This could be a *great* thing, if Google does this right.

Imagine having an option in the menu called "Local Deals".

Opening this shows coupons and sales for the nearest stores to your location... things you may *actually want*.

^_^ If they did this, I know many people who would buy the phone *JUST FOR THE ADS*.

Advertisers would get people coming into the stores, users would get discounts and coupons, and Google would get statistics on what kind of price drops bring people into the store off the street. Everyone wins.

"Who elected your representatives?"

Corporations who funded representatives with enough money to cover an area with signs, tv and radio ads.

If you don't have millions of dollars, you chances go way down.

If you expect me to read or understand the topic before I form an opinion, then I str...
HEY LOOK! A PENNY!

"Don't try to lump everyone in your claims just because you were too incompetent to learn it."

Exactly! How foolish of us!

If someone sticks the ignition switch under the car's wheel, then it is our fault for being too incompetent to learn this!

How could *anyone* consider such a thing as "bad design"?!?

It is clear that we are all just jealous of the new "Drive over yourself" starting design!

Thanks to your comment, I found the video you were talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZOsSPsTYi0#t=3m10s

Because we know that no other company is going to bend to China's will to make a profit.

/points to the army of companies bent over with drawers down.

This deep, well thought out comment brought to you by YouTube!

"They very kindly replied thanking me for the suggestion, but alas, it never materialized..."

^_^ Actually, it did. Grab the most recent copy of Ubuntu on a live CD, boot into it, go to "System", "Administration", and click "USB Startup Disk Creator".

It takes ANY ISO and makes a USB bootable with it. Have used it already, worked great for installing to an EEE.

Yes, IBM was so clever to get Microsoft to start attacking them for the valuable "Slashdot saw it" demographic.

If we were going to go the obama way, we'd have to respond by buying Iran.

At this point, I think that would be cheaper than trying to invade.

"While I firmly believe that Apple can do well after Steve Jobs leaves, he has built a Cult of Personality that will immediately cripple whoever follows."

^_^ Ah, that's where your wrong. Steve Jobs plans to die battling an army of Microsoft servers for freedom and puppies... he will change the Cult of Personality into a Cult of Martyrism, led by his dying wish to crush evil and defend new ideas!

O.o and bam, they replace him with NO one, and every new Mac is "In memory of our brave, noble leader".

Yet most Wii games don't really use motion controls at all... They either ignore it, or convert "Waggle" to a button press.

Well, I can't speak for all OS's, but I have a theory.

In Ubuntu (And other OS's that use a repository), Almost all programs are available from a central location, and have been checked and confirmed as safe and working. You also get all updates from that repository, so that removes a lot of vectors for attack.

Instead of running a random exe off a random site and hoping it does what it says, you can safely add/remove dozens of apps at once, and they add anything they need to work to the download list from a safe and reliable source.

So, *can* you get a special exe that runs a virus? Yeah, I have no doubt. But since Ubuntu users are trained to install from a pre-approved massive list, it is less likely to happen as often as with a Windows OS.

Also, a large number of Virus writers are lazy. They copy/steal each others works, they assume that Windows is on the "C:" drive, they assume IE is available. Since most linux OS's don't conform to this, that is one extra layer of security by obscurity. ^_^ We are only vulnerable to patched/new viruses that target Linux, so a lot of the old stuff is harmless to us.

Has Windows fixed the bug where nobody can install a program that boots by default without user intervention? When the OS doesn't allow silent Virus installations, then I will concede the point.

I believe that the video displayed earlier was only a tech demo, as in pre-recorded. Otherwise it has a horribly slow reaction time to movements... sometimes 2-3 seconds later, the character would move. When the 360's product comes out, or an actual demonstration occurs, I will be MUCH more interested.