Oops, I just actually looked at my phone and I guess its only 1 "bar". Somehow I had in mind that there were 4 total.

Unless you use 802.11n at 5GHz, which is really necessary to see most of the speed benefits anyway. At 5GHz the range is pretty terrible.

I get 2 bars on my iPhone from my Linksys WRT 610N from about 20 feet away through two thin walls (in the bathroom of my one bedroom apartment). The upside is that that particular router has 2 radios, so it can run on 2.4GHz simultaneously, allowing me to access it from outside where the 5GHz doesn't reach.

When you pay for water and electricity, you are actually buying them. The utility company produces them (well, with water they pump and purify it, and might have to pay for their water source depending where you are and how the service works) and sells them to you.

Comcast doesn't produce the bits they deliver to me, they simply transfer them from someone else who I might be paying for the bits. If they can actually deliver the 16Mb/s they claim they can to me at any time of day regardless of "congestion" (of course they can't), then the cost difference to them of delivering nothing for a month and maxing out that connection for a month is negligible. Their routers might draw slightly more power, but the total cost of delivering an additional bit (or 100GB) is next to nothing compared to the cost of making the network available to me.

The idea behind ISP transfer limits is totally different than paying per unit for water or electricity. With water and electricity you pay per unit (usually - in my hometown of Anchorage, AK water is actually a fixed rate I think) because it costs the company to sell you a unit. With ISPs, they want to limit your use because the speeds they charge you for aren't actually the speeds they can deliver if everyone actually uses their connection. So instead of telling you realistic speeds, they just make sure people can't actually use their connection, making it more likely that you will be able to use yours (until you too hit the cap).

Of course there is the totally separate issue of most ISPs also selling content that they would much rather you get via pay per view, etc than via the Internet...

Only if you consider RIAA lawyers to be "the court".

Keyboard, multi-tasking and a much more open development model. To name a few.

Because they can't control how you use a tethered computer. Try torrenting something on an un-jailbroken iPhone, then tell me how much it is like "another computer".

I keep seeing people posting about how much more advanced than us a species would have to be to reach earth. I simply don't see why thats true. To my knowledge we have at least general knowledge of every major technology we would need to travel between stars, and thats with NASA never having had a budget over about $34B 2007 dollars, and currently closer to half of that. If we spent less time and money on killing each other and bailing each other out, and maybe cared about something other than our own social problems, there's no reason we couldn't have people on other planets as we speak.

Consider this:
For about $135B 2005 dollars we effectively went from flying propeller planes to repeatedly placing men on the moon.
Since 2001 we have spent about $865B in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since Fall of 2008 we have committed about $12.2 Trillion Dollars to "Economic Recovery" plans


The barrier between us and the stars is not some insurmountable technology one, its a matter of money and willpower. The only hope I see is that private interests (including SpaceX and other companies) will pursue these technologies (considering that hundreds of companies have higher revenue than NASA) otherwise I'm afraid we may never get off this miserable rock before we kill ourselves off. You wouldn't bet the uptime of a moderately important website on a single webserver, yet we continue to bet the survival of our species on a single rock floating in space.

But it seems very confused about what it is: http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=wikipedia

I don't see what this has to do with consumers, as the summary seems to imply. Also, if you RTFA, no one related to the Obama administration "ruled" on anything, rather "President Obama's attorney filed papers with the Supreme Court supporting an earlier court decision that found Cablevision's remote storage DVR to be legal."

New Summary:

The Solicitor General filed a brief supporting a one company over another, after the Supreme Court already ruled that the first company was correct. Both companies were from industries that financed Obama's campaign and have done everything in their power to fuck the consumer, so the ruling is essentially meaningless to you unless you happen to own lots of fiber or lots of IP.

Really? Where are you from?

Doubtful

Really?

Sounds like fglrx destroyed your gentoo. I'm running the latest xf86-video-ati in portage on a RadeonHD 4850 with excellent results.

Look into Puppet or CFEngine (we use CFEngine but am considering switching to Puppet eventually). They're both extremely flexible management tools that will trivially handle package management, but you can use them to accomplish almost any management task you can imagine, with the ability to manage or edit any file you want, running shell scripts, etc.

The work flow goes something like this:
1. Identify packages that need update (have a cron job run on every box to email you packages that need updating, or just security updates, however you want to do it)
2. Update the desired versions in your local checkout of your cfengine/puppet files (the syntax isn't easily described here, but its very simple to learn).
3. Commit/push (note that this is the easy way to have multiple administrators) your changes. Optionally have a post commit hook to update a "master files" location, or just do the version control directly in that location.
4. Every box has an (hourly? Whatever you like) cron job to update against your master files location. At this time (with splay so you don't hammer your network) each cfengine/puppet client connects to the master server, updates any packages, configs, etc, runs any scripts you associated with those updates, then emails (or for extra credit build your own webapp) you the results.

You might be interested in the Touch Book from Always Innovating. At this point they're only taking pre-orders, but it definitely looks pretty neat. The keyboard is optional and detachable, so its not really "built in", but it gives you a good compromise between netbook and tablet, and its ARM based and cheap. I'm sure people will have Android going on it within days of release, as its basically a Beagle Board (which Android already runs on) with a touchscreen.