I come from Eastern Europe and I think that it is socially driven. Corruption is so prevalent in absolutely every aspect of life - from traffic tickets to simply buying something in the store. So "white collar" crime like this is socially acceptable.

It is most definitely not economically driven - in Eastern Europe there is a huge hunger for competent developers, so unless Russia is an exception (I doubt it), it is easy to find a legal well paying programming job.

Full disclosure: I left Eastern Europe a long time ago and I am not Russian, but I am extrapolating from my own country.

The "porno scanners"? Give me a break. You are so scared that somebody is going to see your naked body? Big whoop. What are you ashamed of? This is getting ridiculous.

While I personally do think that the TSA is ridiculously ineffective and this is security theater, I don't get why most Americans are so ashamed of their bodies. It is ... unnatural for lack of a better words. It reminds me of the idiocy surrounding Janet Jackson's nipple. The whole world was laughing. Duh, she is a woman - she has nipples. My mother has them too.

I remember in Europe little girls and boys as old as 5-6 years old used to run completely naked on the beach. Of course in the USA that would be considered "perversion", I guess. The perversion is in fact the exact opposite.

It isn't that, I think. The phone is ringing, but the screen remains black so there is no way to answer. Often I have another problem - it can't hang up; just locks up there and only removing the battery fixes it.

In a strange way it is by far the best phone I have ever had, and by far the most unreliable one :-)

I love my Nexus One, but I have to say the statistics are probably true. I have to reboot it a couple of times per week - the touch screen stops working, or the screen just turns black when I am receiving or making a call. Sometimes I have to resort to removing the battery. A co-worker with a Nexus One is having similar problems, so it is not that my specific device is defective.

As much as I hate Apple, my wife's IPhone 3GS hasn't had any problems whatsoever and she's had it for longer.

No, no, you don't understand. Microsoft does this because they care! Ask any Windows developer :-)

Seriously though, objectively speaking, no matter how ridiculous this technology churn seems to us looking from outside of the Microsoft universe, it does keep people perpetually employed. It feeds not only Microsoft but a huge ecosystem of businesses, consultants, IT experts, MCEs, support stuff, technical book authors, administrators, etc. It is great!

It may look inefficient, but if it was really inefficient, would it continue to exist and be successful in a market-driven economy? Well, of course market rules wouldn't apply if there was a monopolist in the room :-)

Just to show how objective I can be, the constant API churn of the Linux kernel acts in much the same way. And it sucks.

Sigh. Few people actually realize this, but Google can't possibly do it even if they wanted.

Each different phone has different custom hardware. That requires a different kernel, different drivers, etc, etc. Google couldn't possible push an update to any hardware except its own - Nexus One and Nexus S. There is no standard for phones like there is for personal computers. Google would have to maintain and test different Android distributions for every one of the (hundreds?) phones out there. Absurd.

When you buy a phone from a manufacturer (Samsung, HTC, Motorola, whatever) it is that manufacturer's responsibility to update your phone. If you don't like their update policies, don't buy from them. The market should work. And if people don't care (which is apparently the case), why should the manufacturers?

Sadly, Google gets blamed for something which is outside of their control. It is like blaming Linus Torvalds for me being too lazy to install the latest security updates on our company website.

Well, I am a Comcast customer (have been for several years) and I really don't have issues, especially in the last couple of years. Before that there were service outages for about an hour every week, which was annoying as hell. The speed is reliable 5up / 20down and I haven't ever hit any throttling or caps, considering that my usage pattern is hardly typical (remote access to different machines, shared document editing, VPNs, transferring large amounts of data over SSH, etc). The only time I remember needing a Comcast technician - when I moved in my current place - he was on time and did his job.

Of course that is just my personal experience, but it is the only one I have :-) It may depend on where you live - I am located in the Bay Area - but it bothers me to see Comcast constantly being vilified, when my personal experience with them has been consistently good, and as far as I can tell they are actually better than some other ISPs.

My only real complaint is that 5up/20down should cost like $10 a month, and it should be the only kind of service I need from Comcast :-) (With Netflix and, say, Vonage).

I don't understand this irrational hate. How is Comcast trying to destroy the Internet? They have clearly defined caps, they are one of the first trying to deploy IPv6 to consumers, they offer one of the best speeds. No, they are not perfect, and they are not cheap, but as an ISP they are better than AT&T, for example.

One of them is a monopoly in a couple of important areas, and using that monopoly to muscle itself via brute force in nearly every single aspect of computing (gaming, mobile, cloud, etc) - guess which one?
Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).

I think your suggestion makes a lot of practical sense. I doubt many people will actually understand and appreciate it though. Judging from the other comments they don't - it is actually quite shocking how negative most of the replies are. That is why it has zero change of being adopted. Oh, well, at least a couple of years from now, when we are fucked and IPv6 is still nowhere, you can tell everybody "I told you so" :-)