You clearly missed the memo that netbooks have also gone the way of the netbook . . . . wait, what?

Right . . . the AT&T executives from 1974, when the anti-trust lawsuit that led to AT&T's break-up was filed, are still running the company. C'mon now, John deButts, the chairman and chief executive of AT&T at that time, died in 1986.

I'm guessing this comment / question will not see the light of day due to my lousy rating, but here goes nothing:

I'm an electrical engineer making a decent living practicing applied electro-magnetics and communication theory. As part of my program at a slightly above average state university in the late '90s, I was required to take a semester of C++. I also took a second semester as an elective, but mostly coasted through as it was my final semester and had crammed in 13 other credits in required courses to finish.

Now, I certainly don't make a living writing software for public sale, but I do occasionally want / need to automate hardware and software tasks. My software development "language" choice was generally dictated by what was at hand, or with what I wanted to interface, or what had already been done. I've used TCL, LabVIEW, VB, Scheme, LUA, among others. I'm not an expert in any of them and I certainly am not an efficient programmer. I haven't had the need to use C++, or any similar language, but I do feel as though the C++ course that I was "forced" to take was beneficial. Specifically, I learned about programming syntax, how to read and debug code, and what arguments and built-in functions you should expect from any other language. More generally, I think I learned how to learn a new language which has been indispensable.

Is C++ the best language for learning what I did? It seems to have done okay for me, but I probably learned and forgot a lot of OO stuff that isn't very useful for what I do (quickly bang out some software to automate the task at hand) and maybe C would have been more applicable. Thoughts?

Ummm . . . no. The PDF from Verizon stated, in bold, and as the title of the subsequent paragraph, "If you subscribe to a Data Plan or Feature on February 3, 2011 or after, the following applies:" I'd like to add RTFA, but if you are a Verizon subscriber as implied by your post, apparently you couldn't even be arsed to read an important notice from a company with which you have signed a contract so I suppose it's hopeless.

Wireless providers are judged by investors on subscriber churn. They'll say whatever they have to and come up with whatever promotions they have to to always have more people signing up than are leaving. If that means pushing services that your network couldn't handle if more people use them than you predict, so be it. That said, a friend of mine, with mathematics and computer science masters degrees works for a wireless provider and spends his days managing a team that predicts what the business impact of decisions like this will be. Based on my discussions with him, I'm sure wireless providers have a very good model for how many people will actually be regularly using these high bandwidth services. Based on this announcement, it sure seems that at this time Verizon isn't able to achieve a high enough ROIC from building out their network capability to support the needs of the highest 5% of users.

. . . to which I'm looking forward. I can see the headline now; "February 3, 2016, California Appeals Court rules that Free Internet Porn is a basic human right."

I'm pretty sure my standard for cool is impregnating both an actress and a supermodel.

The engineer in me says, "This is a laser because the light is generated through stimulated emission," but the kid in me says "The lasers from the GI Joe guns don't spread out like that; that's not a laser."

I don't use FB, but I can agree with the point I think you are trying to make, which others in reply have expanded on, re: ease of creating ad hoc community message boards. However, if someone is a "Friend" they probably should not get annoyed at regular updates of your deathly sick kid in the hospital.

That's a fair point. I was, perhaps, too generous with my ranking of iPad-like tablets and they are probably a 1 or a 2 maximum on my scale; much closer to smart phones than they are to any netbook.

If a desktop is a 10 on the portability versus usability scale and a smart phone is a 0, owning a third device in between might make sense for this site's demographic. Currently, I own a netbook which is probably a 4 or a 5 on the afore mentioned scale. I'd rank the iPad and iPad-like tablets as a 2 or a 3, so for me, that's too similar to a smart phone and not different enough from my netbook to make me want to spend the time and effort of setting it up and integrating it into my daily routine. I think the tablets fit better for someone that has a fully-featured laptop and a smartphone and wants something in between.

I voted "Need fulfilled by other device(s)" but that's not quite correct. It mostly comes down to the fact that I already have three devices that I spend a lot of time using, and a fourth device would just be yet another thing I spend far too much time using and learning about. This is partially why my PMP is an un-Rockboxed Sansa Fuze. Rockbox is great; I've used it and enjoyed it in the past, but I don't want to tempt myself with something else with which to fiddle.