And Germany still has those 'hacking tools' laws covering nmap, nessus and such, correct? I've been having a hard time (for about ten years now!) finding somewhere worth emigrating to that doesn't have some fscked laws that remove them from my list of potential candidates. Sad really, because every year seems to find the US falling further and further into insanity (as it has been since I was in High School, at least. 9/11 changed everything? No, Columbine changed everything.) Where's my pacifier? This IS a nanny state, isn't it? :D

The only thing worse than an American teamsters union is a Russian one? :D

Yeah, and what is the last id game you remember playing? When Quake 4 came out you could still find Quake collection packs at stores. When Doom 3 came out you could still find Doom Collections out. I would say based on market metrics that Id is well into their twilight, and the sale to ZeniMax just solidified that. The best quote I can provide is 'past accomplishments is no indication of future success.'. The linux ecosystem in general is showing this. I was looking at an old hard disk from 9 years ago the other day. Where has Theora come in the past 8 years? Did anything productive ever happen from the Golgotha source release? (How many of you even remember that?). Has Gnome/KDE finally succeeded Windows on the Desktop? Additionally with every successive kernel version, the userspace to accompany it has grown more bloated. Within about every 6th version of a library or application something is added requiring a later kernel, or a later kernel requiring a later compiler, each in turn leading to a cascade of new packages in order to make your system again stable. Anyone who had to update a system during the devfs to udev period can attest to this, and anyone who's kept a system updated in the interim. Furthermore given that this has gotten labelled as both a troll and flamebait, I'm going to assume the linux fanboys are mostly ubuntu users, because ubuntu is the mac of linuxes. (And I say that with two systems currently including an install. Neither of which will be updating to 11.04 or above.) Honestly the three biggest projects I'm waiting on are uclibc, libc++/libc++abi, and a version of clang that can handle enough gnuisms to compile most apps. Assuming clang can retain compilation on gcc 4.2.x it will be possible to bootstrap to a system that can act as a stable software base without the crazy cascade of packages that linux has become.

... the John Carmack of Open Source *nix Kernels. Seriously, what has he personally done in the past 5 years other than fsck us with first Bitlocker and then Git, a decade long string of incompatible 2.6.x releases, and finally, in order to 'me too' bad judgements by other open source companies, releasing a half baked kernel as 3.0 that might as well have been called 2.7 or 2.8 for all the new features it provides. (That is to say... none?)

Eh, just convert to MineTest and enjoy a multiplayer GPL'd version of Minecraft done in C++ with cross platform support for Windows, linux, and OSX :) It may not be finished, but at least anyone can go and wrench on it. Also shouldn't he have referred to it as a 'Trial of Refusal'?

As an American with the U8150(Orig Ideos) I just wanted to congratulate you on a smart purchase :) And regarding your prices for the iPhone and Galaxy S: The same is true here. We just also have a class of 'wanna-bes' who live in lower class housing accomodations here because they'd rather pretend they're rich than actually put in the time and investment to save up and become so. (While I agree not everyone gets the socio-economic opportunities to, the people I'm referring to were primary born middle-class and through our modern educational system combined with 'nanny-state' induced immaturity, have slid down the rung into lower-middle class.) That said, the Ideos provides all the resources need to rapidly produce android applications, while also providing 9/10ths of the functionality of even the higher end smartphones (Resolution, 3d, and lack of Camera Auto-Focus withstanding.)

While I agree about the original VGA-era resolution (320x240? That's DOS-era VGA baby!) The benefit it allowed when first released was a much more responsive Capacitive touchscreen in place of the resistives everything up to the 300-400 dollar pricepoint had. Any android tablet/phone at that point with capacitive touch was at over 300 dollars, and most required a carrier commitment. At 140-180 street price the Ideos blew them away for people desiring the functionality of Android without the 'smart phone' price-tag. Even more so given many of those 300+ dollar phones were stuck on 802.11g and other older wireless technologies.

Obviously (s)he's onna the 'gonna gets' :D

Well I was quoting 3xUnlimited pricing, and that was based off the T-Mobile prepay rates. Contract rates were 20-30 bucks less, but tied you into them for 2 years. Honestly I could forego both text and phone service if I could get unlimited 50-100kb/s data service, but nobody seems willing to offer such a plan. Honestly unless you need videochat or huge media downloads, 50-100kb/s is more than enough to hold you over IMing, VOIPing and web browsing. Combine that with one of those Google Voice accounts and you should be good to go.

This is actually the reason I'm on T-Mobile now, and exactly why I won't switch to Sprint. My last phone was a CDMA and honestly I prefer the SIM card approach to the 'bring your phone in and hope that we can reprogram it without screwing anything up approach'). Once ATT is the only game in town I might consider switching back, but honestly at that point I would probably just drop phone service altogether and rely on hotspots and IMs to handle my day to day communication. Anyone who needs to get ahold of me generally knows where I am, and anyone who doesn't I'd probably rather not have blowing up my phone to begin with.

In a word: Yes. Thankfully I've got unlimited text now, but unless you want to spend 100+ dollars a month you won't have unlimited talk/text, and LIMITED data (5gb) will put you up to 150+ for a single user (family plans lower this slightly but not a whole lot. 70+ dollars per phone, plus 30 each for data. And that's T-Mobile/Verizon's prices, not ATT)

Reading BOFH can do that for you.

If you've ever seen the WINGS on a V1 you'd know why they were so slow. The V2s on the other hand... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb There's a link for ya :)

The cotton gin and the American Industrial Revolution (Hint: We stole many of our inventions from Britain and ignored their own copyright/patent laws because it economically benefitted us... But we'll complain now when other developing nations do the same thing? Go look at China for another example, they've spent how many decades copying american patent/copyrighted stuff and now all of a sudden are making the move to 'Big IP' now that they've got creations of their own.

Get rid of patents and make the licensing based on FDA certification. After X number of years it goes PD. Given that the field trials and certification are supposedly where a lot of the money is spent, doing it this way allows the same effect while removing the patent motivation altogether. If someone else can get a similiar but different drug trialed and past the clinical trials, then they can do the same thing (or license the original from whoever got it certified.) Problem solved, and patents weren't even necessary.