The strongest password needs to be your email account.

Why? "I forgot my password". Doh!

+1: I currently pay $57.80/month. A bit hard to believe when I found out the vast majority of my friends' cell bill was north of $90 for the same service!

But for me TMo wins just as well for service. I travel for a month in europe every year so need a mobile phone. Really mobile, like world wide. TMo has been great making sure it all works. They will SIM-unlock a new contract when you need it for travel.

The huge variation in opinion here has a lot to do with the phone being the most personal of our digital critters. Lots of different requirements and ecologies.

But, man! Where in the world do normal folks get $80-90/month for a PHONE!

Give me a break, Oh Open Superior Life Forms.

Perform the following experience: Give a Samsung Tablet and an iPad to your Average Idiot, you know, the MARKET for these bright shiny toys. Ask them if they come from the same company. Easily 99% yes, right?

This is the real battle: Apple builds a great product, forces ATT to their knees to have $15/month non-subscription plans, is about to come out with a world/universal phone that works on ALL networks, and basically takes the power from the lame cell carriers and brick dumb handset manufacturers. You know, innovation, right?

Then your basic we-make-anything manufacturer, no innovation just machine parts and chips, jumps in with a copy cat. BMW could have made these Android things.

So slack up know-it-alls, Apple really provided YOU with new freedoms from both the carriers and handset manufacturers who have been fucking you for years.

Lend, dammit!

So do it. Please.

You'd better hope not, you're slave to them already, especially by your being chained to gmail.

You clearly have not heard of our solution in the lab: use complex numbers for each octet. This expands the space of addresses to Great Big, although finite due to use of integer values of the real and imaginary part.

Yes, yes I know what you're saying: it takes more bits, right? Wrong. String theorists have applied extra dimensions to the octet encoding so as to only use 4 bits in this space, with the additional values residing comfortably in The Other Ones.

Sorry to have left you out of the loop, but we knew we could keep getting by with our current modification to IPv4 .. just add an i.

A definitely non-trivial problem is that different sites have different acceptable passwords. Some don't like special characters. Some don't like 12 characters.

+1 PKI

We had a local talk by folks who attended Google I/O this year. Several of us wondered where the heck Google is headed .. there seems to be little coherence in their offerings. Things don't seem to fit together. Wave was the first one discussed, it just didn't make sense. Apparently the attendees agreed, they grilled Google staff about this and got the answer that all google projects are small independent groups with little required synergy with the rest of the company.

This certainly lead me away from GAE, for example. I just don't trust them beyond gmail, search, calendar, maps and a few others. Not apps. Not GAE. Not Go.

Not to say google's "ecology" is lousy, but I certainly wouldn't risk a customer's project on it.

Do what MIT does: teach Programming first .. via Scheme!

Look, there is no "right way" to start. MIT presumes you need to learn about what programming is all about first. Then they teach Java, C/C++, MatLab and so on later on in engineering and science classes. They created a nifty system, Processing(.org), that takes the sting out of Java and uses it to show designers how to hack.

Kinda interesting that Google limits themselves to 4 languages:
C/C++
Java
JavaScript
Python
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/06/rhino-on-rails.html
"One of the (hundreds of) cool things about working for Google is that they let teams experiment, as long as it's done within certain broad and well-defined boundaries. One of the fences in this big playground is your choice of programming language. You have to play inside the fence defined by C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript."

And for GAE, JavaScript and Java/Rhino look great.

I think JavaScript is due for a huge burst of popularity as soon as folks "get it". JS on the server and on the client, and JSON for data/ajax. Brilliant. But it takes a lot to understand JS .. the Good Parts.