You're right: it's easy. And I like easy. No doubt the /. crowd definitely appreciated the IT examples more, but if I can help an undergrad write a paper, why not.

I agree with you. I think this problem is certainly bad in IT, but even worse in drug policy. It seems that drugs are really, really scary things to most people and prohibitionists seem to love statistics and damn lies. Some great examples: the crack epidemic, cocaine deaths, and meth babies. Some sources: http://reason.com/archives/2009/05/28/birth-of-a-cocaine-factoid http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27coca.html?_r=1 http://www.jointogether.org/news/yourturn/commentary/2005/meth-science-not-stigma-open.html

Let's suppose firms and consumers respond to incentives. Also suppose firms wish to maximize their own profits, while consumers wish to maximize their own utility. If AT&T effectively increases their price for data plans, then what do you think competitors will do? Certainly all the firms do better when all firms in a market charge higher prices for inferior service, as you suggested. But any firm that defects and doesn't have their customers as much over a barrel as AT&T stands to make hearty profits, as consumers will start to switch providers. Since it seems all of /. is convinced AT&T is just using this as a move to extract inordinate amounts of profits and drop the least profitable consumers, then smaller firms like Sprint and T-Mobile must be very happy this is happening. They get to charge the same prices and take on customers that just pick up excess capacity they have being wasted.

Note to clueless replies and mods: WOOOOSH

Seldom do I travel farther than St Louis, 100 miles away. So it would work for me. Any farther (Mt. Vernon) and I'm probably staying the night anyway.

But yeah, if I wanted to go to Florida or Colorado on vacation it wouldn't work.

Everyone can blab on about herd immunity etc but this seems like denying a stolen car a repair under warranty. Systems are going to be used for attacks, it might as well be the pirates systems and not mine. Security these days is more about running faster than your peers, not outrunning the hackers. Microsoft doing this will put paying customers closer to the front of the race. And I am not a microsoft fanboy so don't write some bs about that.

What will everyone want next? Metadata updates for your stolen music from the record companies? As much as I hate some things about companies, you have to draw a line somewhere.

I feel bad that this post is 0, Offtopic. If I had mod points, I would mod you up. Why? Because I give you the benefit of the doubt and believe you were meaning to post in a story that was about that problem.

You might want to try joining a site like Livemocha. Usually people will want to talk to you on Skype. Another good way to improve your German would be to join dict.cc and send messages to German native speakers on there who are likely wanting to improve their English. Hope that helps.

Actually, Social Security is the biggest chunk of the national budget at 21.05%. The Department of Defense is 16.85%. Actually if you add SS, Medicare, Medicaid, Unemployment and Welfare, Housing and Urban Development, and Health and Human Services

It's no mod, its a TRAP!

I don't speak Dutch, but a quick glance at http://dell.nl/ shows that they do not seem to offer Ubuntu (or any OS other than Windows XP) pre-installed on their netbooks. I should have qualified "all" and said "all Dell netbooks sold in the US and Canada." I think this oversight is forgivable, as the focus of Slashdot has always been geared toward English-speaking residents of the United States. (See http://slashdot.org/faq/editorial.shtml#ed850) Furthermore, the person to whom I replied had nothing on his user page indicating that he would likely be in the market for a netbook sold by a division of a company that was not selling to North American English speakers.

Dell gives Ubuntu as an option on all their netbooks, maybe you should have read more reviews. Have a look. http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-9?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=mn http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-10?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=mn http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/laptop-inspiron-12?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&~ck=mn