Nope, we had 3G before 3.5G and EDGE and GPRS before that.

4G shoudl get you 1Gbps when stationary and 100Mbps when on the move (in car or bus). Here, in developing Estonia, we get 21Mbps everywhere and in some areas (towns) 42 Mbps from 3.5G networks. It seems unfair, that you pay more to get less.

Is the decompression step of images in web hardware accelerated? I do know that videos made of jpeg frames can be decoded in hardware but do the browsers actually use the hardware? When I first heard about WebP I assumed Google is pushing an unified decoder architecture that would process all videos and images in hardware saving some precious joules while doing so. Never bothered to check it out tho.

Civ5 and Portal 2 are defenetely worth of the price.

You can't sell a steam account, it's pohibited. The reason is credit card frauds.

It might be simpler and operate on different basis. For example - valve gifted their entire catalogue of games to the participants of Portal 2 ARG who managed to get all 36 potatoes. They also cherry picked the 10 community leaders from the ARG and fly them over to Valve HQ and provided them with early access to portal 2. Essentially they created a bunch of torch bearers who will promote Valve in their respective communities. Another example could be a fan who e-mailed for an autograph and got disproportional response.

Don't be rude. Gabe is the nicest person in the industry, I wish there were more executives like him.

Not if you're creationist - for them Neptune revolves around the earth and hence the distance does not change much.

My point is that you have not had a war on continental America for ages. Now that Bin Laden brought the war onto your court the game has changed. The wiretapping and whatnot is necessary to keep the war at East Asia.

The World, however, is not black'n'white. I do agree that some of the privacy intrusions are not actually necessary.

Don't be such a pussy, it's not as bad as you think. While Chernobyl is not a healthy place to live there are people who work there day by day, year by year and are still alive. "Only" half of the emergency fire brigade, who were tasked of putting down the fire, died. And they got the worst of it while working above open reactor that's still critical.

Hydro-plant is much worse - a dam break at large hydro-plant has potential to kill millions of people. If a nuclear reactor melts down it kills few and people have time to evacuate. Some more people will have health problems but it's still far better than being dead.

May I remind you that you're at war. You should be happy that your house is not under bombardment.

Everyone knows PI squared is ten.

Good developer tools cost money. A lot of money. If you think that Apple or Microsoft make profit on this $99 then you're mistaken.
Don't be cheap and just buy those damn licenses if you're really interested or leave it if you aren't. There are far too many "me too" apps in android store diluting the value of professional made apps making the android worth less for developers and consumers.

I wonder why they ask the $5 for it. The XCode is worth thousands of dollars but apple chose to give it away for free. Comparing to the actual price the $5 is as good as free but creates a small entry barrier in sense I have to go searching for my credit card or iTunes store credentials. Maybe they want us to be all set for publishing once we get this XCode running on our machines making the iTunes account creation a part of installation process.

Not necessarily - I'm doing a PhD and have no plans to stay in academia. I do not expect to receive any direct benefits from the degree after I graduate, it's just something I like to do. The PhD studies are free in my country so why not take the opportunity.