I figured it was because the USA and our corporate media interests made them an offer they couldn't refuse...

I have Sprint, they've never given me a problem about tethering. As far as I can tell, there's no data cap on my unlimited plan (2 Epic 4G phones, $150 /mo unlimited everything family with the 4G premium, both phones are rooted and running Froyo 2.6.32.9).

My wife is a heavy media consumer with Pandora and Netflix. Occasionally my AT&T home internet goes out, and I stay online for work and play by using Wired Tether (http://android-wired-tether.googlecode.com/) because my desktop doesn't have 802.11. I frequently use the Wireless Tether (http://android-wifi-tether.googlecode.com/) when I'm out and about with my laptop, as my "4G" (San Francisco bay area) is generally faster than free WiFi and I don't have to deal with a gateway.

All told, it's rare for us to be under 4 gigs per month, and I haven't received any communication from Sprint other than the occasional text advertisement and our monthly statement, but YMMV.

You're thinking of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

"My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. -- And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth. We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. -- Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion. -- We shall prevail!" -- Apple, 1984. That's the copy from the famous Apple ad with the guy speaking to an audience of people in grey from a big screen.

The Apple fanboys hate that paragraph (and will mod it down to "Troll" in about 30 minutes). But that's a clear statement of Apple's "walled garden" approach. They even use the same terminology: "A garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths". As for the "Information Purification Directive", see the the EFF's analysis of the Apple iPhone Developer Agreement. Apple tries to keep the Developer Agreement secret, but they accepted a NASA app, which made it subject to a FOIA request, and now anyone can read it.

This.

It's a false dichotomy to discuss "streamlined user experience" versus "user freedom" as if one is completely at odds with the other. To provide a streamlined experience simply requires good design and sensible defaults. You don't have to lock-out the user from changing those defaults, accessing the full capabilities of the device, or repurposing the device entirely.

Of course it makes sense that vendors of locked-down solutions would spread this misunderstanding. They want to enforce consumer lock-in to their product/services stack. By convincing customers that the lock-in is actually to their benefit, they now have people effectively begging to give up their user freedoms. What bothers me is that media outlets seem not to have generally caught on to this lie. Instead they repeat the false dichotomy, as if it were a fact of nature. I guess it is because computers are still fairly misunderstood by the public at large. (By comparison, most people would not buy it if they hired an electrician who installed locks on their fusebox, telling them that they'll have to call/pay him when the fuses blow... because only then can he guarantee a proper "electrical user experience"...)

Right. BP's corporate misfeasance is Congresses fault, because we know corporation always act in an optimal way to preserve their long-term self-interest and would never cut corners otherwise to risk horribly expensive disasters.

Let's look at something that BP was responsible for less than four years ago: the Alaska oil pipeline shutdown (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14219844/).

Set aside the environmental aspects of the spill entirely and just focus on how BP managed that pipeline which delivered 8% of U.S. oil consumption and $30 million of revenue a day. Obviously in possession of such a cash cow, BP's enlightened self-interest ensured that they would keep that pipeline in good condition so that that billion-dollar-a-month gusher would never dry up. But did they? Nooo... they cut corners on maintenance and suffered an entirely avoidable shutdown.

The Libertarian notion, taken up by many non-Libertarian right wingers also -- that regulation is unnecessary since the discipline of the marketplace guarantees good corporate behavior and citizenship (And maximizes economic performance in the short and long terms! Really, no downside at all it seems!) -- is a quaint bit of Nineteenth Century economic utopianism.

Although pointing in a different direction, this "perfect free market" notion is strikingly similar to the character of Marxist thought - another bit of economic fantasy literature harkening back to the 1800s. Both are elegant theoretical structures, so pleasing to its adherents, that the naked evidence of its disastrous failures (and thus the falsity of their premises) in the real world go entirely unacknowledged.

I am not sure about the musical notation, but the tab is completely unplayable. Note the 12 12 12 AND the 2 nd string. Good luck making your fingers do that. Also, my guitar does not have 23 frets. And I especially cannot hit the 23rd fret while pressing down the 5th fret. WTF?

It might be worth applying the LilyPond adjustment algorithms in his framework. Their stuff looks decent enough to be usable.

VMS is very much still in production:

- ported to Itanium
- fully supported by HP
- IPv6 compliant
- java, apache, etc. available

PalmOS is still alive and well, although it has been sold by Palm to another company and renamed Garnet. See http://www.access-company.com/products/accesspowered/handhelds.html for a list of current devices with this OS.

As far as I know, regular subscribers only got 8 - lifetime subscribers received an additional 8 slots as a 'thank you' for dropping $200 on the lifetime subscription.

8 to start with, eventually they plan to offer additional character slots for a small fee. However, in-game each character can have multiple costumes that are completely different from your original (even down to changing body size and proportions) so it's not quite as inflexible as the 8-character limit initially seems.

AFAIK, the lifetime subscriptions were only offered up until the official release - so unless you participated in the Beta or the "early start" offered to certain pre-order customers, it wasn't really an option.

There's lots of bang-boom, the controls are fairly simple, an 8-year old that enjoys comics and has the computer skills required to operate the game could enjoy it. I would not let the child play unsupervised, though.

Quite large, but not disturbingly so. There really isn't any 'boob physics' to speak of, like you'd see in a fighting game. They just sort of poke out there like a pair of bulbous road cones.

I get much more amusement out of making characters that have disproportionate bodies - huge gangly arms with short legs, gigantic melon head, etc.

This is so many levels of incorrect I don't even know where to begin.

Let's start with the Clean Water Act. There are numerous failures in compliance, and the EPA acknowledges they are vastly underfunded to provide proper enforcement. Depending on the state, there have been noncompliance rates of as high as 80%, e.g., Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The violators claim that many of these are bureaucratic in nature and don't actually represent a threat to the water supply, but to say that legal measures have adequately protected the US water supply is woefully ignorant of the facts.

Second, "residual chlorine" does not "leach" out of the water. Chlorine does not just magically disappear out of aqueous solution; the atoms are still there--indeed they must be in order for chlorination to be effective!--unless you have found some way to evolve a gas that will bubble out of the water. Leaching refers to the release of a substance out of a solution over time. Once you put chlorine into water, it forms hypochlorite (the same ion found in household bleach), which is the disinfecting agent.

Third, the study already amply documents the growth of the aforementioned bacteria inside the shower head. There is a small amount of standing water that remains in the head; exposure to air then permits the bacteria to grow--even in the presence of any small concentration of chlorine in the water. It doesn't take much for a colony to overpower a little bit of chlorine.

Fourth, there are many species of bacteria that are well adapted to surviving in what we would consider highly toxic environments. It should not come as a surprise that there should exist bacteria that are simultaneously (a) able to flourish in a (poorly-maintained) shower head attached to a municipal water supply, and (b) pathogenic in nature.

Finally, all it takes is to get an all-metal shower head where you can easily detach the nozzle assembly. They sell them at the hardware store--I should know, I bought one recently (my old shower broke). Once a month, you unscrew the nozzle portion, and clean it out. If your water is really crazy hard like mine (seriously wtf, it's got more calcium than milk), you pretty much need to do this anyway because the nozzles get clogged if you don't. But don't buy cheapo plastic shower heads because (1) they break easily, and (2) they seem to clog faster because the nozzles tend to be finer.