Dell's business computers can be ordered plain vanilla or without the OS loaded, if you wish. I always recommend their business line, whether the person asking is a business or home user.

Dell's consumer offerings also come with 3 discs for reinstall... Operating System (which is a clean, unbranded Windows disc), Drivers, and Applications and Utilities. If you want a clean system, stop after disc 2.

Compare the performance of something like FoxIt PDF Reader ( http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/ ) against Adobe Reader, and then tell me with a straight face that Adobe's version is better. And if you leave Windows-land and get to Linux, then there's options like evince which are also significantly better than Adobe's offering.

And honestly, the only reason that Flash is installed on my computer at all is for YouTube. If I had a choice in the matter, I wouldn't have that load of crap at all... more often than not, it's used for intrusive ads on websites, not anything of actual value. (gawd, I hate surfing at work, where I am in serious hock if I'm caught using anything other than MSIE 6.0... *shudder*)

We're talking about a distance of 7.3 billion light years. Even if the expected difference in speed is 1m/s (absolutely miniscule difference against the speed of light), we're talking a difference significantly greater than 3.1s in travel time.

In the USA, an election is actually about 50 simultaneous voting opportunities. You may be voting for your congressman, your senator, the President, your town mayor, several state-level positions, the county sheriff, a few propositions, your local school board... the list seems endless. The ballot is so long and so complicated that they have to mail out booklets to voters ahead of time just to explain all of the choices.

That over-complication is what I was getting at. If there's multiple elections going on at the same time, great. Have a plebicite on every bill that passes before congress for all I care. But Don't put 50 different questions on the single ballot. The reason the Canadian system works is that it's so simple, and there's never more than one question on a ballot. If there's more than one question that needs to be asked, do it at multiple polling stations within the same building, with multiple different ballots. Or do a combined ballot, but stick with the large print, idiot-proof way of marking a ballot like we use. Crap like the whole dangling chads fiasco would never happen in the Canadian election system.

And as to your point about there being a lot more voters in the US... it's a fair point. But did you miss my point about each polling station being divided to have between 200-500 voters? 500 as the upper limit to keep it manageable for 2 people to count in a matter of hours, and 200 as a lower limit to preserve the anonymity of the vote... if a polling station only had 3 voters, it'd be too easy to tell who voted for what. There's no reason the same system couldn't be expanded to handle the size of the US electorate... our own election system was initially designed when the population of the country was significantly less than 1/10th what it is now.

It needs a firmware because the technology that controls read/write on the physical medium is not open source, and is probably not common across all drives. For SSD's, you have several different kinds of Flash that are in use, along with several different read/write controllers. The firmware is simply a low-level driver that translates between these read/write machine code and the standardised SATA interface. Some of the more intelligent firmware will also do some kinds of optimisation and load balancing on the flash chips.

You do realize that physical spinny platter-type drives also have firmware? As do optical devices? As does everything else you've got connected to your computer, even the keyboard/mouse and monitor? While some of those firmwares will probably never need to be updated (when was the list time performance on a keyboard was a major factor on a benchmark? The only time I've *ever* seen a problem with one of those, it was on an old iMac running System 9, and the issue was actually the os's input buffer which couldn't keep up with my typing rate that's in excess of 110wpm.), those devices still need and have a firmware.

But enthusiasts have had the ability to update the firmware on their CDROM drives and hard drives for a long time, as a code optimisation there can make a big difference to a benchmark that involves the device... on optical drives, it has even been done to upgrade a 32x drive to 40x or 48x with a firmware update, and there's also pirate firmwares available for DVD drives that reset the region change counter every time you power cycle the device.

Mmm.... you're right, I think. And sometimes you can pin down exactly who it is, too.... like, for example, if you suddenly have 5 posts modded as "troll" (that clearly aren't trolls) the day after you call somebody out for being a self-important twat with no clue what he's actually talking about... (look at my posting history for an example, you get a cookie if you can guess who it is)....

It happens. Some people are idiots. Theoretically the meta-mod system is in place to mitigate that kind of asshattery. Practically, though, Karma really doesn't serve a purpose at this place at all, except that when it gets high enough you have the option of turning off ads on the site without buying a subscription (as if you couldn't do the same thing with AdBlock Plus :P)

You're right that the screen is the biggest drain on power... on my laptop, it accounts for about 40-50% of the juice that the system uses. Most of that comes from the backlight... in fact, battery life goes up by almost an hour by turning the backlight down to respectable levels. The system in question gets very good battery life, though... it's a 15.4" display @ 1680x1050, with a GeForce 8600M GT 256MB. 4GB of RAM, T5450 processor, 120GB 7200rpm hard drive, running Windows 7 (RTM version, from MSDN). I was able to stay online for 3h during a power failure while raiding in WoW... ventrilo, wireless network (UPS to keep home server up), and all. (it's a Dell Inspiron 1520 with the 9-cell "high capacity" battery)

But if I can get that kind of battery life out of a system that's drawing its maximum, what do you suppose would happen to the battery life if I were to swap out the 25W Centrino processor with a 2W ARM? Ok, it probably wouldn't be powerful enough to run WoW, but for something like word processing/web surfing, and a few other power efficiency changes (video card, display resolution/brightness, hard drive for SSD), we could be building laptops with a full size keyboard and screen that's big enough to do actual *work* on that can pull off 8h on a charge.

Y'know, in Canada, we use this funky invention, called pen & paper for voting. You are given a ballot that clearly lists each candidate's name, their party affiliation, and has a white circle to the side. You make your mark in the circle of the candidate you want to vote for. If you mark more than one candidate, or if you mark outside of the circle, or make any kind of personally identifying mark on the ballot, your vote is considered spoiled and rejected. It's really idiot-proof, when you think about it... there's even a placard on display in the voting booths that shows examples of how to correctly mark the ballot, and what will cause your ballot to be rejected.

Each polling station has two members of staff, and will handle between 200-500 voters. At the end of polling day, those two will unseal the ballot box, and count the ballots. Each party has a right to have two representatives serve as scrutineers to make sure the count is done correctly. Once their count is completed, they report their count in to the returning officer for the electoral district. They then make arrangements to get the ballot box and its contents to the office of the RO. As the polling stations report in, their results are updated electronically with Elections, who can announce preliminary results. In cases where the count is close between candidates, a judicial recount is required, and candidats have the right to scrutinize the recount in order to make certain that it is done transparently and correctly. All the while, the anonymity of the vote is assured, because the ballot is rejected if it's personally identifiable. After the recount period, the returning officer will announce the official winner, which *usually* matches the preliminary results. It's an expensive way to do things (EC employs about 190,000 people during the average federal election), but we have our final and official results within days of polling day, not months.

Oh, and our elections are usually done in 36 days, not the year+ that American elections campaigns can take.

So yeah. If only there was a system where the vote could be verified efficiently, quickly, and while preserving the anonymity of the elector. Having a physical ballot where telling who the vote is for is idiot-proof, and where the candidates can oversee the ballot counting and have a right to contest a ballot that is invalid or miscounted... what a concept.

That's 7,776,000 chips/day. I find that more than hard to believe.

They're not building the chips themselves. ARM licenses their chip designs out to other fabricators. When you consider that most of the cell phones in the world have an ARM chip in them, as well as many embedded devices (ATMs, fridges, programmable coffee makers, DVD players, car stereos, iPods/portable MP3 players, programmable remote controls, telephones, etc.), it's really not hard to conceive that they're shipping 2 billion units a year. Actually, I'm a little surprised the number is so low.

I do wish I had mod points...

But the parent is absolutely right, and whoever submitted TFS is either trolling or an idiot. I'm not surprised that the editors haven't read TFA or the law, but the submitter? That's a new low....

Yeah, 'blame Canada' - to put it in context, most Canadians west of Ontario, view Ontario in the same way most Americans view France - that is, hopelessly and utterly broken. So stuff like this isn't a surprise - I don't mean to troll, but those easterners are about as blissfully statist as you can get and still be called a democracy.

You do realize that this particular law is in place in Ontario and Quebec because we were following suit from Alberta and BC?

And actually, the way the law is worded, my iPhone would be exempt. It's docked into a charger/fm transmitter station.

It would be exempt. As long as you were not using it to text or write an e-mail. If you're using it as a hands-free cell phone, then you're fine. If you're using it as a media player, you're fine, as long as you aren't taking your attention from the road to browse through your collection and choose a CD. But in spite of that exemption, there are some things that are still illegal.

The law contains exceptions for EVERYONE to use a cell phone to call 911. So whether it's you calling the police, or the police calling the police, it's the same rules.

The law also contains a blanket exemption for *all* emergency vehicles. Fire/Ambulance as well as Police.

As for the why, it's because those emergency vehicles need to be able to use the radio to stay in touch with dispatch and be able to actually perform their emergency services. There's an exemption for professional uses as well... so that truck drivers and bus drivers can use their radios, too, but I don't think it applies to would-be "professionals" with a mobile office using the cell phone.

Irregardless, TFS is completely wrong and FUD. The law applies to hand-held devices. Cell phones, Nintendos, portable DVDs, GPS devices, etc.. It does not apply to drinking coffee, changing the radio station, or even people who like to drive with one arm hanging out the window.

That's insulting to Neanderthals, many of whom would look like Rhodes scholars in comparison to the majority of /b/.

How can the DoD release software under a copyleft license when the federal government is incapable of holding copyrights in the first place? I thought it was all automatically PD if it's not secret? Not that that's stopped anyone from asserting copyright when it suits them.

Just because the DoD develops software doesn't mean they have to release it at all. You can request the software under Access to Information (FOIA in the US, I think?), but they can always cite national security reasons for not releasing, say, the guidance code for the Tomahawk missile.

Without having read the memo in full, I would presume that they're talking about what license to use when releasing stuff. I'd sincerely doubt that they would use something like the GPL/LGPL to release code, but there are other open source licences that are more in line with what the government does. The ones that leap immediately to mind are the BSD and MIT licenses, both of which had their births in the need to keep government-funded developments in the public domain.