And binoculars, for that matter.

my word brain is running behind by a generation.

I have an R6300 (much less expensive, 90 percent of the power) and routinely saturate our 802.11N channels using DD-WRT, including to the outside world (connected via Google Fiber, which includes its own router, but a router that's significantly less cool). Before we had GF, we used the DD-WRT QoS features heavily and it was absolutely perfect.

The router is handsome, has been rock solid and running strong for many months now, and only cost $100 on sale at a Best Buy retail store. Prices may reach even lower now, particularly when sales are on.

How dare anyone make fun of Pluto after all it's been through!

I think this is panic, mainly because experts are afraid of some mythical nightmare scenario where it gets into a large city and overwhelms the medical infrastructure's ability to cope, and it infects millions.

I think it remains to be seen whether such a scenario would actually play-out that way, or whether other factors would intervene. We've seen situations in history, like Black Plague, and the Spanish Flu, where they did, indeed balloon up beyond anyone's expectations - one wonders whether that will happen with Ebola, which is harder to transmit human-to-human than flu or plague. But I think that health officials don't want to be blamed for any political/social/economic fallout that results. A major African city or region becoming impacted like this would likely bring on war or genocide on a massive scale, because of the general nature of the region. But there are a TON of what-if's in these assumptions. It really just comes down to nervous officials, IMO.

7 Up has a mass of 16.1+4.9-3.5 MeV/c.

I travel a ton and stay in dozens of different hotels every year. Domestically, and in maybe 50% of the foreign cases, the high priced hotels had worse and slower internet up until a couple of years ago. For the last 2 years they have gotten better, on the average. Oh, I was in a 5-star Vegas resort last night that had horrible bandwidth. In the past, my joke was accurate that the difference between a Four Seasons (just an example) and a Super 8 is that at the Super 8 the internet worked and was free. The most important thing to me in a hotel is computer use. The fancy suites in major hotels are often set up for entertaining friends and DON'T even have a computer desk. I ask my wife to book me into Super 8's whenever possible.

Tetra-chromats are by definition female. You need two x chromosomes to carry the two different genes that code the two slightly different pigments.

It's an axiom that there are no women on the internet.

Ergo, there are no tetra-chromats on Slashdot.

Um, yeah, I don't believe you for even a quarter second.

1. Nobody who runs a wind farm would refer to wind turbines as "windmills". Seriously, that's like a third-grade level mistake. This is a windmill. This is a wind turbine. Nobody in the industry would ever call a wind turbine a windmill, they'd get laughed at.

2. The typical bat in the US weighs about 10 grams. Even if we assume that the "trucks" are only pickup trucks that can haul 2 tonnes and your use of the plural only means two - about the lowest possible way we could interpret your "truckloads every year" comment - that would be 400 thousand bats per year. Your mere 700 commercial-scale wind turbines (less than 2% of the US total) would have long ago driven to local extinction any bats in your area.

The reality, of course, is that estimates for all bat deaths from wind turbines in the US combined range from about 30k per year to 800k per year. All combined.

3. Your "destroys the health of operators and technicians" line puts you solidly in autism-vaccine cookoo land.

Just ignoring your grossly inaccurate description of wind power availability, or the concept that a wind farm operator is going to hire someone who despises wind power with a red-hot passion to run their facility.

I'd really be more concerned about infrastructure. When you're mass-producing something like automobiles, you need good access to either a world-class seaport (which SF bay area IS), and/or rail network center (which noplace west of the rockies really does well, and probably LA does best). You need to be able to bring in lots of raw materials from diverse places, and ship your product out. For most purposes, even with the port of SF, SF is a terrible location.

This is why internet startups were able to thrive - because they had those phat pipes.

so spare me the politics.

It was "Why is Sony failing?"

The reason that sony is failing is that you can buy (or, in your terms, "rent") more content, more accessories, more apps, more of everything, and do so more conveniently, from competitors products. The device itself is not the failing; it is that the usefulness of the device is diminished by the relative lack of things to do with it, and the lack of ways to do so conveniently.

It matters not at all what you think of the big picture to answer the posed question; it is simply that whatever Amazon offers, Sony offers *less* of it—not in the device hardware, but in everything that surrounds the device hardware, in the ways that the device hardware can be used. Sony's hardware is thus less useful, not for reasons relating to hardware or UI design, but for reasons relating to business relationships, customer-facing opportunity structure, and so on.

The politics of DRM and so on is an important discussion to have in our political life, but the fact that Amazon offers DRMed books has little to do with why Sony is failing (Sony, of course, offered the same—just fewer of them, with fewer ways to get them on the device, and fewer accessories to use with it).

Yes, the community is the product—it is also the product that the community consumes. Yes, publishers and manufacturers skim value off the top of that circular transaction. That is, as you point out, the business model.

And what I am saying is that that is the *dominant* business model right now, and that Sony sucked at it in comparison to Amazon or even to Barnes and Noble.

They're still working 20 years behind everyone else, caught in a love for industrial and UI (as opposed to UX) design.

They don't get the "ecosystem" concept. In fact, they actively fight it while everyone else is trying to build it.

Everyone else has known for a decade at least that every product is part of a service.

Sony is still busy thinking that every service is part of a product.

Others: The product is one of our service's features/facets.
Sony: The service is one of our product's features/facets.

So their devices are technically great, but too often they come narrowly bound to half-assed services that have only seen enough investment to allow the product to ship with the basic claim that it's functional. As a result, you can't actually practically use their products for nearly as much or nearly as well as competing products. The content isn't there. The accessories aren't there. The third parties aren't there. The fellow users interacting aren't there. Other devices may be technically inferior, but that have a large ecosystem of content, enthusiasts, third-party developers, accessories, etc. behind them.

While everybody else is practically begging the world, "Please, community! Embrace our product and take it in organically emerging directions!," Sony is busy saying "Get lost, community! We're in control here; stop trying to take this in non-approved directions!"

Other tech companies would kill to get a community going. Sony would kill anyone that claims to be a part of a "community" around their product.

I agree; the archlinux wiki is one of them most helpful sources out there. The arch distribution, however, is basically unusable, unless you personally have the hundreds of hours required to gain proficiency in every aspect of OS operation and configuration that, in nearly every other distribution, is basically 80-95% functional without the heroic levels of user intervention that arch typically requires.

Even as a coder, I've had this problem when trying to contribute to documentation. Even writing howto's for specific use-cases. There are a few good developers out there who are capable of communicating, answering questions, etc. - to help make sure that the documentation I write is accurate. But they're few.