It wasn't really discontinued, since it was never really launched.

Frankly it's something lots of other manufacturers could learn from - even when you're ready and about to launch, if you realize the product is below par it's better to count your loses than to launch something substandard.

Not many people even *provide* 2G anymore, and not anyone who has 2G is going to be posting on slashdot.

I live in a US city of 100,000. I can get 3G coverage in a circle with a radius of around 3 miles. Beyond that, I can go 30 miles in any direction and have 2G coverage only.

Your idea that nobody provides 2G coverage is simply wrong. It's widely provided and is the default for many.

Your sentance doesn't really make sense, so I'm not sure what you mean.

If someone doesn't have a data plan, or is romaing and doesn't have access to data, what are your suggestions? There are other 411 services, but I haven't found one as fast or as accurate as Google's was.

Similarly, the SMS service provided an alternative way to conduct a simple google search. It wasn't a substitute for Google, but if you needed a number for the hotel you're staying at, or for the restaurant you're meeting someone at, it was a great tool.

Even if you do have data access, 2G is still common across much of the U.S. and frankly either of those two options was often quicker and more reliable than waiting for pages to load if you were in an area with poor coverage.

This is not about relying on these services, it's about appreciating them while they were available and recognizing that closing them removes a service that can't simply be replaced by a website - since their very existence was a recognition that the web is not always best.

It's quite disappointing given they already abolished the Google 411 service. There are still plenty of folk without data plans, or who find themselves roaming where they have minutes and text messages but no data.

I understand Google's desire to move the world forward, but often these interfaces were useful, and sometimes they were they only interface available.

The idea that this is down to focusing on other products really doesn't wash. The products were both stable and likely taking almost no resources to maintain. If they did need anything to support them, I doubt it would be beyond the capability of an intern.

Regarding diagrams in kindle books, this is a pervasive problem. I have purchased several academic texts that have been unusable due to the low resolution.

One book had a series of tables that had been printed landscape in the original, still in landscape in the e-book version. You can imagine what this means, you can't just turn your phone or tablet 90 degrees or it autorotates, so now you need to turn off the auto-rotation each time you read that book. What a pain.

Too many companies have tried to make e-versions of existing titles on the cheap.

All ITSPs then should ditch SIP for PSTN trunking and move to support IAX2.

That would be to presume none of these patents implicate IAX2. After all, they're not claiming a patent on SIP, they're claiming patents on what SIP does. Providers would want to be sure IAX2 is not going to be found to be infringing before making the effort to migrate.

What would be better would be concerted work on having as many of these patents invalidated as possible. Hopefully the remaining ones can then be worked around.

even though the evidence now points to there being plenty of oil?

So let's say we take the high end estimate. 11 billion barrels of shale oil available.

Current US oil consumption runs around 19 million barrels per day. You just discovered enough oil to last the United States for twenty months.

I guess you might be correct, for very small values of plenty.

Thanks, this is pretty much what I figured. Ad revenue is tiny.

I imagine the likes of slate, which obviously has a huge number of readers, it's possible to make money. But equally it should be profitable to sell an ad-free version very cheaply and still make more money.

What had me curious was the shift to pay-walls for newspapers. Many seem to have gone from trying to be ad supported to being a dollar or several dollars per week. The leap seems to be huge. Of course it may simply be that they were hugely loss making before and this is really necessary to break even. I just know that I am not alone in simply ignoring many of these sites now, because I never visited often enough to justify dollars per month, but might have paid $5 per year.

So, I'm curious. What sort of revenue can you expect from adds from a user?

Say I use an app like the Slate.com app and read 6 articles a day. Plus the menu page, that's seven possible impressions. Maybe they'll be obnoxious and split some articles over two pages, so maybe 10 impressions. Let's say I'm religious about this app and use it every day. So you serve me 3,650 adverts per year.

Are you paid on ad views or clicks? What sort of revenue would you expect from one user who sees just shy of 4,000 adverts per year?

I'm trying to figure out what the value of a non-ad version of some popular free apps should be.

No one is ever denied care for lack of insurance in the emergency room.

That's simply not true. The ER does have to provide emergency care to stabilize a patient. If, however, you have cancer you can't just go to the ER for treatment. If you need an organ transplant to live you won't get one in the United States without some form of insurance/state coverage to pay for the operation and the ongoing costs. As your liver fails, you will be able to go to the ER to try and help reduce the toxins in your bloodstream or stem excessive bleeding. But once your life is no longer in danger and you are considered stabilized, you can be dischaged - even though the doctos know your only hope for survival is a transplant.

If you are older and break a bone, the ER will treat you and set the bone in a cast whether or not you have insurance. They won't however cover the cost of physiotherapy to help you walk again afterwards.

There are many who visit horpital emergency rooms and are denied the care they need to function or indeed to live.The largest for-profit network of hospitals, HCA, now demand up-front payment from ER patients if their condition is deemed to be not a true emergency.

I don't know, 11 year old routers might be pretty uncommon.

You can buy a wrt-54gl (the model with the original, larger, flash and ram) new from Amazon, today. Your netgear model is double the price.

While it took much longer for the UK to get a freedom of information act., it does seem much more powerful than that available in the US.

There's no cost for most inquiries (where the cost to the government body to respond is less than £600. It covers the bulk of public bodies. Anyone, anywhere on the world can use it. Replies are expected within 20 business days.

Combined with the Data Protection Act, and it seems UK citizens have far greater rights and protections when it comes to personal and public data than who live in the United States.

That's not to say the UK FOIA is perfect, far from it. Exceptions are too wide, and some government bodies can be obstructive. Still it has delivered useful information that would likely not have been discovered otherwise.

Can you explain this a bit more?

If the hackers didn't get the salt, and only have the salted hashes, and let's say the salt is, say, a 20 character random phrase using numbers, letters and symbols, what is the weak spot?

I'm sure many /. users are implementing systems like this using salted hashes, so if there's an inherent weakness (other than the salt becoming exposed) I'm sure it would be useful if there was a straightforward explanation.

I'm going to go out on a short, cynical limb and guess...

I think you may have guessed wrong. This page states that the costs of harvesting the organ is borne by the recipient/the recipient's insurance. If correct, it is very much in the interests of the hospital harvesting the donor organs for them to be used rather than discarded. There would be no economic motivation to harvest an organ that they know will not be used.

This is quite specific to liver transplants in the United States. Here most patients who die while awaiting a liver transplant have had an offer of a donor liver. 55% of patients who die have had the offer of a high-quality donor liver.

Increasing supply will always be a good thing, but there are huge issues to be addressed in making sure those on the US wait list for a liver transplant actually get a transplant from the available organ supply. It seems patients and doctors are turning down way too many good organs.

"Our data show that the current liver allocation system has provided one or more transplant opportunities to nearly all candidates before death/delisting. Therefore, simply increasing the availability of de-ceased donor livers or the number of offers may not substantially reduce wait-list mortality." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22841780