Simple test and the one that convinced me to try to eat organic when I can.

Grab two oranges at the grocery store - one organic and one regular and come home.

Have someone peel them and serve them on two plates as a blind taste test. After taking bites of both you will understand very quickly why I purchase organic when I can.

There will be a fuel + GPS Mileage tax. No bureaucrat will give up that revenue source no matter how small it is. BTW, I don't own an aluminum foil hat but I am not even comfortable with this. I fully recognize the government could conduct surveillance and track my whereabouts today. However, today its HARD to do so. Things like warrants and satellites and patching into the cellular phone system to triangulate must be done. While there are procedures to do so, I like the fact that its HARD and not easy. Having a repository of easily viewed and mined locational data is not my idea of a good time.

GPS Mileage tax = FAIL

If you sent this guy back to 1999 with all the knowledge of the last 10 years at his disposal - I think he still screws it up and history repeats itself in terms of how the market plays out. This is a guy who cannot and will not change. The industry could have OWNED online distribution but instead decided to put its head and the sand now it deals with its gatekeeper and arbiter, Apple. Good job there sparky.

If they could both bury the hatchet for about 5 minutes, a joint bid by Oracle and IBM would actually make much more sense. IBM would take the Solaris platform and hardware, Oracle would take the ZFS, MySQL, and DTrace. They could then both jointly purchase and spin-off Java into an Open Source project or its own firm with each company taking a stake. Since both rely so heavily on Java and neither would enjoy the other firm owning the platform it makes perfect sense for it to continue as an independent entity.

U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, ding ding ding

I'm from Texas and I think every judge in that district should be removed.

The lock-in is a carrier issue. I actually run a HTC Touch Pro (a Windows Smartphone) on the Sprint network and have found it to be far more open then many of the other phones I have had. Of course, we will see what happens because for all intensive purposes much of the development in the mobile world is going to the iPhone right now and Apple is following the old MS playbook, build audience until you are relevant to developers - unlike Win Smartphones today.

As for GSM, it might have been easier today if we had done that at the time. The problem between GSM and CDMA has always been that they originally started out solving two very different problems. GSM began by trying to link very dense, small, urban areas with cellular service - like Europe where it is ubiquitous today versus CDMA which was trying to account for large swaths of area where there would be fewer users but a greater need to conserve capital by spreading towers. For the most part both have arrived at close to the same place today. However, we are still bound by the decisions of the past whether we believe they were the right ones or not.