It was probably sarcastic, but from a cost standpoint the GP has a point. Fox gives their signal "for free" OTA and makes money on advertising. Seems like the distributors could reverse the table if they wanted to play hardball. What good is a phone is you are unable to speak?

These bubble generators aren't free, sweetie! These things cost money (capital) and, even if they have a payback in lower operating costs, the capital cost will be reflected in shipping rates and be added incrementally to shipped goods which are bought by poor people. It's a way to take pennies from the minimum wage worker and aggregate it into hundreds of millions of dollars for the rich.

FTFA,
"these powerplants are some of the most fuel efficient units in the world"

"the 15 largest ships in the world emit as much nitrogen oxide and sulphur oxide as the world’s 760 million cars"

So it's not really the climate-affecting carbon emissions that make these vessels "polluters" but rather that they use a fuel which contains excess sulfur and inefficiently scrub nitrogen-based compounds from the emissions, things that autos don't contend with or do because of regulation. It turns out that instead of 50 million cars, the biggest ship in the world put as much carbon into the atmosphere as about 15000-18000 cars. (109k HP @ super high efficiency vs 100HP in your typical automobile, factored for 280days@24h/dy vs average car at 400h/yr)

"You would never consider taking random things you find on the floor or street and putting them in your mouth"

You clearly don't have kids. Kids don't know better and are curious. Now extend that to every person who doesn't manage computers for a living or as part of their hobby. Interestingly, that includes almost everyone born before 1960 and after about 1995. The younger generation understands computers as little as the elderly - we've simplified the UI to the to the point that they're magic boxes to both age groups.

My 12 yo though her computer was "kind of slow". Turns out, she was out of drive space - filled up the 100GB on the SSD and never even realized it.

"while you're accessing your data"

That's really the critical part, isn't it? If you're using this for backup you should never need to decrypt it. The only time you need it is if you have a local failure. Then you have to make a choice: give up the data or take a chance that they are at the server siphoning off your data as you request it.

For 99.999999999% of data, I'm going to say that the US government doesn't give a fuck and the chance that they're monitoring your account when your local copy fails and you are getting your data is going to be pretty darned near zero *unless* you happen to be the target of an investigation. If you are, I would suggest that you pay the extra money for something like SpiderOak, where all the encrypt/decrypt is done locally. Though, to be honest, if you're going to be watched by the Feds, a USB drive and a good fire safe is probably a better solution for backing up your "sensitive" data.

I thought it was a pretty good write up, without any particular spin on the marketing side (except, of course, it was on the BB site with the logo). There's no shame in presenting data that could be useful to those of us who don't have the opportunity (or budget) to buy a stack of drives and run them full out for 3 months. Though I'm sure I'm not the only person who thought it sounds kind of crazy to be adding a pod every day just to keep up with the data demands.

Um, because it's clearly not working? The whole "towards collapse" is simply a face-saving measure.

We deal with worse governments (in terms of "communism" or totalitarianism) every day, and they're our (nominal) allies. The whole Cuba thing is just a 50 year long pout. Nobody cares anymore. There's not some super-villian running Cuba that will destroy the American Way of Life if we join the rest of the world in trading with them.

We are pushing Russia because we disagree with their tactics in the Ukraine. From this year, not from 50 years ago. Totally different condition.

So then we all get to subscribe to $10-30/yr private DNSs which aren't poisoned, I presume. It's not like I'm using my ISP for my DNS.

Sadly, no. Nobody hires people they don't need. It's the fallacy of the idea that lower taxes create jobs. I say this as a business owner: If you don't need employees to do the work, you are not going to hire them. Full stop.

Earning more money after taxes means only that the federal government is effectively subsidizing the companies.

"you have more people available to learn new skills"

That's the biggest fallacy in the argument. Most people who talk about getting the chronically poor into a position where they can learn new skills and do more work to give them the chance to move up the ladder. Here's the dirty little secret: humans are no longer cost effective at any price which supports the modern concept of first world necessities (clean, healthy food; safe, energy efficient housing, basic transportation - personal or public, connectivity to others). \

These people aren't unemployed because they don't have the right training, they're unemployed because they're untrainable for jobs that will command a living wage. And I can guarantee that if you found out tomorrow that your job didn't pay you even 1/4 of what it would take to make rent and put food on the table, you would eventually stop going to work. (you would probably look for alternate ways to live, but you wouldn't give up 40-50 hours of every week and still go hungry).

The parent has been modded troll for the "modest proposal" tack taken to the surplus worker problem, but the basic tenet is true: we've either replaced the entry level jobs with automation or reduced them with efficiency. Calling them surplus is merely extending the word used for old factory equipment which has been superceded by more cost effective versions. It's not a judgement on the people, personally, but a simple value calculation that they do not/can not perform tasks more efficiently than machinery which has replaced them.

We've reached an interesting point where we don't really need all the people we have (by half!) what it takes to keep society fed and clothed. And yet our million-year-old value system requires that you perform some useful task for the herd in order to partake in the benefits of the herd production. It's going to get very interesting over the next century.

Yes, I know; the joke about SV having shit service, but...Colleges are well wired, the towns around them are often not. Virginia Tech - the "electronic village" - that was supposed to get 10bT to every home over a decade ago - STILL has ISP-by-address. If you're lucky you get Verizon 7/768 AND Comcast, but many places have a single provider. And there is basically no fiber. The only competition I've seen is from a rural telecom who stopped by one day while running new service to a select few, and they could get you T1-speed service (1.5/1.5) for the bargain price of $120/mo. AYFKM?

The town looked into high speed but decided it was too difficult to exercise their rights of way and didn't want to piss off Comcast, so they scuttled 100Mb fiber to everyone. I think they may still be meeting once a month to talk about "high speed internet" but they'll never get anything done about it.

"If Samsung were to create another version of their flagship phone, but with 4000mAh to 8000mAh batteries (to support the extra GHz and cores without draining the batteries too fast), they can make their phones twice to 4 times as fast, just by upping the Ghz, or the number of cores, or both."

See how easy that was? When it comes right down to it, the processors are on par within the total thermal/power envelope presented by the form factor and battery technology. If we've learning anything since the days of the 486, it's that clock speed and core count don't really matter when the input is a power envelope and the output is useful work done.

[cheapshot]What amazes me is that in all the years Apple has been making smartphones, it's still impossible to add a music file from email to itunes on the phone.[/cheapshot]

"...they actually toss out copies of their genetic mateiral (sic)..."

This is /.; we're familiar with the process.

Tell that to SpiderOak.