I wouldn't call it optimistic but the Battlestar Galactica reboot dealt with a lot of "hard questions". It's the only reboot series I thought was far better than the original. The original was a lot more "optimistic" but was a bit corny.

I really like the first new Star Trek movie. The second one was pretty lame. The space battle scenes were cool but it was all explosions and a real weak plot. Now JJ gets a chance to murder Star Wars. Should be interesting.

A.) can go off the deep end and try to do that now.

B.) can force me to buy services only through their approved "partners" and shut out companies I actually like by throttling them into oblivion if they aren't allowed to double dip and get money from both sides. B can also raise an Army pretty easily.

B scares me more than A.... though A scares the shit out of me, I can thwart their efforts through technological means and good security discipline if they get obnoxious. I can do so even better if B can't legally screw with my traffic.

And you have no right to a landline phone but the populace considers it a basic need, thus Title II.

And if my kid HAS to have internet access to attend public school these days, that's also qualified as a "need".

AT&T and ComCast don't have the right to bully local governments into giving them monopolies either. So yeah, they can get bent. They brought this on themselves with scummy business practices and douchebaggery. If you do business unethically, it comes back to bite you. And since people have no options to switch in most areas for wired service, they have to go the legislation route to avoid being abused.

So yeah, fuck those bastards. They should be getting dinged for imposing limits on "unlimited" service anyway. If they can't even give me what I paid for without trying to screw me behind the scenes and degrade my service..... and I depend on them for my daily routine..... it's legislation time.

Our options:

A.) Incompetent government regulation causing some inconveniences and waste.

B.) A corporate boardroom full of sociopaths telling me what I can and can't do with an "unlimited" network connection that I require to do my job.

Option A is the lesser of two evils. Internet service is no longer a "luxury", it's basically required to do business and even attend public school now. It's a utility and needs to be regulated like one to keep those greedy bastards from gouging us, killing innovation and hampering network performance for profit.

As screwed up and brutal as our government is, and as much as I think regime change is necessary..... I trust Verizon and AT&T even less.

Yeah, I was definitely more impressed with the 802.11 chipsets and gear they used in the PPC PowerBooks and iBooks. My older 2009 Macbook doesn't seem to have as many issues as my newer Air does though.

Oh, forgot to mention. OSX is directly derived from NeXTStep. Which also wasn't X11 based and was around since 1988. So no, it wasn't for "marketing" purposes.

I'm pretty sure EVERY UNIX vendor used UNIX for "marketing purposes".... it couldn't have been because it was the quickest path to a full pre-emptive multitasking environment with full multiuser capabilities that had been rigorously tested for over a decade.

It's more UNIX-like under the surface of the UI than any modern Linux distro I can think of personally. A lot of us actively manage REAL UNIX boxes as well and think you're full of crap.

The major difference is the fact that it doesn't use a dated clusterf**k of a GUI environment and has actually evolved since the 80's instead of piling kludge on top of kludge to mimic functionality found in other more high-performance GUI environments.

Would OSX be my SERVER environment of choice? Probably not. But as far as UNIX WORKSTATIONS with real desktop software go, OSX is lightyears ahead of anything Linux or FreeBSD have to offer. Or any commercial UNIX vendor for that matter.

OSX is quite a bit less f**ked up than Solaris. And OSX is the most widely used UNIX desktop environment on the planet. And I'm glad it doesn't use the GNU userland, I prefer BSD anyway. If you want OSX to be more traditionally UNIXy, install MacPorts, XCode, XQuartz and TotalTerminal. And go tick some checkboxes in various preferences in Finder and such to make it work as you expect.

You bash OSX yet every modern FOSS desktop tries to mimic it terribly and cram Windows-like UI elements in as well. And the Linux crowd is doing its best lately to try to make Linux as un-UNIX-like as possible to the point where it's becoming difficult for a desktop environment to even properly compile and run under FreeBSD anymore which is far closer to real UNIX than modern Linux.

That's only true in iOS-land. ;-)

Depends how you have your login and shell profile scripts set up.

In fact, you can plug in a USB->Serial adapter and set up a real VT220 as a secondary console, or if you have a hackintosh with a real serial port, you can just use that.

Or if the machine is set up to ask for a username and password instead of clicking a picture, you can even type '>console' as the user name and drop directly to shell without using terminal.app.

I did. Oops. Still.... that can't be cheap. And I can think of a certain wireless provider that offered unlimited service only to force everyone out of those plans later. I don't trust Verizon any more than AT&T.

Faster connection with 4G just means you'll hit the bandwidth cap faster and pay Verizon for content that should be free.

And this is different from every single commercial UNIX workstation vendor, how?

Solaris was littered with AT&T and badly documented Sun bullshit everywhere.

A/IX is littered with IBM bastardization everywhere.

HP-UX is littered with indescribable horrors.

Digital UNIX/Tru64? Now THAT was bastardization done right.

A/UX was littered with Apple bastardization and undocumented bullshit too, that didn't make it any less interesting.

So yeah, your argument is stupid.

It's pretty easy. First, take it out of the box. You lift the LCD into a proper viewing angle and push the power button. There you go. Unix.

Yup, FiOS isn't as profitable because users won't tolerate overage charges or massive throttling on wired connections but they'll bend over when it comes to wireless. Even though their wireless connections are NOWHERE near as good as wired connections.

Yet in even some of the poorest countries you can get 20Mbit connections with no cap for less money than you pay in the US.

Change "some" to "MOST" and you have a better idea. FTR, I work in this industry.