This is code for straight-up Socialism or Chinese Style "Capitalism". Picking winners and losers by the Government.

I would instantly agree that we need to stop picking winners like we do now under Crony Capitalism, but putting that power more in the hands of Bureaucrats and Politicians is not the solution.

Along those same lines, Windows 11 is dropping support for older Intel Processors lacking certain features. Supposedly, it's to improve virtualization, but how much would it cost to just not support that virtualization as well on older processors?

It's a boon to PC manufacturers that push Windows 11. The big PC makers say "Works best with Windows!" on their websites and don't highlight or give you any price break on units with Linux installed. Didn't I read that MS requires that they get a payment for every PC sold, whether it runs Windows or not as part of their licensing agreement with the manufacturers? I know the manufacturers get a big break on Windows copies from retail.

I thought Apple should have bought Dell when Dell went private a few years ago, made PCs with no Windows advantage, pushed Linux and maybe even Darwin on these new PCs. I'm not saying don't sell Windows too. They could keep the Dell and marketing separate to not dilute the Apple brand. They would have enjoyed massive buying power for PC parts, screens, batteries, SDs. They could have gotten Dell for a tiny fraction of their massive war chest a few years ago. Could have had most of it financed, too, just like the deal to go private did. This idea might have faced anti-trust scrutiny.

Apple should have recognized that MS wasn't going away and as long as they are there, they are a potential huge competitor in many of their markets.

It would have also been revenge for the obnoxious remarks Michael Dell made back in the 90s when Apple was experiencing hard times.

We are a SonicWall partner - a large portion of our clients use them.

Sure you can do content filtering, but it's impossible to configure any sort of granularity in the system such as, allow these users to access these sites, those to access those site. I've worked with multiple Sonicwall engineers on this issue. You just can't do it. Period. There is one set of rules that you can either allow or deny. That's it. Similarly, the bandwidth management sucks if you want to do any sort of QoS.

This all boils down to the UI really. GUI's and firewalls are just a mix that only work for simplistic needs. Once your needs pass a certain threshold, they just get in the way and make it nearly impossible to do the configuration you need. Sonicwall designed their interface for the "part time office manager IT person" and grew from there. And it shows. Cisco frankly is in a similar situation. Use the GUI for simple crap to get you going, the command line when you actually need to do anything complex.

As another poster mentioned, pretty much all firewalls out there are embedded Linux or BSD, and just slap their GUI on top along with other random services. Some do a pretty good job of exposing the underlying power of the native firewall, others, not so much. Sonicwall's is pretty good for exposing that power but the web GUI gets in the way all too often when you need to do a lot of similar rules or complex rules.

Finally, another poster recommended using GMS to manage multiple Sonicwalls. This product is insanely priced and only makes sense in a larger organization that would be better served with alternative products (Cisco, etc.) Despite all the high end models they sell, I wouldn't use ANY of them for an organization with high-end needs. Sonicwall's nitch is small business with 50 or fewer users and in my opinion, selling and supporting these things, that's the only market that it's viable to use them in.

IANAA (Astrophysicist), but I believe asteroids of that size would reach the earth. Depending what it's made of, it could break into a lot of pieces, though.

This is a pretty small asteroid and (again, I'm no expert) but its orbit means that it wouldn't have a great relative velocity if it did strike earth (nothing like a comet, by comparison). There were some estimates on the damage it would do if it were to strike in the referenced article and this doesn't seem to be a major concern.

0 click buy!

I think this advice is good in most cases, but there are some cases where it might not be applicable.

This might be good advice for people fresh out of school, but I'd like to point out that some companies make it difficult for people to do anything public outside of work.

Also, not everyone is interested in web work. In those cases, I'd expect those people to have blogs where they discuss their projects, show code and relate experiences.

Another issue is that certain school programs are pretty demanding and don't leave much time for work outside. A prospective employee going through one of these schools might be also doing internships at one of the companies that don't allow you to do work outside.

In all these cases, the prospective employee should have code that they can show and explain, a portfolio.

I'd use them to assign off-topic to all the posts concerning teacher pay, benefits, workload and state budgets.

Come on people. This teacher is just trying to do a good job and we have to turn into an on-line teaparty or NEA advocacy forum?

Sounds like they've reinvented Broadway.

I always thought it sounded like a neat idea, but it went exactly nowhere 14 YEARS AGO.

No it doesn't translate well to computers.

Do you really want your financial, personal, or medical information on some random idiot's personal machine? A machine (maybe a laptop) that someone's kid uses to download all sorts of crap? What if the machine gets stolen while at the office? Who pays? What about the data? Can you mandate full drive encryption? How do you audit it?

Think of the legal liability.

No, no, it's not a good idea when you think past the initial $$$$ and allure of having a non-sucky work machine. Yeah, a good machine costs a few dollars, but compared to the cost of wages and other overhead associated with an employee, it is fricking stupid to saddle the employee with a crap machine that hinders their productivity. If a better machine increases productivity more than 5% then, as a company, you are insane to keep around a 5 year old machine with a tiny monitor.

We keep most of our clients on a 3 year rotation. The tax laws make it reasonable to do so. We track maintenance costs on systems, and find that as a machine ages, it really does get more expensive to maintain and it costs the company more in lost productivity than it's worth. With rare exceptions, our clients understand this. Tech isn't cheap but not keeping up costs more.

Do you have inside information concerning the subsidies, because that's privileged information. I'd be surprised if the adware and MSN pays for the OEM Windows license, but maybe I could be surprised.

I do recall that netbooks used to be cheaper without windows. I think MS has since struck arrangements that make this no longer possible, but that's the way it used to be.

Huh? Of the 3 Republicans you mentioned, there was one alleged gay and two men with women on the side. These are your examples of closted gays and "diaper wearers" in the Republican Party? Mark Sanford resigned. Larry Craig actually resigned, but took it back.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Mark Foley, but then, he did resign, so I guess that wouldn't fit with your theme.

Spitzer resigned, true. He had lots of powerful enemies on Wall Street, he was seriously weakened by "Troopergate" and was under investigation for financial misdeeds surrounding the prostitutes (bribery, misuse of campaign funds) he was procuring that it's hardly surprising that he had to go. Note that Patterson suffered not a bit when he admitted to infidelity.

It's pretty surprising, actually, that Clinton survived. He was caught in a clear case of harassment, it doesn't matter a whit if it's consensual, the difference in power between a President and an Intern would have been harassment in a reasonable world. There was also that little matter of lying in open court. Martha Stewart goes to Prison for lying to an investigator and Clinton skates on lying in open court?

What other Democrat had to resign? Are you saying the Democrats are pure on this account and Spitzer and Clinton are the only examples?

I agree that the media applies different standards to Democrats when it comes to scandal. Like the blackout on the stories about Gore that have been known to reporters for years and are just now coming out.

If I had a girlfriend...

Stop right there.

Ideally, it would allow new ISPs to enter the market and compete with the current conglomerates.

The problem isn't long-haul bandwidth. Reasonably priced OC48+ is already common pretty much everywhere in the US. Reselling it isn't the issue. The "Last Mile" is the issue and has ALWAYS been the issue. The ONLY "resellable" last mile option is telco copper, and the problem with it (in all too many cases) is loop length, and quality of the loop. In my area, the wires are long and old, meaning that 1.5M/384K is the absolute max I can get, and it has lots of dropouts (and I get nasty static on my POTS line.) I've been trying to get it fixed for 5 YEARS! Letters to the PUC have yielded absolutely nothing. So my ONLY other option now is cable. And to be honest, the speed for $$$ on my business line (15M/2M, 5 IP's, no caps) is so far beyond what the phone company or ANY third party DSL ISP can offer, it's a no-brainer. All I could ask for is better reliability (I've had a number of outages where I have never had an outage with my phone service.)

My situation, unfortunately, is not all that unusual. There are areas of San Jose, CA, that STILL can't get DSL due to loop length.

So... Back to the original topic. This will do NOTHING for your local home / small business internet service. It will make it a little less expensive for large businesses to have or upgrade their private networks. That's it.

The solution for the last mile is an independent "fiber utility" that offers / supports the physical fiber, and to allow multiple companies to connect to it and offer services over it at a neutral facility. I don't need 15 different companies stringing cable, but I would like 15 different companies competing to offer me TV, internet, and phone over that common fiber.

Anytime someone says something based on FACT that an Obama lover doesn't like, they mod you down.

Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I think I'm entitled to them.
Jessep: You want answers?
Kaffee: I want the truth!
Jessep: You can't handle the truth!