Yes, it's "giving up", but I think it's better to have T-Mobile's kind of capping (where speed gets reduced) than a nice little surprise on your bill with per-GB (or whatever the "over the bucket" bucket size is). It means your bill stays predictable, which is what most users want. If it's slow, it's not a problem for most users, annoying, but not a problem

What I'm curious about is why do they re-activate the network per state.
As of right now, just California and a few New England states seem to be "online". One server per state? Sounds a bit odd.
Oh and the map is stored on Flickr. For a moment there I thought someone hacked their blog system too, and just posted faked-up "we're about to go live again" message.

Sounds pretty much like warning system for earthquakes, that shows up as an urgent message on practically all phones in Japan.

The back-end is still probably going to be SMS/MMS based (FCC document vaguely mentions the future ability to send audio/video with these messages).
As long as it's not over-used (say, blasting everyone with "flood warning" messages every time there is a flood warning would be kinda annoying -- I already know that as soon as it rains, everything in my county is under "flood warning") it would be fine.

Alas, Netflix won't be able to save cult shows. Mostly because it would eat up all of their cash with dubious return.
Unless ratings are wildly underestimated, $10 a month won't cut it to make anything more advanced than a talk or "reality" show with no special effects

Patiently awaiting a clever hack that will allow storing any data there instead of just music.
Documents in MP3 wrapper? 50Gb free storage anywhere? Sweet :)

Sure, as soon as you get global warming effects in the form of floods or snow or drought in your apartment, your WiFi coverage will suffer tremendously :(
Frankly, when the roof is missing, people tend not to get too upset about bad WiFi reception.

For normal outside activities just use cell 3G/4G signal :)

What are they, trying to write their own web server from a scratch?

Besides, they will probably get an earful from the "security companies" they have hired, because it implies that even after all the audits not all security holes were found.

Per Steam support article the saves won't be compatible, which kills primary advantage of linking your PSN and Steam accounts. Yes, you will be able to play on PC/Mac and PSN. No, your progress won't be tracked, so you'd have to play them independently, not just picking up where you left off on PS3. Hopefully with time they will resolve this problem (or make some sort of PC/Mac utility that will convert the save data).

Some other Steam games (i.e. Torchlight) also have this limitation when you go from Mac to PC -- saves don't work cross-platform, which is a bit pity.

So, one step closer to "buy once, play everywhere", but not there yet :)

I think the really important aspect is if users actually remember/care about the version number of browser.
Do they know it's Firefox 3 (16.6?) or Firefox 4?
I don't think Google ever advertised the version number in any significant way.
It's always "Download Google Chrome", not "Firefox 4, Free Download".
If Firefox moves away from major version numbers completely then yeah, call it 5-6-17-293-whatever. It's "Firefox"

Oh well, 40 million bucks (40-50 estimation from this bloomberg article) doesn't buy much of a wall these days I guess.
I wonder how many times did they have to re-write it from the scratch, what amount was spent on "market studies" ("Would you pay us $50 a month of online access? No? Whyyyy?") and how many pennies were spent on actual QA.

Just wondering...

has already decided to end daylight-saving time.
Because "power savings" from this back-and-forth are 0.2%. And hassles from switch time are simply not worth it :) Heck, Arizona lived without DST without problems...

I thought they ported Java onto Javascript/HTML5. You know, so there'd be an emulator of a java that runs emulator of PDP that runs a game.

And the whole thing is inside of a Virtual box, that is installed on top of an instance running inside of a cloud :)