There is no exclusivity for the iPhone. Verizon and Sprint could have the iPhone right now but they are not interested in getting devices like the iPhone because that would just turn them into a dumb pipe. Verizon is all about the V-cast and other services along with disabling WiFi and locking down ringtone downloading. That is how CDMA carriers operate.

There was nothing stopping Verizon and Sprint from launching 21 Mbps HSPA+ networks in the US like their CDMA counterparts in Canada did this November. Verizon is going to drag out the LTE deployment as long as they can because nobody is pressuring them to change their game plan and they can milk the marketplace for every cent possible using CDMA. Most Americans seems to think that CDMA is "good enough" but it is slower than HSPA 7.2 let alone 21 Mbps HSPA+. Heck, even Sprint's "4G" Wimax is twice as slow as HSPA+.

If you want real cellular competition, go to the source of the problem and pressure the CDMA carriers to beat AT&T at their own HSPA game. Canadians put on the pressure and the carriers did something about it. Are you really going to let us Canadians make your wireless industry look like a joke?

Indeed. Mostly commonly, users receive it by clicking on spam emails with subject header "Free Personality test!". Downloading "AntiThetan Pro 2009" is also a major source of infections.

Not for parking brakes. There is no scenario where this is a good thing. It is perverse and unique for the sake of being perverse and unique.

You are either misinformed or a propagandist. The turbo was a very mainstream option in a very mainstream car starting from 1962. I must say I do like the bit of verbal jiujitsu you pulled there with 'special one-off model'. Maybe you are referring to the Oldsmobile Jetfire that had a 'special one-off' production run of about 10,000 units.

Your logic, knowledge, and common sense fail, but the Apple owner in me appreciates your fanboyism.

The Pope's argument would be, of course, that(while God is certainly the ultimate owner of the copyright in question, among a large number of other things) he is God's authorized agent/distributor for this territory.

Since this seems like the best excuse for doing so that I've yet had, I include the "software licensing analogy for distinguishing between Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism" below:

Judaism is a corporate site licence: All members of the organization are automatically entitled to software under the terms of a legal agreement between the organization and the software producer.

Catholicism is per-seat licensing from a value-added reseller: The church has an agreement with the software producer, under which its sales reps entitled to sell the software, along with a suite of helper utilities and documentation supplements, and the support of its field techs, to any interested individuals.

Protestantism is retail shrinkwrap software: The individual buyer enters into a contractual relationship with the software producer, without intermediaries. All that the buyer receives is the software and the packaged manual(sola scriptura).

Addendum: Quakers are FOSS: Individuals get together communally, and anybody who the spirit so moves can get up and code something.

For what it's worth, I work for one of the state govt's of Australia and one of our departments has just switched from Win2k to XP :/ so I'm guessing we won't be moving to Windows 7 for at least 2 years.

Care to name the state and department? If it's the state I live in, I'd like to write a letter about this to my member. In fact that's so outrageous I might even get around to writing a letter to someone from Parliament.

Somebody please explain to me why Android matters. What does it have that all the other phone OSs don't? Better APIs? Nicer SDK? I imagine a lot of geeks like the idea of owning a hackable phone, but that's not enough by itself.

Whenever I ask this question, I get answers that only address issues with the iPhone, like the fact that nobody tells you what software you can run on it. Please recall that there are a lot of phone OSs out there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mobile_phone_operating_systems

I agree with your statement. I don't think native apps will go away, but I do think they will be the minority. I use an Android powered phone and the apps I use 95% of the time require that data be pulled from the cloud for some reason or another. Once web apps are allowed to interact more heavily with mobile device and connectivity speed increases, apps that use cloud data will most likely just shift to being web based.