But you DO need FCC approval on a per-device level to transmit in the cellular spectrum. And unlike in ham radio in which all you get for unlicensed transmissions is a stern lecture from a cranky old man (the reality is that the FCC only acts on the very worst transgressions in the ham band), if you transmit on cellular frequencies without an approved device, the FCC will be all over your ass. Because of the potential for serious harmful disruption; you might even end up on the DHS radar and discover first-hand how paper-thin the veneer of "civil rights" actually is. Disabling a portion of a city's phone infrastructure is just the kind of thing that Really Bad People would love to do.

Cellular spectrum isn't Citizen's Band. Homebrew will land your ass in front of a judge.

Also, there are serious restrictions on what you can and cannot do and say on the ham bands. You cannot engage in work-related topics (that's what commercial bands are for). You are not allowed anonymity; your callsign has to be given, and it's in a publicly searchable database. You are forbidden to encrypt your traffic (digital or otherwise), or even engage in coded speech. You're not supposed to swear. You MUST get out of the way of emergency traffic. And nobody needs a warrant to listen in or record your conversations.

Ham radio is great fun and is useful in regional emergencies like Hurricane Katrina, but is in no way a substitute for a telephone (socially, technologically, or legally).

Now, if someone came up with a user-configurable platform with an approved radio and approved locked-down radio driver code (which is separate from OS code, as people who write jailbreaking software know), there might be a very small niche market for that. But it's only a niche; don't fool yourselves otherwise. Slashdotters are not the center of the world, do not drive social or legal policy, and for that we should all count ourselves lucky.

Dear Princess Ahmadinejad,

Non-proliferation, "bonus" software, or Tomahawks. Choose no less than one.

Your faithful adversary,
The Non-Jihadist World

Think of all the economic activity this will generate: Blackmail - "Hey, Mr. CEO, I wonder if your wife knows you were at that leather bar at 10:40pm last night."
Industrial espionage - "The CEO was tracked to the headquarters of a certain component supplier. Could this mean an entry into a certain hardware market?"
Kidnapping - no. That's not even close to a joke. It happens.
Assault - "Today, protesters hounding a CEO turned violent as they cornered him at a local coffee shop..."

Yeah, I think it's best for everyone involved that it doesn't happen. There are legitimate uses for position-tracking (delivery truck driver, armored car services, school busses, etc.), but if you're not in a position which explicitly requires such tracking, no fucking way.

And despite all the knee-jerk CEO-hate that college freshman have, no, it's not okay to force physical risk and privacy invasion onto someone else, even IF they are a big bad scary exploiting evil-because-he-has-money-and-you-don't CEO. This is why we don't let children make decisions for others.

Which candidate promises to give me more tax money taken from other people?

a) BreadAndCircuses-crat
b) CircusesAndBread-lican
c) CrankyOldCoot-itarian (never happen)

Votes are bought and sold every day. How do you think the US deficit got as high as it has? Greek foreign debt? Spanish public debt? Voters, when offered a chance to tax anyone except themselves, do so.

Well, goatse IS in our universe... so, yeah, kinda.

While I'm sure the data quoted is accurate, I'm not seeing it here locally. In my group (20 of us, QA + development product group in a networking products company with about 2,000 employees), 9 are female, and an eyeball-survey says that this is about normal for the rest of the engineering organization. Same for candidates whom I interview; about half are female.

Where are all these all-male companies? Could other tech-oriented industries (defense, etc.) be getting lumped in with Silicon Valley style companies, and if so, is that really an accurate assessment?

Baryonic matter ("normal" matter from our perspective) is the minority.

WE are the Goatee Universe.

So where are the new crops coming from? Why is Monsanto winning? All politics aside, could it be because they're better at such research than government-funded programs because (unlike government research) they are incentivized to work harder and produce results? Government-funded research has little incentive to push hard, and I would actually argue has an incentive not to (gotta keep the government dollars flowing, and successfully finishing a project STOPS the income... while with private research, successfully finishing the project STARTS the income).

Monsanto might not be the only people capable of producing such crops, but right now, they're just about the only people who ARE producing such crops. If people have a problem with that, the solution isn't to cripple Monsanto. It's for everyone else to improve, rather than just suck public research dollars. You're paid to perform.

In which case the incentive to develop pest-resistant, high-yield and other modified crops that allow supporting 7+ billion people goes away. Monsanto isn't a charity, and would be absolutely within their rights to stop allowing Brazil to use their products. Yield per acre goes down, food prices go up, and the very poorest starve. Bottom line: cash-grabbing research companies with a shrill "big corporations bad! Seizure of money good!" results in zero reason to try to develop new crops or medicines. Does anybody stop to think about the consequences of attacking pharmaceutical and food companies and making cash grabs like this?

But who cares about THAT? It's only equatorial brown-skinned people who will feel the worst of it, and they don't count for anything at all, right, privileged white-boy apologists? Fuck the brown people, we gotta get our SUE on, because that makes mama's-boy college kids feel powerful! We're not the ones who are going to go hungry.

1. DUH
2. "May have". Yeah, that's news. Meaningless. They "may not have" too. Is there something specific somebody has to say, with something to back it up other than a closed circle of "may have"?
3. Speculation is fact on Slashdot. This warrants an article, why? Is there NEWS here, or are we going to see "space aliens MAY HAVE dressed up like call-boys and 'anally probed' the editorial staff"?

Wankers.

Fixed!

What's your solution then? Only one side allowed to be heard, with the other side silenced? That's indefensible.

"Innocent until proven guilty" applies to allegations against police too. It MUST. Claiming otherwise is, in my opinion, as evil as committing crimes under the color of law.

Non-Apple users' opinions do not matter to Apple. Why should they? If you're not their customer and aren't going to become one, you're irrelevant.

This is true of every business, including whatever PC passes your furious anonymous trolling.