Well done

I've been doing Windowsy stuff for a long time now, to the point where if I don't immediately recognize an error there's a 50% chance I'll need to get Microsoft on the phone and submit stack traces to figure out WTF happened. Those are always fun.

I have a 16GB Nexus 10 that I thought would be just fine. I'm almost never away from wifi. Boy-howdy was I wrong. After almost a year with it the biggest problem I've had is that Play Magazines (Motortrend) take up ridiculous amounts of space, so in those times when I can't be online (when I get around to reading them) it can get a bit constrictive. It's just not enough space, even if you're all cloudy-like.

Tablets really should have SD slots, too, so that's sort of a fail. I love Android but I may move on to non Nexus devices from now on if the price of the higher storage models doesn't come down.

Faster boot times. Sure, with SSD I can boot to the Win7 desktop in about 30 seconds, but now that I'm used to that, it's an eternity (My nexus 10 takes over a minute, though...)

Instant on without being pre booted.

Partly facetious, partly serious.

Perhaps this should be reversed.

1. Buy Tesla
2. Lease Tesla to person of questionable credit at slightly higher rates (owing to their low credit score)
3. Refinance Tesla (repeat as necessary)
4. ???
5. Profit!

Wait, where would education fit in there...?

I hated hipsters before it was cool.

I accidentally red that as "all of the furry my..."

I'm sure either way Inman will be all about that "support"

Probably for the same reason that phone companies can get away with charging up to $0.10 per text. Either the convenience seems to outweigh paying the charge or, well, they just can. And at $0.10 for 140 bytes of data, that comes out to somewheres around $748/MB.

Or more traditionally: AT&T will tack on 1000 SMS's for $10. Or about 136KB for $10.

Just sayin

I already mentioned this higher up, but so I'll try to summarize how it works (I was off put by how they were charging, too)

Amazon only charges for data and services that move through Whispernet over 3G. Amazon makes it super easy to control your spending if you decide to use 3G Whispernet services in your account, too. You can set limits on a maximum individual charge, which prevents you from accidentally sending enormous files to yourself and paying out the ass for it. Or you can just send things to your user@free.amazon.com account, which won't whisper its way to your Kindle until you're on wifi. Finally only approved email addresses can even send content in. True, it's very easy to spoof an email address, so I just created a very obscure email address name and use that as the only approved address.

Maybe that information will fill any gaps in what you've researched. It was all pretty confusing to me and I ended up just buying a book and having Whispernet give it to me over wifi to see if I was charged. Nope! As far as how much they charge? Well, that's one of those 'vote with your dollar' sort of things.

For my part, I owned a Nook and really didn't like it. When Kindle 3 came out I did a lot of reading. I didn't feel the need to buy the 3G since I can just flip it on in the morning at home and let it sync and then go about my day. I don't subscribe to periodicals, but even if I did I could set up a small script to hit up those websites and send it to my user@free.kindle.com account for free translation into their PDF format. And finally, well, I can't imagine (personally) sitting somewhere without access to wifi or a computer and thinking, "Shit! I need to buy and read a book RIGHT NOW!!" And if I do? Odds are my phone is around.

Any file transfer done with the Kindle's Wifi connection is free. It's just the 3G data that you'll have to pay for. You get free 3G for browsing, etc. But all the Whispernet services have chareges associated with them. IE, if you email a document to get converted and have it delivered over 3G, you'll have to pay for it. But if you email it and have it delivered by Wifi, no charge. Same with books. The only time you pay a delivery fee is over 3G.

I email documents that I have to review for work to Amazon for conversion all the time and never pay a cent. I also forward articles that I'd like to read later via instapaper's website. Amazon makes it painfully simple to prevent getting charged for anything by setting a set limit on how much of a bill you're allowed to rack up at any time. Set it to zero and you can't accidentally spend $10. So there really isn't any reason to get bent out of shape. Amazon isn't being (too) evil here. Somewhat like with phone subsidization, they're fronting the cash for your 3G connection, but you only pay if you use it.

Whether or not it's a fair price should be the question. When compared with, say, a cellular data plan, it's about 3-4x's more expensive per MB. When compared to texting plans? Well, let's say it sits much closer to cellular data fees. It's a convenience charge. It's up to you whether or not you want to pay it.

(Also, I have a Kindle 3, so I'm not sure what they do with Kindle 1/2 users.)

Great. Now I need to buy a digital cliche meter. This summery of this story nearly caused my mercury cliche meter to burst.

Can you imagine being the people who were responsible for the widget? Not that I like them, but they must be pretty proud that it worked for as long as it did...

Nevermind...

I don't agree with everything Franken does but I do like how he works. He seems to be attempting to be the untouchable politician that you see in movies get taken down after his wife/kids/wookie is ransomed or something. You should have been here during the campaigns. All Coleman could do is use a handful of common guys (and one who bore a slight resemblance to Ron Jeremy) talking about Al's stand up routine and his hand in the pron industry. Most pathetic mudslinging ever.

At any rate. I really hope he can get this regulated. The municipal monopolies that Comcast and Qwest hold are already bad enough. Last thing I need is them telling me about their 'great new plans' where I can pay an extra $15 a month to get multicast packets from video based websites at the normal speed....