The US phone market is just going the way of the European phone market. You'll still be able to get a contract and subsidised handset if you want, but you can also get a SIM only deal and bring your own handset.

Not everyone can afford to drop £500 on a phone outright so there are many people who still go down the contract route.

The SIM only deals will be split into two. Either you top up the SIM at the beginning of the month and get a bunch of texts and data - or you can get a contract for your SIM which gives you a load of minutes, data and texts for a monthly fee.

Last time I had access to a network operators stats (4 years ago), customers on contract were about 51% of the total base. I wouldn't be surprised if SIM only is now the majority.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again; the metro screen is a full-screen start menu with vista/7 gadgets built in and expanded.

But this is a prime example of why Microsoft is still around after 20+ years, when so many other computing companies aren't; they're surprisingly agile for a large company. They'll try something, and if it doesn't work, they'll move on.

They demonstrated this back on the 95 era, when in the space of six months, they went from 'internet, schminternet' to 'internet! internet! internet!' and they're demonstrating it again.

Soldier: Holy shit, the enemy is infiltrating our network wirelessly and shutting down our shit!

Commander: Soldier, initiate contingency plan 'unplug the fucking AP'.

Soldier: Yes sir, unplugging the AP now.

Cylons: Well, shit. Oh well, kinetic bombardment doesn't need a willing receiver.

Yes and no... a few years ago when I got my first RFID card from Mastercard, I had to threaten to cancel the card if they didn't send me one without it. Two years later, when I got one from Visa, it was a 5 minute phone call and the new card (minus RFID) was in my inbox 3 days later.

A minor point, but one that people on Slashdot don't seem to understand, is that you don't actually get your cards from Visa or MasterCard at all.

They are payment processors and they pass payments from one bank to another. They ensure that the X banks in the world don't have to build connectiors to X-1 other banks just to let you buy something at a shop or online. Instead each bank just connects into Visa or MasterCard (or sometimes both) and then calls it a day.

The relationship you have is actually with your bank (in industry speak, your card issuer). They are the ones that decide what payment scheme to use and issue you a card for that scheme. They are also the ones that would decide whether or not to make available to you the option to have a non-contactless card. Visa and MasterCard have no say in what they give you.

Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

As the first poster said, -"Tech can be obvious but round corners can't?"

Worth noting that the practise of putting a proximity sensor in a touch screen phone to turn the screen off when you make a call was so obvious, not a single Windows Mobile phone launched by HTC, Samsung or Motorola in Europe prior to June 2007 had one.

How about making sure the leaders and other political figures of the party aren't ignorant egomaniacs with an agenda and a pocket full of bribe money. That is my first request.

Who other than ignorant egomaniacs are going to run for office? It's like saying that professional sports has too many gifted athletes.

When I read the title, I expected a calculation or rounding issue, or an internal range issue from built in components and not "dumb ass user didn't set the range correctly when averaging". That's not an Excel error, that's a user error - Excel did exactly what it was told to do.

Not to mention that if you use a reasonably recent version of Excel (at least 2003, which is nearly 10 years old), it'll warn you if you're doing something with a range of cells and it thinks you've missed a bunch of them out.

It's not perfect, but it's caught quite a few mistakes that I've made - which is far better than doing nothing.

Which is likely an extremely edge case.

Now, I doubt very highly that the 720 will *require* Internet access. But it could very well be that Microsoft's done the market research, crunched the numbers, and decided it's a good idea.