I do think you're trolling, but I'll bite.

I didn't say the first thing about the costs of the cell phone companies -- they are really irrelevant to my point. The point is that people can run up basically unlimited unsecured debt, regardless of their ability to pay. This puts people in the bad position of choosing between paying an unreasonable amount of money for service, and defaulting on a debt (and having their credit history tarnished). Maybe the cell phone companies don't need to collect because the service didn't cost them that much, but they are clearly profiting off some people paying these ridiculous bills (or paying a discounted, but still ridiculous bill).

I've always thought that it would make more sense to have progressive fees for cell phone service. So you get a base number of minutes and after that, each block of minutes would be progressively cheaper until they were eventually free. I think they could have a single plan, but I can understand why they'd still want to have different base packages with different cost/minutes. So if you got the cheapest plan, your base payment would be $40 and unlimited usage would cost $120. If you got the base unlimited plan, it would cost $90 or whatever. This would still let the cell phone companies encourage people to estimate their usage and sign up for a more expensive base if they were more intensive users. But it still has a reasonable max for everyone. The fact that you can rack up thousands of dollars in charges, when the unlimited plan costs a couple hundred, is abusive (and should be illegal).

-Esme

4/10

It's insane that cell phone companies are effectively giving people $10,000 lines of credit (I've heard of cases where international roaming charges racked up that much in a month). At the very least, there should be an option to specify a maximum amount, where service is turned off if it goes over that amount, and I have to confirm that I want to continue service and understand how much it's going to cost to go over that amount. This would handle the vast majority of cases where people go way over because of international roaming charges, bandwidth overages, sending thousands of texts, etc.

I really don't understand why any discussion of a new technology that might possibly be used to limit children in any way is accompanied by an immediate assumption that only terrible parents would use it. This seems like a very simplistic false choice between total freedom and BOFH-style lockdown.

It seems much more reasonable to me to give children freedom appropriate to their age, but also use tech to limit that freedom where that makes sense. Of course technology is no replacement for supervision or for judgement. Of course any technological limit can be broken or circumvented by someone with enough time and patience. But that doesn't mean there is absolutely no place for using tech to enforce rules.

-Esme

This is really not that big a deal.

That's where you're wrong.

I already use adblock, and generally go to great lengths to remove as much advertising from my life as I can. So I'm already lost to you. I've known for years that you've been tracking people, selling the data to everyone, etc.

But this is so obvious that even casual users have noticed. The New York Times is running a big story on it. I really think that once everyone knows how sleazy and invasive the advertisers' practices are, revolt and regulation are much more likely.

I think you've got that exactly backwards:

Google currently makes billions being the middleman that helps everybody aggregate clicks into identities. If everybody's traffic was already associated with a globally-unique identity, then why would they need Google?

As it turns out, the video format isn't an issue for me -- I've already converted all my video to h264 and loaded it in iTunes, so all my video is already iPad compatible. It was a bit of a pain when I switched from my old format, but hasn't been an issue since. I downsampled some of my videos to save space (and because I couldn't tell the difference on the iPad or on my 720p TV).

I definitely wouldn't buy any video from the iTunes store unless I really didn't care about being able to use it in the future or on different devices (I think I bought a handful of TV episodes when I didn't want to wait for the DVD to come from Netflix). But this really isn't an iPad problem -- it's a MPAA problem, and anybody else that sold movies or TV shows would have the same DRM bullshit as Apple.

The other form factors (laptop/netbook and iPod touch) are completely out for the car -- a laptop/netbook can't be easily mounted in the backseat, and an iPod touch is way too small for two kids to watch together. Before the iPad came out, I had looked for a replacement for the DVD player, and found very few that would play video from SD cards, and none that had internal storage of any kind. So the options were either a DVD player with marginal support for playing video from an SD card, or a phone-sized device that was too small to bother with. I was leaning towards just not replacing the DVD player because those options really weren't appealing to me.

And for just a video player, I wasn't sold on an iPad either. It was a couple hundred bucks more than the DVD players. But when I realized it could replace our (admittedly aging and underused) laptop, then it made sense to me.

You say it's "slow", and I really don't know what you're talking about. It does all the tasks I need doing without any obvious slowness. I haven't compiled anything on it or transcoded any video, but then that not what it's for.

-Esme

OK, I'll bite:

I recently bought an iPad to replace an old laptop and a portable DVD player.

It's better than the portable DVD player because instead of carrying around DVDs, I can just load up movies from iTunes. I can rip the DVDs using HandBrake, and put them in iTunes, or I can buy stuff from the iTunes store. As a nice bonus, it's also a much better map in the car than an iPhone, because the screen is so much bigger.

It's better than the laptop because it's a couple hundred bucks cheaper than buying the new laptop we were considering. It can handle all of the same tasks we used the old laptop for (it was our living room computer which we mostly used for checking email, web browsing, etc. while hanging out with our kids, watching tv, etc.). It's also easier to use standing up, which is great when you mostly use the computer for only a minute or two at a time to lookup a recipe, read a few emails, check movie times, etc.

I was initially skeptical of the iPad because its limits are pretty obvious (like most tablet computers). But it fills a niche for me much better than a laptop would, and at a lower price.

-Esme

No -- 3D is just a less mature technology, and like sound and movies before them, it'll go through a fad phase before the novelty wears off and somebody gets around to using it to make art.

I think early access to stories and removing ads are big features some people would pay for. Customized searching and reporting, free/discounted classified ads, PDF/ebook formats for downloading to mobile devices, etc. I don't know if these add up to a viable business model or not, but I can see how they would be worth a modest subscription price to some users.

I think the bigger problem with news is that the internet (and on a smaller scale before that, cable) has divided the market so that instead of reading one newspaper, many users now read dozens of news sites. So asking $20/month from each user is now completely unreasonable. Maybe users feel like any given site is worth only $1/month. That's great if you're a blog with at most a handful of staff and some hosted webservers. But it sucks if you're a traditional newspaper with hundreds of staff and a rapidly declining readership.

The way things have been going the last few years, I suspect that a lot of the free high-quality news sites are going to go out of business, or be forced into larger and larger merged corporate entities. Maybe it'll be easier to setup profitable paywalls and/or premium services when there are only five news sites all under the same profit pressures. Or maybe it'll be easier to convince people to pay $20/month when they get a full suite of news, entertainment, sports, etc. sites -- in short when the conglomeration of internet content has turned it into TV.

-Esme

The local paper (Gainesville Sun) had a picture of the skimmer on the first day it was found:

http://www.gainesville.com/article/20100707/ARTICLES/100709681

Basically it looks like a thin bundle of electrical tape attached to the wire between the magstripe reader and the circuit board inside the gas pump -- completely hidden inside the pump cabinet unlike ATM skimmers.

-Esme

My wife has an iPhone and we're getting a 3G iPad, and I'm really pleased with this. For the iPad, I expect to use the 3G only occasionally, so being able to upgrade to 2GB for $25 seems like a better deal than unlimited for $30. My wife uses nowhere near 200MB a month, so she'll be able to cut her data plan price in half. I wish she could have the iPad data plan, instead of having to pay $15 for each 200MB if she goes over, but you can't have everything.

More importantly, I'm really glad AT&T has gotten rid of unlimited plans. Their 3G network is a finite resource, and a small percentage of users were using huge amounts of bandwidth to the detriment of all. If they want to keep doing that, they should pay more for it than normal users who just want to check email, browse websites, etc.

-Esme

This seems like the most likely outcome to me. Completely shutting off access to ARM chips to everyone else would kill ARM's business and lose Apple a lot of money.

But they could probably just give themselves priority, and then they would always have the newest chips, and everyone else would be a step behind. This would give Apple a competitive advantage, but probably not make everyone else jump ship.

...between making general-purpose computers that are great for creating content, and creating limited devices for consuming that content?

Sure, the iPhone, iPad and AppleTV aren't very good general-purpose computers. They don't have the same keyboard and pointing devices. They are limited to the walled garden of approved apps. You have to buy in to Apple's other products to get the most out of them, etc. But they are great at what a lot of people are using their computers for these days -- watching TV, listening to music, browsing the web, looking at photos, etc., etc.

I don't know anyone who could have an iPad as their only computer -- even Grandma needs to upload her digital pictures somewhere, and the iPad doesn't fit the bill. But it strikes me as a great computer for hanging out and casually consuming email/web/video/photos/etc. while talking to people, watching TV, etc. This helps content creators by increasing the way people can consume their content. And that obviously helps Apple sell more MacPros.

So the whole premise of this story is bogus: why would Woz be disappointed that Apple was making devices for content consumption. How is that at odds with content creation, which was always Apple's focus?

-Esme

Not much you can do with half a finger.

Wendy's would beg to differ.