...I walked out on the movie Minority Report about 10 minutes in, because it's exactly like that.

There were definitely some unpleasant things in that movie. But it's like the book "1984": it gives people a nasty mental image of a government with too much power. Which is very useful for those of us who want to influence the debate.

What you're talking about is being communication standard neutral simply by supporting multiple standards, but that is increasingly a non-standard

CDMA might be a "non-standard" globally, but in the US, 2 of the 3 biggest carriers (Verizon and Sprint) use it. If you want to be able to freely switch between carriers here, supporting GSM and CDMA is important.

Here's what I'm really envisioning:

• You buy an unlocked phone that will work on any major US cell carrier.
• Carriers offer more and more pre-paid service. You buy some minutes on every carrier.
• You set your phone to use whichever carrier has strongest signal where you are.
• You give out a universal number (like Google Voice) that forward calls to whichever phone number you're currently using (I'm assuming you have one on each carrier)
• To complete the picture, you use a service that monitors your prepaid minutes and automatically buys more from whichever carrier you are using.

Tada! Now you don't care about carriers. Your phone just works, and you just pay for the minutes you use.

Of course the carriers would fight this scenario tooth and nail...

What will really be big news is when someone (probably Google or Apple) introduces a phone with something like the Gobi chip, now being used in some netbooks. It's a "carrier-neutral" chip, so you can activate the device on whatever carrier you like - GSM or CDMA.

The only reason people buy phones from carriers is to get financing (which is what carriers' phone subsidies really are - rolling the payments into your plan and sneakily continuing them forever). If people are willing to pay up front, or if the manufacturer will finance the handset, you can buy a phone and pick your own carrier, or even activate the same device on multiple carriers. This would be a real game-changer, and would push the carriers further towards being dumb pipes.

I think this would be ideal: make carriers compete on network quality alone, and make handset makers compete cross-carrier on handset quality alone.

All I want is Motorola hardware with... someone else's OS.

You're in luck - they're going with Android.

Mr. Jha soon decided to axe the entire Symbian product line as well as phones using several other operating systems. He wanted to simplify product development to standardize on one or two core systems. It came down to a Microsoft Windows mobile operating system and Android. When Microsoft said that a crucial release of its mobile operating system would be delayed, Mr. Jha gave Microsoft the stiff arm and bet on Android.

Is the DRM also 3D? Does it actually come out and stab you in the eye?

Well, my thoughts are, really...unless you want to have kids, there is really NO reason to ever get married. Why risk losing half your **** over a piece of ***?

I don't know, maybe some of us don't see every other human as a piece of meat, and like having a companion who will always be there. Maybe we find satisfaction in knowing someone intimately, and taking care of them, instead of having an endless parade of meaningless dates and shallow conversations. Maybe we find it deeply comforting to have someone love us despite knowing our worst faults, and to be able to do the same for them.

But yes, if you see other people as sexual vending machines, you should avoid marriage, for everyone's sake.

What I don't get, and maybe someone can answer this for me, is why do people care if global warming is man made or not? Even if it isn't man made...we need to do something to stop it...

So you're saying that we may need to stop global warming, but it doesn't matter whether we know what causes it?

...or come up with alternatives for our survival.

And these alternatives would be necessary IF we determine that we can't stop it, right? And to make that determination, step 1 is to find out what causes it. (Step 0 is to determine whether global warming is actually happening.)

I don't have an opinion on any of this, but if global warming is a real problem, it does matter whether or not we're causing it.

Applying human moral rules to non-human entities driven by very different rules of success with zero loyalty to humanity is a recipe for disaster.

There may be some differences, but stealing is still stealing. When I go to work for a company, I'm making an agreement with my boss and my coworkers to give my labor in exchange for my pay. If I don't do what I promised, it just as wrong as if they didn't pay me as promised. It's not immoral for my company to fire me or lay me off, unless they promised that they wouldn't, just as it's not immoral for me to quit unless I promised I wouldn't.

If I steal company property or data, it's just as wrong as if the company stole my property or data. You can try to abstract it away, but my actions would harm my coworkers.

So, rather "they all deserve to pay," I think @reporter outlines a reality of choices within the realm of market "only profit is good and nothing else matters much."

Profit is the goal of business, but that doesn't mean nothing else matters. Imagine you have a business, and you are the owner and sole employee. Can you morally kill babies if it makes you a profit? Of course not. Profit is the goal of your business, but you are still a human. If you then hire 10 or 10,000 employees, the "no baby killing" rule would still apply. Saying "this is business" changes nothing.

You mean everyone but Ballmer and Murdoch. I don't believe they think it is a bad thing to have a bunch of fragmented corporate ghettos. At least in Microsoft's case, it allows them to tramp all over industry standards and appeal directly to Business School Product running those corporations.

Well, in the long run, I think they'd lose, too. How are their programmers and journalists going to effectively do research without the open internet? They are sawing off the limb they're sitting on.

From TFA:

The Magic Mouse is a straightforward application of multi-touch to mousing and is a tame improvement compared with Microsoft's more radical designs.

...and by "tame" we mean "already living peacefully in people's houses." And by "radical" we mean "awesome in theory."

I wonder if Microsoft understand what they've started?

Excellent point. Although I think that this will never work (explanation here), if it does, it's bad precedent.

Currently, web sites compete to offer the best content, and search engines compete to help you most easily find the best sites. The best sites and search engines win. If somebody created a search algorithm tomorrow that kicked Google's butt, they could win the market.

If these guys succeed, search engines will stop competing on quality and start competing on their ability to make backroom deals about what they can index. Great new search engines and great new web sites will fail, because they're too small to make deals with the big players.

In short, this would ruin a lot of what makes the internet a worldwide competition for awesomeness, and turn it into a bunch of fragmented corporate ghettos. And everyone would lose.

I don't believe you.

Don't believe what? The post you're replying to says:

Google's main business is advertising. If you search, you are the product, not the customer.

That's just a simple fact.

Yes, they work hard to give you the best search results, and don't take payment for top listings. That's because if their search is sucky or biased, you won't use it. Just like if your local radio station sucks, you won't listen. But in both cases, delivering a good product is a means to an end: namely, selling advertising.

Do you pay Google for search? For Gmail? For any other service they offer? No? Then who does? The answer is: advertisers. Advertisers pay Google because they know you'll be using Google's services and seeing their ads. You don't pay for the "product" you get (search), so you're not really a customer. Advertisers DO pay Google for the "product" they get (your attention), so they are Google's customers.

That doesn't make them evil, any more than it makes newspapers or magazines or radio stations evil. But it is the truth, and we should keep it in mind. You can't understand a person or company unless you know their motivations.

Except that Microsoft doesn't let you fork their operating system and connect it to your own cloud.

...AND it would promote the .NET platform to a wider audience who might then be more willing to try other .NET apps after having a good experience with Paint.NET.

If they know what that means. Everybody that I tell about the software is intially confused.

Me: "It's called Paint.NET."
Them: "Oh, so www..."
Me: "No, sorry, it's not a website. It's a program you install."
Them: "What?"
Me: "It's built on a thing called the .NET platform, and I don't know why they included that in the name."
Them: "Oh."
Me: "But it's really good!"