A tablet uses a OS such as IOS, Android, or Windows 8, and you install apps. They have limtied functionality. A touchscreen laptop usually has a full blown OS on them (XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, ETC) and has the same functionality as any other laptop (with the addition of a touchscreen).

BIG difference between touchscreen laptop and a tablet.

Don't really see an issue with this - unless someone can find out how to hack VLANS, but is that really that much different than someone hacking WEP or WPA? In fact, I would imagine VLAN is much mroe secure - you are running multiple virtual instances on a physical machine - you would have to hack into the physical router for there to be a security issue, which people could pretty much do now if you have things poorly configured.

If Comcast has a way of distinguishing between what is public and what I am paying for (figutively speaking, I am on Time Warner), I see no hit in performance, they increase the number of nodes in a neighborhood, increase their overall bandwidth, and, if you are talking about the number of wireless devices that can connect to a router, if they prioritize what connects to the customer's vlan over the public vlan, and don't affect the end customer in any way, I don't see how this would be an issue. In fact, I see it as a great idea.

Plus, as the summery stated, customers get new hardware.

Question is, the summery states "Customers will be upgraded to new wireless routers that will have 2 wireless networks, one for the home users and one for the general public". So does this mean their new routers doesn't support customer VLANs? I guess that wouldn't surprise me too much - with Time Warner I had to finally end up buying my own router as their crappy routers didn't properly support VPN - anytime I tried establishing a VPN or OpenVPN connection, the router would reboot.

I am supposing this also means that customers can still use their own routers and opt against Comcast's routers, and just rent (or buy) modems.

You are assuming 97-98% of people 1) want to look at porn or 2) are going to bother to take the time to opt-out.

Granted, you can opt-out. So it's not like it's that big of a deal, at lest, to me. While I have looked at porn on the internet, it usually comes from starting at someplace innocent, say, a news site or something, then falling down the internet rabbit hole. (ie :Hmmm, that looks interesting. That does too, let's read that. Well now, I wonder how someone would do that, let's google it. Hmmm, something is getting past my ad filter. Whoa, what's that?" Several hours later you pull your mind out of the gutter.).

While I am not big on government censorship (ie don't like it at all), I, for one, probably wouldn't bother to opt out. By the time I remember that porn is blocked, and then start the process of opting out, my desire to look at it will probably have passed. And considering how much time I loose when I do start falling down the porn rabbit hole, I would probably start thanking the filters from saving me from hours of unproductive time on the internet.

Yeah, you can opt out. Many people will. But 97-98%? I'm willing to bet it will be under 50%. Willing to bet a good number of people are like me - while they have looked at porn on the internet, they did not have that intention when they first sat down at the keyboard, and out of those who did sit down with that intention, a good number of those wouldn't bother to turn off even a local filter, much less bother to opt-out.

It's a good plan if you want to police people's morality - while people will oppose this very vocally, most of those people won't go through the trouble of opting out, no matter how simple they make it.

I am not trying to start a politically correct argument or be pro or anti transgender. I think we should back up and look at the bigger problem.

The issue here is the age of many of these databases, with only minor updates occuring over the years. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these databases dated back to the 70s, written in COBOL, living on an System/360 or 370 (or a newer system - 390 or zSeries or something else - with the database just ported over from the 360 and 370 days. Possibly the database was then "ported" over to a server based enviornemnt, but the cores database and information attached was still in place). At the time those databases were written, you were either male or female, or lived in shame. Not sure when sex reassignment surgery began, but you hear stories now of people who were born hemephrodite, and their parents had the surgery performed on them as infants or toddlers.

it probably did not even occure to the database designers to include an option for for changing Gender or for including possibly a third option.

The question should be 1) why has the older systems not been overhauled and 2) where they have been, why is the option no longer there. For systems that have been overhauled, if someone is maintaining the code, you have to ask how hard it would be for someone to go into the code and make that a changable field.

At that point, though, it probably changes from a technical issue to a political / sociological issue. I am not going to guess on the political issue, because I don't follow it, and making an assumption would be stupid (I know, I just made an assumption about the above. Rather, I don't want to get into the political issues to avoid flames and troll baiting). As for the sociological issues, even with media attention lately on transgender issues, we are still a society that breaks things down into male and female. Transgender stories still shock many people (although it is starting to become more understood and accepted - at least in some places).

I am not trying to get into an issue of if it is right or wrong, whether it needs to be changed or not. I am saying that the lack of options in databases shouldn't really come as a surprise.

I know this site is mainly anti-Microsoft, but Outlook is a damn good RSS reader. And the RSS feed gadget in Vista and Windows 7 is nice.

For them to be a tracker, they would have to host torrent files, and they haven't in years.

So are you saying we are going to declair open war on the Brits to give us more Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Britain's Got Talent? .....

Actually, I like this idea, where do I sign up!

Truth in a headline. :-) I sped read the article, and it looks that they were alluding to the fact that it hasn't been confirmed as a planet. But after reading "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming", would speculate that you could also say that images have been taken that are still being analyzed, or that both computer and human observations have glossed over that show planets.

ISDN, T1 and T3 lines are dedicated, whereas cable is shared. ISDN, T1 and T3 lines are also synchronous connections. Even in business-class cable and DSL connections, I rarely see synchronous speeds (doesn't mean they don't exist, just means that they seem to be rare). In the larger cities, I see major companies going to Fiber connections, but in smaller cities and towns, T1 and T3s are still the way to go.

Our company still has ISDN lines as backups when the fiber fails.

At least in the States, where you have a lot of smaller towns and rural areas with sometiimes hundreds of miles between them and the largest hub, I see copper pair staying around for a while yet.

On a commodore 64 and later on a pc. After doing a few programs, I started breaking the code down, making changes. I must have been about 7. When I was 9, I took an official BASIC course at the local junior college in their college for kids program. In high school, I took Pascal, then majored in Computer Sciences in college where I learned C, Cobol, Java and Assembly.

and say that they most likely did not know the rules. That is such an outdated rule, that it is likely they did not even think twice - especially if they were using a smartphone. The government is most likely acting like this because its the BBC.

That being said, as many other have pointed out, their country, their rules.

You could always take the northern route from Tibet, but I have a feeling that the Chinese government would be harder on them than Nepal.

I can see me checking about 50 times a day. My notifications for facebook, e-mail and texts all sound the same (and I have dug through everything to figure out hwo to change that). Luckily, for text messages, the phone lights up. So whenever my phone buzzes or beeps, I look down to see if it lit up. I have it setup where, if its plugged in, the screen stays on unless I shut it off, so I will glance down at it every time a notification comes in. So I guess you can say I on average check it about 50 times a day. If I had work e-mail going to my phone, I am sure I would check it more often than that.

I agree. In fact, I take it a step futher - if I am not on call, for at least one 24 hour period of my weekend, the phone goes OFF (unless I am trying to make plans with someone to do something, but as I am off Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and no one else is ever available Thursdays, that is the day the phone is off). On that day, I don't check personal e-mail, I don't blog, I don't facebook, I don't do bills, or even check personal e-mails. I might do laundry, but it is usually a day of laying around, reading, watching movies, catching up on TV shows, or reading books (fiction - reading an O'Riley book could be construid as work). Yeah, it may sound like a religious motivated thing, but it is a good thing to do - to give your body and mind a day to just relax and unplug. The change it has made in my life has really been amazing - I am happier, less stressed, and feel rested when I go back to my work, ready to take another week of abuse. I suggest everyone to give it a shot if they are not on-call.

Makes me wonder how fast they are having to add storage. For that matter, what type of storage are they using to use for the constant read / writes. And that is just for YouTube - forget Gmail, Google Earth, Google Docs and Google. Man, I would love to see pictures of Google's DataCenter. Oh, wait, I can Google it:
http://images.google.com/search?site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1536&bih=891&q=google+data+center&oq=google+data+&gs_l=img.3.0.0l9j0i10.648.2409.0.4177.12.11.0.0.0.0.297.1367.3j6j1.10.0...0.0...1ac.1.14.img.4Zg6ztnIvrI

You shouldn't confuse Fox News with the Fox Network. I think the two exist so that they can make their own news stories on slow news days.