Have you seen how much a maintenance contract (aka Health Insurance) on YOU runs?

At the rate we're going in the US, they can afford to put your Z-series hardware on your health insurance premium as an inexpensive rider.

The Android line is not a paid consumer product. It's a piece of middleware offered to phone manufacturers.

Wonder how long "Google Play Music All Access" will last? Compared to PlaysForSure (Microsoft), Zune Music Pass (Microsoft), and WalMart Music Download Service. Just having a big company behind it is no guarantee of success. Google has never had a successful consumer product that people had to pay for.

List of discontinued Google products.

Don't you mean CloudFlxr, or pyUrFramely?

The damned thing's immortal.

IBM has found the secret to everlasting life!

Surely, there is some money to be made here?

Look, you guys don't get it, do you? You never get this sort of thing.

Of course Flikr and Tumblr will mix well. They both end in a contracted 'r'.

It's pretty clear why you all aren't in business.

Despite all the noise, almost nobody is making money in "social". Even Facebook isn't very profitable, despite its size. The business strategy in "social" seems to be to give the service away for a few years, build a following, then crank up the density of ads until the users get fed up. Worked for Myspace, right?

Facebook traffic peaked about a year ago. Twitter is now exploring the user's threshold of pain with "sponsored tweets". This is robocalling in another form.

Basic truth: ads with search results are useful to users and effective for advertisers, because they're presented when the user is actively looking for something relevant. Ads on "social" are merely annoying because the user is looking at what their friends are doing.

OK, a fanboy from the Arduno cult has been heard from.

Back in 1979, Milton Bradley introduced the Big Trak. This was the first mass-market battery-motor-wheels-CPU toy 'bot. Since then, there have been more machines in that category and slightly above it, like Lego Mindstorms.

It's been three decades since the Big Trak. There hasn't been much progress above that level in mass-market devices. A Roomba is only slightly smarter than a BigTrak. Mobile phones, on the other hand, have advanced somewhat since the late 1970s. R/C toys have become much better, but most of that reflects improved batteries, and the good stuff is still at a rather high price point.

There's a new BigTrak from 2010. It has an optional camera and a WiFi connection, and will connect to an iPhone. It has the basic hardware to be an intelligent autonomous vehicle. But it's no smarter than the original BigTrak. If you want something as dumb as a BigTrak, you can buy one of these. No assembly required. Ages 6 and up.

Here's what's possible today at the hobbyist level: an autonomous paintball robot. Runs a maze and hits targets. Uses a Kinect as a sensor. Has 2D SLAM; builds a map of its environment. That's what new products should be doing.

"Public documents? At a low cost!? Guffaw! Let them eat Kickstarter!"

You've got the wrong burr up your butt.

The money we give to large corporations though 'incentives', policies, military support, unneeded contracts and a host of other subsidies makes all of those 'welfare queens' that you're so worried about less important than a rounding error.

Let the little stuff slide. Deal with important things first.

And look at where you are now. Sunday morning. Slashdot.

Seems like you've gone downhill there, old boy.

You don't need a touch screen all you have to do is push hard enough to separate the contacts.

Some managers failed their basic economics classes and don't understand "economy of scale". You can do things in a large company that are not affordable for a small one. But anyone who thinks that giving up completely and throwing in the towel is an appropriate response doesn't deserve to be in a leadership position.

There are already dumbots in that range. Any new robot should come with at least an Allwinner ARM CPU ($7) and a camera as standard. That's enough for some vision processing and at least 2D SLAM. The hardware to put some real smarts in a little bot is now cheap and there's enough open source software available to get started on making it smart.

What's even more heartwarming is the AC techs kind and gentle transplanting of live ants into the warm and cuddly confines of the electrical boxes.