If you can figure out how to make this part of a real legislator's platform I will be amazed. There's not too many who want to make life harder for the police, civil liberties be damned. Maybe someone from Rodney King's district.

The problem with your analogy is that it ignores the fact that Apple is a walled garden. A better analogy is: you made a deal to sell shoes in Wal-Mart, and now they've decided to charge you an amount that happens to be your profit margin for shelf space while they introduce their store brand alongside them.

The problem is that the idevices are, if not a monopoly, effectively the only game in town. Good luck getting the courts to fix that. Eventually they'll squeeze too tight and there will be a killer app you can only get on android or some other future competitor device, but who knows when or what. Probably after Steve Jobs steps down someday in the distant future, they've gotten pretty good at this.

There's a good chance that a lot of those 42% won't repeat because they only needed to drum up initial publicity once. Having done it, they don't need to do it again.

They banned smoking in bars and restaurants around here, and maybe all those people are smoking other places, but my shirt doesn't smell like smoke any longer. I find it very hard to believe that consumption hasn't gone down, and maybe some people have quit/not started who otherwise would be smoking today. I'm sure not getting any second hand anymore and I love it.

I'd really like to know if any US carriers allow tethering without ridiculous additional fees. I use very little data, but occasionally need to use my laptop for a task (usually connecting somewhere via ssh) that would be inconvenient on an iphone, and since I "upgraded" to 4.x I can't tether anymore. It's kind of ironic that I probably use less than 1/2GB data per month, but because I want to use it in a way that's convenient for me they want to charge me double for no additional work on their end.

Laws against slavery restrict the free market too. The free market is not an unmitigated good.

PDA? Faugh. I'll use the laptop in my backpack and a CueCat!

With so many outstanding series were canceled after only two seasons, like Firefly, Deadwood, and countless others, is there any hope that the same might happen here? The first Dark Tower book was outstanding, and the next three were all right. The last few were bizzare self-indulgent crap where King appears to have simply transcribed his therapy sessions in the wake of his being hit by a van. The man has never written good endings, let's hope the studios do it for him this time.

Maybe they can get Shatner to play a Shaman who can't stop talking about Chuck Norris's character in the Barrens.

Honestly, if it's running a linux kernel, with just a quick download you can get X windows and run every app you want anyway, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google had some sort of X emulation available for just this purpose within their OS for adventurous users. Just getting the kernel out there means people can run linux apps, meaning the install base grows and that's good for everyone who would like to see a change in Microsoft's market dominance.

Yes... but I still have peers lol

You can't tell them no, at least not without being a jerk.

When I was a young skate-rat, we would be out in the hot sun all day and we'd stop periodically at convenience stores to rehydrate. I always bought grapefruit juice. I like grapefruit juice, but that's not really why I bought it. I bought it because nobody else ever wanted any, so I didn't have to worry about someone asking for a sip and drinking half the bottle, I didn't have to worry about shared germs, etc. Nobody else liked grapefruit juice.

The moral of the story is, get yourself an uncommon user interface and an unfamiliar alternative browser. Shrug and say "do you know how to use Galeon on Afterstep" or the like, and you'll probably get a lot of intimidated demurrals.

I would dare say that most of the "just works" crowd doesn't know the difference between a static and dynamic ip address.

Once you want to do something non-standard you either get the windows experience (it's easy if you can do it at all, but you probably can't) or the linux experience (it will take a little (or maybe a lot of) work but you can do basically anything your heart desires.)

You just need to work farther north. In some parts of the country you could spend almost six months in the zone with nary a Peep 'til Easter.