None of this applies to the US. US Carriers that subsidize phones charge the same rates for non-"pay as you go" plans regardless of how you acquired the phone. US carriers that don't subsidize phones just add the price of the phone divided by some number of months to your monthly bill.

I have just started to build out my 10Gbps backbone at home, and get over 380MB/sec on disk transfers (RAID arrays on both ends). I've got some major tuning to do, though, as I only see about 600MB/sec on the network level. I'd like to get that up to about 900MB/sec. I have switches at several places in the house that give me 1Gbps wired to most rooms. One bedroom gets wired connectivity from DirecTV cabling, and there are two WiFi access points for various portable devices.

Otherwise, I have a CentOS box serving as an iSCSI SAN (14TB) for 3 ESX hosts. I also have a separate file server (9TB), and several user workstations (desktops and laptops).

The only hardware I use that is designed to be rack mounted is the networking gear, because most rack-mount servers are too loud.

When I said "cable companies", I was referring to their ISP portions.

And those still aren't common carriers. No ISP is. That's the whole reason they are complaining about the FCC thinking of reclassifying them under Title II, which would make them common carriers.

I actually have little problem with that whole setup, as the group I hung around with in college was seriously geeky (D&D, video games, etc.), but not quite as socially awkward. And, we did have at least one girl who we had not known for more than a week borrow our shower. Like Penny, this girl was comfortable enough with people that it didn't seem weird to her. Like Leonard and Sheldon, my roommate and I didn't strike her as people who you couldn't trust in such a situation (and we didn't do anything to violate that trust).

There are many things that happened in my college days that would be considered "too unrealistic" to show up in even a sitcom, so I don't have a problem with the situations and characters on BBT. I do have problems when the show is internally inconsistent, like when Leonard and Sheldon don't know Tweety Bird's catch phrase, but Sheldon later references other Looney Tunes characters. Because Sheldon has an eidetic memory, most of the inconsistencies are concerning him, since the writers don't remember everything, and often there are different writers on different episodes. Every show needs an internal fact checker to keep the retcon factor down, but a show that's supposed to be about science should have more than one, as making those sorts of mistakes takes you out of the moment.

Personalities aside, one of the things that was an issue early on is that the guys spent so much time "goofing off" (D&D, video games, etc.), which just isn't possible once you get to the point of having to spend so much time doing the science that the show was supposed to be about.

The primary reason I have cut back on those same sorts of things is because work takes up so much time. Even with clocking less than 45 hours per week of actual work, keeping current on new technologies stretches that out to an average of 7 hours per day, every day of the year. Add in even modest sleep requirements, and I just can't spend 48 hours straight gaming, even though I still think it's a fun thing to do.

SSDs with their own toolbox app handle this problem via scheduled tasks.

I had 12GB of RAM in my XP box for 5 years (just switched to Win 7 this year). You do know that there was a 64-bit version of XP, right? And, despite what you've heard, I had no problems finding drivers for my hardware. The only reason I moved to Win7 was because I built a new machine and had learned enough about beating down the quirks of Win7 to be able to make it work well with some older apps I have to run.

For you, this is important, for others (like me), not so much. First, the title bar text is more than enough for me to distinguish windows from each other. Second, the preview costs memory and seems to pop up even when you don't really need it (like if there is only one window in the taskbar icon stack), which just slows down the UI. Third, I use a multiple desktop system that I have used since Windows NT, so I don't need the extra preview (the multi-desktop manager has its own), and there are also many third-party apps that add this feature to XP. Last, if you disable features like Office's "show documents in taskbar", you don't have nearly as many windows to deal with.

I also don't need the "desktop peek" feature, because I don't have 30 windows all maximized and can't see my desktop. With 11x3 virtual desktop space, I have 33 different workspaces that can each hold a few windows sized best for interaction, and memorized for later if I choose. They can be jumped to very quickly (right mouse on the window in the workspace), and I can easily move windows between workspaces when I need to.

Windows Terminal Services is a complete implementation of "multiuser timesharing". It's only a "server" product, so you don't generally see it unless you are an admin. Linux doesn't really separate out "server" vs. "workstation" versions, so that may be where you are confused.

On the other hand, every Windows version has support for running programs in different user security contexts at the same time, just like Linux, and because of this there are free (as in beer, at least...some also libre) add-on products that give you many of the "server" features you are used to in the POSIX environment. For example, it's trivial to add sshd functionality to Windows because the security model allows multiple users to log in at the same time.

I use Windows as a desktop, and Linux on servers every day, and I think you have been blinded by the fact that you only use Linux.

Anyone tasked with "installing a database" on Linux will know about X-Windows, and if they use Windows, they will also know that there are dozens of X servers available for Windows. Cygwin takes all of 15 minutes to install and configure to have an X server running. This also gives you bash, ssh, git, etc. I interact with our git repositories solely on Windows...it's no different from using Linux.

And, I use Windows as a desktop because I don't want to "tinker with GNOME/KDE/whatever". Putting a shortcut to just about anything (program, folder, host, URL, etc.) anywhere on my Start Menu is a whole lot easier than the last time I used an X desktop manager: right click on the item, choose copy as shortcut, open the Start Menu to the folder where I want the shortcut, right click and choose paste. It may now be this easy with modern X desktops, but it's been this easy with Windows for 15 years. And, don't get me started on the lack of universal clipboard under X. It's gotten better, but there are still some apps that you can't even copy and paste text between because they don't use a common clipboard interface. For graphics, it's a complete crapshoot.

On the other hand, Microsoft has no clue how to do user elevation correctly at the GUI level, despite the fact that the Windows security model is far more robust than the simple POSIX owner/group/world system. I also think MS is going down the "pretty but not functional UI" rathole fairly quickly, and if it keeps up, Linux may end up being easier to use for even casual users.

I find that management of packages on Linux is far easier than Windows.

With Linux, I just apt-get upgrade or yum update and the OS and all my applications are updated to the latest version. Windows Update only does this for the OS itself (and some select Microsoft apps), so all the other apps need to either be manually updated or you need to have dozens of auto-updaters running (either as services or scheduled tasks). I know that there are some websites that give you a one-stop updater for a lot of popular software, but there's still a lot of other software that they don't support.

Even though I do use Windows as my desktop, I absolutely agree that listing the price of Windows as "$0" or "included with system" is extremely misleading. Pre-built systems from companies like Dell should list the OS as a line-item price just like every other optional feature. At the very least, if Windows is the default, you should be able to subtract it for some kind of credit.

Of course, then we'd get into situations where Linux distros installed on such systems would be priced as much or more as Windows as an "installation fee".

Cable companies aren't common carriers. That's the problem.

If they were common carriers, they wouldn't have to respond to DMCA complaints, because they wouldn't be liable for anything they transport over their network.

Much of that has to do with three things:

1. Many people have already purchased all the pre-1999 music they want, and now only buy new music. Prior to digital, there were a lot of replacement sales of old music.

2. It is now easy to only purchase the songs you want, so people no longer have to spend $10 for two songs, which means overall revenue is down. The solution to this is for artists to create music where every track on an album is desired.

3. "Rental" options like Spotify, Pandora, etc., don't count as sales, but are widely used by many people as their only music source.

Also, every Google app can be disabled, and all you lose is the functionality of that app (although some Google apps do use functionality from other Google apps).

In the business world where you don't change the underlying OS on a critical system just because you feel like it, it's pretty easy to make sure the target hardware meets the spec.

There will be yet another level of redundancy through the cluster, as each file will be available on at least two different nodes. ZFS will help in finding discrepancies that are found at the cluster level.