"vast frozen wastelands"? Really?

You must be confused. We are talking about Northern Europe, not the North Pole. While it does get a little bit chilly and snowy in the Northern Finland during the winter, it's very much habitable.

Most of Finnish population outside the main capital area and the other few big "cities" (more like towns, really...) is quite well spread around the countryside. Yet we don't see the idea of providing fast internet access for everyone as an impossible task. Stop crying that it's impossible and that your problems are somehow unique in this world and try to do something about it.

Am I the only one who reads MBH as mega black hole, not micro black hole? It's confusing. If the prefix is micro, it would make sense to use a letter that actually means micro, instead of a letter that represents mega.

question: In eath atmospehere, different wavelengths travel different distances because some wavelengths get absorbedby oxygen in the air or water vapor, some travel over the horizon because they use reflect of the ionospehere, etc... But what about in a total vaccuum? Do different radio waves travel the same distance in a vaccuum?

That's only on the 27" iMac, if I've read correctly, though. The 21.5" is output-only.

How much good quality video can you fit in to, say, 1gb? 0.5-3 hours, depending on quality?

Music? 10-20 hours?

And what about books? Well, you can fit hundreds of them in to a gigabyte. That's enough reading for a decade, at least.

I know bandwidth isn't that big of a problem these days, as it was before, but take what happened for me, for example:

I heard about this interesting science fiction book one day. It didn't sound interesting enough for me to rush to amazon.co.uk to order it, though, so out of a whim I decided to do a search on the pirate bay, just for fun. What I found was this torrent that was filled with science fiction books, a couple of gigabytes in size. It contained basically every single notable book by every single notable science fiction author.

The fact that downloading a whole genre of books is so trivial that it can be done in a half-an-hour these days makes me glad I'm not a science fiction author

This isn't a TeX document either. That would be just wrong.

After all, If we had a way to post readable formulas and uncommon chararacters, this wouldn't be the Slashdot comments section ;)

He's describing the battle of the line, the final battle of the earth-minbari war from Babylon 5.

A company is actually listening what their customers have to say? Thats quite refreshing to hear during these days.

We don't need another Apollo-like mission to the moon. We've already done those enough. It's just going to cost money without any substantial new information. The next mission to the moon should be bigger and a lot different from what we have done before. Either have the balls to commit yourselves and the money to something meaningful or don't do it at all. I'd also like to point out that the moon isn't going anywhere in the near future. If a meaningful mission would cost too much now, there's no shame in waiting for the technology to became more mature.

Opera 10 on Mac does it, too.

And of course I meant two months ago, not three months. Silly me

And let's say... three months ago (30.4.2009), with an exchange rate of 1.32, the EU MacBook would have cost $1031. 32$ Difference. Not that much difference now, right? The prices are a little bit higher to accommodate for changes in the currencies values.

Reading comprehension doesn't seem to be in fashion anymore... Read the GP again.

"If you are clever enough a user to want to right-click, it's simple enough to just go to the System Preference pane for your mouse and turn it on."

A small checkbox in the settings panel and the Apple mouse is a two-button mouse. Press the left side, you do a left click, press the right side, you do a right click. The left and right clicking work exactly like with a normal mouse.

These micro transactions have some ok poential uses, but some of the uses are just down-right silly. Like that FPS game Apple demoed, where you can pay some tens of cents to get a rocket launcher to get an advantage. I, personally, can't wait to see the Slashdot story about a kid who racked up tens of thousands of dollars of debt with his parents credit card by trying to be the best on a silly FPS server.

Maybe they already have something like that in place? Just because there is some sort of construction going on near a secret cable, doesn't mean it will certainly be cut. It would make sense to keep a close eye on construction projects that have a possibility to cut a black wire, but only step in when it actually happens. Telling everyone who does some construction near your secret cable to be careful not cut that secret cable that's not supposed to be there would seem to defeat the whole idea of a secret cable