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Comment Re:Verizon (Score 3, Informative) 375

+1 to this
(Assuming you are going to be spending the majority of your time in an urban area)
Get an unlocked Galaxy Nexus (or whatever the next Nexus is) and use it on the Straight Talk T Mobile service.
Here's a pretty comprehensive guide: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1646755 Plus, here's another vote for T-Mobile's customer service.

Comment Re:Simple (Score 2) 515

One small note, MSE is *not* available for 64 bit XP. So in the (admittedly unlikely) case that your laptop has XP 64 bit on it you'll have to look further. Your first line of defense, as always, is safe surfing, but Avira is going OK for me. It'll annoy you with occasional pop-ups but they are easy to dismiss.

Comment Re:Limited hardware supported, not by vendor thems (Score 1) 257

OK, is $30 a month reasonable enough for you? Assuming you are in the USA, you can buy the Galaxy Nexus (unlocked) from Google and use it on T-Mobile's Pay as you go service. Here are a couple of XDA threads which may help you out: [GUIDE] Smartphone Service for just $30/month [INFO][GSM] Own Your Cell Service ..with Prepaid and the Galaxy Nexus [UPDATED 5/24]

Comment 18 trackers on TFA page. (Score 1) 103

Reprising the comment I posted over on TFA:

Disclaimer: "This ITWorld page contains at least eighteen trackers, including eight of the top ten listed in the article. Dan's eSarcasm site loads at least 5 trackers including three of the top five."

There, fixed that for you.

--

He had me until he praised the Wall Street Journal series. While the goal of informing non-technical people about tracking on the web is a good one, the series has been full of inaccuracies, omissions and sensationalism. WSJ seems to actively avoid telling people how easy it is to avoid/minimize tracking and AFAIK has never broached the obvious conflict of interest issue raised by their reporting.

Like most Slashdot readers am no fan of tracking and targeted advertising and I run the usual suite of blockers you would expect (Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, NoScript, FlashBlock, Better Privacy, etc etc. But intellectual rigor is even more important to me. It has been missing from the WSJ reporting.

Comment Re:Compared to what? (Score 1) 226

This experience taught me: 1) Cell phone makers simply don't care about software. They have almost zero incentive to put effort into it and often have incentive NOT to invest in software. 2) Never run the stock install from the phone maker. Root it and install a custom mod that is much closer to vanilla Android as possible.

3) Buy a handset with vanilla Android on it to start with.

There, fixed that for ya.

Comment Re:tl;dr (Score 1) 226

Seconded.
One plain vanilla phone on every carrier with every radio.

For all other phones: On starting the phone for the first time pop a dialog box:

Would you like to use plain vanilla android (with no enhancements for this particular device)?
OR
Would you like to use TouchWizSenseBlur a beautiful-finger-paint-like-buble-gum-super-duper-extras-which-will-love-you-all-night-long-and-cook-you-breakfast-in-the-morning-full-of-win-enhancements-for-your-personal-phone-and-life?

At the start of 2010 it looked like Google was going to try to go down this road with google.com/phone but then Verizon came calling and said "we don;t think so". Google got into bed with VZW on the issue of net neutrality for wireless networks and one of the victims was their project to change the way phones are bought and sold in the US. Perhaps Larry Page will revisit this in the future, but it's difficult to see how it fits into his "focusing" strategy. I'm not holding my breath that all this changes in the US any time soon.

And yes, I vote with my money. I bought an unlocked Nexus One through Google.com/phone on the very first day it went live and replaced it last month with an imported unlocked Galaxy Nexus GSM. And yes, it is a fine phone. When I showed it to the folks at the local Verizon store they were salivating. And then they offered to sell me cases and sleeves for it. They had those in stock, even if they still don't have a release date for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus phone itself.

Comment Re:Wait what? (Score 1) 247

As an American, I feel sure these speeds must be mis-types by an order of magnitude. Right?

This. Many times over. It's just soooo frustrating sitting here in USA seeing the UK complain about speed and caps and prices. I'd *love* to have that problem. Of course Brits probably look at our US discussions of petrol/gas prices or taxes and have much the same reaction! Swings and roundabouts, I guess.

Comment "A trove of good resolution fine 'art'" (Score 1) 103

I would love a MythTV plugin for this... I've been slowly amassing hi-res images to put on our livingroom TV as a slow slideshow for when we have people over... I'd been looking for a trove of good resolution fine 'art' ...

http://www.haltadefinizione.com/home.jsp?lingua=en from http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/02/1415229/Masterpieces-Online-mdash-High-Culture-At-High-Resolution but I dunno how easily you'll be able to grab the images. Or, indeed, remove the watermarking

Science

Submission + - Sharing Research Data: Great Day for Public Health (wisdomofwhores.com)

markzip writes: Epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani's eccentrically named "Wisdom of Whores" blog has a post heralding the new agreement:

"Today, the world of public health research changed for ever. Or so I hope. The institutions that fund most health research in developing countries (and a good deal of research in rich countries too) have finally launched an assault on Data Hugging Disorder. They are pushing the scientists they fund to put any data they collect in the shared scientific domain."

Apparently, data sharing like this has been fairly common among physicists, much less so among epidemiologists. Now NIH, Gates and Wellcome, among others, are moving to prise open the hard drives. No word on the likelyhood of private companies doing the same, of course.

Low bandwidth version here: http://www.wisdomofwhores.com/sharing_research_data_a_great_day_for_public_health.html

Comment Re:For all of us? (Score 3, Informative) 120

You need to block Facebook widgets because they track even without your being signed in (or even a member):
Facebook's 'Like This' button is tracking you (Whether you click it or not)
which is derived from this paper:
Facebook Tracks and Traces Everyone: Like This! (Social Science Research Network)
Assuming you are not a member of facebook and have no need of the "Share" and "Like" buttons, the hosts file is your friend. Just enter 127.0.0.1 for facebook.net, facebook.com, facebookcdn.com (there may be others but I can't be bothered to look for them right now)

Comment "Forecasted" ? Really? (Score 1) 449

I may not be much of a grammarian, but shouldn't the title read "PC Era Forecast To End In 18 Months"? "Forecasted" just looks and sounds ugly to me. It's an irregular verb and thus disobeys some rules.
Cite: Forecast or forecasted? (itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com)
Cite: English Verb - To Forecast (writingenglish.com)

Apart from that pedantic observation, I concur with those suspicious of the source and methodology. Market researchers are interested in selling reports to those interested only in high margin expanding markets.

Anecdote: My father finally decided to upgrade his computing experience and after much thought and consultation we decided replace his ancient desktop PC with a 15 inch laptop. This combined the speed he wanted with a screen size which meant that he and my mother would not have to squint at the new screen.

BTW, as part of the consultation process, my father asked me "What's the difference between a program on my computer and an app?" Good question.

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