Actually, most of the phones on planes use Satellites, since, well, there's no ground stations when you're flying over the ocean :) Aircell is the exception, but that only works over the continental US, and IIRC you need to be > 10,000 ft above ground.

The sat phone might not... but on the Iridium network you can get 2400bps of data (ppp). And yes, I've read + posted twitter updates over this.

I love bashing the rich, Microsoft, and especially Ballmer as much as anyone but it's kind of hard to overlook the glaring logic error in the cynicism: whether or not that measure passed would have no effect on Ballmer's stock sales before the end of the year anyway. I suppose it would've looked a little worse if the measure passed and he immediately dumped a bunch of stock, but somehow I don't think that PR problem is worth the effort and expense.

'This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,' Jobs said. 'Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.'"

I have five different grocery stores near my house -- I don't have any problem buying groceries. They all sell slightly different "stuff", which gives me more choice than if I have just one store. CHOICE IS GOOD.

The Android marketplace is competitive capitalism; Apple is one-size-fits-all, buy-what-we-say communism.

I'll take the chaos, thank you.

I never have mod points when I read soemthign excellent. :) Well said, sir.

Why is Chrome OS considered "cutting edge"?

I'd love to believe it, but I don't. Yes, there may be vast numbers of solar systems containing rocky planets in approximately the right orbits. But "habitable?" That's a big stretch. I suspect what we'll find is more like Niven's "Known Space" series, where the "habitable" planets out there are weird, marginal, and possibly inhabited by hostile things.

Err... so you are taking a patient providing a guaranteed revenue stream from staving off a terminal illness, and replacing him/her with a patient with a possibility of providing a smaller revenue stream, maybe for a longer period if you're lucky?

And this is a patient who almost died and suffered through uncountable procedures and doctors and uncertainty, and you think they'll jump at the chance to play with even more pills and doctors? Everyone I know who has had a serious encounter with the medical establishment would do almost anything to avoid having anything to do with doctors again. And that includes dying. (Yes, it's anecdotal, but I have deceased family members in precisely this category.) Younger people especially may find the idea ludicrous, but the idea of living at all cost becomes far less appealing once you become personally acquainted with that cost.

No money for the drug companies, true.

But what about the other much-maligned member of the "health care" industry: insurance companies? They would save a ton of money if somebody came up with a proper cure. Not only would they not have to pay for the expensive last-ditch drugs for the currently incurable disease, but they wouldn't need to treat all of the complications that arise from late-stage terminal illness.

People would probably freak out if the "evil insurance industry" started to dabble in researching their own drugs and treatments, but they are the ones with the incentive. This whole idea was given to me by a friend of mine, who once suggested to a high-level insurance representative that they should be awarding bounties for cures. It makes a lot of sense, even though bounties are obviously limited in what activities they can support.

(Note: the quotation marks around "evil insurance industry" should not be taken to mean that I actually disagree with the label; personally, I find the insurance industry as it is currently set up to indeed be a systemic evil. I'd much rather they sold insurance for catastrophic health expenses, rather than being an integral part of the payment and approval process.)

Yes, it's not SF to LA via Sacramento. It's two branches from Fresno to SF and Sacramento. You can see the proposed map here.

Isn't this "study" a waste of energy?

I am a C/C++ programmer by trade; I'm not fond of PHP. Yet this "C++ saves energy over PHP" argument smells like more selfish politics to me. And selfish politics is what is bringing doom down on humanity's head -- the use of PHP vs. C++ is a sideline, a distraction, and only truly valuable for people who have a philosophical axe to grind.

You want to save a lot of energy? Shut down all the computers running MMOs. And stop wasting cycles looking for alien signals in cosmic radio waves. And get rid of banal YouTube videos... and... the list is endless. The science behind Global Warming is being used to further political and social agendas that have little or nothing to do with adapting our species from a potential environment change.

In the end, selfish politics will kill us all. We will become a footnote in history is we do not discover enlightened self-interest.

Dead on. I am in a COD Clan, which I will not mention here. We were in existence as far back as MOH Spearhead...and later hosted servers for COD UO, COD2, COD4, and now, WaW. We typically support (modded) servers long after others have left the game...and are currently still running servers for COD2 and COD4 in addition to WaW.

We buy our games on release day. Actually, we pick them up on release day...we buy them well in advance. We have about 150 clan members and another 100 or so associated regular players...in addition to our guests. We don't pirate...and we run PB...so they are free to check what they want for our members, regulars, and guests.

We pay over $400 a month for a dedicated physical server (on which we host multiple game servers). We also pay for a separate host for forums, map redirects, and a Vent server.

In the past, we have also run BF2, BF2142, MOH Airborne and other titles, but CoD is our primary game...and we were really looking forward to MW2. No longer.

We run only games that allow us to host our own server. We finally were able to swing that with BF and that's why we ran it. For us, the community is *at least* as important as the game. We want a single place (or set of servers actually) where our members, regulars, and guests can join us. We also want control over the maps, mods, and admin. We run a mature server and do not tolerate immature players, cheaters, or folks who lack sportsmanship.

Frankly, I have limited expectations for this petition...or any type of boycott. That said, my clan is out. There is no way that we support a game that doesn't allows us to host it. i.e., a game that ignores the importance of our community. We have had a fairly sizable number of members cancel pre-orders...and now have switched our attention to BF3. It's a big leap for us (sad, but true), but as the dude says, this will not stand.

The clan abides,.

Leonard: We need to widen our circle.
Sheldon: I have a very wide circle. I have 212 friends on myspace.
Leonard: Yes, and you've never met one of them.
Sheldon: That's the beauty of it.

I have exactly the same setup - personal MacBook Pro, running an official company sanctioned (and licensed) Windows XP image from the IT Dept. Works quite nicely. The image is backed up to Time Machine, so when I travel for personal reasons, I simply delete it and restore it when I come home.

It could get ugly legally, but with a decent lawyer you should be able to prove the logical separation, and let whomever needs it take the copy of the VM and do whatever they want with it while keeping your personal stuff intact and private. I wouldn't be surprised if this starts to become the norm in the tech industry, as it solves lots of problems for employees who frequently cross the work/home/life balance.

Note that I primarily work from home, which makes things a bit simpler.