BT offer a nationwide wifi hotspot network here in the UK. Access to it is free if you're a BT customer and I believe Orange's land line net package offers free access as well.

Google: Openzone

£15 will get you unlimited internet on a pay as you go plan on Three. The same plan on a contract is £12.50. Frankly unless you have a very specific need that requires both mobility, data rates exceeding ~12mbps at peak and are living in a few select areas, this really is a crappy deal.

Internet connectivity is a necessity in the UK, even those on unemployment benefits will soon be required to have access to prove that they're looking for work. But this plan is an absolute joke no matter what way you cut it. Thankfully there are other options that would be more than adequate.

KDE seems to manage the jump between Desktop, Netbook and Tablet without much effort in the part of the apps. Adding a box with an X to close them is again hardly rocket science. I can take a current desktop linux app, even one not specifically developed with KDE in mind, fire it up in desktop mode, it have a border, fire it up again in netbook mode and the controls appear as part of the task bar at the top, in tablet mode the app borders and decorations are in a style that is more fitting with the form factor. Just a shame that KDE is basically windows with Downs.

This is available today.

On the Padfone again we see that the apps don't need special modifications to run in either mode - the underlying toolkit deals with that. Given that apps are designed to handle different resolutions anyway, it's hardly a massive jump. There is absolutely no need on the part of the app developer to worry about this as ICS does all the grunt work, just as in the KDE example. Any app written with ICS in mind should have no problems at all running in either tablet or phone format. At worst in the padfone example, you might have to restart some apps when you plug the phone into the tablet dock.

Go check out the reviews of the padfone on Youtube and see it in action, I saw one by a spanish reviewer about a month back and the apps, which were third party by and large, all seemed to cope well in either form factor. Unifying the codebase under ICS meant that there was no longer a need to write one version specifically for tablets and another for phones, just write for ICS and your bases are covered.

Is it for you? Based on what you've said probably not. Hell it's not even for me if I'm honest (frankly the cost is higher than a similarly specced smartphone and tablet). But the complaints you've put forth simply don't apply.
But, all that said, as practical implementations of the concept go, the padfone does seem to offer a fairly stable and usable base from which to go on.

Now if only they could make Android pleasant to type on, they might actually be able to turn it into something that right now is strictly usable only for content consumption into something capable of content creation...

Erm, it does already, when running as a phone it offers the ics phone interface, when you plug it into the tablet, it automatically switches to a tablet centric interface. Likewise when you plug it into the keyboard dock it enables Asus's optimisations for use in netbook mode, just like the transformer.

Adding a new launcher optimised for desktop use really doesn't seem like much of a stretch, from a technical standpoint.

Fair play, frankly the productivity software available for Android is pretty sucky.

The Asus Padphone works along these principles - phone, phone UI, plug it into it's companion tablet screen and it switches to tablet mode and takes advantage of the extra aerials and batteries in the tablet enclosure, plug the tablet into the keyboard dock and just like the Transformer/prime/infinity it does a little optimising to make it a little more friendly for use as a netbook.

It's not hard to see someone taking this idea to having it slot into a base station that in turn switches on a more dedicated desktop launch system.

They did try their hand in the android market, half heartedly at least. I believe though that they only managed to convince ZTE to produce a phone with a single core atom based chip. The phone was a budget phone and by all accounts has severely limited access to the Android market due to many more complex apps being being dependent on ARM or specific graphics chips within the SOCs.

When The Register did a review of the phone they said it had plenty of performance, but that didn't change anything - the handset manufacturers were clearly in no mood to give up ARM, especially when you consider that some of the handset manufacturers also design and make their own SOCs.

Running back to Microsoft... Frankly the only surprise in that is that it took this long. EA, after a similarly disastrous outing in the Android Market are looking to do the same.

I imagine Nvidia aren't going to be best pleased at this apparent cosiness.

Which is all fine and dandy up until you take into account the fact that many peoples budgets simply won't allow for much more than getting lower cost kit that offers the best bang for their buck.

Dismissing people as stupid for not paying over what the can reasonably afford on what is essentially a luxury item says more about you then it does them.

I wish I had mod points for this, in one picture and a couple of paragraphs, the author has explained superposition, decoherence and entanglement in a manner even I can understand.

Thanks for posting this!

100 metres should be 100ft... or 30m...

Why does it need to be thousands of feet in the air? 12 nautical miles is the limit for territorial waters and to be visible on the horizon at that point you'd need a little over 100 metres of whatever rope/cable/cord you're using to get there.

One question I'd have though is how it'd connect to anything else... Laying cable is expensive, especially for marine environments and would probably qualify as being in whatever country the cable was laid off. Satellite? Trying by Wifi or wimax seems impractical due to the amount of power required to boost the signal enough to have it be picked up over 12 miles, even with line of sight. Whatever you use, the single biggest problem you're going to have is lifting the transceiver set regardless of whatever you're using as a tether.

The alternative might be to try to do a Radio Caroline... But that would be a lot harder to maintain and comes with the added issue of storms causing your vessel to run aground/sink.

Ultimately though, no matter what the solution, if someone is determined enough, they'll get you. Consider that the MAFIAA basically bullied the Swedes into breaking into a server farm and confiscating the pirate bay servers.

Here's hoping garlic routing takes off. After that, it's game over for all this rubbish.

At least until they outlaw that...

Well I was thinking an anchor with a length of rope, but I imagine if you wanted to get fancy you could rig up some gps gear and a couple of propellers powered by solar electricity and batteries...

I imagine you could do it relatively cheaply if you used a helium balloon. Need to fix it, go out there on a boat, swap over the electronics package, let it go back up. If it's done right it could make for some very interesting developments.

http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/enforcement/spectrum-enforcement/guidance

The relevant part:

Google works.

Apparently you don't understand how the airwaves system works. The tl;dr version is that its basically like a mobile phone network in that unless you have a registered airwaves terminal, you ain't listening to squat. The encryption just adds another layer of defence. These terminals can be disabled remotely too.

Apart from the fact that, as the other poster states, its illegal. Its also technically impossible due to the fact that the police, ambulance and fire brigade all use an encrypted TETRA based system called Airwaves, and have done for the better part of a decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airwave_(communications_network)