The Slashdot post is incorrect, according to the article. The actual throughput is about 4GB/s.

Not exactly. The primary reason people would pay big bucks for the SLR camera is because of the difference in lens selection and quality. Other than artistic skill, there's no single component that is going to make a bigger difference to the look of the photograph. All other things being roughly equal, a $1,000 lens on an SLR camera is going to be capable of producing a better photograph than a $99 point and shoot, from a technical perspective at least. There are some photographs that you can get with an SLR that you'll never be able to get with a point and shoot. High speed action, or extremely low/high depth of field shots, for example.

This is absolutely true. Still is, even with digital.

Sure there is. In fact, that's probably the largest market segment for digital cameras. Quality is getting better all the time, even as camera sizes are shrinking. Heck, they're starting to stick cameras in phones that rival the high end consumer digital cameras of only a few years ago.

C'mon, that's just your excuse for being lousy in bed.

That algorithm does particularly poorly on just one processor. In fact, if it ran successfully the universe would implode.

I think it could be done with no more than two. The technology behind the iPod touchscreen is capable of recognizing the shape and size of a touch point. So you should be able to determine the type of piece with a single point, and you'd just need another point for orientation. I think only oval shapes can be recognized, but if asymmetrical shapes are possible (or if you had pieces that were symmetrical and limited the forward direction to a 180 degree arc), you could do it with only one.

But if you had access to the low level touchscreen interface, it may not even be a problem. I believe the iPod filters out points below a certain size threshold as random noise. But if you know that you're looking for certain patterns, you could separate these from the noise yourself and there would theoretically be no limit to the number of recognizable shapes.

It's actually more significant than you might think. Drawing the desktop requires a graphics operation as well as a disk operation, and these are two of the slowest operations the computer can perform. If you have a ton of icons in your desktop folder (which I usually do, since I use it as a generic holding space for temporary files, and only bother to clean it out relatively infrequently), it can take a significant amount of time to draw all of them. Maybe not a whole lot, but when you consider that it's constantly there, it can add up.

Also, disabling the desktop prevents the system from preparing for a cross application drag if you just drag across the desktop while trying to drag from one window to another within the same application. Some poorly designed programs (I'm lookin' at you, Final Cut Pro) will freeze up for several seconds while they enumerate something or other based on the premise that since you crossed over the desktop, you might conceivably want to drop things on it. Disabling the desktop prevents that (but you still have to be careful not to accidentally drag over any stray Finder windows!)

With Tinkertool, you can turn off the desktop entirely so that no icons show whatsoever. Doing so provides a bit of a performance boost since it never has to redraw the desktop window, and it provides the added benefit that a clumsy click on the desktop won't switch you out of the current application.

Also, they're having a conference for criminals down at the local police station. Real big conference, trust me. I bet there'll be booth babes.

The presence of competition is not a necessary condition for a "free market". This is not open for debate--this is a simple matter of the definition of the term. What you might be thinking of is a "perfect market", which is a theoretical concept in economics that is not the same thing as a "free market". Go read up about it on Wikipedia and you'll see what I mean.

So you want to legislate morality. We must all believe in your ethics, and anyone who doesn't follow your ethical code must be punished, and those who do should benefit. Funny how similar the views of the right-wingers and left-wingers are when you reduce them to their cores.

You generally believe the purpose of the government is to benefit people you like at the expense of people you don't like. You can qualify it however you want, but there is nothing noble about forcibly taking from those who have what you want, simply because they're not part of your favored group. If you wanted to say that the purpose of government is to prevent people from unjustly enriching themselves to the detriment of others, then perhaps we could agree. Then it would just be a matter of determining what is "just". But you seem to believe that some people are intrinsically entitled be enriched at the expense of others who intrinsically deserve to be punished, and are willing to use government powers to forcibly do so--after all, government powers derive entirely from the fact that the government has a monopoly on force.

The government should no more be benefitting the CEO of the company than the janitor. Personally, I don't believe forcing others to benefit you against their will is right, no matter what sort of populist veneer you put on it.

How do you propose to do so? Perhaps pass laws saying that Comcast must do X or must not do Y? And do you expect to do this for every complaint people have, until they're no longer "crap"? And how do you enforce these laws? If they refuse or are unable to comply with your whims, do you simply revoke their license to operate? Or do you sanction them until you force them to comply? What about the increased operating costs involved in complying with your regulations (or paying the sanctions)? These costs would necessarily be passed on to the consumer. Would you then regulate the price they can charge?

Unless you believe resources are infinite, any of these regulations must necessarily reduce the quality of service for a given price, or increase the price to consumers. Alternatively, if the service provider is unwilling or unable to comply with the regulations, it would result in the cessation of service entirely. Can you provide an example where an unregulated company that provided poor service suddenly improved dramatically in quality and/or price as a result of increased regulation?

The great populist lie. Who do you think runs the "large mega telecommunications companies"? I'm pretty sure they're run by people, not autonomous robots or computer programs. So let's restate what you're saying a bit more accurately: The goal of society and government is to benefit certain people to the detriment of other people, based on who is part of the largest group and hence has the most votes.

Your vision of the role of government sounds like mob rule to me.

And your solution to Comcast being crap is... to legislate them into not being crap? That'll totally work.

So you think that if you agree when you sign up that you won't use more than a certain amount of bandwidth, and you end up using more than that, Comcast should just have to suck it up? I'm glad I'm not doing business with you.

From Wikipedia:

Your understanding of economics is flawed. There is nothing about a monopoly that is per se incompatible with a free market. And again, why is there an urgent need for a regulatory solution to a theoretical problem that, at present, doesn't exist?

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And whatever you do, for God's sake don't let the government anywhere near it! If the hypothetical problems that everyone is concerned about emerge, there's always the option to legislate later. But what makes you so certain the free market won't sort things out, when by your own admission it has so far done just that?