Like the outrage about unions doing the same thing for the past decades? I dont think its right in either case. But if a union can form a PAC and donate to and lobby candidates/elected officials, its not any different for a company to do it too. Personally I'd rather see neither allowed...

As long as a Republican isn't in the White House? I suppose you have read all the new NSA directives since Obama has been in office that have upped the standard? Or are you referring to that time Obama signed the extension of the Patriot Act. Definitely higher standards there.

Its the same from both sides, don't obscure the truth that the gov in general is running around destroying privacy and other rights while people fight about what side of some random carpeted aisle the idea came from...

Expect that phones and all other "transmitting" devices (among other things) are completely banned from secure areas. If you carry a phone around in a SCIF you have bigger problems than the Steve Jobs tracking file.

Not true. See here: http://www.bgr.com/2011/01/19/verizons-htc-thunderbolt-will-support-simultaneous-voice-and-data-over-lte/

The first iteration of LTE will support this. The current issue with LTE is there is no standard for voice calls over it yet. So its data only and you make your call using the other side of the network. Just like how on VZ now the "3G" portion (EVDO) is data only and you still make a voice call over the 1X side.

This is happening to me on Chrome (Win or Mac) and Safari....

There are a couple of instances where this sucks for me. I have a Droid X as my personal phone

The worse is when your GF is yammering on and on about whatever and you don't have a data connection to play poke or check the scores or otherwise entertain your brain

Not that I disagree with this being slightly stupid but...

I don;t see a difference between your statement that buying Wintel meant x86 compatible HW and saying Quadroid means buying ARM HW. And if Intel had suddenly switched all its CPUs to some other arch, it still would have been Wintel. Because that meant more than the specifics of the HW.

Just becuase you say Intel doesn't give you an idea of the HW either. Is it 1 core or 8? Does it have hyperthreading... how big is the cache? Blah blah.. some exact thing as "Quadroid".

I would argue that everything you need to know is NOT in the name of the OS. Someone says "Android" and I still dont know what it is. Is its 1.6, or 2.1? Or do I get lucky and get 2.2? Is it a vanilla Google built, or is it HTC or Samsung or Moto screwing with the UI. Do I still get the stock apps, or am I stuck with the HW manufacturers apps?

Then lets add in carrier specific BS. Am I stuck with VZ crap I can't uninstall on top of Moto apps?

I would say better names would be VerMotoid, or HTCdroidmobile, or SamTTroid. The CPU is the least of the issues with android phones at the moment...

I know.. I've simply giving an example of an interesting way Altera lets you customize some of their IP. The Atom has an Intel core and an Altera FPGA... im doing some wishful thinking that maybe you would get some level of access to the CPU like you do with the NIOS.

FPGAs are useful as the actual digital circuits are re programmable. So you could theoretically patch your CPU and change the physical functionality of at least part of it. This would lead to all sorts of nice customizations.

One interesting aspect of the Altera soft CPU (NIOS), is that you can add custom HW directly into the execution unit, basically making your own HW instructions. Then you can generate an assembly instruction for it and use it right from your code. This lets you do nifty things like build a custom piece of HW to implement some arcane computation that is specific to your particular use of the HW and have it built right into the CPU. Wonder if there is this sort of setup here.. that would be pretty nice.

www.altera.com/literature/ug/ug_nios2_custom_instruction.pdf

.. the 3G unit is modular in the iPad (unlike a phone's, which is integrated with the radio)...

The 3G module IS a radio. The iPad #G baseband chip is the Infineon X-Gold 608, according to the data sheet it supports HSDPA, WCDMA, and EDGE. This is the same chip that could be used in a phone to make calls.

There is not "probably" about making a CDMA version. You just need a CDMA chipset instead of the X-GOLD 608 and you would need different drivers in iOS to support the different chip. But I would suspect there is a very clean interface in the code that makes this easy. The dialer app isnt making calls directly to the radio or something. Look at how Android's telephony stack is setup. And look at how they have phones on CDMA and UMTS networks... this isn't difficult....