Most of the schools around here have Smartboards now... and the average kids that are graduating from said schools around here are still dumb as shit, so much for Smartboards.

Right, and... where that is true if US states are sovereign, it's likewise true with sovereign world states.

Are you actually comparing moving your family to another state in the US, to moving your family to another country?

This is not appealing. Human rights shouldn't be subject to referendum.

I think we both agree on that, but the fact is that there are large groups of people all over this country that disagree and it's a constant struggle that takes resources and attention from way more important issues. The federal government has no business deciding either way, what's best for every single state.

I think you and I both know that's not how the energy market works. You're going to have skyrocketing energy prices in the midwest (just as we do on the coast) regardless of policy.

Due to ever increasing demand, yes, but that wasn't my point. For large parts of the US, (unreliable) wind and solar energy is not even remotely feasible and the transmission technology to efficiently distribute renewable energy from other distant places, does not currently exist. The EPA's ridiculous mandates are just about ready to hit all of these people in the wallet and I'm fairly certain a lot of them aren't even informed enough to know it's coming. Jobs will be lost at these power plants, and new potential jobs in "green energy" mean fuckall for people hundreds or thousands of miles from areas where these jobs exist. Nuclear power would've been a possible solution, but that's not even on the table after what happened to the poorly designed reactors in Japan.

Poor people already can't make ends meet as it is, how the fuck are they going to afford a sudden 30% jump in energy costs? Guess what they will start doing to offset their higher heating bills? They'll be firing up wood burning stoves and pellet stoves (oh and theft will go up too). Tell me, how does that ultimately help air quality?

Meanwhile, China and other 3rd world countries are spewing out pollution like crazy, to make cheap stuff for us; and we're expected to just pick up the slack. Why even bother? It's a shell game.

if government is all of the bad things US libertarians say... then when the proposal is to gut the US federal government and, implicitly or explicitly, bolster US state governments, all of your work is still ahead of you. Again, what makes the US federal government special? Or, what makes the states special?

Well, for one, if you don't like the political direction your state is headed in, you could always move to another state. Would you not agree for example, that the culture in the North East, values completely different things than the South? All of these people are trying to grab control of the federal government and jerk it in different directions to suit their own agendas. If the states had more control, you could have gay marriage and Marijuana be legal over here, and those bible thumpers down there can outlaw gay marriage and reinstate prohibition. These people over here on the sunny/windy coast can ban fossil fuels and subsidize (with their own damn tax base) wind turbines and solar panels all over the place without skyrocketing energy prices in the midwest where it's not so sunny and windy all the time.

Dwight Schrute... is that you?

If I were you, I would just jailbreak your 3G. Most of the iOS 5 features have already been around for jailbroken iOS devices forever anyways.

No, I'll never discover it. Apple abandons old products, so my iPhone 3G will not allow me to "discover" anything like that.

WAAAHHH... the vendor won't support my 3 year old smartphone with the latest OS upgrades anymore!

Try getting OS upgrades for some Android and BlackBerry phones that are only 2 years old, even IF the vendor has released one, there's a good chance the carrier won't. At least they're still supporting the 3GS which is now two generations behind.

one great example is being unable to customize the sound played when a message is received) that there's simply no excuse for, but those cases are certainly exceptions.

Which they've finally added as a "feature" in iOS 5!

I wouldn't call VirtualBox on Mac OS X perfect. I run it constantly to keep a Windows 7 VM going. I've seen it cause a kernel panic once, it's USB device support is sketchy and slow at best on the 64-bit Darwin kernel, usually it doesn't work at all. The snapshot feature (I'm running 4.1.4) has been pretty damn broken for me since the last three releases, it almost never successfully deletes snapshots and I have to go manually dick around with VDI files. I've never been able to get a VM's network interface to work as "bridged" on a bonded host interface, I always have to use NAT. Sometimes the Windows 7 VM just completely locks up for several minutes at a time, usually after some semi-transparent artifact is left on the display (no, this is not with Aero or even Direct3D enabled). Direct3D support in their Windows driver is shoddy at best, but they've marked that as experimental anyways. So no, not nearly trouble free by any means, but hey, it's free!

Incognito Windows aka Private Browsing is your friend. Just open up the Google account you want and keep it contained to that window, do everything else in another window. This is also a good way to keep an active Facebook session from snooping what you're doing on the web.

judging from the fine print on Apple's page, it seems it might be more of a technical limitation of CDMA, instead of the carriers not wanting to sell service to someone.

On other phones, it's only a limitation in firmware programming for the baseband chipset; on BlackBerries for example, you'll notice that Sprint and VZW use the exact same models. On the 4S it's strictly a limitation put in place by Apple mandated by the carriers, the 4S's are now (physically) identical for all carriers with the implementation of the Multi-Mode Gobi baseband chip. Historically when the iPhone was connected to iTunes for activation, that's when it was locked to the carrier. I'm guessing VZW and Sprint will track which ESN's belong to them now and the baseband's firmware will be effectively gimp'd once the phone is activated. If the ESN is a batch of unlocked phones, or was sold by another carrier, they won't activate it (or can't because Apple won't unlock it).

Wait and see how the unlocked 4S's will work seamlessly between ALL carriers in other CDMA countries. Meanwhile, here in the US, we get screwed.

HAH! Dream on, from: "The unlocked iPhone includes all the features of iPhone but without a contract commitment. You can activate and use it on the supported GSM wireless network of your choice, such as AT&T in the United States.* The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint."

So what this means essentially, is that Sprint and Verizon plan on continuing to be dicks, even though there's no technical limitation that would prevent the same unlocked 4S from working on any CDMA or GSM carrier. If you want an unlocked 4S, your only options for service in the US are ATT, Tmo or some crappy regional carrier such as CBW. In other news; ATT also refuses to allow Apple to provide unlock codes for iPhone 4's, even after your contract is fulfilled, it's total bullshit really.

virus's just from viewing emails or web pages hasn't really been an effective means of spreading malware for some time now.

Uh, my company's firewall logs would beg to differ. There are numerous exploits out there utilizing out of date Adobe plugins, the JRE plugin and malicious JavaScript embedded in advertisements, Google image search results are also a huge festering pile of exploits; most of these don't typically require the user to do anything (besides viewing a page) to execute them.

I was referring to apple, they also use that to prevent you from dropping any ram module into their machines as well.

Care to site a source? I've upgraded numerous Apple laptops and desktops with generic RAM, including the newest Macs with EFI, and I've never encountered this.

I haven't tried generic PCI WiFi adapters in a while, but I did use a cheap off-the-shelf Belkin one in a PowerMac G5 that happened to have the same chipset (driver) that AirPort used, it worked great, granted this was on a PPC system with OpenFirmware. Belkin didn't even mention that Macs were supported.

I've also heard of people utilizing the Mini PCI slot in Mac Minis to install whatever adapter they wanted.

If you ever use Delta Skymiles to get some "free" magazine subscriptions, be prepared for a shit-ton of frequent spam that you literally can't unsubscribe from. It also has the awesome feature of coming from no less than 5 different email addresses, making it a PITA to effectively block once you figure out that their unsubscribe links are purposefully broken. Bastards!

I mount the drive across the network from a Unix box and run a combo of du piped to grep and sort on it.