"Too large for a phone" is a matter of opinion. This is exactly the size of phone I've been waiting for. I want as large a screen as possible, without making it impossible to hold it to my ear for my (very occasional) voice calls, or conveniently carry it in a holster or (less often) a pocket.

For me, a phone being tiny is of little value. Give me vast amounts of screen space, a large physical keyboard with hard keys with spacing and some travel distance, and a huge battery that won't run out even if I spend all day using it heavily in areas with poor signal. The Dell Streak isn't what I want, having only the screen space but not the physical keyboard and an unknown battery (and an obsolete OS), but the size? Perfect.

"Not useful for serious business"? Depends on your business. Much of my business is coordinating employees via email and text message, keeping records in spreadsheets and simple text documents, and occasionally consulting and searching through previous emails and web-based resources. A smartphone with a 5" screen, a reasonable array of apps, and a keyboard that lets me do 50wpm, is just fine for this.

Even my T-Mobile Sidekick was adequate for most of my business needs, despite the dubious browser and poor screen, thanks to the ultra-quick app switching and utterly fabulous hard keyboard unmatched by any other device. If Microsoft hadn't bought the platform, stripped it of development resources, and left it to die, I might still be using it.

Sure, this large a phone isn't for everyone. But that's one of the lovely things about an open OS - you have choices in hardware. I'd rather use iPhone OS, it's a far smoother user experience, but where am I going to find an iPhone with a 4-5" screen? or a physical keyboard? or running on a carrier other than AT&T?

If Adobe loves Apple, they have a funny way of showing it. When they ship versions of Flash Player for OS X that are even less efficient and even more buggy than the Windows versions, and publicly acknowledge that making Flash for OS X anything more than barely usable is a low priority because they'd rather work on the Windows and mobile versions, that doesn't sound like love to me.

Funny how much time they spend scrutinizing players who "cannot create a significant edge", isn't it? You kinda wonder why they even bother barring them. Except, of course, if your hypothesis is completely bogus...

Smart players are an anomaly. Thus the business can work even if some of the games are beatable.

the casino operators are not stupid.

You haven't spent much time in casinos, have you? They're among the most inertia-driven bureaucracies you'll ever see.

Option 1: Your analysis is incomplete and inaccurate.

Option 2: Countless media portrayals and first-hand accounts of card counters making money are all wrong. Media reports of expensive anti-counting technical measures are part of a casino conspiracy to make people believe blackjack is beatable. Books and conferences on blackjack game protection are hoaxes. People who've been barred from multiple properties based on information in the Griffin book are making it all up. Lawsuits against casinos whose security guards have roughed up card counters are actually filed by insiders as part of this elaborate theater they're putting on to increase public interest in blackjack.

You're pretty smart. Can't be #1. Must be #2!

The article says Google is crowdsourcing their data, but if so, where's the input? When I click on "My Location", I just get a message that "Your location could not be determined" - I don't see any followup on "so where are you, so we can add this location/wifi-signal pair to our database".

For what it's worth, Loki gets my home location exactly right, while Google doesn't even venture a guess.

FWIW, I've been using the Skip Dr device for years, and it's done a great job for me, 100% success on perhaps a dozen or two discs. Customer reviews on Amazon also appear positive overall.

If you're dealing with truly irreplaceable and valuable discs, though, you might want to use a professional service - it surely doesn't make sense to buy a professional-quality device for use with your own collection, unless you plan to use original media and store them in a bag of gravel for the indefinite future.