>Hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers.

Stupid liberals with their non-discriminatory laws, weekends, and social safety nets. Stupid intellectuals who don't believe in god or starting a posse!

> Decent men who believed in a day's work for a day's pay

Funny how that didn't work out too well during the industrial revolution when the market was in charge and it took regulation and labor unions as well as massive protests before that was even possible.

Ugh, I love how Rorschach went from being a complete and utter right-wing psychopath to the posterboy of "common sense" in America. Wow, just wow.

None of that matters if you like to travel. Or if you like to actually own a phone and can swap out SIM cards to change phone numbers and carriers quickly.

Or if you like fast 3G (EVDO vs UMTS/HSPDA).

So CDMA is technically better, in theory but in practice its a lot of lock-in and slow ass 3G. There's more to deciding which is better than just tech specs on a piece of paper, but this being slashdot, we have the "TECHNICALLY CORRECT IS THE BEST KIND OF CORRECT" crowd.

This isn't about ports. I'm not sure how it suddenly became about ports (poor writeup?).

Iran uses packet inspection. They're getting good at it. They took down Tor for a little while before those guys found a work around. A lot VPNs don't work in Iran. Lots of things don't work. Simple work arounds like port numbers don't work.

In other words, when your country is a theocratic dictatorship, bad things happen. Considering how Iran is also a police state, there's little to no chance of anything stopping this anytime soon.

Ah religion. Your evil knows no bounds.

>It reads like an Al Gore infomercial, not a patent. More space is given to banging on about saving the planet than about the actual claims.

What? Are you saying Gore's global warming presentations were full of false information? Granted, his agenda was to popularize a marginalized message (which what it was when he started) but the facts were in line with IPCC.

Look, the broken patent system isn't being shut down in our lifetimes. I have a choice to buy from the company that shuts down competitors with patents or the company that bills competitors with patents. Guess who I'm going with.

There is no camera in any ipass system nor any intention of doing so. Camera tech is ancient, this could have been implemented 10 years ago. I know this is the kind of manufactured controversy that gets ad impressions for slashdot, but please, there are real problems in the world, and this isn't one of them.

Yep, the advice I always give is:

1. Uninstall java. Most end users never have a need for it and don't update it.

2. Use Chrome to read PDFs or Foxit. No need for Adobe, but to be fair Adobe's new sandbox model in version X is resistant to viral infections and exploits.

3. Update flash as often as it says or switch to Chrome.

4. Run MSE or some other AV.

First to file does not invalidate prior art. I really wish people understood this.

I don't believe in patents and want them abolished, but lets not spread fud. Thanks.

Its a security nightmare. Sun/Oracle haven't been able to secure their VM. End users never upgrade. You'll see people casually running java versions that are months or even years old. The little notifier in the tray is just ignored. Crimepack stats released by Brian Krebs shows that it is the number 1 vector for malware.

Considering how infrequently java is needed by end users, the idea that its sitting there ready to run any applet is crazy irresponsible. FF and the rest should refuse to let it run if its not the newest version and/or throw up a warning about java apps and maintain a java whitelist.

Or we can live in the status quo of massive malware infections.

>You can get 100GB drives for ~$150. How much cheaper does it have to be?

I wish SSD enthusiasts would accept this simple fact: SSDs are not that reliable yet. RAM is reliable, barring a power outage.

If you want reliability, you at the very least need to buy Intel. Now your "cheap" drive isn't so cheap. We can't cheaply RAID them either so because the storage industry is so set in its way, they still haven't released much in the way of TRIM enabled RAID cards.

So lets say I wanted to do this in any way that was remotely reliable. I'd have to pay for a TRIM enabled RAID1 card and two 160gb SSDs, preferably intel. Now your $150 solution is more like $1500 solution.

Depending on garbage like OCZ is really asking for a fall. Business as well as consumers have been burned by the current crop of "fast but highly unreliable SSDs."

Unfortunately, we're probably years away from a cheap AND reliable SSD storage solution that can run for 5 years with the fail rate of a spinning disk. In the meantime I'm running expensive Intel SSDs and not worrying. I can't imagine selling OCZ to Joe or Jan consumer, inflating the price of their computers $200 for a mild speed boost. Not to mention laptops don't usually have a second slot for another drive. Either SSD all the way or spinning disk. Half-assed caching solutions have historically been big failures.

No one needs calendar that isnt integrated with their email client. Yes, I'm sure there are edge cases, but for the most part, this whole project is odd. It should just be rolled up into Thunderbird and cancelled. Instead its a stand-alone with a thunderbird plugin.

Moonlight is the Silverlight client for Linux. MS contributes and has donated licensed media codecs for it. Oh, that's right this is slashdot, so facts don't matter.

Netflix doesnt work with moonlight? That's a problem with netflix. Bring it up to them.

>It was an Obama appointee to head NASA who said that his number one priority as head of NASA was outreach to Muslims.

An appointee was talking about something about Muslims you say!?!

Show me the change in the mission statement, show me the change in the missions. Oh you can't. You're just parroting Hannity, Rush, and O'Reilly with your meaningless drivel.

>Well, that combined with the fact that most NASA employees are in Texas and Florida, states that most likely will vote against Obama next year.

Florida is a swing state. The big problem I see is that pork barrel GOP Senators "design rockets by commiteee" to keep the pork flowing in their states, but of course you're free to believe conspiracy theories about Muslims and elections. There's no shortage on conservatives on Slashdot to vote you up. No wonder this site is shedding users to quickly. Its "Fox News" chat for morons here.

> but the reality is that part of recovering from this unfathomly huge deficit is cutting spending.

What? NASA is 17 billion annually, or less than 2 months in Iraq. Our defense budget is 600billion not counting our wars. Or war spending during Bush is in the TRILLIONS.

I hate fuckers who want to cut science or education or medicare because they voted GOP and wanted to go to war but now refuse to make rational cuts in defense and war spending. We're spending ourselves stupid because all the proposed cuts are for everything EXCEPT the military and the wars.

People used to ask me what iPhone I had about 3 years ago or so. Now everyone asks me what kind of phone it is and when I mention Android they understand. So, no, the battle is never over.

Regardless, the retail world of tablets is bigger than what the ill-informed lowest common denominator think. I mean, these are the people who call our Canon "the xerox machine" and when they want to know your email address ask for your "aol." They're not the cutting edge trendsetters you think they are.