If the person the child is with most of the time isn't open to letting you call or skype with the child, this isn't going to help things. You can't give a four year old a phone and say this is yours no matter what mom/dad/grandparents say. The person who takes care of the child has complete and total rights to say the kid can't have a phone. If this is your issue, you need to solve it differently. Buying a phone and handing it to the kid will just complicate things further. If the issue is that there is limited access due to purely technical reasons, i.e. no internet in the home, caregiver doesn't have a phone that can be used for personal use, you might have luck getting a cellular enabled tablet. What you need to do is setup times you can call or skype with your son, with the person who is caring for him. Then you can figure out the devices to use. Handing a 4 year old a phone and saying keep this with you so I can call you isn't going to be a viable solution.

The problem is, Verizon had nearly every cell site up with LTE by the end of 2012. Two years after that Sprint might be up to that level on their smaller network, and it's not a trivial amount of time from now, we're talking 16 months. When you combine that with their failed WiMAX rollout which overcharged and ended up shafting a bunch of customers who never got the speeds they were promised when they bought their phones, their 'Network Vision' looks pretty short sighted to a customer. Why would anyone wait for sprint again when they've already been bit? For me the most important thing is a carrier's geographic coverage area, and everyone is ridiculously behind Verizon in this, and honestly I don't think they're even interested in competing. I don't like VZW and how they treat their customers one bit, but when it comes to building a network no one is at their level.

It also won't work. If its software based it will be circumvented, just like bootloaders get unlocked. Theoretically, you could use efuses to cause hardware damage and permanently disable a device. But this would be a mess, there's potential for a major attack which could leave thousands or millions of devices unusable, and then there's the guy who bricks his ex-girlfriend's phone out of spite. Even still, a signal has to be received, and the phone will be able to be flashed with software which will ignore the signal. Steal phone, turn off radios, flash phone. Blacklist the IMEI and require all carriers to respect the blacklist. Right now I think when a major carrier blacklists a device, it can still be used on some of the MVNOs. You've still got the overseas market but unless you physically damage the device that will always be there.

I think that was the the OP's point.

Can you explain, in terms I could tell the average person, how your patent is novel enough that anyone who wants to distribute audio over the internet should license it from you? I'd appreciate it if you could address how the distributions of podcasts today widely differs from downloading audio files in 1995 and how your patent help change this.

I believe the idea behind the policy is that the government should not offer products that compete with the private sector.

For instance, you have a subscription website that offers say, high end weather information and analytics. You've spent thousands of hours developing software which takes raw data and improves it. You've built a subscriber base, and provide a service they're happy with, and continue to innovate and improve.

Then NOAA comes out and says we're going to build a public site which directly competes with you. They're going to use taxpayer money to essentially make your business obsolete.

There's certainly arguments on both sides here. On one hand getting information to the public is valuable. But it's not free. You might say I don't want or need this information, that's why I didn't subscribe the the private company's service in the first place.

This doesn't seem to be the same case. While Google had a similar product, it didn't fit the needs of the NSA. They see that what they've done might benefit the DoD, and other areas of the government, and as they should, they release the software out to the public.

Are they directly competing with Google? I don't think so. It sounds like they're actually innovating, and not mimicking. This allows other private companies to actually pick this up and potentially compete with Google. It also doesn't prevent Google from doing the same.

This is a good thing, and not what the policy was intended to prevent.

*facepalm*

Yes, closed.

OSX is absolutely a closed OS.

A terminal window has nothing to do with openness. Android doesn't put a terminal window in the forefront, but it's an open OS.

And for the record, UNIX(TM) is absolutely not open either. Linux is, FreeBSD is, UNIX is as closed as anything from Apple or Microsoft.

My 32GB version is scheduled to ship by 7/9. Preordered through Verizon.

I don't believe there has been anyone touting a 64GB version. 32+SD is what I want though. Don't know if I'd pony up another $50-100 for an extra 32GB on board.

I use Rhapsody and Google music and have no issues with it cutting out. Both allow for storing songs locally as well.

I'm not in the young category, unless they're rather liberal with the term... But I've been a Rhapsody user for years and love the service. I save quite a bit of money, and have access to damn near anything I want to hear. Before I would easily spend over $500 on music per year. Now... under 200.

Am I worried about Rhapsody going away? Nah, I'd just move on to the next option.

Being an effective representative isn't simply about yes or no votes. He or she also needs to effectively argue and influence his fellow representatives. Simply being a pass-thru for online polls when the rest of the districts do not operate that way does not seem to work. If all districts worked this way and the job of the representative was solely to push a button when a vote comes up, sure, but why elect someone at that point, just let the online polls do all the work.

I wouldn't vote for this person. While I think he's got good intentions, I don't think he understands what the job entails. I don't have all the information. I don't have time to listen to debate. Neither does 99% of the population. I think I would be better off looking at a candidate who has similar views to me, and hope that they represent me well, if they don't I'll vote for someone else next time.

I want a representative who does listen to his constituents. I don't want one that isn't able to speak his mind on an issue or is not willing to make a stand based on their own opinions which should in most cases be more informed than the general public. I'd much rather have someone who is intelligent, passionate and open minded as my representative than someone who says of the 10 people who went and voted on this online poll 6 said yes, so that is how I will vote. Isn't the point of debating an issue to convince others? How do you accomplish that if you're parroting the results of an online poll?

What about new work? How do you go about getting initiatives started? Do you just not do that? Do you poll your constituents on what they want? How do you come up with those options? What if an item is one you aren't familiar or excited about?

How are you effective as a representative of your constituents in the government structure we have today if you aren't truly a representative, but a mouthpiece?

I bought my Droid Incredible with Eclair, and they've upgraded it to 2.2, and most recently 2.3. It wasn't as quick as most would have liked, but I can't say that I'm languishing with the same version that I initially had. My wife's Evo also is up to 2.3.

The beauty is most Android devices are easily hackable and you are not at the mercy of the provider. In most cases its trivial to install a custom ROM, and for those for whom it isn't, they're probably fine with the older versions. I hope we've turned the corner on trying to lock devices down at any cost.

If quick updates to the latest version are your thing Cyanogenmod is out there. If I was running a device that didn't have sense on it I'd be all in on it. As it is, sense is actually a good overlay when compared to touchwiz or blur.

I can't wait for what CM does with Ice Cream Sandwich. I will run that on my GalTab 10.1, and then won't have to worry about Samsung coming out with their official.

I don't think you'd get a COOP working, but you may be able to get the municipality to do so. You can do that in Kansas, but not Missouri, it's illegal. Same with Nebraska, Texas and Arkansas. The telecoms are actively lobbying to get laws passed in other states as well.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/07/who-supports-city-owned-fiber-networks-the-us-government.ars

The proper thing to do is sit back and wait, the telcos are sitting on a huge pile of money we gave them in the 90s to build these fiber networks, they'll get to your town soon....

I do. And frankly, I prefer eclipse to Visual Studio.

Self signed certs DO NOT make traffic encrypted. If you think they do, you're a complete idiot.

The point of SSL is to protect against man in the middle attacks. If you're in the middle and able to control somebody's session, all you have to do is re-sign the session with a CA you control. The end user has NO WAY OF KNOWING YOU DID THAT since they don't have a trusted CA on their computer to validate the session against. Self signed certs are a completely pointless waste of time and CPU.

Repeat after me

SSL without a certificate authority is a pointless waste.
SSL without a certificate authority is a pointless waste.
SSL without a certificate authority is a pointless waste.

Get it?