Rob,

Thanks for Slashdot and the impact it made in my career early on.

I read the whole post and everything after the hard numbers was irrelevant. The point was that if someone is living on that meager of an income, television service of ANY kind is the last thing they need to worry about.

Cable television isn't going to increase your earning potential unless you happen to fancy yourself the next Cake Boss.

For the record, I don't have cable. I use an OTA antennae to get the few shows we watch with the kids - mostly PBS. The rest we get from Netflix either streaming on the xbox or shipped.

"For some people that's half a week's take home pay."

If someone is only making $170 a week in take home pay, maybe they should stop paying for fucking cable. There are bigger priorities at that point.

I wish. I joked with my wife about the tax benefits of our two kids. Being a math geek, she started to do the math taking into account the new birthdays, additional holiday gifts..on and on. Let's just say it didn't end up much of a benefit in the fiscal sense.

You were presented with the confirmation when you installed the application. You should always read the requested permissions list before installing an application. If you're downloading a game, why does it need access to activate the phone? Legitimate developers will frequently leave comments and notes in the description about WHY they need additional permissions.

Actually I think it will be awesome for my 2 year old.

So yeah, it's pretty exciting.

Okay that blows because I don't HAVE a cable provider. I'm not even sure who services my neighborhood.

Kinect is exciting and I'll get it but the biggest announcement had to be the ESPN agreement. That's a cable killer right there depending on how blackout/regional rules apply.

If an application (enterprise or not) doesn't have a mechanism that handles stale connections(connection pool or not), it might not want to call itself an application.

Seriously.

The problem comes from the concept of "unlimited". Evidently, in legalese unlimited means "reasonable for x percentage of customers" and not "unlimited".

The cell phone companies should simply be forced to stop using the term "unlimited" in advertising. It's false advertising under every common use of the word "unlimited". If you can't provide true "unlimited" access on your network, don't advertise that you can. It's that damn simple.

Unless Crysis 2 has Thomas the Tank Engine as an unlockable character, he probably won't be interested ;)

Murdoch knows EXACTLY how the new technologies work. At least at a high-level. He doesn't need to know the detailed tech:

1 - Google indexes content
2 - Google links to content that is has indexed

Your statement " Half the time I don't even realise which site I'm reading the news on" is exactly the problem the newspapers have right now. It's not going away either. News is a commodity. Unless it's a local story, editorial or some sort of investigative reporting the news is the same across ALL papers. Hell, I work for a newspaper. Everyone pulls in news from the wire services. How many times has google sent you to jrandom midwest paper about a hot topic only to realize that the story was sourced from AP or Reuters? I can go to 20 other sites and get the EXACT same story.

He knows how it works, he just doesn't LIKE it. As someone else said, newspapers have been double-dipping for the lifetime of the product. Selling subscriptions on the front side and ads on the back. The problem is that people are willing to accept ad-supported content online in exchange for free access but I'll be damned if I'm going to patronize a web site that continues to show me ads AFTER I've become a subscriber. That attitude is simply counter to how newspapers operate. Look at the demographics of newspaper subscribers these days. The largest population of subscribers are literally DYING (something like 40% of the subscriber base is over the age of 60).

The only people who really like the current crop of offerings for print-to-ipad conversions are, surprise, newspapermen. We had a big meeting with our editor a few weeks back and he was going ON and ON about how amazing it was to read his old hometown paper on the iPad because it was just like the paper he could get there (ads and all). Seriously?

One reason the WSJ actually works as a paywall is that they have specialized content and analysis but that won't fly for the majority of print outlets making the jump.

I find this out 6 weeks late. When did having kids become like buying technology?

Seriously though, there are some cases where that might not be possible. My first son was an emergency c-section. I don't know how long it was before he started breathing but it felt like forever.

Thing2 was a scheduled c-section and I had him in my arms almost immediately. I honestly don't know how quickly they clamped.

Broadcom doesn't release the non-x86 chipset drivers as opensource. It's a bit more complex than that but that's the gist of it.

Nobody is stopping you NOW. That's the problem with the environment Apple is creating and to some degree enforcing.

Apple (and most companies for that matter) are arbitrary and frivolous in what they decide to get upset about. All it takes is for someone at Apple HQ to get a stick up his ass and iPad/iPod jailbreaking is toast.

How long did people sell modded game consoles before the manufacturers decided to come after them? How long did HTC have SenseUI before Apple decided to sue them?

People are capricious. The DMCA is still a law.

Mind you I hold the same grudge against Microsoft and Amazon in regards to the platforms they have. However Apple is the only one of those three vendors that has a top to bottom stack and has the backing of major media outlets to push the product.

I do fear the end of tinkering and wonder but that desire will always be there in some people. What won't always be there is the ability to do so because of legislation.