These test results are quite surprising to me, as the packages I receive from UPS are typically battered and have damaged corners, whereas those from FedEx are typically well-treated. I even had UPS call me once to tell me that a package, which I had taken care to tape really well, had come open during shipment, and was apparently in such a state of acceleration that the contents were strewn about, so they wanted to ask me what was in the box.

Well the artist thing is really just a concession; I don't believe you have to have a Mac to do anything artful (as implied in my original reply by the quoting of the word "necessary"). Art is but an excuse to buy into Apple's marketing.

I love Apple's mobile products, I just don't see the point in buying their laptop/desktop machines unless you are an artist. Even then, it's becoming a bit of a stretch of the word "necessary" to have an OS X machine. Their Windows counterparts are just incredibly cheaper and more compatible with devices and other computers around them, usually. 7 is a very good OS, IMO.

Quite honestly, I'm beginning to believe the longer before any sort of legislation on Net Neutrality is passed, the better. It's going to be a real mess once the ignorant Congress and the predatory corporations involved are done with it all.

I don't see this as being as much of a direct problem for residential users. What I find disturbing are the comments being made by telco CEOs in an obvious attempt to lay a framework for legislation. Gems like:

"We have to make sure that they [application providers] don't sit on our network and chew up bandwidth," Seidenberg (Verizon CEO) said. "We need to pay for the pipe."

"Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it," says Whitacre. (AT&T CEO) "So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?"

So, if you have any knowledge of the complexity of the Internet, you already know that Google and other hosts out there are already paying for service. You and I, on the other end of a TCP/IP connection, are already paying for our service. Who, exactly, is "sitting on the network, chewing up bandwidth" or "using the pipes for free?" Currently, it's the same for any other protocol being used on the Internet. Both parties are paying for service, on whatever scale they use it. Peering arrangements are made between ISPs to ensure they can mutually provide for their users.

The real issue here is that these companies have seen just how much money they can milk out of a 3G-capable cell phone, and they want to extend that plunder to what they know is going to be the ultimate service of the next 100 years as people drop cable and home phone service for Hulu and VoIP.

Stockholm Syndrome?

Wait, wait, wait a minute...who said anything about unlimited bandwidth? I don't know about you, but the only 2 competing ISPs in my area have "invisible" bandwidth limits, which can be found, but are not openly available to the customer.

Can we not just agree that the backbones need to be engineered with a tighter grid with much more bandwidth?

Bandwidth for residential users is not nearly as aggressively deployed as bandwidth for financial institutions is.

Dear AT&T,

How much for the Slashdot / Reddit / Gmail / Gaming Bandwidth package? Just planning ahead...

Hopefully they have worked out the multitude of bugs with the Wind and Netbook Remix. I have no power button in the UI, power management has a bug with the brightness function keys, no display for turbo mode, wireless adapter disabled on bootup sometimes and function key to enable it won't work, eats battery like Pac Man on a bender...

Unfortunately, I'd rather just boot to XP on my Wind for most tasks.

I feel oddly guilty now, having downloaded the Crysis demo just last night to punish my new video card.

It goes everywhere, it's small/lightweight, 3G coverage, and has great battery life.

WHS is basically just JBOD; I don't feel safe with it. When I was in the beta, they didn't explain exactly where or how files were stored, just that if you weren't using the full capacity of the array, that they were redundantly stored across drives. I like to be able to mount drives under linux to recover files if the OS crashes.