At his last All Things Digital (fast forward to 1:31:30 or so), Steve Jobs said that the TV market was hard because the hardware was subsidized, which prevented doing anything interesting. The set-top box from your cable company is "good enough", it's free (at least, you think it is), and enough people won't spend money for a wow-cool interface to allow someone like Apple to make money. He referred to Apple TV as a hobbyist product.

So it sounds like the strategy now is to make the whole TV and not just a set-top box. I'm curious what that is going to bring. Sure, it'll be a nice set and maybe the interface will be better than the typical clunky "navigate a menu without a mouse" things. But so much of what's controlled on the TV is controlled outside of it - i.e., through my Dish/Cable/etc. carrier's box.

Will iTV replace those boxes? Is this a sort of androidy model where Apple provides everything those carriers do and then says to the carriers, why keep building your own set-top boxes when iTV can do that for you?

If it's just a nice TV with a better interface for adjusting the brightness, I can't imagine anyone getting excited, so there must be something more...speculations, please.

"Some members"...who?

Doesn't it get boring jerking that same knee all the time?

Good thing they didn't buy a company based in the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France, or India...all of which fit your criteria of having WMDs and a past that includes racism.

Clearly, they shouldn't buy companies owned by humans.

It seems to me that phone vendors have not changed their mindset from the pre-smartphone era. Back then, no one cared about OS or version. You got an integrated product and it never changed. Today, it feels like phone makers still think "we put it together and ship it - this idea of later changing or upgrading the software is kind of weird to us."

To them, a phone is complete and unchangeable one it leaves the factory. Alas for their mindset, consumers see phones as customizable, upgradeable devices. If they were $50 each, sure, just replace it, but at $500+ (even if it's stretched over two years), people are making a more significant investment and don't want to be left behind.

You neatly summarize Polish foreign policy in the 1930s.

How about a Personal Appeal against SOPA?

Yes, I am joking.

Well said.

Exactly. The idea that "the last time the US declared war was WWII" is a canard.

The reason I talk on the phone is that it take me 50 minutes to drive 15 miles on the freeway. Fix the roads, and I won't need to talk on the phone. The problem, as is often the case, is government incompetence.

(And no, public transit is not the answer. I live in a city with excellent public transit, light rail, etc., and the fastest public transit trip is 1.5 hours.)

I think you may be exaggerating a bit, given that some people run WP blogs on VPSes with only 64MB of total system memory.

What is the difference between being "pretty much a massive juggernaut" and being a massive juggernaut?

What is the difference between a habit and a distinct habit?