The t-mobile price you compared against doesn't include unlimited text. The t-mobile plan is actually $15 more expensive for one line. For two lines, t-mobile would be $40 more expensive. I don't text much, but for someone who does the price difference is significant.

The cards may be issued by another bank, but the terms of the card will often be better. My credit union gave me a card at 8.9% even though I had no credit history. Even if my local bank had been willing to issue me a card, the interest rate would have been at least 23%.

A jailbroken iphone does not usually slow down when an application runs in the background because it doesn't support virtual memory. In my experience, the phone frequently runs out of memory and kills your background applications. There isn't much point to running pandora or iradio in the background if safari is going to kill it to free up memory to load slashdot. I think that the multitasking in OS 4 would work better on the 2g iphone because the OS would know that pandora was playing music and try to kill mail and ipod before killing pandora.

I believe that Switzerland has heroin injection sites. People with existing addictions can buy a dose of heroin at a reduced price and have it injected by a nurse. The clinics sell heroin on a sliding scale to eliminate the need to steal to pay for drugs. Because getting drugs from the government is cheaper and safer than on the street, drug dealers don't sell heroin.

In this situation, heroin is easier for addicts to get, but harder for new users to get. Because heroin users don't have to hide from the government, they are less afraid to seek treatment. The injection centers even offer referrals to treatment programs. I believe that overall heroin use is down since the program started.

If people were less uptight about drugs, we could do the same thing here. Unfortunately, a program to give free heroin to addicts wouldn't pass here. It doesn't matter that keeping addicts from robbing citizens to pay for their addictions is better for everyone.

The problem with the news industry is that the Associated Press sells their content to newspapers very inexpensively on the assumption that they can spread the costs among many newspapers that operate in different cities. This assumption was fine before the internet. When a small paper with no national reporters can post the AP feed on their web site, they ensure that nobody wants to pay for news. This will cause a massive consolidation in the newspaper industry. After the consolidation, a subscription to AP will cost much more because there will be fewer newspapers to share the cost.

Since giving away the AP feed on the internet is going to massively increase the cost of an AP subscription, the AP should start charging a massively higher rate for newspapers who give AP content away on the internet. Newspapers could still give stories away for free, but only stories that their own reporters wrote. This change should drive readers to the newspapers with the best journalists instead of the newspapers that leech off the AP and provide no original reporting. Hopefully, this would allow newspapers to focus on using quality reporting to sell news to readers instead of inexpensive reporting to sell readers to advertisers.

If I understood correctly, drm is to prevent everyone from copying the game and then immediately selling it back to the game store. If everyone did this then each store would only buy a handfull of copies of the game from the publisher and repeatedly resell the few copies they bought. For example, a store might buy 20 copies from the distributer and then buy them back and resell each copy 10 times each in the first week. While this is legitimate if the game is unplayable, it isn't legitimate if all 200 customers kept a copy and are still playing it. The publishers hope that drm prevents customers from copying the game and selling it back to the store until after initial rush of sales ends and they have hopefully made a profit on the game.

Of course nobody would buy $6,000 at one time just to fill an ipod, but over time people who love music will spend that much money over time. My wife and I have bought about 500 in the last decade. At $12 each, they would have cost $6,000 total. We didn't buy it all at once, we bought 4 CDs a month for a decade. Even though our whole music collection is only about 30gb, but I wouldn't feel bad about owning a larger ipod because buying music is about discovering and enjoying new things. If I only had a 30gb ipod, it wouldn't have room to add the new albums I find in the future.

While I understand that people don't want to sacrifice battery life by running lots of background applications, not all background applications kill battery life. By default the iphone runs Mail, iPod, Safari, and Phone in the background. Together all these applications take up about all the memory on the phone. If users could install more background applications, the phone would frequently run out of memory. Even with the default set of background applications, loading a large web page can kill the iPod application.

I would like to see iphone applications be allowed to perform minimal tasks when not running. For example, I want my todo list to update its emblem every morning to show how many tasks are on today's todo list. I would like to be able to set alarms on tasks in the todo list. I want to listen to internet radio while I use other applications.

These kind of things were all supported on my Treo. Background alarms for user installed programs were even supported on my old Palm IIxe with 8mb of ram and a 16mhz processor. There really is no excuse for not providing these features.

While the palm os was designed specifically to allow calling functions of programs that were not running in the foreground, emulating those features with a modern operating system should be easy. For example background tasks could be implemented with small programs that would be executed with tight limits on cpu and memory usage. The system could start these tasks one at a time to avoid using too much cpu. Applications like an internet radio client could be split into a background task that just played the music and a user interface that could be unloaded when not in the foreground.