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Enjoy your free WiFi - it won't last, most likely. Governments around the world are tightening the screws on copyright infringement, and open WiFi is in the cross-hairs - see one example here: http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/the-death-of-open-wifi

This is part of 'graduated response', also known as 'three strikes', which is the copyright owners' term for various actions to discourage infringement short of lawsuits - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduated_response or http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/graduated-response/

UPDATE: Slate’s Big Money reports that a cartoon version of an Oscar Wilde story got the black-block image-censor treatment over a gay kiss. The iPad really is turning into a Victorian computer. UPDATE 2: Looks like Apple has yet again decided to undo its policing once enough media piles on. According to a comment from the “Ulysses Unseen” guys, Apple has asked them to re-submit and the Oscar Wilde comic is also getting its censor blocks removed, according to other press reports.

UPDATE: Slate’s Big Money reports that a cartoon version of an Oscar Wilde story got the black-block image-censor treatment over a gay kiss. The iPad really is turning into a Victorian computer. UPDATE 2: Looks like Apple has yet again decided to undo its policing once enough media piles on. According to a comment from the “Ulysses Unseen” guys, Apple has asked them to re-submit and the Oscar Wilde comic is also getting its censor blocks removed, according to other press reports.

Also from the Wired article.

The Atom-based servers target a few specific tasks performed by data centers. In the past, servers were largely used to solve a small number of complex data-based problems, says Feldman. But the internet changed this. In the internet-focused data center, the challenge is to handle millions of small tasks such as searching, mapping and viewing pages quickly, and to do this in a way that can handle unpredictable bursts of traffic.

They are going for mass IO not computing power.

Here is the link again. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/seamicro-server-intel-atom/

According to the wired article they use a custom chip set.
From the article
“If you just replace the chips in a traditional server with Atom processors, the power consumption actually goes up,” says Feldman.

Integrating features such as storage, networking and server management into a single ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) helps manage power better, says the company. It has also virtualized the CPU input-output so those modules that would have otherwise occupied space on a board and consumed power don’t anymore.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/06/seamicro-server-intel-atom/#ixzz0qqLKrZZH
"
So this may be a bit more interesting than it first looked.

This is the part that stands out to me -- not from the same page, but a couple of clicks away we find an edited transcript of Manning's chats with Lamo, and scrolling down we find this:

(02:35:46 PM) Manning: was watching 15 detainees taken by the Iraqi Federal Police for printing “anti-Iraqi literature” the iraqi federal police wouldn’t cooperate with US forces, so i was instructed to investigate the matter, find out who the “bad guys” were, and how significant this was for the FPs it turned out, they had printed a scholarly critique against PM Maliki i had an interpreter read it for me and when i found out that it was a benign political critique titled “Where did the money go?” and following the corruption trail within the PM’s cabinet i immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on he didn’t want to hear any of it he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees (from http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/wikileaks-chat/)

This, to me, is the truly incendiary accusation: that though our stated mission in Iraq is to establish a functioning democracy, in fact we are assisting the Iraqi government in functioning as a dictatorship. Documentation of this claim would be more important, IMO, than the video.

According to the Daily Beast, Manning apparently had “special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders.” The cables date back several years and traversed interagency computer networks that are available to the Army. They contain information about U.S. diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, the diplomat said.

In chats with Lamo that Wired.com has examined, Manning said he had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRnet, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level. The networks, he said, were both “air-gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out. “I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.” “listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis a perfect storm.” Regarding the State Department cables specifically, Manning told Lamo, “State dept fucked itself. Placed volumes and volumes of information in a single spot, with no security.”

Manning described personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated. He said he had been demoted after he punched a colleague in the face during an argument, and was reassigned to a job in a supply office pending early discharge. He also told Lamo, “I’m restricted to SIPR now, because of the discharge proceedings.”

But in his chats with Lamo, Manning told the ex-hacker that all traces of evidence had been deleted from his work computers as part of the troop-withdrawal procedures that have started in Iraq. “I had two computers. One connected to SIPRnet the other to JWICS,” he wrote. “They’ve been zero-filled. Because of the pullout, evidence was destroyed by the system itself.” He also told Lamo that network security monitoring and logging was ineffective or nonexistent. “There’s god-awful accountability of IP addresses,” he wrote. “The network was upgraded, and patched up so many times, and systems would go down, logs would be lost. And when moved or upgraded, hard drives were zeroed. It’s impossible to trace much on these field networks."

They have already tested theirs multiple times. It is amazing what you can accomplish in a one-side cold war, when the other side is working hard to avoid one, thinking that they can change things. The advantage to the one side is that they can steal tech at will, and build up loads of weapons.

And now you can do a Google too:
"As we said before, this was a mistake”
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/google-wifi-debacle/

Between intentional and accidental is "a Google".
If you are exposed just quote "“As we said before, this was a mistake,” Google spokeswoman Christine Chen"
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/06/google-wifi-debacle/#ixzz0qJdk9Bjv
Wait, stonewall, wait a bit more and the press moves on :)

The iPad does not have a USB port, it has the same dock connector that the iPhone uses.

iPad specs. Scroll down to "in the box."

Sure, it's a USB-to-dock adapter. But the fact that there are USB host signals in the iPad's dock connector is a wild departure from every other iPhone-like device that Apple produces.

I don't know all of the reasons that Apple might have had for non-removable storage on the iPad, I'm just listing possibilities. I'm sure that reality includes some of these reasons and possibly more but you'd have to talk to the engineers over at Apple to get their actual reasoning. I'm sure some of it, but not all of it, is the money issue.

Please understand your subject matter, and the context: The iPad does support removable storage (and a few other things), and this is a discussion about the iPhone 4, which does not.

I don't know any of the reasons why Apple does what Apple does, except that engineering has little to do with it. The lack of the SD card slot is the product of the same folks who are responsible for the non-removable battery: designers, the marketers, and (most importantly) Steve Jobs. Had any of these folks created a spec and a drawing that included a place for an micro SD card and sent that down the chain to the folks who make specs work, I have every bit of confidence that Apple's engineering department would have had little difficulty implementing it.

If it's theatre that we're paying for, shouldn't we get to watch it? Oh no, we would manipulate it if we could watch it.

I'm just wondering what those who rated this down as a Troll going to do about Bradley Manning being arrested.

Sorry, Sony has already patented and implemented that idea.

They are 'optional' if a developer dosn't want any feedback from the app in terms of usage data. If you want that, you MUST sign up to iAd's: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/with-new-developer-agreement-apple-unlevels-the-iad-playing-field/

Martinson turned Hogan in, because Hogan had plugged the phone into her laptop in an attempt to get it working again after Apple remotely disabled it. She was convinced that Apple would be able to trace her Internet IP address as a result. "Therefore she contacted Apple in order to absolve herself of criminal responsibility," according to the detective who wrote the affidavit.

Anon because I've already moderated several times in this story thread.

MIT OpenCourseWare (That's their silly capitalization, don't blame me.)

Wired story about Flat World Knowledge, a company that provides free online and cheap printed copies of college texts that sells study aids and practice quizzes to support the business. Online browsing is free, PDF is about $20, and printed books cost about $60 or less if the pricing I read about is still current.

Wikibooks has books of several levels.

Here's a list of open books for undergraduate mathematics as recommended by Robert Beezer at University of Puget Sound

US House Bill 4575 is an attempt to authorize government grants to publishers of open-source college texts, as widespread affordable education is seen as good thing for the country as a whole. There's also a Senate version.

There's a consortium for Open Educational Resources among community colleges. They have lists of many titles under many categories. There's still a lot of work to be done, but some of the books have been peer-reviewed and they clearly mark which ones those are.

LibrarianChick links to all sorts of books and all sorts of sites that links to all sorts of other books. Some of these are texts, but there's also reference, fiction, tutorials, and more. Several of the linked works are university-level. There are also links to non-books, like search engines, research results pages at places like Harvard, and open online encyclopedias other than Wikipedia.

Textbooks Free is a fairly ugly site with beautiful content: links to textbooks by subject, links to other open textbook projects, and even an Amazon affiliate link so when you buy what non-open books you want you can support open textbooks. They also have links to open course materials like audio and video lectures. Their links include material from MIT, Johns Hopkins, University of California at Irvine, Tufts, Stanford, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon.

Bookboon has ad-supported free textbooks. For those of you who won't get too distracted from studies by the ads, I think that's not a bad model. These are free but not open and you have to give them your email address to download the books.

Free Book Centre has links to lots of open and public domain texts. They are mostly CS, engineering, and mathematics but they have some medical books too. There are some books linked that are free-but-closed, and some of those are only free for non-commercial use or only in electronic format (sometimes only by browsing the book on the author's web site without even saving a local copy). Some of the links are currently broken, too. Overall, it's a pretty useful site if you're looking for CS/math/EE/medical materials. One additional note of caution: at least one "book" is just a detailed ToC for a book by someone else, some "books" are just sample chapters for closed books for sale, a few are lecture notes for specific courses collected but not necessarily edited into textbook form, and there are a handful that seem to be pirated copies of commercial books from the likes of O'Reilly. You have been warned.

Creative Commons has a tag for news items about open textbooks to help us k

A portable phone with pictures is nothing compared to suddenly living in car-powered cities vs. agricultural existence.

Maybe it is not comparable to the agrarian hunter gatherer vs. industrialized society-gap, but everyone being able to film and upload in seconds does make an impact. (I headed here from the ongoing discussion over cops not wanting people to film them; some balance of power is shifting here).

The toys may not matter much in the lives of the individual, but neither does a car in itself. Living in a society where everyone has a car, and products can be moved about with ease, does make a difference - and so does living in a world where everyone can share anything with everybody.
The profit-motive and gadget-fever western society is so wild about right now is making huge, serious changes elsewhere:
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/sms-fights-malaria-scourge-in-africa/
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/ghana/090527/africa-looks-cell-phone-banking
And that whole outsourcing thing we are seeing the tip of now...

No doubt about it. He is actually doing things, and not just stealing other ppl's work or using that money to make their name.

Not just that, but he has invested all his own remaining money, which inspires other investors: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/05/musk-says-i-ran-out-of-cash/

Frankly, I think it's hopeless. There will be lots of suffering and hardship, and then in the future when we find ourselves doing it afresh with some other resource, no one will remember or care how we walked to ruin down the same greedy path of short term profit the last time. And the story will repeat itself, yet again, like it has done so many times throughout history.

Humanity is depressingly predictable.

While I share some of your concerns, I am not as pessimistic as you. Primarily, this is because I think that it largely depends on the speed of the changes involved and the distance to the alternatives to oil-based economies.

First, the time frame for declining oil stocks, and hence higher prices, to destroy the economy is (I think) on the period of decades, not years. There is a lot of 'play' in the amount of oil that is economically viable to pull out as the price increases. A doubling in the price of oil will vastly increase the size of the available stocks, and provide another decade or two of oil.

Second, the alternatives are considerably more expensive than oil right now, but if the doubling proposed above occurs, then the alternatives become viable. check out this Wired article about the alternatives and when they become viable. In the U.S., we have access to ridiculous amounts of coal, for example, which can be converted to liquid fuels. It's not as cheap as pumping it out of the ground, but as oil becomes more expensive, it will become economically feasible, and at costs that will not destroy the economy. Alternatives such as concentrating solar, wind, and geothermal are similarly much more expensive than oil, but as the price rises they become viable.

The time-frame involved in converting from oil-based to the alternatives is, again, on the order of decades. So, the whole thing works in terms of transitioning from one form of energy to another when it becomes necessary and will (I hope!) not cause serious shocks to the economy.

Frankly, I am far more concerned about the effect on the environment and climate change due to fossil fuel based economies, and the fact that we can transition from oil to coal / shale / tar sands means that we are still screwed. But, it won't be because of the price of energy. And the U.S. is screwed economically because we spend too much, don't save enough, and don't tax enough. But, again, it won't be because of the price of energy.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/11/swedish-researc/
As people might recall log-in and password information for 1,000 e-mail accounts belonging to foreign embassies where seen in plain text too.
Tor was always one huge honey pot built on the US telco network with all exit nodes collectable to the NSA.
Others are just building their own small data collection services on top.
Another man in the middle data retention story :)

The idea to stress behind war-oriented robots is to stay away from "battlebots."

built supercomputers and technologies to address the underlying causes of war, and attack those causes. poverty, famine, fear, education, etc...

what we've done is created a 2 million dollar device that pulls the trigger...not very amazing at all.

This older story comes to mind whenever I see a new article about military robots.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2007/10/robot-cannon-ki/

How about beer produced with 45 MILLION year old yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae (aka brewer’s yeast)) cultivated from a piece of amber. I've tried it and it's damn good too: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/brewery/

You sir, are incorrect. The original PDF from the police department (which was copied by and is still being hosted on Wired.com's website with their follow-up article) has a layer of black 'redaction' blocks, but all the personal data is still there and can be cut-and-pasted.

The reporter sanitized the PDF for the cops by printing it, scanning it, and making another PDF (I would have just raster printed it direct to another PDF file), and replaced the original on the web site with the new one.

You sir, are incorrect. The original PDF from the police department (which was copied by and is still being hosted on Wired.com's website with their follow-up article) has a layer of black 'redaction' blocks, but all the personal data is still there and can be cut-and-pasted.

The reporter sanitized the PDF for the cops by printing it, scanning it, and making another PDF (I would have just raster printed it direct to another PDF file), and replaced the original on the web site with the new one.

Interesting. I thought it was just stupidity. Who'd a thought....

Oh wait, http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2004/01/62102, yes. It is ironic.

Experiments with green technology do not have to cost millions of dollars:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/kamwamba-windmill/

I have also heard of people in rural areas who heat their homes by digging holes and using heat trapped in water a dozen or so feet below the soil; they sometimes do this without using pumps. There are farmers who create cheap biodiesel using plant material left over from the harvest. There are people who create biochar, and use the excess burning from that process as a source of energy (to cook with, or perhaps to drive some other chemical reaction). All of these things can be done on very low budgets.

It is true, though, that larger scale projects require more money, but that is not at all surprising. Really though, a lot of the work is done at universities on grant money, which is an entirely different world from businesses/community development.

And also a former target of Ted Kaczynski. I still refer back to this fascinating article from time to time. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

"and we only have so much helium left"

That's the bad news. The good news is actually two-sided. For one...

For helium-3's true believers - the ones who think the isotope's fusion power will take us to the edge of our solar system and beyond - talk of the coming shortage is overblown: There's a huge, untapped supply right in our own backyard.

"The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3," says Savage, and he's right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful."

So all of the helium we could need is on the moon, and if we can reach them, the gas giant planets. So the second part of the good news is that this gives us a real, economically viable reason to go back to the moon and stay this time... to actually build a base and commence helium mining and collection. And there's other resources on the moon waiting for us as well.

I think you might be confusing privacy and anonymity, which are not the same thing.

That may be true, but even Obama has claimed that enforcing intellectual property was vital to national security. Well duh, no shit! It plays a huge part in our nations GDP. Regardless, I don't agree with having IP laws rammed down our throat, and that of other nations too.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/obama-declares/

Why the Future Doesn't Need Us

Pst... iPhone's are the worst for security.

"An ad network such as AdMob (a Google acquisition target) would clearly fall under the third-party category — the first two being Apple and the app developer — so this clause appears to bar competing ad networks from collecting data about how users interact with in-app ads on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, or targeting them with specific ads."

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/with-new-developer-agreement-apple-unlevels-the-iad-playing-field/#ixzz0oeS8xeWZ

"An ad network such as AdMob (a Google acquisition target) would clearly fall under the third-party category — the first two being Apple and the app developer — so this clause appears to bar competing ad networks from collecting data about how users interact with in-app ads on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, or targeting them with specific ads."

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/with-new-developer-agreement-apple-unlevels-the-iad-playing-field/#ixzz0oeS8xeWZ

True, XOR is the fastest operation, and One-Time Pads use XOR and nothing else. However, short of you and the other person using radio telescopes to obtain a common intergalactic source of randomness (and, yes, that is seriously done), you need to take account of the time (and space) needed to store pads large enough and the encryption time (which can't use a One-Time Pad) taken to securely transfer it.

Having said that, for B2B, OTPs using an intergalactic RNG would likely be cheaper and safer than using quantum cryptography. It would also be much more practical, as it takes a lot of hardware at the moment to deliver qbits. Also, OTPs can't be broken -at all- if the pad itself is secure, but the vulnerability recently discussed shows that quantum cryptography CAN be broken to the extent of being partially readable.

To use a common radio source, all you need is a common starting point and a common target. Aluminum atomic clocks have an error of 8.6e-18 of a second. (This makes it a 1.1 Petahertz clock, rather better than the clock chips we're typically using.) That should be good enough to get some excellent randomness from just about any source out there and insure that both collection systems are in-phase.

It should be obvious that the vegetarian argument is based upon a creature's capacity to experience pain and suffering...Our best data suggest that plants cannot experience anything at all (much less pain and suffering), hence there is no moral argument against using them as a food source.

That's fairly simplistic, and I'm not convinced it's true (though I'm not convinced it's false, either).

Plants definitely take action in response to physical attacks.

A few responses to physical harm that have been observed in some plant species:
1: Evasive acts, including closing of flowers, and emitting pheromones that predators dislike
2: Signalling other nearby plants to take similar actions
3: Emitting pheromones that attract insectivores as an interspecies defense mechanism

It's certainly possible that they're not experiencing pain and suffering, and merely engaging in stimulus/response behavior. OTOH, when a living creature actually takes action to defend itself and to alert those nearby to harm, it's tough for me to be 100% convinced that it's not feeling pain and suffering at least on some level (though possibly in a way that's very different from our own).

Rich Young once summarized it in what strikes me as a fairly balanced manner:

At its base, pain can be viewed as a warning to the organism that experiences it, that it's life and/or ability to propagate its genetic heritage is under threat. It can be argued that organisms are essentially [as some wag once said] "DNA's way of making more DNA." Virtually ALL organisms have sensory mechanisms that are aimed at warning the individual of threats to life and/or reproduction, thus, while plants probably can't "feel pain" (as defined in human dictionaries), plants can certainly sense their environment and react in ways that are clearly intended to minimize threats to life and/or reproduction: threats that humans would interpret as painful. In other words, whatever one chooses to call it, plants certainly experience the *functional equivalent* of that which we humans call "pain"

That said, it's entirely consistent to me even if you admit that plants do have some capacity for feeling to believe it's so alien, primitive, or instinctual compared to our own as to be on a different moral level.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/plant-family-values is also sort of interesting; it shows some sort of community behavior, though titling it "family values" is obviously polemical.

While "Big Government" is willing to either give away (like for the EV1 projects) or loan (recent bailout) millions or billions of dollars to the big automakers, they seemed to have no real interest in helping Tesla...

What? You think the $465 million government loan Tesla got doesn't count as help?

(1) You have no idea how much a production facility costs apparently

(2) You forget that half a billion is a LOT LESS than GM's and other's recent MULTI-BILLION dollar bailout.

(3) You obviously have no idea how much was wasted on the EV1.

In comparison, that makes their efforts with Tesla seem like "no real interest"

While "Big Government" is willing to either give away (like for the EV1 projects) or loan (recent bailout) millions or billions of dollars to the big automakers, they seemed to have no real interest in helping Tesla...

What? You think the $465 million government loan Tesla got doesn't count as help?

What if my laptop is encrypted because of PCI compliance? What if it is against the law in my country for me to compromise confidential information, but now Australia demands to see it? Does this mean American businessmen can't travel ao Australia with company laptops?

Or will Australia not search encrypted laptops?

Karma for this:-
Border Agents Can Search Laptops Without Cause, Appeals Court Rules
and
Taking your laptop into the US? Be sure to hide all your data first

But the US is not alone. British customs agents search laptops for pornography. And there are reports on the internet of this sort of thing happening at other borders, too.

and how much of the oceans are devoid of life?

The black, oily, part.

Or maybe there's life there, too

Okay, replace SS with DHS/TSA.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/dhs-threatens-blogger/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/tsa-withdraws-subpoenas/

There are definitely "average people" being annoyed and harassed by their bullshit on a fairly regular basis. Mostly as part of the "Security Theatre" at airports, but also via subpoenas to read data from personal devices... in cases like the above... where the document in question wasn't even classified, and the Canadian government published it with additional details on their website, as quickly as the U.S. Citizen bloggers posted links to it.

Your wish that government agencies would always act sanely, is a nice platitude, but not playing out in reality.

Would it have been a whole heck of a lot easier for both of these guys if their devices had a wipe feature? Hard to say, but remember even if the subpoena called for only certain data, the DHS got a bit by bit copy of the entire hard drive.

Okay, replace SS with DHS/TSA.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/dhs-threatens-blogger/
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/tsa-withdraws-subpoenas/

There are definitely "average people" being annoyed and harassed by their bullshit on a fairly regular basis. Mostly as part of the "Security Theatre" at airports, but also via subpoenas to read data from personal devices... in cases like the above... where the document in question wasn't even classified, and the Canadian government published it with additional details on their website, as quickly as the U.S. Citizen bloggers posted links to it.

Your wish that government agencies would always act sanely, is a nice platitude, but not playing out in reality.

Would it have been a whole heck of a lot easier for both of these guys if their devices had a wipe feature? Hard to say, but remember even if the subpoena called for only certain data, the DHS got a bit by bit copy of the entire hard drive.

What no empty aluminized mylar potato chip bags?

Or a bag made out of the same Steel Mesh as these Wallets?

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/news/2007/07/steel_wallet

You can say it's vulnerable if there is evidence to support that claim, though.

It is vulnerable. They can't check for a certain class of malware: apps that maliciously use public APIs.

The reason is that they don't review source code. Their binary inspection tools and test processes are unlikely to detect every outcome of an application, especially since it's not hard to make an application simply not do anything malicious during the review process.

Unless their procedures have been substantially tightened, things like this are possible.

Can you support the assertion that they 'check for privacy violations'? How would they do that?

There have been some for Android. At least 2, which posed as fake banking apps. They have been removed for a while now, however.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-open-alternative/

That's the equivalent of a significant angel round of funding in the internet startup world, and their fundraising on the Kickstarter crowdsourced funding site has another 19 days to go.
It's also an impressive for a project proposal from four students who say they aren't going to start coding until they graduate from college this summer. And a testament to how strongly that a growing number of people want an alternative to a centralized and dominant social networking site.

they haven't started programming it!

"hey, i got a cool idea, wanna give me $115K?

holy the awesome power of media coverage batman

And for the elevnty-hojillionth freaking time, MORE IS NOT ALWAYS BETTER! Not EVERYONE needs to do EVERYTHING! Plenty of people CAN get by with a very limited device.

As for the rest of your rant, read this.

[Engineers and designers at Apple] take something small, simple, and painstakingly well considered. They ruthlessly cut features to derive the absolute minimum core product they can start with. They polish those features to a shiny intensity. At an anticipated media event, Apple reveals this core product... Then everyone goes back to Cupertino and rolls. As in, they start with a few tightly packed snowballs and then roll them in more snow to pick up mass until they've got a snowman. That's how Apple builds its platforms. It's a slow and steady process of continuous iterative improvement...

Look at the original iPod. Kinda pricey, Mac only, FireWire only--wow, look at crazy Apple, they're selling something that doesn't even work with all the computers they've sold in the last few years! But they added Windows support, and USB, and photos, and videos, and then they made them in different sizes, and according to Wikipedia they've sold over a QUARTER BILLION of them in less than ten years. So you'll have to excuse Mr. Jobs if he doesn't trip over himself to listen to your advice or anyone else's.

Geeks like Woz but the other Steve is plenty smart too. If you've got a little time, read this 1996 interview with Steve Jobs. Look at how much he got right: "The most exciting things happening today are objects and the Web. The Web is exciting for two reasons. One, it's ubiquitous. There will be Web dial tone everywhere. [emphasis added] And anything that's ubiquitous gets interesting. Two, I don't think Microsoft will figure out a way to own it."

The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free/

Basically from what I can tell it sounds like you're going to have to go with a startup type bank/payment service like Paypal which has actually made an effort to open its platform up.

I suspect most traditional banks won't change significantly for at least a few decades. My bet would be on ING and its brethren to open up first, try talking with them.