My wife's a faithful Mormon, I've listened to plenty of what they have to say. My wife told me about the time when God suddenly gave those guys a revelation about an important issue that an omnipotent Creator would totally lie awake at night worrying about:

"You can only have one piercing per ear."

Thousands of chaste, faithful Mormon women who happened to have a second piercing in their own ears immediately felt compelled to take out one of their earrings and let the piercing close up. Because God told them to.

I'm not disputing that most of what they say is feel good stuff, "Love God and your neighbor" "Take good care of your family" etc. It just strikes me that their "revelations" seem much more like the rantings of the "get off my lawn" set (Dern kids these days with their piercings) than something God himself would concern himself with.

Also, I don't like the way the LDS church in Utah organized phone banks there to call Californians and tell us how to vote on our recent bigotry proposition, Prop 8. Californian atheists don't set up phone banks to call Utahns and ask them to enact pro-Gay legislation, I'd just like the same courtesy in return.

If I had my way, all churches would lose their tax-exempt status. Those of them who do actual good work (I know LDS has a large charity budget) instead of only political lobbying can set up separate, tax-exempt charitable organization arms and donate to those for tax deductions.

"Called" to the position? Indulge me for a moment and pretend that you don't believe in the supernatural. So when someone is "called" to a high church office, what that REALLY means is that the other high church officers like you and hooked you up. Don't make it sound like it's a random lottery of all church members. It's politics, plain and simple. Whoever is more popular among the almost-elite will get the elite "calling."

And the scam is that the church leaders want power, not money. Money only goes so far. True power is controlling the lives of millions of worshippers the way those old men in Utah do with all my Mormon friends (especially the women).

No, I'm not saying the government should shut y'all down. Just that y'all should quit and if you must "believe," find a faith that's free.

WTF? The Mac Mini costs that much by itself after tax. I call bs. I would never use a mac for anything TV related. In that department, a PC can do the same job for half the cost. After all, you're going to use some kind of 10-foot interface anyway so it doesn't matter that Windows looks like a piece of crap. What's the point of a Mac in your living room unless you plan to buy every TV show for $2 a pop?!!

PS: I wrote this on one of my two MacBooks.

Nothing to do with HD? Cool, I didn't know you could do 720p over NTSC, that's awesome! /I know that having DTV doesn't mean you have HDTV, but I am pretty sure NOT having digital TV does mean you DON'T have HDTV. Unless you are getting your HD source from cable or sat. Which would be an obtuse position to take since we're talking about OTA.

I wonder if the current IBM employees know that they'll be required to store up to 4 more Sun servers under each desk now because of this new program.

> In California, if you shoot someone in your house and you don't kill them, they can come back and sue you.

but, what if you do kill the burglar? Can their kid/mom/baby mama sue you for wrongful death, thus resulting in even greater liability? Just wondering.

I live in CA but i have no respect for criminals so I'm all for them not having the right to sue for things they could have avoided by not being criminals.

>A penny represents 1 cent, but that's not what it's worth.

That's right. It's worth NOTHING. Because (roughly) nobody ever uses them for anything but gathering dust. The penny is a symbol for the power of lobbying against the public interest (Zinc lobby) and also of retarded sentimentalism ("OH NOES when i was a kid a penny had a little bit of value so we must always keep it around forever even though it's worthless now and I never use them").

Secondly, your argument makes no sense because if you didn't make that penny you could use that money to mint currency that would be actually used (or you can at least agree used more). Continuing to make pennies is a foolish waste of energy and resources.

> Can't the browser update when it's running

Uh, if the updating code is running, what do you care whether it's running in the process with the main browser process or in its own process where you can see what resources it's consuming separately? Do you think the number of processes is that important? I would rather have it in a separate process.

> Google published Chrome to increase its overall face time with its customers so that's why they'll cram ...

Yay conspiracy theory! I'm sure the engineers who designed the updater were thinking exactly that when they made that architectural decision.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Was_Made_to_Love_You

That's all I've got...

Amen. Who the hell cares if he uses a Zune or uses Windows or whatever? News flash, a lot of people use Windows. Even a lot of people use Zunes! It already came out that they don't even LET the president use email or a blackberry (OMG NOT AN IPHONE), so he probably won't be using computers much for the next 4 years.

HOW can anyone care about this crap?

I'm sure he asked a staffer to go get him an MP3 player and this is what the guy found at Best Buy or whatever. I'm sure somebody had a windows machine to load it up with tunes. Do you really think Obama-land is a Mac-only shop?? Is there even such a thing as a whole office without ONE windows box??

I would buy a Zune if I used a Windows machine on a regular enough basis to load it.

Australia is quite a ways behind other parts of the world in regards to broadband, but I can still choose between at least five MAJOR providers, and likely fifteen more medium sized ones without any hassles.

That's real nice, mate! But I live in the USA. Guess how broadband works here? A duopoly. If you're lucky. And sorry, you're not winning any points with Americans talking about how this all worked out dandy down in Oz. Guess what? Most people on /. seem to think your broadband sucks worse than ours. If you don't agree, search this article's comments for Australia and see what percentage are "Shut up, here we have a ludicrously low cap!" Also, Australia relies on undersea cables for most of its traffic as someone pointed out because all the content is in EU or US. I'd wager 95% or more of the traffic I consume as an American comes from this continent. Hell, 90% probably originates from Santa Clara County. There's no need--besides greed--to ration bandwidth in this manner.

Where are all your ISPs? Sounds like it's a fantastic market for companies to jump in

Surely you're joking. I have two pipes into my house. One owned by ATT and one owned by Comcast. Cable companies don't share the cable at all anymore (there was a brief regulated period where you could get multiple Cable ISPs but conservative bought politicians let cablecos stop sharing.) Technically you can get an alternative ISP over the phone line, but the same politicians decided it was unfair to require ATT to rent access to other ISPs for a fair price, so your choices are: AT&T DSL: $15-$40 for various speeds of consumer DSL (depending on what speeds they can provide you without upgrading their sorry infrastucture) OR Alternative ISP: $40-80 for the same range because AT&T gets a huge cut of that for the line rental. This is how it is in the entire country. Did I mention that this is the same AT&T that has no plans for Fiber-to-the-premises?

What you say = Net Neutrality. I agree.

1) Yes, actually there is something that says these limits won't shrink. It's called competition. Blah blah capitalism free market beautiful system Ayn Rand Country First blah blah.

Or both incumbent providers who together control almost all the cable in the ground could, you know, collude anticompetitively to both have terrible caps, and get away with it. Kind of like the way the cell phone carriers get away with all requiring contracts to be a normal postpay customer even if you buy your own phone. (note: I know VZW has sort of stopped this, but how many years did they do this? Class Actions scared them into line, not government regulation.)

2) What about HD? I watch HD tv through either cable or free TV...blah blah piracy is bad.

Oh, you do? That's nice. Many people watch HD content that they pay for over the Internet. Have you heard of iTunes? How about Netflix's online offerings? You want to kill that emerging market because it would be better for ATT/Comcast's bottom line not to have to invest in infrastructure to support progress. Also, I pirate network TV shows over the Internet even though I pay for TV service too--sometimes I forget to DVR something. Recently one member of my family wanted to start watching a show from the beginning, that is in its second season, so I downloaded season 1. I don't watch commercials either way so I don't see how I'm hurting anyone. Color me pirate, I guess, but even if I am that doesn't make people who pay for their content pirates.

I use more and pay less now blah blah

That is irrelevant. Up until Comcast intro'd their cap, I'd have agreed with you--"It's all been getting better up until this point. My argument today is that it peaked and we're going to be paying more in the future for less. Less freedom. Less of what we want, more of what the ISP wants you to have. Your internet connection will be like the late '90s AOL, except when you want to go out to the "www channel" you'll incur additional charges. And capitalism isn't going to do shit when both incumbents pull the same shenanigans. Ha, if you're lucky enough to have two choices and not just one! The best ATT can do at my house in a large city is a theoretical max of 3Mbps whereas my Comcast is (real-world) over 10Mb. So even if ATT was the white knight you are telling capitalist fairytales about, fighting for my business by offering no caps, I'd be faced with good speeds and caps, or sad third-world speeds and no caps. Both of which suck.

I have no problem with partners offering "unmetered downloads" as long as normal content is not filtered/slowed/capped in any way.

HELLO?? No, "normal content" is not "filtered/slowed/capped"-- it's BILLED TO YOU AT A DEAR COST. Gasoline isn't slowed or capped either but you have to pay for it by the gallon.

All they're doing is replacing the "degrading traffic that hasn't been paid for by both sides of the pipe" with "charging a lot of money for said traffic, after a token traffic 'allowance' which we could adjust at our discretion at any time without your consent."

These limits appear high now, but they're planning for the future:

1. Nothing says these limits won't shrink. Maybe 250 becomes 25 but it's ok because we provide A LIBRARY OF 150 FREE ON-DEMAND MOVIES FROM COMCAST STRAIGHT TO YOUR PC! FREE!!!
2. Think about HD.
3. Think about how much bandwidth you use today versus 10 years ago. I'll bet you never thought you could bump up against 10x what you used then. But many people did.

"OK, our standard plan is 250 GB of traffic a month, but if you download movies from us, we don't count it against your limit"? As long as they're not blocking the traffic of competitors and treating all their traffic the same way (IE, their competitors traffic all counts equally against your 250 GB limit), then again, so?

Bollocks bollocks bollocks!

Okay here I will prove why you are dead wrong.

I will try to make a table:
Cap / $perGB above cap / Whether it seems harmless
250GB / $2 / Harmless (according to you)
100GB / $5 / Harmless?
50GB / $10 / ??
1GB / $10 / OH CRAP LOOK HOW MUCH THIS SUCKS

All the ISPs have to do to accomplish that last scenario above is make this their wet dream of extorting all the fun sites like YouTube is to expand their "this bandwidth doesn't count" list to include enough sites (who pay for the honor, of course) that users have *some* place to go inside the walled garden for each service. In 2 years, here's how the Internet will work:

You type in YouTube.com.
AT&T Interstitial pops up on your screen "Avoid Overages! Use AT&Tube Powered By Vimeo instead of YouTube. It's just as good, but FREE and only for AT&T subscribers! * You can click HERE to continue to YouTube. Your usage will count toward your 1GB allowance. Further usage will be billed at $10/GB. Watching a typical video may cost you up to $1. Terms and conditions apply. See your 3-year user contract for details."

AT&T will have iTunes, Comcast will have Rhapsody. Time Warner will have Napster. Netflix will probably not have the clout to convince any ISP to forego pay-per-view sales by allowing unmetered access to it so they'll go under. Amazon will pay one or both of them if they want to stay in the download business.

No one will be able to afford to use non-ISP-affiliated services because they know they will exceed their cap.

Whoever pays AT&T will end up on the "free bandwidth" list, whoever doesn't will be in "ZOMG OVERAGE" land, and users will actually demand the interstitial warnings so they don't unknowingly run up a $5000 "long-distance-internet" bill.

It will be EXACTLY like making phone calls used to be before unlimited long distance became commonplace. Every call you have to check the number carefully to see if it's in your local free calling area or else you have no idea what to expect.

If you disagree, please explain exactly why they wouldn't do what I describe. And if you say customers will leave them for the competition, please punch yourself in the face since there's usually only 2 choices available to you and they will BOTH be doing this--as this article demonstrates.