Wow... that means I wasted 30 years of my life so far!

Btw does anyone knows which keyboard has cursor keys that don't wear out so quickly? I hate having to stop the game just because I have to buy yet another keyboard.

For a whole association it's even harder to pull off such an extortion than for a single company due to politics (not every member will be interested in doing this for various reasons) and technical issues (many will have outsourced Internet service for starters).

Besides, what's stopping those students to just use their mobile phone for Internet connection if they can't to the sites they want to? That students are a major market for certain sites, also means the students want to access the sites. Blocking a site will just tell them to find a workaround, and with mobile Internet between affordable and dirt cheap (I pay the equivalent of less than USD10 a month for unlimited data and 1200 minutes or so airtime) the fixed line connection becomes less and less essential. College asks them to get a book for their course, they'll get the book. Is it not over the fixed line, it's just done over the mobile.

Part of the problem you face there, is that the summary mentions "college towns across America". So if you're dealing with a business to whom these 15,000 are important, you're talking about a national business, and unless it's highly specialised it'll be too big to care about you.

On the other hand, any local business is local (and "local" I read as "operating in one town or less"), which means any local business would target no more than a fraction of the 15,000: the faction that happens to live in that town.

It depends on how big that 35,000 students is on their total market. For some sites (Netflix) it's nothing. For other, it may be a large portion.

All manufacturers have to pay these costs, so they don't lose competitiveness. It just makes the handsets a bit more expensive than they would otherwise be - and as a result it's the consumer that suffers. They have to pay more for their phone.

There won't be a single manufacturer that can't compete due to these costs. They're the same for everyone. Just like the physical components, this is just a part of the bill of parts of a phone. And if a phone manufacturer doesn't pay for those patents, they can't sell their phone in a market where those patents are valid.

Agreed.

I'm also one of those oldies, and never heard of that particular site. However I'm on Slashdot from not too long after the beginning (many years of just reading - not commenting) - my friends told me about this site over a beer in the students' club. Good old days.

To come back to Slashdot and Google: I'm using Google quite extensively to search for all kinds of topics, including tech related ones. I don't recall having ever seen a link to a Slashdot article appear in Google, not even a link to a comment (which is of course where the real interesting bits can be found), probably as Slashdot doesn't produce any new content, they just aggregate what they find elsewhere. If Metafilter is indeed also just an aggregator, good that Google skips their links and instead provides the links to the actual content instead.

It definitely helps. There is a lot of money sloshing around the market, looking for a place to go.

For more dramatic examples, look at China. There is a lot of money in that market, locked up in yuan, and capital restrictions prevent it from leaving the country (yes, there are plenty of leaks, but the restrictions are overall quite effective). This money is looking for a way out, somewhere to be put to use, somewhere to be invested and increase in value.

The banks are not it with their minimal interst rates. So there's been the Shanghai stock market bubble, with stock prices going up far above reasonable when looking at the real value and earnings of the underlying company. Real estate is going up, another market that can mop up cash. The price of pu-erh tea has exploded, thanks to speculation. Gold is yet another example where Chinese buyers started to put down their money.

The US capital market is of course more open, with more places for money to go, also abroad. But sure if you pump more money into the market, that money has to go somewhere. Some may go to improving the general economy (spent on all kinds of products and services), some will be invested.

Some may even argue this is a side effect of our long and overall peaceful run since WW2. Wars after al are destructive, and cost a lot of money to wage and for the country to rebuild afterwards, allowing excess money to be taken out of the system for good. The current US budget issues nicely highlight how expensive and destructive war really is - and that's for the area where the war itself isn't being fought - just imagine how destructive it is for the area where the bombs actually fall.

Investors do throw a lot at those companies - but mostly to cover running expenses.

The billions they use to buy up other companies come mostly by using shares, valued at a certain amount. E.g. a smallish company issues say 10,000 shares, sells 100 of them at $100 each, raising $10,000 cash. The rest of the stock, those 9,900 shares, are booked at $990,000 total.

Next thing you hear, company A buys up company B. They use 5,000 of their shares to pay for it, valued at $500,000. So they buy the company for $500,000! Or do they? Well, the ones that accept those shares now have a share in the new company - but good luck selling them for cash at $100 each...

That's what Facebook et.al. are doing. Just add a bunch of zeros to the numbers above, I kept it simple for readability. Now would our example company go bust, they may wipe out $1,000,000 in value, but investors stand to lose only $10,000. So nothing much lost, really. Makes it easy to inflate bubbles, easy to pop them, and all with little impact to the economy at large.

This of course in contrast to the recent banking crisis, where real money was lost. Lots of it.

That's done all the time. And then they're let out an hour a day or so to walk around a slightly larger space (like the Orca's get to a bigger pool to perform tricks), and get some exercise.

This is what's called "prisons". Humans generally don't seem to like it, but they also don't live that much shorter inside a prison than outside (it's suggested that it cuts lifetime to about a quarter of natural lifetime, which for humans would mean most prisoners should be dead within 20 years behind bars).

Oh sure, and those with the high gun ownership rates and absence of government are the best places to do business, of course!

Sex is not the problem - the Africa is the fastest growing continent in the world, by far! We really don't have to provide that. On the contrary, that's something you'd want to slow down. Or at least educate the population on - where the Internet has a great role top play again. Oh, and the churches as well. The "no sex before marriage" moral isn't all that bad. Especially if combined with proper sex education and the provision of contraceptives and condoms as "second best" option.

Anything I had for the last 15 years or so has been booting from USB just fine. And anything older than ten years is probably not suitable for this purpose anyway, and there are plenty of younger disused computers out there so you don't need so really old ones.

Drivers is usually not much of a problem when talking about Linux. It comes with drivers for all common and lots of less common hardware included, and older (even legacy) hardware tends to be supported best - this in contrast indeed to the latest and greatest hardware.

For a large part of Africans, those problems have been solved long time ago (if they every really existed to begin with). That's the part of Africa this project is useful for - and likely by pushing up the standard of living of those Africans, there'll be a trickle-down effect to other parts of the continent. Overall more and overall better paying jobs means more people can get to work, and those that work get better income, which hopefully is self-reinforcing.

The best help for those countries is to help them to help themselves, and helping them improve their Internet access and computer literacy is one of those ways. Sending large quantities of free food and clothing is great for emergency relief, after that it's becoming destructive (as it kills off any local food/clothing production).

There is a major difference between most African countries and most Asian countries, and that is a strong, stable government. This as political stability is a requirement for businesses to thrive. In too many countries, larger companies need their own private army to protect their factories. You don't need that in China, or even Myanmar. Those countries are far more stable than most African countries. (note: in this argument I don't care about WHAT KIND OF government there is, just that it is STABLE).

Secondly, China alone has a far larger population than the whole of Africa. And even China is currently suffering from serious labour shortages, with factories not being able to take on more orders as they don't have the people to manufacture them.

I agree with you that Africa is a great candidate to become the next low-cost manufacturing hub, however first they'll have to get their politics in order. A stable government, that is firmly in power, and that rules the whole country, not just the big cities. Factories need space, they're not in the cities, they're out of the cities. Without proper safety there, and at least a half-decent protection of land ownership, it's a no-go.

You just explain why people watch only such a small subset of channels.

For you the Spanish channels may not be interesting, for someone else they may be all they watch.

And be glad that Amazon is not good enough for all of us! They're monopolistic enough already. Try to imagine a world where the only place to buy stuff is Amazon (and, where the only place someone can sell stuff, is Amazon). Just the though of it scares me.