I will blow up what I want, when I want. It's not my fault your dog is a pussy.

I hear you can get maps printed on this material called paper, and they bind many of them together into a booklet. Sounds scary, but people tell me it's usable.

Safety standards, or lack thereof. Cars have to be heavy now to pass the government-required safety tests. Lighter materials don't hold up as well in an accident.

True, which is why a lot of people will open the display and test it in the store before they pay for it. Apple doesn't mind, because hey, they're buying an $800 monitor. They just seal up the rejects and sell them to less anal people.

Who said anything about an iPhone? The OP just said cell phone, and didn't mention the "Find my iPhone" app or anything, just "GPS tracking." My brother had a $10 flip phone that had that feature. We had a service called family locator, and even the cheapest phones they sold supported it. I don't see a problem with giving a child an inexpensive cell phone, especially since pay phones are few and far between these days.

Alice will notice the difference. The text balloons for SMS messages are green, and they're blue for iMessages. It also says "Text message" or "iMessage" in the text box before you start typing your message to indicate how the message will be sent.

Exactly. I have been regularly reading Slashdot for about 10 years now. I come here for the comments, mostly. I tend to get the actual stories/articles earlier from other sites that I frequent, but the conversation here is always insightful. Yes, even now, I still feel that way; although the quality of the comments have gone downhill from the early days.

I do know a lot of people with iPads. I work in an environment where I see dozens every day. About half just have a smart cover, but the other half have all kinds of different cases and keyboards. The iPad accessory market is certainly thriving.

The Palm Pre DOES have a user-replaceable battery. I had three batteries for mine that I was constantly swapping out because they only last about 10 hours if you actually use the damn phone. I'm very happy with my new iPhone 4S, even if it does have battery issues and even though I can't swap out the battery, it still lasts twice as long as my old Pre did.

You're only getting 60% of what you've been promised, and you're calling that "pretty good?" I'd call that pretty terrible. I'm in the US on Comcast (so there's two things working against me) and I regularly get 90% to 125% of my advertised line speed.

Uh oh... I keep my 4chan folder on Dropbox. Better go delete some things...

The fact that you think Limewire represents less than 50% of all file sharing should be telling as to just how out of touch you are.

Idiots use Limewire. 95% of the internet is idiots. Damn near 100% of the computers I've had to clean up for spyware, viruses, etc. had Limewire installed (I'm not saying Limewire caused this, I'm just saying that the type of people who tend to get viruses are the type of people who tend to use Limewire). Pre-teens, teenagers, and even their dumb parents all use Limewire because it's free, it's easy, and everyone's heard of it. Seriously, ask around at the local high school, I promise you that the vast majority of kids who download music are doing it through Limewire.

Only the smart people use torrents or usenet, and let's face it, there aren't a lot of smart people out there. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to hear that Limewire accounts for an even bigger chunk than 50%.

Option 3: make the providers start obeying truth-in-advertising laws and actually fucking invest in network capacity again rather than pushing dishonest "up to X speed" plans where the users never see even a third of it.

I always see people claiming that the "up to X speed" claims are a big lie, but I've yet to see this in practice. Over the last decade, I've used high speed internet service (some DSL, some cable, some wireless) from WideOpenWest, Comcast, AT&T, Sprint, Clearwire, and Cox. With every single one, I was regularly and reliably able to get 100% of my advertised speeds from both speed tests and large file downloads. Even during peak times, I would rarely see it drop below 80% or so. The wireless providers would obviously fluctuate more than the wired, but even so, never a drop below 50%, and rarely even that low.

Pressed CDs, which you refer to as "the real thing," are very cheap and high schoolers CAN afford them for their bands. You can get 1000 real, pressed CDs, jewel cases, and full color inserts for about $1200 (well, that was about three years ago, don't know what the current prices are). That's not terribly expensive, and small independent bands are doing it all the time. Taking the high school example, if you're in a band with four other people, you each need to get together just $240 for a run of discs. Not difficult at all.