On my Mac machines I have quite a lot of ram, 2gb on one 4gb on the other. I occasionally monitor memory usage as I'm a developer and that's just something I do. I've never seen my swap, even after days and days of editing video and so forth go over 2GB. Most of the time, however, it's around 256mb.
Furthermore, at one point several years ago I was pointed to a revealing explanation of why, even with quite a lot of ram, swap is useful. Something about optimization through intelligently hibernating shared but inactive libraries preinitialized into virtual memory as well as using it as a cache to reorganize active memory? Anyway I wish I could cite the article.
Point is, if I couldn't have a dynamic paging file I'd cap it at 2GB max 256mb minimum.
where X is whatever you want. Top results will be sun java docs which are complete and have links to parent and descendent classes, implemented interfaces, etc.
The problem here is that google sends you to outdated documentation, sometimes as far as 7 years old javadocs from old versions. It's better to just go to java.sun.com and get a link to the live docs and stick it in your bookmarks, especially since there is more info there that's not just javadocs.
Also ##java on freenode IRC is an excellent resource if you don't come in acting like an entitled moron...
Oh and as a bonus for Java-ites, if you're on a Mac, grab Xcode (free) and its documentation browser will download and maintain an updated copy of the javadoc with decent searching functions. Furthermore any decent IDE (Eclipse IDEA NetBeans) should have their own way of quickly linking you to javadoc.
And I assure you, it also wasn't the designers' idea to have players start out at level 2, then advance through levels 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 13, and 1, in that order.
The Firefly MMO was in private beta but they couldn't seem to figure out why just as you were about to ding level 3 the game would exit abruptly and show you a confusing array of cutscenes from the rest of the content...
Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
MAGIC
Seriously, solid state electronics, even after years and years of being around them as an early 80's baby, still just seems like magic to me. I can't wait to get rid of every little motor whine in my computing world, even if it's another 10 years, that will be a happy day to have a powerful computer without any moving parts.
If you read the documentation that is available after agreeing to the discolsure agreement, you'll see that it is all marked as unfinished. They have a reasonably strong argument in their favor of preventing the widespread publishing of stupid wrong information based on incomplete and potentially incorrect documentation while they finish it up.
The NDA will surely be lifted when the documentation is finished.
Beige box Macintosh computers are what nearly killed Apple in the 90's. Why would you expect anything less than nuking from orbit from Jobs on this matter?
You might find that last bit of anecdotal offering out of place in this discussion since most of the participants don't actually have any work to produce.;)
All I can think of is the cave at the beginning of the first level in Donkey Kong Country for SNES. When you enter the cave, DK sees that his banana pile is all gone and is sad.
Clearly this is a viral commercial for the next DK Country! DK Country Wii: Panama Disease Adventure!
See, I have the Apple TV, and I've loved it since day one. I double love it since the "2.0" major firmware updates and feature additions. But the wife, you see, has had netflix for years. And since they added the streaming movie feature, she watches maybe 4 or 5 flix that way a month. Thing is though, the selection pool is by and large old B movies nobody would've watched on purpose if they weren't really in the mood for something cheesy.
So basically, the Apple TV and the Roku are rather complementary in my opinion. The Roku is the source for cheap totally random movie watching and the Apple TV gives me my higher end rentable new releases, my podcasts and music directly from my media housing computer, and lots of other nice aspects. So yeah, I don't see this really being any kind of direct competition unless you have absolutely no taste or preference of your movies, then I guess the cheapest crap in the barrel would please you as much as the top of it.
Thanks to this breakthrough the sequel to the 80's movie "The Manhattan Project" will be 90% shorter with 300% more John-Lithgow-Scrunched-Up-Nose per cm2
I never knew there had to be any specific percentage of "African-Americans" participating in any activity.
And yes, "African-American" is a downright stupid appellation. Can you call a black child born in Denmark "African-American"? I demand they stop calling us "whites" and refer to us directly by lineage, I insist that to avoid racist tension, the article refer to me and my "kind" as Danish-German-French-Dutch-American!
This isn't a violation of law, it's a violation of code. There is a significant difference. Consider it analogous to the violation of traffic movement code vs. an actual criminal offense like theft.
FCC/FTC violations, just like traffic violations can escalate to criminal offenses in certain rare situations but it's rather unlikely this will happen here.
And still, on your example, the damage percentage is not based on a fact of the punished party, it's based on the value of what they stole or used without permission. Take the recently tested constitutionality of RIAA's awards in their various cases, that's not based on what the defendant gained from the situation or anything about them other than the number of offenses, it's based on the maximum amount of attachable value within the constraints of jury determined morals and the constitution as upheld by that jury's decision.
Fining a company the profits they made selling TV's they can legally sell would result is vastly different fee structures for differently sized entities, potentially allowing franchised corporations the ability to avoid fair punishment... no those types of fines should generally be a same range or calculation regardless of the individual business's success in the matter.
And in this case, I think it would be seen as a single violation per location in question, much like an OSHA investigation.
But what if that $6 million fine was the result of an extra $60 million profit from selling cheap TVs for people to put in their bathroom/camper/boat/etc?
These fines should be based on some percentage of the profits from the activity in question. And that percentage should be over 100%. It isn't going to be, there is no chance that the 3-4 analog sets remaining in these stores makes that much revenue let alone profit.
In fact, in most of these stores I have personally seen the warning signs that are required, so they are not skirting the issue. Most likely, a few individual stores failed to properly update their signage according to the corporate directions and that's resulting in the fine. The most likely result will either be store manager firings or at best, a massive training effort to prevent this from happening in the future.
Furthermore the constitutionality of intentionally harming the profitability of a business as a penalty is suspect. Fines generally must be the same for anyone who violates the rules, and not based on percentages of facts about them.
One thing I do is I say "Just a moment". Then I leave the phone off the hook for about ten minutes. This wastes their time quite effectively. I even had one of them get quite angry at me, which was good.
Due to unfortunate requirement for food, water, and shelter, I had to be a telemarketer for several years. Truly this was the most painful job I've ever had, and I've worked at Taco Bell. Your strategy of leaving the phone off the hook for a while is not remotely unique. But I assure you, many telemarketers appreciate it. Seriously.
What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales. What we did was maintain our right to continue working a complete day. If you didn't maintain a certain quota, they would simply send you home. And the wages? Well there was this fancy thing called a "differential." What that meant was, if you made X hours in the pay period, your wage would be increased by Y dollars. So to make the meager 7.25/hr. I was told I'd be making, I'd have to work at least 60 of the 80 hours possible in a two week period. Obviously not a difficult thing to do in a normal job but..
Imagine for a moment that you made just enough money to get by, you had maybe $30 a week after all of your bills were paid to buy groceries for you, your wife, and your daughter. You worked as a cold calling sales person, constantly searching but never finding another, more reasonable job. IN the meantime, you went to work each day, starting at 7 am to call the east coast, and sell things that nobody in their right mind would ever want to buy. If you did not make at least two sales per hour on average, you would be sent home before lunch time. Now imagine that, despite working very hard, your two weeks came up and you missed the mark. Suddenly your paycheck wasn't only less because of fewer hours, no, your rate was 30% less, putting you around 50% of what you would normally have made. What the hell would you do?
Not all callcenters are this bad, not all phone jobs as painful, but many are and I hope some of you can have a better understanding of the tenacity of phone sales people.
Oh and another aspect more relevant to your "method" is that the calls must be made constantly. Non-stop, save a few very short breaks throughout the day for the restroom. That means that the moment you hang up, the phone immediately calls another person. In fact, when enough agents are on the floor, the phone system PRE-DIALS so that when you click off one call, you're IMMEDIATELY on another. This goes on all day long. You try that sometime, and tell me how you feel after several months of it. So trust me when I say, that 10 minute break your telemarketer risked enduring was a godsend to them.
For example, you can get the same signal driving across the country? The service from satellite is different. You're right - The service is different. But, the competition isn't over who'll provide your satellite radio service. It's over who'll entertain your ears. I can drive across the country while listening to continuous content from my mp3 player. Of course the service is different. But, if I'm listening to mp3s, I'm not listening to satellite. The same goes for the, again different, AM/FM service.
XM is not the biggest competitor for Sirius (nor vice versa). CD/MP3 players and AM/FM broadcasts are - and HD radio is marketing aggressively to try to maintain that market segment. The driver for lowering satellite radio prices and improving content is persuading people that it's worthwhile to adopt satellite radio and pay the subscription fees. A market war between two satellite providers would only drive prices up and deteriorate service quality.
This is very true. Personally I can attest that my current indulgence in MP3 players and newer car stereos was driven solely by the dearth of actual entertainment on the public airwaves. They directly lost in competition to me paying for music, and hardware, to listen to what I know I like in the car. It's nice to hear new things from time to time but frankly, I don't need a radio for that. With services like Rhapsody, live.fm, and even the suggestions on iTMS I have found more incredible new music that fits my personal tastes than I ever did in 10 years of listening to the radio.
So from my POV, I think this merger is a great idea. It's the only way this technology can grow safely while it becomes something attractive. Right now I have absolutely no draw to it other than the tech is minorly interesting. If they aren't stupid enough to hike prices, and are smart enough to take some format risks, they might draw me in.
It's true this isn't vista. Also, it's older. But I guess I forgot to make my point. This thing I described only works with a specific method of recovery. If I recovered via the boot partition I never get a chance to cancel the process. Basically, it asks for a cd to get started with the bloatware install and I'm forcefully crashing the little startup app that does it, then removing it from startup.
I suppose that was a vital point I forgot to make:)
I'm not one to completely avoid jumping on a bashwagon once in a while but this is just silly. Nearly every new LED and consumer LASER based device is using this technology but you singled out Blu-ray... why?
I wonder what kind of incendiary headline will be on fark and digg when slashdot is next sued for patent or copyright infringement. Obviously Microsoft has prior art on "Website that claims to be web standards compatible but is broken in most browser most of the time." Better be careful of that one;)
I have a Sony Vaio subnotebook with all kinds of crap installed on top of WinXP Pro. But here's the deal. You can make a CD version of their restore kit, though. And when you restore that way, they let you choose to ignore the little "restore partition" that wastes a lot of space so that's awesome.
But the best part is, the "crapware" doesn't go on until the OS is all restored. It's clean until you finally boot back up and it starts asking for CD's again. At least in the version I have, you can cancel the process there. You'll have to get your own drivers from the download site, which isn't hard, they have a nice streamline downloader that produces a report and everything.
So at least with my Vaio T-340P I had no troubles working around the (realistically minor compared to some machines) bloatware.
If he were rational (which is not to say that irrational precludes being brilliant), I don't think he'd really care that much about iPhone hacking, unless people started to look at it as something safe and normal and that Apple should support those hacks.
This is precisely the concern. Have you ever worked in support? I worked technical support for several years. The worst part of the whole ordeal was dealing with all of the unpredictability on the other end. This is the only reason we had no official Linux support. It was the reason we only needed 3 people to handle all Macintosh calls. The more predictable the workspace on the other end of the line, the better a technician can deal with a situation.
This also applies to software development. This is what makes game consoles attractive, you have a reliable set of expectations to target. You know, when you have a device as sophisticated in software as the iPhone (it's got an entire OS, not just some execution firmware like non-smartphones) it is infinitely helpful to be able to predict what will or will not be going on there.
So, while I'm sure Apple has no realistic expectation to avoid firmware hacking, I do believe they try to keep the expected cases in place as best as they can without getting ridiculous so the quality of software can remain high. So they can provide what they claim to provide in the device.
While a more savvy person may realize their phone is running out of battery twice as fast because of some software they put on there themselves, the average consumer is not going to understand any of this reasoning. Apple doesn't want to deal with phone calls and complaints that root from things the user did to themselves unwittingly. The easiest way to avoid that is making it hard for users to do it to themselves. Make it an effort to get hacked firmware and unapproved software and you achieve this goal. You don't have to prevent it 100%, and therefore, there is no logical argument that Apple is being hypocritical about their DRM stance. This isn't DRM, this is the virtual version of that welded bolt on the back of a service-only machine.
Any geek willing to break the seal is willing to forego support when they inevitably break the machine.
I guess as a consumer I don't see something as "invented" until I can grab it myself relatively affordably and easily. But that's a good start. I'm pretty serious about this "wish." I'd love to be able to have a conversation on the train without anyone hearing it and more importantly without the other end needing to hear the train. Also part of this would clearly need to be something for me hearing the other end, just as undetectable.
My grandfather introduced me to programming. He worked with similar set of languages though not VB. He went with Delphi around that time period. It was awesome, he has tons of computers (mostly apple) and also HAM radio equipment. Very tech savvy, for 1992. That was 16 years ago. He doesn't know crap about modern technology, and barely recognizes the internet at this point.
There's nothing wrong with my gramps but the point is, just because someone has technical exposure during a time doesn't mean they maintain awareness and the important detailed knowledge necessary to fathom points about issues like net neutrality. No less criticism should be given to this person's influence than is given to any other random corrupt politician.
Slashdot Mirror
On my Mac machines I have quite a lot of ram, 2gb on one 4gb on the other. I occasionally monitor memory usage as I'm a developer and that's just something I do. I've never seen my swap, even after days and days of editing video and so forth go over 2GB. Most of the time, however, it's around 256mb.
Furthermore, at one point several years ago I was pointed to a revealing explanation of why, even with quite a lot of ram, swap is useful. Something about optimization through intelligently hibernating shared but inactive libraries preinitialized into virtual memory as well as using it as a cache to reorganize active memory? Anyway I wish I could cite the article.
Point is, if I couldn't have a dynamic paging file I'd cap it at 2GB max 256mb minimum.
just google:
java X class
where X is whatever you want. Top results will be sun java docs which are complete and have links to parent and descendent classes, implemented interfaces, etc.
The problem here is that google sends you to outdated documentation, sometimes as far as 7 years old javadocs from old versions. It's better to just go to java.sun.com and get a link to the live docs and stick it in your bookmarks, especially since there is more info there that's not just javadocs.
Also ##java on freenode IRC is an excellent resource if you don't come in acting like an entitled moron...
Oh and as a bonus for Java-ites, if you're on a Mac, grab Xcode (free) and its documentation browser will download and maintain an updated copy of the javadoc with decent searching functions. Furthermore any decent IDE (Eclipse IDEA NetBeans) should have their own way of quickly linking you to javadoc.
And I assure you, it also wasn't the designers' idea to have players start out at level 2, then advance through levels 3, 6, 7, 8, 4, 5, 9, 13, and 1, in that order.
Hold on... you lost me there...
The Firefly MMO was in private beta but they couldn't seem to figure out why just as you were about to ding level 3 the game would exit abruptly and show you a confusing array of cutscenes from the rest of the content...
Also, the industry needs to effectively communicate why consumers or enterprise users should pay more for less storage," says Joseph Unsworth, an analyst at Gartner Inc.
MAGIC
Seriously, solid state electronics, even after years and years of being around them as an early 80's baby, still just seems like magic to me. I can't wait to get rid of every little motor whine in my computing world, even if it's another 10 years, that will be a happy day to have a powerful computer without any moving parts.
There's a web developer that's on the ball...
To be fair, it is kind of hard for a monkey to balance on a ball...
If you read the documentation that is available after agreeing to the discolsure agreement, you'll see that it is all marked as unfinished. They have a reasonably strong argument in their favor of preventing the widespread publishing of stupid wrong information based on incomplete and potentially incorrect documentation while they finish it up.
The NDA will surely be lifted when the documentation is finished.
Beige box Macintosh computers are what nearly killed Apple in the 90's. Why would you expect anything less than nuking from orbit from Jobs on this matter?
Afterall, it's the only way to be sure.
This dream brought you by LIGHTSPEED BRIEFS!
You might find that last bit of anecdotal offering out of place in this discussion since most of the participants don't actually have any work to produce. ;)
All I can think of is the cave at the beginning of the first level in Donkey Kong Country for SNES. When you enter the cave, DK sees that his banana pile is all gone and is sad.
Clearly this is a viral commercial for the next DK Country! DK Country Wii: Panama Disease Adventure!
See, I have the Apple TV, and I've loved it since day one. I double love it since the "2.0" major firmware updates and feature additions. But the wife, you see, has had netflix for years. And since they added the streaming movie feature, she watches maybe 4 or 5 flix that way a month. Thing is though, the selection pool is by and large old B movies nobody would've watched on purpose if they weren't really in the mood for something cheesy.
So basically, the Apple TV and the Roku are rather complementary in my opinion. The Roku is the source for cheap totally random movie watching and the Apple TV gives me my higher end rentable new releases, my podcasts and music directly from my media housing computer, and lots of other nice aspects. So yeah, I don't see this really being any kind of direct competition unless you have absolutely no taste or preference of your movies, then I guess the cheapest crap in the barrel would please you as much as the top of it.
Thanks to this breakthrough the sequel to the 80's movie "The Manhattan Project" will be 90% shorter with 300% more John-Lithgow-Scrunched-Up-Nose per cm2
Who cares?
I never knew there had to be any specific percentage of "African-Americans" participating in any activity.
And yes, "African-American" is a downright stupid appellation. Can you call a black child born in Denmark "African-American"? I demand they stop calling us "whites" and refer to us directly by lineage, I insist that to avoid racist tension, the article refer to me and my "kind" as Danish-German-French-Dutch-American!
This isn't a violation of law, it's a violation of code. There is a significant difference. Consider it analogous to the violation of traffic movement code vs. an actual criminal offense like theft.
FCC/FTC violations, just like traffic violations can escalate to criminal offenses in certain rare situations but it's rather unlikely this will happen here.
And still, on your example, the damage percentage is not based on a fact of the punished party, it's based on the value of what they stole or used without permission. Take the recently tested constitutionality of RIAA's awards in their various cases, that's not based on what the defendant gained from the situation or anything about them other than the number of offenses, it's based on the maximum amount of attachable value within the constraints of jury determined morals and the constitution as upheld by that jury's decision.
Fining a company the profits they made selling TV's they can legally sell would result is vastly different fee structures for differently sized entities, potentially allowing franchised corporations the ability to avoid fair punishment... no those types of fines should generally be a same range or calculation regardless of the individual business's success in the matter.
And in this case, I think it would be seen as a single violation per location in question, much like an OSHA investigation.
These fines should be based on some percentage of the profits from the activity in question. And that percentage should be over 100%. It isn't going to be, there is no chance that the 3-4 analog sets remaining in these stores makes that much revenue let alone profit.
In fact, in most of these stores I have personally seen the warning signs that are required, so they are not skirting the issue. Most likely, a few individual stores failed to properly update their signage according to the corporate directions and that's resulting in the fine. The most likely result will either be store manager firings or at best, a massive training effort to prevent this from happening in the future.
Furthermore the constitutionality of intentionally harming the profitability of a business as a penalty is suspect. Fines generally must be the same for anyone who violates the rules, and not based on percentages of facts about them.
Due to unfortunate requirement for food, water, and shelter, I had to be a telemarketer for several years. Truly this was the most painful job I've ever had, and I've worked at Taco Bell. Your strategy of leaving the phone off the hook for a while is not remotely unique. But I assure you, many telemarketers appreciate it. Seriously.
What you may fail to recognize is that telemarketing is a slave driving business. The people on the phone, we didn't make squat off the sales. What we did was maintain our right to continue working a complete day. If you didn't maintain a certain quota, they would simply send you home. And the wages? Well there was this fancy thing called a "differential." What that meant was, if you made X hours in the pay period, your wage would be increased by Y dollars. So to make the meager 7.25/hr. I was told I'd be making, I'd have to work at least 60 of the 80 hours possible in a two week period. Obviously not a difficult thing to do in a normal job but..
Imagine for a moment that you made just enough money to get by, you had maybe $30 a week after all of your bills were paid to buy groceries for you, your wife, and your daughter. You worked as a cold calling sales person, constantly searching but never finding another, more reasonable job. IN the meantime, you went to work each day, starting at 7 am to call the east coast, and sell things that nobody in their right mind would ever want to buy. If you did not make at least two sales per hour on average, you would be sent home before lunch time. Now imagine that, despite working very hard, your two weeks came up and you missed the mark. Suddenly your paycheck wasn't only less because of fewer hours, no, your rate was 30% less, putting you around 50% of what you would normally have made. What the hell would you do?
Not all callcenters are this bad, not all phone jobs as painful, but many are and I hope some of you can have a better understanding of the tenacity of phone sales people.
Oh and another aspect more relevant to your "method" is that the calls must be made constantly. Non-stop, save a few very short breaks throughout the day for the restroom. That means that the moment you hang up, the phone immediately calls another person. In fact, when enough agents are on the floor, the phone system PRE-DIALS so that when you click off one call, you're IMMEDIATELY on another. This goes on all day long. You try that sometime, and tell me how you feel after several months of it. So trust me when I say, that 10 minute break your telemarketer risked enduring was a godsend to them.
XM is not the biggest competitor for Sirius (nor vice versa). CD/MP3 players and AM/FM broadcasts are - and HD radio is marketing aggressively to try to maintain that market segment. The driver for lowering satellite radio prices and improving content is persuading people that it's worthwhile to adopt satellite radio and pay the subscription fees. A market war between two satellite providers would only drive prices up and deteriorate service quality.
This is very true. Personally I can attest that my current indulgence in MP3 players and newer car stereos was driven solely by the dearth of actual entertainment on the public airwaves. They directly lost in competition to me paying for music, and hardware, to listen to what I know I like in the car. It's nice to hear new things from time to time but frankly, I don't need a radio for that. With services like Rhapsody, live.fm, and even the suggestions on iTMS I have found more incredible new music that fits my personal tastes than I ever did in 10 years of listening to the radio.
So from my POV, I think this merger is a great idea. It's the only way this technology can grow safely while it becomes something attractive. Right now I have absolutely no draw to it other than the tech is minorly interesting. If they aren't stupid enough to hike prices, and are smart enough to take some format risks, they might draw me in.
It's true this isn't vista. Also, it's older. But I guess I forgot to make my point. This thing I described only works with a specific method of recovery. If I recovered via the boot partition I never get a chance to cancel the process. Basically, it asks for a cd to get started with the bloatware install and I'm forcefully crashing the little startup app that does it, then removing it from startup.
:)
I suppose that was a vital point I forgot to make
I'm not one to completely avoid jumping on a bashwagon once in a while but this is just silly. Nearly every new LED and consumer LASER based device is using this technology but you singled out Blu-ray ... why?
;)
I wonder what kind of incendiary headline will be on fark and digg when slashdot is next sued for patent or copyright infringement. Obviously Microsoft has prior art on "Website that claims to be web standards compatible but is broken in most browser most of the time." Better be careful of that one
Awaiting troll mod in 3...2...1...
I have a Sony Vaio subnotebook with all kinds of crap installed on top of WinXP Pro. But here's the deal. You can make a CD version of their restore kit, though. And when you restore that way, they let you choose to ignore the little "restore partition" that wastes a lot of space so that's awesome.
But the best part is, the "crapware" doesn't go on until the OS is all restored. It's clean until you finally boot back up and it starts asking for CD's again. At least in the version I have, you can cancel the process there. You'll have to get your own drivers from the download site, which isn't hard, they have a nice streamline downloader that produces a report and everything.
So at least with my Vaio T-340P I had no troubles working around the (realistically minor compared to some machines) bloatware.
This is precisely the concern. Have you ever worked in support? I worked technical support for several years. The worst part of the whole ordeal was dealing with all of the unpredictability on the other end. This is the only reason we had no official Linux support. It was the reason we only needed 3 people to handle all Macintosh calls. The more predictable the workspace on the other end of the line, the better a technician can deal with a situation.
This also applies to software development. This is what makes game consoles attractive, you have a reliable set of expectations to target. You know, when you have a device as sophisticated in software as the iPhone (it's got an entire OS, not just some execution firmware like non-smartphones) it is infinitely helpful to be able to predict what will or will not be going on there.
So, while I'm sure Apple has no realistic expectation to avoid firmware hacking, I do believe they try to keep the expected cases in place as best as they can without getting ridiculous so the quality of software can remain high. So they can provide what they claim to provide in the device.
While a more savvy person may realize their phone is running out of battery twice as fast because of some software they put on there themselves, the average consumer is not going to understand any of this reasoning. Apple doesn't want to deal with phone calls and complaints that root from things the user did to themselves unwittingly. The easiest way to avoid that is making it hard for users to do it to themselves. Make it an effort to get hacked firmware and unapproved software and you achieve this goal. You don't have to prevent it 100%, and therefore, there is no logical argument that Apple is being hypocritical about their DRM stance. This isn't DRM, this is the virtual version of that welded bolt on the back of a service-only machine.
Any geek willing to break the seal is willing to forego support when they inevitably break the machine.
I guess as a consumer I don't see something as "invented" until I can grab it myself relatively affordably and easily. But that's a good start. I'm pretty serious about this "wish." I'd love to be able to have a conversation on the train without anyone hearing it and more importantly without the other end needing to hear the train. Also part of this would clearly need to be something for me hearing the other end, just as undetectable.
My grandfather introduced me to programming. He worked with similar set of languages though not VB. He went with Delphi around that time period. It was awesome, he has tons of computers (mostly apple) and also HAM radio equipment. Very tech savvy, for 1992. That was 16 years ago. He doesn't know crap about modern technology, and barely recognizes the internet at this point.
There's nothing wrong with my gramps but the point is, just because someone has technical exposure during a time doesn't mean they maintain awareness and the important detailed knowledge necessary to fathom points about issues like net neutrality. No less criticism should be given to this person's influence than is given to any other random corrupt politician.
I think the fact that someone modded this informative is more amusing than the original joke.