Microsoft, it seems like the available Windows rootkits are getting significantly more capable. They're harder to notice, harder to locate and harder to remove - sometimes even infecting into the system disk's HPA.
While it might be relatively easy to avoid a slow moving canon set next to you, avoiding a 5" hole through your chest, a hail of game darts will, eventually, leave their mark. That's the situation Microsoft faces.
Personally, I don't feel like protecting someone from thousands of darts. I'd rather them try their own luck against the canon.
Also, Rome is in a pretty moderate climate: the temperature and humidity does not vary much throughout any given year. Compare this to conditions in, say, the Northeast US, Northern Europe, or even the Western US: the temperature varies significantly, and there is notably more moisture throughout the year - which will seep into the cement and contribute to its decay.
And terrorists would use over-ripe cantelopes to blow things up (or shoot people with roofing guns) if more effective alternatives were not available. In the 13th century they'd cut off people's heads (and governments would do same/similar) with swords; today, they do other things, because they're more effective.
The tools used are inconsequential; it's the actors we should be concerning ourselves with.
How, exactly, would they lose their shirts?
I get cable service to my house for something just short of $30/month - I don't pay much attention to the bills. It's pretty shoddy service as far as cable is concerned - only 5Mbit/2Mbit.
But it's under $30. For this cable installation they need to put in:
* Reels of very expensive copper cable.
* Fiber between neighborhoods.
* Relay boxes/aggregators/whatever they call them in each neighborhood.
* VoIP analog boxes on every house, whether they're using phone service or not.
All those trucks, cables, "installation specialists", etc. don't come cheap. Oh yeah, and there's no (significant) degradation to service from QoS or port blocking, either (port 80 works just fine).
Furthermore: it's not like it's just "install and forget" for them. They're constantly uprooting streets to put in new runs/replace old runs, upgrading infrastructure, and the like.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention... there's competition in this demographic, albeit just barely. But it exists. And both companies are quite profitable (and growing) despite the relatively small domain in which they operate.
So what's AT&T's beef that they can't provide Internet ('unlimited' but throttled bandwidth) at twice the cost, with a fraction of the necessary physical infrastructure? Somehow, I doubt maintaining a radio on top of a hill (or licensing the frequency) compares to the costs of landlines. If local radio stations can still afford to operate with only OTA ads, what's ATT's problem? The relative income from $50+/month subscribers is certainly higher than local radio ads.