Statistically, there's a reasonable chance they're driving by a Sears or KMart to get there.

Sears died not because of poor locations or lack or same. They died because they were viewed as non-competitive on price and poor merchandise choices, coupled with some pretty poor marketing (especially in the case of KMart).

I agree that if Microsoft isn't respecting the terms for the API then they have to change it, but come on, Microsoft actually gave us an ad-free youtube client they are not the scum you want them to be

Considering that advertising goes to pay the company providing the service in the first place (Google, and often the content producer too)..

Yes, Microsoft is being the scum we expect them to be.

Worth noting that Microsoft has a competing ad network to Google's as well.

It stops making sense when you realize that general-purpose CPUs aren't very efficient DSPs, especially when the DS your P'ing is very latency sensitive like the PSK and you're running on an operating system that has no ability to guarantee resources in a timely fashion (like 16-bit Windows).. and the contemporary CPU speeds of the day were well under 400 MHz.

Today, a Winmodem would likely work quite well, assuming well-written software and a stable OS (and at least on Linux, I can tell you that softmodems work quite well as a rule). But now we have computers with clock speeds in the gigahertz and we're not all strapped to the nightmare OS that was 16-bit Windows.

Except the policy doesn't technically discriminate on the basis of sex. A woman that does not bear a child only gets 8 weeks, just like a man. The additional 8 weeks is for recovery from pregnancy.

Now, it would be interesting if a FtoM (that is, somebody who was born female but happens to be considered "male" by society) happened to get pregnant if they would get 16 weeks. My guess is that they would, precisely because of this distinction.

Methinks you don't understand how "court cases" work, especially in libel cases in the UK.

Not five digits. Low end of four. Actually, if you have a low end PC lying around to act as the softswitch, you can probably do it for under $2,000. Well under if you're willing to make compromises.

You should look at what the GNURadio folks are doing with SDRs. There's even LTE implementations being developed.

.. thou doth protest too much, methinks.

What's more evil, a company that has no compunction about the fact they are evil (in the case of Phillip Morris, for example, "tobacco products producer" is exactly what it says on the tin for crying out loud), or the one that swears up and down they aren't?

That's what makes the contest worthwhile. We don't expect the cable company or a video game studio to be corrupt and evil.

The funny thing is the Newton required "conformity" as well, it just was more subtle about it. And you fell for it.

Of course.

But take Unity as a "case in point." Unity is such a radical departure from just about every other window manager on the planet that Shuttleworth is now saying that "we need to rip out the entire Xwindows infrastructure and replace it with something else." Can you think of any other Linux distro that does that?

And there's numerous examples of that in Ubuntu: changes that were made against the grain of what has traditionally been "the *NIX way".

The other mainstream distros try real hard to keep Linux.. well, Linux. The heart and soul of Linux is The UNIX Way, like it or not. Some of us happen to like it. And for Shuttleworth to handwave that away when his company was built on the blood, sweat, and tears of the thousands of volunteer contributors that make Linux what it is strikes me as very wrong.

Even Google wasn't as insensitive with Android. Google outright says "we're not trying to replace Linux, or make Linux change what they're doing for us. We like Linux for what it is: many of us use Linux every day, and Linux drives our company's servers from top to bottom. The Linux kernel is a powerful tool; and Android is built on that tool. But please, carry on!"

Shuttleworth's built an awful lot of goodwill from the Open Source community, and to basically tell us "if you don't like it, lump it" is highly insensitive at best, and sociopathic at worst.

I disagree, personally. I actually don't mind relevant, unobtrusive advertising. I also don't mind when it's creative and interesting. The problem is so much of the ads out there (not just online, but in society at large) is neither relevant nor unobtrusive.

Google does have the right approach: targeted ads that are relevant and simple.

.. but I whitelist certain ad servers.

I have three simple rules.
1. Ads should never have audio, popouts, popunders, or Flash/Javascript/Java content.
2. Ads should never exceed the download size of the page
3. Ad systems should respect my privacy and be responsive to complaints and concerns.

If your ad site adheres to these three rules, I see no reason to block it. Oddly enough, only Google's, Reddit's and Fark's ad servers are on the whitelist. Everybody else can go rot in hell.

The rub comes in that Ubuntu is not necessarily a "fair" representation of what "the Linux" is, anymore than Android is.

I've seen many a person who has been using Ubuntu for a significant amount of time flounder when given another distro to work with: even Debian. There is a "*NIX way of doing things", and Ubuntu often deviates from that. Sometimes dangerously far.

And it can hurt the community. Many an Ubuntu user comes wandering in to the support forums for (insert FOSS project here) all confused, and it is difficult for the community to help them because between Debinization of the package and what Ubuntu does to the Debian package it's often hard to figure out where things have moved.

Ubuntu is walking a path away from what Linux (and other Unices) have been in the past towards something of their own design, often not asking what Linux people want. That's all fine and dandy, but for Shuttleworth to basically tell long-term users "we're gonna do what we want, go fuck yourself" is not right either. And that's basically what he's saying.

And even assertion 1 is faulty.

Cyclists also pay for roads via sales and property taxes in Washington, probably reasonably close to their proportional use of same. Cyclists are more likely to use city streets over state highways (and aren't allowed on Interstates at all), occupy a considerably smaller footprint than an automobile, and impact the road surface considerably less, if at all, given their light weight.

The evidence doesn't support this theory.

I work for a regional ISP, and I manage the mail servers. While we do see some traffic with [common word]@ourdomain.com, it's not always a productive attack vector. While you can pretty much expect to get spam at sales@ourdomain.com, support@ourdomain.com, and a few others, aside from a few hundred common names most spammers don't bother.

And it makes sense, if for no other reason that the first exchanger you talk to may not be the one that hosts the user information. There are some pretty large mail systems out there that the external facing MTA will accept everything and then try to route it. Secondly, more than one mail appliance out there will temporarily ban a sending IP when it detects this sort of attempt (ours will add a ban if you attempt 5 invalid RCPT TO: destinations in less than 10 minutes, on a sliding scale [the quicker they come in, the longer the ban: 5 in a single transaction is 72 hours]). I won't even touch the fact that there are honeypot MTAs out there specifically looking for this behavior, and the quickest way into one of the anti-spam databases is to try this stunt.