Blackberry did this: they allowed you to CHOOSE what permissions you granted apps, not present you with a "take it or leave it" all-or-nothing choice.

If RIM figured it out a decade ago, I'm sure everybody else can.

Nobody likes your "Top Stories" thing now. People perpetually complain about how they're missing "updates" from friends because they don't know about this "feature". And even those of us who do know about it can't turn it off because you don't make the setting "sticky". And even those of us who know about it and know about ways to make the setting "sticky" are getting a little tired of you fucking with those tools to break them.

Right. Isn't California actually trying to do something like this? So, your point is?

And the lag. Oh gods, the lag.

I infrequently have to use Starband. Considering where I'm at when I'm using it, I get a pretty solid 1.5M down. But getting around 300ms round trip packet time AT MINIMUM really sucks.

Which is a great theory.

But have you looked at the footprint of some of these cable companies like Comcast? Here in Oregon, you have five choices based on where you live.

1. Live in a big city in the Willamette Valley, and your two choices are Comcast (soft caps) and CenturyLink (soft caps, limited availability of speeds higher than 12M
2. Live in Beaverton, where your choices are Comcast (soft caps) or Frontier's FiOS (no stated cap, but rumors are that since Verizon's sale there has been a significant decrease in overall speed)
3. Live within coverage of Clear or one of the other LTE/WiMAX providers (all of whom use aggressive traffic shaping and/or very stingy caps)
4. Live in one of the rural areas with a small independent a long way from the job centers, and even then you may have a choice between a cable company that caps (BendBroadband, which for example has a 100Mb product with a 250GB hard cap) or doesn't (such as Crestview, which only does 12), and the phone company. You may have the option in #3 available as well, depending.
5. Get lucky, find a fiber provider that offers a solution that doesn't cap and pay a premium fee for Metro Ethernet or PON service, where available.

That's an awesome set of choices we have here.

ISPs shut of Usenet servers because it cost a fortune to maintain, and nobody used it. A full newsfeed now consumes terabytes (!) of bandwidth a day.

I work for a regional ISP. We have around 40,000 users. We shut our Usenet feed off in 2009. We had exactly three complaints.

Who spends $8 billion on a product?

Setting up a large-scale VoIP provider with a $1 billion budget would be a trivial enterprise. Microsoft already had a Messenger app. Microsoft's problem isn't "branding": they already have a highly recognizable brand. If you spent $1 billion building a VoIP provider from the ground up that was part of Microsoft's existing Messenger platform, that'd still leave over $5 billion for marketing.

To put that in perspective, you could probably mail anybody who used Skype once ever in their lifetime a crisp dollar bill and STILL have billions left over.

I'm sorry, there's no "brand" that is worth that kind of money, because with a fraction of that budget you could build that brand literally overnight.

I think you missed the point. This was about marketing, not advertising (advertising is just one small part of marketing).

So you're blocking advertising, great. But what if the fact you have an adblocker installed on your machine (which is generically trivial to detect, BTW) means you automatically pay 10% more for everything? That's the world the author of the original study is warning us of. That the data collected via widespread tracking can be used to penalize one class of customers for fuck-all reasons.

It's already begun. There have been cases of Orbitz presenting higher prices to Mac users. Or some of the pricing slipperiness Amazon has engaged in.

This sort of "different pricing for different people" is already somewhat pervasive in society, even in B&Ms. As a member of a particular grocery chain's frequent shopper program I get special coupons every three months in the mail. Those coupons are custom-printed for me, and are different than the coupons somebody else on the same program would get, because they're based on my shopping habits and demographics. At what point does that start heading into becoming discrimination and/or "unfair"?

Or, more importantly, the first time some 90-year-old grandma gets flim-flammed by some Bitcoin criminal, the general public will demand (and politicians will be happy to comply) that Something Be Done About It. If history is our guide, that "something" will be to make Bitcoin illegal.

That's one of the flaws (no, that isn't a "feature") of the system. By making the system inherently 'unreversable', they have sown the seeds of their own destruction.

Undoubtedly.

"As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"

We need multi-site, and we needed encrypted communications, and we also needed the ability for some users to make phone calls. iDEN was ideal and worked perfectly. It's a shame that there is nothing to replace it.. doubly so because the existence of iDEN basically drove most of the SMDR systems off the grid.

A straight UHF repeater may be what we use next year, but we won't have the secure comms, the talk group capability, or the ability to allow users to make conventional phone calls, too...

I work as a telecommunications coordinator for a pretty large convention in the Pacific Northwest. We have traditionally used Nextel iDEN phones for our comms, and as a general rule worked without any major hiccups.

This year, we were forced to move off of iDEN (with the Nextel shutdown) to Sprint's more conventional network's push-to-talk service. It was a complete and total disaster. In addition to the fact that Sprint's building penetration is extremely poor, their network in downtown Seattle is overloaded, and the phones would regularly just put the data connection to sleep and simply lose alerts and PTT calls. Add to that: many of the group calling features we had with Nextel weren't even available. We couldn't build talk groups and have users join talk groups arbitrarily as they needed people in a particular department.

We will not be depending on Sprint for 2014, or for that matter, ever again.

There's a reason for the growing distrust of medicine.

I generally trust my doctors. However, since they are human beings, they are as subject to confirmation bias as anyone else. Probably like more than a few people here ln /., I'm "obese" and have "metabolic syndrome." However, my cholesterol levels are where they should be, and historically always have.. even after 20 years of Type II diabetes.

However, my doctor wants to test my cholesterol every six months (even though there's absolutely no diagnostic value in doing so). Why? The logical side of me wants to just chalk it up to that "confirmation bias": I MUST have high cholesterol because I fit the profile, so the last 10 years of good cholesterol numbers don't mean anything. Additionally, my work provides free yearly cholesterol screenings as part of our corporate wellness program.. so even when I provide those lab results to the clinician he still orders a cholesterol screening.

The cynical side of me walks into the doctors office and sees freebies (pens, clipboards, etc.) advertising Lipitor and it's real hard to begin to wonder if the doctor works for me or the drug company. Somebody who's a bit more paranoid is going to see the correlation between all these cholesterol screenings and the statin drug freebies and go all Jenny McCarthy.

I deal with it the same way every time. When I go to the lab to have the actual lab work done, I decline the cholesterol test, give them a photocopy of my most recent screening from work, and ask that they add it to my chart for me.

You got me. I'm about as un-American as they get: I'm a Native/Tribal American.

These damn kids came on my lawn in 1492 and they just won't f#@$ing leave.