Seriously. Nobody is willing to pay the necessary premium to bring this to market. Indegogo, Kickstarter, etc. provide a way to get funding, but even then you don't see keyboard phones popping up, though everybody and their brother seems excited to build another 3D printer.

What would you pay for a slider, and could you find 1000 people willing to put their money where their mouth is? Android is open(ish) so you don't even have to make your own OS. With a couple thousand people you might be able to get the cost down to $5000 a piece.

A Tesla with an extra 1/2 battery pack would bust that record.

So, really, with a half-pack of bonus batteries in the trunk of a Model S Elon Musk could easily set a new world record?

I love the quote, "Five hundred kilometres is pretty much as far as a normal person would want to drive in a single day." Oh, man, I've driven further to see a live show, and driven back essentially the next day (It's ~750km to NYC from my house). I wouldn't want to drive that every day, but It's not unusual to top 500km for a long weekend/vacation trip which we do multiple times a year.

Better, faster, cheaper.

Choose two.

FTFY

Probably not. This isn't a place of business in the traditional sense - it's a purchased seat on an airplane. It would be more akin to selling you an item, posting a poor review, and then the shop owner taking it back unless you deleted the review.

Exactly, though I probably would have re-tweeted both the original and the SWA legal threat immediately upon landing.

So the $600 pre-refund of taxes that Bush2 put in place (which made a negligible increase in per paycheck take-home) and the SS 2% rebate by Obama (which had a similar result) were useless? No, they weren't, they were identified as having an impact on the economy, even though the money wasn't even in consumers hands when it was announced/started.

Minimum wage has nothing to do with minimum ability. It sets a price floor for labor. The people who lose out are those just above the minimum wage floor who see their less skilled/experienced/tenured coworkers elevated to a higher wage while theirs remains stagnant. (This happened to me, btw, and it sowed a short period of discord in that company)

For businesses with very small margins, the costs will be transferred pretty much one for one. As the margin of the business increases, the cost will be passed on in a proportionally smaller magnitude. People are (almost) never hired because they're "cheap" but because work needs to be done to meet demand. Just as nobody hires people if their taxes go down, or fire people if taxes rise. Might it delay hiring? In some instances it makes greater efficiency more valuable, with businesses investing in machines (which are built by people) instead of people. However most of the time it's just a cost of production. If you need to make more silk shirts and the cost of silk goes up, you don't buy less silk - you buy as much as you need to meet demand.

They can't bother to keep their (required annually) admin whois contact email up to date, but their phone number is going to be a working one that connects to someone who can resolve the problem?

I use Google Apps. Spam is never an issue.

It interesting, though, that the requirement for verifying your contact information goes (essentially) entirely unheeded. Perhaps there should be a 2% audit of addresses every year, with a 30 day response time and mandatory permanent loss of domain name and $10,000 fine for incorrect information.

As soon as the industrial revolution made most manual labor jobs safe, we began to value life more. In a time when you lost 3 kids to childhood disease, 2 to farming or machinery accidents, and ended up with 2 or 3 making it to adulthood, you made babies knowing you were going to see a 50%-70% loss rate. Nowadays, you make 2 and you expect them to make it to adulthood unless some major calamity happens.

Once you expect zero mortality, you begin to covet it. Also, with all the extra free time, people think of all the worst case, outlier scenarios. Most people, I've decided, are inherently evil and untrustworthy. They imagine themselves with all the power of technology, and then figure that's what The Man (TM) intends to do from the start. And then they fear something for it's danger.

http://www.networkworld.com/ar...

Ours does. But there are limits on their copies, and limits to their purchasing budget, which means very few new books in a given year. Interestingly, they also have CDs and DVDs - yet the selection I can get for $10 through Spotify or NetFlix, available any time with no worries about the item(s) I want being checked out, is 100x as large as theirs.

Libraries are good. But if you're okay dropping $10/mo for a much larger selection (potentially...nobody knows yet) it still might be worth it.

My wife goes through 8-12 novels a month, and often the more recent ones are either not available from the local library or are checked out/reserved, so we're spending $40 or more on new or used books that generally get given away when she's done with them. She almost never re-reads, so there's no real loss in the rental model for her.

So depending on what the selection is like, it might be worth it. Even more so if it's a per-family cost instead of a per-device, since my daughter seems to be trying her best to put B&N back in the black, esp. during summer months.

Wait, no...that's a different show.