"I find myself in need of money to fight against the evil imperialist OLPC organization. I hold valuable patents on which they are infringing. For the sum $10,000 I will sell you half my company to pay my lawyers. Once the suit is settled the company will be worth 20 million dollars of which you shall own half. Please enclose check made payable to me."
If the FCC drops the hammer on cable I guess adult, language, subject matter not porn, will have to move to the web. I wonder if they are going to attack channels like TCM, FMC and IFC because they don't edit for TV? I just wonder how long after the move to the web they try regulating it? That's going to be a tough one because out of the gate most homes have access but it's not dedictated access so that 70% rule is going to become meaningless.
I'd be curious if the under sides of the sliding sliding stones were concave? Why I mention it is I still remember a certain chinese restaurant's tea cups had a habit of sliding across the table. The table tops were resin coated and the concave cups tended to capture moisture under them so when the tea heated the moisture under the cup the expansion provided enough lift to break the friction and allow them to slide. They would move randomly in different directions then stop for a few minutes then slide again. Since the area is hot a unique combination of heated rocks with slippery mud and wind could in combination cause the effect. I remember that some rocks slid and others didn't as well as the direction changes.
First it doesn't allow for multiple migrations from the same Asia population and it doesn't take into account the possibility of extinct migrations. It's possible several migrations failed and all immigrants died whether from starvation or even being wiped out by future migrations like in New Zealand.
"Biased"???? If Chernobyl was no big deal then move there and start a home vegitable garden. Not that many died outright? What about the numbers that have severe health problems related to the accident. Coal plants are damaging but when there's a disaster they don't create dead zones around them. We've been promised solutions for storing waste and fuel rods for fifty years. The only solution is still digging a hole and burying it. There are lots of safer solutions so why the obsession with nuclear? It's easy? Guess why the power companies like it. It's centralized so they control the cost and most of the clean up costs wind up being picked up by the government. Translated you and I pay for it. Check out Hanford and the status of the clean up there. They've spent an insane amount of money and they have made little progress. A new plant is opening right now that produces solar cells at 10% of the cost of standard solar cells. If we put them on every house and business in the country we can start closing coal plants and not even bother with nuclear reactors. Add in wind and other options and we can avoid dirty options entirely. We can cut demand in half through conservation alone. Don't kid yourself nuclear is dirty. Just because there's no smoke doesn't make it clean. X ray machines produce no obviously polutants yet they can still kill you with enough exposure. I get sick of hearing how clean and cheap nuclear is. Guess what there's no end in sight for the expense of existing reactors let alone building a 1,000 or more which is what we'd need. Every single reactor will continue to cost us money for the foreseeable future. When you replace windmills or solar cells you either recycle them or the waste is similar to electronic waste every home produces. With a nuclear plant you have to store and manage the fuel rods and all contaminated material. Storing fuel rods long term is like "Clean Coal" technology. Sounds good on paper but no one is doing it yet. Remember 50 years of rods laying around and still none in long term storage. Clean Coal as it's called is just a concept there's not a single commercial "clean coal" plant in operation. If you watch TV you'd swear they all are from the commercials they don't bother to tell you they have yet to build a single plant but they could if they wanted to so lets just burn more coal. Nuclear is the same way. The power companies are lying to you and it doesn't take much research to find it out. Hanford is an obvious one that most people that know about nuclear have heard of but there are hundreds of other sites. No it's not a power plant but it's an example of what contaminated sites are like. Do some math and see if it takes your breath way. Take the yearly output of waste and times it by five. Now allow for growth and do the numbers for fifty years. The tonage of waste should be enough to make your knees shake. This is not a perminate solution to anything. Just picture the number after 200 years? Yes I know you'll be happily in the ground and fuck your great grandkids but that's the attitude that got us into this mess. The only solution that saves civilization is one that will be viable for the next 1,000 year. We can't aford to think in decades we need to think in terms of milleniums if we are to survive. If you really are interested in the future focus on things that guarantee we'll have a future and not a toxic waste pile for a planet.
I'm sure they feel if they can get people used to having ads then they can drop the lower price point then just make it standard on all DVDs. They'd probably phase it in but I have to believe that's the real intent is to make the technology available industry wide and slowly get rid of the option and simply make it another revenue stream. I won't watch FX Channel because of the in program ads on the screen. If they go this route with DVDs, force feeding commercials, I'll stop buying and renting, period. I barely rent as it is because there are so few films worth seeing. This is just another way to bleed a few extra cents out of each DVD. I just hope people aren't stupid enough to accept it but given the lack viewer reaction to the current onslaught of commercials I have to believe the future is even more pervasive commercials and me reading more books.
It's nothing more than a nuclear pile. Where's the invention? Inject water around mass of uranium, produces steam=power. It's a neighborhood uranium based nuke plant. The concept has been around in one form or another for decades just no one was stupid enough to build a bunch of them and scatter them across the country. It's hard enough to keep track of nuclear material as it is.
What was your first clue, the fact that the power cable coming out would have to be half the diameter of the device to power 25,000 homes? I don't care if you can fit a fusion reactor in a match box you still have to have a means of transfering the power in a practical form. That's one dense source of power 27 megawatts from a hot tub sized reactor. I'll believe a flying car first.
The whole agrument is nuts and in truth doesn't justify a response. "God made it that way" ends all arguments for them so there is no rational thought behind their position. The real fact is there's an ocean of evidence for evolution and the true age of the Earth on one side and "God did it" on the other side. Where's the debate? The only evidence presented is heavily distorted scientific evidence. Gee sedimentary layers were left over from the great flood. Why are there different layers and different forms of life in each layer? No good response. Cells are very complex highly organized and self repairing, only a genius could have planned them. Or maybe it took a few billion years of trial and error? Why is this fictional date that some one came up with hundreds of years ago so important? It's not mentioned in the Bible he deduced it by adding up ages of the men listed in Genesis, some of them living nearly a thousand years which presents it's own set of problems. There is no form of evidence that will ever change their minds so there's no debate. They can complain all they want that science won't change but that's like trying to talk some one with a winning poker hand into the fact they just lost. Science doesn't need faith they have something far better, the facts.
Wouldn't it be better to just collect the methane and burn it to displace coal/oil? Sure, you still get CO2 , but methane has the highest energy yield per CO2 yield of all the hydrocarbons, and it is orders of magnitude cleaner than Coal.
How many cows and/or sheep would I have to keep on the roof of my car to get enough methane to drive to the store?
Where have you been, you only get Flamebaited on Slashdot when you defend the US. I often boast of Russias accomplishments because the US is buried in beaurocracy. The US could have beaten the Soviet Union with a satellite, it was ready a year ahead of the Soviet Union but government wouldn't let them launch. They also were prepared to launcha a man into orbit before the Russsians but instead launched a Chimp. The US is still the only one to land a man on the Moon let alone do it repeatedly and that was with 60s era technology. They dropped the heavy lift Saturn rockets in favor of the space shuttle which was a glorified satellite maintainence platform, a primary reason for all the blacked out missions in the 80s. Also if you think the Russians never seek publicity for their accomplishments I take it you are extremely young or don't watch the news much. The Russians are quite vocal with every achievement. I believe the complaint is more about Western press but Pravda is equally slanted. I still think the Mir was an amazing achievement but a lot of Russian progress came with a heavy toll of lives. They took cheaper lower tech approaches that came with higher risk. Up until the Shuttle NASA had an amazing safety record. There's a lot to respect about what the Russians have done with fewer resources but knocking the West is cherry picking your facts. Russia has a miserable track record when it comes to Mars and they've never done anything approaching the rovers. They have managed a landing on Venus which is impressive inspite of the craft being short lived. If you look objectively both the US and Russia have similar accomplishments when you make adjustments for financial and political restrictions, Ironically the west tends to have the money but politics tends to hamper progress. As far as the largest aircraft the Russians always took the big dick approach having the biggest of everything from aircraft to largest nuclear explosion whether it was practical or not. It was a cold war propaganda thing of boasting about having the biggest. Since the end of the cold war you noticed that trend changed to more practical weapons and aircraft than simply the largest.
The point is the game company should have a reasonable expectation that what they were doing was legitimate. Withdrawing the product is an unreasonable action and grossly harms the game company when there is a serious question that they did anything wrong in the first place. Lots of covers of songs sound just like dumbed down versions of the original. The only way they might have a case is if there was a reasonable expectation of confusion and the game company was selling the cover version as a single or part of an album. There's no damages in this case since the record company owns the song and licensed it for use. Go to Las Vegas, there's a bunch of lookalikes doing covers every night of songs and they even dress like the stars to "Create" confusion with the original artist. If they advertised the game as including the Romantics song that could also be grounds since they are using the band's name to help sell games but I take it that isn't the problem. Basically the band got screwed out of money because the record company owns their songs not them. That's the issue not a game company ripping them off.
The real point that should answer the questions is who owns the copyright the creator or the community at large? That really seems the debate. As a copyright holder I've already radically changed what work will be released to the public and how it will be released due to the weakness of the current copyright system. Electronic distibution and foreign markets that ignore copyright has seriously threatened the market and the ability of creators to make a living. Yes there's still money to be made but for how much longer? I have films based on my work in stores in Malaysia shortly after their release for a $1 a copy. South East Asia is already spoiled as a market with the largest potential market China being almost exclusively pirate. If the creator doesn't benefit from his/her work then why do it in the first place? Yes we'll still create but why release it to the public? I can make money off my lesser work so I decided to not release any of my favorite work to the public because of the current system. It's like a genie in the bottle and once it's released it will be copied endlessly. I'm a writer by preference and even if I strictly limit my work to printed text even then some one will likely scan it and post it. The point I'm trying to make is if I can make a living off what I consider lesser work and I want to avoid others exploiting work that is important to me then the world at large will never benefit from the better work. You can say who cares and I agree one artist may not be important but I do know of others quietly doing the same. As free distribution of material gets worse so will the restricting of material so in the end the community suffers. Many artists were mentioned like Shakespear. He's a perfect example. Let's say his work was strictly performed live and never published in any form. He would be completely unknown today. All artists especially writers have work that they never publish. What if they as a group decide to restrict their best work? Already there's been a noticable drop in the quality of the work available. It may not be the primary cause but I will say I know for a fact that some writers are no longer releasing their best work. An artists creation is very much like a child to them and it's at times like throwing your children to the wolves. In the past it was publishers and film studios that molested writers but now the community seems to feel they own our children so it might be time to start keeping our children in a closet. There are two sides to any situation. If the community at large feels they should be able to freely exploit an artists work then they may find one day they control smoke because there might not be much out there to exploit. We need to encourage the best people not punish them. Been to a movie lately? One of my passions is film and in the past I've been known to see three films in a single day in a theater. Now I rarely go and going to Blockbuster is a depressing experience. Dozens of films were released this week for the holiday rush and yet I found myself renting several older films. I'm hesitant to sell film rights anymore due to how poorly they are treated by most film makers these days. Anyone see The Mist? They turned one of Stephen's best stories into a tedious yawn fest. If our best work is going to be stolen and butchered whats the point? I'd rather restrict my favorite work to family and friends and my safe deposit boxes.
It seems insane to end such a cost effective program but government rarely makes sense. I guess they could change their program to search for proof the Universe is 6,000 years old then do real science in a clandestined manner like it was done 800 years ago. How far we've come.
Such things usually balance themselves out. The collapse will cause a reduction in demand because fewer services will be available. A lot of net hog services have yet to turn a consistent profit. Investors will shy away from anything that hasn't a proven profit record.
I find the easiest way to get Trolled or Flamed is to post a response that doesn't fit the Party Line in the geek community. Post something pro downloading of copyrighted material and you'll almost always get a positive mod. Post something that disagrees with downloading and/or points out the negative ramifications and you'll generally get modded down, and you'll usually get some vicious attacks from other posters, ones that should get Trolled or Flamed. There are a number of sacred subjects that you need to avoid if you don't want to get a negative mod and you disagree with the masses. Personally I'd rather be modded Heretic than be Trolled for disagreeing with the majority. Trolling and Flame should be reserved strictly for the obnoxious posts not for people with a decenting opinion. Oh well another troll for the collection, sigh....
Political correctness has even ended careers of minorities. One of the most famous was Mantan Morland. He was one of the funniest comedians of his time. He was highly paid and the studios gave him star billing gladly at a time when most black actors barely got a mention. The persona was his own creation and was meant to reflect his character's personality but it was deemed a negative stereotype and it basically ended his career at it's height. Was it positive? It was never meant to be but the point is he was wildly successful and was respected for his talent. He was just a funny guy and deserved his success. If he was directly making jokes about blacks I might agree but I can't recall a single line he uttered related to blacks in general, I may be wrong I just don't recall jokes but they weren't the centeral theme. The character was unique unto himself. It'd be like saying Don Knots back in the day was demeaning to whites. Political correctness tends to be more about the eye of the beholder than any real intent. Today black comedians constantly make jokes about black people yet the only one who lost their career was one of the few that never made a joke about being black. They can view the Cookie Monster smoking as a bad sereotype but calling it adult is rediculous. They don't learn smoking as much from old Sesame Street characters as they do from watching their parents smoke.
Part of it is we provide protection for other countries. An example is Japan. Japan spends very little of their budget on defense but we provide military protection. It began over WW II and not wanting Japan to maintain a sizeable military but we inherited a lot of the expense, Japan provides part of the funding. Similar with the Panama Canal. There are lots of examples including bases in Europe. Then there are things like arms subsidies for countries like Israel, but I'm not sure which budget those fall under. Most of the money really doesn't go for defense of our shores so much as our involvement worldwide. And yes a large number of us would love to see the military come home and stay there but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. It's the downside of democracy there's always going to be a percentage that disagree with the majority. We just spent nearly a trillion dollars, and counting, fighting what started out as a few hundred to a few thousand people. It would have been cheaper and saved lives giving each terrorist ten million and send them to Vegas. A few months of gambling and brothel hopping would have taught them the error of their ways.
Slashdot Mirror
So given the volume of spam what do you get, 200 or 300 a day?
So Vista Service Pack 1 is about ready for release?
Signed,
Cash
If the FCC drops the hammer on cable I guess adult, language, subject matter not porn, will have to move to the web. I wonder if they are going to attack channels like TCM, FMC and IFC because they don't edit for TV? I just wonder how long after the move to the web they try regulating it? That's going to be a tough one because out of the gate most homes have access but it's not dedictated access so that 70% rule is going to become meaningless.
I'd be curious if the under sides of the sliding sliding stones were concave? Why I mention it is I still remember a certain chinese restaurant's tea cups had a habit of sliding across the table. The table tops were resin coated and the concave cups tended to capture moisture under them so when the tea heated the moisture under the cup the expansion provided enough lift to break the friction and allow them to slide. They would move randomly in different directions then stop for a few minutes then slide again. Since the area is hot a unique combination of heated rocks with slippery mud and wind could in combination cause the effect. I remember that some rocks slid and others didn't as well as the direction changes.
First it doesn't allow for multiple migrations from the same Asia population and it doesn't take into account the possibility of extinct migrations. It's possible several migrations failed and all immigrants died whether from starvation or even being wiped out by future migrations like in New Zealand.
"Biased"???? If Chernobyl was no big deal then move there and start a home vegitable garden. Not that many died outright? What about the numbers that have severe health problems related to the accident. Coal plants are damaging but when there's a disaster they don't create dead zones around them. We've been promised solutions for storing waste and fuel rods for fifty years. The only solution is still digging a hole and burying it. There are lots of safer solutions so why the obsession with nuclear? It's easy? Guess why the power companies like it. It's centralized so they control the cost and most of the clean up costs wind up being picked up by the government. Translated you and I pay for it. Check out Hanford and the status of the clean up there. They've spent an insane amount of money and they have made little progress. A new plant is opening right now that produces solar cells at 10% of the cost of standard solar cells. If we put them on every house and business in the country we can start closing coal plants and not even bother with nuclear reactors. Add in wind and other options and we can avoid dirty options entirely. We can cut demand in half through conservation alone. Don't kid yourself nuclear is dirty. Just because there's no smoke doesn't make it clean. X ray machines produce no obviously polutants yet they can still kill you with enough exposure. I get sick of hearing how clean and cheap nuclear is. Guess what there's no end in sight for the expense of existing reactors let alone building a 1,000 or more which is what we'd need. Every single reactor will continue to cost us money for the foreseeable future. When you replace windmills or solar cells you either recycle them or the waste is similar to electronic waste every home produces. With a nuclear plant you have to store and manage the fuel rods and all contaminated material. Storing fuel rods long term is like "Clean Coal" technology. Sounds good on paper but no one is doing it yet. Remember 50 years of rods laying around and still none in long term storage. Clean Coal as it's called is just a concept there's not a single commercial "clean coal" plant in operation. If you watch TV you'd swear they all are from the commercials they don't bother to tell you they have yet to build a single plant but they could if they wanted to so lets just burn more coal. Nuclear is the same way. The power companies are lying to you and it doesn't take much research to find it out. Hanford is an obvious one that most people that know about nuclear have heard of but there are hundreds of other sites. No it's not a power plant but it's an example of what contaminated sites are like. Do some math and see if it takes your breath way. Take the yearly output of waste and times it by five. Now allow for growth and do the numbers for fifty years. The tonage of waste should be enough to make your knees shake. This is not a perminate solution to anything. Just picture the number after 200 years? Yes I know you'll be happily in the ground and fuck your great grandkids but that's the attitude that got us into this mess. The only solution that saves civilization is one that will be viable for the next 1,000 year. We can't aford to think in decades we need to think in terms of milleniums if we are to survive. If you really are interested in the future focus on things that guarantee we'll have a future and not a toxic waste pile for a planet.
http://www.oobject.com/category/radioactive-products/
Just because you're a dog molesting cannibal doesn't mean you're a bad date.
I'm sure they feel if they can get people used to having ads then they can drop the lower price point then just make it standard on all DVDs. They'd probably phase it in but I have to believe that's the real intent is to make the technology available industry wide and slowly get rid of the option and simply make it another revenue stream. I won't watch FX Channel because of the in program ads on the screen. If they go this route with DVDs, force feeding commercials, I'll stop buying and renting, period. I barely rent as it is because there are so few films worth seeing. This is just another way to bleed a few extra cents out of each DVD. I just hope people aren't stupid enough to accept it but given the lack viewer reaction to the current onslaught of commercials I have to believe the future is even more pervasive commercials and me reading more books.
It's nothing more than a nuclear pile. Where's the invention? Inject water around mass of uranium, produces steam=power. It's a neighborhood uranium based nuke plant. The concept has been around in one form or another for decades just no one was stupid enough to build a bunch of them and scatter them across the country. It's hard enough to keep track of nuclear material as it is.
What was your first clue, the fact that the power cable coming out would have to be half the diameter of the device to power 25,000 homes? I don't care if you can fit a fusion reactor in a match box you still have to have a means of transfering the power in a practical form. That's one dense source of power 27 megawatts from a hot tub sized reactor. I'll believe a flying car first.
The whole agrument is nuts and in truth doesn't justify a response. "God made it that way" ends all arguments for them so there is no rational thought behind their position. The real fact is there's an ocean of evidence for evolution and the true age of the Earth on one side and "God did it" on the other side. Where's the debate? The only evidence presented is heavily distorted scientific evidence. Gee sedimentary layers were left over from the great flood. Why are there different layers and different forms of life in each layer? No good response. Cells are very complex highly organized and self repairing, only a genius could have planned them. Or maybe it took a few billion years of trial and error? Why is this fictional date that some one came up with hundreds of years ago so important? It's not mentioned in the Bible he deduced it by adding up ages of the men listed in Genesis, some of them living nearly a thousand years which presents it's own set of problems. There is no form of evidence that will ever change their minds so there's no debate. They can complain all they want that science won't change but that's like trying to talk some one with a winning poker hand into the fact they just lost. Science doesn't need faith they have something far better, the facts.
How many cows and/or sheep would I have to keep on the roof of my car to get enough methane to drive to the store?
I'm not opening my eyes again. First I have to worry about killing a cat now I've got to worry about the whole damn Universe!
Where have you been, you only get Flamebaited on Slashdot when you defend the US. I often boast of Russias accomplishments because the US is buried in beaurocracy. The US could have beaten the Soviet Union with a satellite, it was ready a year ahead of the Soviet Union but government wouldn't let them launch. They also were prepared to launcha a man into orbit before the Russsians but instead launched a Chimp. The US is still the only one to land a man on the Moon let alone do it repeatedly and that was with 60s era technology. They dropped the heavy lift Saturn rockets in favor of the space shuttle which was a glorified satellite maintainence platform, a primary reason for all the blacked out missions in the 80s. Also if you think the Russians never seek publicity for their accomplishments I take it you are extremely young or don't watch the news much. The Russians are quite vocal with every achievement. I believe the complaint is more about Western press but Pravda is equally slanted. I still think the Mir was an amazing achievement but a lot of Russian progress came with a heavy toll of lives. They took cheaper lower tech approaches that came with higher risk. Up until the Shuttle NASA had an amazing safety record. There's a lot to respect about what the Russians have done with fewer resources but knocking the West is cherry picking your facts. Russia has a miserable track record when it comes to Mars and they've never done anything approaching the rovers. They have managed a landing on Venus which is impressive inspite of the craft being short lived. If you look objectively both the US and Russia have similar accomplishments when you make adjustments for financial and political restrictions, Ironically the west tends to have the money but politics tends to hamper progress. As far as the largest aircraft the Russians always took the big dick approach having the biggest of everything from aircraft to largest nuclear explosion whether it was practical or not. It was a cold war propaganda thing of boasting about having the biggest. Since the end of the cold war you noticed that trend changed to more practical weapons and aircraft than simply the largest.
The point is the game company should have a reasonable expectation that what they were doing was legitimate. Withdrawing the product is an unreasonable action and grossly harms the game company when there is a serious question that they did anything wrong in the first place. Lots of covers of songs sound just like dumbed down versions of the original. The only way they might have a case is if there was a reasonable expectation of confusion and the game company was selling the cover version as a single or part of an album. There's no damages in this case since the record company owns the song and licensed it for use. Go to Las Vegas, there's a bunch of lookalikes doing covers every night of songs and they even dress like the stars to "Create" confusion with the original artist. If they advertised the game as including the Romantics song that could also be grounds since they are using the band's name to help sell games but I take it that isn't the problem. Basically the band got screwed out of money because the record company owns their songs not them. That's the issue not a game company ripping them off.
The real point that should answer the questions is who owns the copyright the creator or the community at large? That really seems the debate. As a copyright holder I've already radically changed what work will be released to the public and how it will be released due to the weakness of the current copyright system. Electronic distibution and foreign markets that ignore copyright has seriously threatened the market and the ability of creators to make a living. Yes there's still money to be made but for how much longer? I have films based on my work in stores in Malaysia shortly after their release for a $1 a copy. South East Asia is already spoiled as a market with the largest potential market China being almost exclusively pirate. If the creator doesn't benefit from his/her work then why do it in the first place? Yes we'll still create but why release it to the public? I can make money off my lesser work so I decided to not release any of my favorite work to the public because of the current system. It's like a genie in the bottle and once it's released it will be copied endlessly. I'm a writer by preference and even if I strictly limit my work to printed text even then some one will likely scan it and post it. The point I'm trying to make is if I can make a living off what I consider lesser work and I want to avoid others exploiting work that is important to me then the world at large will never benefit from the better work. You can say who cares and I agree one artist may not be important but I do know of others quietly doing the same. As free distribution of material gets worse so will the restricting of material so in the end the community suffers. Many artists were mentioned like Shakespear. He's a perfect example. Let's say his work was strictly performed live and never published in any form. He would be completely unknown today. All artists especially writers have work that they never publish. What if they as a group decide to restrict their best work? Already there's been a noticable drop in the quality of the work available. It may not be the primary cause but I will say I know for a fact that some writers are no longer releasing their best work. An artists creation is very much like a child to them and it's at times like throwing your children to the wolves. In the past it was publishers and film studios that molested writers but now the community seems to feel they own our children so it might be time to start keeping our children in a closet. There are two sides to any situation. If the community at large feels they should be able to freely exploit an artists work then they may find one day they control smoke because there might not be much out there to exploit. We need to encourage the best people not punish them. Been to a movie lately? One of my passions is film and in the past I've been known to see three films in a single day in a theater. Now I rarely go and going to Blockbuster is a depressing experience. Dozens of films were released this week for the holiday rush and yet I found myself renting several older films. I'm hesitant to sell film rights anymore due to how poorly they are treated by most film makers these days. Anyone see The Mist? They turned one of Stephen's best stories into a tedious yawn fest. If our best work is going to be stolen and butchered whats the point? I'd rather restrict my favorite work to family and friends and my safe deposit boxes.
It seems insane to end such a cost effective program but government rarely makes sense. I guess they could change their program to search for proof the Universe is 6,000 years old then do real science in a clandestined manner like it was done 800 years ago. How far we've come.
The new Republican only software service pack was an upgrade to improve machine performance and simplify the voting process.
Such things usually balance themselves out. The collapse will cause a reduction in demand because fewer services will be available. A lot of net hog services have yet to turn a consistent profit. Investors will shy away from anything that hasn't a proven profit record.
Boxx has anounced machines using this chip so I'm guessing there are boards just the first run aren't available to the home builder.
I find the easiest way to get Trolled or Flamed is to post a response that doesn't fit the Party Line in the geek community. Post something pro downloading of copyrighted material and you'll almost always get a positive mod. Post something that disagrees with downloading and/or points out the negative ramifications and you'll generally get modded down, and you'll usually get some vicious attacks from other posters, ones that should get Trolled or Flamed. There are a number of sacred subjects that you need to avoid if you don't want to get a negative mod and you disagree with the masses. Personally I'd rather be modded Heretic than be Trolled for disagreeing with the majority. Trolling and Flame should be reserved strictly for the obnoxious posts not for people with a decenting opinion. Oh well another troll for the collection, sigh....
Political correctness has even ended careers of minorities. One of the most famous was Mantan Morland. He was one of the funniest comedians of his time. He was highly paid and the studios gave him star billing gladly at a time when most black actors barely got a mention. The persona was his own creation and was meant to reflect his character's personality but it was deemed a negative stereotype and it basically ended his career at it's height. Was it positive? It was never meant to be but the point is he was wildly successful and was respected for his talent. He was just a funny guy and deserved his success. If he was directly making jokes about blacks I might agree but I can't recall a single line he uttered related to blacks in general, I may be wrong I just don't recall jokes but they weren't the centeral theme. The character was unique unto himself. It'd be like saying Don Knots back in the day was demeaning to whites. Political correctness tends to be more about the eye of the beholder than any real intent. Today black comedians constantly make jokes about black people yet the only one who lost their career was one of the few that never made a joke about being black. They can view the Cookie Monster smoking as a bad sereotype but calling it adult is rediculous. They don't learn smoking as much from old Sesame Street characters as they do from watching their parents smoke.
Part of it is we provide protection for other countries. An example is Japan. Japan spends very little of their budget on defense but we provide military protection. It began over WW II and not wanting Japan to maintain a sizeable military but we inherited a lot of the expense, Japan provides part of the funding. Similar with the Panama Canal. There are lots of examples including bases in Europe. Then there are things like arms subsidies for countries like Israel, but I'm not sure which budget those fall under. Most of the money really doesn't go for defense of our shores so much as our involvement worldwide. And yes a large number of us would love to see the military come home and stay there but that's not likely to happen anytime soon. It's the downside of democracy there's always going to be a percentage that disagree with the majority. We just spent nearly a trillion dollars, and counting, fighting what started out as a few hundred to a few thousand people. It would have been cheaper and saved lives giving each terrorist ten million and send them to Vegas. A few months of gambling and brothel hopping would have taught them the error of their ways.