Yeah, it was the final thing that pushed AT&T off the table for me.

Sprint is giving me 450 minutes a month, free nights and weekends, unlimited minutes to, and from any mobile phone on any carrier at any time of the day or night, unlimited data and unlimited voice / data roaming and unlimited SMS for $79 a month. Sprint roams on Verizon's network.

If you get a corporate discount through your employer, it comes out to exactly $77.90 after taxes (in California).

Is Sprint the super-fastest network ever? No. Is it bad? No. Is it worth signing the contract? Yes.

Your argument is flawed in that you're applying your own rural area's poor level of service to infrastructure that is not designed for the sticks.

The average car driver commutes alone. The average bus holds 50 to 100 commuters. Rush hour headways in many major American cities are 8 to 15 min, with buses running at full capacity.

This is why they deserve their own lanes, and signal priority. That bus waiting to cross an intersection is likely moving more people than all of the cars waiting at the light combined.

This post in picture form: http://consumerist.com/2010/06/how-much-street-space-car-vs-bus-vs-bicycle.html

Earlier versions of the iPhone have simple voice commands too. I never knew of anyone who used them. I'd imagine they were invaluable for the disabled though.

That being said, Siri's real strength is the ability to parse a sentence of natural-language speech and proceed with a multi-stage response. The kicker is that it's really just manipulating a few pieces of info that other apps use all of the time. The people you've texted recently, your address book, your current location, etc.

As annoying as Apple can be sometimes, I have to give them credit for taking a piece of advanced technology, and using it to bind together a bunch of things that already existed, and make them work better together as a unified whole.

- "Hey Siri, wake me up at 8:30 tomorrow"

Siri sets an alarm for 8:30am using the alarm tone you last used. You can specify AM or PM, but otherwise she'll assume you want to get up in the morning.

- "Let Lisa know I'll be late."

Siri figures you're probably trying to text the Lisa you message the most. She writes the text "I'll be late." and offers to send it.

If you've never texted any Lisa before, she'll ask which one you're talking about. She might ask the next few more times you try to text Lisa, and eventually stop asking.

- "Remind me to thaw the chicken when I get home."

Siri is aware of everything in your address book, along with your current location. An alert will pop-up when you get home telling you to "Thaw the chicken."

Again, nothing crazy advanced at work, except some really nice noise-cancelation features and better language parsing than we've seen on a phone before. The other ingredients have been in place for years. It's how they've made them function together that matters. Apple is less about selling you a long list of features, rather than a package that does a shorter list of things very smoothly. You're not talking to a phone, you're just talking. Not "Make new calendar entry. Doctor appointment. 10 am January 20th." but "Remind me to go to the doctor at 10 am on the 20th." It's a subtle difference, but an important one.

How people interact with their computers is just as important as what those computers are capable of.

That's not an elegant solution and a shoddy level of product consistency. It would never be implemented.

I guess all Android apps are free, and those non-DRM-ed AAC files Apple has been selling for years are magically not-portable.

From the Ars link:

Yeah, Siri is not really a bandwidth hog at all. 63KB is about the same amount of data needed to get you one image on one web page. Browse something as innocuous as a few news articles? Congrats, you've used more data than Siri will during an average day.

Sprint has come out and said that the average iPhone owner burns through 50% less bandwidth than the average 3G / 4G user on another platform.

Sprint's CEO was cited elsewhere saying that Android apps tend to be "more chatty" with the network, and the iPhone does a better job of offloading data to WiFi whenever possible. And the App store does its part too. If you try to download a large app over the cell network, it will throw up a little alert window and ask you to try to download it over WiFi instead. (Before you complain, that's a mandate from the carriers, Apple has been trying to raise the limit)

It's posts like these that distance users from the OSS movement.

People want solutions, not "LOL CODE IT URSELF LOL".

Congrats on working to marginalize open source.

Try working in broadcast media.

The autopilot is not bugged. The autopilot wasn't even active for over four minutes before the crash. The headline is completely misleading, as the autopilot shut down as soon as conflicting airspeed readings came in. The system recognizes that it is unsafe to have a computer flying when the computer is getting faulty data. Thankfully Airbus flight computers are pretty good about error-checking, as they detected the airspeed discrepancy and acted on it - by turning control over to the crew and telling them why.

The accident appears to have been triggered by a number of events:

- Faulty pitot tubes providing faulty airspeed indications.
- Weather radar that saw a little storm ahead, but not the big, fuck-off storm behind it until the pilots decided to fly through the small storm.
- An avalanche of data coming into the cockpit during critical moments. During an emergency, it can be difficult to avoid focusing on a few bits of data, while others slip by.

The storm was recreated in an Airbus simulator for multiple flight crews. Using data the flight computer sent back to the maintenance crews during the flight, they were able to trigger the same errors (Pitot tube failure and airspeed mismatches).

Every crew survived.

You would think that everything is stored and handled remotely when it's always a case of:

*press "Make a Deposit"*
*stare at a progress bar for 5 seconds*
*press "Deposit a Check"*
*stare at a progress bar for 5 seconds*
*insert a check*
*stare at a progress bar for 5 seconds*
"Would you like a receipt?"
*select a receipt type*
*stare at a progress bar for 5 seconds*
"Printing receipt!"
*stare at a progress bar for 5 seconds*
"Another Transaction or Take Card?"
*press "Take Card"*
*stare at a progress bar for 5 seconds*
*take your card back*
*screen blanks out for 20 seconds before the next person can do anything*

LOOKING AT YOU BANK OF AMERICA!