Babylonians, I bid you welcome to your new home!

Y93D1 Activity, knitting and crocheting
T1500XA Foreign body in cornea, unspecified eye, initial encounter

The rub in 2 and 4 comes when you STILL have to click the checkbox to make the software run. Nothing that they send back in paper form will get you past a hardcoded EULA/TOS agreement. By clicking OK even when you have the paper document in hand, you are explicitly accepting the original agreement and the company laughs at you.

..100Base-T. Albeit not over incredibly long distances.

Conversely on that broadband cable line already coming to your house, each 6MHz channel can support a downstream rate of 42.88Mb/sec using QAM256 (with some of this as overhead). Devoting that entirely to "Internets", the usable frequency range of that cable (typically) is from ~54MHz to 750MHz which represents 116 channels. 116*42.88 = 4974Mb/sec, or ~5Gb/sec of useful data in one direction. Cut that in half, and allowing for upstream inefficiencies (QAM64 instead of QAM256), you could theoretically get ~2.5Gb/sec down, ~1.75Gb/sec up over that one cable using current tech.

Of course you'd need multiple cable modems on the receiving side (or a killer DOCSIS 3 device supporting 58 down, 58 up channels) and the corresponding hardware at the head end. This is not unfeasable, just impractical.

And with Comcast you'd reach your bandwidth cap in just under 7 minutes...

The point is that the claimed level of performance of DSL can be trumped by a single entry level DOCSIS 3 cable modem (152Mb/sec down, 123Mb/sec up) using just 4 channels each way.

BIG badaboom!

I hear the guys are having great success speeding up this process with funroll-loops and -O51
*ducks*

goodbye karma...

Interestingly, gold plated contacts when in contact with mating gold plated contacts, can spontaneously stick or form weak "welds" to each other. This is not useful mechanically as they can still be separated (usually), but electrically it results in a copper-nickel-gold-nickel-copper regime, rather than two separate gold interfaces. Also GP Poster's comment about audio applications is not true - the skin effect does not apply at such low frequencies, especially for the thickness of the plating.

You do realize that the vast majority of ethernet cables are unshielded right? And that the shielding actually decreases performance measurably?

If I recall, anything lower than S11=50 was not supported by most modems, and L3 generally overdrove the lousy piezo so much that the DTMF was nearly unrecognizeable as such.

A sheet of ruled paper beats Quickbooks - at least if you look at it wrong it will not corrupt the database and the last week's worth of entries. I'll take vi (maybe Eclipse for some projects, or notepad++) over suffering through VS any day. Watson is running a Linux cluster with a huge foundation of FOSS. Chromium IS open source. Excel (except for install base) and Powerpoint really dont have much going for them except the cruddy ribbon bar that (almost) everyone hates. 7zip/LZMA2 is on par or better than winRAR again except for install base - better compression, slightly lower speed. GMail as an interface is on par with Zimbra - the cloud factor allows Gmail's spam filters to be more intelligent, but the UI and usability are similar - at least Zimbra can sort! I do not know any FOSS products that have led to more virus infection vectors than Adobe products... so I cannot dispute Adobe's dominance there.

            That leaves Vegas, and TurboTax. I've never used Vegas, to be honest. Given their (Sony's) current stance as a company I doubt I ever soon honor them with my patronage. Turbotax is in an odd boat - They have the great ability to reap funds from people every year, for an evolutionary product. In that instance FOSS fails (though I'm happy to be proven wrong), in that it does take significant effort to change it each year, yet there is guaranteed funding stream.

At the time I purchased the original uncrippled 60GB model, I was weighing the purchase of that against a Mac Mini as a media center PC. The PS3 won out, since it did everything I wanted out of the Mini. The PS3 did not, of course, run OSX, but it did run any PowerPC Linux happily, and mplayer/VLC/XBMC were capable of playing back pretty much anything the Mini could. Additionally, it had a unique hardware set that was faster at certain functions than anything then available at any reasonable price. e.g. I wrote a stupid fast (useless but fast) port of Conway's Game of Life using the SPUs as learning tool.

Add in the Blu-Ray playback, and card readers, and it was very very useful as a general purpose media center PC. Needless to say I did not upgrade past 3.15, and lost PSN connectivity back then. Everything was happy until the graphics hardware started throwing up random polygons when playing offline games.

The PS3 Sony sent back when I paid for repair/replacement was already upgraded past 3.15 (ignoring my request to NOT upgrade my console, and specifically telling them to return my console unfixed if a replacement was not at 3.15).

As a result, I am very thankful to again have that capability to run Linux back due to the jailbreak community. Sony screwed me twice already. If they permaban me now it will be a very sad day.

Ridiculous qualifiers? I think not!

Well, to be fair, the update WAS released on April 1. I can understand that at least the first wave of updaters could have considered it an April Fools gag, before the forums lit up with anger.

And here we have the class-action lawsuit against Sony regarding OtherOS still ongoing and waiting... and waiting... delayed...
Whereas the case against GeoHot is going hot and fast, with Sony allowed to do forensics on his equipment and tamper with evidence.

Small Claims Court? County of Oakland, CA. Hope for a no-show on Sony's part, then a default judgement. Good luck collecting on that though.

If you can look at those charts and see any trendline I applaud you. To me it appears the numbers are statistically brownian noise.
Your first paragraph is ok, but then you dive into the deep end... You give no basis for why para 1 is "poison to democracy". Speaking of which, what is this Democracy to which you refer? People like you, with no basis in economics, or civics, are what make the long term prospects of the US "not good".