Virgin Mobile in the US is about as close to prepay as you can get. Their least expensive plan is a prepay $25/month (including all taxes and BS charges) for 300 talk minutes plus unlimited data and texts.

Alas, the phone is still locked to Virgin Mobile's rented network. Which is really Sprint's CDMA network.

But you can get a Samsung Intercept Android phone from Virgin Mobile (or other retailers) for around $180 on sale.

$180 for the phone and $300/yr for service is a hugely sweet deal compared to the iPhone on AT&T for over $1200/year on AT&T's crummy network.

What's funny is that Sprint also offers the Samsung Intercept for $99 and $70/month (or $840/year) with a 2 year contract. Same network, same phone, just a whole lot more expensive.

Only in the Sun386i, which Sun killed in 1990 when they introduced the Sparcstation 1 and put all their "wood behind one arrow" in the SPARC architecture.

The Sun486i, while developed, never saw the light of day as a product BECAUSE it was faster than the SPARC offerings of that time.

Part of the issue was that the 386i and 486i were developed on the east coast at the former Apollo Computer that was acquired earlier by Sun. There was a lot infighting between the divisions on the each coast. The east lost.

ionice works great in a terminal window, but isn't integrated into any of the Desktop GUIs.

I suppose you could prefix the various file transfer commands used by the GUI with an added "ionice -c 3", but I haven't bothered to look.

Using ionice to lower the i/o priority of various portions of MythTV like mythcommflag, mythtranscode, etc. can make it quite snappy.

Let me guess. The "inmate ankle band" is made by Microsoft or Apple, right?

If Microsoft open source most of Windows Phone 7 and licenses it for free to hardware makers it may have a chance. They'd just have find a sweet spot of control like Google has. Otherwise, Windows Phone 7 is already doomed.

The Foleo was kind of an iPad with a keyboard. Without the keyboard and a lot more hype it might have worked.

Yes, this is a joke.

Agreed. The idea of cloud computing is a power play to make users feel more secure given the inherent problems of (primarily) Microsoft Windows usage on the Internet.

The pitch is: "We'll do everything for you in the cloud and then it won't matter what you are running on your internet access device."

The problem with that model is that everything gets controlled by someone else. But the majority of non-technical customers do not understand how much they are giving away with that service model. They feel safer with a large corporate entity telling them what to do than with local in-house technicians and service providers.

I think that the future model should be more of local clients synced across the internet. Like the DropBox service provides. Everything works whether you are connected or not. And everything is re-synced whenever a client connects to the net, but no processing or closed applications are run "for you" in the cloud.

Most consumers see technology as "magic" and don't realize what they give away or lock themselves into until it's way too late. We are seeing that more and more each day with Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. Whose business models depend on the naive user to accept free services or supposedly "safe hardware" in exchange for lock-ins.

Google at least seems to be offering the most open data formats on it's services, so the user lock-in is not nearly as complete as with Apple products.

Apple seems to want to re-invent television via a complete locked-in patent controlled proprietary walled garden that they can charge tolls on to everyone who uses it. Good for Apple and their shareholders, and bad for almost everyone who buys into it. But most buyers won't realize that until they've invested time, $$$ and their data in a product that's more like pretty handcuffs than a good tool.

Or the car manufacturer will discontinue that model and therefore the stop making replace computers aka ECUs aka Engine Control Units.

Car collectors don't even bother collecting cars that have closed ECUs. Why? You can't get the necessary info to replace them once the limited life electronic components fail. And such a car will never pass required SMOG tests and is therefore WORTHLESS.

I have an early 90s sports car. I can no longer buy an ECU for it. The ECU is completely proprietary and the manufacturer hasn't made any of them since the late 90s. The last available ECU for that model has been sold.

Reverse engineering the ECU would be very expensive. It has tens of inputs from various sensors and how it reacts to all those inputs is unknown except to the manufacturer. And even if you could reverse engineer it, the state SMOG laws consider that an illegal modification of the car. So all you can do is scrap the car.

So now, if you own that car and your ECU fails you are SOL. You can't get a SMOG certificate and you can't drive that car in ANY US state.

Wearable computers will initially need you to also wear extra batteries. Clothing will change to support the batteries.

The visual interface will be a HUD like display via glasses that overlay the real world in front of you. Initially, there will be text input based on your finger movement. Subtle body movements like gestures will provide other inputs. There will also be voice recognition commands whose interpretation will occur in the cloud rather than locally in your phone due to power limitations. In fact, many requests will occur in the cloud with the results presented in the HUD or on the screen. When you go from place to place you'll be able to plug your phone into a standard interface to use other peripherals and transfer data.

Companies providing the technology will get their revenue from ads and charging you for long range wireless access, but WiFi will also be work.

There will laws against driving while wearing your computer.

The tech for all this exists right now at about the level of the Apple Newton is compared to the iPhone of today. It's all there. It just needs to be combined, standardized, refined (a lot) and productized. It's coming. The only question is when it will arrive in a viable form.

The operating system platform is likely to be open source. Android is a likely grandfather of this kind of operating platform.

Eventually, after better batteries and more efficient processors and memory this may all become a wrist computer with wireless interfaces to HUD and data input devices. But that will take longer.

This makes it really clear.

The Google Toilet Service:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrontojPWEE

If you want privacy don't use services or purchase anything on the Internet.
Never buy anything online.
Never use a service that requires that you get an account.
Even then use anonymizing techniques or services like Tor for those few sites that you do visit via random WiFi connections you find by driving randomly around after purging all the cookies in the browser you are using.

But while you are doing that make sure that you always pay for everything in cash.
Do not use a library card.
Avoid all areas that use video surveillance.
Do not get healthcare or have a medical record.

You really don't have any privacy anywhere anymore. If the info is on a network connected computer somewhere, there is someone you have not authorized that can get access to it and copy it. There may be laws against that, but they won't be enforced... because its way too much effort.

Before networked computers held info of all kinds there was the illusion of privacy, but even then it didn't exist. It was just harder to get at the data.

The internet is a public forum. The only privacy that exists is what you set up with other parties BEFORE you use the Internet.