Personally I'd absolutely love it if an employer made free candy bars available. I've had an employer buy the entire (about 15 employee) company free Subway on Fridays when the company was doing well enough, just to keep up morale... Which was awesome. I tend to think the unemployed would appreciate free candy bars too, or any kind of free food really. The problem with capes is that they're useless, not that they're patronizing. You can't eat them, you can't pay the bills with them, you can't wear them to a job interview, you can't print extra copies of your resume with them, you can't use them as transportation to a job interview... Any of which would have been better things to spend the money on.

That's one heck of a false analogy. Electricity is a homogeneous quantity. It's all the same, regardless of which company produced it and how it was produced. I can count on my laptop working the same whenever I plug it into any US power outlet that's getting power, regardless of who the local power company is and whether they produced that power from nuclear sources, windmills, hydro power, solar cells, or any combination thereof. The company that's providing me with the electricity owns both the electricity they're providing me and the cables over which it's being delivered, and what they charge me for is the electricity - the content - not the delivery system. They maintain the delivery system because it's in their best interest to be able to bring their content (the electricity) to as many consumers as possible.

By contrast, with the Internet, we have to deal with one company that owns the delivery system (the ISP) and one company that owns the content. And both can vary a great deal -- Gmail does not have the same features as Yahoo. Hulu does not have the exact same content as Netflix. World of Warcraft is not exactly the same as Everquest. So you get to make choices as to which content you prefer to pay for. Ideally you'd also be able to make choices over which delivery method you'd prefer. Which is to say, ideally any major urban area should have enough competition between broadband Internet providers to give you some real choices. In reality this isn't necessarily the case.

Now, as things stand, people who consume more content generally do pay more for that content. Netflix subscriptions cost money. So do most VoIP services (Packet8, Vonage, etc). And that's when you start seeing the real problem. Chances are your broadband Internet provider also has a digital phone service and possibly TV service. And chances are that, in order to compete with independent VoIP providers, Netflix, and hulu, they're already offering you various "bundle discounts" that will get you cheaper Internet if you also get your TV service or phone service through them.

If net neutrality isn't mandated by law, then [random broadband Internet provider] would be legally allowed to artificially slow down any traffic between their subscribers' computers and the servers of companies that compete with them - Vonage, Packet8, Netflix, hulu, etc. And then they'd be able to send you promotional materials telling you that their phone service has better call quality, fewer dropped calls and less "cut up sound" during calls than Packet8 and Vonage have... And that their TV services never pauses suddenly like Netflix and hulu. And of course, that on top of that, you'll get a discount on your Internet if you subscribe to either.

It's this type of scenario that net neutrality is really trying to prevent. And at it's core, it isn't something that the FCC should be concerned with. It's a clear cut anti-trust law issue. It's companies that provide service in numerous realms (Internet, TV, phone) using their virtual monopolies in one realm (Internet) to compete unfairly in another realm (phone and TV). I believe there was already a ruling several years ago declaring that DSL providers have to give their customers the option of ordering "naked" DSL - DSL Internet without any accompanying phone service. What really ought to happen, though, is a ruling that says companies that provide broadband Internet cannot also provide other services that may unfairly compete with services offered independently online... In other words, broadband providers need to be forced to split off their Internet service into a separate company from the rest of their services, like what happened to the phone companies in the 80's and like they tried to do to Microsoft in the 90's.

When you go to the supermarket to buy a particular product... Let's say KETCHUP... You'll usually find you have several different brands available to you. The more expensive name brands are usually placed right at eye level, whereas the least expensive store brands are usually on the bottom shelf, where you're only likely to notice them if you're really looking for a deal. This is called SEGMENTED MARKETING. The name brand is targeted to the people who have the high-stress, well-paying jobs and don't have the time or energy to try to find the best deals. But the best deals are still available for those who need them.

I'm yet to see cable companies and "content providers" doing anything equivalent. But they really ought to. The vast majority of people who spend time and energy on piracy are students and low-income people who couldn't buy the content legitimately. People who have active, stressful lives and who make enough money will frequently fork over the money for legitimate copies of the content they're interested in just because it's less of a hassle to do so.

What cable companies and content providers ought to be doing is trying to come up with that deal saving "store brand" version of their content. The content that could still appeal even to the starving college students and minimum wage slaves that they'd consider shelling out a few bucks on it here and there.

According to the wikipedia entry for Windows services, a Windows service is essentially the same thing as a daemon is on *NIX machines. Daemons are not device drivers -- they're user space programs.

A device driver is a loadable module that gets inserted into the kernel and provides an interface to a specific piece of hardware... It's been a while since I've owned an iPod -- the most recent one I had was a 4th Generation 20 gigger, but I'm fairly sure at least back then iPods didn't require unique drivers. They went through the standard USB Mass Storage driver.

You could make the case that the fact that misbehaving user-space software could theoretically interfere with the upgrade process points to a deep design flaw in Windows as a whole. I recently upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, which turned all the core parts of my operating system from 32 bits to 64 bits... I did have a few bits of third party software stop working after that. None of them affected overall system stability, though... And definitely not the install.

I'll admit you have a point there. As a MacOS X user, I have fairly ready access to an X11 compliant server... One which I'm fairly sure is based on XFree86. All I had to do was check an extra box during installation to make sure it ends up on my hard drive.

That being said... Windows machines (including, to the best of my knowledge, Windows 7) still don't come with a pre-packaged X11 server. And Windows machine are still the de facto standard out there for the average end user, whether we like it or not.

And even besides that... X11 isn't precisely easy for the layman to deal with. Heck, I'm told I'm something of a freak for being a Mac user who has the Terminal application (which opens up a standard UNIX shell window) in my system dock.

I know Slashdot readers are generally on the geeky side... But honestly. There's a lot of value to being able to access your documents from anywhere. Having ready access to your resume from wherever you happen to be can be invaluable. Having ready access to your medical records from wherever you happen to be can be invaluable. Heck, in some situations it's just awesome how much more dynamic it lets you look.

Barring hard-core privacy concerns, I honestly think online office suites are very much the next big thing.

An SVN for off-site backup still doesn't come close to meeting the accessibility of an online office suite.

I had an experience last year where I was looking to sublet a room for a few months. While I was looking at the room, the guy who owned the house happened to mention that he was looking for a programmer to work with on a contractor basis. He asked me if I happened to have my resume. I logged into Google Docs from his computer and got it for him.

The vast majority of people who use computers are looking for technological solutions that will give them more personal freedom. Not for an opportunity to indulge in the geekery of setting up SVN. An online office suite means all you need is a computer with a web browser installed and a connection to the Internet and you've got access to all your documents. Heck, with WebKit being the standard on the iPhone, the Palm Pre and on all the upcoming Android phones, it looks like we're finally getting a usable standard for cellphone web browsers.

This is an immense amount of flexibility that the average user, who'd prefer to keep their computing resources as unobtrusive as possible to their lifestyle, simply cannot afford to pass up.

This makes me think of nVidia's purchase of 3dfx. 3dfx (makers of the famous Voodoo series of video cards) were very friendly to the open source community... They played a very pivotal role in the realm of 3D rendering on Linux when it was still in its infancy, contributing significantly to OpenGL. Then nVidia bought them and discontinued its entire product line... And something like 6 months later it was announced that nVidia won the contract to make the graphics chips on the original Microsoft X-Box. Coincidence?

MySQL, by virtue of being an open source product available in a "community" version for free, has become a central part of the business model of countless small businesses. And it's just fallen into the ownership of its biggest closed-source, for-pay competitor. This could potentially have ramifications for the global economy as a whole. Very scary.

To be honest, it sounds kindda narcissistic to me when people start talking about big companies looking through their personal Emails. I doubt anyone is particularly interested in spying on the voicemail you left your girlfriend, telling her you're going to get home late and that she should go ahead and have dinner without you.

If Google does look through your personal Emails or your personal voicemails, it'll be for keywords that might clue them in to things they ought to try marketing you. They'll do it automatically and they'll do it on a massive scale, and the end result would be that you'd get something like an AdSense ad attached to your Email or voicemail.

Outside of people who have valuable trade secrets to protect or people who are looking to overthrow some governments, that's pretty much the best commercial motivation a company could have for looking through your Email or your voicemail. And while I wouldn't precisely say I trust Google in the abstract, and I definitely wouldn't say I trust Microsoft... I do trust big companies to only bother wasting their time on thinks that would make them money.

Snooping through most peoples' Emails would not.

How so?

I mean, I'd definitely agree that documents that contain potentially extremely valuable trade secrets probably shouldn't be stored with a third party. And even in the general case, I'd think there'd need to be a fair bit of concern as to the reliability of the storage medium... And into the ease of migrating to a different option if you should ever choose to in the future... (Google Docs lets you easily export to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice or PDF)...

But outside of that, do you see any principal problem with online office suites?