Corporations are people in the US. This is one of the unintended consequences when such a concept is taken too far.

For those of you unaware of the corporations = people thing, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

The only time the US was actually under attack, they didn't use it. Other news sources are far faster and more efficient. Like my local paper that allows me to subscribe to SMS cell-phone updates.

See the WikiPedia article for more information on why national EBS is near useless: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_broadcast_system

The old cable-TV model is slowly collapsing for a few reasons:

The basic architecture of one pipe shared by whole neighborhoods is inherently bandwidth limited and not scalable.

In the sub-nets where the Internet signal is sent over coax along with TV signals (not the fiber backbones), the interference (intermodulation distortion) resulting from large numbers of signals originating from the customer’s modems reduces bandwidth quickly. Cable is inherently one-way, and does poorly when pressed into bi-directional service.

New Internet companies are able to distribute media ala-carte at much lower cost. Partly because they don’t have the contractual obligations to distribute content. The dispute between Fox and Cablevision is but one example of the greedy content providers forcing all cable customers to pay, whether they watch the content or not.

Demand and use of high speed Internet and high resolution HD channels is increasing rapidly.

Services like Verizon FIOS have a major edge over the antique cable system as they have individual pipes to each home and can increase total bandwidth with less infrastructure.

Because they are not paying their share, and that means you and I have to make up for it. Further: this nation generally supports a progressive tax where the more wealthy pay a greater share, not less.

Not that Google is the slightest bit wrong for doing this! If I owned their stock I'd expect them to do whatever is legal to reduce non-productive expenses, which taxes are. I'd prefer them to invest it new products and technologies, or pay me a dividend.

That... and how many 3D glasses do you need to buy? What are you going to do during a Super Bowl party? Ask everyone to bring their own 3D glasses? Will they even be compatible?

3D TV is a non-starter for me until a good product comes out that doesn't need expensive glasses (i.e. cheap polarized glasses, or no glasses).

Computers are not really needed by the masses, they want entertainment devices. That means HD format screens are made in huge numbers.

There is not a large enough market for LCD manufacturers to make inexpensive devices optimized for displaying text. Would you pay even 25% more for a screen of the same area and pixel count, but different aspect ration? I didn't think so...

Do what I and many others do: get multiple screens and rotate one or more 90 degrees. Continue whining (like me too), but no one is listening...

Per gigbyte of what? Not certain what you are talking about; in normal Slashdot style I will answer your question anyway.

It is standard practice in many large corporations for departments to pay ‘charges’ for the infrastructure and supplies they are using. Not real money, just numbers so that the bean counters can figure out what stuff costs to get things done, and to juggle the numbers to make things look better or worse (as directed by their managers).

At one place I worked they charged for server disk space. The theory being that it cost money not only to buy the disk or make it redundant, but also to back it up incrementally, offsite forever, transport it for me through the network, process the data on the servers, pay the IT staff to support me, to be trained and to go on vacations. The number usually was much higher than you’d expect, and actually included *all* IT expenses. They used disk space as a *fair* measure of my groups IT needs.

Remember too: some places will backup your PC via the network, so just because the disk is cheap on the PC doesn’t mean that is the whole expense per GB.

I don’t know what it costs these days at a big company. $30/month sounds like an old number for old infrastructure, not your desktop PC. Thank God I work for a small place now and the accounting is almost sane.

Where starting is the operative word. Here is one indication of how far they still have to go:

Visit the Microsoft Online Safety password checker (https://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/passwords/checker.aspx). Try “Password1”.

Wow, a "Strong" password! They don’t even do a simple dictionary check. Same is true in the OS from what I’ve seen so far.

How long has that been built into Linux?

From what I’ve seen in the field, dictionary attacks are the first thing malware attempts to gain control of a network.

They are just starting to be serious about security.