You hit it right on the nose. I have a 60D with a couple nice lenses on it and for my hobby purposes I will be hanging onto this for the next 5 years at least and that's a camera that's just above the low end of the DSLR market. Something like the 5DMkII is built like such a tank and puts out images that only the top-end gear could beat it and even then it's closer than what Canon/Nikon would like you to believe.

I would imagine with the lens and camera rentals becoming more mainstream more people will shoot with their phone and can rent a high end kit for vacations or when they feel they need it.

You can enable it once you have created an account: https://www.google.com/landing/2step/

I've been using it for years now with the Android app and it's been terrific. You can also just use it via SMS. Other software vendors can even leverage Google's app for their own products (One example I know is Guild Wars 2 can use Google's app for 2 factor on your game account)

Agreed it likely varies by state and city, but at the end of the day your municipality had to grant some form of monopoly to someone for utility delivery. Where i am (Central FL) if you live in one part of the city you have OUC and in the other parts you have Duke and that's that for power. The system you describe is hopefully part of what we'll see in internet delivery. Comcast could in theory be forced to wholesale their cable lines for other ISP's to compete with service over.

Therein lies the point. Your gas/water/power utility is a natural monopoly granted by your municipality as it makes sense in many cases to have one source for those items due to the huge capital involved in deployment and not wanting to have a mess of pipes and wires criss-crossing the city from every provider.

Now with those utilities when they are granted that monopoly it carries certain regulations. Rates are negotiated and fixed and cannot be increased without approval from the city. Service has to be provided equally and throughout (The power/water companies cant deny you service because you are out of the way or one block too far from the water line, unlike your ISP). Right now the your local ISP gets all the benefits from the local monopoly but without any of the regulations. This just puts them under the same sets of rules.

Before the internet there were these things called "telephones" and being the most crucial communication medium we had it was in everyone's best interest to make sure all people could get service. If you wanted a phone in your house the local telco was obligated to provide service at a regulated rate. The internet has replaced the phone as the communication utility every household needs. It should be regulated as such.

This isn't about Sony jumping in with F2P, it's about the high cost of developing MMO games. When a game costs north of $100,000,000 to develop as well as the high number of servers and support staff you need to be able to reach as many gamers as possible. Being restricted to Sony/PC platform still leaves out the XBox audience (while smaller than PS4/PC it's still a large enough chunk to not ignore) and being under Sony's control means cross-platform is something of a conflict of interest.

Sony will still be more than amicable with having the new studios games on it's hardware it just gives the developers more flexibility. Sony still collects it's license fees by the game being on PS4 and they'd rather collect those fees (the bread and butter of consoles) and not be responsible for the day-to-day operations, which will likely operate better as an entity who does and only does MMO as opposed to cog in a huge corporate umbrella.

I think Android tablets were all set to be huge but a couple things happened:

- The phablet boom came in and seems to dominating the Android ecosystem. Many people i know have a Note3/4 and that fills both needs "well enough".
- The tablet app ecosystem for Android is still a bit lacking. Android goes punch for punch with the iPhone nowadays but the iPad seems to have so many more dedicated tablet apps and for high end apps like audio production and AAA mobile games the iPad gets most of the support (likely since iPad users seem far more willing to put actual dollars for expensive dedicated apps).

I have an Android Tablet and an iPad Air and the iPad's apps are great and polished and built for the platform whereas the Android tablet while still quite useful and has some killer apps it still seems to be treated as "a big phone".

Couple things for the naysayers to consider though, and why I believe Episode 7 will be good (but not near the hype):

- Abrams himself said he is a much bigger fan of Star Wars than Star Trek. You can see that in the Trek films. They are far more "space action" akin to W than Trek.

- Disney is the big mouse and certainly has and can screw with production they have really let the Marvel folks run their own system and it's working to great effect. The hot thing for studios these days is a more hands off approach and that's good for everyone.

- Kathleen Kennedy is running SW and shes been around for the golden years for Lucas and Spielburg. Disney will let her and Abrams run the show.

- Dear god the script. Both ST reboots were penned by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. They are responsible for quite a bit of the new hollywood schlock (Look at their IMDB's). Hell you could make a case that Abrams direction is what made the new Treks at least somewhat enjoyable and not just Transformers in space (and Into Darkness came close). Lawrence Kasdan who wrote TESB is involved. Basically everyone who's had their hands on the SW script has far more talent then those two.

And lastly my biggest hope is that this is a movie being made by a generation that grew up on SW. They had to eat what Lucas was giving them like the rest of us and should want to start anew. Every fan has thought "if i made a SW sequel..." and now some of those folks are getting to, with some help from those that helped in the beginning.

Could it all go south? Very much so, but I am keeping restrained excitement.

While I would be pissed if I owned an RT device, the whole thing had the classic Ballmer "me too!" strategy all over it.

x86 can't support a tablet for more than 4 hours? Better use ARM! Everyone else is! Screw compatibility!

Whats that Intel? You've new chips coming in 8 months that will give Windows tablets 9 hour run-times with no real work on our part? You left a voicemail? Our WinPhone 7 never upgraded to voicemail and we didn't want to ditch it for WinPhone 8. Oops.

I don't know what 1990s you were living in but in the one I was in I sure wasn't able to own a compelling virtual reality experience for less than $500. All those developers who don't care at all about VR? I don't suppose they're the ones who sold out the Oculus DK2 for months? I know i'm never going to want to check out a HoloLens, the one I got 23 years ago still works just great over my parallel port. Sure there was VR in 1992 but there was also an automobile in 1886, not exactly accurate to say an Acura is just a rehash of an old idea.

One of my main issues with mandatory drug testing, especially before one even has the job, is it's still unfairly selective. Lets say you had 3 job candidates:

#1 - An alcoholic with a real issue. They sober up the night before the interview/test.
#2 - A cocaine addict who stopped using a few days before the interview/test.
#3 - An occasional marijuana user who smoked a joint 2 weeks ago.

Assuming everything else about those candidates is equal only one of those people is going to fail the test and not get the job. All 3 of them could be perfectly fine at it and never present an issue but some common sense and risk analysis would tell you the one who failed is probably the least likely to present an issue down the line.

As many have mentioned, Windows 8 failure was purely from a UI standpoint. Any Windows users who have used it with Start8 or Classic Start can attest that it's faster, more stable and overall better than Windows 7. This is also the first Windows release under Satya Nadella (Ballmer Free!) as well as with a new lead for the Windows faction of the company (I have read many an issue with Sinofsky being a terrible lead for Windows 8) so I think 10 will likely be the "best" Windows we have seen yet.

Now to speculate, my belief is MS will continue its cheap/free licensing of Windows 10 for tablets and phones. They will also offer a free/cheap upgrade for Windows 8 users to upgrade to Windows 10, and unlike Android tablets MS can push that right to users without having to go through the OEMs (not sure about Windows Phone 8) so we'll quickly see Windows 8 market-share plummet and 7 and 10 will be the majority of users.

Now despite all this Windows will likely still drop marketshare on the desktop and will gain a bit on the mobile side. Linux folks will still use Linux. Apple folks will not be dropping their Macs and iPhones to get Windows 10, but that doesnt really matter. If Windows 10 is technically as good/better than 8 and get' the interface right (which it seems like they are doing enough to satisfy desktop users) then they will keep their Windows userbase happy and likely Win10 will be the one we see business move off Win7 and right now that's likely job #1 for them.

Credit where credits due, the actual bill itself (linked in the article) is only 4 pages in total and although IANAL it does seem to be straightforward and to the point. It also generously defines "edge provider" as

(A) any content, application, or service over the Internet; or
(B) a device used for accessing any content, application, or service over the Internet.

Maybe someone with a bit more knowledge can poke a hole in it, but in this age of 1000+ page bills that no-one seems to have the will to read it's a nice change.

If i hadn't already made a comment that would be points to you good sir. Very informative.

No mention in the article of what changes are happening on the technical level. Is "5G" still LTE based and just the next highest revision? That was LTE was supposed to be, it's acronym means "Long Term Evolution". And the mention of keeping 3G/4G online alongside it seems counter-intuitive since the older tech (especially 2G/3G) seems like it's far less efficient with spectrum than even LTE is.

Considering we here in the states barely have nationwide 4G coverage and most of us are working with 2-10GB per month maybe it's a little early to get excited on being able to use that up in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.

I really like the look of this device and the recent Nokia phones I've held and used have a very nice build quality. If this wasn't Windows RT I would definitely consider purchasing it. With the new Bay Trail Atom chips there's very little reason in my eyes to offer RT if I can have x86 Windows and 8+ hours of battery life and there are devices coming to market soon that will offer just that and every generation of chip's will extend that further.

Besides power consumption, app store lockdown and not wanting to alienate first gen customers, what reasons are there not to just cut your losses with RT?