The Acer settlement (and all the others mentioned here, if I had to guess) is for US residents only. It's too bad this couldn't have been mentioned in the summary, the linked article, or even the front page for the settlement.

Are the /. editors yet unaware that the majority of its readership lives outside the US?

Also interesting is the fact that the entire world of computing outside of the XBOX 360 was able to adapt to the Pb-free initiative without all the drama and years of failed hardware.

Not until we can rule out NAT acceleration.

Poe's Law

We've got to HELP THEM!

Mojave, baby!

So on that note, is Windows 8.1 really Windows 6.2.1?

Maybe, but I've never seen a buffet discourage its customers from eating more food. Sometimes they have a sign asking you not to take more than you can eat, or even promising to bill you extra if you do, but large ISPs don't ask you not to waste their product, they simply discourage it across the board.

I think the buffet comparison is particularly apt. Whenever my customers ask me about transfer caps, I simply ask that they enjoy the bandwidth and do not waste it. I leave it up to them what constitutes judicious use of the resource.

Completely agree

I run a small hobby ISP and I can have effectively as much bandwidth as I'm willing to pay for, or rather, as much as my customers are willing to pay for.

As a somebody selling internet access, I love Netflix and any other online service that give my potential customers a chance to blow through the incumbent telco's artificially low transfer caps (I don't put caps on my service). I can't think of another business where the typical vendor prefers that his customer use less of the product he sells. It makes no sense to me.

I quite doubt that. The average consumer is used to being told that he has to upgrade. There might be the odd muttering of "money grubbing" and the like, but at the worst, it would go over like every other forced upgrade.

In reality, however, Joe average will take this information to his maven friends (like the folks who talk about this kind of thing on /.), who will assure Joe that IPv6 migration is in fact a good thing that is long overdue, that most consumer routers support it by now, and he should be grateful to have an excuse to upgrade his $50 home router to something that will allow him to use the internet to its intended potential. Joe will be happy with this advice and go spend the money on the new router and not think of it again.

The Cree bulbs include a 10-year warranty at 6 hours of typical use daily. If they last that long they will be well worth the price I paid for them ($16 CDN).

I've used many CFL bulbs under many brands, and found none typically last longer than 2-4 years. We'll see how LEDs do by comparison, but they're already more efficient if you are choosy about which ones you buy, have no warm up time, and don't contain mercury.

Should have mentioned that the Cree are explicitly dimmable, while the Phillips explicitly are not.

We just bought a home and had to do some major renovations. I have replaced most of the bulbs in the house with Cree (9W, 800L) and Phillips (10.5W, 800L; 7W, 600L; 4W, 320L), and have to agree that the Phillips 10.5W and 4W models have a more natural feeling light to them compared to the Cree 9W and the Phillips 7W.

My biggest complaint with the Phillips LEDs (the 7 and 4W versions at least, since I didn't read the packaging on the 10.5W bulbs), is that they have a 1-year warranty at 3 hours of use daily, compared to the 10-year warranty at 6 hours of daily use for the Cree. Further, the Phillips packaging warns not to use the product in a sealed enclosure, which most light fixtures are, in my experience. Cree's included product literature inspires way more confidence in the technology, besides having the edge on efficiency.