In the context of wireless, it's not trivial. There are spectrum auctions, licensing, site acquisition and leasing, marketing and customer support. The fact that you call it trivial betrays a certain ignorance on the topic. It's not dial-up.

More importantly, the "entitlement-crowd" is also known as "the customer crowd". As it stands at this very moment, I have an entitlement with AT&T for data carriage services from my smart phone to any site I so desire. That entitlement remains as long as my check cashes. If AT&T decides that their network infrastructure provides a better return on investment by prioritizing or engaging in tiers of service, then I will indeed find another ISP. And if necessary, I will go without a smart phone if it no longer fits what deem as an acceptable level of service.

I'm not alone in this thinking. While I greatly enjoy all the benefits of a smart phone with internet connectivity, piss me off and I'll slide my SIM into my $40 dumb phone, cancel all my data plans and AT&T just lost $180 month while conniving to get an extra $20 a month out of me in incremental service charges.

Having worked in the wireless industry, I agree that wireless data is fundamentally different than cable or wire-line access due to the scarcity of spectrum. But that isn't an open invitation to fleece the customer, and that is what this is about more than anything. Wall Street wants an ever increasing amount of flesh, and managers are required to deliver in order to justify their own entitlements.

It's real simple; if the consumer doesn't want it, the consumer won't pay for it. As the previous posts have indicated, if this appears on any of the internet services for which I pay, they're gone. Period.

If it comes down to an internet that is tiered like cable TV channels, it's no longer the product I want to buy. And these companies that sell this stuff to telcos and MCOs can explain why the insertion of their very expensive equipment resulted in customer defections.

We're still in charge here; it may not be fun to have to give up the iPhone and the internet access at home, but if it proves a necessary point, I can certainly spend the money just as easy on something else.

There's two reasons for consumption based-billing:

1. Make Netflix a lot less inexpensive in order to keep the profit line strong on their own video offerings.

2. Raise prices. Consumption based billing won't be less expensive for people who are light users because broadband service will be $50 for the privilege of having the coax terminate at the house, and *then* you pay what the meter says. And it won't be cheap; I would not rule out several dollars per gigabyte. By doing so, the ISP has a nice fat recurring revenue stream for doing absolutely nothing, and a service pricing structure that encourages you not to use the service.

I don't have a problem with consumption based billing. I have a problem to the GOTHCA! capitalism of having Wall Street and its corporate minions finding yet another way to fleece the public.

I don't consider it a misunderstanding over their "right", but a complete lack of understanding of the platform for which they want to develop. There's a lost art of having to program devices with limited memory and energy budgets. Thanks to the desktop, the solution wasn't to code more efficiently and have the developer bear the pain, it was just far easier to push it to the user in the form of more memory and faster processors. And yes, more energy.

This can't be done on tiny devices, and the write-once run everywhere mantra comes at a hefty expense. I also agree with Jobs' point that high level abstractions and languages *do* reduce the application down to the lowest common denominator.

At some point, Adobe and their peers will want to start putting their libraries inside the iPhone OS. We've all seen how intrusive and bloated Adobe Reader has become, that's just the kind of behavior I hope to avoid on my phone. Sure, Flash would be nice, but am I willing to get it at the cost of allowing Adobe to modify files in the OS? The alternative is that these Flash applications carry the necessary libraries with them and these simply Flash games are now pushing tens of megabytes in girth.

Furthermore, where does it end? They permit Flash, then Java and hey what about .NET /CLR for applications? How about Visual Basic on the iPhone? Wait, that we've left out the Fortran programmers so we need to support them as well.

Here's an idea. Instead of being a "Flash Developer", how about you just be a developer and understand that a language is a tool and like all tools, there's a right one for the job. Tiny device programming is a different art form, one of where less really is more and it isn't necessarily an easy world in which to work.

Sorry to be a buzz kill.

The draw depends upon the person. Many hams are drawn to the hobby by building their own equipment and/or antennas. There's a lot of math and theory that goes into building transmitters and creating good antenna designs. Not to mention, the pride of breaking through a pile of amateurs wanting to talk to someone in a foreign country and mentioning that you are using only 100 watts into your antenna that is a "homebrew 7 element beam at 50 feet".

Some modes in amateur radio require above average skills that the test doesn't cover; things like moonbounce, long distance microwave or satellites (hams have their own low-earth orbit satellites).

There's also the computer aspect of it. Hams have developed their own digital modes that use very low power and require DSP techniques to use, as well as software defined radios.

The hobby has a lot of interesting facets other than just talking to your friends on the radio. These are what keeps it going in an age when it's easier to just fire up Yahoo IM or use a cell phone.

What good are 300 baud and 1200 baud transmissions with latency measured in the tens of seconds? The email he seeks is to remain in touch with his business (not exactly kosher on amateur radio). He wants low latency for VOIP. Packet isn't going to do that. And considering the decline of packet radio within the hobby, there isn't much chance of being able to digipeat somewhere to actually *find* an internet gateway. There's Winlink, but then he's likely to have to pack HF communications gear.

More of a problem though is the increasing cry of FOUL over recreational vehicle and sailboat owners using WinLink as cheap alternatives to pay services (like Sailmail). While I don't think these people will cause the chaos and mayhem often cited by posts on ham websites, the people complaining do have a some salient points. The biggest being that there's a segment of users of amateur services and spectrum who are there for the FREE stuff and contribute nothing. Once amateur radio no longer serves their purposes, they are outta there. Not exactly the group you want carrying the hobby forward -- as if it doesn't have enough problems of its own.

Because hams don't use APCO25 or many of the other digital public service protocols currently in use. They also can't encrypt their communications as many agencies have the need to do.

This is a software defined radio that can be programmed to work with any of them, and ostensibly, all of them. Including analog FM systems that hams use.

There are many amateurs who are using their own software defined radios, so in a way, I guess you're correct. But I doubt Motorola, GE or Ericsson are going to turn over information on their communications systems to the hams. But they will give it to Thales...for a price.