What would be even more green is having a phone with an SD card slot so that you wouldn't need to be connected to "the cloud" to have a reasonable amount of content stored on it.

I don't see what's wrong with having government have a monopoly on some basic necessities. The government has a monopoly on my local water utility, and they do a pretty good job of things. Electricity and natural gas are highly regulated by the government, and I'm very happy with the service I'm getting.

In fact, of all the monthly utility bills I have, the ones I despise the most are landline phone, and cable tv/Internet. And those are both delivered by commercial entities that have a monopoly because they own the lines. With cable and phone lines, you can buy services off another companies, but they are just paying big corps who own the lines, making it so that there's really no way to escape them. And if you ever need your lines fixed, and you're with one of the other guys, the guys who own the lines make sure it isn't fixed quickly. Even with other connectivity problems, the internet providers are often just renting some racks inside the big corps data center, meaning even small configuration issues can take a long time to get resolved.

I like my cell phone provider, because they've allowed smaller players to buy some of the spectrum so they can operate completely independently of the big boys, and they offer much better service, with lower prices for more features.

By that logic, people who have kids should get paid more. People should be paid based on the work they accomplish, and not on their personal circumstances. If I choose to live in a smaller house, drive a cheap car, and live a meager lifestyle does that mean I should get paid less, because I don't "need" the money?

If they have a foreign visa, then that means they are living in America, working in America, and paying American taxes. The question is, why are they willing to accept less pay than an American citizen if they have all the same expenses as an American? They may (most likely?) have less student loans, but other than that, there's no reason you can't live off the same wages they are. I can understand complaining about overseas workers, because in some places it's actually cheaper for just about everything, even if you buy the exact same stuff. But for foreign workers living in the same city, with the same housing options, and shopping at the same stores, if they think the job is worth the lower wages, maybe you are the one who's expecting too much.

But why does it have to be the most efficient? I know a woman who took software engineering. After she completed her degree, she went to teacher's college, and ended up becoming a teacher. To be a teacher where I live, you need 2 things. A bachelors degree, and to graduate from teachers college. For the most part, it doesn't matter what discipline you get your bachelors degree in. For her, at the time, it was interesting to take software engineering, and it gives you something good to fall back on in case you can't get in to teacher's college, or you decide you don't want to be a teacher, or if the number of jobs for teachers goes into decline. It's a much smarter path than taking an English degree, and then for some reason you can't get a job as a teacher, and you end up with a degree that doesn't help you get a job either.

Even after looking at the full report, I see no actual numbers for how many vulnerabilities there were. Going from 1 vulnerability to 2 vulnerabilities would have been a 100% increase, without a huge reason for concern. They also state:

a trend underscored by a progressively shorter time to first patch for its past two releases

Is time to first patch really a bad thing? It really means that vulnabilities were found, and that they were fixed quickly. As opposed to vulnerabilities found and not fixed quickly. I suppose it's worse than "no vulnerabilities found" but even if none are found, it doesn't mean they don't exist. Fixing things quickly is about the best thing you can do. It also goes on to say in the report

Both IE exploits released in 2014 (CVE -2014-1776, CVE-2014-0322) used Flash to build the ROP chain and launch shellcode

Which really leads me to believe that the numbers really did go from 1 to 2, and that the exploits were more due to flash than they were to specific functionality in IE. MS was able to work around the bug by stopping it at the first step, but looks like the exploit isn't possible without Flash.

There used to be a corner store across the street from my house that would rent a VHS tape for $2, or 3 for $5, which was great for a rainy day. One video rental shop in my town had a deal where you could get 7 movies for 7 nights for $7. Currently, There's a grocery store by my house that rents out movies for $2, or there's another store with a RedBox that rents Movies for $1 a night. Still a more expensive than Netflix if you do enough volume, but not bad if you're just rending the odd movie. I never understood how Blockbuster got so popular with such high prices. There was always cheaper options.

As long as the other VOD (Video On Demand) services continue to charge $1.99 an episode or $4.99 for movie rentals, Netflix will continue to be a good value for my money. As long as my family watches about 2 or 3 things as week, it ends up being cheaper than doing the same vs other services. I think that the problem is exactly as you state. charge me 25 cents an hour for watching stuff, and I would gladly pay. Instead, they make it way too expensive. Currently, Netflix is the only service available that you can get down to this price, as long as you watch enough TV.

Yeah, $13.50 a piece for print magazines seems to be quite expensive, especially on a subscription plan. Typically magazines give subscribers big discounts. That doesn't seem to be happening here. For that price, I'll just leaf through it at the book store and only buy it if it has something that particular catches my eye.

I find it a little disingenuous that they are saying that print isn't dying and then go on to say that they only have 3,000 subscribers.

And my biggest problem with print magazines is exactly as you stated. If they have a print and online version, by the time you get your copy in the mail, you could have easily just already read the online version. Unless they purposely delay the online version, which is an equally bad idea. But why stop there. Why even delay individual articles until there's a whole magazine's worth. Why not just publish individual articles online as they become available.

Yeah, especially on tablets and laptops where people generally don't (or can't) update the hardware at all. I would have to say that it's just yet another piece of identifying information. Combine it with all the other pseudo identifiers like user agent strings and font lists and you can narrow down the number of collisions quite quickly. Also, it's probably another thing that varies from time to time, which allows you to double count people and drive up visitor counts to increase your worth to advertisers.

Most likely, by the time 4K becomes popular, h265 will have reached maturity, and you'll be able to fit 4K streams in a 20 Mbps stream. 100 Mbps is still enough to do 5 simultaneous 20 Mbps streams. Also, if we could get away from all this streaming nonsense, and be allowed to download shows before we want to watch them, it would pretty much be a non issue. My computer could download stuff while I'm at work, and have everything ready for the evening when I'm ready to watch.

I personally don't see what the point of Gigabit speeds at home are. I have 30 Mbit/s internet, and that's fast enough to do at least 3 or 4 video streams at the same time. I don't really see many reasons I would need my internet connection to be 33 times faster than it already is. I think 100 would be the most I could ever forsee needing at home. At that rate, you can stream 5 Blu-Ray quality streams using h264. There's other uses such as downloading games, but the servers hosting the games aren't likely to be able to dedicate 1 Gbit to a single downloaded. Maybe in a decade some new thing will come along and I'll need a gigabit connection, but as it stands now, there isn't really any content on the internet that would benefit from having such a fast connection. At least not where I'd be hosting it out of my house.

This is why I'm seriously considering Windows Phone for my next one. I don't like iPhones because they only have 1 model (ok 2 now) and they are really expensive. Plus the fact that they make it hard to do anything that isn't Apple integrated. Android phones have the problem of you never know if they need to be updated. The only flaw I know about the Windows 8 phones is that there is a lack of apps. But as long as it has the apps so I can do what I want to, what does it matter what the total count is?

Not only that, but 8 MP camera is an easy to understand bullet point on the marketing brochure. UI that doesn't suck is harder to qualify, and doesn't really make sense on the marketing brochure. My biggest beef with Android phones is that many of them don't get updates after they leave the factory. This is especially true on many of the cheaper phones. Unfortunately, you don't see any phones marketed with "we promise to provide timely updates to the latest Android OS for the next 2 years" as a marketing point. And even if they did. There isn't much you can do to hold them to that.