A coworker of mine who lives in a rural area out of range from all the cable and DSL providers was looking into going with a mobile broadband solution. Knowing nothing about the topic he handed me a Kricket brochure and asked if it was a good deal, and it was a good thing for him that he did. His intentions were to set up a webcam in his backyard so he could watch the animals as they came out of the woods. With that in mind I scanned the brochure and happened upon their terms of use, which stated that the service could only be used for normal web activities. Sounds reasonable, until you read their definition of "normal" activities which excluded server hosting, online video gaming and streaming video of any sort, meaning his webcam was out.

The moral? Make sure you read the terms of use to find out what the service allows before committing to it, otherwise you may end up paying for something you can't use.

Bah, very embarrassing to someone who actually uses proper punctuation in and spell checks his text messages.....

Being the good little /.er I am after reading the summary but not the article I'm not too sure that's the case. The example given in the summary tells me that everyone will still see ads from the same company; it's the contents of the ad that will differ. If a company only produces tampons then you will still see a tampon commercial.

Again, I have not read the article and I have a lot of lazing around to do this fine Saturday morning so I can't be bothered to do the proper research to know if I'm write or not. That being said, if I'm wrong this will be followed by fifty different responses from people who DID read the article calling me an idiot and correcting me on the issue, ensuring I don't have to read it anyway. THANKS IN ADVANCE!

Furthermore an ILLINOIS politician said it so it must be true. Here in Illinois we have such honest, civic-minded politicians after all.

Unfortunately voice recognition, at least in my experience, is very hit or miss. First of all, you still have to hit a button to activate voice recognition, then you have to say the name you wish to dial, then you have to keep saying no to all the names the phone thought you said.... And that's only if the number is programmed into the phone already. My experience with voice-to-number dialing has been even worse than voice-to-contact. You'd be amazed at what numbers the phone can confuse with one another.

And all this while speaking in a clean (to me at least) midwestern accent. Throw in someone with a heavy southern drawl or thick New Yawka accent and forget about it. Voice dialing is great and it's come a long way but it is still problematic. As a stop-gap until we get closer-to-perfect voice recognition, or even as a companion to voice dialing, this is a great idea.

It is true that these things happen to even the best of companies and it's impossible to remove 100% of the bugs in software before it's released. The thing I'm sick of though is that had this happened to even the most obscure laptop manufacturer (and remember, this particular case involves a very popular and very expensive laptop) running Windows after a Windows update there would be hundreds of "this wouldn't happen on a Mac" posts. Such a double standard around here really. It's nice every now and then to see Apple and their herd of zombie followers (which by the way I am not including yourself in, generalized comment) brought down a peg and realize their sacred fruit can also be a rotten apple. Now, excuse me while I go finish trying to get the rest of my software running on Vista.....

Obviously they'll figure out amazing things to do with what they have, but that doesn't change the fact the the Wii is unique among consoles in that it doesn't represent that big a difference from the last generation.

Not a big enough difference from the last generation.......? Good God man, what are you smoking...? Do you even know what the Wii is? Because if you ask me, your comment applies to the other two consoles more so than it does to the Wii.

What's so different about the Xbox 360 from the Xbox...? Well, other than a prettier face, nothing really. It uses practically the same controller (moving two buttons does not constitute enough of a change), actually LACKS the built-in hard drive its predecessor had, and introduces wireless controllers, which have been available since at least the SNES era.

How about the PS3....? Again, a prettier face but that's about it here as well. It's pretty much the same damn controller that's been used since the Playstation. It's got a hard drive but that was done last generation. Online service....? Xbox 1 did that. Motion sensor in the controller....? Ummmm, yeah, we won't even get STARTED on that. Oh, but I forgot the biggest difference between the PS3 and the PS2; no one's buying it!

If you sit down and look at it, the Wii is the ONLY system that is really something different from the last generation. The other two systems are more or less visual upgrades to consoles of the past while the Wii demands an entirely new way of looking at and playing video games. To be honest, the Wii is the first console that has shown a real "change" in gaming since the Nintendo 64 introduced the ability to push out games in 3D, everything else has been just visual upgrades, though you can make a case that with Live! Xbox marked a significant change as well (the counter-case would be that PC games had already been doing that for years, but since we're talking consoles here we won't consider that).

Every person who considers how much something has changed by it's looks needs to actually sit down and think about it, because the cosmetics are probably one of the smallest factors of change in my opinion.