Having owned cattle: it doesn't work that way.

No, you don't have lots of reads on small numbers of cattle, depending on where you are. You're not their parents, and you don't care who they hang out with after class. If you're a large enough rancher to segregate groups of his cows, then you keep them segregated for that reason. (For example, you want to keep a group from breeding that season.) That group does not often change. Your main tagging duties are:
1: Calving. (Actually, probably during castrating time -- you've penned up half of that year's calves anyway. Pen the rest.)
2: Buying cattle: tag them as they come off the truck.
3: Selling cattle: new buyer tags them.
4: If you've got a very large herd, and you're controlling batches of them as above, then track them when you batch them. If you've batched them, you did it for a reason, and you're not going to change it more often than once per season. (If that often.)
5: Sure, you're out in the middle of nowhere with the cows, but we're not tracking them real-time by satellite. I guarantee you that even the smelliest hand goes to the bar on the weekend, and I've never known a bar without a phone. Seriously, they just hand the scanners to the boss that night, and he uses this bit of ancient technology called a modem -- at MOST every two weeks.

(Oh, and expense won't be a problem for small farms: they'll chip in and buy one for three or four farms and spend the next ten years blaming each other for losing it and everybody wanting it at the last minute, just like they do for everything else.)

I grew up on a small cattle farm, so I know what I'm talking about. You absolutely have to sterilize young bulls, or they'll challenge the older bulls, and you'll wind up with a bloody bullpen instead of a lot of happy, complaining cows. So that's 50% of each year's herd you have to spend at least 15 seconds of...intensely personal time with anyway.

Secondly, cows aren't cats, but if one person is herding a small group of cattle then he's doing it through a chute or with a small bucket of feed. Again, this is completely not a problem.

Small cattle ranches obey Sturgeon's Law exactly like any other small groups. They whiners are just complaining because they aren't going to be able to hide downer cows or sell the sick ones before anybody notices. (Which, by the way, is one reason we raised our own, until my brother and I went to college and there was no more farm help.)

If I were still on my parents' farm, I'd welcome this move 100%, even restricted to the 28.8Kbps modem my parents still use.

Agreed; and humans do a lot of things that other animals would do if they could.

I mean, cats didn't evolve to eat food out of tins, but if your cat could work a can opener then he'd be done with you for good.

I guess the "Post Anonymously" box isn't going to help me now anyway.

I know it's an offhand comment, but it already doesn't help you. /. still stores who you are; you can't moderate and post in the same story, even if you checked "post anonymously."

My G1 tethers just fine...but not by default.
Unless you got an app I haven't seen, you had to get root, right? Start with an old image, flash to a new JF image to get the upgrades but keep root, and get the bluetooth connection working?

I actually have nothing against barriers; I miss the days of "you must be at least THIS smart to use the Internet". The 98% of the users who can't figure out how to tether can subsidize my bandwidth that way.

I'd love it. Bring it on -- the bigger and slower, the better. Ever since big, slow backup tapes stopped being significantly larger than the drives they backed up, keeping important info safe has been a nontrivial task. If you can back up an enterprise's 20GB-a-day data generation habit with an array of slow-but-reliable 10-20TB drives, then your life gets a lot easier.

First of all what you are describing is not cybersquating (sp)
Ok...
The domain has been registered by a domainer - a domain trader that buys premium domains treating them as an investment.
That's the definition of a cybersquatter. Domainer is what cybersquatters call themselves -- it's like how mobsters call themselves "legitimate businessmen".
it's no trademark, not a domain typo - there is no bad faith.
That's just a subset of cybersquatter. I think we used to use the word "domain scalper" for these guys, but I'm not a real Internet anthropologist, just an old man.

You're usually spot on man, but in this case man, I think your name is apt.
The amount of road we have is finite, so the addition of these large trucks is fine for a few, but once you start getting more than a handful of trucks on the road, all traffic is affect.(sp)

You're correct -- it's an infrastructure problem. However, taxpayers shelled out billions of dollars in subsidies from Congress to the telecoms for the equivalent of an 8-lane highway. The only reason these "big trucks" are causing congestion is because cable companies just added that money to their profit statements while contemplating lining the roads with snipers to take out the trucks.

When something holds up progress, you have two choices: whine about it being hard and expensive and that we're too rural (even in our dense cities, which never seemed right to me), or we can kick its ass and chew bubblegum. The countries that run out of bubblegum first will be the leaders in the 21st century.

Here's another good example of "correlation vs. causation." Extremely good runners have a very mechanically efficient stride and smooth foot action. Some of this is training, and some of it is related to how the feet and knees are aligned. Most people do not have perfect alignment. We will probably never become Olympic competitors or join the Stanford running team, but we can run for fun; I do the occasional road race, and I'm doing a triathlon next weekend.

Those of us who run for fun and who are not gifted with perfect alignment may overpronate or supinate our feet when we run. This action is less efficient, so we're less likely to be fast enough to join a college team. A small majority of people overpronate, somewhat less have a good neutral position, and a few people supinate. To look for overpronation, check out your old tennis shoes: if your shoes wear out first near the ball of the foot, chances are you're an overpronator. (If you have flat feet, you're also probably an overpronator. Try the "wet foot test": when you get out of the shower, step on a piece of paper and look at the prints you make.)

I'm a moderate overpronator, and shoes with a little extra cushion that compensate for my less-than-perfect foot position have kept my feet injury-free for five years.

No, a lot of first-job recent graduates are "libertarian leaning", because they get their first paychecks and ask "Who is FICA and why do they get all my money?"

They get told "you have to pay taxes to pay for all the roads and bridges", but they realize that all the money is spent playing GI Joe and saving banks that were run into the ground by gambling-addicted bankers who broke the world. War in Afghanistan got little support because it was difficult to spell, so we had to invade Iraq, as that fit more nicely on bumper-stickers.

They stop being libertarians a bit later when they realize that the only thing better than a world based on equality is being on top of a world based on inequality, and they begin donating to one of the political parties. (Doesn't matter; there are occasionally balance issues between Red Team and Blue Team, but Red got nerfed on the latest patch, so we'll see if that fixed it.)

Let's fight this, Austinites. My gf and I are engineers, and we VNC into work on weekends and for late nights, and we use more than 2GB/month just on that.

Here's the letter I'm sending to my senators and representatives. I need to figure out who to send it to at Time Warner and the Statesman. (The big newspaper, for out-of-towners.) I'm looking for advice and critique and sources for some of the arguments I've heard here. (Look for the [brackets])

Dear ________,

I am an electrical engineer with *company*, and like many engineers in the emerging high-tech center of Austin, I rely on high-speed Internet connections to my home. In these times of economic hardship, it is more important than ever for working professionals to be able to access work computers and other information quickly and economically.

Time Warner Cable has announced that they are implementing tight limits on the amount of information that they will provide to users of their cable modem services. While Austin's workers attempt to reach a compromise between work and family life by accessing critical business operations over the Internet, Time Warner plans to restrict their networks for these heavy users. They are instituting these caps in spite of the fact that a vast capacity of their fiber-optic lines remain unused, and in [year], Congress gave [millions] of dollars to cable companies to improve our nation's digital infrastructure.

For Time Warner to pocket this investment and make no improvements, then attempt to extort outrageous fees that infrastructure from Austin area workers, is outrageous. Only the fact that there is no significant competition for broadband access allows cable companies to unilaterally impose these restrictions on those of us who depend on the Internet for our livelihood. As Congress has given heavily to cable companies and has seen no improvements, I would urge you to closely examine the stranglehold this company has upon Austin's digital infrastructure and the abuse of monopoly power that this upcoming cap represents.

I look forward to your quick action in this matter, [and I anticipate supporting you in [your next election] (for elected officials) ].

*OpenGLFan*

They are however excellent when it comes to playing games at a fun volume and getting decent positional audio.
And flattening my ears.
That brings up a good point -- I've listened to a fair number of decent-to-good headphones owned by friends, and my ears always wind up physically squished. For the audiophiles in here who listen on big cans all day: do your ears automatically adjust? Are some more ear-friendly than others? I'm currently listening on a pair of Philips headphones, not because of the sound quality, but because my ears don't physically ache for the rest of the day.

My Nokia N-800 isn't bad. It's pocket-sized and has a decent web browser. I've switched now to an Android G1, so I don't know about recent developments. You do have to use the stylus to use the keyboard though. I've heard that the newer model has a pop-out keyboard, so that might be better.

It is a good joke, if taken in fun. The real joke is that this democratic system, in a slightly more elaborate, slightly more bot-resistant way, is basically how we elect our Presidents.

Adobe's particularly horrible implementation.

Right now, on my laptop, I have two VirtualBox sessions running images pretty close to the servers at work. I'm testing out some simulation. I've got slashdot open in Firefox, and I've got Adobe's PDF reader open to a reference manual.

The PDF reader is using more memory than the two virtual servers combined. That's a ridiculous amount of bloat, and it doesn't even count the "Adobe Updater" software that runs all the time.