Amazon's got far less stake in regular data processing, they just want to know about shopping habits.

Yeah. Right. Just like Google only cares about search results.

Are you a parent trying to keep your kids from porn? Are you a business trying to keep your workers on task? Are you a government trying to control the eyeballs of your citizens? Are you just trying to keep ads away from your personal eyeballs, malware from your personal devices?

If it's for your own personal use there are two approaches:
1) Do it on the device. This has the advantage of being easy to pause if it causes a web site or service to stop working. It has the down side of not being centrally managed. You'll have to set it up on all of your devices/browsers. It may not be available for certain mobile platforms.

2) Do it centralized through a proxy. You only have one place to set it up and you run all of your devices through the proxy. More of a pain to self tune, and you have the added overhead of running a proxy.

If you're one of the other use cases and you want to use keep your users from accessing certain kinds of content, there's really only one answer: Do it as far upstream from your users as you can get. Because the users are not going to be happy with it and some will do everything they can to circumvent it. Ideally you're on a network where you can filter all of their (non-wireless) traffic through a single controlled point where you need physical access (lock and key) and a passcode to make changes. If you can remote admin it, or if people can access the 'net at large without going through that point, you've lost the battle.

If it really is GPS then it's simply the local time, broadcast in the clear. How is that classified?

You might take a look at GitTip. It's also a microtransaction platform, but different from Flattr. Patrons pledge from $0.25 to $25 a week to another person.

I like the weekly pledge and the tiny amounts. The weekly pledge encourages people to keep up the good work while the small amounts... I can pledge $0.25 weekly to a lot of people before I miss that money from my bank account.

Good analysis. I suspect that the project was founded by ... I don't know what. Guys without any experience with embedded systems is my bet. The cost difference, in bulk, of a small 16 mhz 8-bit CPU with 0.5k RAM and a 100mhz 32-bit CPU with 128K RAM is about a dollar.

If they had spent the extra dollar per unit they could have had a device that could take care of all of the I/O formatting, etc, etc and been a stand-alone device.

(Even without spending the dollar, you can get a lot of performance out of an old 8-bit CPU if you know what you're doing.)

So that repeat robocall to my cell phone only needs to call 179 million more times before they'll take action.

Okay, so how about my home connection. 56K is what we pay for, but we get 41K when the weather is good. It's 1/10th the speed of my 3G phone (When I'm in range of a tower). That is no where near enough to stream even the smallest YouTube video. And that's the best we can get at any price. I'm a couple miles outside a small midwestern town. Wireless is our only option and the only wireless data that gets any rections here is a 2G tower 12 miles away. With a directional antena we can duplex that. The phone lines here are crap so no DSL, even satellite is out because we don't have an upload signal path. We're not that unusual.

With that meager bit of data we can email. (And /.). But using the web is incredibly painful. Video is straight out. Skype doesn't happen. System updates are flaky and take all day to download. Web pages aren't made for connections this slow any more, they're hundreds of K, and can take minutes to load, and some connection will often get lost, which will bork the whole page.

No one uses the internet here. They don't know what it's for. They don't know they can find out anything with it, that they can learn the skills to take them further, or talk to people all over the planet. Or get movies on demand! You won't hear much from them around here because they don't know about Slashdot. Or online discussion forums in general. The Internet is a thing that they talk about on (broadcast) TV.

So while some people might bitch about only getting 1.5mbs, there are no shortage of people in the United States who essentially can't use the modern internet.

Scientology has been doing this for years, keeping Dianetics on the top of the charts. Members buy the books in bulk then send them back to the publisher - often in their original boxes - which are then sent back to booksellers.

At least ebooks make book laundering difficult and more expensive.

Okay, lets say there's a slick, smooth-as-snot implementation. The software is perfect, it works in any browser - even mobile- without plugins. User navigation is natural and intuitive, and it has a high frame rate even on obsolete devices.

Well you still haven't described 99% of the web. What do people use the web for?
1) Interacting with people. 3D chat stinks and always will. Even fully realized 3D worlds like MMORPGs chat has nothing to do with 3D, it's essentially IRC. 3D email's a looser. Email is best navigated as a list.
2) Finding information. But most information is best displayed as a 1 or 2 dimensional list. You can read pages of information, not 'volumes'. You're already looking at a virtual screen, watching videos or reading on a virtual screen within your virtual screen is a needless and distracting abstraction. And navigating a 1D or 2D space is much faster than 3D. Seriously, try finding the entry you're after in a 3D room full of Wikipedia. You don't want to have to look behind the article on Aardvarks to find the one on Abe Lincoln.
3) Porn. And having been around the net a bit I know there's some CGI porn out there, it's creepy as hell, and that isn't changing until people want to fuck at the bottom of the uncanny valley.
4) Shop. While I'd love to have full 3D fly-through of every product I shop for, it's not going to happen for several reasons. First, preparing 3D models of products that look as good as a manufacturer wants it to is incredibly time consuming and often futile. They'd much rather customers see a heavily photoshopped glossy product image. Second manufactuerres don't want people to have full 3D models of their products. It sets the intellectual property lawyers on edge.

Those 4 cases cover 95% of web use. So no, it won't ever 'take off'. It will always be a niche.

(Source: My experience working, for various clients on an alarming number projects that tried to do the things above in 3D, dating back to 1996. All of them were embarrassing failures.)

The vast majority of people/stores in San Francisco do us paper. I haven't noticed a change in the percentage of people who use reusable bags. In fact I rarely see people using reusable bags when I go to the store. (Possibly because the stores I go to are mostly walking distance and who carries around empty bags when you walk?)

Given that a) not many people use reusable bags b) it doesn't appear that there's been a change in the percentage of people who use reusable bags, and c) a higher incidence rate of disease, I'm going to say they're probably unrelated.

Except even the number of tasks is often variable over the life of the task.

Take for example loading a web page. It starts out as 1 task: Get a page from the server. Once you've done that, how many more requests will that first request generate? Impossible to tell. It could be none. It could be hundreds, and some of those can generate their own requests. (etc, etc.)

The answer is this: Some feedback, no matter how incorrect, is better than no feedback at all.

Also no problems with 4S and 6.1.

I wonder if some of these 'problems' are from the same people who refuse to believe that iTunes shuffle is random.

I know why /. posts these articles, to get lots of comments. All the comments are between fanbois and trolls. Which adds nothing to nothing.

Curiosity has 17 cameras, not one.

I mean, if you're coing to criticize, get it right.

I think anybody who doesn't want to lose data should be using more than one of the choices above.

VisiCalc was the first application that made a serious case for general business use. It sold more computers to more businesses than anything.

(See also: Lotus 1-2-3 and Appleworks.)