It all comes down to what a Gold Member (VMware..err EMC) can do to clock block your project 10 years longer than first anticipated.

In the end EMC does want to be compatible with others, else people will not use their server virtualization products if you are truely locked in. They just want to have first pick and mind-share of the market which is willing to pay. with mind-share, you have lock-in.

I am getting pretty annoyed how so many companies are being settled with for legal issues, at cost of a mere pittance to these companies.

I want to see the ban hammer come down and come down hard on these guys. If i break the law with something as simple as a parking ticket, that is a substantial cost to me. if I were to break the law in something major it screws me for life. Why is this not being applied to corporations?

Price fixing? confiscate ALL past profits gained from of the fixing, and fine future profits as an exponential multiplier of the fixing revenue. not to mention jail time for the crooks who okay the fixing. make companies leave yellow piddle marks when people even suggest they could be price fixing, colluding, bribery.

he would still be none the richer.

I would consider population to be the biggest chance of "Apocalypse". YES, POPULATION. Think Soy lent Green: The human population will consume EVERYTHING until we get a population crash. That means an apocalypse of all of our natal world, every cherished rainforest, undisturbed habitat, unique (delicate) species, and interconnected biodiversity.

To me, if we lose biodiversity, if we gentrify every cubic foot of land into farmland in the name of ever denser cities of people bordering on the line of life in a shoebox. what worse Apocalypse can you imagine?

People should thrive with adequate personal space, with enough resources to live interesting lives. If we allow populations to grow forever, space and resources will only be a luxury for the rich more so than it already is now.

I can vouch first hand you can do it, as well as the parents sip provider mentioned is a fine choice as I also use callcentric, and its a fair price imho. you can even call port your number to them (ATT however..... will Drag... Their....Feet... then call port you on a Friday after business hours).....

I have a bit different setup from the parent--mine utilizes a PAYG number when i have no wifi access. If i am not logged into callcentric, they I can make a rule to auto-forward to my PAYG number.

Get a sip capable pone, honestly, pay the extra bucks to get a smartphone, versus standarlone sip phone with no features. you'll like the web browsing and email when you have wifi. (Note: most nokia wifi capable UNLOCKED phones have SIP integrated... I use an e71)

Voice works wonderfully for me, but people get a bit confused if i call them back from my PAYG number, and if you really need to text, callcentric doesn't support sms. but you could from the PAYG number, or from a free Gvoice account (additional confusion)

in total, my bill went from ~54 per month plan on the cheapest 450 minute plan with sparrse texting, to somewhere around ~11-14 per month. I have paid for the smart-phone two times over at this point.

I'm pretty techy, and I looked into a PBX solution as some have mentioned, but either you're stuck with a non-static number, a non-call ported number (google) number, or to do it yourself your rates are fractions of a cent within callcentrics cost to you. combined with the power of said device and annoyance to set it up, and be your own telco, I decided to not bother with the self-pbx route. If you need some very fancy call wizardry, then maybe a in-house pbx would make more sense. (such as screen everyone but a group of numbers after X time is what i would like)

one more thing, do you talk a lot? cellular may still be better for you. I estimate my usage around 300-800 minutes a month usage.

Ammonia - they use ammonia to serialize equipment, meat, etc. they do not have to have this on the product label either. Recent studies (no i'm not going to do your work for a citation) have shown that bathing everything in ammonia is also not quite as effective a sterilization process as they'd hoped either--at least in meat factories

The ammonia tibid i recall hearing on minnesota public radio, about a guy who won a Pulitzer i believe, for his coverage of these processes and what happens to meat at meat factories. He basically said he wouldn't eat pink hamburger, but would feel safe with a pink steak.

Regarding your claim about animals raised in different conditions, i highly urge you to read "the omnivore's dilemma" Basically, vast majorities of cows are raised on feed lots. Their fed corn, and other stuff. Cows are not made to digest corn. Corn is nothing like grass. These cows get quite sickly, or borderline sickly because of this. They sustain a lot of infections because of this. Their consistently fed antibiotics preventive when it wouldn't be needed with grass.

and after decades of with this capability, what percentage of capable systems actually do this? ... very few.

who would want this w/o strong encryption either: Maybe a telephone company, and their vendor locked in phone. "oh i'm sorry, it wont work w/o the net boot OS"

I would notify your state's attorney general of that. That is tampering with YOUR data & packets--surely breaking some laws out there.

Intel is not affordable compared to AMD.

My system here has been frizzing out on me after 4+ years, and literally 2 hours ago I ordered an AMD 3ghz 3-core processor for 75 bucks. the board (with on board GPU) , 2gb memory, and cpu with shipping came to $230...

JUST 14 bucks more than the only Intel's dual-core processor listed in the article.

I realize i worded that oddly, but
incoming + outgoing calls are not charged for the same call.

incoming calls cost one rate
outgoing cost another.

there's a couple plan options for each.

I feel the $5 range is pretty optimistic for most people as you talked for 130 minutes of incoming calls. $9 bucks gets your unlimited incoming.

Users should also realize that outgoing costs money too. it's $0.019 per min on top of the incoming costs......

This is what i do with callcentric. Get a VOIP capable cellular-phone, i use a Nokia e71... (most UNLOCKED Nokia smartphones all have a sip client built-in as i understand). Give friends your call-centric number, setup a rule in callcentric that forwards you to your PAYG number and if you are not logged in.

The savings alone from dropping my cellular-400 min plan paid for the phone in a matter of a few months. You then get big telco independence, and you'll save hundreds per year overall.

Yes, all of the scientists working at CERN are colluding together to...

1.) Cover-up the statistical odds of the destruction of earth so they can get grants to...
2.) Implement LHC, which will....
3.) WHOOOSH....
4.) There would be no profit.

Nevermind that much higher energy cosmic rays hit our atmosphere every minute, and we've somehow never been gobbled up. But hey, perhaps we should go back to becoming hunter-gatherers because "fire" may cause an uncontrollable reaction consuming the very earth itself! We'd better not risk it, 'lest the gods become angry.

The author appears to me to be an idiot of the 'global warming isn't real' type.

The netbook is only going to grow, so long as companies keep making more and more apps for linux, xor companies keep moving their applications onto the web. There's only the balance then of what does a consumer need to run locally versus connected.

Your prediction of low margins may be true to a point---but that is the beauty of globalization. These US companies who want to make only huge profit items will eventually wither from a thousand cuts as Taiwan/Chinese companies decide their happy to make 10 million netbooks with a net profit of 3 bucks each.

If you need specialization, then you're going to pay through the teeth (GPS Navigation / E-Readers). Those companies make a killing on you from both software and hardware. Personally, i wont touch e-readers until they allow me to place them onto a general-computing device. Same reason I've never toughed DRM-Music.... its too expensive and too limiting.

It's called a line connection fee. EVERYONE already pays this. There is no reason that solar CONTRIBUTORS should have to be charged to help the power companies, if anything excel should have to pay them. Think about it, power, they dont have to maintain, service, or otherwise pay to implement, comes into their grid magically.

These guys just want to remain a near monopoly on power generation, so they want to create barriers of entry. People who propose stuff like this should be flogged, or worse.

I don't know which particle it would be, but basically cosmis rays can flip bits. Fortunately, ECC will generally correct this--most times--In the below writeup, IBM is advocating why their advanced ECC chipkill is something that would be very relevant for highly critical servers. The big brand servers basically all use chipkill now.

IBM directly seems to be charging for these reports, but the writeup here.

http://www.ece.umd.edu/courses/enee759h.S2003/references/ibm_chipkill.pdf