Unions have helped bring the human component to our work lives

Biggest laugh I've had all day. Unions have no interest in the outperformer. To the extent that they seem to help members, they protect the mediocre, the inferior, and those that could make an effective cause celebre. Unions want their members to appear interchangable, otherwise collective bargaining is an obvious fraud.

Anyone know of any large outsourcing company that deliver what they promised, to a decent quality?

Capita are another company that comes to mind. They have ripped off most public services in the UK with their poor products. Capita did a good job at ripping Birmingham City Council off with their new web site.

I was seriously thinking about jailbreaking mine just to get the Google Voice app. I might not need to now.

I mean really do you feel that threatened by the police?

Yes.

Mark Driver agrees.

Actually for once EA is doing it correctly. You have 4 ways to buy their games (that I know of):

1) Physical product from store
2) Steam (where you get the goodness of Steam services and social aspects)
3) Direct2Drive
4) EA's own store and download manager

You can buy your game from any place you prefer. If you buy from other places, you won't get EA's own download manager or things. That's how it should - buyer can choose the platform he prefers. For me that is (unsurprisingly) Steam.

I'm sure not all people like the social gaming aspects of Steam and other platforms, but I do enjoy them. It's easy to play with friends or chat in-game (good with multiplayer games). But for those who don't like them, they can be turned off. I never buy from physical stores anymore, it's a lot more convenient to buy from Steam and almost instantly get to play it. I always keep wishing I could do the same with my PS3 or 360, but they usually only have the smaller games in their stores and I have to order the "real" games via post.

Good example of social aspects in Steam is also that via MW2 I've got many interesting players on my friend list so that theres always someone to play with, but they don't bother me if I'm not playing. It's more fun to play with the people you somewhat, even if very vaguely know.

The hyping model worked for the music industry as well for a while. They played a song up and down the radio for a few weeks or even months before the record could be bought so people were anxious to get it when it finally got out and it was an immediate smash hit simply because everyone rushed to the store to get it. It doesn't work anymore, you might have noticed.

The business model works still maybe, but the question is how long it will. Any business model that relies on the customer not doing what he wants with his product will eventually run into the resistance of the customer, either by a refusal to buy or a hack that results in the ability to do what they want.

I'm not sure at this point that a PS3 is significantly more powerful than a cheap computer, although the BluRay, and a few other special features would be expensive to replicate. For pure number crunching I don't think it has the massive price/performance advantage it did a few years ago... although as a media device, it probably still does.

Literally true, in that I would never use Photoshop because I'm not prepared to pay for it.

But GIMP has a markedly different user interface to Photoshop -- much more oriented towards context menus. So much so that Photoshop users trying it out would complain.

It's an image processing tool, so it's going to share a number of features - layers, masks, filters, brushes, etc. But it goes a lot further than cloning Photoshop.

I'm reasonably productive in GIMP. I'm totally lost in Photoshop.

"Compatible" arguably means different things by context.

As you say, "iPhone compatible headphones" does not imply "headphones that can run stuff from the app store". This is because headphones never run applications(pedants may argue that the DSP baked in to high end noise cancellation headphones counts; but not really) and nobody expects them to. By contrast "IBM compatible PC" is (when the vendor wasn't lying) precisely a statement about a device's ability to run a particular class of software; because the context, that of computers, implies that that is what "compatible" means.

Given that the use of phones to run applications enjoys a higher profile than the use of phones as remote controls(and, even in those cases where they are used as remotes, this is generally done through an application), it isn't wildly unreasonable to assume that "compatible" means "software compatible, at least in some sense".

Given history, I suspect that the headline could be more accurately rewritten to say "Sony-Ericcson releases high-end dumbphone defined by a couple of genuinely interesting features and a lot of mediocrity(just like all the other times they've done that), also functions as a bluetooth remote for one specific home theatre device".

21 Billion... 294,000 homes... is $71,428.58 per home

google Calc: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLC_enUS312US312&q=21+billion+%2F+294000

Now, $71,428.58 Per home / 20 years = $3,741.43 PER YEAR COST OF SPACE ENERGY!

YIKES! REALLY!! PASS...

20 Years life expectancy of solar cells guessed at because of various googles and the chance of an astroid taking the whole thing out... and then you'd have to reinvest the next $21Billion for the next batch..

If it went longer than 20 years, it would lower costs, but not it is really too much of an outlay for 294,000 homes. quick lookup gives me around $600-700/yr... So that is like 5 times what I pay for normal ohio electric (mostly coal...)

Don't know how much to build Nuclear and how many homes... Anyone? We could burn the waste in the next generation reactors if we get a bunch up and running now...

Cell phone usage while driving is not illegal in Utah.

You didn't read the footnote, which clearly states that using a cell phone while driving is classified as careless driving, and is thus illegal. From your link:

Utah's law defines careless driving as committing a moving violation (other than speeding) while distracted by use of a handheld cellphone or other activities not related to driving.

This law has been in effect since 2007 and included cell phone usage at that time, so yes, Utah does have a law against cell phone usage while driving.

Even though it was done, I was able to send and receive email via Thunderbird with IMAP.

Yeah! Sony's wasting their time with this stuff when they should instead allow the PSP to play PS1 games!

Oh wait, the PSP has been able to play PS1 games for years now, and can even move saved games between the PS3 and PSP... and if you put a PS1 disc into the PS3, you can use the same Remote Play program to play the PS1 game, or you can just buy it again as a digital download from the Playstation Store...

You'd think someone would look to see if their suggestion had already been taken care of years ago before making it...

Nice try but that would be fixin' not plannin'...