I'm curious. While you argue in favor of jailbreak as a right of the customers, you are not okay with unlock.

Why is it okay for a company to disallow use of a product with any network. Once the customer has paid for the phone, its his/her choice which network to use.

A different way to look at the assumption is, the guys who will be making and maintaining "telex" nodes will not sell them to any Government or ISP that censors the internet.

And the telex client software will change the public keys used to sign the encrypted requests periodically via some update mechanism. This will ensure that ISPs that had claimed to be anti-censorship earlier to get hold of telex boxes with private keys can not turn on their censor filters later and use the old telex boxes to intercept traffic.

Now what does that tell a person ? Pick one ore more from the below
(1) Micro-usb sells a lot more than the proprietary apple cable. It runs out of stock sooner.
(2) Standardization is good. No store keeper finds it lucrative to sell overpriced proprietary cables.
(3) Standardization allows users to use one cable with multiple accessories. Hence, reducing market demand.

CRAWDAD is a community based effort of sharing data captured on a wireless network, only after anonymizing. This has proved to be very useful to the research community in general.

Very real statistics about the protocols used and the kind of traffic patters observed over a period of time can be observed from the data sets. All of this with users not being very conscious of their activities. I say this because some of the data sets are for durations as long as 5 years. It is a lot easier to avoid surfing pron for a 45 minute lecture than to avoid it altogether for the entire duration of stay on campus. Having said that, I am sure some of the detailed statistics like popular IM clients, top 20 websites etc can not be found out from the CRAWDAD traces.

Do one of the following:

1. Click on the "See this document in HTML mode" link to the right
OR
2. Replace "doc" in the address bar with "documents"

True. Here in India the two iPhone providers (Vodafone and Airtel) do not have any unlimited data plans for iPhone. The rates range from $0.001/10kB to $0.006/50kB with a fixed free usage allowance of a few hundred MBs in data plans.

The only unlimited data plans that exist are for Blackberry phones. Another point to note here is, India does not have any 3G service provider except for the state run MTNL and BSNL. The bidding for 3G spectrum by private providers gets delayed by a few months every time due to "circumstances beyond the control" of the telecom ministry.

PS: I checked the rates while converting from INR 5paise and 30paise respectively to USD. yes, I am aware of verizon math... $0.002 and 0.002c :)
PPS: I was tempted to provide a comparison with Indian mobile data rates just because the call rates in Indian mobile market are one of the lowest in the world. i.e., free Incoming calls and SMS. Outgoing rates as low as 2.5c or $0.025 per minute or SMS (INR 1)

I think not many would take efforts to find that out.

I help administer a lab of ~20 computers with Ubuntu NIS/NFS setup. Although many users are comfortable with linux, not many are inquisitive enough to tweak around with settings.
e.g.,
1. Most users dont know how to change default programs to open a file. Say default acroread to open pdf files. This can be done by right click on any pdf file ->properties->open with and choose from radio button options
2. Many dont know about the keyboard shortcuts CTRL+L for direct access to firefox address bar and CTRL+K for search bar
3. Although many users prefer Thunderbird for emails, they are unaware of setting it as the default email client from System->Preferences->PreferredApplications
so on and so forth.

Hence, I think, defaults do matter.

Its strange that you find this acceptable. Please tell me that you were looking for sarcassm there.

TFA talks about at least two patents being asserted by IBM for which they have pledged not to assert as recently as in 2005. Now, as a matter of good faith I think it does not matter whether IBM said it in 2005 or 1905.

My advice to IBM would be --- "If you dont mean it... dont say it"

A very interesting link. Thanks :-)

However, this 'hole in the roof, bottle' method will not work in modern structures with concrete roofs and more importantly when there are more than one floors in a building.

The article points to a interesting way of lighting a room by sunlight captured at a distant spot. This may not completely replace the traditional lighting because of concerns like lighting on cloudy days and during the evening and night hours. But, this can definitely help in reducing energy consumption. Again, as many readers have already pointed out, the website is thin on details and the important thing to know would be the total cost of ownership of such a system and the lighting capacity of such a system on an average i.e. replace how many bulbs etc.

numbers from the base-2 series
128 = 2^7
256 = 2^8
512 = 2^9

Yet, the telecom industry wanted to latch on to the binary 128kbps, 256kbps, and 512kbps connections when they could have been easily 100kbps, 200kbps and 500kbps ?

Exactly. Dont give in to the mistakes of HDD manufacturers and legalize their wrong advertising.

Doesn't pint/quart/gallon differ according to geography. Pint, Gallon and so on.