The Win10 one supports virtual desktops and improved Aero Snap. There's plenty of room to make the Win7 DE better. With that said, yeah, the current crop of Linux DEs all seem to leave something to be desired as well.
You can easily install a SSH client on Windows. There's no lack of them, really, unless you specifically mean one built in. For myself, I used to use OpenSSH on Interix (Subsystem for Unix Applications), but after Microsoft canned SUA with Win8.1 I switched to just using the client that comes with the Git for Windows package. ssh -V OpenSSH_6.6.1p1, OpenSSL 1.0.1i 6 Aug 2014 Server is harder, though you can find it. Interix supported SSHD as well as the client, as does Cygwin, and there are probably others.
Powershell will be getting SSH (apparently both client and server) sometime soon as well. Not here yet though.
KDE has a load of dependencies to just install one tool. It's a good experience if you're just using the whole environment, though.
Except, Kubuntu isn't even the red-headed stepchild of the family. It's more like the sickly foster kid you keep locked in the basement except when the social worker comes around once a month. It's got egregious bugs, in both current and LTS versions, which basically never get addressed (admittedly, I don't know of any that impact kolourpaint; I haven't used that in years and it wasn't on Ubuntu). Nobody gives a damn. I recently tried to get kmail working on Ubuntu for around five hours, then concluded it would be easier by far to replace the OS with a half-decent distro.
On the other hand, it sounds like the Linux version is still a little clunky, at least to install. It really should be available as a set of.DEB/.RPM/whatever packages, or ideally already in the standard repositories. By all means continue to have a version that is independent of package management software, but a tarball and an install script... well, that's not really what people are looking for.
Do the journals only accept Word docs, or merely only accept document formats that Word can open? Word has had support for ODF files for years now (I think it was a plugin for 2007 but it's been standard in versions since). Try saving as "OpenDocument Text (*.odt)" format and see if they can accept that. If so, you should be able to use Open/LibreOffice (Word's support for ODT should be better than Writer's support for DOCX).
I actually have a response to this: I would really like to see the KDE-on-Windows (http://windows.kde.org/) project picked up again. KDE has some nice utilities, but the last version of them that was built for Windows is now years old. There is, of course, no reason why this *couldn't* be done; it was done before, and the build scripts may well still work. I could probably get it building again myself, at least on MSVC. Without making it easy, though, I probably won't make the effort for the relatively few tools (Kate, maybe Amarok, maybe Kopete, used to use Konqueror but probably wouldn't now) that I'd like to get out of it. Part of that is because the alternatives have improved, but a lot of it is just because any given KDE utility has a slew of dependencies that really want to be built as part of an automated and comprehensive build process.
Code is a pretty nice editor, and I am really glad to see Microsoft working on releasing products for Linux (and OS X, but I don't much care there). It's not even close to full Visual Studio, though. As far as I can tell, it has almost no integration with compiler or debugger, beyond the standard *nix code editor "Run this command and show me the output of it" functionality. It certainly doesn't include any compilers. No background compilation means no syntax checking, etc. It doesn't use Visual Studio solution or project files (I'm not even sure it can parse them; it suggests it can but I haven't managed to get it to do so usefully), which makes it minimally useful on larger Windows code projects.
On the plus side, it's free, easy to configure, and getting rapid updates.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that "I.T. workers" is a bullshit category. It makes as much sense as putting theoretical mathematicians, rocket scientists, and accountants all in a category because they all "do math", or (house) architects, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, and landscapers all in one category because they "make houses".
Here's a partial list of things I've done for work as part of an "I.T." job:
* Website design
* Malware removal
* User account management on a Windows domain
* Physically cannibalizing one rack-mount server for parts to put in two others
* Writing code in a programming language (not to be confused with writing HTML/CSS)
* Go through crash dumps in a debugger to figure our what happened
* Black-box test web applications for security vulnerabilities
* Review design documents for security risks in the designed software
* Research new test tools and make recommendations
* Write reports (on a computer!) related to the above
No two of those things are the same skill set. I'm not including things that bridge some of the gaps, like writing scripts (coding!) for automating some test tools (black-box testing!); those things may require skill in two different tasks, but the tasks themselves are mutually independent. I'm not even including things that every field has to deal with that aren't really the core skill, like interviewing people, managing project schedules, interpersonal communication, etc. I'm also leaving out a lot of fine-grained differences in things, like the difference between worrying about performance in a driver (where you want memory and CPU efficiency, avoiding long blocking operations, etc.) and performance in a web app (where you want scalability through parallelism, caching, offloading work to the client where possible, etc.). Some of these items might be broadly categorized as being in the same kind of field ("Tech Support" or "Software Security" or "Development") but even there the skills needed, aptitudes an individual will have, and interest levels vary wildly between tasks.
I love my current (sixth, counting college internships) job overall, but that doesn't mean I enjoy the report writing or am good at network pen-test just because I can find XSS in damn near any web app and can reverse engineer phone apps. My second and fifth jobs were disasters for very different reasons, but both boil down to "I wasn't doing what I was hired to do, and was being told to do things that I had no knowledge of and/or interest in" and poor management (one wouldn't define objectives, the other didn't understand that you can't just have two people do the work of five, without the deadlines changing, simply because the other three quit). So yeah, sometimes you can group the jobs meaningfully and compare the specific instances (jobs five and six are similar, though there are a lot of differences even so). But it doesn't even make sense to group jobs two and five (beyond "was working on software-related stuff") any more than it makes sense to group a theatrical stage lighting director with an electrician (even though they both work with light bulbs).
This is already law in the state I live (Washington), and has been so since before I get my license. It is *almost* never enforced.
With that said, there was a time at a past employer where somebody posted mail to a large social (voluntary inclusion, not-work-related) internal mailing list asking for advice on how to get out of a ticket he'd gotten for holding up traffic in the left lane. The typical response ran something like this:
Well, did you get the cop's name/badge number? Because I'd like to buy him a beer sometime.
Yep. I didn't even realize they'd bumped my tethering cap from 3GB to 5GB until I had to use a few hundred MB of tethered data this weekend and went to the My Account app to see how much I'd used. The cap was 2.5GB when I signed up (500MB baseline, 2GB extra as part of the "Unlimited (when you aren't tethering)" plan), then they bumped the baseline to 1GB (which increased my limit to 3GB), and now it's apparently 5GB.
For something "very hard", they seem to be doing just fine at it!
Sorry, I think you misunderstood me. I should have been clearer. Replace the current "unlimited" (yes, note the scare quotes) plan with a 100GB one (advertised as "100GB", not as "Unlimited", and actually offering that). After you change "Unlimited" to 100GB, there no longer is an "unlimited" plan. Most people will never be directly affected by this change, and those who would be can either cancel (preferably with plenty of warning), cope with the reduction, or maybe do something like pay for data a la carte beyond that.
I think we're going for the same idea. I never suggested the deception that you seem to think I did, though.
The silly thing is, depending on how "super" a yacht you need, you're off by a few orders of magnitude. My parents have been living aboard and cruising the world for the last 14 years. A 48' (14m) sailing catamaran isn't exactly a mega-yacht, but it's actually more boat than two people need - it was bought for a family of four plus visitors - but it's also possible to buy it and fit it out for about the cost of a house. In fact, they still own the house, and I think its value is higher than the boat despite being a fairly dated suburban location. Lots of people go cruising on less than a quarter million. You certainly can sink a few million into the boat if you want to - it'll get you a larger and more luxurious one, maybe with a few more perks and automation and definitely with more space - and you can then add a permanent staff if you'd like to (owning a boat on your own is a lot of work, and there's something to be said for hiring a cook, a mechanic, etc.) and now you're talking real money... but it's still only going to come out to probably 7 digits initially and then about 6 digits per year.
Not saying you couldn't spend more than that if you really want to, of course, but you hit seriously diminishing returns.
Technically the latter, but there's only so much bandwidth to go around and in a heavily-populated area there will be a lot of contention for it. Unlike cable, you can't just roll out another trunk line if one of them is getting saturated. Adding more towers may let the phones switch to lower power, reducing interference and allowing more devices to use the same frequencies at once within a city, but adding towers (like rolling out a new line) costs money. Cellular data, like most Internet service, is billed on the assumption that users want fast infrequent service, not constant max-bandwidth usage.
California is a big place. I get LTE in the all the major cities and most of the smaller ones along the I-5 corridor. You won't get it in the boonies, though; LTE is fast but not good for wide-area coverage. The bands T-Mobile uses for LTE also apparently don't have excellent building penetration, so you may drop to 3G inside some buildings. I get LTE at home and at work just fine, though.
I wonder whether it's actually even being used for tethering at all. Technically, there's no reason you can't just run a torrent app on a phone. My phone has 96GB of storage in it (counting SD card) and can access more than 5TB via LAN when I'm at home; if I *wanted* to use it for torrenting I could (and I'd be tempted to, because My T-Mobile connection is faster than my wired one).
With that said, wireless bandwidth is a limited resource that needs to be shared across a lot of people. There's a lot of really excellent use cases for it, and massive torrenting is one of them. I'm 100% in agreement with you that they shouldn't call it "unlimited" if they're going to put limits on it (though they'll probably try to weasel that by saying "it's only unlimited for un-tethered data; i.e. that which will be used by the phone directly!" Having good reason to not actually make something unlimited doesn't excuse calling it what it isn't.
Making the "Umlimited" plan only actually 100GB (before you get throttled like everybody else who goes over their limit; TMoUS never actually kills your data connection) would be pretty reasonable, I think. Throw in an increase to the official tethering cap for such accounts (currently 5GB) so that people who want to use the connection with their PC can do it without relying on hokey apps that try to enable tethering in ways the phone OS and network provider can't tell... well, I'm actually in favor of that! Yes, it'll limit me to approximately 7x as much data as I've ever used in a month, but it'll also keep that network more useful.
Bumping AC's comment, because yeah, this is stupid. The whole article on email encryption for smartphones talks about exactly one app, available for the second-most-popular smartphone OS, and nothing else. It doesn't cover encryption support for other platforms, other apps, or other encryption methods. It talks about the need for platform support, without mentioning any platform support found on any smartphone platform.
There were smartphones before iOS, and there are still other smartphones. In fact, iPhones don't even have that a very dominant market share, no matter how much money they make for Apple. If you want to get the masses using email encryption, you can't focus only on a minority platform!
I've known a number of drunks who've done just that (none, thankfully, in *my* living room), and the consequences (of the peeing in particular, not necessarily of the drunkenness altogether) have generally been light. Admittedly, they were all passed out or close to it when the call of nature came...
In any case, though, it's a very false equivalency. People pee where they are *by default*, not *by preference*. Even animals often won't befoul their own nests unless sick, injured, or very young. Pissing where you stand is something children do until they learn better, and the old or sick (or drunk) do when they have no choice, but that the healthy and reasonably-aged essentially never do. Having multiple romantic partners is something you are taught not to do your entire life, and then (in many cases) do anyway when the opportunity arises and the urge becomes unbearable. Very, very different
That is indeed interesting. Pretty sure that's mostly an artifact of inheritance laws, though; in societies where men owned and inherited property (and women were little, if anything, more than that) it was a serious concern that a man's wife/wives have no other lovers, or some of his wealth would go to children not his. In modern society, while polyamorous marriage is not legal, anybody (regardless of gender) can split eir inheritance amongst multiple recipients and, if you particularly care to do so, you can determine genetic paternity relatively inexpensively and with excellent accuracy.
The first point I'll grant you, though if given a choice I'd undo the death of an uncle who I saw but a few times a year (who died at 50) over undoing all the bad breakups of my life and the reasons for them. Maybe that's unusual of me, but the fact remains that from my viewpoint, it's really, not the same when somebody hurts you and dumps you vs. when somebody is taken from you, and the latter hurts for much longer.
For the rest, though, no. You're taking my sentences out of one context and then trying to claim they're in another. That's gotten you a few mod points, but it doesn't actually address the point I was making in those sentences at all. The point was, in case you somehow failed to read the first sentence of the paragraph you're quoting from, that " humans aren't really wired very well for monogamy". They get away from it when they can, either by being powerful, or with the consent of their partners, or without that consent. I am by no means attempting to claim that these are morally equal, any more than I'm claiming you should look up to the powerful and vicious (which are *not* the same thing, though viciousness, like non-monogamy, is a thing that power can let you get away with and this appeals to many more people than you seem to realize). I'm not justifying a behavior, I'm simply highlighting the fact that it happens, and if society doesn't want it to happen the bad way (cheating) they need to legitimize it happening the good way (socially acceptable ethical polyamory).
As for my "ridiculous strawman", that's actually one of the core advantages of polyamory. Monogamous relationships require a tremendous commitment, not only to give up all the other relationships and partners you might have had, but to be there for your partner for whatever ey expect a partner to provide. Polyamory frees you from both obligations, allowing you and your partner(s) to get everything that is desired from as many sources as it takes. Of course, in practice it doesn't work out perfectly, but a lot of polycules can get closer to that ideal than the typical monogamous relationship.
As for your last argument, I disagree. I'm not going to touch murder, except to point out you've hardly argued that it's not inevitably part of human society. Back on topic, though, cheating *is* inevitable, so long as society requires people to give up a relationship before starting a new one (and accept a huge stigma in the process), but sneaking around without your partner's knowledge is still frequently possible. Adjust the latter and you'll get less cheating, though you'll probably still get some because people are bad at weighing consequences, especially when their hormones are up. Adjust the former, and the rate of cheating will go *way* down, because the only reason to do it will be because you want to hurt your partner even though you don't want to leave them, and that's a really silly reason (especially if separations are made easy and relatively effortless).
For the record: my first personal experience with polyamory was when a girl I liked (but figured I had not chance with, because - among other things - she was married) told me she wanted to date *me* and wanted to know if I was OK with the fact that she had a husband. The relationship eventually ended, but I'm still friends with both her and her husband, and another of her ex lovers (from while she was married, with husband's consent), though I haven't met the new guy in her life yet.
My OKCupid profile says I'm in an open relationship and only interested in meeting people who are OK with that, and remarkably enough this has not made it any more difficult to find dates. Great thing about open relationships: they mean the dating pool doesn't shrink every time somebody starts a new relationship!
Legally-recognized poly relationships would indeed be legally complicated, and I expect that this is coming within the next century or so, but legally-unrecognized poly relationships will become (relatively) commonplace well before that. If gay marriage is just now crossing from the third to the fourth states of "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", polyamory is mostly still at the first stage.
Oh, bullshit. I realize you're probably just a troll, but whatever. Marriage *is* a legal agreement specifically to handle things like division of property (originally, specifically to handle inheritance).
Religion co-opted it as one of many way to separate the righteous (those who held to their vows, assuming they make them with the right kind of people) from the sinners (those who would do such terrible things as tempt somebody to break a vow). After all, nothing unites a people like having an outsider who is terribly wrong and will destroy all that you hold dear. If you don't have an enemy, invent one. History, both religious and secular, is chock full of examples of this behavior.
Back to marriage: marriage ceremonies have borne religious trappings (and often been conducted by religious figures) since long before Christianity or even Judaism - one wishes to bless the couple with health and fertility, to grow the tribe and make it stronger - but its core was always a secular agreement even back to the days before law was a concept. It was a declaration that the child of this woman is that man's heir, and often enough also that the woman was essentially now his property; she would serve him (and bear his children) and he would provide for her (and his children as she bears them). The requirement that they be his children (not those of some other man) is where the exclusivity of marriage comes in. By the time Abrahamic religions came along, people had enough property (and social expectations of how it is distributed) that a fledgling religion that tried top upset the system would be shunned or even destroyed, but by co-opting the system and making its rules *religious* rules, it emplaced itself as the enforcer of good laws... and, coincidentally, the keeper of marriage.
"I'm talking a group of people who live together, love each other, and all F* together as desired." That's an extremely narrow class of polyamory. The term, as the communities I'm a part of use it, encompasses pretty much all forms of non-exclusive or more-than-pairwise relationships. There's some discussion over whether it applies to people who, alone or along with their regular partners, engage in casual sex outside of their relationship(s), though most people seem to count that too. Any form of "polycule" certainly counts, even though there may not be a single cycle within the relationship graph and there might not be any subgroup larger than two who live together. A man (such as a king or other important/powerful person) who has a harem of voluntary, non-coerced and non-captive members (OK, that may be idealizing things a bit) would count as poly, even if none of the women have other lovers themselves.
With that said... I don't really know how common it's been. The powerful have often had it, including in decidedly non-Judeo-Christian societies, but the powerful have always operated outside of social norms - it's one of the appeals of power, after all - but the more interesting question is how often everyday people have had it.
One thing to bear in mind, though, is that hetero sex used to near-unavoidably mean children, and children of uncertain parentage were a cause of inheritance nightmares (and by "nightmares" I mean anything from simple resent and abuse to full-scale civil wars). The institution of marriage grew out of a need to formalize inheritance by stating that the children of this woman were the inheritors of this man (and if the woman was caught doing something that could lead to bearing another man's child, she was trying to defraud her husband and thus adultery was a crime). Modern advances - like paternity tests, child support, birth control, and women owning property independent of their father or husband - have made this ancient system irrelevant, but it was the way an awful lot of the world worked for a really long time. In such a society, polyamorous relationships of any form *other* than multiple women exclusively with one man is obviously not acceptable.
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The Win10 one supports virtual desktops and improved Aero Snap. There's plenty of room to make the Win7 DE better. With that said, yeah, the current crop of Linux DEs all seem to leave something to be desired as well.
What if you open the ODT in Word? MS Office supports the Open Document Formats, and has for most of the decade.
You can easily install a SSH client on Windows. There's no lack of them, really, unless you specifically mean one built in. For myself, I used to use OpenSSH on Interix (Subsystem for Unix Applications), but after Microsoft canned SUA with Win8.1 I switched to just using the client that comes with the Git for Windows package.
ssh -V
OpenSSH_6.6.1p1, OpenSSL 1.0.1i 6 Aug 2014
Server is harder, though you can find it. Interix supported SSHD as well as the client, as does Cygwin, and there are probably others.
Powershell will be getting SSH (apparently both client and server) sometime soon as well. Not here yet though.
KDE has a load of dependencies to just install one tool. It's a good experience if you're just using the whole environment, though.
Except, Kubuntu isn't even the red-headed stepchild of the family. It's more like the sickly foster kid you keep locked in the basement except when the social worker comes around once a month. It's got egregious bugs, in both current and LTS versions, which basically never get addressed (admittedly, I don't know of any that impact kolourpaint; I haven't used that in years and it wasn't on Ubuntu). Nobody gives a damn. I recently tried to get kmail working on Ubuntu for around five hours, then concluded it would be easier by far to replace the OS with a half-decent distro.
This should be modded higher.
On the other hand, it sounds like the Linux version is still a little clunky, at least to install. It really should be available as a set of .DEB/.RPM/whatever packages, or ideally already in the standard repositories. By all means continue to have a version that is independent of package management software, but a tarball and an install script... well, that's not really what people are looking for.
Do the journals only accept Word docs, or merely only accept document formats that Word can open? Word has had support for ODF files for years now (I think it was a plugin for 2007 but it's been standard in versions since). Try saving as "OpenDocument Text (*.odt)" format and see if they can accept that. If so, you should be able to use Open/LibreOffice (Word's support for ODT should be better than Writer's support for DOCX).
I actually have a response to this: I would really like to see the KDE-on-Windows (http://windows.kde.org/) project picked up again. KDE has some nice utilities, but the last version of them that was built for Windows is now years old. There is, of course, no reason why this *couldn't* be done; it was done before, and the build scripts may well still work. I could probably get it building again myself, at least on MSVC. Without making it easy, though, I probably won't make the effort for the relatively few tools (Kate, maybe Amarok, maybe Kopete, used to use Konqueror but probably wouldn't now) that I'd like to get out of it. Part of that is because the alternatives have improved, but a lot of it is just because any given KDE utility has a slew of dependencies that really want to be built as part of an automated and comprehensive build process.
Code is a pretty nice editor, and I am really glad to see Microsoft working on releasing products for Linux (and OS X, but I don't much care there). It's not even close to full Visual Studio, though. As far as I can tell, it has almost no integration with compiler or debugger, beyond the standard *nix code editor "Run this command and show me the output of it" functionality. It certainly doesn't include any compilers. No background compilation means no syntax checking, etc. It doesn't use Visual Studio solution or project files (I'm not even sure it can parse them; it suggests it can but I haven't managed to get it to do so usefully), which makes it minimally useful on larger Windows code projects.
On the plus side, it's free, easy to configure, and getting rapid updates.
I'd like to take this moment to point out that "I.T. workers" is a bullshit category. It makes as much sense as putting theoretical mathematicians, rocket scientists, and accountants all in a category because they all "do math", or (house) architects, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, and landscapers all in one category because they "make houses".
Here's a partial list of things I've done for work as part of an "I.T." job:
* Website design
* Malware removal
* User account management on a Windows domain
* Physically cannibalizing one rack-mount server for parts to put in two others
* Writing code in a programming language (not to be confused with writing HTML/CSS)
* Go through crash dumps in a debugger to figure our what happened
* Black-box test web applications for security vulnerabilities
* Review design documents for security risks in the designed software
* Research new test tools and make recommendations
* Write reports (on a computer!) related to the above
No two of those things are the same skill set. I'm not including things that bridge some of the gaps, like writing scripts (coding!) for automating some test tools (black-box testing!); those things may require skill in two different tasks, but the tasks themselves are mutually independent. I'm not even including things that every field has to deal with that aren't really the core skill, like interviewing people, managing project schedules, interpersonal communication, etc. I'm also leaving out a lot of fine-grained differences in things, like the difference between worrying about performance in a driver (where you want memory and CPU efficiency, avoiding long blocking operations, etc.) and performance in a web app (where you want scalability through parallelism, caching, offloading work to the client where possible, etc.). Some of these items might be broadly categorized as being in the same kind of field ("Tech Support" or "Software Security" or "Development") but even there the skills needed, aptitudes an individual will have, and interest levels vary wildly between tasks.
I love my current (sixth, counting college internships) job overall, but that doesn't mean I enjoy the report writing or am good at network pen-test just because I can find XSS in damn near any web app and can reverse engineer phone apps. My second and fifth jobs were disasters for very different reasons, but both boil down to "I wasn't doing what I was hired to do, and was being told to do things that I had no knowledge of and/or interest in" and poor management (one wouldn't define objectives, the other didn't understand that you can't just have two people do the work of five, without the deadlines changing, simply because the other three quit). So yeah, sometimes you can group the jobs meaningfully and compare the specific instances (jobs five and six are similar, though there are a lot of differences even so). But it doesn't even make sense to group jobs two and five (beyond "was working on software-related stuff") any more than it makes sense to group a theatrical stage lighting director with an electrician (even though they both work with light bulbs).
This is already law in the state I live (Washington), and has been so since before I get my license. It is *almost* never enforced.
With that said, there was a time at a past employer where somebody posted mail to a large social (voluntary inclusion, not-work-related) internal mailing list asking for advice on how to get out of a ticket he'd gotten for holding up traffic in the left lane. The typical response ran something like this:
Yep. I didn't even realize they'd bumped my tethering cap from 3GB to 5GB until I had to use a few hundred MB of tethered data this weekend and went to the My Account app to see how much I'd used. The cap was 2.5GB when I signed up (500MB baseline, 2GB extra as part of the "Unlimited (when you aren't tethering)" plan), then they bumped the baseline to 1GB (which increased my limit to 3GB), and now it's apparently 5GB.
For something "very hard", they seem to be doing just fine at it!
Sorry, I think you misunderstood me. I should have been clearer. Replace the current "unlimited" (yes, note the scare quotes) plan with a 100GB one (advertised as "100GB", not as "Unlimited", and actually offering that). After you change "Unlimited" to 100GB, there no longer is an "unlimited" plan. Most people will never be directly affected by this change, and those who would be can either cancel (preferably with plenty of warning), cope with the reduction, or maybe do something like pay for data a la carte beyond that.
I think we're going for the same idea. I never suggested the deception that you seem to think I did, though.
The silly thing is, depending on how "super" a yacht you need, you're off by a few orders of magnitude. My parents have been living aboard and cruising the world for the last 14 years. A 48' (14m) sailing catamaran isn't exactly a mega-yacht, but it's actually more boat than two people need - it was bought for a family of four plus visitors - but it's also possible to buy it and fit it out for about the cost of a house. In fact, they still own the house, and I think its value is higher than the boat despite being a fairly dated suburban location. Lots of people go cruising on less than a quarter million. You certainly can sink a few million into the boat if you want to - it'll get you a larger and more luxurious one, maybe with a few more perks and automation and definitely with more space - and you can then add a permanent staff if you'd like to (owning a boat on your own is a lot of work, and there's something to be said for hiring a cook, a mechanic, etc.) and now you're talking real money... but it's still only going to come out to probably 7 digits initially and then about 6 digits per year.
Not saying you couldn't spend more than that if you really want to, of course, but you hit seriously diminishing returns.
Technically the latter, but there's only so much bandwidth to go around and in a heavily-populated area there will be a lot of contention for it. Unlike cable, you can't just roll out another trunk line if one of them is getting saturated. Adding more towers may let the phones switch to lower power, reducing interference and allowing more devices to use the same frequencies at once within a city, but adding towers (like rolling out a new line) costs money. Cellular data, like most Internet service, is billed on the assumption that users want fast infrequent service, not constant max-bandwidth usage.
California is a big place. I get LTE in the all the major cities and most of the smaller ones along the I-5 corridor. You won't get it in the boonies, though; LTE is fast but not good for wide-area coverage. The bands T-Mobile uses for LTE also apparently don't have excellent building penetration, so you may drop to 3G inside some buildings. I get LTE at home and at work just fine, though.
I wonder whether it's actually even being used for tethering at all. Technically, there's no reason you can't just run a torrent app on a phone. My phone has 96GB of storage in it (counting SD card) and can access more than 5TB via LAN when I'm at home; if I *wanted* to use it for torrenting I could (and I'd be tempted to, because My T-Mobile connection is faster than my wired one).
With that said, wireless bandwidth is a limited resource that needs to be shared across a lot of people. There's a lot of really excellent use cases for it, and massive torrenting is one of them. I'm 100% in agreement with you that they shouldn't call it "unlimited" if they're going to put limits on it (though they'll probably try to weasel that by saying "it's only unlimited for un-tethered data; i.e. that which will be used by the phone directly!" Having good reason to not actually make something unlimited doesn't excuse calling it what it isn't.
Making the "Umlimited" plan only actually 100GB (before you get throttled like everybody else who goes over their limit; TMoUS never actually kills your data connection) would be pretty reasonable, I think. Throw in an increase to the official tethering cap for such accounts (currently 5GB) so that people who want to use the connection with their PC can do it without relying on hokey apps that try to enable tethering in ways the phone OS and network provider can't tell... well, I'm actually in favor of that! Yes, it'll limit me to approximately 7x as much data as I've ever used in a month, but it'll also keep that network more useful.
Bumping AC's comment, because yeah, this is stupid. The whole article on email encryption for smartphones talks about exactly one app, available for the second-most-popular smartphone OS, and nothing else. It doesn't cover encryption support for other platforms, other apps, or other encryption methods. It talks about the need for platform support, without mentioning any platform support found on any smartphone platform.
There were smartphones before iOS, and there are still other smartphones. In fact, iPhones don't even have that a very dominant market share, no matter how much money they make for Apple. If you want to get the masses using email encryption, you can't focus only on a minority platform!
I've known a number of drunks who've done just that (none, thankfully, in *my* living room), and the consequences (of the peeing in particular, not necessarily of the drunkenness altogether) have generally been light. Admittedly, they were all passed out or close to it when the call of nature came...
In any case, though, it's a very false equivalency. People pee where they are *by default*, not *by preference*. Even animals often won't befoul their own nests unless sick, injured, or very young. Pissing where you stand is something children do until they learn better, and the old or sick (or drunk) do when they have no choice, but that the healthy and reasonably-aged essentially never do. Having multiple romantic partners is something you are taught not to do your entire life, and then (in many cases) do anyway when the opportunity arises and the urge becomes unbearable. Very, very different
That is indeed interesting. Pretty sure that's mostly an artifact of inheritance laws, though; in societies where men owned and inherited property (and women were little, if anything, more than that) it was a serious concern that a man's wife/wives have no other lovers, or some of his wealth would go to children not his. In modern society, while polyamorous marriage is not legal, anybody (regardless of gender) can split eir inheritance amongst multiple recipients and, if you particularly care to do so, you can determine genetic paternity relatively inexpensively and with excellent accuracy.
The first point I'll grant you, though if given a choice I'd undo the death of an uncle who I saw but a few times a year (who died at 50) over undoing all the bad breakups of my life and the reasons for them. Maybe that's unusual of me, but the fact remains that from my viewpoint, it's really, not the same when somebody hurts you and dumps you vs. when somebody is taken from you, and the latter hurts for much longer.
For the rest, though, no. You're taking my sentences out of one context and then trying to claim they're in another. That's gotten you a few mod points, but it doesn't actually address the point I was making in those sentences at all. The point was, in case you somehow failed to read the first sentence of the paragraph you're quoting from, that " humans aren't really wired very well for monogamy". They get away from it when they can, either by being powerful, or with the consent of their partners, or without that consent. I am by no means attempting to claim that these are morally equal, any more than I'm claiming you should look up to the powerful and vicious (which are *not* the same thing, though viciousness, like non-monogamy, is a thing that power can let you get away with and this appeals to many more people than you seem to realize). I'm not justifying a behavior, I'm simply highlighting the fact that it happens, and if society doesn't want it to happen the bad way (cheating) they need to legitimize it happening the good way (socially acceptable ethical polyamory).
As for my "ridiculous strawman", that's actually one of the core advantages of polyamory. Monogamous relationships require a tremendous commitment, not only to give up all the other relationships and partners you might have had, but to be there for your partner for whatever ey expect a partner to provide. Polyamory frees you from both obligations, allowing you and your partner(s) to get everything that is desired from as many sources as it takes. Of course, in practice it doesn't work out perfectly, but a lot of polycules can get closer to that ideal than the typical monogamous relationship.
As for your last argument, I disagree. I'm not going to touch murder, except to point out you've hardly argued that it's not inevitably part of human society. Back on topic, though, cheating *is* inevitable, so long as society requires people to give up a relationship before starting a new one (and accept a huge stigma in the process), but sneaking around without your partner's knowledge is still frequently possible. Adjust the latter and you'll get less cheating, though you'll probably still get some because people are bad at weighing consequences, especially when their hormones are up. Adjust the former, and the rate of cheating will go *way* down, because the only reason to do it will be because you want to hurt your partner even though you don't want to leave them, and that's a really silly reason (especially if separations are made easy and relatively effortless).
For the record: my first personal experience with polyamory was when a girl I liked (but figured I had not chance with, because - among other things - she was married) told me she wanted to date *me* and wanted to know if I was OK with the fact that she had a husband. The relationship eventually ended, but I'm still friends with both her and her husband, and another of her ex lovers (from while she was married, with husband's consent), though I haven't met the new guy in her life yet.
My OKCupid profile says I'm in an open relationship and only interested in meeting people who are OK with that, and remarkably enough this has not made it any more difficult to find dates. Great thing about open relationships: they mean the dating pool doesn't shrink every time somebody starts a new relationship!
Legally-recognized poly relationships would indeed be legally complicated, and I expect that this is coming within the next century or so, but legally-unrecognized poly relationships will become (relatively) commonplace well before that. If gay marriage is just now crossing from the third to the fourth states of "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win", polyamory is mostly still at the first stage.
Oh, bullshit. I realize you're probably just a troll, but whatever. Marriage *is* a legal agreement specifically to handle things like division of property (originally, specifically to handle inheritance).
Religion co-opted it as one of many way to separate the righteous (those who held to their vows, assuming they make them with the right kind of people) from the sinners (those who would do such terrible things as tempt somebody to break a vow). After all, nothing unites a people like having an outsider who is terribly wrong and will destroy all that you hold dear. If you don't have an enemy, invent one. History, both religious and secular, is chock full of examples of this behavior.
Back to marriage: marriage ceremonies have borne religious trappings (and often been conducted by religious figures) since long before Christianity or even Judaism - one wishes to bless the couple with health and fertility, to grow the tribe and make it stronger - but its core was always a secular agreement even back to the days before law was a concept. It was a declaration that the child of this woman is that man's heir, and often enough also that the woman was essentially now his property; she would serve him (and bear his children) and he would provide for her (and his children as she bears them). The requirement that they be his children (not those of some other man) is where the exclusivity of marriage comes in. By the time Abrahamic religions came along, people had enough property (and social expectations of how it is distributed) that a fledgling religion that tried top upset the system would be shunned or even destroyed, but by co-opting the system and making its rules *religious* rules, it emplaced itself as the enforcer of good laws... and, coincidentally, the keeper of marriage.
"I'm talking a group of people who live together, love each other, and all F* together as desired."
That's an extremely narrow class of polyamory. The term, as the communities I'm a part of use it, encompasses pretty much all forms of non-exclusive or more-than-pairwise relationships. There's some discussion over whether it applies to people who, alone or along with their regular partners, engage in casual sex outside of their relationship(s), though most people seem to count that too. Any form of "polycule" certainly counts, even though there may not be a single cycle within the relationship graph and there might not be any subgroup larger than two who live together. A man (such as a king or other important/powerful person) who has a harem of voluntary, non-coerced and non-captive members (OK, that may be idealizing things a bit) would count as poly, even if none of the women have other lovers themselves.
With that said... I don't really know how common it's been. The powerful have often had it, including in decidedly non-Judeo-Christian societies, but the powerful have always operated outside of social norms - it's one of the appeals of power, after all - but the more interesting question is how often everyday people have had it.
One thing to bear in mind, though, is that hetero sex used to near-unavoidably mean children, and children of uncertain parentage were a cause of inheritance nightmares (and by "nightmares" I mean anything from simple resent and abuse to full-scale civil wars). The institution of marriage grew out of a need to formalize inheritance by stating that the children of this woman were the inheritors of this man (and if the woman was caught doing something that could lead to bearing another man's child, she was trying to defraud her husband and thus adultery was a crime). Modern advances - like paternity tests, child support, birth control, and women owning property independent of their father or husband - have made this ancient system irrelevant, but it was the way an awful lot of the world worked for a really long time. In such a society, polyamorous relationships of any form *other* than multiple women exclusively with one man is obviously not acceptable.