I would say it could, in part, be the fact that some people recognize that cell phones and the internet are active only so long as things are running smoothly.

Disaster--either weather, social, political, or economic, can take them down in short order.

Ham is broadcast, so as long as you have some power you can send your message out to potentially hundreds, or thousands, of ears.

The other part for me is that cell phones, mobile data, GPS, etc have all become so simple, so inexpensive, and so common, that that there is simply no excitement or feeling of being on the cutting edge anymore with these devices... 10 years ago GPS in your hand was "wow, check that out"... having a mobile data connection "woah, you can get on the web from here??"... having a handheld computing device, like the old Zarus, was "wow that runs Linux?"... now everyone can walk into their local store and have all that and more for what passes as a reasonable price...

As old tech as ham may seem to be, for me it still retains that feeling of "I'm doing something interesting"... Not to mention you're in a somewhat focused community of like minded individuals, not unlike being a member of a topic-specific internet forum.

...spend years maintaining decades old code, never really getting to build anything yourself, gaining no new or relevant experience to so called cutting edge... probably working with derelict ancient hardware as well...

The trouble is that the companies that want to maintain Cobol systems are typically CHEAP companies... insurance companies, banks, etc... these people won't spend a dime on IT unless it returns a quarter or is absolutely necessary to operating the business.

I applied for a job like that 10 years ago at a life insurance company keeping their mainframe running and linked to newer processes... I was a relatively new college grad, 2 years out and working for a semi-conductor company... I remember thinking it would be great job security (because my industry tended to be steadily being outsourced to either India or China, and still is)... but then I heard their wage... it was $10K less than the lowest offer I had received anywhere else 2 years prior... I know a few people who work there, they were telling me about how great it was to work there because they receive a 3-4% raise every year... yeah that's wonderful, except that after 10 years you're earning what I was making my 2nd year out of school...

Good stuff, thank you for posting. I've been backing up in a similar way using Thunderbird, I agree it's sometimes flaky, but organizing into folders/labels seemed to be working--however maybe I'm missing something and don't know it.
 
...now backing up Calendar, Contacts and Documents... not quite as simple?

...and the other big issue of course is that if you are using your actual Gmail address you'd better start changing things fast.

...or how about Google Voice? I ported my 10 year old number there, if that were cut off it (no more forwarding or VM) I would be royally screwed...

The more I think about it, I have all my eggs in on basket and that's not good! :)

I think the point is, if you are already paying $6/day for a latte, can you really claim to be outraged over a $6/mo increase for a service like Netflix that many people use quite extensively?

Frankly I think it IS a good analogy... comparing something as overpriced and superfluous as a latte is the perfect thing to compare a service like Netflix to. Sure, you don't NEED either one of them, but which one provides you more enjoyment over a given period of time?

...or in my case a reduced customer.

I was happy paying $10/mo for unlimited streaming and 1-DVD at a time, the thing is that I almost never cycled DVDs, the one I have now was shipped to me back in April, and the one before that was from 2010.

For customers like me they had next to no cost for the DVD portion of my account, yet they were getting the $2/mo. Now they are making $2/mo less off people like me.

For their sake I hope their number crunching works out because they will have a number of customers who opt to pay LESS money each month, but possibly cost them less then the $2/mo... they will have people like you who cancel... and they will have a few who agree to the extra $6/mo...

I've been a customer since 2006, I enjoy their service, but in all honestly I have no particular loyalty to their brand. If Amazon's streaming service offered as much content as Netflix I'd seriously consider using them exclusively. Or, if my cable provider offered the same content as Netflix Watch Instantly, even with a $7-10/mo fixed fee, I'd probably go with them just for the sake of being able to watch on my TV w/o switching inputs from the cable box.

I see that as the make or break for the great Netflix hype--if they can partner w/ a cable provider to provide the streaming via the cable STB and for an increased monthly fee, that will explode Netflix's potential even beyond the current hype. If they can't, well, then it's just a matter of time before someone dethrones them or they find themselves in a sea of copycats.

What they did BEST was the mail order DVD biz and that's what allowed them to kill the Blockbuster and Walmart competitions, those other guys simply couldn't do it as efficiently as Netflix. Well, now it's just a bunch of servers and a UI. Much easier to dethrone that.

ugg... to...

I was thinking it sounds like "fire those involved and make it very clear too all remaining employees that those involved were fired and are unlikely to get another job in the medical field after being terminated for a HIPPA violation...

...HUD adds cost/complexity to build and repairs, but isn't necessarily perceived by the general public as that great of a feature (maybe just because not enough people have experienced it?) ...When it really comes down to it, how often does the average driver actually look at their speedometer (when they haven't just passed a cop)? ...showing the current radio station is nice, but with the proliferation of HD radio, satellite, CD text, iPods, etc, suddenly that's an awful lot of data to be putting into the driver's field of view, whether or not it's slightly opaque.

We had this same problem in the 1950s and 60s... of course back then not EVERYONE drove like an idiot, so it wasn't so bad.

Mass transit or whatnot is clearly superior to an infinite number of monkeys driving cars at the same time.

On paper that seems correct... until you find yourself waiting in a queue with those monkey's to get onto a train/bus/subway which is already full of those monkeys and piloted by a monkey (or a computer programmed by monkeys)... suddenly you find yourself saying, I'd rather sit in traffic for an hour then next to these monkeys.