If I, as a third party, want to offer telephone services that use broadband internet (VoIP), Comcast will be able to make my access to their consumers so crap

Well it's a shame then the FCC rules under discussion would have nothing whatsoever to do with that,.

Gosh, I wonder what you are getting if it's not at all what you thought. I wonder what you are getting from an agency intertwined with the cable companies, when you ask them to provide regulation from same companies... Perhaps utterly the opposite of what you wanted?

What would you recommend? Morse is well understood and standardized in many contexts like HAM radio. Perhaps an adapter that can the breaths and turn them into phonemes that then get converted into text? A cloud NLP application tying into such a device (simple as querying Google with the output and seeing what it suggests) could result in some very useful (and maybe even tailored) responses.

Just wondering, though, how would backspaces be handled...

When people read the summary of this story, I'm sure a lot will be like "blah blah blah blah MAGNETS GOOD FOR HEALTH AND CURE EBOLA blah blah blah.

This problem could have been easily avoided. Send iTunes users an announcement that they can go to the store and get the U2 album for free, if they want to.

That's how it worked for everyone that didn't enable auto-downloads of purchases (which is not enabled by default).

I *wanted* the album, and it took me two days to figure out how to get it. It did not appear for me anywhere automatically...

I can't believe people get worked up over being given music for free. Hey guess what, all sorts of free crappy music is in whatever music streaming service you favor also. Why not complain about that?

They're both still vulnerable to supernovae. You should have at least one backup in another galaxy.

Fun fact, the real reason for the Voyager mission was someone wanted a permanent backup of William Shatner singing "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds". You didn't ever see the back of that record they included with Voyager, did you... now you know why.

Welcome to international rules of war. They're chock full of semi-absurdities like this. One of my favorite is the fact that the M2 .50 caliber machine gun is not classified as an anti-personnel weapon. That means you are not allowed to shoot people with it. You can, however, shoot it at any sort of military equipment, including any that may be carried or worn by an enemy soldier.

I say "semi-absurdities" because with all of these rules you can construct situations where they do make a difference and make war more "humane" (to the degree that makes sense). But you can also always construct common scenarios where they're absurd.

I addressed it squarely. Advertisers don't get information from Google, but don't complain (much) because Google is so effective at targeting. Apple, apparently, isn't, and so advertisers feel like they're not able to get adequate value.

You also completely ignored my point that if you want to know what advertisers see you can go look for yourself.

Better, study both. Deutsch does add some new ideas.

Completely different situation. Had the other poster said there existed people who believed what he was saying, I'd have had to agree. But he didn't, he imputed those beliefs to me, specifically.

Among other things.

I'm not an anthropologist or a psychologist, so I'm not really equipped to explain it in detail, but ask one. Or do some searches. My first search got this top hit: http://www.apa.org/monitor/201.... I'm sure with a little more effort you could find the studies that appear to demonstrate that the need to believe is pretty deeply wired into our basic cognitive structure.

If cognitive psychologists have it right, that's not true. Unless we find something else to replace it. I offered (at length) a possible option in another post on this story: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

So... do you expect CPUs to be 128-bit in 2024?

Personally, I wouldn't be surprised if we stuck with 64-bit for a very long time. At least with respect to address space, it seems unlikely that we're going to have devices with tens of exbibytes of RAM. Or even addressable persistent storage which is touched enough that it's worthwhile having a flat address space.

2^64 is a really big number. 16 EiB = 16,384 PiB = 16,777,216 TiB = 17,179,869,184 GiB. I mean, yeah, Moore's Law and all, but even in a world where high-resolution holographic video records of entire lifetimes are common it's hard to see what machines would do with 18 billion GB, much less storage so much larger that bank-switching is inconvenient. 640,000 TiB should be enough for anyone.

And if we do make the jump to 128-bit, there will clearly never be any point in moving beyond that. Not for addressing, anyway. Not unless our computers are "made of something other than matter, and occupy something other than space", as Schneier put it.

I'd love to hear cogent counterarguments, though.

Keep in mind that the percentage of revenue artists get from album sales has historically been heavily genre-dependent. Rockers in general, and heavy metal and alternative rock in particular, have long derived most of their income from touring and merchandise. They treat album sales primarily as PR for their live performances. In contrast, with pop and top 40 groups, it's the reverse. Most of them use touring as PR to generate album sales.

U2 is actually one of the latter, even though they're rockers, BTW. They put on such extravagant live performances that their financial goal on tour is to avoid losing money (and they often fail). They do make some money on merchandise, but most of U2's income is from album sales, or at least used to be. Perhaps that's changed; my information is 10+ years old. The source of my information, BTW, is a gentleman (and I use the word deliberately, he was, unlike many of the people I encountered in the music biz) I worked with at Universal a few years back. He had been the manager of U2's account for several years, responsible for the financial aspects of the label's U2 business including royalties and their advances and recoupment.

All hail open source - Chrome is not (completely) open source, Firefox is. Google doesn't want or care if you want 64bit (or don't want it).

I've not over years of use, I guess it's that weak-ass Gorilla Glass 2 the original post was wishing for. Hopefully Apple ditched them if you can simply scratch it with keys.