Even if you were getting the speed they promise, you're not allowed to use it. For example, if you get 5 Mbps down and actually saturate that connnection, Comcast calls you a "heavy user" and will warn you about your usage and even throttle you. The problem is that they oversell their lines, like overbooking planes. Most of the time it's not a problem because most people don't even come close to saturating their connection (like there will almost always be cancellations and no shows on planes), but it is a problem when everyone booked on that flight shows up. Same for ISPs. They're promising you something they can't deliver and when you try to use what they promise, they punish you for it. There need to be regulations in place to prevent this. Stop over selling the service. Give customers the speeds you advertise. And allow people to saturate the connection. If i have 5 Mpbs down, I should be able to download 5 Mb of data every second, all day, every day. That's what I'm paying for, and i should be able to use it.

It may not save energy, but dark backgrounds save my eyes. I always love when sites use darker themes. Bright white backgrounds on a 24 inch monitor are very very painful, no matter how far I turn down my backlight.

If they hadn't left XP and IE 6 out in the wild for 6 years before updating it, this would never have happened. Microsoft got complacent and users got complacent. And developers figured it was ok to require IE6 and ActiveX and all that other crap for their mission critical applications and now they're fucked. This is why you should always develop applications with open standards. HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MYSQL, Python, Perl, CGI are so ubiquitous for a reason: they're awesome. And you can do everything you need to do with those instead of using Microsoft-only languages and protocols. Though IIRC, I think Microsoft intended XP to be this sort of ongoing thing. They weren't going to have new operating systems after that, it was supposed to be an "experience" that you subcribed to for updates and whatnot. And while they took their sweet time figuring that out, people got complacent and decided they never wanted change.

I asked for directions from Florida to South Korea and it told me to drive to California and then kayak to South Korea.

My reasons for using OSS are mostly along these lines. It's great to be able to modify the software if I wanted to, but as only a mediocre coder, I rarely would, but it's nice to know that I can if I wanted. However, the lock-in and control factor is my main reason. I like to know that the software I use is mine and that I'm the one in control of my digital life. I can use whatever software I need and not worry about licensing issues, or being locked to a platform or piece of software. I can roll my own solutions for whatever problem I need to solve. And since the code and development cycle are open, there's no mystery as to what is going on with the software.

So I guess, in a way, my thoughts do sort of mirror the "value the things I create myself" theory of TFA.

Giving the benefit of doubt, I'm assuming that you mean that you have a purpose, but have spare processing power and would like to put it to use. In that case I would recommend maybe seeing if you could help out with Folding@home, SETI@home or CERN distributed computing.

I had the same problem with electronics sections of stores. CRT TVs and monitors were PAINFUL to be around. But it wasn't a matter of RF sensitivity, it is an auditory sensitivity. And it's not just electronics. I can hear incredibly high frequency sounds that nearly everyone I know cannot hear.

Except for when your graphics card is shot or you're using an older machine that doesn't have the right 3D compositing. Or when you need to get to it from a non-Mac OS and you can't because the backup is in a proprietary format. Or when you need to backup anything else but Mac OS-based files.

We could only hope so.

The thing with FLOSS is that you see the development process. You see the bastard kids. You see the failed ideas. You see the brainstorming-throw-shit-at-the-wall development until they reach a rev where everything works. You don't see that with closed development processes. You just see an end product and never see the "failed" bin.

The positive in that is that someone might like rev 3.2 that you threw out. And they can take that rev, fork it, and have a product that loads of other people love as well. It gives people freedom and choice that the closed systems deny you. People may hate Unity and GNOME 3.0. So someone comes along, forks GNOME 2, keeps it alive, and people are happy. And maybe by version 1.5 or 2.3, Unity gets really good. And maybe by 3.6 GNOME gets really good. KDE 4.0 was unusable. But the latest release is really great. The whole process lets people have the choice of using what they like instead of being told what to use and how to use it.

I live in Florida, so seasons don't exist. It's sickeningly hot for 10 months, comfortable for about a month and a half, and chilly for 2 weeks.

I'll grant that NT was better than the old Windows-as-a-GUI-for-DOS architecture, but not better than UNIX. NT shined when it came to networking. The DOS-based Windows systems simply couldn't handle themselves in a networked environment, because MS-DOS was never meant to network.

But UNIX at the time had been running on mainframes, minicomputers and desktops for nearly 30 years. It had maturity and stability behind it. Everything about UNIX was ahead of NT. UNIX had been a multi-user, multi-tasking, networked operating system years before NT was a glimmer in Gates' eye.

I'll give Microsoft a lot of credit for their contributions over the years, but this is whitewashing.

The problem is that there are entire segments of goods that are not manufactured in the US at all. There are no electronics manufacturers here. So if you want a computer, phone, tablet, television, dvd player, etc., you have zero choice but to buy foreign. You can't just say "buy american" and it solves all our problems. Most of the things we consume simply aren't made here.

So if one's motherboard cannot handle more RAM, are they supposed to just buy a new one? Is the fact that you have 16 GB RAM an excuse for shotty app development? "Oh, we have plenty of RAM, who cares about system resources?" I have 8 GB of RAM on my rig, but I don't want Firefox taking up 2-3 GB of it just because it can. And there's no reason it should, except for lazy developers. Your "buy more RAM" attitude is snobbish at best, and justifies lazy developers at worst.

There is plenty of available bandwidth. All they want to do is throttle you so they can sell you back the thing they just took away from you.