>Your ISP is going to scale back or cancel any rollout of faster service or they will lower everyone's speeds or they will charge everyone more money.
Hahahahahah...they do this NOW - this will just give them an actual excuse.
The fact is that a whole generation was brainwashed into the notion that government = bad, which I think ultimately dovetails with the prevailing general social philosophy of "it's all about ME." Anyone or anything that tries to put any kind of rules on me is bad because it might interfere with what I want to do. These same retarded arguments that "any rules = destruction of the industry" were pushed by the auto industry originally when speed limits were imposed, and when safety laws were passed. I remember how the industry fought air bags to the bitter end...it now is typically a selling point in automobiles, and created a whole industry for the manufacture of the devices. What destroyed the American auto industry wasn't government regulation, it was the greed and stupidity of their management (and union management, it must be said.)

Any system can impose ridiculous bad laws and destroy innovation. It can also impose good laws that foster improvements. This argument that "any laws inevitably will result in NAZIS TAKING OVER AND FINDING THE ARK OF THE COVENANT" is worse than kindergarten logic.

Corbyn's 'method' for making weather predictions: Corbyn 'studies the sun': He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles. He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time - and he makes a prophecy.

I also note that the referenced website bills itself "The WORLDWIDE LEADER in WEIRD". My feeling: don't think this type of input is really more relevant to public policy than Al Gore's movies...

Figure out what the plugin is and stop using it. Fixed.

This is why a lot of app developers hate plugins, etc. because their product gets blamed for some cute "dancing reindeer" add-on that leaks memory and now their product "totally sucks!"

If you think Chrome will solve your problem, you will be sad. The sandboxing is to prevent a plug crash from taking down the whole browser, but it's perfectly fine for it to consume memory. And Chrome, particularly the latest dev build, is a resource monster already. As more plugins accumulate for Chrome, all of these complaints will migrate to Chrome...circle of life, I suppose.

This is old news in pre-paid. On my VM phone, you have to pay 10 cents to use Gmail if you're stupid enough to do that. Navigation is pay per day, etc.

Well credit them for referencing a blog that actually has some timely information in it. It's gotten to the point that I see articles in /. a couple of days after I see them in the Huffington Post...this place seems to be increasingly irrelevant the past year or so, sad to say.

I think what he meant to say about the earlier statement was that Microsoft turned 360 degrees and walked away from it.

Best comment in the thread. They won't be stupid enough to actually offer a rate based solely on the user agent. In fact, you could use the thesis that they market a rate closer to the actual likely rate you will get to Firefox and Chrome users because they're assumed to be more clever, or at least more likely to be annoyed at obvious marketing ;-)

Your bullet point 4 is precisely the strategy. All of these other considerations are, as is typical with engineers, minutae that misses the point. It's no accident that these two announcements
happened together. It isn't that Apple, with $40+ billion in cash, can't afford to support Java on the Mac. This is a strategic decisions aimed, I think, primarily at Google, to keep the Java
ecosystem from being able to easily leverage the Apple installed base.

What I also find interesting, and hasn't been mentioned, is that Jobs and Ellison are famously buddies...I can't believe that they haven't discussed this move. My guess would be that Oracle, apart
from bludgeoning people, which is its favorite business model, hasn't the slightest interest in Java the language. They are a database and ERP software company, and also famously proprietary.
If Oracle can't make somebody pay them 18% annual maintenance on it, they don't have any interest in making it.

It makes me sad, but it's clear that Apple will abandon the general "computing platform" model and is moving to a "content delivery" model, where you can read "advertising" for "content". Apple
wants to build stylish devices that can deliver content that Apple can then get a cut of the revenue stream for. I think they are probably spot on here, too, most people are baffled by computers
and since they *aren't* locked down they are riddled with viruses, etc. Apple can also see how much money is being made with pure gaming consoles, which are also "locked down" platforms.
I think at some point, Apple will sell only sell IOS devices...these may have a laptop form factor, but they will essentially be iPhone with a keyboard and large screen.
I would guess that 10.8 will also be where Apple announces that OS X will become a "deprecated technology"...

I don't see the problem here. As with IBM, and then Microsoft, once Apple gets too arrogant and thinks it has everything its own way, people will be ready for a change, and some new company or technology will yank the rug out from under them. Don't like what Apple is doing? Buy something else.

...to ragequit again.

>but it's an entirely different audience

A bigger audience. This is Stephenson's day job.

I loved the guy's early work, which was snarky and fresh (if somewhat weak on actual concluding), but the 'historical fiction' genre bores me. Also, the "more is more" aesthetic he has pursued the last ~10 years doesn't
really work for me, I don't have the time to absorb the sheer volume of his awesomeness that Stephenson insists you ingest along with the novel....

It's still here?

And you have the information to back up this "often" claim, besides the one example you claim?

I know a guy who worked for a number of years for Reuters as a communications tech in war zones all over the world, and he never "worked both sides" whatever that means to you but whose life was endangered on a number of occasions. He was paid for it and he accepted the possible consequences. However, he, along with I would suspect are the majority of Reuters employees, did not work for for Hezbollah, and didn't, as you appear to suggest, deserve a couple of 30mm shells for doing his job.

Since this is the Internet, though, people who disagree with you of course deserve death, I suppose.

How many times have you been in Earth orbit...? Atlantis wins.

>Scroogle has access to the exact same information Google would have had you used Google

Wrong. The reason people that don't just walk around cluelessly believing everything people tell them are concerned about Google is that it continuously is trying to be the Panopticon. It's not just your search history, that's a tiny part of what they do now. It's Google Analytics, it's watching what you're watching on YouTube, their (pathetic) attempt to muscle into social networking with Buzz, the emails they have full access to via Gmail, etc. It's not because they want to "improve your search experience". They want a full profile on you so they can sell you as a package to advertisers.

Even setting aside concerns about oppressive governments getting their hands on this data, do you really want advertisers to have this data in detail? For example, Amazon already uses differential pricing. If a retailer knows you are super keen on a particular genre, they may provide you with *higher* pricing than other people because they are reasonably sure you'll pay. I don't want to hand over negotiating leverage to a party that already has way more information than I do.