OK, I'll bite. Most of us call WHAT car parks? Are you talking about parking lots? Or places where VW Beetles can frolic and sniff the exhausts of bigger models?

With a guaranteed income from locked-in design professionals, Adobe can finally stop worrying about innovating with each new release. They can continue to sell the same version for years to come, month by month, with no expectation of adding new features, capabilities, etc.

Sadly, Adobe also owns a boatload of patents when it comes to computer-based graphic design, so the threat of serious competition from new upstarts is almost nil, too.

Don't speak ill of your new owners.

Not sure why should be considered a problem. StackOverflow offers reviewed, edited documentation from people who actually use/enjoy to technologies they're describing.

By providing documentation filtered through the real world, you get useful information that describes how features DO work, and not how they WOULD work if they were implemented the way some unknown documentation writer described them.

To me, the SO solution is MUCH better than written documentation, and I've quickly picked up a working knowledge of entire new platforms, languages, etc. just by getting the answers to questions I needed, rather then sifting through tomes of irrelevant information and "Hello World" examples. SO is good documentation; perhaps companies should have their doc writers participate in discussions there, rather than formatting new whitepapers and PDFs.

I have an old Android phone that I use exclusively as a Skype phone. By loading Skype on startup, it becomes a full-featured phone -- especially when combined with a Skype To Go number. This just stays at home, and basically just takes the place of a land-line/office phone.

Why should this revenue stream be available only to large software companies and gang protection rackets?

Holy crap, 8.5x11 must be HUGE in Canada!

No way that would fit on what the U.S. calls 8.5x11-inch paper. Obviously, the metric system provides a much better ink-to-paper conversion rate.

"Large" is relative. Today's first-class is yesterday's baggage compartment. Yes, first-class is an improvement over today's steerage compartment, but yesterday's first-class simply doesn't exist anymore, and certainly does not justify the price differential.

Bullshit. You can pay top prices for these flights, and you're still on those same planes. Fact is, unless you rent a private jet, you can't buy your way to a pleasant flight any more.

This article was surely published in 1965, right? I can't even get the attendants on AirHate to whip a bag of soggy pretzels in my direction these days. What's this nonsense about actual food on a modern aircraft?

Yep, Hitchhiker's it is. Figured somebody had to represent HG2G fans in this apparent sea of Trekkies.

...a nice, hot cup of tea?

Indeed, the look of the Prada does foreshadow that of the iPhone, but while it LOOKS like an iPhone, it was really just a feature phone with a touch screen (not multitouch) and a few built-in apps. It replaced buttons with on-screen icons, but that was about it: no app store, no full browser, nothing that would make one call it more computer than phone. Basically, a very car-looking buggy. (Meanwhile, Palm's Treo line was still the "smartphone" standard at the time -- all engine, no sleek automotive buggy, though).

Speaking NOT as a fanboy, but as a gadget fan:

In hindsight, it's easy to say the iPhone is just another smartphone, but at the time it was introduced, it was nothing like any phone that came before it. Yes, its individual features -- touch screen, icons, internal antenna, multitouch UI, etc., all existed -- but until the iPhone came along, they had not been put together quite like this before (To use the hackneyed "car" metaphor: wheels, internal combustion engines and axles predate the automobile, but this doesn't mean the car was nothing new when it came along).

Just look at marketing materials from the major carriers in 2006 -- flip phones and candy bars were the typical (practically only) form factors available before the iPhone was revealed in January 2007. It took very little time for all that to change, but when it comes right down to it -- there was nothing akin to the modern smartphone before the iPhone.

It's pretty silly to suggest today's wide array of multi-touch handheld computers have nothing to do with its design and success.

Just because you can't balance a checkbook doesn't mean nobody can. Deficits CAN go away; It's not magic; it's restraint.

I certainly hope we haven't reached a point at which nobody believes problems can be solved without alien intervention.

Unlimited AT&T users still can't use tethering -- even if they'd agree to pay extra for it (They need the not-quite-unlimited-take-it-bitch-take-it plan for that). It will indeed be nice to see what competition does in this space. Both providers have their share of baggage, but at least now there's competition. But what will we do with http://www.thisiswhyiphonesucks.com/ now?