3Mbit up? It's still garbage. Wake me up when they make it 25Mbit up & down.

It doesn't really make sense for MS to use a subscription model for the OS, even from their perspective. I would actually be perfectly willing to pay $20-30/yr, but the problem is, what happens when I stop paying, or some kind of problem occurs with the system? If it totally locks you out, you'd have people lining up with pitchforks and torches. If it just stops getting updates, you have a bunch of insecure Windows boxen, that would make MS look bad. You could potentially turn it into nagware, but you'd still have people just ignore it. Same with doing nothing - people would pay for the first year, then stop. So, you charge several years' worth of "subscription" up front, and then provide updates until the EOL date.

Well, no one said they were planning on making a profit selling it. Could be propped up by other sales, just to push competitors out. Or maybe to game the "fleet average" fuel economy numbers.

I'm sure that customers with astronomically expensive or critical payloads will always have the option to specify a "new" booster if they're willing to pay more.

On the other hand, if you need to launch a constellation of 20 satellites, it might be much cheaper to budget for 22-24 cheaper "used" launches than 20 more expensive but more reliable new ones.

I beg to differ. Games that are trying to run hundreds/thousands of copies of a unit AI or pathfinding (Dwarf Fortress, RTSs, etc.), or are doing tons of physics (KSP, From the Depths, etc.) are what usually end up causing slide shows for me these days, not the graphics. More cores & threads, please. (Yes, I'm aware that a lot of times this due to the games not taking advantage of existing cores)

The real problem is that some desktop tasks really need one thread to run as fast as possible, and others (path finding for 200 drunken Dwarf Fortress denizens, for example) would benefit from having 100 somewhat slower cores. When you buy a desktop CPU, all the cores are the same, and you end up having to compromise between number of cores, single-thread speed, heat, etc.

Maybe it's time we started designing systems with two separate chips - one dual core chip optimized for running single tasks as fast as possible, and another with 10-50 simpler cores optimized for parallel tasks. I think we're halfway there already, what with GPUs being used that way to some extent, but standardizing it would actually allow non-custom applications to make use of it.

If you're a 'suspect', and they want to talk to you, then at a minimum, you're forced to pay to retain counsel (unless you're stupid, and talk to them without one). So you're screwed no matter what at that point.

My favorite way to deal with people that claim a right to not be offended is to point out that I find them taking offense at whatever stupid thing they're on about very offensive, so by their own logic, they must stop being offended because they're violating my rights. :P

What we really need is a purpose-built "CopCorder" device. Has a camera and mic that records to local storage, and streams via 3/4G to mitigate confiscation. It would have a panic button that can be configured to lock it into recording mode for a time period, until the battery dies, or it's destroyed (so it's physically impossible to comply with any order to turn it off). The storage to local media means that if THEY destroy it, they've destroyed evidence, and you probably have a recording streamed of them doing it. If they confiscate it, you continue to get the streamed recording of whatever they subsequently do/say. Bonus if it can support a hidden external bluetooth or whatever external camera or mic, so if they take it and put it in their car or something, you may still get a recording.

Or quit buying AAA titles at all. There are enough good indie games around that I haven't even got around to looking at the big names for the last two years. Even the pre-alpha/alpha/beta versions seem to have fewer bugs (and they get fixed faster) than a major release of a AAA title.

Makes you wonder just what the budget split is in the big studios between bling/marketing/executive leeches and actual development.

Time for a feature like "Right index finger unlocks, left index finger wipes most things, then unlocks."

Yep... read that quote very carefully. "...can select what information they want to share with retailers..." They'll still hoard everything, they just won't (voluntarily) share it with retailers (but might with anyone else who's not a retailer?).

I blame the faulty autopilot that's running the Slashdot editors.

Worse, TFA only gives ONE example, then goes on to say, "...monitoring the responses from the email server in issue."

This seems to imply that not all email servers have a problem. Given that the symptoms (*****-ing out the SMTP banner, and blocking STARTTLS) are the exact behavior of a default protocol inspection config on a Cisco ASA or PIX firewall, I'm guessing that it's a major overreaction to the way the firewall in front of the destination email server is configured, and nothing to do with the ISP at all.

You beat me to it. That's the first thing that popped into my head, too. This (for some inexplicable reason known only to Cisco) is the *default* behavior of ASA and PIX firewalls, so really it probably just means that someone that didn't know what they were doing threw a firewall in the mix somewhere. It's an easy fix, but requires messing with policy-maps, which inexperienced admins often find confusing.