Well, what do you expect with all the science deniers in Congress and the White House? If the Democratic Party members took global warming as seriously as the Republicans do, they'd quickly cut out the red tape and solve this nuclear waste storage issue in order to economically reduce reliance on fossil fuels, as places like Arizona do. Instead, they chase after non-scientific stuff like biofuels, where the science is settled.

It's nice to see that Microsoft is finally ready to get out of beta with their 1.0 release soon, even if some folks probably still don't think they're quite ready for it yet...

Yeah, I'm waiting for someone to run a broadcast radio or TV advertisement that says something like "Hey Siri, Call 703 555 1212 (pay per call line) or "Hey Siri, Directions to XYZ business", or even "Hey Siri, search for malicious iPhone jailbreak website". You can also substitute in "Ok Google" as well to catch android phones...

Yeah. Oil prices go up for a while because of new demand, people figure out new techniques and start putting into production more wells, so oil prices go down and keep going down until some of the wells aren't profitable at the new prices, so they stop producing and the prices start going up, then the well and oil rights owners start producing more again and the prices goes back down again, and so on and so forth.

It's all just basic supply and demand curves, tied into a little technology and some lag times for changes. The only people who should be surprised are those folks who bought into the whole peak oil thing, somehow believing that we were magically going to run out of something that currently has more proven sources than are remotely economically workable at current prices/technological levels, but that can provide enough petroleum products to last the world for thousands of years... and more are discovered/proven every day when people bother to look for them.

Bottom line for what you want, which is FreeBSD, start with the manual.

Then go to the releases and pick the latest production, i.e. stable, release (Currently 10.1). Everything will be stable and binaries and source packages for your desired functions will all be available and up to date.

if you want a dedicated machine for one specific purpose, then another BSD might be better, but for multiple purposes/general purpose, just use FreeBSD. It'll be just as good as the others for specific purposes (just not by default, you'll have to run a command to install software, big deal), many of which have a FreeBSD source.

Don't forget to push each of your versions of this through the FDA's medical device approval process....

Ever read mainstream news reporting about a topic you were very familiar with? Perhaps something related to technology, or a local issue you were in the middle of?

Most people have had that experience. The more you know about something, the less the story seems to be accurate.

Yeah, all the rest of the news stories are about that accurate also, people just mostly don't notice.

Think about it.... it's mostly some j-school grad who asked a couple people some questions to get quotes, then threw the "story" together. Usually they're lucky if they understood what they were told, let alone can explain it in a manner which actually enlightens their audience.

My best luck as been with subject matter experts who blog on news topics related to their subject. So I get my economics news and analysis from economics professors (not the pet ones in the NY Times), my legal news from law professors and judges who blog, my technical news from a technical site focused on that part of the industry, etc...

Even then you have to be willing to read multiple viewpoints to try and see a bigger picture than one voice is going to paint for you.

Operating systems for gaming computers? I suppose your Playstation and your Wii and your Steam Machine run windows and WINE doesn't exist? Dude, don't confuse a monopoly with having a big market share.

De Beers managed to get to 85-90% of the world market for diamonds, not quite an actual monopoly... but as the diamondmarket is international, couldn't get all the governments to protect their market position by granting an actual monopoly and requiring their customers to purchase only their products. Guess what their market % is now? 40%? Lower? I guess they didn't have a natural monopoly after all.... market forces and all that.

Monsanto? No need to even go there in terms of IP. There are hundreds of seed companies farmers can buy from. Yeah, Monsanto is one of the biggest (at around 35% of the corn and soybean market share, just below DuPont) because many of their customers like their product combinations (pest control + seeds that resist it), but if another company came along tomorrow offering a better deal, how long would their market share last? One season, two? You're reading too much anti-GM propaganda and not looking at the actual facts.

Show me a monopoly in the United States that isn't enforced by the government and you might be able to start to make a point here.

The reality is that power company monopolies exist most everywhere in the U.S. today because the government legally requires things to be that way.

Companies have no power to enforce a monopoly without the government making laws giving them a monopoly. Even if a capitalist managed to achieve a local monopoly on something, the only thing keeping their competitors away is if the barriers to entry are larger than the potential profit.

You can claim that there are some natural monopolies, but if these are actually natural monopolies, then why would it require a law to prevent anyone from competing with them?

When you have government price controls (see for example, your local public utility commission), the natural result is that the company they've setup as a monopoly has only an incentive to deliver the worst possible service they can get away with, spending the least possible on everything, and pocket the rest.

It works that way in every industry it's been tried, so there shouldn't be a big surprise it works that way in the local electricity market. The real question is why do we keep having our government set things like this up... oh, that's right, most people are ignorant of basic economics and public choice theory.

Why do people keep conflating complete government control of an industry, to the point where the government outright decides who your local power company is and exactly how much they charge you, with capitalism? You could make a good case for calling that model socialism, or communism, or even fascism, but it's the exact opposite of any sort of market-based capitalism...

Sure, when the people in government decide to take complete control of an industry, the people in the industry become reduced to working their government masters for their own benefit, but the issue there isn't a lack of government power.

Ever heard of a public utilities commission? They're the ones who approve rates, expansion, rules for how the power company functions, etc...

Would it surprise you to learn that the deaths from producing renewables is orders of magnitude higher than the deaths from all the reactor meltdowns combined?

If so, do a little research and prepare to be surprised.

Exactly. The biggest issue is that it's difficult for a PHB, even a technical one, to reliably determine ahead of time who is worth 2x what everyone else is getting for a particular technology job and who is worth 1/2.

Then once someone is hired, in most companies HR makes it impossible to either give appropriate raises to those who actually deserve it or to get rid of those who aren't worth their salary as long as they're minimally performing.

Unregulated last mile wiring looks like this [ggpht.com]. It's a "natural monopoly" because the alternative is a dangerous, unmaintainable eyesore.

Except of course, as best as I can tell, your image appears to be from India, where the companies responsible for those poles are chosen as regional monopolies heavily regulated by the government. That short of undercuts your argument....

I agree that a co-op is a decent middle ground, especially in rural areas where the residents may be more interested in the services than might be otherwise profitable for companies to create the infrastructure. The key for me to that is that the co-op actually be voluntary, not a co-op in name only, but really just another required-by-the-government organization that they decided to name a co-op.