You must be a glutton for punishment. I was very active in the Mac emulator scene many years ago (provided hosting for MacMAME.org, etc.) and recently looked into it again, only to be very depressed by what I found. I had assumed that with the growing mainstream popularity of Macs over the past decade that emulator availability would increase but I found just the opposite. In fact, it seems like it's a PITA just to get a current version of MAME up and running, let alone MESS. The old sites and message boards I had visited long ago had vanished, and it just didn't seem like there was much of a community for Mac emulators any more.

Any suggestions on where the hub of the Mac emulator scene is these days? Or is it just gone?

Internet FOUL! How DARE you introduce logical and rational statements into an Internet argument, sir.

The next thing you know, people will be equating the same degree of "magical thinking" with conservative farmers denying the evidence of climate change and liberal farmers touting the lack of evidence of benefits of non-GMO produce. Have you no shame?

Kinda sorta used to be more but not so much now.

Part of the confusion comes from the fact that, unlike pretty much the rest of the world, US carriers did not standardize on the GSM technology family. Back in the day, AT&T and T-Mobile chose GSM, while Verizon and Sprint chose the CDMA technology family. So right there you had incompatible technologies between carriers that didn't exist most anywhere else in the world (except for Japan and Korea, mainly).

Phones built to run on the GSM family of technologies use SIM cards and are generally "SIM-swappable." Some phones, typically the ones bought on a contract for a discount, are "SIM-locked" to a carrier meaning that the phone has to be unlocked by the original carrier before the phone can be used with a SIM from another carrier. However, pretty much all cheap/prepaid phones are not SIM locked and can be swapped easily. Phones built to run on CDMA family of technologies do not use SIM cards so are a moot point for "SIM swapping."

Oh, and don't forget this in your research - there are at least three popular SIM card sizes roaming (no pun intended) in the wild these days, and they are mutually incompatible. So don't expect to take the full-sized SIM out of your feature phone and transfer it to the micro SIM slot of a Galaxy S4 or the nano SIM slot of an iPhone 5s ... although of course you can buy adapters that will make smaller SIMs fit into larger slots.

In case you're wondering, the fact that all four major US carriers are using LTE nowadays should make the situation less complicated, but it really doesn't. That's because there are virtually no phones out there that use LTE exclusively. Unless your carrier has VoLTE deployed, your "LTE" phone is just using LTE for data but is falling back to 3G CDMA or GSM/HSPA to make your voice calls. So even though every LTE phone has a SIM, phones on legacy CDMA carriers aren't full "SIM-swappable."

Long story short - SIM swappability these days is far less about carrier locking and more about SIM sizes and which network you're trying to use. Good luck!

At least in the United States, the rules for libel are different based on whether or not the libeled party is a "public figure" or not. If someone is Joe Average, the only requirement is to prove that you said something incorrect about them which caused quantifiable damages. "Public figures," however, are expected to have good and bad things said about them as part of normal discourse. (Otherwise Ke$ha could sue someone for saying her album sucked.) So for public figures, the libeled party must prove that not only is the thing you said wrong, you must also have known it was wrong and had malicious intent in doing so. It's a high bar to meet, and that's why you see so few celebrities or politicians suing for libel - there's usually only provable malice in a few cases where a tabloid is printing knowingly false information in order to boost sales, etc.

All treaties are negotiated in secret. Furthermore, at least in the US, no treaty is in effect until it is ratified by the Senate, at which point all the elements of the treaty will be public and heavily debated down to the last comma.

It's great that Wikileaks is giving the world a heads-up view into what is being negotiated, but I don't understand why every Slashdot story about international treaties harps on "negotiated in secret" like that's unusual, or that a treaty can somehow take effect silently and invisibly.

Okay, here's some evidence for you. I will freely admit that if I could not have downloaded Season 3 of Game of Thrones, I would have shelled out $40 to get it on BluRay. HBO and/or the makers of the show and/or whatever retailer I would have bought the set from lost $40. I liked the shows enough to watch them but I really don't feel like paying $40 after having watched them all just to ease my commercial equivalent of a conscience. True fact and actual value lost.

So what now? Can we be done with the "nobody lost anything because of downloading" argument once and for all and move on to something more substantial as a reason for both copyright reform and ethical Internet usage?

They do dilute the holdings of the existing shareholders. However, when you do an IPO you have the option of making only a minority of your shares public. You can start a business that you own 100% of and then go IPO but only sell 49% of the stock and still retain majority voting rights. Or, like Mark Zuckerberg, sell a majority of the company but keep most of the "special" shares that carry 10x voting rights.

The reason most companies don't do this is that investors generally don't trust a company that they can't have a strong say in keeping or ousting the management team. (Which is a pretty reasonable concern.) If you retain majority control, just understand that you will make less money per share on your IPO due to those investor concerns... and if you aren't doing an IPO to make money, why are you doing it in the first place?

Typical engineering mindset - "inventions" are not the only yardstick of creativity. Pablo Picasso never invented anything either, but I hope you're not going to argue that he wasn't creative.

Jobs demonstrated a highly creative approach to business, acting intuitively and often flouting the rules of "what businesses should do." He transformed Pixar from a software company to an entertainment company. He change Apple from an also-ran PC manufacturer into a provider of an ecosystem of mobile and desktop devices with seamless software, entertainment and marketplace integration. He imagined what customers would want and took the gamble of building it, and had no fear of cannibalizing his existing products to do so. And, in the world of business, that is creativity.

No. No it is not. You may wish to read up on something called Watergate, for example, and recall that no reporters were ever charged with a crime for exposing it. Or the Iran-Contra Affair. In fact, the exposure of illegal and unethical government activities by journalists, police and whistleblowers goes on at a brisk pace every day. It is not illegal.

What is illegal is sharing classified materials without authorization from the government to do so. cf The Pentagon Papers. Those by the way weren't even exposing illegal acts, they were exposing incompetence and poor decision-making. But Daniel Ellsberg was prosecuted because he didn't have the legal right to share them with newspapers and by extension the public.

I'm not espousing a stance on Snowden either way. I'm just saying it's important to distinguish which activities are illegal and which are not. It is fair to say that it is illegal to expose any kind of classified information - relating to anything, legal or not - without explicit authorization from the government. But exposing corruption and illegal activities by the US government is definitely not illegal in and of itself.

My guess would be maintaining a credible ability to deter Russia from claiming disputedly Canadian Arctic territories and their associated mineral and gas resources. Russia has shown no compunctions about annexing new territories from countries which are unable to project force into them.

Or very aggressive moose hunting.

This is the thing I think people don't understand about the US cellular industry - you can't try to "create" a new competitor because it will fail. The reason is that cellular business is all about scale - precisely the thing that is driving the T-Mo/Sprint acquistion. Fundamentally, you need to have the same 30-40K+ cell towers to cover most of the population centers in the US whether you have one million users, 10 million, or 100 million. When you are distributing that same infrastructure costs across fewer users, your economics are far worse than the big guys and it's very very difficult to compete. Additionally, size brings additional benefits such as more clout when negotiating device costs from Apple or Samsung, better deals with network infrastructure providers, etc. Scale is everything.

So the problem with bringing in a new competitor is that it will take them many years to even get to a point equivalent to today's T-Mobile, which is struggling to make ends meet with a national network supporting 25 million users. Even if you subsidized out of taxpayer pockets the spectrum and some of the infrastructure, you'd just be propping up a company for the sake of competition that would have to merge/get bought by someone else eventually or remain uncompetitive on pricing and probably go out of business.

It's unfortunate for a variety of reasons... but when you have businesses with a high financial barrier to entry and a model that grows efficiency with scale, economically speaking you will always see a trend towards consolidation to the minimum number of viable players.

Correct. You are not typical. Your experience may be very normal in a community you would identify with such as asexuality, or it could potentially be associated with a disorder, such as hyposexuality.

Your situation may be entirely healthy and rewarding for you, and that's great. And, frankly, you have probably saved a lot of money, time and heartache compared to many of us on the other side of that spectrum! I would just caution you not to use it as a yardstick for most other people in judging questions of sexuality.

If it costs $2,000 to run the fiber from your neighborhood DSLAM-equivalent to your home NID - which in the US is a pretty common price - do you still think that would be worthwhile to you?

As it is, Verizon et. al. are paying that cost now and you are paying for it in inflated monthly connection fees but not in direct upfront costs. If most households had to pay for that upfront but got lower monthly bills, how many do you think would accept? Would it be enough for telcos to have a critical mass of customers in any given area? Probably not.

Think of how many US households in dense urban areas - the prime customers for fiber rollouts - cheat themselves out of their own money getting payday loans because they can't spare an extra couple hundred dollars, let alone "investing" a couple thousand in order to get lower bills or better service over the next several years to follow. Or think of how many people buy cellphones for free with a two-year contract that they could have saved money on if they had more cash upfront.

Moral of the story: buying and owning your own "local loop" would work for the 1% but not - at least in the US - for most of the population. And having the government own the last mile isn't free, it just means that the 100% pay higher taxes for it somehow, and there is probably a better way to serve the needy with those dollars than last mile ownership.

Well, frankly, yes. Verizon has said for several years that the cost of rolling out FTTH for FiOS was so high, and the adoption rate low enough, that they are done with expanding it for the foreseeable future. Verizon is a business, and FiOS just isn't making much profit. And that is with Verizon having no obligation to share its fiber with other providers, unlike the copper TDM network sharing requirements for UNE-P and DSL. If Verizon had to treat FiOS like a utility and/or line share, it would have been deployed in even fewer places or not at all. It sucks, but it's true.

To be treated as a utility generally means to be compensated in a "cost-plus" environment. You are allowed to charge consumers what it costs you, plus a little margin. Fair enough for water and electric, say, but those are industries where the infrastructure was built a long time ago and a need to upgrade customer-facing physical plant is not really an issue. Bu if you want to build a new power plant, or a sewage treatment plant, you have to go to a state/local Public Utilities Commission and ask permission to raise your rates to cover it, which can take a long time for review and approval. Imagine doing this every time you want to buy a new OC-3, refresh your CPE/modems, or install new wireless towers! Network upgrades will slow to a crawl. Being a regulated utility is good for steady state maintenance and uptime but bad for capital-heavy upgrades and investment.

People forget that even though the old "Ma Bell" phone network was regularly upgraded, that wasn't because of regulation. Ma Bell was actually a business with a regulated/utility portion (local phone service) and an unregulated portion (long distance and other services). For decades, the unregulated part of their business made enough money that it effectively subsidized the regulated local phone service infrastructure and upgrades. When Ma Bell was broken up, local phone service rates actually went up because the ILECs no longer had the unregulated, profit-making businesses to subsidize them. And it is entirely possible that the same thing would happen if ISPs were treated as utilities and were not using TV, phone or other high-profit services to subsidize Internet access.

No, not unless you would like your Internet access technologies refreshed and upgraded about as often as your water pipes or electric lines are. Which is to say approximately never.

The story is "slow news day" Slashdot click bait (see also Snowden, Assange, Android vs. iOS fanboy wars) that has been hashed and re-hashed endlessly. Some people think Comcast is right not to give free peering bandwidth to non-peers like Level3 and Netflix. Other people think it is incumbent upon Comcast to give free peering to Netflix or Level3 anyway because it will improve the experience of their paying subscribers. Both sides argue vociferously and neither convinces the other of anything. Move along, nothing to see here.

Your brain cells will thank you for reading just about anything else on the Internet, with the exception of foxnews.com or pitchfork media.