As my company's telecom manager, I probably have a somewhat unique perspective on these issues. The article is spot on in that people, in general, do not realize that the real cost of smartphones is $500+, they've been brainwashed to believe that the subsidized price is the price and that cell service costs $80-100 a month.

This worked fine until someone came up with a better model because people want high end devices, but if you look at the number of people that can afford to spend $200 on a phone vs those that could afford to spend $600 I think you'd agree that without some sort of subsidy or financing for these high end devices that Apple's stock price would not have done nearly as well as it did after the iPhone was released.

T-Mobile says they did away with contracts, but that's not what they did at all. They just disassociated the subsidy of the phone from the wireless service, so on AT&T or Verizon you buy a phone for $200 then you pay $100/mo for two years, total cost $2600. On T-Mobile you finance the phone and pay $25/mo toward the phone and $50/mo for wireless service, total cost $1800, savings of $400 a year over the AT&T / Verizon model. This works because T-Mobile will subsidize your ETF to get you to switch over from AT&T or Verizon, so they're racking up subscribers like crazy.

What will be interesting is to see how the game plays out. There will eventually be a tipping point where AT&T and Verizon realize they can't continue hemorrhaging customers so they'll step up and play ball cost-wise. The whole notion of competition in a free market increasing customer choice and driving down price really is a great thing.

Personally, I'm surprised someone hasn't stepped up to take the T-Mobile idea to the next logical level. Why hasn't a financial institution stepped up to be in the market for financing phones, so the cost of the device is totally separate from the cost of your wireless service? To make the requisite car analogy, you don't go to a car dealer and sign a contract with them to finance your vehicle. Well, you can, at a buy here pay here type of place, but in general for new car sales the financing of the car is totally separate from the entity that sells it to you.

Why aren't cell phones handled this way? There's plenty of money to be made for someone to finance phones. The whole idea of phones being locked to a certain carrier needs to go away as well. You have Verizon iPhones and AT&T iPhones and if you have one for one network, it won't work on the other network, even if it's unlocked. That's silly. Verizon phones can speak GSM (otherwise they wouldn't work outside the USA), so why isn't there a single version that will work with any carrier?

Back in 1997-1998 I interned for the high school I was attending over the summer as part of a tech project. We had a couple Gateway 2000 tower servers donated to us and we used to joke that if there was ever a hurricane we'd use them to build a barricade and crawl under them. They were full tower cases maybe 2.5' tall and they were quite solid. Cases today you can bend the metal easily just by pressing on it, the metal in those cases would've taken a hammer to bend. Maybe that's why they probably weighed about 100 lbs each.

Unfortunately, this is probably one of those things that was overbuilt for no good reason. I don't imagine many servers would have to put up with the level of abuse that would've been necessary to hurt those things.

I think this is bunk for a couple reasons. First, if you're a beer aficionado then a lot of the beer you drink probably comes from pretty small breweries, potentially small enough that they aren't big enough for it to be worth their time to setup arrangements with farmers to sell their waste products, so in that case it's not going to make a ton of difference.

Second, even if the above isn't true for you, there are plenty of very small breweries/brewpubs out there that definitely aren't doing anything like this. There are two in my town that brew something on the order of 50-100 barrels/year. They don't sell their waste products, they brew with quality ingredients and they have to pay rent, salaries, etc and they still manage to serve excellent beer for $5-6/glass (that's retail, consume on premise pricing) which I think is totally reasonable. If the little guy can do it then the big guys certainly can too.

Maybe it's a good thing though, perhaps it'll turn a few more people on to homebrewing which is really simple and very cost effective assuming you drink a good amount of beer.

There are a lot of magazines that cover niche topics, hobbies, etc. Specifically those that target a mostly older demographic are likely to still have good content in print. I used to be into woodworking and there were still quite a few magazines specific to that topic that were worth reading. Shopnotes, Wood, Fine Woodworking, etc. They're all expanding their online content, but I don't see them going online-only anytime soon.

1 - this would seem to fall under cruel and unusual punishment (they have laws against that, right?)
2 - if they want to extend someone's life as long as possible to inflict the maximum amount of suffering, why should taxpayers be compelled to pay to feed these criminals three meals a day AND pay for the drugs that are being proposed on top of that? Spending more money on criminals is not the answer.
3 - How about in cases of especially heinous crimes where there is no doubt of guilt, we just throw the criminals into a pit 300-style and let them slowly starve to death?

Either buy double the storage and periodically do a differential backup or use a cloud service. A Google search for 'unlimited cloud backup' yields tons of results.

If he has 20TB of music and movies, why even back it up at all? The majority of that content is available on BitTorrent. The idea of backup is that you only backup unique data that can't be replaced.

I very much disagree with this. How about XML, JSON, HTML, JavaScript, SQL, CSS? Students that have never dabbled with web stuff before could spend two years learning them and becoming proficient, they're very much relevant now and if you don't think they'll be relevant in two years I think you're crazy.

Sure there are people that have no desire to be thrifty and will continue to buy k-cups from the supermarket until the end of time. I do not fit in that classification however. Once or twice a year I make a bulk purchase on Amazon and based on the pricing I am guessing the cups I buy are not "officially licensed". If I knew I couldn't get the cheap cups and had to buy the expensive k-cups all the time, there's zero chance I'd shell out for a keurig.

Violating laws is never a good way to try to right a wrong. This could have gone very poorly for him, luckily whoever he contacted didn't press charges.

You sir, beat me to it. Amazon Whispernet is what it's called, and it's exactly the right argument to make here. I was actually having a conversation with some coworkers the other day about something similar.

Amazon made a deal with one or more national cellular carriers to be able to deliver purchased books to user's Kindles. When Amazon pushes a book, I imagine they pay whatever carrier they used to deliver it a nickel or something. So figure an automotive update is what, maybe 2 GB? I can buy a 3 GB data plan from AT&T or Verizon for $30, so let's call the data rate $10/GB (and that's high because it's the consumer rate, auto manufacturers would quite positively get some sort of discount due to their buying power). So let's say it would cost the automaker $20 per car to push the update OTA. Now compare that with what they have to pay the dealership in labor to do the same update. Last time I checked dealer labor rates were something like $70/hr with an hour minimum. This saves them 71% on their costs to have the updates rolled out. So lets say Ford sells 50k F150s a year. If they have to push an update to all 50k of them, assuming the dealer update cost is $70 and the OTA cost is $20 then the dealer update cost is $3.5 million, OTA cost only $1 million. Savings of $2.5 million per update.

What percentage of modern cars don't have OnStar or something like it? I don't even think you can buy a GM vehicle that doesn't have the basic OnStar system which includes a cellular device capable of transmitting data. Your statement doesn't hold up.

How is pushing an update OTA any less safe than having that same update installed at a dealership? The end result is the same either way - if the update breaks the car then it's going to break the car regardless of the method used to install it. You seem to be implying that the process of using OTA updating makes the update itself less safe, but that's really not true if done properly. By 'properly', I mean using well established, common sense rules that have been around for ages. First, don't do anything with the update until it's done downloading. Second, when it's done downloading, verify the file you downloaded exactly matches the original source update file using a hashing algorithm. Just about every electronic device that receives automatic updates does this and those updates are no less safe because they were automatically downloaded over the Internet versus installed from a USB flash drive by a technician.

They must be using some kind of new-fangled routers because the ports on the ones I have only go to 100%. Bad wording there.

It sounds like you have something to hide. I'm just the opposite of you. I don't have a personal home phone, cell phone, laptop, etc because my employer provides all of that stuff to me and they don't care if I use it for personal stuff as long as it doesn't interfere with business use. I don't see any sense in paying for something I already have access to for free.

Email is free, so I do have a personal e-mail addres but I use my work e-mail for tons of personal correspondence just because it's a lot more convenient and I don't really care if my employer reads the day to day e-mail conversations I have with my friends and family.

Me. It's a lot more convenient to reach over and pick up my desk phone than it is to fish around in my pocket for my cell phone, unlock it, etc. Plus there are a lot of folks that have poor coverage on their cell phone at work and using their desk phone prevents them from having to get up and go outside. Personally, I have a work IP phone at home and use it almost exclusively because my cell coverage is spotty.

If you work at a company that would care about who you're calling, then how happy can you really be with your job? I wouldn't use a work phone to make a personal call to China or somewhere else where the long distance rate might be expensive, but for everyday personal calls I don't see any problem doing it. How much can your employer really find out from knowing who you talk to? If they were recording the calls, then that would be another deal entirely. Fortunately I live in a state where that would be illegal to do without my knowledge.