Heck, quite a few people don't even openly discuss their medical conditions with their doctor when the doctor asks them directly about it. Anybody who thinks that most people will willingly own up to something that makes them look bad even when it could help them out a bunch is seriously deluded.
Paying $75000 in federal taxes equates to making somewhere around $300000-500000 in gross income (depending on how you earned it) not $1000000. Somebody making a million dollars would pay something around a quarter million or more in income taxes. Also, don't forget the 15% of a worker's paycheck that has to be contributed in Social Security (although there is a cap that's something like $100000 on wages that can be taxed for Social Security.) Medicare is several percent as well and there is no cap for that IIRC. There are also state income taxes in all but a few states, so tack on something between 5 and 10 percent. Some cities charge income taxes as well, and those run in the low single digit percentages. And don't forget sales taxes, energy taxes, "sin" taxes, property taxes, tolls, excise taxes, phone taxes, airfare taxes, etc. ad nauseum. All in all, the governments take the majority of many peoples' income.
I have similar experiences. My ISP (Mediacom Cable) is an AT&T reseller and I haven't seen them do any sort of traffic shaping or port blocking. The only two ISPs I have used that do stuff like that are the university's Internet access and BellSouth. The university blocks all P2P activity and SEVERELY rate-limits downloads of files larger than about 50 MB from non-LAN servers over the wireless. BellSouth is much more pernicious and while it does not block P2P, it blocks outgoing SMTP and HTTP, and rsync. I was visiting relatives who had BellSouth as the ISP and I was completely unable to do *anything* useful with my computer. Trying to use rsync brought down the connection until I rebooted the modem:sigh:
The problem with the SSN being public is that it's the only unique for identifying you. Nothing else is singularly unique and does not change- name, birthday, address, etc. Of course one could use several of the non-unique identifiers to create what would most likely (but not be guaranteed to be) a unique profile. But why do that if the government is handing out numbers that are guaranteed to be unique and each number is linked to the same person for their entire life? It's all a matter of ease.
Not using an SSN wouldn't stop people from getting fraudulent lines of credit in your name. Sure the instant-decision lines of credit make it easier, but banning that would only mean that it would be a little longer before the thief gets their money. Like you said, most of your personal information is already out there. If somebody has your information, they should be able to fool the verification as well. The extra hurdles may discourage the most casual of thieves, but somebody determined would still defraud.
The burden of proof methods are currently set up so that everybody shares the risks of not keeping information secret. The general population has their information and their incentive to keep it secret is not ruining their credit record and being made to pay a portion of the fraudulent debt (such as the $50 for credit card fraud). The lenders also have the information and it's in their interests to ensure that the ID is valid as a defaulted loan yields a large loss for the lender- that $50 that the actual person paid doesn't cover the thousands that the fraudster rang up. Putting all of the burden of information safety on the lender would result in them taking all of the risk and likely higher rates of fraud as people wouldn't care about ID theft if "some big nameless, faceless corporation has to eat the bill." You may say, "Hey, that's not bad at all!" but you need to realize that the lenders simply adjust their returns to compensate for the increased risk and losses. So everybody ends up paying more in higher interest rates and fees, not just the person who had their ID stolen.
However, there should be a little amendment to the current rules. If you are a third party with sensitive information such as SSNs, such as a university, employer, or the government, and there's a breach of security, you should be liable for all fraudulent debt on the SSNs that you leaked because it was YOUR mistake, not the person's, and not the lenders. There should naturally be a time limit on this liability, such as a year. This just seems like common sense in sharing the risk of securing personally-identifiable information.
The motherboards in some of the smaller laptops probably are roughly that size; however they are irregularly shaped to fit the notebook's contours and can be sized to fit in all needed parts. This board is rectangular and has to deal with the constraints of its shape and size, so VIA had a tougher time packaging everything in there. Plus, many notebooks use heatpipe coolers that have the sink well away from the CPU and sometimes even the motherboard, whereas this unit did not. Not having that big old aluminum heatsink on there would probably have made VIA's job easier.
I'm waiting to see one of those guys in mBGA-479 format for a Core 2 Duo ULV CPU and with an Intel 945GMS chipset or a BGA version of AMD's S1g1 socket for the upcoming Bobcat CPU. That would be much more powerful than VIA's CPUs and probably not consume too much more power.
Can somebody register at a bank? Because I think that nothing says "Congratulations" like a wad of $50s and a sack of $20s and want to know if I can get away with it.
I agree- you should have your own of something that's used that heavily and might need to be used at the same time. Especially when one can get a decent new desktop for well under a grand and a decent laptop for something around a grand- it's not like they cost $30,000. Even if they did, most married people still have separate cars and those *do* cost that much money.
In my case, I don't think this will be an issue with my girlfriend as she likes using Windows XP on her laptop and I can't stand either a laptop or XP, while she doesn't like using Gentoo on my desktop as she doesn't like my keyboard (it's an IBM Model M for crying out loud!) and isn't a big fan of Linux. Probably the most I'll ever combine things is put in a file server someday and have the big stuff in/home or My Documents on it, but that's a much different case as you use different computers to access the files and the files can remain separate to the point of unreadable by the other party if needed.
The only problem with urinals is that they require a decent amount of water delivery rate in order for the vacuum-flush unit to work correctly. Some houses in areas with low water pressure and a small delivery line have a problem with that. But it's nothing that a shallow-well jet pump and a little pressure tank can't fix.
I have a very simple solution to that one: shut the lid. That way, both people have to open something, and it's no more work to lift up lid + seat instead of just the lid. Nobody gets to claim "dominance," plus I think that the closed lid makes the bathroom look a little neater as well. Particularly if you have a low-flush (should be called "no-flush" as it's more accurate!) toilet and need to allow for some soaking time between the first five flushes and the next five flushes to successfully get the skid marks out of the bowl. The lid-down method has worked very well for me and everybody else I know that's had both parties agree to do it.
Installing the RPMs using rpmbuild and compile flags/options set requires that they be compiled before install. That would work, but doing that would pretty much defeat the advantages of using a binary distribution in the first place- speed of installation of packages. Alternatively, an option could be to have a few different options be able to be passed to the RPM installer and it would then pick one of a few compiled binaries to actually install, ignoring the rest. That would preserve the speed but lead to less choice than a real compile-your-own system and much bigger binaries than a one-size-fits-all method.
RPM dependency hell is generally caused by the manual installation of third-party RPMs. That used to be rather common a while ago when the official RPM repositories had something like 2000 packages while Debian and the DEB distributions had 20000 or so packages and largely skirted around this as you'd be much more likely to find what you needed in the repos rather than having to get it yourself. Now that the RPM repos have about as many packages as the DEB ones, the dependency issues are largely gone and it's very similar to use an RPM vs. a DEB distribution.
The "real" broadband you speak of would not even be able to be fully utilized by most people in the U.S. and I suspect elsewhere as well. The simple reason is that most computers and routing equipment cannot deal with even close to the 250 Mbps+ bandwidth you speak of. All of the cable and DSL modems I have seen have a 100 Mbps LAN port, which bottlenecks the bandwidth that the computers can use. Most people have a router or switch to distribute the connection (as they have more than one computer), usually a wireless router. Only two wireless routers I know of, the D-Link 650 and the most expensive Netgear draft-N model, have the capability to rout GbE from the WAN to the LAN. D-Link's DGL-4300 has GbE LAN ports but the WAN is 100 Mbps, no beans there. And those are the only routers to have any GbE on them at all; the rest are 10/100 Ethernet and would again bottleneck the throughput if somebody were able to get a currently non-existent modem with a GbE port on it. Oh, and most people use the wireless on their routers and not the wired ports, so you're looking at about 20-25 Mbps for 802.11g and roughly 100 Mbps throughput on cooperating draft 802.11n parts. Neither come close to being able to carry 250 Mbps of bandwidth. Oh, and 250 Mbps works out to 31.25 MB/sec, which is about as much as most laptop (the most commonly-sold type of computer in the U.S.) HDDs can write. Oh, and quite a few laptops don't even have GbE LAN ports anyway, although most all desktops do.
I understand what you're getting at, but it's a little optimistic and unrealistic at the moment.
They couldn't get it to take off commercially as there were a lot of legacy x86 DOS and Windows applications out there. There would also be a lot of older devices that would lack drivers for the new-arch OS. Running x86 apps would require slow and computationally expensive emulation for a PPC-powered computer. Apple managed to switch arches when going from MC680x0 CPUs to the PowerPC units, but that was helped by the fact that the PPC CPUs were much faster than the m68k units they replaced. The PPC chips at the time that the CHRP was around were much closer in speed to the Pentiums, K5s, K6s, and Pentium IIs that they were to replace.
Switching architectures is a pretty non-trivial thing to do even when the new one is backwards-compatible with the old one, such as x86_64 is with x86. The drivers still need to be updated and some old applications still won't be 100% compatible unless recompiled or otherwise built against the new system. Proprietary binary OSes like Windows running proprietary binary applications make this pretty tough to do, so that is why the open-source OSes running open-source applications are really the only setups that are able to change architectures in a reasonable amount of time and with a moderate cost.
Of course a fair scheduler will cause a single process to yield its CPU time- that's the point. It tries to spread the system resources out among as many similarly-niced processes as possible. Now if you want your game to run better than something else, why not renice the game -1 or renice the other stuff +1? I do this all the time to be able to run extremely compute-intensive processes in the background on my system and it makes them pretty much invisible to me (as long as they don't eat up all the RAM or do a lot of HDD I/O, of course.)
Actually, it's the PATA devices that do. SATA has been built into Intel chipsets since the 865/875, NVIDIA chipsets since the NF3, and ATi since the 200M. So it's simply putting down a few physical connectors. NVIDIA and ATi/AMD still support a PATA channel on their chispets, but Intel chipsets newer than the 975X don't. That means boards with the 965 and 30-series have to buy another IC and put it on the board to get the functionality. Ironically, parallel, serial, PS/2, and the other much older legacy stuff uses so little bandwidth that it goes off the LPC bus and you just need a connector like SATA. So you'll be more likely see a board that has parallel and serial but no PATA than one that has PATA because it's less expensive.
PCI slots are far from dead, although my year-and-a-half-old NF4 SLi 939 motherboard that cost me $110 has 5 PCIe slots (2 x16, 3 x1) and only two PCI slots. Boards don't have four or five slots like they used to back in the late '90s through about 2005, but most have at least a couple if they're not a uATX or ITX board. Even the little guys generally have one PCI slot. And don't forget FireWire or USB 2.0- you can attach disks via FireWire and disks, tuners, NICs, and such over USB, as long as you don't have a 5+-year-old machine with USB 1.1 ports.
By the way, only recently did anything PCIe x1 and any SATA optical drives less than a hundred clams start to show up. GPUs had been PCIe x16 for a while, but very little besides larger RAID cards had been PCIe except for GPUs. Even now most NICs and tuners are PCI. Now five years from now PCI might be rare, but it's like parallel and serial ports and laptop floppy drives today. Many computers lack them now, but there's not been much made in years that use them, let alone use *only* them. By the time 2012 gets here, I'm sure that the nice fanless machine will probably have been replaced with something that supports SATA and PCIe (probably 2.x of not 3.0.)
Never, EVER, underestimate the stupidity of juries. They did award millions to a lady who spilled hot coffee in her own lap and the guy who set the cruise control in his Winnebago and then proceeded to take a nap. However, a judge may or may not be smart and a Supreme Court justice with even mediocre knowledge of the Constitution would just laugh at a law like that and strike it down.
You have exactly what they're aiming at- control, pure and simple. The Internet is a real thorn in the side of a politician who wants to have a carefully manicured image of who they are be all that's out there. That's not really hard if the on;y way people get news is by fixed-point media outlets like TV, radio, and print as somebody can throw around a few bucks and shut them up. They are a very known quantity. Anything "outside" of that would be word-of-mouth and very small and slow-moving. The Internet suddenly enabled word-of-mouth to reach millions of people in a hurry rather than a few dozen people over weeks, so it can (and does) really hurt that image. If they can control the Internet, then the only major outlet for people "not in the business" or without a ton of cash or influence is dead.
The "think of the children" part is just their way of selling it. Remember the old adage: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sure, there's a lot of seedy stuff out there, and somebody can pretty easily find it if they want to. But it's the parent's job to enforce that, certainly not the government's. My parents certainly told me what is acceptable and not. Yes, I could very easily do something if I wanted to and they'd never know (simply clearing the history would have been sufficient), but I didn't get into porn and that stuff because my parents took the time to explain why not and that they trusted me not to when I was online. Sure, some kids will still seek that stuff out, but you can't prevent everything. Hell, murder is illegal and there are very stiff penalties, but still people do it fully knowing the consequences.
The university I went to adopted just that kind of policy after the Blaster worm took the entire network offline. You had to register your MAC with the IT services and then go run (or say you ran) the clean-up CD and then they'd let you back on the network if they didn't see any crap coming from your MAC address on the network. Unknown MACs were blocked from accessing the network and you would also be blocked from accessing the network if your machine became zombified and started putting out traffic that indicated it. You'd have to call the IT guys after you ran the clean-up CD and then they'd let you back on if the network traffic from the machine looked fine.
I don't see how this would be any harder for any other ISP to handle, considering that the university has something well over 65k machines on the network, roughly 90k actual IIRC. That's probably more than quite a few smaller ISPs have. We haven't had much trouble with internal DOSes since, so apparently the tactic works.
Infrastructure isn't something that is a very competitive market as it's very hard and expensive to run an entire network or system. The up-front costs are so huge that the economies of scale pretty much prevent more than one player from being the market in most areas. The government didn't help things in turning the de facto monopoly into an actual one and stifling somebody that might want to enter a market that could support two independent networks. This happened in my town- the local telco prevented the university from selling access along its fiber loop on the grounds that another provider would provide "unfair competition." The judge agreed because of the monopoly agreement the telco had with the city.
Probably the best way to deal with it is similar to other infrastructure, like roads. In smaller areas, the government would own it and contract out for construction and possibly maintenance with third parties. Anybody would be free to sell services over the network, with a uniform (either per user, per data quantity, or a flat fee) access fee charged to the providers. Private companies would not be barred from building completely independent networks if they want to and "the last mile" would be open for grabs by anybody. The private networks would be solely set up by, paid for, and administered by that company, and they'd have get all of the easements themselves, without using eminent domain or any other methods that require the government to act on their behalf and do things the company could not do themselves. In return, the private networks could do whatever they wished with it with regards to access by others as it is solely theirs.
Probably more likely is what happened with phones- a new transmission medium that gets around the high infrastructure costs and the "last mile" restrictions of traditional setups will become dominant and render the hard-wired infrastructure monopoly issues pretty much moot. Cell phones radically changed phone service in the U.S. because it was possible to have several competitors in an area. WAN wireless Internet via something like WiMax could do the same for Internet and cable. That's probably a few years down the road, though, but that's what's going to alleviate monopoly issues, at least in some areas.
The only reason that you would have to recompile the kernel to add major drivers would be if the default kernel didn't have the driver you needed compiled as a module. But that generally only happens with pretty uncommon hardware as most everything is compiled as a module in Linux kernels anymore. You might have to change your modprobe scripts to load the new hardware's modules at bootup, but that's about it. And if you have a new driver that's not in the kernel tree (like ATi/NVIDIA and VMware drivers), the worst you have to do is compile it against the kernel, not recompile the whole kernel.
There are other reasons one has to recompile a kernel, but drivers aren't generally one of them, unless you count moving from a single-core box to an SMP one and needing to enable SMP. But even that's rare as most distributors have only an SMP kernel and no UP kernel now.
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, quite a few people don't even openly discuss their medical conditions with their doctor when the doctor asks them directly about it. Anybody who thinks that most people will willingly own up to something that makes them look bad even when it could help them out a bunch is seriously deluded.
The summary mentions Web TV choking the internet...didn't that die off a while ago when computers became ubiquitous?
Why do you think the Second Amendment is not very popular with many politicians? I'll give you a hint: "think of the children" isn't the real reason.
Paying $75000 in federal taxes equates to making somewhere around $300000-500000 in gross income (depending on how you earned it) not $1000000. Somebody making a million dollars would pay something around a quarter million or more in income taxes. Also, don't forget the 15% of a worker's paycheck that has to be contributed in Social Security (although there is a cap that's something like $100000 on wages that can be taxed for Social Security.) Medicare is several percent as well and there is no cap for that IIRC. There are also state income taxes in all but a few states, so tack on something between 5 and 10 percent. Some cities charge income taxes as well, and those run in the low single digit percentages. And don't forget sales taxes, energy taxes, "sin" taxes, property taxes, tolls, excise taxes, phone taxes, airfare taxes, etc. ad nauseum. All in all, the governments take the majority of many peoples' income.
I have similar experiences. My ISP (Mediacom Cable) is an AT&T reseller and I haven't seen them do any sort of traffic shaping or port blocking. The only two ISPs I have used that do stuff like that are the university's Internet access and BellSouth. The university blocks all P2P activity and SEVERELY rate-limits downloads of files larger than about 50 MB from non-LAN servers over the wireless. BellSouth is much more pernicious and while it does not block P2P, it blocks outgoing SMTP and HTTP, and rsync. I was visiting relatives who had BellSouth as the ISP and I was completely unable to do *anything* useful with my computer. Trying to use rsync brought down the connection until I rebooted the modem :sigh:
The problem with the SSN being public is that it's the only unique for identifying you. Nothing else is singularly unique and does not change- name, birthday, address, etc. Of course one could use several of the non-unique identifiers to create what would most likely (but not be guaranteed to be) a unique profile. But why do that if the government is handing out numbers that are guaranteed to be unique and each number is linked to the same person for their entire life? It's all a matter of ease.
Not using an SSN wouldn't stop people from getting fraudulent lines of credit in your name. Sure the instant-decision lines of credit make it easier, but banning that would only mean that it would be a little longer before the thief gets their money. Like you said, most of your personal information is already out there. If somebody has your information, they should be able to fool the verification as well. The extra hurdles may discourage the most casual of thieves, but somebody determined would still defraud.
The burden of proof methods are currently set up so that everybody shares the risks of not keeping information secret. The general population has their information and their incentive to keep it secret is not ruining their credit record and being made to pay a portion of the fraudulent debt (such as the $50 for credit card fraud). The lenders also have the information and it's in their interests to ensure that the ID is valid as a defaulted loan yields a large loss for the lender- that $50 that the actual person paid doesn't cover the thousands that the fraudster rang up. Putting all of the burden of information safety on the lender would result in them taking all of the risk and likely higher rates of fraud as people wouldn't care about ID theft if "some big nameless, faceless corporation has to eat the bill." You may say, "Hey, that's not bad at all!" but you need to realize that the lenders simply adjust their returns to compensate for the increased risk and losses. So everybody ends up paying more in higher interest rates and fees, not just the person who had their ID stolen.
However, there should be a little amendment to the current rules. If you are a third party with sensitive information such as SSNs, such as a university, employer, or the government, and there's a breach of security, you should be liable for all fraudulent debt on the SSNs that you leaked because it was YOUR mistake, not the person's, and not the lenders. There should naturally be a time limit on this liability, such as a year. This just seems like common sense in sharing the risk of securing personally-identifiable information.
The motherboards in some of the smaller laptops probably are roughly that size; however they are irregularly shaped to fit the notebook's contours and can be sized to fit in all needed parts. This board is rectangular and has to deal with the constraints of its shape and size, so VIA had a tougher time packaging everything in there. Plus, many notebooks use heatpipe coolers that have the sink well away from the CPU and sometimes even the motherboard, whereas this unit did not. Not having that big old aluminum heatsink on there would probably have made VIA's job easier.
I'm waiting to see one of those guys in mBGA-479 format for a Core 2 Duo ULV CPU and with an Intel 945GMS chipset or a BGA version of AMD's S1g1 socket for the upcoming Bobcat CPU. That would be much more powerful than VIA's CPUs and probably not consume too much more power.
Can somebody register at a bank? Because I think that nothing says "Congratulations" like a wad of $50s and a sack of $20s and want to know if I can get away with it.
I agree- you should have your own of something that's used that heavily and might need to be used at the same time. Especially when one can get a decent new desktop for well under a grand and a decent laptop for something around a grand- it's not like they cost $30,000. Even if they did, most married people still have separate cars and those *do* cost that much money.
/home or My Documents on it, but that's a much different case as you use different computers to access the files and the files can remain separate to the point of unreadable by the other party if needed.
In my case, I don't think this will be an issue with my girlfriend as she likes using Windows XP on her laptop and I can't stand either a laptop or XP, while she doesn't like using Gentoo on my desktop as she doesn't like my keyboard (it's an IBM Model M for crying out loud!) and isn't a big fan of Linux. Probably the most I'll ever combine things is put in a file server someday and have the big stuff in
-10000 painful (!!!!)
The only problem with urinals is that they require a decent amount of water delivery rate in order for the vacuum-flush unit to work correctly. Some houses in areas with low water pressure and a small delivery line have a problem with that. But it's nothing that a shallow-well jet pump and a little pressure tank can't fix.
I have a very simple solution to that one: shut the lid. That way, both people have to open something, and it's no more work to lift up lid + seat instead of just the lid. Nobody gets to claim "dominance," plus I think that the closed lid makes the bathroom look a little neater as well. Particularly if you have a low-flush (should be called "no-flush" as it's more accurate!) toilet and need to allow for some soaking time between the first five flushes and the next five flushes to successfully get the skid marks out of the bowl. The lid-down method has worked very well for me and everybody else I know that's had both parties agree to do it.
There are self-contained application packages like the DMGs in OS X for Linux, it's called Klik.
Installing the RPMs using rpmbuild and compile flags/options set requires that they be compiled before install. That would work, but doing that would pretty much defeat the advantages of using a binary distribution in the first place- speed of installation of packages. Alternatively, an option could be to have a few different options be able to be passed to the RPM installer and it would then pick one of a few compiled binaries to actually install, ignoring the rest. That would preserve the speed but lead to less choice than a real compile-your-own system and much bigger binaries than a one-size-fits-all method.
RPM dependency hell is generally caused by the manual installation of third-party RPMs. That used to be rather common a while ago when the official RPM repositories had something like 2000 packages while Debian and the DEB distributions had 20000 or so packages and largely skirted around this as you'd be much more likely to find what you needed in the repos rather than having to get it yourself. Now that the RPM repos have about as many packages as the DEB ones, the dependency issues are largely gone and it's very similar to use an RPM vs. a DEB distribution.
The "real" broadband you speak of would not even be able to be fully utilized by most people in the U.S. and I suspect elsewhere as well. The simple reason is that most computers and routing equipment cannot deal with even close to the 250 Mbps+ bandwidth you speak of. All of the cable and DSL modems I have seen have a 100 Mbps LAN port, which bottlenecks the bandwidth that the computers can use. Most people have a router or switch to distribute the connection (as they have more than one computer), usually a wireless router. Only two wireless routers I know of, the D-Link 650 and the most expensive Netgear draft-N model, have the capability to rout GbE from the WAN to the LAN. D-Link's DGL-4300 has GbE LAN ports but the WAN is 100 Mbps, no beans there. And those are the only routers to have any GbE on them at all; the rest are 10/100 Ethernet and would again bottleneck the throughput if somebody were able to get a currently non-existent modem with a GbE port on it. Oh, and most people use the wireless on their routers and not the wired ports, so you're looking at about 20-25 Mbps for 802.11g and roughly 100 Mbps throughput on cooperating draft 802.11n parts. Neither come close to being able to carry 250 Mbps of bandwidth. Oh, and 250 Mbps works out to 31.25 MB/sec, which is about as much as most laptop (the most commonly-sold type of computer in the U.S.) HDDs can write. Oh, and quite a few laptops don't even have GbE LAN ports anyway, although most all desktops do.
I understand what you're getting at, but it's a little optimistic and unrealistic at the moment.
They couldn't get it to take off commercially as there were a lot of legacy x86 DOS and Windows applications out there. There would also be a lot of older devices that would lack drivers for the new-arch OS. Running x86 apps would require slow and computationally expensive emulation for a PPC-powered computer. Apple managed to switch arches when going from MC680x0 CPUs to the PowerPC units, but that was helped by the fact that the PPC CPUs were much faster than the m68k units they replaced. The PPC chips at the time that the CHRP was around were much closer in speed to the Pentiums, K5s, K6s, and Pentium IIs that they were to replace.
Switching architectures is a pretty non-trivial thing to do even when the new one is backwards-compatible with the old one, such as x86_64 is with x86. The drivers still need to be updated and some old applications still won't be 100% compatible unless recompiled or otherwise built against the new system. Proprietary binary OSes like Windows running proprietary binary applications make this pretty tough to do, so that is why the open-source OSes running open-source applications are really the only setups that are able to change architectures in a reasonable amount of time and with a moderate cost.
Of course a fair scheduler will cause a single process to yield its CPU time- that's the point. It tries to spread the system resources out among as many similarly-niced processes as possible. Now if you want your game to run better than something else, why not renice the game -1 or renice the other stuff +1? I do this all the time to be able to run extremely compute-intensive processes in the background on my system and it makes them pretty much invisible to me (as long as they don't eat up all the RAM or do a lot of HDD I/O, of course.)
Actually, it's the PATA devices that do. SATA has been built into Intel chipsets since the 865/875, NVIDIA chipsets since the NF3, and ATi since the 200M. So it's simply putting down a few physical connectors. NVIDIA and ATi/AMD still support a PATA channel on their chispets, but Intel chipsets newer than the 975X don't. That means boards with the 965 and 30-series have to buy another IC and put it on the board to get the functionality. Ironically, parallel, serial, PS/2, and the other much older legacy stuff uses so little bandwidth that it goes off the LPC bus and you just need a connector like SATA. So you'll be more likely see a board that has parallel and serial but no PATA than one that has PATA because it's less expensive.
PCI slots are far from dead, although my year-and-a-half-old NF4 SLi 939 motherboard that cost me $110 has 5 PCIe slots (2 x16, 3 x1) and only two PCI slots. Boards don't have four or five slots like they used to back in the late '90s through about 2005, but most have at least a couple if they're not a uATX or ITX board. Even the little guys generally have one PCI slot. And don't forget FireWire or USB 2.0- you can attach disks via FireWire and disks, tuners, NICs, and such over USB, as long as you don't have a 5+-year-old machine with USB 1.1 ports.
By the way, only recently did anything PCIe x1 and any SATA optical drives less than a hundred clams start to show up. GPUs had been PCIe x16 for a while, but very little besides larger RAID cards had been PCIe except for GPUs. Even now most NICs and tuners are PCI. Now five years from now PCI might be rare, but it's like parallel and serial ports and laptop floppy drives today. Many computers lack them now, but there's not been much made in years that use them, let alone use *only* them. By the time 2012 gets here, I'm sure that the nice fanless machine will probably have been replaced with something that supports SATA and PCIe (probably 2.x of not 3.0.)
Never, EVER, underestimate the stupidity of juries. They did award millions to a lady who spilled hot coffee in her own lap and the guy who set the cruise control in his Winnebago and then proceeded to take a nap. However, a judge may or may not be smart and a Supreme Court justice with even mediocre knowledge of the Constitution would just laugh at a law like that and strike it down.
You have exactly what they're aiming at- control, pure and simple. The Internet is a real thorn in the side of a politician who wants to have a carefully manicured image of who they are be all that's out there. That's not really hard if the on;y way people get news is by fixed-point media outlets like TV, radio, and print as somebody can throw around a few bucks and shut them up. They are a very known quantity. Anything "outside" of that would be word-of-mouth and very small and slow-moving. The Internet suddenly enabled word-of-mouth to reach millions of people in a hurry rather than a few dozen people over weeks, so it can (and does) really hurt that image. If they can control the Internet, then the only major outlet for people "not in the business" or without a ton of cash or influence is dead.
The "think of the children" part is just their way of selling it. Remember the old adage: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Sure, there's a lot of seedy stuff out there, and somebody can pretty easily find it if they want to. But it's the parent's job to enforce that, certainly not the government's. My parents certainly told me what is acceptable and not. Yes, I could very easily do something if I wanted to and they'd never know (simply clearing the history would have been sufficient), but I didn't get into porn and that stuff because my parents took the time to explain why not and that they trusted me not to when I was online. Sure, some kids will still seek that stuff out, but you can't prevent everything. Hell, murder is illegal and there are very stiff penalties, but still people do it fully knowing the consequences.
The university I went to adopted just that kind of policy after the Blaster worm took the entire network offline. You had to register your MAC with the IT services and then go run (or say you ran) the clean-up CD and then they'd let you back on the network if they didn't see any crap coming from your MAC address on the network. Unknown MACs were blocked from accessing the network and you would also be blocked from accessing the network if your machine became zombified and started putting out traffic that indicated it. You'd have to call the IT guys after you ran the clean-up CD and then they'd let you back on if the network traffic from the machine looked fine.
I don't see how this would be any harder for any other ISP to handle, considering that the university has something well over 65k machines on the network, roughly 90k actual IIRC. That's probably more than quite a few smaller ISPs have. We haven't had much trouble with internal DOSes since, so apparently the tactic works.
Infrastructure isn't something that is a very competitive market as it's very hard and expensive to run an entire network or system. The up-front costs are so huge that the economies of scale pretty much prevent more than one player from being the market in most areas. The government didn't help things in turning the de facto monopoly into an actual one and stifling somebody that might want to enter a market that could support two independent networks. This happened in my town- the local telco prevented the university from selling access along its fiber loop on the grounds that another provider would provide "unfair competition." The judge agreed because of the monopoly agreement the telco had with the city.
Probably the best way to deal with it is similar to other infrastructure, like roads. In smaller areas, the government would own it and contract out for construction and possibly maintenance with third parties. Anybody would be free to sell services over the network, with a uniform (either per user, per data quantity, or a flat fee) access fee charged to the providers. Private companies would not be barred from building completely independent networks if they want to and "the last mile" would be open for grabs by anybody. The private networks would be solely set up by, paid for, and administered by that company, and they'd have get all of the easements themselves, without using eminent domain or any other methods that require the government to act on their behalf and do things the company could not do themselves. In return, the private networks could do whatever they wished with it with regards to access by others as it is solely theirs.
Probably more likely is what happened with phones- a new transmission medium that gets around the high infrastructure costs and the "last mile" restrictions of traditional setups will become dominant and render the hard-wired infrastructure monopoly issues pretty much moot. Cell phones radically changed phone service in the U.S. because it was possible to have several competitors in an area. WAN wireless Internet via something like WiMax could do the same for Internet and cable. That's probably a few years down the road, though, but that's what's going to alleviate monopoly issues, at least in some areas.
The only reason that you would have to recompile the kernel to add major drivers would be if the default kernel didn't have the driver you needed compiled as a module. But that generally only happens with pretty uncommon hardware as most everything is compiled as a module in Linux kernels anymore. You might have to change your modprobe scripts to load the new hardware's modules at bootup, but that's about it. And if you have a new driver that's not in the kernel tree (like ATi/NVIDIA and VMware drivers), the worst you have to do is compile it against the kernel, not recompile the whole kernel.
There are other reasons one has to recompile a kernel, but drivers aren't generally one of them, unless you count moving from a single-core box to an SMP one and needing to enable SMP. But even that's rare as most distributors have only an SMP kernel and no UP kernel now.