And that includes iPhone 3gs, 4, Samsung Galaxy Note, and Galaxy note 3 during the smartphone era.

You can pry the X1 from my cold, dead hands. (Or probably not even then.)

in the first place?

There are some FABULOUS devices coming out of China these days, readily available on eBay and Amazon, with high specs, Android KitKat or Lollipop, and sold at half the price or less vs. offerings from the carriers.

Just got a Huawei Honor X1 and am using it with an MVNO in the US. The retail price of the new off-contract phone from China, purchased on eBay, was about what the two-year on-contract retail price of a similarly specced Android device is in the U.S. The MVNO contract, with "unlimited" data (throttling to HSPA+ after the first several GB every month) is less than half the price of a similar contract at a major carrier.

There's no reason to buy on-contract phones any longer.

FaceBook may be the group that puts an end to this because it will KILL THEIR BRAND. Just as the police seem to target "urban" locations over suburban for drug raids -- targeting Facebook social party announcements will cause people to create their parties on other platforms.

And we have to ignore the fact that drug addiction has been proven to be more the result of having an empty life over properties of the drug.

While I don't want my kids getting involved in the drug scene, or have risky behaviors, I'd say it's clear that people have better lives and contribute more to society if they are NEVER CAUGHT by law enforcement. Experiment with drugs, move on, sell some to a friend and eventually grow out of it -- eventually become a well paid contributing member of society and a hypocrite while figuring your own kids will never do that kind of thing -- perfectly healthy compared to "ex con" status.

Having a bunch of domain names is no sign of "investment" or "savvy" -- it's having a few bucks at the right time.

Not sure if these people have to pay the wholesale renewal price of $15 or not, but it seems to me that you shouldn't be able to squat on names of websites not in use, or vaguely sounding like a website you have in use. I can understand "donaldtrumpbadhair" as a domain Donald Trump might reserve.

I predict we will soon have intelligent agents who take care of our internet connections, and the naming will be moot for all but the most visible web domains. Then the battle will be over the "processing of content" as the agents digest information and present it to the user. We can see this in the case of SIRI on the iOS platform -- it can get you right to your target without much of a glance at all the intervening marketing. The internet will become more and more of a service platform -- just as software is becoming.

Then someone is going to patent the patterns of connections. Maybe we'll have pattern squatters.

They seem to have decided a number of years ago to try to be Best Buy, only in 1/20th of the floor space, with higher prices, and while ensuring that they rebadge any major brand products to bear their own, woefully antiquated and little-known brand badges instead, to ensure that consumers would gravitate to Best Buy instead, where said major brands with which consumers were familiar continued to remain on display.

It started to make zero sense sometime in the late-1980s and it just got worse and worse from there.

I still buy parts, diagnostic equipment, and accessories for many tech items in the house. Just now I buy them on Amazon.com. I just bought a pack of about 30 DPDT switches the other day for $5.00 or so. I don't need 30, I just need one. I'd have just as well paid Radio Shack $2.99 for a switch and had it the same day—only the local store doesn't carry that stuff any longer.

because suburbanites and flyover folks won't shop in them. Mom and pop and competing national chain open on the same block, the entire crowd flocks to national chains, particularly in smaller communities. Hell, they're even proud to have them. Getting a Wal-Mart means they've arrived, it puts them on the map.

The only place where Mom-and-pop shops still survive are in heavily blue urban areas, where they continue to do well. That's no accident.

I've been shooting with four thirds since it was released, and I have the same great lenses that remain perfect as they day I bought them.

This year I finally upgraded my body (to an E-3) for the first time in years. Logged over 150k actuations on my E-1 previously.

So I bought one body and zero lenses in a decade.

Once all of the pros and semi-pros and serious shooters have made the switch from film to digital, and are fully satisfied with the quality they're getting, and once all of the snapshot shooters have a camera that is automatically included and upgraded each time they get a phone (which everyone has), there's just not a lot of growth market left.

The switch from digital to film was a one-time boom until parity was reached in quality, and now it's done.

WANT greater depth of field. You want LESS.

That's what the non-photographer public senses when they talk about the difference between "professional photos" and "snapshots."

In a snapshot (small camera), everything in the picture is in sharp focus, which makes the photo about the "scene" and distracts eyes from any one particular subject.

Shooting at f/2 on a tiny sensor, you get only snapshots.

Shooting at f/2 on a DSLR, only the subject (the person, the face, the rock feature, whatever) is in focus, and everything else is slightly blurred, which brings attention to the subject of the image, and at the same time blurs out distracting, unimportant details in the background.

Here's a good example from Google Images: http://ns12.sovdns.com/~nich61...

On a small camera or a smartphone, only the photo on the left is possible. In fact, on the smallest phones/cameras, you won't even get that much blur in the background; nearly everything can be razor sharp.

Generally, that's not good for subject work—only for scene work.

Apple pays out 67%. That's on Gross.

If they were to perhaps, talk about the expense of promotion, servers, and the fact that all the toys for Whack-A-Mole ended up in lawsuits, they could use Hollywood accounting. It would still be 67%, but of the net -- which means cab fair instead of money to buy the Limo.

I don't except that Programming is "Bigger than Hollywood" until we have people saying they are programmers while the bulk of their income comes from waiting tables, and I have to sleep with my Employer to get a job interview.

I WISH the process were that simple.

I saw a lot of EISA systems. It was a reasonable performer and physically robust (not as sensitive as PCI cards to positioning in slots, etc.). I'd say that EISA hardware was generally of very good quality, but high-end enough that most consumers wouldn't run into it despite being a commodity standard, sort of like PCI-X.

The systems I had experience with were running Linux, even then. :-)

Yeah but can we all just agree that connecting some of these systems to the internet or a wireless network is a bad idea?

I want a person who sees one screen with internet access, makes a decision, and presses a physical button on the controls for the nuclear power plant.

So auto driving cars are great -- can be secured, but let's not be cavalier about "other things are computer controlled" -- there's going to be iPhone software that tweaks the car and that means 100X more access by script kiddies to mayhem.

For a very long time, tape drives and media gave tape drives and media a bad name.

Consumer QIC — about 1% of tapes actually held any data, total snake oil that took 10 days to "store" 10 megs (immediately unreadable in all cases)
4mm — Tapes good for one pass thru drive; drive good for about 10 tape passes
8mm —Tapes good for maybe 10 passes thru drive; drive good for about 100 tape passes before it starts eating tapes

For all three of the above: Don't bother trying to read a tape on any drive other than the one that wrote it; you won't find data there.

Real QIC —Somewhat more reliable but vulnerable to dust, magnetic fields; drive mechanisms not robust, finicky about door closings

Basically, the only tapes that have ever been any damned good are 1/2 inch or wider and single-reel for storage. Problem is that none of these have ever been particularly affordable at contemporary capacities and they still aren't. Any non-enterprise business should just buy multiple hard drives for their rotating backups and replace the lot of them once a year.

Nobody said "the science is done" -- they said; "the alarm has been sounded."

A fire alarm goes off in your house -- do you wait for the research to be conclusive or do you look for smoke, get a fire extinguisher, call 911, leave the building or do something useful to deal with it? The research into; "what do we do, the alarms are going off?" Is underway.

Know, you are talking about an exploit that could be affecting 60% of Android phones vs. "a potential" of affecting iOS but no proof and you point out "but if there was a problem you'd have no options".

Sounds like someone in a campaign defending a corrupt and incompetent politician with the potential that the other candidate could start Armageddon based on them not doing anything to prevent Armageddon.