#1. Weren't most of the Palm patents sold out already? Of course whichever is left could be "enough" but still...

#2. "Visible" problems are always better than new ones. Unless Oracle actually closely examined Palm/HP's stuff you can't say if there will be lawsuits later, so blindly buying new operating system might be actually worse than letting Oracle and Google hash it out in court.

#3. So what? Look at HTC -- the older versions of Android skinned with HTC's Sense were almost unrecognizable from the stock Android. Same is for Nook, for example -- android inside, pretty skin hiding "unnecessary functions" on the outside. In this case Amazon would have to port all of their stuff onto webOS. On top of shelling out some money for the purchase and having developers work on the further development of OS.

While I suppose Amazon can pull in enough developers that weren't even looking at Web OS for now, there's still going to be a ramp-up time for "open" part of the system (third party apps). And I don't know how long it will take for major software houses to migrate enough of their developers onto WebOS if they haven't done it up to this point.

So I have to wonder if there's some other reason for this presumed purchase (perhaps to prevent Chinese manufactures from getting "their own" os so freshly bought asset will simply be mothballed?). Or the whole information is just wrong and Venture Beat is simply being used to pump up the price -- you know, "well, we'd sell to you for $$ but there's Amazon that's soooo interested, would you like to increase your bid amount now?"

Experiment is nice, lovely, news-worthy and, I think, kinda pointless.
Mostly because Universities never seemed to have suffered from the lack of or "slowness" of internet connection in the first place (though any amount of bandwidth can be readily consumed by students doing whatever students normally do ;) ). Have you seen one that'd be disconnected? Not that it would lack fiber to every dorm room, but rather a complete lack of connectivity? I thought so.

The more important experiment is that Google Fiber in Kansas. Wiring residential area is way more difficult and costly. Plus most residential areas lack any sort of substantial ISP competition, and a proof of working, profitable (at least a tiny bit) alternative means of connection that gives local telco/cable run for their money would make more difference than wiring any university. Unless you're planning to move into a dorm and live there.

Because so far in most cases the way to "prevent/reverse man-made climate change" is "well, just make it too expensive to pollute" and "let's trade carbon credits!"
Guess who's interested in trading? Organizing an exchange with some fees to come with it? Help companies to make "the most" out of credits companies would get for free via assistance of a broker? Compensate for "rigid requirements" with wonders of free market?

Yeah. And, as price of pollution credits goes up, so will the fees.

Instead of making a non-monetized restriction on pollution and regulations that reflect reality, everyone seems to be completely certain that regulation has to include an exchange and stupid across-the-board unobtainable (without trading) goals.

I think the primary problem is not the climate change, but the amount of entities that want to earn easy money on proposed solutions.

Oh, for a moment there I thought they decided to force carriers to cover all fees from the bill. You know, so it'd be one total, not total + FCC Mystery Line Fee, USF Fee, blah blah blah.
Either that, or soon we'll see "Employee Handwashing Fee", "Cleaning Surplus Reimbursement Surcharge" and "Poison Control Center Fee" being imposed at fast food restaurants.
Oh well. I can dream...

What surprises me is that it's been almost a day and we don't have a giant first page headlines "WE CONFIRMED SHE IS EVIL! Email details ... ". Nothing beyond regular (and sometimes understandable) stuff.

Which probably will result in more conspiracy theory to the tune of "Well we know She's Evil, it's just only those months of emails that weren't released must contain the Pure Evilness!", which is kinda silly.

I think every governor should have emails released, frankly, before he/she leaves office. The whole transparency thing, people love to talk about so much (but never deliver). That way someone who's about to become a public official will know that the public will see all communication for sure, without a need to file information requests (plus some states don't seem to care much to store the data as long as Alaska does). It will probably disrupt their "ability to negotiate" (like releasing the list of people who visit the White House) but isn't transparency worth it?

In most cases people don't really have much choice.
You go to register to do something, and marketing department demands that registration form has a mandatory City, Address, Zip, blah blah, whatever their data appetite demands (and probably with data validation too, so doing New York, Blah Street, won't work).
Sure, some people will stop right there. But if "free" thing you gain access to by filling out registration form seems compelling enough, people will fill in the address.
And only a few of them will be clever enough to give some other (easily remembered, in case of site's trickery) address.
That data will live in archive forever, because marketing will never ever allow deleting anything.
Until it gets stolen (heck, probably afterwards too, but there will be a marketing blurb about being very secure, tested daily for hacker intrusions and stuff like that, wash, rinse, repeat)

Yes, it's "giving up", but I think it's better to have T-Mobile's kind of capping (where speed gets reduced) than a nice little surprise on your bill with per-GB (or whatever the "over the bucket" bucket size is). It means your bill stays predictable, which is what most users want. If it's slow, it's not a problem for most users, annoying, but not a problem

What I'm curious about is why do they re-activate the network per state.
As of right now, just California and a few New England states seem to be "online". One server per state? Sounds a bit odd.
Oh and the map is stored on Flickr. For a moment there I thought someone hacked their blog system too, and just posted faked-up "we're about to go live again" message.

Sounds pretty much like warning system for earthquakes, that shows up as an urgent message on practically all phones in Japan.

The back-end is still probably going to be SMS/MMS based (FCC document vaguely mentions the future ability to send audio/video with these messages).
As long as it's not over-used (say, blasting everyone with "flood warning" messages every time there is a flood warning would be kinda annoying -- I already know that as soon as it rains, everything in my county is under "flood warning") it would be fine.

Alas, Netflix won't be able to save cult shows. Mostly because it would eat up all of their cash with dubious return.
Unless ratings are wildly underestimated, $10 a month won't cut it to make anything more advanced than a talk or "reality" show with no special effects

Patiently awaiting a clever hack that will allow storing any data there instead of just music.
Documents in MP3 wrapper? 50Gb free storage anywhere? Sweet :)

Sure, as soon as you get global warming effects in the form of floods or snow or drought in your apartment, your WiFi coverage will suffer tremendously :(
Frankly, when the roof is missing, people tend not to get too upset about bad WiFi reception.

For normal outside activities just use cell 3G/4G signal :)

What are they, trying to write their own web server from a scratch?

Besides, they will probably get an earful from the "security companies" they have hired, because it implies that even after all the audits not all security holes were found.