This sort of abstract economics bugs me. Yes in theory in a perfect world and a closed system with perfect frictionless economics you might be right. In practice, the system is not closed and not frictionless. When those jobs go they a) may exit the closed system (eg: disappear from the US and appear in China, India or elsewhere) or b) if they do reappear there may be a tremendous cost associated with that (people losing jobs, defaulting on their loans, marriages breaking up, children scarred by trauma of financial hardship ...). There's no fundamental law that guarantees the net positives will outweigh the net negatives of any given event like this that happens. You can have your theory about the general market and how overall it moves humanity forward and also an opinion that an individual transaction is destructive and a net negative and be totally consistent.

Except that by some metrics now they are bigger, and arguably far more powerful since they've escaped virtually any regulatory control. Microsoft is now truly a tamed beast, while Apple is a like Godzilla on the loose stomping all over the place.

That's why I said I would like my EHR to be electronic, but rather than stored centrally, carried on my person, in a way that I'm unlikely to ever forget (phone, implanted chip, etc.).

As a counter point - suppose you did have an emergency and didn't end up at a VA facility but instead at a generic hospital somewhere? If your records were on your phone then they could get them whereas with the VA they might not. I could imagine NFC being a useful technology here - your records are in your phone and you merely need to punch in a PIN to have them made accessible to a health professional - and there could even be an "override" PIN for use in emergencies that accredited workers could look up so that if you're unconcious and can't grant consent they can still get the information.

My main fear about EHRs is mainly the centralized nature of it. Centralized databases are rarely necessary and never good, but seem to be the fantasy of every bureaucracy. I would like my EHR to be electronic, but to carry it on my phone, or in an implanted chip or something. I would like it to be illegal to store even one iota of it in a medical system that spans more than 24 hours. I want to have the power to erase it absolutely and at any time without permission from anybody. When you need to know it you can read it from my phone, and you can store any data you want right back there on the phone. If you have to keep some data for whatever reasons then you keep only the exact parts you need and you anonymize the crap out of it. If you want any more than that then you ask me very nicely for it and I choose to release it to you at my discretion.

What you do NOT do is start compiling a giant centralized database with massive amounts of information about me without my consent just in case some random future researcher wants to plunder it to publish another paper.

> . They don't know how things work, they don't care, and they don't want to have to mess with it.

To be honest, this is a little bit of a myth. Yes, most of them don't care until they one day happen upon a restriction that bothers them. For example, my mother who wanted to copy an audio book from her friend's computer onto her iPod Touch. Suddenly she is calling me up saying "I thought I could plug in my iPod and just copy it there but it doesn't show up and iTunes has scary messages about deleting everything!". And all I can say is "there's no good reason for it, but Apple doesn't want you to copy anything onto your iPod unless you do it through iTunes on your own computer. That way they make more money." And then she suddenly cared. So in most cases it's not that they don't care - it's that their lack of technical knowledge shields them from the reasons to care.

The nice thing is that these days "get a cheap phone" can mean a full featured Android smart phone for ~$120 which will give you the full smart phone experience while being cheap enough that if you lose it you can just write it off. (you might think that is a lot, but in the context of a whole trip and considering how much benefit it can be ... I think it's worth it).

I think his point was that T-Mobile uses the non-standard AWS band for 3G data. So sure, you can subscribe to T-Mobile's data plan, you still aren't getting any data on a standard international GSM phone (except for edge, which is actually good enough for minimal purposes - keeping your maps working, etc.)

Depending where you're coming from it can be highly likely that your flight to Canada will involve a connection through the US - in which case, yep, you're getting fingerprinted and anything else they want to do with you.

(Yes, with enough effort / expense one can certainly get flights that enter direct ... I just want to point out that the US system is perverse enough to capture even people who are just transiting through and treat them like criminals too.)

Well, I sort of have to read between the lines in your answer but it sounds like you are confirming that you can just stick a SIM into any unlocked phone. You then piled a whole bunch of conditions onto the circumstances under which you would purchase such a thing (only in your home town, only if you can try it hands on, only with a return policy that meets your criteria of "good" ...). I suspect whatever I suggest you will trump up a reason why it wouldn't be acceptable to you, but just to show how easy it is here's a nice unlocked phone that you can buy today if you want.

AT&T uses the same standard UMTS bands as many regions in the world (most of europe), you can easily find phones that will give you 3G. You certainly don't have be stuck on EDGE (although you do have to be stuck on AT&T, which people might argue is similar :-) ).

They seem to be making an issue out of it for the devices they have anything to do with. Every Nexus and every "flagship" device (eg: Xoom) has been unlocked regardless of the carrier / manufacturer's general policy for locking the devices. I think this is where they've drawn the line: they will do the minimum to ensure that there is always at least one good quality unlocked phone that can run the latest Android. Others can do what they want, but Google will set a baseline there. It's not much, but it's something.

Google said as much. It's not great, but it's pretty clearly the case. Nonetheless, Honeycomb is clearly the most powerful, flexible and open of any tablet OS out there and most certainly what I'll be getting (if I ever get a tablet, which is another question).

Google has clearly been too ambitious with their schedule, that much is clear and pretty much accepted by everyone including Google who are quite open about it. If you want to be angry, sure, be angry about that. But don't try and twist that into some dark evil plot wherein Google is somehow intending to turn Android into a proprietary closed ecosystem.

It's amazing how you have every other player happily distributing their fully closed, never to be opened phones and there's hardly even discussion of it and Google who has faithfully open sourced every release of Android so far under one of the most permissible licenses available just delays release of source by a month or so and everyone screams as if it's the end of the world and Google is the borg.

What happens if you just buy and unlocked GSM phone and stick your SIM card from AT&T in it? (genuine question).

I understand if you insist on sucking on the credit teat of your carrier to get a phone on contract you're stuck with what they let you have and the conditions they put on it. But can't you just buy any international phone and start using it?

It's interesting to see how people are clinging to old, out of date stats to defend the iOS platform.

The 5% number is based on last year. So what you say? So Android grew something like 800% last year. The Android market went from somthing like 10,000 apps to 200,000 apps. The demographics of people buying them went from leading edge geeks to normal consumers. Compare the beginning of last year to the end and you'll have orders of magnitude difference in just about every single metric, and yet people like to average the whole year as if that's valid.

Re: AT&T, they had not a single good Android phone and famously bad reception - no wonder Android users preferred different networks - unlike iPhone users in general, they had choice. We'll never know for sure but it seems quite likely AT&T were restricted from releasing good Android phones either internal choice or by some agreement with Apple. Now they have the Atrix and are changing their tune dramatically so we may well see some dramatic changes in Android adoption there.

So all these years that nuclear experts were telling us that these plants were safe because they would shut down automatically were basically a soft lie. While they are not going to go up like a nuke, they still can barely be controlled, can do horrific damage that might last hundreds of years and destroy whole regions of a country. I suppose the nuclear advocates will say this is all just fine but I think there's going to be a huge loss of faith now in anything else they have to say (which may be a bad thing for humanity since nuclear may be a highly useful / necessary power source for solving other problems the world has ...).