On the other hand, not everyone in need of a hearing aid is stuck using old phones. There's a demographic of hearing aid users that probably never even use a non-cell phone (a lot of people don't even have a land line in their home anymore), and for those people something like Bluetooth or a 3.5mm jack would be much more useful than requiring the hearing aid to have a telecoil in it (especially if the telecoil is going to be something that increases the price of the hearing aid).

One more slash in there and you'd have a word-wise palindromic domain!

(http-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-slash-slash-slash-colon-http)

I actually think the gaming market is one of the places that Apple is weakest. Other than some smaller developers (a la the Humble Bundle), the majority of games are still Windows-only, and will probably continue to be if nothing changes because right now all the gamers tend to own Windows machines.

That said, I can't quite see how partnering with Valve would help make Apple any money, unless whatever they come up with convinces game developers to start writing for other platforms. (The maybe-good-news is that since OS X is built on Unix, they'd be that much closer to Steam for Linux)

So then stick with the first two (instead of just the first one). I'm often willing to pay slightly more for some products to either be able to pick it up now instead of waiting for shipping, or for the peace of mind that if I have to return it, I don't have to deal with return-shipping. Best Buy though, in addition to having terrible prices even compared to like Target or Wal-Mart, has fairly poor customer service to boot; there's just no reason to shop there at all.

Well he's half right. Purely sea-based ice will displace as much sea-water as the mass of the ice itself. When the ice melts, it will become the same mass of sea-water that it would have been displaced while it was ice. The net water-level change would be pretty close to nil.

Though now that I think about it, does salt make the sea water effectively more-dense than freshwater in terms of the amount of ice it can float? And if so, will the water from the ice occupy slightly more space if it's fresh-water? Perhaps there would be a very small rise in ocean level...

Or are the large number of devices an "egg" that now needs to hatch a "chicken"? Hmm?

What do you think homeless shelters are for?

Yes, thank you. Somehow even Ted Stevens is coming off as significantly better informed about the Internet than these guys.

Agreed. Any Congress-critter that calls one of his constituents a "thief and scofflaw" should be outed (and consequently never voted for again). At least that's how it should work...

So let me get this straight. Samsung is designing a device that specifically doesn't infringe on another company's patents. And this is news? Isn't that generally the goal of patents (at least when they're not terribly broken like they are)?

Also, they seem to have been ABLE to produce a phone that didn't rip off Apple's design (it looks pretty good actually), what was all this about "it's impossible not to make a phone exactly like Apple's" stuff that was floating around in their defense earlier?

Gah! Well now that you mention it, yes! And now I can't unsee it!

Good thing I won't be reading the whole article =P

You obviously never played catch, or three-flys-up as a kid. The point being, and I haven't read the article but this is what it sounds like they're going for, is that dogs are more social and do things like playing with their owners. Cats on the other hand just kinda do whatever they feel like without the capacity for as much social interaction.

Excellent summary; I sadly have no mod points to give you, only kudos in the form of a comment.

From my experience working at a Windows/Mac school district and messing with linux in my spare time, I would say that it's generally easier to get Mac or Linux boxes to integrate into an existing Windows environment, than to try to get Windows to cooperate with non-Microsoft tools. Just my two cents.

Safari, Chrome, and IE 9 (sorta) support AAC, as does Flash. (http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html)

That said, you bring up an excellent distinction that I'd missed; I was speaking more of formats in general as opposed to in web standards. With that in mind, I think you're probably right. Web standards do tend to have a way of just hanging around in the stone ages. I mean, look how long HTML4 has lasted. And look at the GIF format, still fairly popular after all these years.

Doesn't mean we can't be optimistic though and hope that in the coming years the web can start to adopt some new, better standards.