Or you know, just your average government corruption at work. Seriously, there have been loads of controllers that should count as prior art to this patent, unfortunately, anything short of patenting breathing gets patented. And it also doesn't help that these guys waited forever to state the case they had (years after the GameCube). If you run a legitimate business you alert people of patent problems during, or shortly after production of the product, if you run a patent troll operation that takes advantage of the US patent system, you wait until 5-6 years after the product was made and then sue for outrageous damages.
I said "preaching". Teaching about religion is completely different, and there's nothing wrong with that.
They are nearly the same though, one usually believes in it when they are preaching and they only have a knowledge of it when they are teaching it.
Where did I say you shouldn't teach morals? How on earth does the tautology "when you die you're dead" lead to an argument for stealing?
If you say you should censor religion too along with whatever else you are censoring, that is, in effect, censoring morals too. Religion and morals go hand-in-hand. Sure, you can have morals without religion, but chances are they aren't as strong as someone with religion.
By all means teach morals, that's nothing to do with belief in a supernatural being. The Bible has some pretty messed up "morals" in it too, should we teach those?
Like.... Lets take the 10 commandments for example...
I am the Lord your God, You shall have no other gods before me
Can basically be translated as, "stick to what you believe"
You shall not make for yourself an idol
Same as above
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
Basically, don't swear. We teach kids that today
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
Go to church on Sunday, is the general meaning. It can be translated as "fulfill your obligations"
Honor your father and mother
Obey your parents
You shall not murder
Rather self explanatory...
You shall not commit adultery
I think that everyone would agree, it is better to be married then to divorce.
You shall not steal
Again, self explanatory
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
Don't lie
You shall not covet your neighbor's house
You will be happier if you just look at what you have
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife
Again, don't try to get what you won't have.
And the rest of the Bible is mostly about Jesus and a few other commandments. There really is nothing morally messed up about it.
This could prove interesting for various sports that use guns such as trap shooting, skeet and general target practice. Because a slower bullet could mean less accidents, for example, if you somehow managed to shoot your foot you would only suffer a small fracture rather than having a broken busted-up foot.
Well, you don't tend to have organisations and schools preaching at children that they must believe in Santa Claus. You don't have "Santa Claus" schools specifically set up for that purpose. I imagine those are the sorts of things he meant.
No, but we do have specialty schools for teaching just about everything else. Religion is no exception, and most of these religious schools are meant to train people to become missionaries/pastors/priests/*insert high-ranking official of your favorite region here*.
FWIW, I wouldn't want to criminalise someone for exposing a child to religion. But I do think it's ridiculous that people are obsessed with censoring (or in some cases, criminalising possession of) media "because a child might see it", yet this is not applied to religion.
But how is religion offensive in any way shape or form? I don't see how you could/would censor religion and why? I mean, I see the censorship of media stupid too, but I don't see why we should censor religion in the same way we do other things. And either way, 99% of religions are peaceful and preach a message of being a general good citizen (and not just Christianity either). If we censor religion then should we censor all other moral teachings? Stop telling Aesop's Fables to children? And surely we should all be offended that a public school would ever show a Disney movie.
I don't see what you are getting at. It is in just about everyone's best interest whether the believe it or not, to give children morals from religion. Put it this way, if you were the owner of a store, would you rather have people teaching "Stealing is wrong" or "When you die you're dead so take whatever because you could die tomorrow".
I've never believed that an "emergency law" is ever necessary. The law should be able to handle situations in advance.
But that is what the Patriot act is made to do. And surely you don't believe that wiretapping Americans is necessary today do you? Emergency laws allow for the suspension of freedom temporarily, and the only solution is to create permanent laws killing freedom permanently if you choose not to use them.
Your idea is that we would allow all freedom 24/7 if we choose not to use these emergency laws, the fact is it won't happen and rather than freedom being stopped for a few months to a year, it becomes permanent. And I myself am willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom for a year to prevent a terrorist attack, I am not willing to sacrifice a lot of freedom for my lifetime to prevent a terrorist attack.
I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography or religion.
Ummm... What is your idea for preventing them to be exposed to religion? If it was the sex scandal with priests, the same thing could happen with any other adult, teachers, etc. And surely then your rationale would be you wouldn't want your child to go to school. If it is belief in things that can't be scientifically proven, then there goes any belief in an imaginary friend, Santa Clause, it could even be extended to anything that isn't real. But seriously, there is no reason to not expose a kid to a religion and by religion I mean any typical religion such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. not the things that call themselves religions such as various cults and Scientology.
And if you prevent your kids from religion then where is the justification from protecting them from naked people? Or then why prevent swearing? The thing is, porn is just pictures of people who don't have on clothes. Swear words are just words. If you take out any religious context, all this censorship doesn't make any sense.
But in a true emergency situation, you need politicians to think more about safety then their own paychecks. For example, if a hurricane came and leveled a town, would you want them to think about the funding and decide to authorize it 2 weeks later or just authorize it fast? Same thing with terrorist attacks or nuclear explosions.
The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge.
It was an absolutely stupid idea to check anything with a credit card when you don't know even *who* that is going to half the time. And what the card is being used for.
The problem with this though, it would discourage any laws that might be needed. For example, the Patriot Act one could say violated the constitution, but in the few months after 9/11 it might have been needed (now, if it needed renewing is up for debate...) but to penalize the making of bad laws is just stupidity. Think of it this way, if another attack on the scale of 9/11 to happen, would you want the government not passing any laws to catch the culprits or for them to be too scared of losing $$$ to do anything?
Or... Realize that it is stupid to "protect" kids from the internet. Now, granted you don't want your kid talking to MrSerialRapist997 on AIM, but some of the things that are censored are absolutely pointless. For example, its OK if an 18 year old swears once in a while, but a 10 year old shouldn't? It is totally OK for an 18 year old to play a game in which you kill people, but not a 16 year old? Really if censoring content is all people use to judge parenting ability, then that is just sad. Now, I think that if you are say, starving your kids, they should be relocated, but just because a kid can say some swear words, plays some violent video games and have seen naked people, doesn't make the parenting bad and our society needs to realize that.
Whilst this is an advantage of open source, I'm not sure how practical forking it is just to fix a bug or add a feature you like, as you now how a separate fork to maintain everytime the main version is updated.
Yes, but there have been examples of it. For example, think of Debian's rebranding of various Mozilla browsers, and also Fun Pidgin which was origionally a fork of Pidgin to add in the resizing of the text box. (see http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/content/features). And I'm not saying it is practical, but rather that you could do it.
If you'd like to see that mechanism improved, head over to http://bugreport.apple.com/ and provide your feedback.
See, that is the difference between Safari/IE/Opera and Firefox. With Firefox you don't have to worry about Apple/MS/Opera pushing an agenda like Apple and MS seem to do (for example, Apple doesn't want you to customize anything and MS wants IE to be as much part of the core OS as possible). With Safari/IE/Opera you can file bug reports and suggestions night and day and still not get a reply or an anything fixed, with Firefox you can get the code and change it. Now, granted, not everyone knows how to code, but if you and 5 other people decide that Firefox should be changed, it isn't that hard to fork it and add in your changes. With IE and Opera it is impossible to do that, and with Safari it isn't impossible due to WebKit being OSS, but as for the UI, that is proprietary.
The thing though is, Apple and MS are clearly pushing agendas, Apple in particular you can easily see what it tries to do and any suggestion that violates the perceived "perfectness" of Safari will be thrown out. With Firefox, you don't have that problem and never will.
I wonder if it's because the last times studies were done on those it was found that they were far more secure than closed source software, in a US GOVERNMENT FUNDED STUDY
The problem with that is you think that the government is going to be unbiased. Granted, the government isn't on the payrolls of Red Hat or Microsoft, but wouldn't it be in the government's best interest to use open source software that is a lot easier to audit and a ton cheaper? I'm not saying that they are wrong, but the government does have a lot of reason to mess with the statistics to their own favor.
This is one of the little situation where it is a blessing that the iPhone uses plain standard HTML/CSS/Javascript and has no (official) support for "thick clients" like Java of Flash. Which are currently the web vandals' advertisers' tools of choice to spit their scum.
Except for Flash/Java games. And YouTube. Now, YouTube is available on the iPhone but only some videos, and it is a lot easier and cheaper to just watch the music video on YouTube then to buy it on iTunes or hunt for the song on Last.FM or your favorite 'Net radio stations. And Flash games would just be awesome using the touch screen....
I have a DS and I can say there are no usable browsers for it really. The browser on the Wii is nice, but the one on the DS just isn't usable. And homebrew is nice... until you realize that your cart you bought for $30 at Wal-Mart doesn't support half the apps and you need to upgrade to another one.
The Wii remote has *lots* of problems for general use. First off is the big one. Your arm gets tired after about an hour or so of use as a pointer. I can use the mouse for around 4 hours at a time without being tired. And secondly it isn't accurate. I can get a mouse to hit just about anything on a screen but it takes a lot more time to hit a link in Opera.
1) Most people don't do anything that's restricted anyway. This is less true of being restricted to a single carrier, but people generally have very little loyalty toward an individual carrier.
People don't have loyalty except in the many places that AT&T just doesn't work. While many smaller phone companies have built towers there and you get full bars with them. And the fact that I believe the contract is *$100* per month!?!? And that doesn't include texting which is nearly essential to have today.
2) People really do not feel that it's a big deal to connect their phone to their computer one time in the 2+ years that they will own it.
Except if the people have a computer that iTunes won't run on, either an older Mac or an older Windows computer (and we know, Linux or BSD but that isn't most people yet).
3) People don't have "many different types of media", they have MP3s. The iPhone plays MP3s.
Except if they rip CDs using Windows Media Player and then they have WMAs. Myself I have music in MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV/FLAC/MIDI formats. Yes, most people will have MP3s, but if they are using Windows Media Player they will have mostly WMAs which I don't blame Apple to not support, but they have them nonetheless.
4) $200 US does not seem overpriced to me. As for overhyped, most people don't have this weird reaction where they feel that they are obligated to dislike anything that's popular.
Except when I can get a Palm for $50 at AT&T and for $100 I can buy just about any other phone they have there, and not get the insanely expensive contract (though being AT&T it still is pricey anyways).
5) Most people simply don't care about replacing their battery.
If I spent $200 for a phone, I am keeping the thing for as long as I can. And if 3 years down the line the battery wears out, I'm not going to be happy if it isn't user-replaceable. Put it this way, On a RAZR I had for about 3 years I replaced the battery a total of 3 times. Did it help that I could just walk into a phone store and buy one for ~$60? Yes. And I didn't have to wait forever for it to come out of repair.
6) Most people simply don't care about storage expansion.
Ummm... Lets see would I rather A) Plug in a MicroSD adapter to my computer and copy and paste my songs with whatever file manager I choose and then copy and paste them from that to my phone or B) Plug in a cable, and deal with the headaches... I mean "excellent user interface" of iTunes to recognize my songs confining me to new Macs and Windows machines only. If the iPhone would be just a USB storage device it wouldn't matter, but just using iTunes is almost enough to stop me from getting one.
The thing that is the killer for me and why I will jailbreak any iPod Touch or iPhone I get, is that Apple won't let you run an app in the background. Now, they have reasons to do so, but that just about kills any hope for Java on the iPhone or a decent last.FM client where I can just stream music and browse some. It also kills the *small* hope for Flash (or GNASH) on it. Plus, it also won't let you do some fun things such as make terminals, etc that lets you enjoy a Unix system to the fullest.
Because it is just about the only phone you can get with Wi-Fi and a touch screen. It also has at least a usable browser, something that no other phone I have used has had. And really, for $200 the hardware it has is cheap. Now you get stuck with some AT&T plan that will charge you more then the price of the phone for just about nothing, but still, the older iPhones can be unlocked.
If you show me an open-source phone that has a touch screen and Wi-Fi and is actually usable (So that throws out OpenMoko, great idea, but unusable at the moment). The iPhone is a compromise, touch screen and Wi-Fi, and usuable but isn't open source, so you can jailbreak it and install something better on it.
Well, 10 years ago we couldn't imagine anything like YouTube, and the idea of streaming media was almost laughable back when most people had dial-up. The very idea of a browser on a cell phone would have been seen as impossible, and a phone that would be driven purely by a touch screen was the stuff of science fiction and would have cost $1000 easily. 10 years ago, Linux on the desktop seemed like something that was impossible. 10 years ago, a $200 desktop or a $300 laptop would have been looked at as if it was a scam. Yet today just about everyone visits YouTube, uses streaming media, and nearly every phone has a browser, and the iPhone has been a success and now only costs $200 (well more if you count in what expensive plan AT&T tries to put you on). Linux is pre-installed on many laptops and desktops today, and we have the $200 gPC and a $300 EEE PC. So, when I say, for a while, it means that today it sounds impossible, but 5-10 years from now, we might all be using it.
The performance of any web based application will depend on A) Your browser and B) your connection speed. If you are using IE 5, it is going to be really slow. If you are using Firefox 3, it should be at least reasonable in speed. If you are on dial-up it will be slower then the guy on a 8 MB connection. All web based apps suffer from this, and is one of the reasons that they aren't used as much.
because it isnt sufficiently interoperable with MSoffice.
Wait a second... Lets see, I can save an item in OOo and I can open it up in Office and still get all the text just fine. I can use a saved file from Office and open it up in OOo and still get all the text just fine. However, I can take a saved file from Office 2003 and open it up in Office XP which should be compatible, but wait... The file from Office 2003 looks totally different on Office XP! But aha! I have Office 2003 installed on my laptop... But wait! It looks different on there then on the Office 2003 at work!
Face it. Even Office isn't good at being sufficiently interoperable with Office. But that hasn't killed Office... Yet.
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Various joystick controllers, the Playstation controllers, N64 and various prototypes would most likely have prior art.
Or you know, just your average government corruption at work. Seriously, there have been loads of controllers that should count as prior art to this patent, unfortunately, anything short of patenting breathing gets patented. And it also doesn't help that these guys waited forever to state the case they had (years after the GameCube). If you run a legitimate business you alert people of patent problems during, or shortly after production of the product, if you run a patent troll operation that takes advantage of the US patent system, you wait until 5-6 years after the product was made and then sue for outrageous damages.
I said "preaching". Teaching about religion is completely different, and there's nothing wrong with that.
They are nearly the same though, one usually believes in it when they are preaching and they only have a knowledge of it when they are teaching it.
Where did I say you shouldn't teach morals? How on earth does the tautology "when you die you're dead" lead to an argument for stealing?
If you say you should censor religion too along with whatever else you are censoring, that is, in effect, censoring morals too. Religion and morals go hand-in-hand. Sure, you can have morals without religion, but chances are they aren't as strong as someone with religion.
By all means teach morals, that's nothing to do with belief in a supernatural being. The Bible has some pretty messed up "morals" in it too, should we teach those?
Like.... Lets take the 10 commandments for example...
I am the Lord your God, You shall have no other gods before me
Can basically be translated as, "stick to what you believe"
You shall not make for yourself an idol
Same as above
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of your God
Basically, don't swear. We teach kids that today
Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
Go to church on Sunday, is the general meaning. It can be translated as "fulfill your obligations"
Honor your father and mother
Obey your parents
You shall not murder
Rather self explanatory...
You shall not commit adultery
I think that everyone would agree, it is better to be married then to divorce.
You shall not steal
Again, self explanatory
You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
Don't lie
You shall not covet your neighbor's house
You will be happier if you just look at what you have
You shall not covet your neighbor's wife
Again, don't try to get what you won't have.
And the rest of the Bible is mostly about Jesus and a few other commandments. There really is nothing morally messed up about it.
This could prove interesting for various sports that use guns such as trap shooting, skeet and general target practice. Because a slower bullet could mean less accidents, for example, if you somehow managed to shoot your foot you would only suffer a small fracture rather than having a broken busted-up foot.
Well, you don't tend to have organisations and schools preaching at children that they must believe in Santa Claus. You don't have "Santa Claus" schools specifically set up for that purpose. I imagine those are the sorts of things he meant.
No, but we do have specialty schools for teaching just about everything else. Religion is no exception, and most of these religious schools are meant to train people to become missionaries/pastors/priests/*insert high-ranking official of your favorite region here*.
FWIW, I wouldn't want to criminalise someone for exposing a child to religion. But I do think it's ridiculous that people are obsessed with censoring (or in some cases, criminalising possession of) media "because a child might see it", yet this is not applied to religion.
But how is religion offensive in any way shape or form? I don't see how you could/would censor religion and why? I mean, I see the censorship of media stupid too, but I don't see why we should censor religion in the same way we do other things. And either way, 99% of religions are peaceful and preach a message of being a general good citizen (and not just Christianity either). If we censor religion then should we censor all other moral teachings? Stop telling Aesop's Fables to children? And surely we should all be offended that a public school would ever show a Disney movie.
I don't see what you are getting at. It is in just about everyone's best interest whether the believe it or not, to give children morals from religion. Put it this way, if you were the owner of a store, would you rather have people teaching "Stealing is wrong" or "When you die you're dead so take whatever because you could die tomorrow".
I've never believed that an "emergency law" is ever necessary. The law should be able to handle situations in advance.
But that is what the Patriot act is made to do. And surely you don't believe that wiretapping Americans is necessary today do you? Emergency laws allow for the suspension of freedom temporarily, and the only solution is to create permanent laws killing freedom permanently if you choose not to use them.
Your idea is that we would allow all freedom 24/7 if we choose not to use these emergency laws, the fact is it won't happen and rather than freedom being stopped for a few months to a year, it becomes permanent. And I myself am willing to sacrifice a bit of freedom for a year to prevent a terrorist attack, I am not willing to sacrifice a lot of freedom for my lifetime to prevent a terrorist attack.
I agree that children should not be exposed to pornography or religion.
Ummm... What is your idea for preventing them to be exposed to religion? If it was the sex scandal with priests, the same thing could happen with any other adult, teachers, etc. And surely then your rationale would be you wouldn't want your child to go to school. If it is belief in things that can't be scientifically proven, then there goes any belief in an imaginary friend, Santa Clause, it could even be extended to anything that isn't real. But seriously, there is no reason to not expose a kid to a religion and by religion I mean any typical religion such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. not the things that call themselves religions such as various cults and Scientology.
And if you prevent your kids from religion then where is the justification from protecting them from naked people? Or then why prevent swearing? The thing is, porn is just pictures of people who don't have on clothes. Swear words are just words. If you take out any religious context, all this censorship doesn't make any sense.
But in a true emergency situation, you need politicians to think more about safety then their own paychecks. For example, if a hurricane came and leveled a town, would you want them to think about the funding and decide to authorize it 2 weeks later or just authorize it fast? Same thing with terrorist attacks or nuclear explosions.
The law would require sites to check visitors' ages, e.g. by taking a credit card, if the site contained any material that is "harmful to minors," whatever that means.
Stupid laws like this is the reason we have so much Identity theft here in the US. The moment that people think that giving out your credit card number to some site just to say, register for a blog, or view some porn, is normal, is the moment that even more scam sites will emerge.
It was an absolutely stupid idea to check anything with a credit card when you don't know even *who* that is going to half the time. And what the card is being used for.
The problem with this though, it would discourage any laws that might be needed. For example, the Patriot Act one could say violated the constitution, but in the few months after 9/11 it might have been needed (now, if it needed renewing is up for debate...) but to penalize the making of bad laws is just stupidity. Think of it this way, if another attack on the scale of 9/11 to happen, would you want the government not passing any laws to catch the culprits or for them to be too scared of losing $$$ to do anything?
Or... Realize that it is stupid to "protect" kids from the internet. Now, granted you don't want your kid talking to MrSerialRapist997 on AIM, but some of the things that are censored are absolutely pointless. For example, its OK if an 18 year old swears once in a while, but a 10 year old shouldn't? It is totally OK for an 18 year old to play a game in which you kill people, but not a 16 year old? Really if censoring content is all people use to judge parenting ability, then that is just sad. Now, I think that if you are say, starving your kids, they should be relocated, but just because a kid can say some swear words, plays some violent video games and have seen naked people, doesn't make the parenting bad and our society needs to realize that.
Whilst this is an advantage of open source, I'm not sure how practical forking it is just to fix a bug or add a feature you like, as you now how a separate fork to maintain everytime the main version is updated.
Yes, but there have been examples of it. For example, think of Debian's rebranding of various Mozilla browsers, and also Fun Pidgin which was origionally a fork of Pidgin to add in the resizing of the text box. (see http://funpidgin.sourceforge.net/content/features). And I'm not saying it is practical, but rather that you could do it.
If you'd like to see that mechanism improved, head over to http://bugreport.apple.com/ and provide your feedback.
See, that is the difference between Safari/IE/Opera and Firefox. With Firefox you don't have to worry about Apple/MS/Opera pushing an agenda like Apple and MS seem to do (for example, Apple doesn't want you to customize anything and MS wants IE to be as much part of the core OS as possible). With Safari/IE/Opera you can file bug reports and suggestions night and day and still not get a reply or an anything fixed, with Firefox you can get the code and change it. Now, granted, not everyone knows how to code, but if you and 5 other people decide that Firefox should be changed, it isn't that hard to fork it and add in your changes. With IE and Opera it is impossible to do that, and with Safari it isn't impossible due to WebKit being OSS, but as for the UI, that is proprietary.
The thing though is, Apple and MS are clearly pushing agendas, Apple in particular you can easily see what it tries to do and any suggestion that violates the perceived "perfectness" of Safari will be thrown out. With Firefox, you don't have that problem and never will.
I wonder if it's because the last times studies were done on those it was found that they were far more secure than closed source software, in a US GOVERNMENT FUNDED STUDY
The problem with that is you think that the government is going to be unbiased. Granted, the government isn't on the payrolls of Red Hat or Microsoft, but wouldn't it be in the government's best interest to use open source software that is a lot easier to audit and a ton cheaper? I'm not saying that they are wrong, but the government does have a lot of reason to mess with the statistics to their own favor.
This is one of the little situation where it is a blessing that the iPhone uses plain standard HTML/CSS/Javascript and has no (official) support for "thick clients" like Java of Flash. Which are currently the web vandals' advertisers' tools of choice to spit their scum.
Except for Flash/Java games. And YouTube. Now, YouTube is available on the iPhone but only some videos, and it is a lot easier and cheaper to just watch the music video on YouTube then to buy it on iTunes or hunt for the song on Last.FM or your favorite 'Net radio stations. And Flash games would just be awesome using the touch screen....
I have a DS and I can say there are no usable browsers for it really. The browser on the Wii is nice, but the one on the DS just isn't usable. And homebrew is nice... until you realize that your cart you bought for $30 at Wal-Mart doesn't support half the apps and you need to upgrade to another one.
According to http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/specials/iphone-info.jsp#0faqSection0 the cheapest plan you can get with AT&T and the iPhone is a $70 per month with 450 minutes and 5,000 night and weekend minutes. With no texting. Now, you get unlimited data. And the plan becomes an extra $20 with unlimited texting.
The Wii remote has *lots* of problems for general use. First off is the big one. Your arm gets tired after about an hour or so of use as a pointer. I can use the mouse for around 4 hours at a time without being tired. And secondly it isn't accurate. I can get a mouse to hit just about anything on a screen but it takes a lot more time to hit a link in Opera.
1) Most people don't do anything that's restricted anyway. This is less true of being restricted to a single carrier, but people generally have very little loyalty toward an individual carrier.
People don't have loyalty except in the many places that AT&T just doesn't work. While many smaller phone companies have built towers there and you get full bars with them. And the fact that I believe the contract is *$100* per month!?!? And that doesn't include texting which is nearly essential to have today.
2) People really do not feel that it's a big deal to connect their phone to their computer one time in the 2+ years that they will own it.
Except if the people have a computer that iTunes won't run on, either an older Mac or an older Windows computer (and we know, Linux or BSD but that isn't most people yet).
3) People don't have "many different types of media", they have MP3s. The iPhone plays MP3s.
Except if they rip CDs using Windows Media Player and then they have WMAs. Myself I have music in MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV/FLAC/MIDI formats. Yes, most people will have MP3s, but if they are using Windows Media Player they will have mostly WMAs which I don't blame Apple to not support, but they have them nonetheless.
4) $200 US does not seem overpriced to me. As for overhyped, most people don't have this weird reaction where they feel that they are obligated to dislike anything that's popular.
Except when I can get a Palm for $50 at AT&T and for $100 I can buy just about any other phone they have there, and not get the insanely expensive contract (though being AT&T it still is pricey anyways).
5) Most people simply don't care about replacing their battery.
If I spent $200 for a phone, I am keeping the thing for as long as I can. And if 3 years down the line the battery wears out, I'm not going to be happy if it isn't user-replaceable. Put it this way, On a RAZR I had for about 3 years I replaced the battery a total of 3 times. Did it help that I could just walk into a phone store and buy one for ~$60? Yes. And I didn't have to wait forever for it to come out of repair.
6) Most people simply don't care about storage expansion.
Ummm... Lets see would I rather A) Plug in a MicroSD adapter to my computer and copy and paste my songs with whatever file manager I choose and then copy and paste them from that to my phone or B) Plug in a cable, and deal with the headaches... I mean "excellent user interface" of iTunes to recognize my songs confining me to new Macs and Windows machines only. If the iPhone would be just a USB storage device it wouldn't matter, but just using iTunes is almost enough to stop me from getting one.
The thing that is the killer for me and why I will jailbreak any iPod Touch or iPhone I get, is that Apple won't let you run an app in the background. Now, they have reasons to do so, but that just about kills any hope for Java on the iPhone or a decent last.FM client where I can just stream music and browse some. It also kills the *small* hope for Flash (or GNASH) on it. Plus, it also won't let you do some fun things such as make terminals, etc that lets you enjoy a Unix system to the fullest.
Because it is just about the only phone you can get with Wi-Fi and a touch screen. It also has at least a usable browser, something that no other phone I have used has had. And really, for $200 the hardware it has is cheap. Now you get stuck with some AT&T plan that will charge you more then the price of the phone for just about nothing, but still, the older iPhones can be unlocked.
If you show me an open-source phone that has a touch screen and Wi-Fi and is actually usable (So that throws out OpenMoko, great idea, but unusable at the moment). The iPhone is a compromise, touch screen and Wi-Fi, and usuable but isn't open source, so you can jailbreak it and install something better on it.
Because the Neo phones that run Open Moko cost $300+ the iPhone 3G just costs $200, and chances are you can find a few on Ebay for $250ish.
Well, which is it? Never, or not for a while? :)
Well, 10 years ago we couldn't imagine anything like YouTube, and the idea of streaming media was almost laughable back when most people had dial-up. The very idea of a browser on a cell phone would have been seen as impossible, and a phone that would be driven purely by a touch screen was the stuff of science fiction and would have cost $1000 easily. 10 years ago, Linux on the desktop seemed like something that was impossible. 10 years ago, a $200 desktop or a $300 laptop would have been looked at as if it was a scam. Yet today just about everyone visits YouTube, uses streaming media, and nearly every phone has a browser, and the iPhone has been a success and now only costs $200 (well more if you count in what expensive plan AT&T tries to put you on). Linux is pre-installed on many laptops and desktops today, and we have the $200 gPC and a $300 EEE PC. So, when I say, for a while, it means that today it sounds impossible, but 5-10 years from now, we might all be using it.
The performance of any web based application will depend on A) Your browser and B) your connection speed. If you are using IE 5, it is going to be really slow. If you are using Firefox 3, it should be at least reasonable in speed. If you are on dial-up it will be slower then the guy on a 8 MB connection. All web based apps suffer from this, and is one of the reasons that they aren't used as much.
because it isnt sufficiently interoperable with MSoffice.
Wait a second... Lets see, I can save an item in OOo and I can open it up in Office and still get all the text just fine. I can use a saved file from Office and open it up in OOo and still get all the text just fine. However, I can take a saved file from Office 2003 and open it up in Office XP which should be compatible, but wait... The file from Office 2003 looks totally different on Office XP! But aha! I have Office 2003 installed on my laptop... But wait! It looks different on there then on the Office 2003 at work!
Face it. Even Office isn't good at being sufficiently interoperable with Office. But that hasn't killed Office... Yet.