I get your point, but just a detail, 1 million millimeters is 1km, not 1000km.

If you want that kind of excitement nowadays, try Google Cloud's documentation :) Some parts are excellent, some parts are just not there which makes debugging issues a challenge, especially since the error messages often are very generic making it almost impossible to filter down to good hits on Google or SO.

A good implementation (as many terminals I've tried in Europe) lets you insert your card/enter the pin while you wait for the cashier to enter the things you bought into the cash register. That is, they do their things as fast as they can, you do your thing in parallel.

Once the cashier is done, you see the sum and press "accept" with barely a second waiting time until it asks you to remove the card. You don't even need to wait for the receipt to be printed unless you want the printed copy.

Old style "sign terminals" in the US (haven't been for a while) forced you to sign once the cashier was done which should actually be slower. Has that changed in the years since I've been there?

Actually, it's one kilometer in 3 seconds, not 1/3.

Seems computers is the only area where the "I didn't mean to, and it's so complicated to secure things with this newfangled technology that I shouldn't have to" defense works though.

About 30 hours of reading with wifi on, a bit more with it turned off.

Available now in Sweden a few hours after Us availability, so may show up in a bit.

If you use ios 5 beta (3), the app will crash right away. Not that I can rightly complain with a beta service on a beta OS :)

Could just be so easy as Lodsys going after the small developers to force Apple to pay up. Going straight for Apple will probably drag out for ages in court, while going after the developers will have an immediate chilling effect and forces Apple to at least consider buying out the patent without much of a bargaining position.

I'm not sure how I became an astroturfer for someone not even mentioned in the thread before you just did.

I agree it's harder to violate the GPL than most commercial licenses, my point was that it's a bad idea to use _any_ license - FOSS or commercial - without knowing what you agree to by using it.

The limitations are usually there, just in different forms for different licenses.

However, you may be the target of SFLC instead. Harder to violate the licenses, but just saying using FOSS will just automatically solve everything isn't entirely true.

*phew* Until I saw that you were missing $, I was sure you meant Perl.

Not black at least, I've been roaming with various European model cell phones while visiting the US without any problems.

Indeed, not saying it's strange in that way. However, if you take a multi million users world wide system and basically shut down all marketing except in the US, you shouldn't be too surprised if your user base declines.

Not only that. AOL seems very US centric, the acquisitions they make (most striking example being ICQ) just seem to "stop existing" internationally.
ICQ was quite popular among the people I know (in Sweden), but since AOL bought them I've only ever heard of them in the context of being considered for sale or now being sold. The service works internationally for sure, but the little marketing I've seen for Live Messenger totally crushes anything I've heard about ICQ for years. In the context of the Internet, no news isn't good news. No news is abandonware.