Nothing like going to one website on one occasion, only to have it come up first, every time you begin to type the URL for a site you visit every day.

Or, having an article you read three months ago appear in the drop-down, but not the one you called up three times that day.

DEFCON 11 would be a state of peaceful tranquility unlike anything the world has seen since the dawn of humanity.

You're looking for DEFCON 1.

Uh, no. We have domestic service. You can get charters to pretty much anywhere in the eastern Arctic from Iqaluit as well.

Some military flights to CFB Alert do pass through Greenland, but aside from that....

Not always useful in the Canadian Arctic. Pack ice sometimes extends for miles out to sea. It's a maze of 3-10 metre ridges that are an absolute bitch to navigate. Trying to pull ammo and supplies through on skis would be absolute torture. Hell, just crossing on a snowmobile through the pack ice on each side of the bay in Cape Dorset (maybe a kilometre and a half) left me sweating like a horse in -25 degree weather.

There's not a lot of pack ice on the old Finnish/Soviet border....

How utterly uncromulent. What you're describing is clearly an insoundenator.

What are you talking about? This is the absolute bleedingest razor edge of science! Science, I say!

First, you'd need some kind of sonic waveform manipulation device, capable of turning mere electronic impulses into sound. Think of the ramifications of this! It's literally earth-shattering!

And then, you'd have to had a device that responds to auditory stimuli, transmuting sensory inputs into purest energy and then making sense of the electron stream! I need more exclamations points for this! Here!! Take these!!!

And finally, before we decide just how many Nobels we want to award (I know, I know: all of them), they would have to create some means, not only of MOdulating the signal, but DEModulating it as well. What brave new world is this, to have such inventors in it!!

As the great Thomas Huxley said, on reading Darwin's Origin of Species, 'How very stupid of me not to have thought of this before.'

If it had been a freeway, the property owners would have been told to take a walk.

I'll respectfully disagree, as I think the shift had more to do with the fact for most users, everything changed at home.

For years, most people had a cheap candy bar / flip phone, or at most, an expensive candy bar / flip phone. All phones were pretty dumb and very similar. Remember the RAZR? It was The Thing for a while, but looking back, it wasn't really that much different from everything else.

The hardware was sexy, but the software was horrible. Nobody liked the OS, nobody thought the phones were responsive, etc. It's essentially what the more vitriolic anti-Apple folks claim to be true with the iOS ecosystem. Except that in this case, it was true. There wasn't much to redeem the phones beyond the case. It was exactly the same garbage people had been force-fed for years.

At the same time, millions of people had BlackBerry phones provided by their employers. They offered email that worked and calendaring that wasn't a step below some CP/M program from 1980. (Seriously, did anyone actually use the calendar applications on those old consumer phones?)

While it was great to have email anywhere, it wasn't enough to shift the market away from the run-of-the-mill consumer devices and over to smartphones. At least not en masse.

Then the iPhone arrived. Suddenly people had phones that did a whole bunch of things people wanted to do and did them a whole lot better than their corporate-provided devices. While it had weak support for the features corporate IT demanded, it was immensely popular on the home front. The candy bars and flip phones got wiped out.

Customers went from owning a terrible phone for personal use and a fancy phone for the office, to owning a fancy phone at home and one at the office that seemed - quite suddenly - rather archaic. Rock solid, but... quaint.

Then Android hit the market. The iOS app store opened. The momentum had firmly shifted to the consumer side of things.

BlackBerry was lethargic in responding. Famously, they reacted to the iPhone launch with disbelief. They literally believed the feature list was a lie, so they didn't worry about it.

Even after reality hit them, BlackBerry's handsets were just more of the same. They admitted to not even knowing how many models they were making. Their tablet didn't even have email. In 2010. It made them look ridiculous. Especially in light of the fact email has always been BB's bread and butter.

Meanwhile, iOS and Android kept improving their corporate IT support and allowing third parties to rollout all kinds of management solutions without interference.

Executives carried iPhones and Androids and started wondering why they had to carry two phones.

Corporate IT people did the same. Sure, they were annoyed that they couldn't get the same crazy granularity in security on non-BB devices, but BlackBerries were looking more and more like the typewriter stuck in the corner of the office. It worked, but you didn't use it unless you needed to... and why was that thing still even around anyway?

BYOD was the final nail in the coffin. Penny-pinching execs eyes lit up when they saw the possibilities of not having to buy handsets anymore. Their iPhone and Android using employees could simply buy their own phone, with their own money!

BlackBerry's decline was due to a fundamental shift in the way people use phones and the failure of the market leader to recognize that fact until it was far too late. Had they mobilized on Day 1, I think they could have rolled-out BlackBerry 10 by the end of 2009. In which case, things probably would have been far, far different.

Honestly, it kind of reminds me of the home computing wars. The IBM PC arrived in 1981 and wiped out the entrenched CP/M market within a couple of years. Apple showed up in 1984 with an entirely different approach and snatched-up its own sizable segment. Commodore and Atari rolled out their own new platforms with strong niche appeal a bit later.

For years, Microsoft and Apple jostled for double-digit marketshare, while Commodore and Atari scrambled to claim whatever was left in their wake.

The smartphone market we ended up with Apple > Android > BlackBerry > Microsoft. The first two being incredibly strong, while the latter are struggling to justify their own existence.

The big difference here is that in the home computing wars, what people used at work eventually ended up being what they used at home. Here, it's the opposite.

That's an interesting way to put it, but there's some truth in the statement. Essentially, many struggles we're involved in right now, from ISOC v ITU to Manning/Snowden v Secrecy, from Apple v Samsung to SOPA/PIPA v The World... all of these derive from the impact of sharing, a thing that many aspects of our respective cultures protect us against. The mere presence of the internet implies that, by giving them away, we do in fact lose our differences. And that is the very essence of subversion.

Dude, what the fuck?

wget is a web client - you know, like the one you're using to read this comment. It bears watching just like any other web client bears watching.

Now, one could argue it might profit them more to pay attention to what data they make available to web clients.... But that would be all... I dunno, sensible.

How dare you compare Apple users to such crass, capitalistic attention whores!

Sent from my iPhone

Dude, just ignore this guy. Of all people who have the right to indulge in a good, old-fashioned 'get off my lawn' rant, Dave Winer ranks last. This is the man who, for our sins, gave us XMLRPC and SOAP, paving the way for the re-invention of... well, everything, in a web browser.

Port 80 died for this man's sins....

I bet you're blaming Google for this.... :-)

Thanks for the insight, Yoda.

All my base are belong to you now. :-)

But this is like telling you: "Since a lot of parents fail to account for the true cost of raising their future children, you have ten years to come up with every penny you'll spend for the first 18 years of their lives, their college tuition and their retirement. Anyway, congratulations on graduating high school!"