On any random day, I use the the print button under the file menu, the "save page as", preferences, zoom, history, bookmarks, in the tools menu I use the preferences for add-ons I've got. Occasional use include the "open file" in the file menu, view page source in the edit menu, and the about tab in the help menu. So maybe you don't use the menu bar but I do, just about every day. Removing it would really, really, really piss me off.
You're missing his point. He'd prefer that Mozilla focus on making the browser actually faster, instead of focusing on making it seem faster. See the difference? One is reality, the other is an illusion, the equivalent of delaying startup of services on login to the user has a command prompt sooner, but then has to sit and wait for the cursor to stop spinning before he/she can do anything.
My personal opinion is that the new version looks like ass -- where's the menubar? Ribbon interfaces don't seem fast to me, they seem like an update to UI for the sake of updating things so people will buy the latest version. If this is the best that Mozilla can do, perhaps I'd better give Chrome a try after all.
It's not just sports games, they already did this with Dragon Age: Origins. If you buy the game new you get a code to go get an alternate party member and there's a nice piece of equipment that you can find along the way. If someone's already used that code, you have to pay $10 to get the alternate party member and the nice equipment.
I bought the game new so it didn't affect me, but my solution to DLC in general is not to bother. Maybe I should but I why should I shell out another $7-10 for just another mission, it isn't worth it.
This is an excellent post. To put it another way though, they certainly have a monetary incentive to cap the well: if the well really is leaking 5000 barrels of oil a day, that's 1.8 million barrels per year. At the current crude oil price of $77/barrel, that's $140 million a year they're losing by having all this oil leak out into the gulf since a lot of their development costs are paid for (i.e., drilling the well). Of course, that 5000 barrels/day estimate is malarky, the WSJ is putting it at more like 25,000 barrels per day, that's $700 million per year.
"Wacko environmentalists" have absolutely nothing to do with it. The big problem with doing that is, unfortunately, there's precious little oil left close to shore. You could fill the entire U.S. coast so full of wells it looks like a pin cushion and it would hardly make a dent in the oil price. You can see the chart right here, U.S. oil production has been on a steady decline for decades and will never, ever recover, it doesn't matter how many wells you drill. Even the discovery of the north slope of Alaska and building the pipeline never got the U.S. production to recover from its 1972 peak. ANWR? Forget about it, ANWR's a blip that's laughably too little, too late. This is why the Republican chant of "drill baby drill" is so ridiculous, drilling is pointless without oil to find. We've used up most of the oil near shore, which is why BP was drilling in 5000 feet of water, it has nothing to do with environmentalists.
Yeah but they never get past the "touted as the next best thing" and graduate to the "best thing". The issues are precisely what is the problem with the dome on the deepwater horizon well -- the clathrates (gas hydrates) clog everything. Also, since they're a solid phase, they don't flow very well while trying to extract them. You can try heating sections of subsurface to thaw them, and you get some, but then they freeze again on the way up to the surface. You can try reducing the pressure to inhibit freezing, but then you're also reducing flow. As far as I know, to date there's only one well that's ever actually produced any significant amount of gas from the clathrates and that was essentially a fluke since the clathrates were sitting just below a traditional gas reservoir and as the gas came up from that, the clathrates sublimated and boosted the pressure slightly.
Traditionally, the stumbling block has been a lack of good artwork, but NWN proved that a sufficiently motivated community could come up with decent artwork and 3D models (a lot of which I admit were ripped from elsewhere, but people used them just the same).
This is a natural consequence of intellectual property for something like GW who essentially relies on people consuming their storytelling, artwork and game mechanics. On one hand, the publisher wants you to be able to do what you want with their IP, but on the other, they don't want you to go so far as to start competing with them in the development of IP. It's a moronic business philosophy, the same as putting DRM on your video discs trying to stop attackers who are the exact same people as the users.
I remember seeing this all the time with NWN mods based on Tolkien's work, a couple of them shut down for fear of being sued by Tolkien's estate. The trick, at least with video games, would be to a completely open source setup that doesn't rely on a for profit publisher. I.e., you'd need an open source engine that is relatively decent as far as graphics go, of which there are several; a common use rules set for determining game mechanics (classes, stats, feats, etc.) and then a large body of creative commons artwork to go with it. Traditionally, the stumbling block has been that NWN proved that a sufficiently motivated community could come up with decent artwork and 3D models. I don't know why it is though that such a thing doesn't exist. I suppose it's easier to just pay $50 for a game that is fed to you, less work.
What a load of horse manure! You've got more to fear about "big brother watching you" from Arizona's immigration laws than from their speeding cameras.
Here's the proof. I got a ticket from one of those speeding cameras in the mail. I looked at the ticked and saw that they only had a partial image of the license plate and the vehicle didn't match mine. So, I called them up and told them that and they said, "Okay we'll take it off" and that was the end of it. There was no "big brother" involved, no court date, nothing. In fact, it was probably easier to disprove the ticket from the camera than if I police officer had given it to me since I could point to the photographic proof that the vehicle that was speeding wasn't me. It is not certain I would have been able to do that with a police officer.
Here's some advice: take off the tinfoil hat and go out for a walk in a park somewhere on a nice day. Buy some ice cream. Stop being afraid of things that don't exist. (Unless of course you actually are a terrorist, in which case, I hope a camera catches you the same way the one in times square got caught.)
That's the typical short-sighted libertarian response: Rather than advocate fixing the timing on the yellow lights, which is the correct solution to the problem, you want to throw the baby out with the bath water and remove the lights entirely.
Well this is the same state that passed the law that effectively makes people of latino descent (or anyone with something odd about them) need to carry their birth certificate or other ID on them at all times, regardless of their nationality. They also passed a law requiring that their presidential candidates need to prove they were born in the U.S. What did you expect from the state ranked 50th in education? Somehow I don't expect enlightened thinking and rationality out of the bunch running AZ right now...
Your comment is spot on. Look at the volume of shares traded for PG today. There is no statistically significant spike in volume today that correlates with the price drop. If the sell was staggered, the price drop should have been staggered. Since it isn't, either Google's volume is way off or this story is a crock. Based on the volume data, the sell-off started well before the major drop in stock price.
I suspect that something funny did happen though, in TFA they are quoting that PG was trading down at $30 per share at some point, so something definitely slipped. Fortunately, we managed to avoid another Black Monday, where the DOW went down and stayed down.
Not everything, but no hardware manufacturer has the right to dictate what tools you may and may not use to develop on their platform. As long as the software winds up as code their device can understand, that's all that matters. Apple is way out of line on this issue.
You argument is silly, hardware manufacturers routinely dictate what tools you may and may not use to develop on their platform and where you can use their tools. This is why can't I (legally) develop xbox 360 games for linux, or why I can't write a quartz window manager on WebOS devices. And another thing, Apple writes software too, so pretending that Apple is only a hardware manufacturer is wrong.
Say what?!? MS Office is not "ahead of OO" because it is designed to work for the lowest level of user expertise: over the past decade its development has been degrading, not improving because they increasingly favor eye candy over usability. Specific things I can think of are things like allowing me to have an option to click "enter" to start editing a cell (which they used to allow but have dropped, IIRC they got this from Lotus-123). Another example is to remove the ribbon and allow the user to pick a sane gui. And don't give me that "oh you'll get used to it" line either, because people can get used to being beaten every day too, that doesn't make it any
better.
In the last decade, I have liked each MS Office less and less and they took away features such as these that I used and replaced them with crap that got in my way. In the past, I have grumbled and grudgingly went back to MS Office as I realized that it still had one or two bits of functionality that I actually needed. One of the last straws was when Calc got anti-aliasing on its charts. Now, between iwork Pages and Keynote and OO.org's Calc, the only time I start up MS Office is to check formatting for sending a Word document to someone.
er, oops, the leak is 1,000 to 5,000 barrels per day, not gallons. So, in answer to your question, the Arizona is like a helium balloon losing it's gas over a long period of time but much larger whereas the deepwater horizon well is more like a fire hydrant turned on full blast.
The U.S.S. Arizona is losing about a quart per day. It's tanks had about 1.5 million gallons when it was bombed at Pearl Harbor. Some of that burned but it's not clear how much.
One thing to remember though, the 1,000 or 5,000 gallons per day estimate that this well is losing is probably as low as is remotely justifiable. BP gains nothing by overestimating the amount of the leakage, they do however gain something by underestimating it.
Normally, investigations start because there is suspected wrongdoing. Here's the quote from TFA about the suspected wrongdoing here:
"Since it's public money, there's enough controversy to look in to the possible manipulation of data," says Dr. Charles Battig, president of the nonprofit Piedmont Chapter Virginia Scientists and Engineers for Energy and Environment, a group that doubts the underpinnings of climate change theory.
I'll be the first to recognize that Mann's hockey stick has some issues with the older data. Unfortunately, there is a difference between manipulation of data for a political reason and just being wrong. Most science, when first published, is wrong and scientists try to be clear that the data they present has significant uncertainty attached to it (this is often forgotten by the media looking for a sensational story).
Given that, let me turn your question around: given that as a political entity, Republicans generally have disavowed that any climate change is possible how could anyone as a member of that political entity actually evaluate the difference between Mann being wrong and Mann committing fraud in an unbiased way? I don't think they can, they don't have any credibility on this topic.
This is true. I hate to say it, but unfortunately some scientists do play a little too fast and loose with their research dollars. The fact is, you can't maintain a research program without moving some money around sometimes to fill in the gaps. These are things like one research grant ending, but the graduate student being paid as a research assistant hasn't finished his or her degree quit yet because they showed up half way through the grant starting (the start of the grant and finding the student are almost never coincident), and so you support that student with another grant for a semester or two until they finish. The alternative is to let the student go unpaid with no degree, but this too will be disaster for a professor if he or she can't graduate students.
Unless Mann is a saint, even if he is not truly fraudulent with his funds, he will be hard pressed to defend every last research dollar spent under his program. He could be found guilty for nothing more than what is an accepted practice among researchers because the alternative is a non-workable research program.
Don't hold your breath: Persecution of scientists who support inconvenient ideas is a tried and true tradition of politicians who wish to maintain power. During the cold war, they would call you communist and wreck your career if you supported social reforms. They took away Linus Pauling's passport and only gave it back to him so he could travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. Oppenheimer's reputation never did recover after his security clearance was revoked, even though everything they said about him was a complete lie. Before that, the church would try you for heresy if you were uppity. Also, every time a dictator or oligarchy takes power, they always kill the intellectuals first.
Mann did invite a lot of criticism by not opening his data when people asked him for it. I'm referring of course to the issues with the bristlecone pine and his convolution of several sets of temperature proxies. I haven't heard of any evidence that Mann is involved in any fraud though, but witch hunts by their very nature never come up empty-handed. This one won't either.
For things to happen as discussed in the article, a number of factors would have to change. For instance, people in my situation would need alternatives for high speed Internet delivery.
This I think is the key to the whole situation. The problem is that with a stationary point of access, be it a television cable or a telephone line, you're always going to have a monopoly of service and this means it's ripe for overpricing and poor service at the same time. The sole DSL provider in the last town I lived in royally pissed me off so I went with a wireless provider. That was OK but not great. My biggest problem was that the wireless drivers on linux are crap so my system would freeze every so often. With the 802.11n however, I think that wireless might be a good way to get some competition to the big ISPs. That of course explains why so many ISPs are fighting municipal wireless solutions, but that's a different thread.
What I find particularly ironic about this thread is that Android's browser uses Webkit. That's right, the open phone that's the enemy of Apple's uber-evil closed system is running a fork of khtml created and supported by Apple. Without Apple, Android probably wouldn't be as good. It just goes to show, somebody modded +5 on slashdot doesn't need to actually need to know anything about technology, they just need to be able to denigrate whatever technology company is currently the market leader.
Your statement only applies to cable modems. DSL is a little cheaper to get without a phone line. It's right here. No land line, and $40/mo. for the middle tier service. Right now, I have the middle tier service and no cable: I can watch Hulu just fine. I have a land line, so the bundle is a little cheaper: I pay $33/mo. You should realize that the cable companies are using their monopoly on the lines going to the house to exorbitantly raise your prices on the internet service unless you buy the television service.
I've been a no cable person for about twelve years now and not had a TV for about eight. With all the money I saved not paying cable bills each month, I can afford a really big monitor to watch movies, internet shows on and PBS with my over the air HD antenna and card. It's great. When I first started, I enjoyed going over to other people's houses to watch cable but in the last few years, every time I have turned on a television to watch cable, I've found myself channel surfing constantly and being amazed that anyone actually wants cable. I can easily miss the odd good show that I do want to watch (e.g. I'd love to be watching The Pacific, but I'm not going to get cable and HBO just for one show).
Nor did he say that an open codec was necessarily a bad thing. Read again what he said:
"All video codecs are covered by patents," read the reply. "A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other 'open source' codecs now. Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn't mean or guarantee that it doesn't infringe on others patents. An open standard is different from being royalty free or open source."
So, what I read from this was that somebody is going to go after Theora, and that Jobs and his army of lawyers (if not involved directly in the case) looked at the evidence and decided it was strong enough to stay away. That might very well be the consortia of companies behind H.264 but at this point we have no evidence for or against that. I might easily be wrong, but as far as I can tell, unlike linux, theora hasn't been tested in court. It looks like it will be soon however based on what Jobs said.
I think it's kdawson's subtle dig at all those people who bitched and moaned about how hypocritical Apple is for embracing an open standard (HTML5) over a closed one (flash) when their platforms are sometimes closed as well as the software they themselves produce. Somehow I guess we won't see much outrage about MS endorsing html5. They were a little more tactful than Apple was though: they hedged their bets by saying that flash is still useful. But then again, MS actually has a good working relationship with Adobe, that's a big contrast to Apple whose relationship has been strained (from a user's perspective) since Photoshop never got ported to cocoa for OS X.
As an interesting aside, this is coming fresh on the heels MS canceling its tablet, following great sales of Apple's tablet. I can see that this sign from a few years ago is still relevant today. Shit, the last time I was actually impressed by the innovation in an MS product, it was Windows 2000.
P.S. The irony is that Safari itself has multiple components that are actually open source, i.e. the html renderer is webkit and gui is editable using xcode, which is a lot more open than IE. I myself removed the brushed metal texture from Safari a few years ago back before ditched that look completely anyway. But a lot of/. users have decided that Apple is completely and irrevocably evil and thus can't possibly do any good features. I'm guessing there will be a lack of vitriol here though, despite the fact that IE is more closed than Safari, and historically has resulted in weak compliance for standards on the web, in fact, IE6 enforced a lot of non-compliance due to the OS monopoly and IE6's poor implementation.
Slashdot Mirror
On any random day, I use the the print button under the file menu, the "save page as", preferences, zoom, history, bookmarks, in the tools menu I use the preferences for add-ons I've got. Occasional use include the "open file" in the file menu, view page source in the edit menu, and the about tab in the help menu. So maybe you don't use the menu bar but I do, just about every day. Removing it would really, really, really piss me off.
You're missing his point. He'd prefer that Mozilla focus on making the browser actually faster, instead of focusing on making it seem faster. See the difference? One is reality, the other is an illusion, the equivalent of delaying startup of services on login to the user has a command prompt sooner, but then has to sit and wait for the cursor to stop spinning before he/she can do anything.
My personal opinion is that the new version looks like ass -- where's the menubar? Ribbon interfaces don't seem fast to me, they seem like an update to UI for the sake of updating things so people will buy the latest version. If this is the best that Mozilla can do, perhaps I'd better give Chrome a try after all.
It's not just sports games, they already did this with Dragon Age: Origins. If you buy the game new you get a code to go get an alternate party member and there's a nice piece of equipment that you can find along the way. If someone's already used that code, you have to pay $10 to get the alternate party member and the nice equipment.
I bought the game new so it didn't affect me, but my solution to DLC in general is not to bother. Maybe I should but I why should I shell out another $7-10 for just another mission, it isn't worth it.
This is an excellent post. To put it another way though, they certainly have a monetary incentive to cap the well: if the well really is leaking 5000 barrels of oil a day, that's 1.8 million barrels per year. At the current crude oil price of $77/barrel, that's $140 million a year they're losing by having all this oil leak out into the gulf since a lot of their development costs are paid for (i.e., drilling the well). Of course, that 5000 barrels/day estimate is malarky, the WSJ is putting it at more like 25,000 barrels per day, that's $700 million per year.
"Wacko environmentalists" have absolutely nothing to do with it. The big problem with doing that is, unfortunately, there's precious little oil left close to shore. You could fill the entire U.S. coast so full of wells it looks like a pin cushion and it would hardly make a dent in the oil price. You can see the chart right here, U.S. oil production has been on a steady decline for decades and will never, ever recover, it doesn't matter how many wells you drill. Even the discovery of the north slope of Alaska and building the pipeline never got the U.S. production to recover from its 1972 peak. ANWR? Forget about it, ANWR's a blip that's laughably too little, too late. This is why the Republican chant of "drill baby drill" is so ridiculous, drilling is pointless without oil to find. We've used up most of the oil near shore, which is why BP was drilling in 5000 feet of water, it has nothing to do with environmentalists.
Yeah but they never get past the "touted as the next best thing" and graduate to the "best thing". The issues are precisely what is the problem with the dome on the deepwater horizon well -- the clathrates (gas hydrates) clog everything. Also, since they're a solid phase, they don't flow very well while trying to extract them. You can try heating sections of subsurface to thaw them, and you get some, but then they freeze again on the way up to the surface. You can try reducing the pressure to inhibit freezing, but then you're also reducing flow. As far as I know, to date there's only one well that's ever actually produced any significant amount of gas from the clathrates and that was essentially a fluke since the clathrates were sitting just below a traditional gas reservoir and as the gas came up from that, the clathrates sublimated and boosted the pressure slightly.
This is a natural consequence of intellectual property for something like GW who essentially relies on people consuming their storytelling, artwork and game mechanics. On one hand, the publisher wants you to be able to do what you want with their IP, but on the other, they don't want you to go so far as to start competing with them in the development of IP. It's a moronic business philosophy, the same as putting DRM on your video discs trying to stop attackers who are the exact same people as the users.
I remember seeing this all the time with NWN mods based on Tolkien's work, a couple of them shut down for fear of being sued by Tolkien's estate. The trick, at least with video games, would be to a completely open source setup that doesn't rely on a for profit publisher. I.e., you'd need an open source engine that is relatively decent as far as graphics go, of which there are several; a common use rules set for determining game mechanics (classes, stats, feats, etc.) and then a large body of creative commons artwork to go with it. Traditionally, the stumbling block has been that NWN proved that a sufficiently motivated community could come up with decent artwork and 3D models. I don't know why it is though that such a thing doesn't exist. I suppose it's easier to just pay $50 for a game that is fed to you, less work.
Thank you for that link. This being a side effect of rampant high frequency trading is the first explanation I've read that actually made any sense.
What a load of horse manure! You've got more to fear about "big brother watching you" from Arizona's immigration laws than from their speeding cameras.
Here's the proof. I got a ticket from one of those speeding cameras in the mail. I looked at the ticked and saw that they only had a partial image of the license plate and the vehicle didn't match mine. So, I called them up and told them that and they said, "Okay we'll take it off" and that was the end of it. There was no "big brother" involved, no court date, nothing. In fact, it was probably easier to disprove the ticket from the camera than if I police officer had given it to me since I could point to the photographic proof that the vehicle that was speeding wasn't me. It is not certain I would have been able to do that with a police officer.
Here's some advice: take off the tinfoil hat and go out for a walk in a park somewhere on a nice day. Buy some ice cream. Stop being afraid of things that don't exist. (Unless of course you actually are a terrorist, in which case, I hope a camera catches you the same way the one in times square got caught.)
That's the typical short-sighted libertarian response: Rather than advocate fixing the timing on the yellow lights, which is the correct solution to the problem, you want to throw the baby out with the bath water and remove the lights entirely.
Well this is the same state that passed the law that effectively makes people of latino descent (or anyone with something odd about them) need to carry their birth certificate or other ID on them at all times, regardless of their nationality. They also passed a law requiring that their presidential candidates need to prove they were born in the U.S. What did you expect from the state ranked 50th in education? Somehow I don't expect enlightened thinking and rationality out of the bunch running AZ right now...
Your comment is spot on. Look at the volume of shares traded for PG today. There is no statistically significant spike in volume today that correlates with the price drop. If the sell was staggered, the price drop should have been staggered. Since it isn't, either Google's volume is way off or this story is a crock. Based on the volume data, the sell-off started well before the major drop in stock price.
I suspect that something funny did happen though, in TFA they are quoting that PG was trading down at $30 per share at some point, so something definitely slipped. Fortunately, we managed to avoid another Black Monday, where the DOW went down and stayed down.
You argument is silly, hardware manufacturers routinely dictate what tools you may and may not use to develop on their platform and where you can use their tools. This is why can't I (legally) develop xbox 360 games for linux, or why I can't write a quartz window manager on WebOS devices. And another thing, Apple writes software too, so pretending that Apple is only a hardware manufacturer is wrong.
Say what?!? MS Office is not "ahead of OO" because it is designed to work for the lowest level of user expertise: over the past decade its development has been degrading, not improving because they increasingly favor eye candy over usability. Specific things I can think of are things like allowing me to have an option to click "enter" to start editing a cell (which they used to allow but have dropped, IIRC they got this from Lotus-123). Another example is to remove the ribbon and allow the user to pick a sane gui. And don't give me that "oh you'll get used to it" line either, because people can get used to being beaten every day too, that doesn't make it any better.
In the last decade, I have liked each MS Office less and less and they took away features such as these that I used and replaced them with crap that got in my way. In the past, I have grumbled and grudgingly went back to MS Office as I realized that it still had one or two bits of functionality that I actually needed. One of the last straws was when Calc got anti-aliasing on its charts. Now, between iwork Pages and Keynote and OO.org's Calc, the only time I start up MS Office is to check formatting for sending a Word document to someone.
er, oops, the leak is 1,000 to 5,000 barrels per day, not gallons. So, in answer to your question, the Arizona is like a helium balloon losing it's gas over a long period of time but much larger whereas the deepwater horizon well is more like a fire hydrant turned on full blast.
The U.S.S. Arizona is losing about a quart per day. It's tanks had about 1.5 million gallons when it was bombed at Pearl Harbor. Some of that burned but it's not clear how much.
One thing to remember though, the 1,000 or 5,000 gallons per day estimate that this well is losing is probably as low as is remotely justifiable. BP gains nothing by overestimating the amount of the leakage, they do however gain something by underestimating it.
I'll be the first to recognize that Mann's hockey stick has some issues with the older data. Unfortunately, there is a difference between manipulation of data for a political reason and just being wrong. Most science, when first published, is wrong and scientists try to be clear that the data they present has significant uncertainty attached to it (this is often forgotten by the media looking for a sensational story).
Given that, let me turn your question around: given that as a political entity, Republicans generally have disavowed that any climate change is possible how could anyone as a member of that political entity actually evaluate the difference between Mann being wrong and Mann committing fraud in an unbiased way? I don't think they can, they don't have any credibility on this topic.
This is true. I hate to say it, but unfortunately some scientists do play a little too fast and loose with their research dollars. The fact is, you can't maintain a research program without moving some money around sometimes to fill in the gaps. These are things like one research grant ending, but the graduate student being paid as a research assistant hasn't finished his or her degree quit yet because they showed up half way through the grant starting (the start of the grant and finding the student are almost never coincident), and so you support that student with another grant for a semester or two until they finish. The alternative is to let the student go unpaid with no degree, but this too will be disaster for a professor if he or she can't graduate students.
Unless Mann is a saint, even if he is not truly fraudulent with his funds, he will be hard pressed to defend every last research dollar spent under his program. He could be found guilty for nothing more than what is an accepted practice among researchers because the alternative is a non-workable research program.
Don't hold your breath: Persecution of scientists who support inconvenient ideas is a tried and true tradition of politicians who wish to maintain power. During the cold war, they would call you communist and wreck your career if you supported social reforms. They took away Linus Pauling's passport and only gave it back to him so he could travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize. Oppenheimer's reputation never did recover after his security clearance was revoked, even though everything they said about him was a complete lie. Before that, the church would try you for heresy if you were uppity. Also, every time a dictator or oligarchy takes power, they always kill the intellectuals first.
Mann did invite a lot of criticism by not opening his data when people asked him for it. I'm referring of course to the issues with the bristlecone pine and his convolution of several sets of temperature proxies. I haven't heard of any evidence that Mann is involved in any fraud though, but witch hunts by their very nature never come up empty-handed. This one won't either.
This I think is the key to the whole situation. The problem is that with a stationary point of access, be it a television cable or a telephone line, you're always going to have a monopoly of service and this means it's ripe for overpricing and poor service at the same time. The sole DSL provider in the last town I lived in royally pissed me off so I went with a wireless provider. That was OK but not great. My biggest problem was that the wireless drivers on linux are crap so my system would freeze every so often. With the 802.11n however, I think that wireless might be a good way to get some competition to the big ISPs. That of course explains why so many ISPs are fighting municipal wireless solutions, but that's a different thread.
What I find particularly ironic about this thread is that Android's browser uses Webkit. That's right, the open phone that's the enemy of Apple's uber-evil closed system is running a fork of khtml created and supported by Apple. Without Apple, Android probably wouldn't be as good. It just goes to show, somebody modded +5 on slashdot doesn't need to actually need to know anything about technology, they just need to be able to denigrate whatever technology company is currently the market leader.
Your statement only applies to cable modems. DSL is a little cheaper to get without a phone line. It's right here. No land line, and $40/mo. for the middle tier service. Right now, I have the middle tier service and no cable: I can watch Hulu just fine. I have a land line, so the bundle is a little cheaper: I pay $33/mo. You should realize that the cable companies are using their monopoly on the lines going to the house to exorbitantly raise your prices on the internet service unless you buy the television service.
I've been a no cable person for about twelve years now and not had a TV for about eight. With all the money I saved not paying cable bills each month, I can afford a really big monitor to watch movies, internet shows on and PBS with my over the air HD antenna and card. It's great. When I first started, I enjoyed going over to other people's houses to watch cable but in the last few years, every time I have turned on a television to watch cable, I've found myself channel surfing constantly and being amazed that anyone actually wants cable. I can easily miss the odd good show that I do want to watch (e.g. I'd love to be watching The Pacific, but I'm not going to get cable and HBO just for one show).
So, what I read from this was that somebody is going to go after Theora, and that Jobs and his army of lawyers (if not involved directly in the case) looked at the evidence and decided it was strong enough to stay away. That might very well be the consortia of companies behind H.264 but at this point we have no evidence for or against that. I might easily be wrong, but as far as I can tell, unlike linux, theora hasn't been tested in court. It looks like it will be soon however based on what Jobs said.
I think it's kdawson's subtle dig at all those people who bitched and moaned about how hypocritical Apple is for embracing an open standard (HTML5) over a closed one (flash) when their platforms are sometimes closed as well as the software they themselves produce. Somehow I guess we won't see much outrage about MS endorsing html5. They were a little more tactful than Apple was though: they hedged their bets by saying that flash is still useful. But then again, MS actually has a good working relationship with Adobe, that's a big contrast to Apple whose relationship has been strained (from a user's perspective) since Photoshop never got ported to cocoa for OS X.
/. users have decided that Apple is completely and irrevocably evil and thus can't possibly do any good features. I'm guessing there will be a lack of vitriol here though, despite the fact that IE is more closed than Safari, and historically has resulted in weak compliance for standards on the web, in fact, IE6 enforced a lot of non-compliance due to the OS monopoly and IE6's poor implementation.
As an interesting aside, this is coming fresh on the heels MS canceling its tablet, following great sales of Apple's tablet. I can see that this sign from a few years ago is still relevant today. Shit, the last time I was actually impressed by the innovation in an MS product, it was Windows 2000.
P.S. The irony is that Safari itself has multiple components that are actually open source, i.e. the html renderer is webkit and gui is editable using xcode, which is a lot more open than IE. I myself removed the brushed metal texture from Safari a few years ago back before ditched that look completely anyway. But a lot of