Rob,

Thanks for Slashdot and the impact it made in my career early on.

I read the whole post and everything after the hard numbers was irrelevant. The point was that if someone is living on that meager of an income, television service of ANY kind is the last thing they need to worry about.

Cable television isn't going to increase your earning potential unless you happen to fancy yourself the next Cake Boss.

For the record, I don't have cable. I use an OTA antennae to get the few shows we watch with the kids - mostly PBS. The rest we get from Netflix either streaming on the xbox or shipped.

"For some people that's half a week's take home pay."

If someone is only making $170 a week in take home pay, maybe they should stop paying for fucking cable. There are bigger priorities at that point.

I wish. I joked with my wife about the tax benefits of our two kids. Being a math geek, she started to do the math taking into account the new birthdays, additional holiday gifts..on and on. Let's just say it didn't end up much of a benefit in the fiscal sense.

You were presented with the confirmation when you installed the application. You should always read the requested permissions list before installing an application. If you're downloading a game, why does it need access to activate the phone? Legitimate developers will frequently leave comments and notes in the description about WHY they need additional permissions.

Actually I think it will be awesome for my 2 year old.

So yeah, it's pretty exciting.

Okay that blows because I don't HAVE a cable provider. I'm not even sure who services my neighborhood.

Kinect is exciting and I'll get it but the biggest announcement had to be the ESPN agreement. That's a cable killer right there depending on how blackout/regional rules apply.

If an application (enterprise or not) doesn't have a mechanism that handles stale connections(connection pool or not), it might not want to call itself an application.

Seriously.

The problem comes from the concept of "unlimited". Evidently, in legalese unlimited means "reasonable for x percentage of customers" and not "unlimited".

The cell phone companies should simply be forced to stop using the term "unlimited" in advertising. It's false advertising under every common use of the word "unlimited". If you can't provide true "unlimited" access on your network, don't advertise that you can. It's that damn simple.