Terms like this and mandatory arbitration clauses should be illegal. It's a very slippery slope to when people can forgo their legal rights, and we're already slipped too far.

This is something that doesn't get noticed enough. You can talk about "Drill baby drill", "global warming is a myth", etc. all you want, but at the end of the day, it is wildly unwise to have our entire economy based around one technology. We are much better equipped to handle change if we're diversified.

We've seen oil prices spike too many times not to know better by now.

Maybe the ads don't effect many users now, but that's how they get their foot in the door.

Remember the Xbox 360 dashboard when the system first came out? Now look at it. You can barely see the screens you want to use, because everything is cluttered with ads.

Yeah, I'm a Minnesotan, so I'm all too familiar with the cold weather problems. But I can still appreciate innovation, even if the solution doesn't work for everyone (yet?).

I was hoping to purchase a Nexus 4, and was very disappointed that I can't get one for Sprint. After a little research, I came across this article explaining the lack of LTE: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/29/3569688/why-nexus-4-does-not-have-4g-lte

In short, blame your greedy carrier.

I can appreciate your monopoly concern, but I think you're missing the obvious. If Google gets more control, it means that the carriers have less control.

Carriers and phones need to be 2 VERY separate entities. Google is pushing for that openness and separation. They are not asking for their own set of locks and restrictions. So, if Google wins this, it stands to reason that more manufacturerswill be able to build open devices.

I think the screen size is a reflection of the market. People are migrating towards phones with larger screens. For example, I'm guess that the Samsung S2 and S3 owe their success, at least in part to their large crisp screens. I'm not saying that 4.7" hasn't gone a little too far for the average user, but I bet that screen looks a lot prettier than the competition.

Personally, I have huge hands, so my next phone will be humongous. I avoid texting because I can't help but hit like 5 characters at once. I'm even considering the monstrously large Note 2.

It's not that someone is making a profit. It's that all of the major phone companies are working together to make phone prices ridiculous. Without contract, you're looking at: $649/16gb, $749/32gb, $849/64gb.

That is one hell of a mark up.

I guarantee that people would be rushing to stores a little slower if it weren't for the 2 year contract "discount". It seems a little fishy that all of the major phone releases have similar pricing and, generally speaking, the phones are locked to one provider. It reeks of collusion.

You mean, a whopping 1,029 people might not be an accurate poll of a country with 314 million people?

I've noticed more and more games are requiring a 1 time use only code to play. For example, EA NHL12 requires you to enter (which is a complete pain in the ass on an xbox) a 16 digit code to play any on-line modes. Essentially it makes the game worthless for re-sale.

So for those of you siting Steam's reasonable prices as "the system works" I disagree. EA dominates a VERY large portion of the gaming market, almost entirely the sports game genre. They have no intent on playing nicely. Yes I can boycott them (which I largely do), but that is LOT of games to boycott.

I had a Pre, and and loved the OS. It was a work of art, and I still think it's more intuitive than anything else available today. Unfortunately, Palm cheaped out on the hardware. The phone scratched at anything more than a gentle breeze, and the plastic began falling apart in a couple of weeks let alone 2 long years. Had Palm worked with HTC to put Web OS on some decent options, the company might be in an entirely different place today.

Its not just giant ships that are a problem. Planes, recreational boats, and even lawn mowers spew largely unfiltered exhaust into the air too. I never understood why the U.S. is so strict with car emissions, but so lax on other things that make significant contributions to air pollution.