As long as 'carrier' is 'major carrier' that is likely true. I know that many MVNOs don't limit themselves. PCMobile( http://www.pcmobile.ca/ ) is a small brand, with the large backing of Loblaws (a Canadian grocery empire). They have only a small selection of phones, and they are all locked. Their prepaid rides on the Bell network, and their postpaid is on the Telus network. But at least their rates are clear, and any time I have to phone support, it really appears that they have not offshored their call centre. They do have data rates for prepaid, up to $30 for 1GB (I know, I know), but at least it's there. Two potential concerns -- the phones are all carrier-locked - which is common across most carriers anyway (unlock on prepaid is available, should be on postpaid), and the prepaid cards are somewhat harder to find - unless you go to Loblaws or a related grocery store.

It's possible to roam with various options available, but watch out for the data charges -- looks like about $5/MB minimum (!!!).

As to the point of sales? For prepaid phones, you go to the store, check the display phones, pull the card for the phone of choice, and checkout which is where they actually get your phone and give it to you. That's it. The whole setup thing happens later, typically over the phone. I've seem similar results for a straight over the counter purchase from Virgin Mobile as well. Note that stores will try and get you to move to postpaid, because that way you pay more. Be polite, but firm, and if you aren't getting what your research said you should be able to get, leave.

Since it rides on Bell or Telus, coverage does not seem to be a problem. Base rates appear to all include number ID on calls, and voice mail. Watch the voicemail one carefully - some brands appear to have a good rate, until you discover that they *NEVER* include voicemail, and you're on the hook for an extra $10 a month.

In general, I would say that you want to leverage WiFi wherever you can -- it's getting to be quite common, and apps like the Android "WiFi Web Login" will often let your phone automatically reconnect to many WiFi locations in stores and restaurants. Lock down your apps so that you know for certain what is using mobile data. It's still going to be a bit of time sink to manage it -- but that's pretty much what the carriers want. Either you use the time to manage the pain yourself, or you pay them to make the pain go away.

According to WolframAlpha:

1.903 x 10^28

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

That is the stupidest thing I've read today.

The headlines seems needlessly sensationalist (I know, shocking!) since apparently we're saying that photons don't always travel at the speed of light, not that the speed of light needs to be "corrected".

Will the output be limited to a single number?

To be taken seriously, one must hit them where it hurts.

Here is why the Snowden story got so big. One single little facet of the whole "government is spying on us" thing.
One Program.
Bullrun.

"Because of Snowden, we now know that the listeners undertook to do what they repeatedly promised respectable expert opinion they would never do. They always said they would not attempt to break the crypto that secures the global financial system.
That was false."
"...attempting to break the encryption that holds the global financial industry together, it had also stolen the keys to as many vaults as possible. With this disclosure the NSA forfeited respectable opinion around the world. Their reckless endangerment of those who don't accept danger from the United States government was breathtaking."

The Occupy Wall Street was all fun and games until one bullet point item came up. (Delaware being a tax heaven for Congressmen). As soon as that point made the news, all of the police forces, in sync, shut everything down.

The PAC needs something as effective and dealdy, and keep their mouth shut about it until it's too late to go back.

I hadn't heard of Calibre either, before I googled for a way to get non-Amazon content on the Kindle.

Sure, ePub support would be great. The current situation is mildly annoying, but not something that keeps me up at night.

Why can't "cool new thing X" ever be discussed on its own merits, without insanely hyperbolic comparisons to "sci-fi trope Y" that it's entirely different from?

"3D printer - it's a Replicator!"
"VR headset - Holodeck!"
"Shitty voice input - Artificial Intelligence!"

It gets pretty silly.

You mean driven the price of "legitimately worth $350" headphones to $500?

Have you seen the Denon line post-AHD2000? I attribute that abomination entirely to the "Us too! Let's be Beats!!!" syndrome.

Beats owns the "high-end fashion accessory" segment of a technology-oriented market - seems like a perfect fit with Apple.

They're making money hand-over-fist (I assume?) selling shitty headphones at silly prices, why should it mean anything more than that to Apple?

No one expects you to take anything as fact.

Those numbers do, on the other hand, sound plausible for a project of that type and size. Including the breakdown between different languages.

Whereas the 500m number is absurd on its face. You're not expected to take away more than that.

One of the experts they hired to fix it, rewrote the entire front end Perl.

So, what's the other 500 lines, then?

I can see how the organization is limited, but yeah, I usually just have a queue of 3-5 unread books. I've only had it for 3 years, though, and that's not a long-enough time frame for me to re-read something.

I haven't found the Kindle to be of much use for tech books and journals: it would need to be at least A4-sized and much sharper (and probably color) for that.

What I would appreciate is better within-book search, and more functional "X-Ray" (that's actually available for more than 1 book in 10).

Not sure what that glitch refers to, I don't think I've ever experienced it on the touch (4th gen). At most, I hit the menu area instead of turning the page every once in a while.

Odd, I read a lot of non-Amazon content on my Kindle. Must be using it wrong...

It's a book reader, only two things matter: screen quality and the ease of getting books on it.

I would've included battery life, but that's been a solved issue with the Kindle from the beginning.

None of the "killer" features listed would do a damn to improve the reading experience, and some of them would be very annoying. Didn't the whole Siri debacle finally demonstrate that no one wants to yell at their devices?