No need any more. iCloud provides this service completely free of charge.

Why stop there? I plan on shipping my software by printing the ones and zeroes, faxing it to myself, scanning it in as a JPEG, and pasting that into a Word Document. Only once that's done I'll tarball the Word doc, encode it on an ISO filesystem, and finally write it to a FAT32 USB stick.

If I'm reading right, the argument is that we're at a part where each additional bit of CO2 in the atmosphere has an decreasingly marginal impact on global temperatures.

The obvious problem to me is the assumption that those marginal differences aren't still large enough to have an impact. Global temperatures rising by only a degree or two Celsius would be enough to throw our climate into chaos, and yet the CO2 in our atmosphere provides a blanket that is responsible for around 33C of additional warming. So while the marginal difference might be steadily decreasing, that doesn't mean that it's not large enough to cause a major impact.

Yeah!!! Buy high, sell low!

Yet another reason I don't take financial advice from Slashdot commenters.

It is a lot. The number is from here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_komanoff_traffic/all/1

Can you afford a $500,000 1 bedroom apartment for everyone?

Wow. Exaggerate much?

Right. The most significant difference between the Nokia MID and the iPhone is just marketing. And people think the Apple kool-aid is potent.

Heh, ours is "FBI Surveillance Van 4d134b".

The point of these measures (if done in the United States) would be to get from where we are now (impotent public transportation, cars as a necessity) to something more sustainable and less costly to society (people living closer to cities, using public transport, walking, or cycling).

Because we encourage people to drive miniature living rooms by offering free parking and free roads instead of actually building out and funding public transportation.

That penalty is nowhere near enough. It's the tragedy of the commons: each additional car on the roads during rush hour might cost the rest of the area hundreds of dollars in externalities. That's why there's been so many attempts at finding ways to manage congestion pricing. By tailoring the price to discourage use when demand is high and encourage use when demand is low, you can dramatically reduce the amount of congestion at peak use.

So if I understand you correctly, your recommendation is that we let one company innovate and take risks, and let everyone else jump on board once it's been borne out in the market. The fact that Android devices have as big of a slice of the market-share pie indicates that this is exactly the situation that's occurred. Apple invested in R&D, took a risk with a dramatically unique product, and everybody else follows suit when it turns out to be a hit.

That kind of situation is the exact reason patents exist. To encourage risk-taking, encourage innovation, and allow individuals and companies to get a huge return on their investment through an artificial monopoly on the market when they come up with something novel.

How about the fact that the whole fucking thing is driven by a touch UI? That it's a thin "shell" that merely exists to assist you in launching apps, as opposed to a full-blown Windows environment? There's more here than just looks. Again, look at the examples of products before the iPad and after the iPad. You can't tell me the only thing that has been copied is the shape and color.

Flamebait taken.

Now thousands of troops will simply die while trying to hold mirrors providing line of sight back to the original light source.