Bryan was supposed to be the premier orator of his era -- his "Cross of Gold" speech brought the house down at the Democratic convention in 1896. But that recording is just a snoozefest -- admittedly, it's about banking, which is important but boring (which is no doubt one of the reasons we're in trouble today), but the rhythm is just stately and bland and blah. Maybe the experience of being in a studio rather than in front of a live, reacting crowd was so foreign that it didn't occur to him that he should be using the same oratorical techniques, and instead was just reading prepared remarks.
The headline is misleading. The MBA students aren't learning how to fight open source as an abstract concept; they're learning what to do when your business produces a piece of proprietary software that competes with an open source product.
I'm all for open source and use a lot of open source apps, but I don't believe that such a dilemma is always most profitably answered with "embrace open source yourself."
Re:Who's calling who a liar?
on
Plane Simple Truth
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Seriously. This is one of the most convoluted setences I've ever seen. I know that Slashdot "editors" aren't really editors in the generally accepted sense of the term, but -- really? Did you look at that sentence and think, "Hey, that's something that should go on the front page and that people will read and easily understand!"
(Full disclosure: I am an editor, without quotation marks.)
then why not fund the SpaceX guys, who at least have had some modicum of success thus far and are well on the way to building a reliable and quality launch vehicle
Wait, is this the same SpaceX that has flopped on every one of their attempted launches?
All you need for this is an electrical outlet at home.
This to me is one of the biggest obstacles to our plug-in future. Those of you who live in the 'burbs where everybody has their own two-car garage may be shocked to hear this, but millions of us live in urban areas where we park our cars on the street, can't be gauranteed to find a spot in front of our houses, and wouldn't be able to run an extension cord across the sidewalk even if we could.
I've been told that this is actually a deliberate aspect of the U.S.'s generally tax-suspicious culture. In essence, you are supposed to know just how much you pay in taxes on purchases, so that you get worked up about it and resist increases and push for decreases. If the tax were invisible, it would be less ofa political issue.
On the one hand, if you phrase this as "Flickr can determine what runs on Flickr's Web site's", yeah, it's not shocking. But the truth is there is no online version of what in the real world would be thought of as public space. Which is fine, I guess, except that for the past 15 years we've been sold on the Internet as a place that allows for the free exchange of ideas and meeting of minds across cultures and so on and so on. Plus the R&D behind it and much of the initial infrastructure was built with public money.
It's not a problem restricted to the Internet. In the US, anyway, more and more of what had been public space is, in the 20th and 21st century built environment, private. A modern mall may serve the same social and economic function as a quaint 19th-century downtown, but in that downtown you could stage a protest and in a mall you can't. Increasingly, your only choices in daily life are to be inside somebody's house or inside a store.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Pixelon was an actual, out-and-out con job. They never intended to deliver the product they advertised (which would have been impossible with the current technology anyway). In some ways that makes more sense than most of the sites on this list, which were elaborate exercizes in mutual self-delusion.
I'm often the person who's in charge of dealing with irritating, faceless corporations over the phone in our family, but quite a few of our accounts with said corporations are in my wife's name, and sometimes they refuse to deal with me because I'm obviously not her, even though I have access to all the information that she would (usually nothing more complicated than our account number and maybe her SS #). I wonder sometimes what would happen if I called claiming to be her, and talked in a ludicrous Monty Python-style falsetto -- or, better, if I just talked in my regular voice and got really offended if they gave me grief about it.
I also met a woman named "Joshua" once. I wonder if she gets hassled by people who don't believe she is who she is.
Oh yes, a war for oil. And how great has that worked out? Considering that oil is at record highs, I don't think that it was a "war for oil" because had it been a "war for oil" we would have more oil.
Hey, they didn't say it was a competently planned war for oil.
You know, IT people are generally all kinds of smug how much smarter they are than everybody else, but 20 percent of them are apparently still backing candidates who dropped out of the race several weeks ago.
Then you build new roads, double decker style if needed.
Most traffic planners will tell you that adding more road capacity doesn't cut down on traffic in the long term. It just attracts more people to the regions served by the new higher capacity roads, and eventually you're right back where you started. And honestly, most people don't like living with huge double-decker highways passing through their neighborhoods. The people who drive on roads aren't the only ones who get a say on whether or where they get built; the people who have to live next to them do as well.
Solving congestion is a non-issue: the fact that people continue to drive means the cost to them of driving is still less than the cost of not going there at all.
True enough as far as it goes. The problem arises when people expect the congested roads be de-congested at no charge to them, the driver.
Build more roads to accomodate them or ignore the problem. Pricing doesn't fix things, it just increases the annoyance to the drivers even further.
Or it, you know, pays for the new roads that you're saying should be built. Or do you think those shoot forth self-living out of the ground?
The truth is that this sort of variable pricing scheme will probably only be put into place on new roads, and it will fund those new roads.
>I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door >taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
>Because people have to get to work, and their wanting other options doesn't cause them to magically spring into existence.
True. Just as it's true that wanting gas to be cheap and roads to be free doesn't make cause them to magically be such. That's my point.
OK. First off, I'm 33. And I don't think you should move every time you get a new job, or if variable congestion charges are applied to your local highway. Really, I don't. Honest.
This is what I'm trying to say. You like where you live, right? You like the support network, the kids in the neighborhood, the schools, etc. Presumably at some point you decided, "Yes, this is where I'm going to live." You did some kind of cost-benefit calculus, and maybe you still do the same sort of thing every once in a while as conditions change.
What I'm trying to say is: commuting costs should always be added to the costs side of that calculus. Always. That's all. And you shouldn't get outraged when your personal commuting costs increase to pay a larger share of what the commuting infrastructure actually costs to create, maintain, and expand to accommodate new growth.
Look at it this way, from a pseudo-engineering perspective. Communities, like machines, often have a weak point, where the results of pressure show up first. Where I live, in the city, commuting costs are not a big issue for my family. We live close to where we work, shop, and play, don't pay tolls, pay much less for gas than average. The weak point where we live is crime. It's kind of bad. And while I'd like to believe that it's slowly getting better, a prolonged economic downturn could make it much worse. It probably wouldn't get to the point where it would make life unliveable, but I can at least see it getting there. And if it did, I would have to leave. Which would be incredibly hard for me, becuase I love our neighborhood and our support network (and our low commuting costs). But if you gotta go, you gotta go.
In the suburbs and exurbs, the weak point is transportation costs. Those neighborhoods and communities were built predicated on the notion that the residents would always be able to afford the gas needed to drive around them, and that the roads would always carry the number of cars needed to get those poeple around. It's possible that the strain on those assumptions are now beginning to show. Could you be forgiven for not recognizing ten years ago that this would happen? Maybe, maybe not. Could you be forgiven now, if you're just now making a deicision on wher to live? I don't think so. Will a more expensive commute, or more traffic, get you to give up all of the things that you love about where you live? Almost certainly not. But that commute getting more expensive or longer is a natural consequence of where you live, just as higher crime is a natural consequence of where I live. It's not some sinister scheme to make everybody's live miserable, because it doesn't affect everybody, or at least not everybody equally -- it affects people who made the choice to live in car-centered communities. It's demand for more gas and more highway lanes bumping up against a declining supply. There a million reasons why you'd want to live in a car-centered community; but those reasons come at a cost. That's what I'm trying to say.
Or you could live in Baltimore (where I live), get a three-bedroom house for $250K, and be in DC in an hour by train (which, to be frank, is how long it will take you to get into DC by car from much of NoVa or Montgomery or PG countires).
But, honestly, what does what you said have anything to do with what I just said? Yeah, many urban areas are outrageously expensive, particularly in the Northeast, and the places you can get there for less money are tiny. Part of the reason they're expensive is because all other things being equal, people want to live where transportation costs (both in terms of money and time spent) are lower. (DC has the added problem of the housing market being distorted by the presence of lots of high-paying government jobs). Lots of people don't want to live in studio apartments. I don't want to live in a studio apartment. But here's the thing: I don't believe that I have some kind of right to buy a four-bedroom house in the suburbs and have commuting costs that are no greater than those for the person who pays the same amount for a studio apartment downtown. That's all I'm saying. It seems so obvious -- it's like saying that a two-bedroom house should cost less than a four-bedroom house built right next door -- but people seem outraged by the idea that commuting costs are something they should have taken into consideration when they decided where to live. You may swear up and down that you won't live in a studio apartment where people can smell your bathroom odors, but don't expect the rest of us to subsidize your commute.
The Interstate Highway System was conceived of as a way to get from city to city quickly and easily. The germ of the idea came when, before WWII, Eisenhower was given a war-games task of getting a group of soldiers from one coast to the other and it took weeks.
But the vast majority of trips on interstates are trips within a metro region, from suburb to city or suburb to suburb. Their primary effect has been to make the modern car-centered suburb and exurb possible. This may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly wasn't Zombie Eisenhower's intention when the plans for the system were first drawn up.
I do actually think that roads are a perfectly legitimate thing for governments to spend money on; I just question whether they're the most legitimate thing. Why is it that, for instance, so many people think that whether someone gets the health care that determines whether they live or die (or live comfortable or live with constant, chronic illness) is something best left to the free market, but that getting from one outer-ring suburb to another in twenty minutes instead of forty is a pressing reason to spend billions of dollars on asphalt? I'd argue that most people see daily annoyances as things that must be fixed and are willing to ignore real necessities that are needed by other people, or that they don't need right now.
Yeah, I know, none of those are available* and/or practical alternatives where you live. Did it ever occur to you that your choice to live somewhere where driving was a necessity for commuting or even everyday chores might in fact entail some cost on your part?
Particularly in 21st century America, just about everyone -- particularly anyone with a job -- has at least some degree of choice about where they live. It's true that in many ways the suburbs and exurbs are a more pleasant choice -- safer, better schools, bigger houses, cheaper land, etc. But the continual build-out of new suburbs and exurbs come at costs, particulary when it comes to the infrastructure needed to get people into and out of and around those suburbs and exurbs. And just as the people who moved to suburbia long ago began to question why they should pay for the problems of the inner cities they left behind, those of us who chose to live in those cities, taking advantage of pre-existing, bought-and-paid-for transportation and transit infrastructure, are starting to question why we ought to pay for your eight-lane suburb-to-suburb beltway highways.
I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
*Actually, public transportation might be more accessible to you than you think. How many people who bitch about toll lanes have ever seriously looked into what sort of express buses and other non-driving options their region provides? I'm not saying you haven't, but I'll bet a lot of people never even think of it.
You might not have noticed, but America is a pretty big country....
True, but a significant portion of intra-US trips take place within the northeast, the most densely populated part of the country. Washington-Boston is 450 miles; New York-Chicago is 800 miles. There's also a lot of intra-West Coast travel -- LA-San Francisco (400 miles), LA-Phoenix (375), San Francisco-Seattle (800 miles).
One of my pet peeves is that many Americans, when told about how Europeans are much more likely to travel by train, reflexively point out how big America is. It's true, but when Europeans travel from, say, Madrid to Warsaw, they fly. It's the sub-1000-mile trips on which trains can be competitive with both air and car travel if they're upgraded to high-speed standards -- something that can be done far more cheaply and easily than building a maglev. And with trains being far less polluting per passenger than either cars or planes, and air travel being an increasingly unpleasant experience, it's high time to invest in upgrading rail corridors.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's onetime ambassador to the UN, was questioned once about the fact that residents of Puerto Rico don't get to vote for U.S. President of have voting representation in Congress, despite being citizens of the US. She said that PR residents also didn't have to pay federal income taxes, which she considered to be a fair trade.
So Republicans think that vote is worth your tax burden, essentially. Maybe we should all agree to stop voting if we didn't have to pay taxes any more?
Actually, if you read the article, it says that some of these exclusive deals cable companies signed with apt. complexes actually forbade tenant from getting another provider by getting a sattelite dish.
Whatever bit of code in Leapord determines if the computer can handle Leopard can be trivially updated to exclude sub-867 MHz Macs. The developer preview doesn't precisely indicate the functionality of the final shipping software -- that's why it's a "preview", you see.
Presumably Apple is looking at the results of all that developer previewing and has decided that Leopard performs poorly enough on sub-867 MHz Macs that users will be pissed and thus blame Apple for making their hardware slow or hard to use with the update. Or their dastardly number cruchers determined that there was more money to be made, take your pic.
Slashdot Mirror
Bryan was supposed to be the premier orator of his era -- his "Cross of Gold" speech brought the house down at the Democratic convention in 1896. But that recording is just a snoozefest -- admittedly, it's about banking, which is important but boring (which is no doubt one of the reasons we're in trouble today), but the rhythm is just stately and bland and blah. Maybe the experience of being in a studio rather than in front of a live, reacting crowd was so foreign that it didn't occur to him that he should be using the same oratorical techniques, and instead was just reading prepared remarks.
The headline is misleading. The MBA students aren't learning how to fight open source as an abstract concept; they're learning what to do when your business produces a piece of proprietary software that competes with an open source product.
I'm all for open source and use a lot of open source apps, but I don't believe that such a dilemma is always most profitably answered with "embrace open source yourself."
Seriously. This is one of the most convoluted setences I've ever seen. I know that Slashdot "editors" aren't really editors in the generally accepted sense of the term, but -- really? Did you look at that sentence and think, "Hey, that's something that should go on the front page and that people will read and easily understand!"
(Full disclosure: I am an editor, without quotation marks.)
then why not fund the SpaceX guys, who at least have had some modicum of success thus far and are well on the way to building a reliable and quality launch vehicle
Wait, is this the same SpaceX that has flopped on every one of their attempted launches?
Grah, I wasn't signed in! A real user hearts disagree mail, I swear!
All you need for this is an electrical outlet at home.
This to me is one of the biggest obstacles to our plug-in future. Those of you who live in the 'burbs where everybody has their own two-car garage may be shocked to hear this, but millions of us live in urban areas where we park our cars on the street, can't be gauranteed to find a spot in front of our houses, and wouldn't be able to run an extension cord across the sidewalk even if we could.
I've been told that this is actually a deliberate aspect of the U.S.'s generally tax-suspicious culture. In essence, you are supposed to know just how much you pay in taxes on purchases, so that you get worked up about it and resist increases and push for decreases. If the tax were invisible, it would be less ofa political issue.
On the one hand, if you phrase this as "Flickr can determine what runs on Flickr's Web site's", yeah, it's not shocking. But the truth is there is no online version of what in the real world would be thought of as public space. Which is fine, I guess, except that for the past 15 years we've been sold on the Internet as a place that allows for the free exchange of ideas and meeting of minds across cultures and so on and so on. Plus the R&D behind it and much of the initial infrastructure was built with public money.
It's not a problem restricted to the Internet. In the US, anyway, more and more of what had been public space is, in the 20th and 21st century built environment, private. A modern mall may serve the same social and economic function as a quaint 19th-century downtown, but in that downtown you could stage a protest and in a mall you can't. Increasingly, your only choices in daily life are to be inside somebody's house or inside a store.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that Pixelon was an actual, out-and-out con job. They never intended to deliver the product they advertised (which would have been impossible with the current technology anyway). In some ways that makes more sense than most of the sites on this list, which were elaborate exercizes in mutual self-delusion.
I'm often the person who's in charge of dealing with irritating, faceless corporations over the phone in our family, but quite a few of our accounts with said corporations are in my wife's name, and sometimes they refuse to deal with me because I'm obviously not her, even though I have access to all the information that she would (usually nothing more complicated than our account number and maybe her SS #). I wonder sometimes what would happen if I called claiming to be her, and talked in a ludicrous Monty Python-style falsetto -- or, better, if I just talked in my regular voice and got really offended if they gave me grief about it.
I also met a woman named "Joshua" once. I wonder if she gets hassled by people who don't believe she is who she is.
Oh yes, a war for oil. And how great has that worked out? Considering that oil is at record highs, I don't think that it was a "war for oil" because had it been a "war for oil" we would have more oil.
Hey, they didn't say it was a competently planned war for oil.
The Japanese Diet is the legislature, equivalent to Congress. The Japanese Cabinet is called the, um, Cabinet.
You know, IT people are generally all kinds of smug how much smarter they are than everybody else, but 20 percent of them are apparently still backing candidates who dropped out of the race several weeks ago.
Actually, it's the other way around. Opus is singluar, opera is plural.
Then you build new roads, double decker style if needed.
Most traffic planners will tell you that adding more road capacity doesn't cut down on traffic in the long term. It just attracts more people to the regions served by the new higher capacity roads, and eventually you're right back where you started. And honestly, most people don't like living with huge double-decker highways passing through their neighborhoods. The people who drive on roads aren't the only ones who get a say on whether or where they get built; the people who have to live next to them do as well.
Solving congestion is a non-issue: the fact that people continue to drive means the cost to them of driving is still less than the cost of not going there at all.
True enough as far as it goes. The problem arises when people expect the congested roads be de-congested at no charge to them, the driver.
Build more roads to accomodate them or ignore the problem. Pricing doesn't fix things, it just increases the annoyance to the drivers even further.
Or it, you know, pays for the new roads that you're saying should be built. Or do you think those shoot forth self-living out of the ground?
The truth is that this sort of variable pricing scheme will probably only be put into place on new roads, and it will fund those new roads.
>I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door >taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
>Because people have to get to work, and their wanting other options doesn't cause them to magically spring into existence.
True. Just as it's true that wanting gas to be cheap and roads to be free doesn't make cause them to magically be such. That's my point.
OK. First off, I'm 33. And I don't think you should move every time you get a new job, or if variable congestion charges are applied to your local highway. Really, I don't. Honest.
This is what I'm trying to say. You like where you live, right? You like the support network, the kids in the neighborhood, the schools, etc. Presumably at some point you decided, "Yes, this is where I'm going to live." You did some kind of cost-benefit calculus, and maybe you still do the same sort of thing every once in a while as conditions change.
What I'm trying to say is: commuting costs should always be added to the costs side of that calculus. Always. That's all. And you shouldn't get outraged when your personal commuting costs increase to pay a larger share of what the commuting infrastructure actually costs to create, maintain, and expand to accommodate new growth.
Look at it this way, from a pseudo-engineering perspective. Communities, like machines, often have a weak point, where the results of pressure show up first. Where I live, in the city, commuting costs are not a big issue for my family. We live close to where we work, shop, and play, don't pay tolls, pay much less for gas than average. The weak point where we live is crime. It's kind of bad. And while I'd like to believe that it's slowly getting better, a prolonged economic downturn could make it much worse. It probably wouldn't get to the point where it would make life unliveable, but I can at least see it getting there. And if it did, I would have to leave. Which would be incredibly hard for me, becuase I love our neighborhood and our support network (and our low commuting costs). But if you gotta go, you gotta go.
In the suburbs and exurbs, the weak point is transportation costs. Those neighborhoods and communities were built predicated on the notion that the residents would always be able to afford the gas needed to drive around them, and that the roads would always carry the number of cars needed to get those poeple around. It's possible that the strain on those assumptions are now beginning to show. Could you be forgiven for not recognizing ten years ago that this would happen? Maybe, maybe not. Could you be forgiven now, if you're just now making a deicision on wher to live? I don't think so. Will a more expensive commute, or more traffic, get you to give up all of the things that you love about where you live? Almost certainly not. But that commute getting more expensive or longer is a natural consequence of where you live, just as higher crime is a natural consequence of where I live. It's not some sinister scheme to make everybody's live miserable, because it doesn't affect everybody, or at least not everybody equally -- it affects people who made the choice to live in car-centered communities. It's demand for more gas and more highway lanes bumping up against a declining supply. There a million reasons why you'd want to live in a car-centered community; but those reasons come at a cost. That's what I'm trying to say.
Or you could live in Baltimore (where I live), get a three-bedroom house for $250K, and be in DC in an hour by train (which, to be frank, is how long it will take you to get into DC by car from much of NoVa or Montgomery or PG countires).
But, honestly, what does what you said have anything to do with what I just said? Yeah, many urban areas are outrageously expensive, particularly in the Northeast, and the places you can get there for less money are tiny. Part of the reason they're expensive is because all other things being equal, people want to live where transportation costs (both in terms of money and time spent) are lower. (DC has the added problem of the housing market being distorted by the presence of lots of high-paying government jobs). Lots of people don't want to live in studio apartments. I don't want to live in a studio apartment. But here's the thing: I don't believe that I have some kind of right to buy a four-bedroom house in the suburbs and have commuting costs that are no greater than those for the person who pays the same amount for a studio apartment downtown. That's all I'm saying. It seems so obvious -- it's like saying that a two-bedroom house should cost less than a four-bedroom house built right next door -- but people seem outraged by the idea that commuting costs are something they should have taken into consideration when they decided where to live. You may swear up and down that you won't live in a studio apartment where people can smell your bathroom odors, but don't expect the rest of us to subsidize your commute.
The Interstate Highway System was conceived of as a way to get from city to city quickly and easily. The germ of the idea came when, before WWII, Eisenhower was given a war-games task of getting a group of soldiers from one coast to the other and it took weeks.
But the vast majority of trips on interstates are trips within a metro region, from suburb to city or suburb to suburb. Their primary effect has been to make the modern car-centered suburb and exurb possible. This may or may not be a good thing, but it certainly wasn't Zombie Eisenhower's intention when the plans for the system were first drawn up.
I do actually think that roads are a perfectly legitimate thing for governments to spend money on; I just question whether they're the most legitimate thing. Why is it that, for instance, so many people think that whether someone gets the health care that determines whether they live or die (or live comfortable or live with constant, chronic illness) is something best left to the free market, but that getting from one outer-ring suburb to another in twenty minutes instead of forty is a pressing reason to spend billions of dollars on asphalt? I'd argue that most people see daily annoyances as things that must be fixed and are willing to ignore real necessities that are needed by other people, or that they don't need right now.
Except people can't choose not to use the roads.
*COUGH COUGH buses trains cycling walking COUGH*
Yeah, I know, none of those are available* and/or practical alternatives where you live. Did it ever occur to you that your choice to live somewhere where driving was a necessity for commuting or even everyday chores might in fact entail some cost on your part?
Particularly in 21st century America, just about everyone -- particularly anyone with a job -- has at least some degree of choice about where they live. It's true that in many ways the suburbs and exurbs are a more pleasant choice -- safer, better schools, bigger houses, cheaper land, etc. But the continual build-out of new suburbs and exurbs come at costs, particulary when it comes to the infrastructure needed to get people into and out of and around those suburbs and exurbs. And just as the people who moved to suburbia long ago began to question why they should pay for the problems of the inner cities they left behind, those of us who chose to live in those cities, taking advantage of pre-existing, bought-and-paid-for transportation and transit infrastructure, are starting to question why we ought to pay for your eight-lane suburb-to-suburb beltway highways.
I'm not saying everyone should make the same choices I do. I'm just wondering why people seem to believe they have a God-given right to cheap gas and door-to-door taxpayer-subsidized traffic-free one-person-per-car commuting.
*Actually, public transportation might be more accessible to you than you think. How many people who bitch about toll lanes have ever seriously looked into what sort of express buses and other non-driving options their region provides? I'm not saying you haven't, but I'll bet a lot of people never even think of it.
Out of curiosity, what's your basis for calling roads "the most legitimate thing government can pay for"?
Try to give an answer that doesn't boil down to "I personally don't use many of the other things that government pays for."
You might not have noticed, but America is a pretty big country....
True, but a significant portion of intra-US trips take place within the northeast, the most densely populated part of the country. Washington-Boston is 450 miles; New York-Chicago is 800 miles. There's also a lot of intra-West Coast travel -- LA-San Francisco (400 miles), LA-Phoenix (375), San Francisco-Seattle (800 miles).
One of my pet peeves is that many Americans, when told about how Europeans are much more likely to travel by train, reflexively point out how big America is. It's true, but when Europeans travel from, say, Madrid to Warsaw, they fly. It's the sub-1000-mile trips on which trains can be competitive with both air and car travel if they're upgraded to high-speed standards -- something that can be done far more cheaply and easily than building a maglev. And with trains being far less polluting per passenger than either cars or planes, and air travel being an increasingly unpleasant experience, it's high time to invest in upgrading rail corridors.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan's onetime ambassador to the UN, was questioned once about the fact that residents of Puerto Rico don't get to vote for U.S. President of have voting representation in Congress, despite being citizens of the US. She said that PR residents also didn't have to pay federal income taxes, which she considered to be a fair trade.
So Republicans think that vote is worth your tax burden, essentially. Maybe we should all agree to stop voting if we didn't have to pay taxes any more?
Actually, if you read the article, it says that some of these exclusive deals cable companies signed with apt. complexes actually forbade tenant from getting another provider by getting a sattelite dish.
Whatever bit of code in Leapord determines if the computer can handle Leopard can be trivially updated to exclude sub-867 MHz Macs. The developer preview doesn't precisely indicate the functionality of the final shipping software -- that's why it's a "preview", you see.
Presumably Apple is looking at the results of all that developer previewing and has decided that Leopard performs poorly enough on sub-867 MHz Macs that users will be pissed and thus blame Apple for making their hardware slow or hard to use with the update. Or their dastardly number cruchers determined that there was more money to be made, take your pic.