As much as I feel disappointed and disgusted by things that Obama and other Democrats have done over the last several years, I still don't buy the whole line that some people here on Slashdot trot out all the time: that Democrats and Republicans are the same thing.

You know that this deal would have sailed through and there's no way the FCC would have pushed for Title 2 regulation, if a Republican were in the White House right now.

Actually, I'm surprised so much is happening on Obama's final term. Usually the second term of a president is coasting because he knows he's not getting re-elected, while everyone else is clamoring for his spot in the next election, so no matter what the president does, it doesn't matter because everyone else is using it to campaign for 4 years. Doesn't matter which party - oppose the president if it gets you votes.

Hence the term lame duck - the president's second term is supposed to be one where they are powerless and really just keeping the White House warm...

It seems unlikely that development support of XP is more costly than the revenue generated by XP users. And Apple has plenty of cash. But this may still be shrewd - let's see if there's a bump in Mac sales this quarter. These users represent existing Apple customers running an OS that Microsoft abandoned. They don't need to know about how fast Apple abandons hardware, but to be fair Apple does upgrades pretty nicely. They can blame MS and gain the customer, all by hosing said customer. Devious and clever.

Well, Apple knows how many XP users use iTunes. They know how much those XP users spend and can easily determine if they're just a tiny fraction of those using Vista or later, or significant enough to continue supporting them. Apple has all that data.

And I've seen it too as my main machine is XP. I'd love to upgrade it if I had the cash (I do have a Win 7 machine used for other purposes so I'm not SOL). Thing is, iTunes still does work, it's just crapping out randomly a bit more than usual - Monday was plagued with the inability to log in (but closing and restarting iTunes several times fixed it), and app updates seem to be an on and off thing (mostly off).

And how fast Apple abandons hardware? Maybe for iOS where you get 50% more support time than the main competition (at least in cases where you get supported updates). Macs that can run Yosemite date back to 2010 or so.

Apple though, does abandon older software a lot faster - they only do support the last two versions of OS X and iOS in general.

This may well have less to do with Apple being mean and cutting off XP users from their fix and more with Apple dropping support for ciphers that are anything but secure anymore, with XP simply not supporting the more current ciphers with better algorithms and more robustness (like forward secrecy). If they didn't, the rant would not go away but simply shift to "Apple's sloppy handling of security puts your content at risk".

Here's the thing - iTunes runs on a virtual version of OS X - one of the reasons it's so big is that it brings with it a bunch of OS X libraries adapted for Windows. Things like ciphers and SSL and all that, Apple already has ported versions of the OS X libraries for that they update - it doesn't use the OS libraries for it.

And in fact, there's nothing wrong with iTunes itself - my version of iTunes worked perfectly until the past week or so - and no, I didn't install any new version of iTunes. So Apple changed something that broke iTunes on its end because iTunes worked before and it wasn't changed

But the real "so what" is that they are OCRing the mail, so even if they were throwing away all of those scans, they would still reasonably be storing the metadata

I would expect them to OCR the mail. in fact, the postal system has the best OCR in the business which can read printed/typed/stickered labels (even at an angle), and handwriting. The accuracy of the system is beyond what you can find - 99.99% accuracy means 1 in 10,000 letters has an error, and if you're dealing with millions of pieces of mail that's not pre-sorted, correcting that requires lots of manual assistance. (they have special stations that let the operator view the mail but not actually handle it and type a corrected address).

Storing images of the OCR'd labels is simply smart because it means you have a set of working scans, a set of failed scans (with corrected addresses) and can run tweaks to the OCR software through actual real live labels that passed and failed and discover whether or not your fix improved matters or made things worse.

Steve Jobs had the most treatable, survivable type of pancreatic cancer. He decided to do yoga and change his diet and do acupuncture instead of real treatments. Then he died. That's just how stupid some people are.

At least Jobs did it to himself. This lady is doing it to others to promote herself and make money.

Jobs did the quackery based on his own beliefs and in the end, the only people he harmed was his family by his death - he didn't try to promote his lifestyle as good or it would cure cancer. What he did, and his death, were the results of his choices in life.

This lady's choices are meant to influence others to take up her "cures" over established medical treatment. Her actions influence others to shun potentially lifesaving medical treatments for her quackery.

In an ironic twist, today Dr. Oz is using his show to defend his use of quackery to promote himself.

Indeed, and any retailer who entrusts all their monetary transactions to a manufacturer's default password is probably going to slip up somewhere anyway.

Except it's likely the retailer doesn't know about it period. They buy a POS system, and it's actually installed, programmed and setup by the company they purchased it from. A lot of POS systems (excepting custom designed ones or franchisees who often have to purchase a specific unit from the franchiser) are purchased, set up, and installed by companies who do this. In fact, a lot of it is blocked out for customers (i.e., the retailer) by the manufacturer. The programming information and interface setup is often provided only to installers who are under orders to never reveal it to the retailer.

Sure, the retailer has a few "controls" (they could add/remove products from inventory, do inventory and other day-to-day operations) but other ones including setting it up with a server, or even setting tax rates or categories (non taxable, partially taxable, fully taxable, etc) require an installer to do it.

The retailer might not know of the password's existence or it could even be locked away under a anti-tamper seal put in by the installer so the retailer doesn't try to ... experiment.

Apple just wants people to buy their watch, and "useful apps that work well" is way down an Apple fan's list of reasons to buy something by Apple, the main one being "ooh Apple gimmegimmegimme hipster shiny Starbucks."

Which would go against the business model Apple is In - selling content to move hardware. Apple WANTS developers to write apps for it. Lots of them. Because the more apps available, the better you can market it as a useful device so it trickles down to people who don't necessarily want it suddenly seeing useful potential.

Even for Apple, you can only shine a turd so much - it still has to be useful in some way or it will die quickly in the market, and no amount of marketing can revive it. (Did you know Sony makes a portable console? They don't market it anymore because there's nothing to market about it, and it's now just a way to play the PS4 remotely).

So attracting developers into the program (who don't really care about the watch color or band) means more apps written to take advantage of it, which may mean even those opposed to the whole smartwatch thing suddenly sees compelling use cases and maybe goes out to buy one.

When YouTube started there was no standard for streaming video. The only working options were things like Flash and RealPlayer, so they went with Flash. Now they are moving to HTML5 and that's the problem - older devices don't support it.

No, the problem is not Flash or HTML5.

The problem is that the old YouTube players were much better than the current one, because well, they didn't support ads.

The new YouTube apps support the Google APIs and they return ads, both the pop up and interstitials, while the old APIs didn't support it.

Back when YouTube was in the old days of getting marketshare, and API use is low, it made sense. These days, with Google monetizing stuff, well, they need all youtube players to support ads.

I'm not sure what you needed to do prior to iOS 2, but that's ancient history - I doubt anyone is still supporting back that far

You did nothing. You couldn't write apps for iPhone OS 1.x because iPhone OS 2.0 introduced the app store. So unless you jailbroke, you only wrote apps against iPhone OS 2.0.

Non system libraries are statically linked .a files in IOS. Apple insists on this, although I'm not entirely sure why. I guess its to avoid DLL hell.

Well, to properly do this, requires a way to manage libraries separately from apps. And that rapidly becomes a usability nightmare, as well as, ironically, a security nightmare.

What happens when an update comes out? Do you keep both versions? What happens if an app is incompatible with the new version? What if the old version is insecure, and the new version incompatible? Do you go for insecure-but-working, or broken-but-secure? What if the developer isn't around anymore to fix it?

Then there's security - if you come up with a way to do this, how do you isolate the data from one another? How do you keep the library (which has access to everyone's data) from accessing and passing around the information? Perhaps a malicious update goes and accesses everyone's information then dumps it to another app for uploading?

Effectively, the only way is to statically link the library into each app - this way each app contains a library that works and is tested. But it also means developers are responsible for maintaining their apps.

He may well believe that past results are no indication of future results, there's one overwhelmingly important fact that comes to mind: noone will be able to buy the stuff made in the robot factories if we're all unemployed or minimum wage serfs.

And if noone can buy the stuff, the owners aren't going to get rich selling the stuff. Which means THEY won't be able to buy stuff either....

No, but the rich folks will just own it all.

See Manna where robots take over. If you don't have a job, you get shuffled off to a jail-like facility where your basic needs are provided for at the whim of the owners who stuff you into a way-to-small box because they really want to sell that real estate you're "living" on with millions of other people.

So, the gubmint agency that built the Internet... "owned" by the same gubmint that built NSA wants to build the new TOR to increase privacy?

Sounds trustworthy to me.

You missed the fact the government created TOR in the first place... (TOR was created by the US Navy).

TOR is basically a US government project. Which is why it's funny when everyone says to go use it to protect your privacy. After all, doesn't the NSA run huge farms of exit nodes which can capture a good chunk of traffic?

I don't think they're getting that much for the ads. After all, netflix manages to offer ad-free stuff for $8/month, same as Hulu+. It's probably closer to the difference between $8/month and $12.

I think the ultimate reason Netflix is creating it's own content is that the more content it controls, the more influence it has over the other media copyright holders. If Netflix can legitimately argue that if copyright holder X doesn't play ball, that it's average subscriber won't sign up to site Y for $Z revenue because the subscribers will simply watch something else, such as one of Netflix's exclusive shows, then they're leaving money on the table, and they don't like doing that.

Sort of like a backwards HBO. HBO does great shows, but are really exclusive about them. If you want to see Netflix's shows, you have to sign up, but it's not nearly as expensive as a cable package + HBO.

Hulu however has current TV a day later. Netflix doesn't get it for months. Hulu's also sponsored by the content networks who are trying to basically regain their ad revenue.

Netflix is creating original content because it can - its business model depends on subscribers and growing that subscriber base. Showing unlimited movies that have been out for months, or TV seasons that everyone else has seen months ago doesn't grow subscribers, especially since OTA TV will get them for free too, just on a less convenient schedule.

Instead, Netflix has to basically create content or inherit content that the networks can't justify carrying so subscribers have something new to watch.

Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, etc., they get the latest TV within hours of airing which is why they generally cost more because their first-run. Netflix picks up the rest.

In the lifecycle of a movie, it first comes out in theatres. Then it comes out as a digital rental (CinemaNow, Vudu, etc). Then it comes out as purchase - either digital (iTunes, Ultraviolet, etc) or physical (DVD/Blu-Ray). Then general rentals, then Netflix, and finally, regular free TV. This takes around a year or two to fully execute.

The lifecycle for a TV program is first airing, then digital sales (Amazon, iTunes), and Hulu. Then months later, season box sets on DVD, and Netflix.

If you're not fussy about waiting, Netflix is a great service. Most people though can't wait that long for their TV, so there are options. And Netflix knows once they have the people who don't care or who don't mind waiting, their subscriber base is saturated. They need to have new content to attract new subscribers who may not watch much of the catalog, but will catch the exclusives and pay for it.

I'm a huge IPv6 fan and I don't game. What IPv6 does is recreates the pre-NAT world of easy communications between systems. Going back to the symmetrical world where everything on the internet is a server simplifies commuting immensely. That's why I want IPv6.

Hah.

Easy communications? Fat chance. Because there'll be firewalls in the way leading to plenty of issues - enough so that assuming you can connect between two hosts is not a safe assumption.

In fact, you'll return to the early NAT days when they were rare, and spend hours trying to figure out why your VOIP app works half the time, but when someone calls in, you can't talk, at all because someone has a firewall in the way and it's blocking the connection.

These days, NAT is pretty much understood and it's easy to detect and work around. Tomorrow, with IPv6, people are going to forget their NAT lessons and we'll go through the same pain that we had a decade and a half ago.

And let's not forget the nice corporate firewalls that already exist today and filter everything that's not HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or SMTP. Just silently dropped. Those will be really fun to diagnose.

And work firewall-less? This is the modern internet, and remote vulnerabilities, spoofs, amplification attacks and others are just sitting there waiting to be discovered.

The myth of apparent reachability died ages ago. Along with the ability to plug a home PC straight into the internet without a firewall.

An off-the-shelf SATA 840 EVO SDD hits 98,000 read IOPS, and all those tasks you mention added together wouldn't hit more than 1% of that. They're the very definition of network bound operations. The average email in my IMAP spool right now is 43KB and would take 11 4KB operations to completely read from or write to storage. Browsers site there idle 99.9% of the time. IRC? Not that I've ever seen.

1% of 98,000 IOPS is 980 IOPS. The best hard drives still only manage around 100 IOPS (10ms seek+latency).

Application loads generally produce a lot of IOPS, especially since they load dozens of libraries and configuration files and other things, and the CPUs can be so quick they're lapping it up as fast as possible. Do it on a hard drive and reading 1000 4k files scattered about takes 10 seconds. On an SSD, that takes 1. It goes from "ugh, takes forever" to practically instantaneous.

And that's where the real value is - it increases interactivity because disk I/O suddenly gets very cheap. Especially in Windows where the document model is application centric - you open a document, Word opens, you work on it, then close the document that also quits Word. Then you open the next document and Word reopens. If you're lucky, the disk cache has it so it loads quickly. If not, thrash heaven.

And I've seen people double-click something 3-4 times because it took so long the first time they didn't realize it was just grinding away. Or they needed to open two word docs, an excel spreadsheet and a few other things at the same time.

If SSDs were completely bunk things, then the apparent snappiness that it gets people must be fake, too, right?

Actually, yes. These loans can't even be dismissed via bankruptcy and many government benefits are tied to the repayment of them.

Because no lender in their right mind would loan students money to begin with.

Student loans are unsecured - the student doesn't put up anything and can borrow easily $100K. And if the student can't find a job, it's not repaid. No lender would take that kind of risk, especially at a measly 7% interest rate - typical unsecured loans are closer to 20-30% (you know them as credit cards).

So the government has to put in some incentives otherwise financial institutions will not provide the loans as they're too risky. By making it non-dischargeable, the banks know that declaring bankruptcy will not make it go away for pennies on the dollar with no recourse (assuming they can get anything - secured creditors are paid first and often the money isn't sufficient to cover those so those take pennies on the dollar. Unsecured creditors typically get zilch).

It's just like if your company goes bankrupt - as an employee, your unpaid wages and benefits are unsecured, so you line up with the rest of the unsecured creditors to hope to get some money.

Back to Tesla, those DOE loans went to a lot of people. Few companies every paid even a portion back. Tesla managed to pay it back, early, with interest.