Arguably you could use some too. Not everyone hates GNOME3 with a passion. Yes it's different and not what you're used to, but that doesn't mean it's bad and wrong and that this needs to be "admitted".

Ok so what I was trying to say was two things -- religion can cause people to do good things, and that disagreeing with other parts of a group you are in (by choice or not) is a normal part of human existence.

I'm not claiming that being religious is a prerequisite for recognising other people as human beings. But if you're claiming "99% of religious people are insane" it would suggest that maybe you are not thinking of those people as human beings, merely wrong-thinking automatons.

That's your opinion, that 99% of religious people are crazy. You're welcome to believe that. Demonise them all you want. Sure, we can be a mixed bag. But religious people I know feed the hungry, house the homeless, and give a caring ear to people locked away in prison who need someone stable and normal to talk to. And part of that is because of their religion. Not because they feel obligated to do these things to earn God Points, to be redeemed for quality of housing in the afterlife. But because they believe that it's the right thing to do -- that they are merely passing on the love they recieve from their creator to those around them who really need it. They may be crazy but the craziness doesn't sound like its results are something I'd want to discourage.

You appear to be widening "no true scotsman" from "no true christian" to "no true religious person"... which is casting the net so wide it's getting close to suggesting that you are a member of the right thinking set, and everyone else is a member of the wrong thinking set. And those other people (why does it always have to be other people) are wrong and evil and can be tarred with one big bad brush. They *all* hate teh gays, they all want to blow us up, they all vote for the wrong person, they all ...

This is quite similar thinking to that used to demonise teh gays, people with the wrong colour skin, foreigners and immigrants, poor people, rich people, people who vote for the other guy (at least seemingly in the US). They're all still people, and keeping up the lie that they're different and bad really only works if you carefully avoid getting to know them (or make special dispensation for the ones you do). If everyone who disagrees with you has to be fought, you're going to end up with a very boring circle of friends, and the world will be that much poorer.

No True Scotsman is a crappy fallacy people knowing nothing of church history (hint: there's a *lot* of dissent in it) love to throw at Christians complaining that "too many of us have lost the plot" and please don't judge us all by that lot.

It's pretty common to be part of a group and not want to be thought of as being like members of that group whose actions/beliefs/etc you disapprove of. Think of it like being a US citizen who doesn't approve of your government's actions, or indeed those of your fellow countrymen, and is at pains to tell people from outside your country that "we're not all like that".

So accept that any group will have dissent, and when it is mentioned shouting "NO TRUE SCOTSMAN LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" may be a little childish.

Bandwidth and transfer are not the same thing.

As an ISP you need to provision your links to cope with peak time load. Limiting data transfer reduces customer's link utilisation, so they are less likely to use all their link's bandwidth at the same time.

Peak bandwidth costs because you have to buy transit to that level (minus peering, but unless you're big, peering won't get you that much). Your routers have to be big enough to cope with that traffic level. The links inside your network, getting traffic between your customers' premises and your transit providers/peering points need to cope with that level of traffic. And if those customer connections go through someone else's infrastructure (e.g. a telco's DSLAMs and associated backhaul) you'll be paying for that too, and not at rates you can control by buying better gear to go at the ends of a fibre link.

In New Zealand we've always had data caps, mostly because bits of glass under the ocean cost a fair bit. We used to have them on dial-up connections. Several times ISPs have tried to offer uncapped broadband connections, and they've until the last year or so always ended in disaster.

How have they solved the problem? Mostly clever traffic management -- forcing you to use less of the 15 megabits of DSL last mile link, by slowing down non-interactive traffic during peak load. Ever decreasing bandwidth costs, and a different cost structure for access via the incumbent telco's DSL network, will also have played a part.

Any uncapped connection is going to be sold as rated at a low speed, traffic managed to be slow at peak load, or really expensive. You can buy dedicated, or at least low-contention bandwidth... that's what ISPs and large businesses do. Just don't ask for 15 megabits of low contention internet for the price you pay for a consumer DSL connection: people will laugh at you. 3 years ago I was getting quoted prices of around $1000NZD/mo ($850USD, ish) for a 4Mbps office internet connection. It'll be less now, and obviously as your connection size goes up, the price per megabit goes down. So if you want a connection that can run at its maximum rate, all the time, you can buy one. You just probably can't afford one.

The economics will be different in the US -- wholesale bandwidth will be cheaper. But last miles cost money, routers cost money, backhaul costs money.

And 3G/cellular networks are an even better illustration of this -- there, the last mile is an RF interface shared with a bunch of subscribers. Selling you a 5GB capped connection means you won't torrent incessantly -- at 21Mbps you may be using all (or maybe, just half) of the available bandwidth in your location. Which will make the network slow for everyone else, who will complain that they're paying for 21Mbps and getting 1Mbps or less.

Looks like I'm wrong -- see what happens when you trust your own memory over Google/Wikipedia? Someone clearly lied to me in my youth when they told me it was referring to our town :-(

You do realise no one outside of New Zealand will get that joke...

Did Apple really do the high DPI display R&D? I thought they bought the displays from Samsung and LG (and maybe others), and that those displays varied in quality, suggesting that each manufacturer has their own process rather than just doing what uncle Apple tells them to.

Me too.

I have an AMD motherboard with integrated Radeon graphics. Yeah, the open source drivers aren't as fast as the binary ones -- but I could do with playing less minecraft anyway. And wow, I can upgrade the system and not worry about graphics drivers breaking things.

My netbook has an Intel GPU. Same situation.

Thanks, AMD/ATI!

You'd think so, but they're often enough caught up in the culture wars to vote for the other guy anyway.

I assume you're in the USA and need reminding that your defense and agricultural industries are hugely dependent on government funding or subsidies, but somehow get missed in the "government needs to spend less" arguments.

Of course, if you ran Linux, you could have this now (sort of) -- it's possible to run full Linux on a rooted android phone, and with MHL you can tether it to a display. Imagine something like the padfone with a keyboard dock...

From a pedant who remembers how this worked:

* You could get more than 8KHz. But the number of PWM steps you had was 1.193180MHz / sampling frequency - so only 54 at 22.050KHz. The higher sampling frequencies made the PWM "whine" less audible.
* As long as you called the original timer interrupt code at the correct frequency (1.193180MHz / 65536, ~18Hz) the system clock would stay accurate. Of course, if you failed to do this, it wouldn't.

It's also not that good a story. It's exposition with poor narrative bolted on. Marshall Brain is, alas, not Aldous Huxley.

Does it make you any less of a dick because someone else paid you to be one?

Would you deny a meal to a starving person standing in front of you because it will contribute to other problems? How is it different if you deny it from a distance?

Okay so some aid is misdirected/misused/etc -- but that's no reason to throw your hands in the air, say the problem is too hard, and ignore it completely.