Physicians have been fighting this battle for quite some time. Traditionally, they only get paid for the services they actually render on call, so if a surgeon gets called in at 3:00AM to do an emergency appendectomy, they only get paid for doing the appendectomy, and nothing extra for having their sleep interrupted.

One of my family members just moved to an area where the physicians have negotiated a "Pay for Call" system with the local hospitals. Whatever specialist is covering a service gets paid a flat fee for covering call for a 24/hour period (IIRC, ~$800), in addition to getting paid for the actual services rendered. It's a pretty sweet deal - and while $800 might be excessive, I think the principle is correct. You want the ability to interrupt my life and restrict my travel / recreation options? You get to pay for that.

I hope I'd do something half as cool as what's Greg Carr's up to. He made his millions selling voicemail services to the baby bells right after the big bell was broken up. Now, he's more or less leased 1,500 square miles of Mozambique's largest wild area, Gorongosa National Park. It was once arguably the most magnificent game park in southern Africa, but has been decimated by years of civil war on Mozambique, and when Carr's foundation took over a few years ago, was nearly devoid of wildlife. His deal with the government is that he has 20 years to try and rehabilitate the park, bring back the animals, stop poaching and bring back tourists. Then he'll turn it back over to Mozambique, hopefully in something like it's former glory.

That's the kind of "work" I dream of doing after I somehow become a billionaire. Hell, why wait? I should email the Carr foundation right now and see if they have any need for a copywriter who's deathly afraid of snakes. I don't see how they could get by without that incredibly useful skillset.

Touche good sir. I would have also accepted, "picking the major with the greatest percentage of sexually curious coeds" and "picking a major where facts are far less important than the way in which they are presented."

That sounds like more of a you problem than an academia problem. If you don't enjoy using a work's minutiae to accuse perfectly innocent authors of misogyny, innuendo, (to add a couple you forgot) blatant colonialism or latent homosexuality, what the fuck were you doing in an English Lit program? The rest of us live for that shit.

There. I fixed it for you.

• Apps - it's got a gajillion, the Pre has like 40 in the App store, and like 50 homebrew.
• Autofocus & Video (In the 3GS)- The Pre's got a good camera, but no autofocus, and no video. I personally don't care about video too much, but it does seem lame to not include an autofocus camera.
• The Compass - I'm not really sure what I'd do with the compass, but I wants it.
• iTunes Ecosystem Integration - The Pre's pretty flexible about syncing media, but its media player kind of sucks, and it's integration with Amazon's MP3 store isn't perfect.

The Pre Wins at:

• Price - At the moment, both phones are exclusive to one US carrier. If I were to replicate my Sprint plan on an iPhone, I'd be paying an extra $60/mo for my wife and I. $1,440 over the course of a two year contract.
• The Keyboard - I like the slide out physical keyboard better than the onscreen keyboard.
• Linux - The Pre is a little linux box. I can download a terminal app, then type in things like, "sudo apt-get" etc... How awesome is that? It means I come much closer to really owning this device than I would with an iPhone.
• Multitasking - This is the one thing that really bugs me on an iPhone. I've gotten so used to switching back and forth between apps on my Pre, that it feels ridiculous to not be able to do it on an iPhone.

The Conclusion: Different strokes for different folks. They're both great devices - but I think for the Slashdot crowd, there's plenty to love about the Pre.

One man's mindnumbingly boring teacher is another man's gateway to another world.

I read from the library voraciously from the time I learned to read. But when I finally got into an AP english class in high school, it was like a whole 'nother world opened up to me. That meaning and subtext that made things boring and dry for you illuminated whole new levels of understanding for me.

One specific example - I remember that my mind was blown the first time a teacher explained to me that an author and a narrator are different characters, and that sometimes, narrators aren't telling the entire truth. I was in a Poe phase at the time - and I suddenly understood that nearly every Poe narrator was nutso. It was like a veil had been lifted.

As I made my way through a degree in English Literature during University, the process only intensified. The more I learn about literature, the more I can find in books to enjoy.

Let me put this in terms of a car metaphor for Slashdot: Anyone can look at a Ferrari and see that it's a beautiful car. But if you happen to know the history of the company, it's F1 heritage, the story of Enzo's life, its collaboration with coachbuilders like Pininfarina, the advances from the F1 team that are incorporated into the company's road cars - you're going to appreciate that vehicle on a whole different level than someone who just walks up and says, "nice car."

So, I'm sorry that your exposure to some perhaps bad teachers ruined your appreciation of literature and literary criticism - but for me it's a toolset that greatly enhances my reading experience. I still have a great time reading Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code - but now I have a chance to get my mind boggled by the subtext of Heart of Darkness and The Scarlet Letter. And maybe - if I really push myself, even begin to understand what Henry James is going on about.

It took me a while to understand how the whole business works, but that's basically the way things work now.

Essentially the way you buy a 3rd party satellite receiver out of the box, it can only receive unencrypted satellite streams. But the decoder box manufacturers pay groups of coders to surreptitiously create and release software which allows the box to decrypt encrypted streams. For the last couple years, DirecTV has been on the as of yet uncracked N3, while Dish and Bellvue (Canada's main provider, with a signal that you can get throughout the US) have been on the cracked N2. A few months ago Bellvue switched to N3, and a week or so ago Dish completed its switch to N3.

In the meantime, a couple companies have implemented something they're calling Internet Key Sharing for their receivers - a system that shares decryption information from a paid subscription with that company's unauthorized receivers. I'm not sure of the technical details, but apparently this doesn't work as well as a true crack - and of course requires an internet connection to receive the frequently chancing keys.

Viewsat, who Kwak represents, doesn't currently have an Internet Key Sharing program, so, unless they can get someone to crack N3 - nobody's going to be buying their receivers.

Plus, the summary does a pretty awful job of getting to the real story. I've been following the development thread and chat since the rooting of the Pre was first announced. The motivation for the development forum's choice to stop talking about tethering wasn't eagerness to avoid lawsuits, it was appreciation for the way that Palm engineers have been interacting with the "underground" community.

Palm engineers have been involved in the unofficial dev forum threads and chat, dropping hints, giving the "hackers" knowledge that might have otherwise taken weeks or months for them to discover unaided.

The big stories here are:
1) Palm DIDN'T send a cease and desist. They nicely said, "Hey, if you want us to keep helping you out here, stop talking about tethering."

2) The Pre Dev community is doing some amazing things, thanks to the fact that the Pre is essentially a little Linux box with a nifty GUI.

3) It doesn't really matter that the affected wiki and forum aren't discussing tethering, since solutions have already been released elsewhere.

Want to get involved yourself? Head over to the most active dev thread at Precentral.net, contribute to the Wiki, or join the chat at #webos-internals on FreeNode (irc.freenode.net).

While I agree with your sentiment (parents should stop freaking out about their kids' safety) - you could say the same thing about things like child car seats. I mean, I made it just fine riding around (in Africa nevertheless) on my parent's laps without any safety restraints. So why should I subject my child to the constraints of a car seat?

Sure, getting in a traffic accident is a much more likely scenario than having your child lost by the school district, but since when was Slashdot against using technology to make our lives better / safer? Step back from the natural - ZOMG! Big Brother! - reaction, and it seems like making sure your 6-year-old is at school when she's supposed to be is a good thing.