Palm had one thing going for it, at least in the early days: excellent battery life. With no wireless, no background serivces, and no traditional backlight, battery life was measured in days—or weeks—or months!

While they don't hold a candle to modern devices in every other respect, I loved being able to tap away at the thing forever without ever worrying about finding a charger. And the EL backlight was pretty darn cool (though it made you really hate dimly lit rooms)...

It's hideously slow and limited by today's standards, the standards are horribly out of date (802.11b anyone?) the ten year old battery is surely shot, and the platform is dead, dead, dead.

If you're looking for a cheap hackable device, get a no-frills Android tablet. If you're looking to get into mobile development, get any decent smartphone.

Still, if you really want to work on that old Palm, you should still be able to find the Garnet OS Development Suite.

Making wildly exaggerated claims always has been legal. Imagine if it were otherwise: you'd have to arrest whole advertising companies, and political parties, and organized religions, and the people who send me forwarded emails...

...

...What? Oh, sorry, I guess I kind of drifted off there.

Right here, it's a bit confusing because the maps in the article are turned ~90 degrees.

As the author points out, each phone release is accompanied by a major OS release. With a major software release comes bugs, as well as a raft of CPU-eating new features to play with, so it makes perfect sense that there would be a spike in complaints about performance and a host of other issues. No conspiracy necessary.

Did that make them valid military targets?

It would have, if that — destroying the soldier's transportation — were the goal. But it is not. The goal of blowing up a bus is to make the population — civilians — afraid. That, by definition, is terrorism.

To put it differently, if the IDF started providing a separate transport for these soldiers going home for the weekend — prohibiting them from using the regular buses, Hamas would still try to blow up the regular transit. On contrast, if Hamas were to stop using schools and hospitals to store weapon caches or, indeed, fire from, Israel would not be shooting at those installations.

Got any more false analogies for me?

This shit keeps up and I'll just skip the goddamn Internet completely and go back to reading more books instead.

Please, do. Instead of adding anything to the discussion, you simply repeated your previous comment — only with more swear words. Please, disconnect. Remember to logout.

Whenever I see a provocative account of something from one person's viewpoint, I suspect it of not being entirely honest.

We don't know, what exactly was said, and how "provocative" both sides were. What we do know is:

1. He griped on Twitter about the agent's rudeness.
2. She called him and his boys back from the plane and threatened to call police, unless he deletes the tweet.

That threat to "call police" over nothing but an Internet-posting is enough to have her fired from the job and prosecuted for attempted malicious prosecution. Worse — because she, likely, was not busy checking the Twitter herself, but was informed by Marketing, who do monitor their @-handles all the time — there should be an investigation into a possible conspiracy to commit malicious prosecution.

These people — almost like police themselves — are granted enormous powers to do their jobs. Any time they abuse it even in the slightest, a slap on the wrist is not enough — the hand should be chopped off (yeah, I know), so that none of them do that again.

The baseline healthy person is of mixed race, has 1.93 arms and 2.1 children, and is a hermaphrodite.

Do we really want an Internet that, with regard to the U.S. consumer, is essentially owned and operated by Comcast/Xfinity?

Whatever Comcast's failings, I wager, you'll find the Internet owned and operated by the government far worse. I predict mandatory "child-protection" filters, for example. Also, any time you violate the service terms (which will be copied from those of commercial providers), you will be committing a crime (however small), rather than merely breaking contract. Oh, and the tech-support will not only be incompetent, but also rude — because, being government employees, they will be impossible to fire.

the more competition that can be arranged the better

A government entering a market — any market — is the end of competition in it.

Roads (and rail-roads), health-care, electricity and telephone — government and government-sanctioned monopolies provide such outstanding services, only a fool or a sell-out would try to prevent their scope from expanding. Tokyo may have competing privately-owned subway lines, but we here in America know better than that!

Take Municipal WiFi — which the young and progressive generation was hailing on this very site only 10 years ago — was not that a roaring success, that swept over the nation?