The continued popularity of the iPad (and decent success enjoyed by Asus and Samsung with their respective Android tablets) would tend to put the lie to this claim. Acer's own entry into the tablet race was by all accounts a bit crap, so this sounds like some serious sour grapes to me. Also, I haven't heard from anybody in the real world who's excited about these 'ultrabooks' ; they sound like a sad marketing scheme from Intel, along the lines of their old 'Viiv' branding.

Bow ties are cool. Or Stetsons. Stetsons are cool, too.

The bit that complicates it for me in this case is that this is knowing that I'm paying $20 to piggy-back on packets that are already being sent constantly anyhow. There's no incremental bandwidth usage and no real infrastructure cost associated - charging for texting is close to pure profit.

Actually, I believe Edgar Wright (of Shaun of the Dead / Hot Fuzz fame) is currently working on an Ant Man film.

I'm not sure when they changed it (I remember downloading it for free too), but the most recent version of XCode was a $5 purchase on the Mac App Store for me. It really doesn't appear to be free any more.

To be fair: Nintendo has come up with something of a solution re: the "nine-year-old's difficulty" bit. Their more recent games (Mario Galaxy 2, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and Ocarina of time 3D) have all had "super guide" functionality - basically, a system that will optionally take over and play part of the game for you if you suck at nine-year-old levels. Seems like they've used that as leverage to start making their games properly challenging again for the rest of us. (Good thing, too; I don't think I died once during Twilight Princess or Wind Waker.)

If we had unlimited power all the other problems are probably solvable through application of more power (for noise reduction, for instance, some sort of active noise-cancelling system, like a giant pair of Bose headphones). It would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would probably cause nasty environmental problems in the colder parts of the world (barring further application of our hypothetical unlimited power source).

Today's XKCD strip seems appropriate here. Granted, there's no guarantee that Microsoft actually plans on implementing this ever...

Part of it is fixed costs - it's expensive to roll out fiber to the home, and that expense doesn't change whether you're buying the 15Mbps tier or the 150Mbps tier. The other part is naked greed; Verizon is a telco, after all.

I think they mean "supply" as in upload or originate, which they clearly didn't do in this case. They do supply some of their own content in the form of stuff like YouTube Live or various partnered offerings, but they're not directly responsible what users upload, which is most of the content on the site.