If you believe there's something broken in the kernel (or other open source project), you don't create a petition, you create and submit a patch. If you don't know enough or don't have the skills to create a patch, you're probably not qualified to criticize the implementation.

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov

My U.S. (NJ) provider, Optonline (Cablevision) does not cap or throttle, at least in my area.

Most sites that use animated GIFs have restrictions on size and dimensions (typically 500x500 1MB). The quality of APNG within those restrictions won't be any better.

Fedora makes available new kernels within a few days, for those that want to play with the latest and greatest. The 3.10 kernel should be available within the next 24 hours using the Fedora rawhide kernel nodebug repository.

While I haven't tried on any DRM'd ebooks, Calibre's converters have to options to play with all kinds of spacing and punctuation during conversion (smart punctuation, transliterate unicode to ascii). I've used them when converting text documents and saved web pages to epub, and they make very nice ebooks. I have a hard time believing that this kind of steganography would survive such a reformatting, but I guess we'll hear about it eventually if it does.

> $1400 gets a 50" TV with a 3840x2160 resolution.

That was my thought as well. Rather than getting a 2x2 1920x1080 monitor array, using the $1400 50" Seiki 4K TV as a monitor will give you the same real estate, seamlessly. You only need one Radeon 7970 (or better) to drive it, simplifying the configuration. $1800 for that configuration is not bad at all.

I'm sure that eventually someone will realize that companies are deriving a benefit from an asset they don't own (not on their books), and thus should be paying tax and or compensation.

Mandatory car analogy: New software makes a computer a new machine the same way switching from Exxon gas to Shell gas gives you a new car.

You want Republic Wireless. We have it, and it works great.

Which doesn't address either issue.

In order to do this without exposing your LAN to security issues, and not create liability issues because of the action of guests, it would require more setup than most end-users are capable of.

The WiFi interface would have to be kept separate (not bridged to the LAN), and the WiFi interface would have to be VPN'd to a (legally) safe termination. If companies want users to be able to use open WiFi, they need to step up to make this a default configuration on routers. Sure, those that use openwrt or dd-wrt can configure this, but there's a vanishingly small percentage of users with that skill set.

You sound like you haven't been to the library in a long while. I get all my TV and movie DVDs from the library. All my e-books (which I can check-out online from home via the web). All my CDs. And free WiFi when I'm onsite. Why are you paying for free stuff?

Tablet makers addressed the issue by including HID support, so that keyboards / mice could be used. Some even include a standard size USB port, supporting thumb-drives in addition to input devices. This lets people use a tablet as a laptop when / if needed, and leave the excess baggage behind when it's not.

Microsoft, you drop secure boot, and Google will give you a YouTube app?

Because, for fucks sake, a giant software company like Microsoft can't code one up in a weekend. How sad is that?

The boot sector issue has already been solved by most BIOS by (optionally, under user control in the BIOS configuration) preventing writes to the sector. The only time you need to unlock it is when you want to update the bootloader (relatively rare). I'm still at a loss for the value-add presented by secure boot.