Google Chrome did for standards-compliance what Pamela Anderson did for breast implants. Even TODAY Firefox and IE do not pass acid3.

Just like the NY Times article, you're missing the point. We don't need people with 'hybrid careers', that's just an ambiguous marketing term that sounds great in a newspaper article. What we need is basic training in algorithmic thinking for the masses. Think of the horde of paper-pushing people who could use regular expressions or very, very basic looping structures to save themselves hours of manually manipulating text. From personal experience I can tell you that even 'technical' people like mechanical engineers are total fucking morons when it comes to automating their drone tasks. Nobody is talking about teaching secretaries to write compilers; your crying about the degradation of computer science is totally out of place as a comment to this story.

You're right, it's a bad analogy, but you're also missing the point. This isn't about privacy, it's about lock-in. This group is trying to make sure Google customers are able to pack up and take their business elsewhere. While Gooogle's privacy practices are questionable, there's nothing evil about them giving you freedom to abandon them.

Neither iPhone nor Android have any issues on pure WiFi, probably because neither Apple nor Google allow cell operators to touch the software. I've owned an iPhone 3G without a data plan for a year now, but at this point in time I'd go with Android, since it's a more open platform.

correlation!=causation

Granted, I've never used a Sansa or a Zen, but do you think maybe this has something to do with the fact that users of those devices tend to be more tech-savvy and specifically know what they want when they buy?

Chances are, a person who buys an iPod (slashdotters excluded, of course) does so because of the ubiquity of the device; they probably don't know about Sansa or Zen.

A user who buys Sansa/Zen probably did their research and familiarized themselves with the management UI well ahead of purchasing.

Why would anyone go through the grief of overpaying for these early adopter formats? you're forced to buy into unproven, new, change-prone technology which requires dedicated hardware which also is very likely to be made obsolete in the very near term. It's so much simpler to type in the url of your favorite torrent site, add 720p to the search criteria and presto, you have a file that can be played on (almost) any reasonably new computer and can be placed on the media of your choice (read: external hard drive).