How fast will transfer rates be when you only have one or two bars' worth of signal? If they're using a higher modulation bandwidth to get that higher data rate that's one thing; but if they're stuffing more data into the same occupied bandwidth then the Bit Error Rate could start climbing really fast once the signal level starts to drop.

I've even pulled songs off of iPods, although I don't and wouldn't own one. People who lose their iTunes account access think they're screwed, because they don't know how to get the music off the device. I just copy the songs off for them, then use a tagger and the metadata that's already in the files to convert Apple's 'obfuscated' filenames to sensible ones.

I guess the point of the lawsuit though is that bypassing iTunes isn't necessarily obvious to the average user - Apple goes out of their way to keep you in their garden.

Yeah, Debian totally jumped the shark with Jessie. A bunch of stuff broke on my machine - I suspect it was systemd. Couldn't go back to Wheezy though - I bought a new MoBo, and Wheezy didn't even support the *wired* LAN connection out-of-the-box.

I never even tried G3 - the screen shots and reviews were enough to keep me away. I switched to XFCE at that point, and I've been pretty happy with it. The file manager is only adequate - but then there are no really good graphical file managers in Linux, and I've learned to live with Thunar's limitations. (Dolphin came close to being as good as Windows Explorer when I dialled down the K-Bling - but that was back when you could still install a small part of KDE without getting stuck with the whole damned ugly fat-filled lot of pseudo-dependencies).

Although I cringe at the thought of Apple and its walled gardens, I hear you and I feel your pain. The Linux landscape seems more homogeneous and less 'choiceful' than it did even a few years ago. But at least give Xubuntu a try before you decide to give up on Linux altogether. And FWIW, I haven't experienced any crashes at all, (fingers crossed), and my installation is as up-to-date as automatic updates can make it.

Unfortunately, Ms Fiorina isn't among the women I'd like to see hold any political office at all. Besides, what is it with businesspeople thinking their experience automatically makes them fit to govern? Sure, some 'sound business principles' are appropriate to the role. But it's the job of government to serve all of its consituents' best interests, not to make a profit come hell or high water.

Corporotocracy be damned - the people are the country's shareholders, not its employees.

Yup, me too. I go one step farther - I turn off search from the address bar. If there's text in the address bar, and the text isn't a URL, the browser should do nothing. It's called an address bar for a reason.

FF finally managed to totally jump the shark when they introduced the Australis interface. Since then I've used Pale Moon - same code base, same plugins, without all the nonsense. If all this ugly bling ensures their survival, (and their deal with Yahoo certainly counts as 'ugly bling'), then more power to them - but as long as Pale Moon keeps going strong, it really doesn't matter to me any more.

It's a case of paying now or paying later, and with the latter option we'll be paying a ruinous rate of interest that keeps climbing. The economic consequences of AGW are already devastating in some areas of the world - as time goes on it will only get worse. As much as I dislike the nuclear option for a whole host of reasons, it may be the only thing that can save us from ourselves. So yes, I think masive subsidies are in order, if that's what it takes to get the job done.

On the one hand, I despise extortionists, and the perpetrators ought to be hung out to dry. On the other hand, the folks at Sony arguably have engaged in extortion and fraud on a few occasions in the past, so part of me feels this is simply their just desserts. If it wasn't for the inevitable collateral damage I'd be tempted to say "let 'em all kill each other and God will sort them out".

It does seem kind of unfair that nobody at Sony was ever imprisoned for the Rootkit scandal or the OtherOS clusterfuck, whereas people behind #GOP will likely serve time in jail if they are ever caught. I guess "Corporate Immunity" is just as real in law as "Diplomatic Immunity" - 'the law' just won't openly admit it.

Funny, I was just about to say that government malfunction can be blamed on people who DO vote. Don't get me wrong - I vote. But I'm starting to feel like a sucker for doing so, 'cause the new boss is always the same as the old boss, and nothing ever changes except the facade and the window dressing.

Voting only works so long as there are truly, fundamentally, meaningfully different choices to vote for, and currently there aren't any to speak of. Sure, there are independent candidates nibbling at the frozen fringes of the political landscape. But they don't have organizations nearly big enough to take on the Repubmocrats, and they are pretty well starved right out of contention by the incumbents, who entirely control the media.

Right now, voting with our feet is the only vote that will have any impact. We need to walk away from playing the game, from the bread and circuses, from the latest piece of shiny being purveyed by the corporations who rule the world with the money and the hard work which we freely give to them. It's time to turn off the tap.

But who wants to be first? Snowden tried, and although I consider him a hero, I wouldn't want to be in his shoes right now. And really, how much support has he gotten, other than cheering from the sidelines from people like us on sites like Slashdot? Even at that, a very large percentage of Slashdot comments that are at odds with the current regime's rhetoric are posted AC. If we won't openly even speak our minds, never mind act on what we believe, what chance do we have?

As far as I'm concerned, voting is an opportunity to claim "I did my part", not a chance to actually do anything substantial. Elections are just one of the acts in the three-ring circus that governments and corporations employ to keep us distracted and divided. Other acts in that circus? The war on drugs. The war on terror. The Kardashians. The economy. Facebook. Twitter. Slashdot. And on and on and on. We are being distracted and amused unto the death of our essential freedoms and of any claim to autonomy.

Until we can get our shit together well enough to take action en masse, (or even directed inaction), we'll get more of the same crap from our 'governorations'. And arguably, we'll deserve it.

This will inevitably result in more people blowing their hard-earned money...

Google search has been very obviously moving towards shit for several years now - the latest round of 'enhancements' is just the coliform-filled icing on a crappy cake. But what I fail to see is why they have to cripple the damn thing for people who DO have some search savvy. It seems to me they could just as easily have a default brain-dead mode for all those people searching for Kardashian gossip, AND a 'strict mode' for people who actually have a clue. It's gotten really hard to get useful results, especially with Google insisting that I must want what it thinks are synonyms for my search terms. I have to put quotes around every fucking term now - and that has its own associated problems. Plus, an 'allintext' search often produces WAY more hits than the same search without allintext. WTF?

Google search has gotten so ugly that it makes me long for Alta Vista. Even so, Yahoo search is a bad joke by comparison.

Gah! Where are my mod points when I need them? Thanks for an informative and insightful reply.