I assumed "Authentic, But Chaotic and Unethical" was the description of the Internet resulting from the census.

This is a minor nit, but sh*t without the asterisk is really sht, not shit. ;)

Some people get a lifestyle choice with ACA coverage that's impossible without the ACA: they can breathe.

Others might remove that choice. There's a civics lesson there. If you're talking about covering people with HIV, or who were smokers, then please charge admission for the times when you walk on water. I genuflect.

Ireland didn't do anything remotely like what Hamas is doing to Israel. If it did, you would have seen the relevant bits of Ireland flattened like what England helped do to Nazi Germany.

We have ISIS running amok engaging in mass murder, mass mutiliations, and the destruction of religious sites. The problems in the middle east have sqaut to do with oil. This kind of ethnic strife would be going on regardless.

It's like the Balkans or any other place on the planet where people can't get along with each other to the point of engaging in genuine ethnic cleansing.

> And I have ones that have failed.

My last Archos 5 with spinny rust inside of it refuses to die. It's fortunate too since no other device I've seen can match it for local storage and disconnected (from the cloud) operation.

I've yet to have an SD card fail. If anything they will become obsoletely-tiny before actually breaking.

It's funny that someone thinks that multiple redundant server farms and the entire network infastructure of the internet and all the phone providers is less of a resource hog than a few tiny bits of electronics.

That is true perhaps.

However, this is all entirely Verizon's fault. They are the entity in this arrangement that has actively encouraged assymetric use of the net by offering assymeteric service. It's really rich to see ISPs complain that they are getting too much traffic all in one direction then that's how they f*cking design their service.

Verizon is selling massive downloads. So is every other consumer ISP.

This bill actually does very little. The DMCA is written very broadly, and has been commonly interpreted as to prohibit cell phone unlocking. Because Congress, in the 90s, when they enacted the stupid thing, was aware that the DMCA could go too far, but didn't want to be cautious or have to keep reexamining the law itself, they gave authority to the Library of Congress to add exceptions to it in specific cases. The process for these exceptions is that every three years, anyone who wants an exception has to plead their case. If found worthy, they get an exception. But the exception only lasts until the next rule making session, three years hence. Then it has to be reargued from scratch or lost.

Two rule making sessions ago, the Library of Congress found that cellphone unlocking was worthy of an exception. But in the most recent rule making session, they did not find it worthy, and the exception was lost; it went back to its default state of being illegal.

This law could have amended the DMCA to permanently allow cellphone unlocking. Or it could've directed the Library of Congress to always find that cellphone unlocking is allowed. But it does neither of these.

Instead it only reinstates the rule from two sessions ago for the remainder of the current session. Next year it will have to be argued again, from scratch, to the Library of Congress, or lost, again. And even if argued, it can be rejected, again.

This is less than useless. It's only a temporary patch, it doesn't even have an iota of long term effect (the rules don't take precedent into account, and this doesn't change it), and we've wasted all this effort getting it instead of something worthwhile.

Yeah, or that shining example of progressive intellectuual integrity, John Edwards.

> Why bother compressing?

Uses much less space and yields you something small enough to fit on a phone while still being useful for a 60 inch TV or 120 inch projector. Besides, most playback devices don't handle MPEG2 very well. They're all expecting h264.

DVD is a really outdated format and benefits greatly from transcoding.

I'm not convinced people in mud huts were numerous enough or destructive enough to manage the megafauna extinctions. A lot of this hysterical screaming about how we're destroying the planet seems a lot like hubris.

On certain level, the idea that we have that much power pleases the egos of some people.

...except consumer tablets aren't proper digitizers. This is especially true for platforms where a stylus is a banned option because it doesn't seem fashionable enough.

Proper tablet inputs typically are PC peripherals, not the limited functionality that comes with consumer tablets.

Even a mundane mouse is better at the "direct manipulation" stuff than what's provided on your average consumer tablet. The "direct manipulation" on a consumer tablet is crude and clumsy.

> No porn and no torrenting, and no hacker tools are not a disadvantage for schools use.

Lack of "hacker" tools is a disadvantage for any educational environment. Students might actually be expected to create something rather than just being mindless consumers.

There have already been educational programs mired by patent attacks that have been pre-emptively banned from the iPad. The corporate IT mentality filters out more than just "the bad stuff".

This much should be obvious to ANYONE that has had to deal with the corporate IT mentality.

With Apple, you get an extra layer of that for free. Your own internal IT busybodies don't even get their chance to kick you in the balls. Apple beats them to it.

> If only tablets had on-screen keyboards or supported Bluetooth keyboards or keyboard docks!

In other words, spend extra money to turn your tablet into some kind of laptop wannabe. You're trying to make the tablet something it's not in order to make up for it's inherent flaws when the simple and obvious thing is to buy the thing that already meets your requirements.

> There's a reason GDocs is free...

Yes there is. It's a solved problem. It was a solved problem 20 years ago. It's simply not a task that anyone should be paying money for anymore.