If you want a analogy to your Droid situation. I would say that my company wanted to include a car mount for free since they thought it was a compelling use case for the device. This in no way would of affected the retail price of the device (because it wouldn't change the wholesale price to the carrier). We already included this in other markets. However the carrier specifically said we could not include it, to the point where when you say No, they won't take your device. They were going to source it themselves for a $1 and sell it for $20-$30.

The biggest point is that unless you are the Iphone, or maybe the droid, you basically have no say with the carrier. For the most part, they rape your device to maximize profits. This is why people are getting out of the cell phone market.

This is entirely the carrier's fault. I work for a phone manufacturer and our carrier would not allow us to include a car adapter. We wanted to throw it in for free, but they said no because they wanted to sell a $30 accessory. Carrier have too much power and it is about time they got a reality check.

I would bet that Amazon Prime is one of their biggest profit centers. With proper supply chain management, an Amazon Warehouse is ALWAYS close enough to you for normal ground shipping to only take 2 days. So essentially they are shipping it the cheapest ways possible for probably 90% of their prime shipments, yet they get people to pay "extra" for it. They already have free shipping above $25, which means that they are padding their prices to absorb the shipping costs. The only value Amazon prime is would be on low stock item at distance warehouses, even then the argument that they get amazing discounts from UPS makes the extra cost fairly negligible.

Common mistake, CAT5 passes an Analog Signal that is interpreted as a Digital. It does this by establishing analog ranges of what it sees as 0s and 1s. There really isn't anything close to a digital signal in our analog world, unless you get down to the single Electron/Photon level. Shielding and better cabling can be important in "digital" cables, but anything past what can meet the error tolerances of the analog ranges is unnecessary. Every wonder why there is a difference between Cat5 Cat6 and Cat7? You would probable say speed, but it is quality. Faster transfers have smaller analog ranges and tighter error tolerances. Cat7 has less interference and noise because of shielding and tight tolerances making it suitable for faster "digital" transfers.

Here is a fairly cheap solution
1 - Carvin DCM 1204 Amp (4 channels, 300 watts a channel)
16 - Monoprice 8" in ceiling speakers (Four per channel, 2 groups in series of 2 parallel speakers (8 ohm load)
1 - Onkyo tx-607
7 - Monoprice 8" in-ceiling speakers.
About $2000 with 12awg speaker wire.
I have a split level house and a pool in the back yard. I ran Coaxial Cable (with RCA ends) from my computer to my coat closet where the Carvin Amp is located (along with a 20 amp outlet) so I drive the system with mostly pandora, but there is no reason an ipod or such could drive it. It powers 4 zones (Upstairs, Kitchen/Dining Room, Basement, and outside) all with plenty of power. It is only a single source system, but I can see much of a need driving different rooms with different music. The onkyo is in my Home Theater on my main level. It also has coax run from it to the Carvin so I can have both system driven by the computer at the same time. I find it works very well, the in-ceiling speakers are very wife approved and are a decent trade off. My friends all like the system and it is very nice to have music through out the house for cleaning, parties, etc...

You have it totally wrong, the best solution for the cell phone company is only if this solutions nets them over $30 a month per subscriber which it won't. The make everyone pay a ton and the make sure that the experience sucks for the highest bandwidth users. If they get fed up then the drop and AT&T is better off without them. They figured this out a long time ago. Get the light users to overpay in exchange of easy billing, try and make the heavy users drop because of a poor experience. You can't expect them to do anything else. Cell phone companies a while ago found out that when they compete on price everyone loses (see about 5 years ago), and now just try and increase revenue per subscriber.

No one knows what is really going on, after working for a company that sold AT&T a phone, you figure out all AT&T is trying to do is increase revenue per subscriber. The mobile phone has become a necessity for most people and there isn't much competition. Although unlimited makes the network suck, it also makes them $30 a person. If they did tiers most people would try and fit in the lowest tier, this is why they don't offer, or cripple the lowest tier. I find it very sad that in 7 years since I got my first mobile phone, I can not get a plan with comparable features as cheap as I first did ($30 a month). With unlimited although the overall experience sucks, the people getting the worst of it are the people that use the most. This is the kind of experience AT&T doesn't care about because them dropping wouldn't be a problem since they are a high bandwidth user. This has become the norm for a lot of industries (Cable, internet). Make as much money per subscriber as you can, and optimize the user experience for those you are making the most money off of.

I got mine in the mail yesterday. Like most nerds I am doing the party for the free copy of windows. As a software engineer who depends on software for a lively hood I refuse to pirate it, so the free copy is nice. However my wife thought that they tote bags were cool and colorful. She will definitely hang the streamers and stuff. I guess it depends on who you are. The only thing for nerds in the pack is the license key. Other types of people might enjoy some of it, but what can you really provide for free on a budget? I'm guessing the the whole pack cost them less then $10 (windows for them is basically free). Really, tell me what you could include for under $10 that would make a better party, that is not illegal, or morally sketchy (think beer pong, I mean, water pong supplies)?

Did anyone actually fill out the application? I did because I thought would be a good candidate for it. I'm not a super fan boy(I develop on linux all day), but I do use Vista Media Center with 4 tuners and 3 extender boxes for OTA TV. This is a great feature of Vista and Window 7 and would be a great thing to show at a party. However in Microsoft's infinite wisdom they don't let you tell them why you want to host a party. You just answer some cookie cutter questions.... Can you upgrade to Windows 7? Will you invites lots of people and talk to the media about it? Looking through these apps is going to be more like a random lottery then actually finding good people to host parties!

I agree with you that this is now state of the art, however it wasn't when Tivo invented and patented it (1998). The real problem is that the legal and patent system is so far behind you can only sue for things 5 years ago.
Like was mentioned elsewhere the real problem is service monopolies versus patents. TV providers want control over their systems and they did that by making their own DVRs, now they should have to pay reasonable royalties to TV who invented the system.

People that use it less are more important because ISPs can oversell better with those customers and make more of a profit. However, you are getting equal treatment, At the start of every cycle you have the same priority, as you use more common resources, then you move down the priority change to prevent you from over-abusing the common resources.

I just can't understand how ISPs make this a difficult problem. Obviously there are some users that use a lot of bandwidth, there are others that don't. They have tried to discriminate based on "type" of traffic for a while, but why not just on the users total traffic for the month? It is super simple, keep track of the volume of data for all customers. From this data generate a QoS ordering for every customer (quantized based on QoS technical limits) daily or every so often. Now people that don't use bandwidth get served first and others get their packets dropped when bandwidth is at capacity(which I imagine isn't 100% of the time). Essentially high bandwidth users get all the extra bandwidth left over after the low bandwidth people get as much as they want. Then there is none of this packet filters, port blocking, man in the middle TCP reset junk that they are doing now. If you really want you can guarantee a minimum bandwidth for each customer and make reservations for that in the system.

The computer market is very very different. There are 4 huge manufacturer of computers that make 90% of the computers retail cost of those computers are 10-20% over the parts. They don't invest a lot except Chinese slave labor into their computers. Anyone can put together a computer, not anyone can put together a phone. In fact that how it is for most embedded consumer electronics and you would be surprised how much of that is sold at 100% market-up (50% gross margin) To make a phone literally costs millions of dollars. Now everyone expect to buy it at 10% over the cost of parts.

Is the IPhone worth $600? I actually think it is worth $500-$600. You have to realize if you live in America you have been conditioned to cheap phones. The phone you paid nothing for? $100 in parts and probably $200 retail. Nokia sells lots of phones in the $500-$600 range.

The real problem in the US is that we have a good credit scoring system. Companies (Cell phone, cable, anyone) have found because of the scoring system it is hard to screw a company without messing up your credit. So they rely on this fact to lock you in or screw you. They can give the illusion that they are generous up front and then make a killing after the upfront costs are amortized. There really isn't a way out of this type of system because it is MORE profitable for companies and the majority of people are too dumb and too cheap to pay upfront to save money in the long run.