And that's the problem here. If the ISPs competed in a free market, this could work. However, since the market isn't free and we're artificially limited to a couple of local ISPs, regulation is necessary to prevent abuses that would normally be limited by competition.

"Letting the market decide" doesn't work when the market isn't free to make a decision.

Q: What do you call a few thousand lawyers on a remote, arctic island?

A: A good start

Doesn't Google or anyone have any Android/Linux patents that they can use to force HTC to pay for patent licensing on WinMo7 phones? And put that money towards the license from MS? I thought all those giant patent portfolios were to prevent stuff like this from happening without fear of reprisal.

If only South Park made an episode(s) about this. Science damn you!!

Or it will be blamed on piracy. But movie studios would never do that when a much more obvious cause is available, right?

While you're at it, you should buy Mine That Bird wearing a mink snuggie

You read your paper and you're enjoying your two-page comic spread. And there's The Family fucking Circus, bottom right corner, just waiting to suck. And that's the last thing you read, so it spoils everything you read before it. I hate it, yet I'm uncontrollably drawn to it.

So does this mean the limited time availability for me to buy Mountain Dew Throwback just got even more limited?

Plus one of the demos on the Nexus One page is for a Google Voice app, and it shows someone replying to a voicemail "via Google Voice". I'm assuming this is going over VOIP, unless they somehow tie Google Voice to the cell phone voice plan.

My alma mater's sporting event internet streams recently moved to CBS All-Access, and I've been missing out on them since All-Access uses Silverlight. I've been trying the Moonlight 2.0 betas though, and they still don't work, probably because the site is using Silverlight 3.0. And I'm sure that Moonlight 3.0 will come out just after All-Access moves to 4.0.

The thing that got me excited about the Google phone were the initial rumors that the phone would would be data-plan only and would use Google Voice. I don't need a smartphone enough to want to pay for the data plan on top of the voice plan, but I would have no problem doing just the data plan. Of course, the latest rumors from this article mention the need to buy a SIM card, which makes me think it's going to be voice plan + data plan like every other smartphone I know of in this country. My excitement level has decreased significantly as the rumors have changed from a completely new way to do data plans to the Droid with Google branding but without the price partially subsidized.

As a Ubuntu user, I'd just be happy if it force a version of Silverlight for Linux that actually works (Yes, I've tried Moonlight. No, it doesn't work for any of the streaming sports broadcasts I'd like to watch). If making it pisses off Microsoft, everybody wins.

How do we reconcile this with slamming Apple for trying to maintain 100% control over the OS/hardware combo?

Easily. These are just hardware requirements, no one is trying force you to run it on an approved version of the hardware. If you can build hardware that fits the requirements, you can run it.

Personally, I can't wait until the major video sites default to HTML5 and we can finally say goodbye to Flash.

Yeah, except for all the major sites that will continue to use Silverlight since Microsoft is paying them to annoy OS X and Linux users even more than using Flash.