The ace that cable has up its sleeve is that your $8 Netflix subscription is riding on a cable internet pipe. In my area, the local non-Comcast provider actually publishes a real pricing scale, and 50 cable channels is a $10 add-on for internet access: http://www.tvcconnect.com/wp-c...

While Netflix's distribution model and show quality make it a locally good thing, I think that in the larger scheme, having content production and content distribution tied together will ultimately continue the problems that the current system has. While some of this content is available through other distributors, they always have an incentive to give preferential treatment to their own distributor. I doubt we'll ever see House of Cards on Hulu Plus, for example.

Aside from having to subscribe to several services to hit all of the content that you're interested in, you also have the cases where, like HBO, they have conditions on subscribing and draconian restrictions on what devices they allow playback on (eg, until a couple of years ago, Android playback was locked out if you had an external display connected)

The Pebble is 1/3 the price, has a 1-week battery, and works with iOS, Android, and Sailfish. I will be interested to see how the Apple Watch actually does after release, since every smart watch review I've read for the past 2 years has measured against the hypothetical iWatch rather than the real competition.

I think that the 70% export figure indicates that while "other countries" have switched which crops they grow, they haven't changed their almond consumption rate. Similar to how the western world has eliminated the environmentally destructive extraction techniques necessary for rare earth metals, but still buys cell phones because China is willing to take the hit.

These guys http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... probably would have preferred to be able to come back up after some number of days, rather than ever. That said, not all losses of data are total, so it might make sense to have a tape system for catastrophes and some other system for correcting a smaller mistake.

I initially thought that the reason What this actually means is not completely certain at this point" was because the product had been announced. Then I saw a big fat "download the free community edition" link, and realized that this was another one of those journalistic failures that Phoronix calls "articles". Seriously, how hard is it to try out the product you're reporting on for 3 seconds to see if the feature that your article is reporting on exists?

Even if the NSA was considering terminating these programs due to cost, that's not the same as terminating them because domestic surveillance exceeds the NSA's mandate. It's kind of like saying that we don't jail people for homosexuality because the prisons would cost too much: while the argument does end the injustice in the short term, it leaves open the possibility of it returning in a way that a moral argument doesn't.

Yes, but vulnerabilities are generally described as "introduced in x" or "fixed in y". Range checking a version is much easier than searching a change log.

He's on CentOS; they have this absurd scheme for kernels where they freeze the reported version and apply "selected patches" for 5+ years, so you never know what bugs are fixed.

That was exactly my thought. This is exactly how cell phones are jailbroken; I was actually quite disappointed that the article was purely from a security vulnerability standpoint as opposed to how I can root my player and make it allow skipping of the thrice-damned FBI warnings.

I wonder if Grizzly Industrial runs into trouble with this; they explicitly advertise how you can use their machine tools to make guns, and in fact some SKUs are labelled as "gunsmithing lathes".

My favorite slashdot mobile ads are the ones that somehow autoload a play.google.com URL, causing the Play store app to come up unless you go through the torturous process of disassociating the intent Play comes with.

Yes, my argument against suspending due process and surrendering government to the "kill people" branch was just an outgrowth of my inner desire for a world where hunting people for sport was interrupted only by pauses to rape children.

Perhaps my position is more clear as a mathematical relation:

Martial Law < Imperialism < Modern Western Culture

Again, it's not good or desirable to regress to previous incarnations of our society. I am not even saying that nuclear holocaust would result in such a regression. I am simply observing that with less population, knowledge, and infrastructure than today, there was a society that did not require a military authority to maintain.

The Demon Conservatives of Slashdot are paradoxically both in favor of a powerful, racist, homophobic state clamping down on any free thought, and an anarchic, eternal war where gold is the only value.

While I do identify my political leanings as conservative, I believe that it is an individual argument, not the political leanings of the speaker, which should be addressed in debate.

As I said, I believe that life was better in the society of the past few hundred years than it would be under a martial law imposed with the power of a modern state. I do also believe that life is better under today's society is better than it was under Napoleon. It is this improvement that I referred to as the measure of our modern civil structures.