Throwing away my mod points for this. George W. Bush started offering subsidized mobile phones to poor people because it's actually more expensive to give them a land-line. (Prepaid phone service is also priced cheaper than a land-line, something poor people get when they don't qualify for a free phone.) Also, would you rather have people who need to apply for work, and need emergency services, have no phone at all? I suspect the way that it keeps poor people from being unable to apply for jobs at all pays for itself program-wise. (A third of all welfare recipients get off of welfare within 3 years time, would you rather they be unable to apply for jobs because they can't afford a phone?)

This reminds me of what people said about the PS3's exotic cell processor and what it would do to gaming. The problem with that rosy view of Sony's CPU prowress on their consoles is one thing: It doesn't have an upgradable GPU. PCs have an upgradable GPU, which means that despite having a worse bus for multicore (not nearly as bad as you say by the way), all of that multicore CPU oomph doesn't matter when you have a much more up to date GPU on the PC. When gaming, GPUs, and a power supply to drive them (which is why they have to be custom-built desktops most of the time), are what matters. Not the multi-core CPUs that are in both consoles and PCs, at least, not beyond a certain point of diminishing returns. Right now, a PS4 is very nice by the way, because its GPU is just under the top tier of GPUs. In another year or two, that'll no longer be the case, and in another 5 years, well, even a mobile ARM GPU might be ready to outperform it. (Which is why this is often called the "final console generation".)

This will happen as likely as the Democrats actually passing a formal balanced budget. I wish American business was as much about the customer as it is about the bottom line. You know, you can do both.

I hate to get partisan, I didn't even vote all Democrat last election, but the only two Presidents with a post-war balanced budget (actually a surplus) were Bill Clinton and Lyndon Bains Johnson, both Democrats. Today's Republicans, on the other hand, have manged to convince everyone, essentially with corperatist propaganda, that the best way to balance the budget is to cut taxes on the wealthy (i.e. bring less money into the government), and not touch a dime of the Department of Defences' money (the majority of Federal government spending), and then somehow cutting the remaining welfare (less than 10% of the budget) without causing riots or starvation will somehow balance the budget rather than a sound fisical approach. They've been trotting out this "cut taxes on billionaires and it'll bring in more revenue" farce since the "Laffer curve" in the late 70s, using largely discredited models of supply-side economics dating back from the late 1920s. (In other words, the type of economics that leads to worldwide depressions.) Then people wonder why the government seems like it's going to fall like a house of cards financially, and take the rest of the country with it.

I'm not particularly happy with Obama either, mind you, he's quite incompetent at dealing with the mess that Congress hands him, a necessary part of the job of any President, and is really George W. Bush II (with different rhetoric to confuse the peoons) in terms of his actual policies. I should also note that I'm not a liberal or conservative, just someone who's responsible who's tired of seeing our elected officials act like spoiled children on the corporate and special interest doles.

RIP Cowboy Neal.

Come on /., you're doing a marketing survey? What, slashdot is going to give over that information to some online ad company? For what it's worth, I have less "formal" education than my siblings, but you'll have to put that information into your database manually. :-)

I think, if I recall correctly, that Xbox no longer requires Xbox Gold to use Netflix. It also displays it in 720p (optionally scaled up to 1080p) rather than in standard def like a Wii. That having been said, lots of other media sources on the Xbox still require the "gold tax", as does multiplayer gaming. Every now and then you can get Xbox Live prepaid 12 or 13 month cards on sale though, sometimes for less than the usual $49 yearly rate. Also, this "Black Friday" at Target, you can get for $10 a 3 month Xbox Live card, which is fairly good if you don't want to wait, maybe they'd allow you to get multiple cards at that price too, which is much lower than the usual price for 3 month cards.

(Whatever you do, don't buy Xbox Live from Microsoft directly, they not only charge you more, they make it very difficult to unsubscribe. It's better to get a prepaid card for this, so MS can't rip you off. :-) )

Can't give you a citation. I don't recall the tech, but the digitizer always misread finger touches. Worked fine with a stylus. And no, it was not a Wacom digitizer. I know those (used to have Motion Computing tablet), and besides which they add too much cost to be used with a cheap tablet..

I've seen the site. Believe it or not, I know how to use Google.

Show me where it says why the distro exists.

Jesus Hieronymous Christ on a Pumpkin! Are you arguing with me or your imaginary friends? Because nothing you're saying has anything to do with my post. Which was about the fact that distro announcements never bother to explain why the distro exists. What are its goals? What are its special features? Why should I take the time to evaluate it?

Again, arguing with something I didn't say. I did not say that Linux Mint was a sucky distro. I said that if people want people to try it, they should explain why it's so hot.

Speaking of old people with outdated vocabularies, can anybody explain to me why "suck" and "screw" no longer have any sexual connotation? It's just weird.

It's funny how trolls (and aren't racists a kind of troll?) always get all mad about their freedom of speech being violated, just because somebody points out that they're trolling. As if the 1st amendment covers saying things that are offensive, but it doesn't cover telling people that they're saying offensive things.

So you're saying all racists are assholes? If I were a racist, I'd be offended by your stereotyping!

almost ALL black people are racist.

LOL. I mean jeez, the irony! You obviously have no idea how racist that statement is.

Can you read? I didn't ask why we should care about Linux, I asked why, out of all the gazillion Linux distros, we should care about this one?