If you've read Daemon and/or Freedom by Daniel Suarez, this sounds like the Hummers guarding Matthew Sobol's house. There's other autonomous vehicles, but I won't give anything else away.

Five things:

1. 1. When 3 of 4 major carriers don't sell the iPhone, the sales numbers for other devices could be much higher than those of the iPhone.
2. 2. Android phones are the first phones in a long time to have a mass appeal of "doesn't suck" or "not corporate", i.e. Palm/Windows Mobile and Blackberry.
3. 3. Consumers that are happy with another carrier, or don't want to switch to ATT, can finally upgrade to a phone with iPhone-like features.
4. 4. Consumers who were in the market for an iPhone waited for v.4.
5. 5. Price.

Seems simple enough to me.

I manage a small group of machines that are connected to each other, but never to the Internet. Our customer asked for the Vista upgrade, paid for proper licensing, we installed Vista in a small test group, customers were happy. Vista failed, customers were extremely unhappy.

This is the sole reason that we haven't migrated all the clients to Vista. And why we had to rollback the test group back to XP. Vista's phone-home cycle is 180 days, then it lies to you and says that "Hardware Changed..." and drops the computer into its restricted use mode.

There is a solution for this problem, Microsoft Key Management Services (KMS). We SAs are ready to deploy KMS, but have run into management resistance for 6+ months now. Vista left such a bad impression with them, they decided to just wait until we migrate to Windows 7 to setup KMS. And that won't happen until the next hardware refresh cycle, so maybe 1Q2011.

Once you have KMS, the 180- to 90-day change really isn't that big of a deal.

Here's how I see it:

• Playstation Home? Charge for it. I used it a few times when I first signed up, but it doesn't really do anything. I'm sure the costs outweigh the virtual trinkets and mini games they sell.
• Playstation Store? Access needs to be free. Any store costs should be included in the price of the game/movie/tv show/theme pack/etc. Plus, on the movies side, it costs enough already to rent or buy movies.
• Multiplayer Games? Who is hosting the server? EA, R*, etc? The hosting cost should be figured into the price of the game. Or they (Pub/Dev) charge a separate subscription fee. Sony hosting the server? Charge for it, XBox Live style.

I have no issue with paying for PSN as long as the price is reasonable. I paid for XBox Live for years, before I got rid of my XBox. $60/yr is perfect, $5/mo. That's $5m per month with 1m users (random user number). I couldn't see servers, bandwidth, datacenter, licensing, and power costs being beyond $60m per year, but then again, IANA MMO SysAd. Any more than $60, and it will fail. Maybe they could get away with a $100/yr price if they included a full Skype client, with video...maybe.

eh hem...put on tin-foil conspiracy hat... Could this be the beginning of a real-world "Newspeak?" With everything else the UK has done in recent years, it is merely one more step toward 1984. For those unfamiliar with Orwellian Newspeak:

• 1984
• Newspeak
• Newspeak Dictionary

Well, I did put "quality" in quotes for a reason, but you are correct.

I've been looking for a replacement for my 12" G4 Powerbook and looked at the Dell Mini 12. Good dimensions and screen resolution, but what killed it for me was the Intel GMA 500 chipset and Atom N530. Underpowered and overpriced, plus flaky compatibility and lousy battery life. Its like a TFT maker had leftover panels and Intel had the junk leftover from making "quality" GMA 9x0 and N2x0 parts and sold it to Dell real cheap.

Roll in a candy coating and sell it for $100+ more than the good Mini 10 series and presto! A line that will be quickly discontinued because the geeks that actually buy netbooks know better.

I don't think Shakrai was implying that education and health care should be run by for-profit corporation. Only that they should not be run by the Federal government. While I like my private health insurance, I believe that education should be run by the local government. Afterall, they should understand the local community better than any bureaucrat in D.C. or a state capital.

Well said. Thank you for posting that. I wish more people understood the points you made, especially about IT being about service.

As a gamer, I've had my eye on a PSP for a while now, mainly for the piracy/hack factor. Its a nice little system that would be great for emulation and PSP games. But what is killing this system, other than the DS, is the Game Starvation. All one needs to do is compare the review lists at IGN (or your favorite game site). Games come out weekly for the DS, in bulk. Games come out in spurts for the PSP, a few here and there, sometimes months apart.

• DS = Lots of games, great and shovelware, ports, remakes, and originals
• PSP = Few games, mostly PSOne ports or remakes, not much original content outside of LocoRoco and Patapon. It doesn't help that the devs half-ass most of the ports/remakes.

Plus when you go to the store, the PSP section always looks like a clearance section. Few games, broken/off displays, lots of empty spaces signifying "better days," and the same few crap games they had last time you stopped in.

Games sell systems. And "50 million" PSP gamers should be large enough to sell new, quality content to. Lack of games and a great system to do emulation on equals high piracy numbers. And lack of software sales is DIRECTLY ATTRIBUTABLE to available content. Just put together a Virtual Console like Nintendo with legal emulation and see how your software sales do.

Sony, want to turn your PSP software sales around? Then 1) sell the damn thing to developers! Your claimed user base should be more than enough to attract some good shops with interesting ideas and IP. 2) Hire new merchandise reps. Your store displays suck. 3) Keep publishing older games and keep them in stock. To sell more games they have to be available. 4) Stop trying to make every game a port or offshoot of a PS2/PS3 game.

When I'd go to Montreal, I'd get hit for GST and QST when I bought stuff. Then when I got back to Michigan, I was supposed to pay Duty/Use Tax for it. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that there's some IRS tax form that you can fill out to get GST and QST back, but unless its a big purchase, its more hassle than its worth. Granted, I was physically there and not shopping online.

It wouldn't surprise me though if us Americans enacted a sales tax based on company location, the Canadians would quickly pass something similar. So buy a product from NY, pay NY tax; buy QC, pay QC tax; buy CA, pay CA tax, etc. If this is the case, I can see many web businesses that aren't more than a warehouse and a website moving to low-tax locations to give them an advantage in pricing. Especially if the difference is great enough to justify the move. Or if the law allows to reincorporate in a "cheap" state and/or have a payment processing clerk there. 5 states have no sales tax: Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon.

Here is a link to the Bloomberg news article. No registration or subscription required.

I have 2 questions.

According to TFA, the Wilkins Ice Shelf has lost 1,800 km^2 of ice in the past year. This article states that the ice shelf is 200-250m thick. This gives volume lost of 360,000 km^3 to 450,000 km^3; 2000m*900m*200m, 2000m*900m*250m (easy numbers). Remaining area = (1800/.14)-1800 = 11057 km^2.

First question. Is it possible that over time (think glacial timeframe, not human timeframe) that the remaining 11,057 km^2 will rebuild the lost volume? How long is this process? If I remember correctly, Antarctica is a rather dry place regardless of the amount of ice and snow seen in pictures. This would require 32.5m to 40.6m of new packed snowfall/ice to replace what broken off in the past year; 360,000/11,057 = 32.5m, 450,000/11,057 = 40.6m.

Second question. What is the air and surface temperature impact of the hole in the ozone layer? link. Would the increased UV and microwave radiation exposure, especially in the Antarctic summer months, more directly impact surface temperature than global warming?