ISP agent: The blocked content includes child pornography, madam.
Linda: Thanks for reminding me that, I will make sure I block CP on my end. I just don't want you or the Government to block pictures of my grandchildren in the swimming pool or something like that.

This reminds me of a project where my team worked from the client's office, and we had to ask the client to let view porn, because their f***ing content filter thought Java source files were porn because they had some comments marked with XXX (standard Java notation to indicate areas that are kluged up or need to be).

A market with two companies is still better than a market with only one. And a market with two products is not as efficient in the short term, but it is healthier in the long run.

Still, it's USD 16K against the NSA budget. And Russia's FSB's. And Mossad's.

In Argentina, if you can afford to start paying an additional monthly sum to switch to OSDE (the best medical insurance in the country) you are free to switch jobs without worrying about an illness becoming a preexisting condition, because you just take your OSDE plan with you wherever you go. You only need to make sure that they will allow you to have OSDE as the "obra social" (government-mandated medical insurance for employees). You can even become self-employed and keep your OSDE plan (but in that case you have to pay about 80% more, still a bargain compared to the US). At last I could find something that works better in Argentina than in the US! Of course it's not cheap, but my plan is one the most expensive and it's under USD 350 for my wife, three kids and myself, including dental, ER, cosmetic surgeries, fertility treatments, some of the best doctors in the country and 100% coverage in neighbouring countries (one of my daughters was hospitalized when she traveled to Chile and we didn't have to pay anything at all, same with daily visits to the ER with another daughter during a two-week trip to Uruguay).

Most Java books should be pulped immediately after printing. Or perhaps the authors should be. K&R's book should never be thrown away.

The problem in Argentina isn't actually the price fixing or even the economic distortions. It's the lack of trust, because there is no economic plan, just a bunch of economic measures decided on a rush, without any longterm strategy. And particularly because Argentine governments have the nasty habit of grabbing the money directly from people's bank accounts when they run out of money. I don't think the true nature and scale of the problem can be understood from the perspective of someone living in a more normal country. Just to give you an example of how different things are down here: four years ago, when global and local economy looked rosy, I sold an appartment and bought a house. My coworkers thought I was crazy because instead of moving more than one hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase like everybody else, I deposited the money in a bank account and transferred it to the seller's account. Why on earth do people move a life's savings in a suitcase risking theft and even their lives when there is a banking systrm for that? Because they fear that the government more, they fear that the government might decide to convert accounts in US dollars to pesos at an arbitrary exchange rate. Or convert the money you need tomorrow to pay for your house in bonds that are payable in 15 years. Or withhold part of your money just in case you owe taxes, without any burden of proof. All these things happened to me in the last 12 years, and even worse things happened in the 70s and 80s.

Literally what? The suspense is killing me!

The only thing new it brings to the table is that it feels more like a replacement of SMS. It's easy to install (they obviously prioritized ease of use over security) and it works with your contacts that are already stored on the phone.

I forgot to add that I live in Buenos Aires, Argentina. BTW, try to avoid posting to Slashdot while you are in the middle of a conference call, you will make mistakes in both.

I work at home now, but I used to have a 30-mile, two hours and a half commute to work, the same to get back home. And no one I know gets to work in less than 30 minutes.

It doesn't have to be a fine. They can just charge for the service. The $75 fee is firefighter service insurance. If people don't pay, they could charge the homeowner whatever turns out to be the actual cost of the service (the annual cost of having the resources available divided by the average number of fires per year, plus a surcharge for "forgetting" to pay). It might be several thousand dollars, and it's up to the homeowner to decide whether his house is worth paying for the service or not.

Letting his house burn and refusing to take the $75 fee without offering an alternative is not the best course of action, even when they have good reason to be mad at him. Of course, they cannot decide the price of the service on the spot, it is something that they should have thought in advance.

...and so they are willing to trade a lot of time in exchange for a little monetary compensation. That fact is behind those market segmentation strategies that make you jump through hoops (like clipping coupons from the newspaper or collecting cookie wrappers) to get a discount. AMD is not going to worry about this, as the existence of this new segment could mean more sales of the lottery chips.