It seems like you're arguing AT&T's point. Why should they give access to a company that doesn't have to comply with telecom regulations if the deal was that they'd give access to other telecoms?

Interference is a different problem. And you're absolutely right that it can be mitigated with more APs (and smart channel assignments).

With a single AP and a completely (RF) quiet environment the aggregate capacity goes down as the number of nodes increases. More nodes means more time spent in backoff. This problem is unrelated to interference or transmit power.

The bigger problem is that having many nodes means having many collisions. The aggregate capacity of the WiFi channel goes down as the number of nodes increases. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSMA/CA

I think it was Turing who actually started it. Its been going on since at least World War II in electronic form. Only thing that has happened lately is the move from tapping copper undersea cables and RF to tapping fiber optics and routers. That and they have the compute power and storage capacity to do it to everyone instead of select targets.

What exactly is this Mozilla model that works so well? Besides charity from Google I mean. I wonder if Google keeps Firefox alive just to avoid antitrust issues with Chrome.

Those desolate islands, along with several other groups of islands, are part of a multi country conflict to try to gain control of the probably vast oil and gas fields under the South China Sea. Countries need the islands to lay claim to larger exclusive economic zone that extend up to 200 nautical miles off a county's coast.

If Apple (or someone) files a patent application it is on the public record*, if they don't, they can't make a claim. So . . . how is Apple meant to make Samsung do its due diligence?

*37 C.F.R. 1.11

How is the ISP meant to know the video's bitrate?

In fact, most streaming video doesn't have a bitrate. It has several and the player adapts based on network conditions.

My concern with the Gates Foundation, like most of their ilk, is the paradox of doing good. Do the people who want to eradicate poverty, feed the world and cure all diseases ever stop to think what the long term consequences will be if they actually succeed?

They are contributing to an eventual population crisis and a crash which will be ever more spectacular the longer we keep staving it off with tech.

There should be an iron clad linkage that if you are going to be a do gooder that you are also going to figure out a way to insure all the people you are saving are going to stop having babies. Improving education and economic well being may eventually lead to this result but its slow and not a certain outcome.

You simply can't keep delivering ship loads of food aid to cultures where couples insist on having 12 children whom they can't feed without ship loads of food aid.

Religions like Catholicism and Islam who compel their flock to breed like rabbits are also doing this planet no favors. Many developed countries are finally starting to get their demographics under control, Japan and Russia are apparently heading towards demographic crashes. Unfortunately Africa, India and various parts of Asia are still breeding too fast for a planet that is being stretched to its breaking point, they need to stop.

China'a one child policy, as ruthless as it is, is doing more good than anything the Gates foundation will ever do for the planet.

I know its all fashionable to beat on the man, but seriously.

There might be some companies where CEO's do nothing, and there is certainly a debate worth having on whether many CEO's are paid too much.

But, the CEO is the person who decides what products the company makes, is responsible for making sure those products are built on time, and sell when they hit the market. They are the people who ultimately insure the company makes its payroll so workers have jobs and get paid. If its a publicly traded company you can add on the massive burdens of answering to regulators, shareholders and the media.

Most CEO's I've seen work really hard, I doubt I'd want the job. They usually have to travel a lot, they have to sit an insufferable amount of meetings, they carry huge burdens on their shoulders most of the time.

You seriously need to spend a week BEING a CEO, so we can all see how horrible you would be at it, and then maybe you would stop running your mouth spewing nonsense.

Tsunami's tend to only be bad where they hit coasts or shallow water. In the open ocean and deep water they move very fast but wave height is usually never more than a meter.

Have we forgotten about PolyHeme? It isn't truly artificial (it is made from human hemoglobin), but it is not infectious and is not type specific. And it can be stored for a year at room temperature.

People don't want DNS. They want web and mail. Both depend on DNS.

So what did Unions, OSHA, Workmens Comp and the EPA accomplish in the long run?

They made the U.S. a horrible place to engage in any business that could easily be outsourced to another country with a lower regulatory burden, taxes and wages. The worker's paradise angle worked until the economy globalized, now it doesn't.

So increasingly there are no low skilled jobs in the U.S. Automation is also a union and job killer because its better to spend a lot of money on a machine than deal with employees. Wage rates are dropping, the U.S. runs massive trade deficits and government is massively in the red because its spending more than its shrinking tax base will support (tax cuts for the rich under Bush certainly helped, as did over promising on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and squandering on the defense-intelligence complex.

Wonder why healthy unions in the U.S. tend to only be fire, police, teaching, government, truck driving. Because those are the jobs that can't be outsourced.

There was a sweet spot in there, maybe around 1950 where unions and government regulation hit a sweet spot, they'd wiped out all the massive abuses of workers earlier in the century and built a big middle class, and then they over rotated and made the U.S. a horrible place to do business. If you don't have business you tend to not have jobs, then you have a lot of people living on food stamps and Medicaid.

A couple of points of fact.

1. You can run non-MacOS software on Mac hardware. (E.g. Windows, Linux.)
2. You can run MacOS on non-Apple hardware (though it is a violation of the license agreement).

I take your point, but I think it would be more apt to say "free as in bar mix". Yes, it's figured into the overall bill. Yes, it makes you want more of the product for sale. But it's not really a trap. More of a loss leader.