Lots of other things encourage living close, too. You don't have to bike to get the benefits. I live very close to work, and I drive instead of bike... Clearly I've got all the benefits of both, and I'm much better off than a cyclist.
Use a bike like most do and ride only a few thousand miles per year and your figures are misleading to the point of being ridiculous.
No, his figures are fair. Yours are the ones that are stacked and misleading, assuming getting on a bike is going to cause all other considerations to go away, and force people into your preferred life-style...
The idea that the car equals freedom is pretty much dead these days if you live anywhere with a dense population.
Right... because Thanksgiving day, the LA freeways are packed solid with people who could just be biking 100+ miles instead of driving, right? And grocery shopping works great when you can only haul one bag at a time, and refrigerated items are guaranteed to be melted and spoiled by the time you pedal your way home.
Cars are for the fat and lazy.
My grandmother wasn't fat or lazy. Into her 80s, I bet she could beat most/.ers at arm wrestling. She didn't own a bike, but she kept driving into her 90's. Only had a couple fender-benders in her time, and those were mostly attributable to bad weather conditions (snow and ice will keep me home, but not her... never).
IMHO, people like you are the the reason people take their cars instead of bike. If it was legal to attach an electric motor to a bike that could sustain 35MPH or so, and could still use bike lanes, sidewalks, etc., a ton of people would prefer them. Instead, a bike is a status symbol, and ego maniacs hate the idea of non-purists (those who may be fat and lazy) getting to join the club.
Those numbers obviously AREN'T for mobile phones. You can't compare Android licensing to their ENTIRE business, because mobile isn't their entire business.
"$543 million from Android devices between 2008 and December 2011"
That may be tiny percentage of ALL their income, but it's more than enough to make development of Android profitable, without forced advertising.
Google only recently aquired Motorola Mobility, so you can't attribute previous actions to them. HOWEVER, I'd say suing Apple is fair game, because Apple fired the first big shot, a billion dollar lawsuit, plus import bans against Samsung over their Android devices. That's the kind of big action Google would need to respond to.
"Competing" or even running at a loss for a while, trying to break into a market, isn't "attacking", What Apple is doing, meanwhile, IS attacking.
And you're wrong about Android. Google is making plenty of money, and NOT from advertising. While Android proper is free, anybody who wants-in on Google's Apps (Gmail, maps, navigation, etc) and the Market / Play Store, has to get a license from Google. They're making good money from it.
What's more, Google has no reason to use patents to attack Apple or Microsoft. Google doesn't have any lock-in on Android that would make that profitable from an advertising perspective. Anybody (see: Amazon) can change out the Google apps, and not use Google search... Some handset makers change everything to Bing, because the Microsoft money is better (though their service is unreliable), and I personally changed my Android phone to use DDG. Meanwhile, Google *does* have ample reason to aquire patents for defensive purposes, since there are concerted attacks by Apple, which Google needs to defend against to ensure the survival of Android.
No filtration method is perfect or fool-proof. Slow sand is one of the best. If you'd like to claim otherwise (as you seem to be doing) you'll have to argue with pretty much every respected authority on the planet. Let's start with the World Health Organization:
If you're making judgements based on implied statements... you're an idiot, and I've got no desire to argue with you, or anyone else so adverse to facts.
However, I will point out that you're now talking about employer-provided health insurance, which is fundamentally different than the private health insurance market. Everyone in the company pays the same price, the employer can subsidize it as much as they choose, and government regulations make many demands on insurers, like full coverage from day-one, regardless of pre-existing conditions or other health factors. In addition, my experience is that employers will substantially subsidize the employee's health insurance, but opting for coverage for spouse and children is less subsidized, and can be quite considerably more expensive.
There have been numerous reports of layout problems with Office documents that are opened in newer versions of Office. For legacy documents, at least, Microsoft doesn't have much of an advantage over OpenOffice. Besides, you can always have that one system in the corner with Office installed, while everyone else uses something cheaper and better for all non-corner cases.
" You are labouring under on the false assumption that all medical care needs to be available immediately, on demand, and that waiting a few weeks for non-urgent surgery is somehow a terrible indictment of that country's system."
No, I was pointing out that there the parent should just stop denying that there are indeed some trade-offs with a public system, and no advantages of a private system.
And now, you're spinning it to a ridiculous degree to justify your opinion. NHS has had problems with waiting-lists of as much as 2 years. That's more than "a few". And "non-urgent" is debatable... particularly when the issue is making a person unable to earn a living, yet they just have to keep on waiting. I'll bet you even know of people who've opted to pay twice for private insurance, or have traveled to other countries for care because they just couldn't wait.
" I don't give a flying fuck about choosing Hospital A over Hospital B, I want the closest one."
Good for you, because if you get sick or injured while traveling, and check-in to any other hospital than hospital A, expect that you'll be refused treatment, and shipped back to hospital A.
<blockquote>
Let me put it more plainly. Linux needs Nvidia more than Nvidia needs linux
I doubt that's true... The big purchasers of GPUs run Linux, and aren't going to change to something else (FreeBSD perhaps?) just because NVidia doesn't feel like working with the platform... Instead, companies will go with AMD GPUs which do work on Linux. This would be a big hit to NVidia, as so many supercomputer clusters and render farms now run on Linux.
I'm also aware that buying the same level of healthcare in the USA now (as a healthy young person) would cost me about twice as much if I lived in the USA
Actually, since healthy young people are the lowest-risk category, insurance for them is very cheap... No doubt cheaper than the taxes paid to the NHS. It's the rest of the populace which would get a poor deal out of it.
Additionally, there was a study showing that Kaiser Permente's model was more efficient and cheaper in the end than the UK's NHS model. While there's been furious debate about the conclusion of the study, it's never-the-less clear that health-care insurance in the US can be found, just about as inexpensively as the taxes supporting the NHS in the UK.
The US certainly needs reform, as evidenced by the sheer number of people who lack health insurance, but the UK's model isn't all that much more cost-efficient, and each country's health care model has numerous problems of their own (some more significant than others, of course), which are unheard of in the US.
The answer you are looking for is: Lower company standards. Having worked for companies large and small, including start-ups at various stages, I can say from experience that frequent releases work because management has reasonably low standards, and is perfectly okay with the last deployment breaking things, and needing to be hot-fixed by a follow-up deployment just days later. That's just the model.
I know the model you're talking about, too. A more solid company, building its web products like it would a critical internal service... Going through design phases and in-depth code review, and extensive compatibility testing, to make sure anything that is deployed will work 100% (or almost), and is good enough that it'll never need to be held together with duck tape and band-aides because the feature was tacked on ad-hock by one dev in a few hours, which is really what you're talking about at these "nimble" startups.
There are some ways to get the best of both. The Amazon model is to develop a public API, then develop unit tests which FULLY exercise that API. Then all the quick development behind the scenes doesn't change the API, and regression-free code is assured in seconds, as you run all those unit tests against the new code. That also instills more discipline, as the documentation is law, and it'll be clear which code is to blame when there's a breakage, and less perpetuation of bugs and flaws to keep other bad code from breaking when they're fixed.
Yes, the developed world has, for centuries, been vastly weather than the currently impoverished areas we're talking about. Pre industrial revolution, people in the western world were much better off, due to natural riches from ample forests, valuable minerals, good soil and climate, or even just nearby navigable waterways... Some parts of the world were simply lucky.
The developed world was also in that situation and it didn't need a wealthier part of the world to bail it out.
Yes it did. History is filled with examples, such as Roman conquest resulting in infrastructure development, and other fringe benefits. In the US, there's no question the wealthier cities / states substantially subsidized the infrastructure for the poorer states, and continue to do so to this day...
We got consistently positive feedback on our call center, and I really think that outsourcing let us provide a better experience than if we tried to build it in house.
I just can't help but wonder, what if the company (airline) who put together the call-center you're outsourcing to, had thought the same thing as you... In some ways "it's turtles all the way down!"
The reality is a third party call center with multiple clients can do a better and cheaper job.
That's not inherently true at all. "multiple clients" is just one method to get economies of scale and try to keep your employees sufficiently busy.
I know from experience an on-site call center can in-fact be CHEAPER than any of the call center outsourcing providers, (with perhaps the exception of meeting peak demand, if applicable) while also being more effective.
Their agents are talking more calls per hour and doing a better job than some fresh hire at a company that looks at call centers as just another cost.
It's true you can't expect entry-level call-center reps to be as efficient as lifers, but you also can't expect call centers to ensure their employees are all as technically proficient with your product as you want them to be. I'm sure we've all gone through situations where the tech support zombie can't even *comprehend* the issue you're reporting, and doesn't know they should escalate, rather than take you through one of the standard scripts. After all, being graded on simple metrics like call time and number of issues resolved makes them very efficient at making sure their metrics look good, no matter what their job actually demands they do.
And besides that... some of those McDonald's employees will turn out to be very good phone support reps. You just need enough time to churn through the lousy ones, while keeping on the payroll enough of the good one.
Even with a slider, I still use the on-screen keyboard plenty. Swype in particular is okay for simple URLs, and quick messages.
It doesn't, however, work in an SSH session worth a damn. All the reasons I've listed, like having to switch modes for every symbol, and things like command-names and paths not being simple dictionary words with loose tolerances about capitalization and extra spaces.
So no, the assertion just isn't true, no matter what.
We have luxuries in the developed world because we're all rich.
If there was no electric grid, I'd buy solar panels, or a wind turbine, or a propane / methanol / diesel / gasoline generator. And indeed, plenty of people are off-grid.
Building infrastructure where people live on $200/year means few if any can afford to use that infrastructure, and the difficulty of installing it will never be recouped. Do it as an NGO project, and they won't even be able to afford regular maintenance of the infrastructure, anyhow. Plus, you need to consider the difficulty of doing all this in many extremely remote regions.
"The developed world approach" has no common strain, other than that people have lots of money, so bringing them conveniences in any way you can will be profitable. The way the electric grid started in New York bears no resemblance to the early grid in Florida. The water and sewage works are very different in the middle of the desert than they are in coastal areas. The only commonality is that people want the convenience, so they'll pay more money than impoverished people even make, to get it.
1. Running water through two meters of sand will filter out nearly all contaminants. It's something any local can do, and costs next to nothing. Instead all kinds of NGOs spend money on fancy, high-tech devices, which require maintenance and replacement, so they just perpetuate a cycle of dependency.
4. Build a toilet (basically a bucket) with a vent pipe which will allow liquids to dry up quickly. Then throw in a small amount of started microbes (for composting toilets). Odor is minimal, and when the toilet is full, it can be dumped out as benefitial compost, and start again with some more microbes. Local production of microbes should make it sufficiently cheap that it'll be easily affordable.
5. Digital electronics, and cell phones in particular, are making this a reality, right now. A little effort by a group of educators to produce the simplest and easiest collection of useful information, tailored to various regions, is just about all that is necessary to get the ball rolling.
If you want to criticize automobile reasearch, complain about the money wasted on ethanol and hydrogen, when everyone knew it was a pointless distraction and dead end. Electric vehicles like the Chevy Volt are the future, and a future where there's less demand for oil means a future where despotic regimes which repress their people will see their funds dwindling, hopefully enough that they'll be unable to maintain their power.
Not many smartphones have physical keyboards with four arrow keys, control, escape, and tab.
And with VX ConnectBot, you can configure the pop-up dialog (when you tap the screen) to include any and every key you could possibly want, to supplement the physical keyboard.
I haven't seen one without arrow keys, ever, but Control-B, Control-F, Control-P and Control-N should do the job in such a case.
Control and Escape are provided by the "Ok" key every Android slider has.
Tab can be approximated by Control-L if your keyboard doesn't have it.
ALL tiny devices generally aren't good at text-heavy operations
That's just not true. Once you've got a physical keyboard, they get impressively good at "text-heavy operations". And with the larger phones, you could even have a touch-type keyboard slide out, ala the old Psion Revo.
but software keyboards (especially well-designed, application-specific ones) DO have some advantages.
Yes, they have a few tiny advantages to go with their innumerable and gapingly huge disadvantages.
I've been there, done that, for over a decade. I will not buy a device without a physical keyboard, EVER AGAIN. In the real world, I'll be doing major work on my slider, while you're just just slowly fiddling with your touch-screen.
I admit, most siders are middle-of-the-road rather than strictly high-end, but there's always high-end options out there. All the wireless providers knows there's a dedicated following, and won't be caught without a couple good QWERTY phones.
Verizon's got the Droid 4, and Pantech Marauder.
Sprint has the Motorola Photonâ Q 4G LTE, and a couple dated sliders.
On AT&T, the Xperia Ion or LG Escape look good.
T-Mobile has the Samsung Galaxy S Relay.
Personally, I'm more interested in battery life than any other high-end specs, because that's always the stumbling block for me these days.
Slashdot Mirror
I learn something new every day...
Lots of other things encourage living close, too. You don't have to bike to get the benefits. I live very close to work, and I drive instead of bike... Clearly I've got all the benefits of both, and I'm much better off than a cyclist.
No, his figures are fair. Yours are the ones that are stacked and misleading, assuming getting on a bike is going to cause all other considerations to go away, and force people into your preferred life-style...
Right... because Thanksgiving day, the LA freeways are packed solid with people who could just be biking 100+ miles instead of driving, right? And grocery shopping works great when you can only haul one bag at a time, and refrigerated items are guaranteed to be melted and spoiled by the time you pedal your way home.
My grandmother wasn't fat or lazy. Into her 80s, I bet she could beat most /.ers at arm wrestling. She didn't own a bike, but she kept driving into her 90's. Only had a couple fender-benders in her time, and those were mostly attributable to bad weather conditions (snow and ice will keep me home, but not her... never).
IMHO, people like you are the the reason people take their cars instead of bike. If it was legal to attach an electric motor to a bike that could sustain 35MPH or so, and could still use bike lanes, sidewalks, etc., a ton of people would prefer them. Instead, a bike is a status symbol, and ego maniacs hate the idea of non-purists (those who may be fat and lazy) getting to join the club.
Yes it does. Medicare, Medicaid, Medi-cal, Veterans Administration (VA), and other programs make up "60-65% of healthcare provision and spending".
But being ignorant of the topic sure makes arguing in support of your opinion so much easier, doesn't it?
Those numbers obviously AREN'T for mobile phones. You can't compare Android licensing to their ENTIRE business, because mobile isn't their entire business.
"$543 million from Android devices between 2008 and December 2011"
That may be tiny percentage of ALL their income, but it's more than enough to make development of Android profitable, without forced advertising.
Google only recently aquired Motorola Mobility, so you can't attribute previous actions to them. HOWEVER, I'd say suing Apple is fair game, because Apple fired the first big shot, a billion dollar lawsuit, plus import bans against Samsung over their Android devices. That's the kind of big action Google would need to respond to.
"Competing" or even running at a loss for a while, trying to break into a market, isn't "attacking", What Apple is doing, meanwhile, IS attacking.
And you're wrong about Android. Google is making plenty of money, and NOT from advertising. While Android proper is free, anybody who wants-in on Google's Apps (Gmail, maps, navigation, etc) and the Market / Play Store, has to get a license from Google. They're making good money from it.
What's more, Google has no reason to use patents to attack Apple or Microsoft. Google doesn't have any lock-in on Android that would make that profitable from an advertising perspective. Anybody (see: Amazon) can change out the Google apps, and not use Google search... Some handset makers change everything to Bing, because the Microsoft money is better (though their service is unreliable), and I personally changed my Android phone to use DDG. Meanwhile, Google *does* have ample reason to aquire patents for defensive purposes, since there are concerted attacks by Apple, which Google needs to defend against to ensure the survival of Android.
No filtration method is perfect or fool-proof. Slow sand is one of the best. If you'd like to claim otherwise (as you seem to be doing) you'll have to argue with pretty much every respected authority on the planet. Let's start with the World Health Organization:
http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/publications/ssf/en/index.html
You seem to be severely fact-challenged.
Putting your fingers in your ears and yelling "No, no, no" won't change things, and doesn't help your argument.
Goodbye.
You need to go look up Swype, because your ignorance is showing.
If you're making judgements based on implied statements... you're an idiot, and I've got no desire to argue with you, or anyone else so adverse to facts.
However, I will point out that you're now talking about employer-provided health insurance, which is fundamentally different than the private health insurance market. Everyone in the company pays the same price, the employer can subsidize it as much as they choose, and government regulations make many demands on insurers, like full coverage from day-one, regardless of pre-existing conditions or other health factors. In addition, my experience is that employers will substantially subsidize the employee's health insurance, but opting for coverage for spouse and children is less subsidized, and can be quite considerably more expensive.
There have been numerous reports of layout problems with Office documents that are opened in newer versions of Office. For legacy documents, at least, Microsoft doesn't have much of an advantage over OpenOffice. Besides, you can always have that one system in the corner with Office installed, while everyone else uses something cheaper and better for all non-corner cases.
" You are labouring under on the false assumption that all medical care needs to be available immediately, on demand, and that waiting a few weeks for non-urgent surgery is somehow a terrible indictment of that country's system."
No, I was pointing out that there the parent should just stop denying that there are indeed some trade-offs with a public system, and no advantages of a private system.
And now, you're spinning it to a ridiculous degree to justify your opinion. NHS has had problems with waiting-lists of as much as 2 years. That's more than "a few". And "non-urgent" is debatable... particularly when the issue is making a person unable to earn a living, yet they just have to keep on waiting. I'll bet you even know of people who've opted to pay twice for private insurance, or have traveled to other countries for care because they just couldn't wait.
" I don't give a flying fuck about choosing Hospital A over Hospital B, I want the closest one."
Good for you, because if you get sick or injured while traveling, and check-in to any other hospital than hospital A, expect that you'll be refused treatment, and shipped back to hospital A.
<blockquote>
Let me put it more plainly. Linux needs Nvidia more than Nvidia needs linux
I doubt that's true... The big purchasers of GPUs run Linux, and aren't going to change to something else (FreeBSD perhaps?) just because NVidia doesn't feel like working with the platform... Instead, companies will go with AMD GPUs which do work on Linux. This would be a big hit to NVidia, as so many supercomputer clusters and render farms now run on Linux.
The US does not have waiting lists for medical care. Finland does.
Actually, since healthy young people are the lowest-risk category, insurance for them is very cheap... No doubt cheaper than the taxes paid to the NHS. It's the rest of the populace which would get a poor deal out of it.
Additionally, there was a study showing that Kaiser Permente's model was more efficient and cheaper in the end than the UK's NHS model. While there's been furious debate about the conclusion of the study, it's never-the-less clear that health-care insurance in the US can be found, just about as inexpensively as the taxes supporting the NHS in the UK.
The US certainly needs reform, as evidenced by the sheer number of people who lack health insurance, but the UK's model isn't all that much more cost-efficient, and each country's health care model has numerous problems of their own (some more significant than others, of course), which are unheard of in the US.
The answer you are looking for is: Lower company standards. Having worked for companies large and small, including start-ups at various stages, I can say from experience that frequent releases work because management has reasonably low standards, and is perfectly okay with the last deployment breaking things, and needing to be hot-fixed by a follow-up deployment just days later. That's just the model.
I know the model you're talking about, too. A more solid company, building its web products like it would a critical internal service... Going through design phases and in-depth code review, and extensive compatibility testing, to make sure anything that is deployed will work 100% (or almost), and is good enough that it'll never need to be held together with duck tape and band-aides because the feature was tacked on ad-hock by one dev in a few hours, which is really what you're talking about at these "nimble" startups.
There are some ways to get the best of both. The Amazon model is to develop a public API, then develop unit tests which FULLY exercise that API. Then all the quick development behind the scenes doesn't change the API, and regression-free code is assured in seconds, as you run all those unit tests against the new code. That also instills more discipline, as the documentation is law, and it'll be clear which code is to blame when there's a breakage, and less perpetuation of bugs and flaws to keep other bad code from breaking when they're fixed.
Yes, the developed world has, for centuries, been vastly weather than the currently impoverished areas we're talking about. Pre industrial revolution, people in the western world were much better off, due to natural riches from ample forests, valuable minerals, good soil and climate, or even just nearby navigable waterways... Some parts of the world were simply lucky.
Yes it did. History is filled with examples, such as Roman conquest resulting in infrastructure development, and other fringe benefits. In the US, there's no question the wealthier cities / states substantially subsidized the infrastructure for the poorer states, and continue to do so to this day...
I just can't help but wonder, what if the company (airline) who put together the call-center you're outsourcing to, had thought the same thing as you... In some ways "it's turtles all the way down!"
That's not inherently true at all. "multiple clients" is just one method to get economies of scale and try to keep your employees sufficiently busy.
I know from experience an on-site call center can in-fact be CHEAPER than any of the call center outsourcing providers, (with perhaps the exception of meeting peak demand, if applicable) while also being more effective.
It's true you can't expect entry-level call-center reps to be as efficient as lifers, but you also can't expect call centers to ensure their employees are all as technically proficient with your product as you want them to be. I'm sure we've all gone through situations where the tech support zombie can't even *comprehend* the issue you're reporting, and doesn't know they should escalate, rather than take you through one of the standard scripts. After all, being graded on simple metrics like call time and number of issues resolved makes them very efficient at making sure their metrics look good, no matter what their job actually demands they do.
And besides that... some of those McDonald's employees will turn out to be very good phone support reps. You just need enough time to churn through the lousy ones, while keeping on the payroll enough of the good one.
Even with a slider, I still use the on-screen keyboard plenty. Swype in particular is okay for simple URLs, and quick messages.
It doesn't, however, work in an SSH session worth a damn. All the reasons I've listed, like having to switch modes for every symbol, and things like command-names and paths not being simple dictionary words with loose tolerances about capitalization and extra spaces.
So no, the assertion just isn't true, no matter what.
We have luxuries in the developed world because we're all rich.
If there was no electric grid, I'd buy solar panels, or a wind turbine, or a propane / methanol / diesel / gasoline generator. And indeed, plenty of people are off-grid.
Building infrastructure where people live on $200/year means few if any can afford to use that infrastructure, and the difficulty of installing it will never be recouped. Do it as an NGO project, and they won't even be able to afford regular maintenance of the infrastructure, anyhow. Plus, you need to consider the difficulty of doing all this in many extremely remote regions.
"The developed world approach" has no common strain, other than that people have lots of money, so bringing them conveniences in any way you can will be profitable. The way the electric grid started in New York bears no resemblance to the early grid in Florida. The water and sewage works are very different in the middle of the desert than they are in coastal areas. The only commonality is that people want the convenience, so they'll pay more money than impoverished people even make, to get it.
1. Running water through two meters of sand will filter out nearly all contaminants. It's something any local can do, and costs next to nothing. Instead all kinds of NGOs spend money on fancy, high-tech devices, which require maintenance and replacement, so they just perpetuate a cycle of dependency.
4. Build a toilet (basically a bucket) with a vent pipe which will allow liquids to dry up quickly. Then throw in a small amount of started microbes (for composting toilets). Odor is minimal, and when the toilet is full, it can be dumped out as benefitial compost, and start again with some more microbes. Local production of microbes should make it sufficiently cheap that it'll be easily affordable.
5. Digital electronics, and cell phones in particular, are making this a reality, right now. A little effort by a group of educators to produce the simplest and easiest collection of useful information, tailored to various regions, is just about all that is necessary to get the ball rolling.
If you want to criticize automobile reasearch, complain about the money wasted on ethanol and hydrogen, when everyone knew it was a pointless distraction and dead end. Electric vehicles like the Chevy Volt are the future, and a future where there's less demand for oil means a future where despotic regimes which repress their people will see their funds dwindling, hopefully enough that they'll be unable to maintain their power.
And with VX ConnectBot, you can configure the pop-up dialog (when you tap the screen) to include any and every key you could possibly want, to supplement the physical keyboard.
I haven't seen one without arrow keys, ever, but Control-B, Control-F, Control-P and Control-N should do the job in such a case.
Control and Escape are provided by the "Ok" key every Android slider has.
Tab can be approximated by Control-L if your keyboard doesn't have it.
That's just not true. Once you've got a physical keyboard, they get impressively good at "text-heavy operations". And with the larger phones, you could even have a touch-type keyboard slide out, ala the old Psion Revo.
Yes, they have a few tiny advantages to go with their innumerable and gapingly huge disadvantages.
I've been there, done that, for over a decade. I will not buy a device without a physical keyboard, EVER AGAIN. In the real world, I'll be doing major work on my slider, while you're just just slowly fiddling with your touch-screen.
Funny you'd say that because: "There's a lot of QWERTY slider Android phones out there if you look hard enough, but most of them are mid- to high-end," http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-transform-ultra-slides-into-the-low-end-20111024/
I admit, most siders are middle-of-the-road rather than strictly high-end, but there's always high-end options out there. All the wireless providers knows there's a dedicated following, and won't be caught without a couple good QWERTY phones.
Verizon's got the Droid 4, and Pantech Marauder.
Sprint has the Motorola Photonâ Q 4G LTE, and a couple dated sliders.
On AT&T, the Xperia Ion or LG Escape look good.
T-Mobile has the Samsung Galaxy S Relay.
Personally, I'm more interested in battery life than any other high-end specs, because that's always the stumbling block for me these days.