You're right, but in about 3 years of running that PC I never played a video game. No big loss. It also won't let me surf the net but I have lots of other ways to do that.
I'm likely going to be flamed and modded into purgatory for this, but I use iTunes for most of this-at least, for music and videos. Some PDFs are starting to go in there if I want access to them on the go on my iPhone or iPad.
I understand that Apple's universe isn't perfect, but for me it all works together pretty nicely. I replaced my high-maintenance, increasingly noisy, power-hungry media PC with a second-generation Apple TV. This works great except that it won't play many video formats. Therefore, I've had to go through the obnoxious step of using VideoDrive to transcode videos into an Apple-approved format. However, it's not the end of the world.
Otherwise, I guess everyone's different, but personally I want to spend my time doing fun stuff like riding my bicycle or spending time with my family, not categorizing my "vast media collection". I guess I'm just getting old, but iTunes does a good enough job, with less work than any DIY system I've successfully maintained in the past.
I bought a 2.3GHz 15" on launch day. It crashed twice unexpectedly within the first week or so. I presumed it had to do with the 8GB of 3rd party RAM I installed, but a night of memtestx86 didn't turn up any problems. The computer's been mostly sitting idle since then as it's mainly just my computer for when I'm travelling, so I can't really say if it's been an ongoing problem or not.
It's a bloody fast computer though (when it isn't crashing). The quad core Sandy Bridge CPU clocks faster than my late-2008 8 core 2.8GHz Xeon Mac Pro.
It still makes me sad that Apple didn't buy Sun instead of Oracle. It would have taken less than 20% of Apple's cash reserves, so in one sense wouldn't have even been a particularly big purchase.
Apple has no significant enterprise division, and Sun was almost 100% enterprise. Apple could have merged its own chip fabrication division with Sun's, and picked up significant engineering talent along with it. Apple would control Java, which would have put it in just as strong of a position against Google as Oracle now has, which would have made sense strategically, as far as I can see.
Sure, there would have been some Java vs. Objective C questions, as well as Mac OS X Server vs. Solaris, but I think overall it would have been a healthier relationship for everyone than Oracle's purchase. Oh well, what do I know. I'm not a billionaire CEO.
I wrote this blog post yesterday and planned to send an edited version to my MP as well, before I read the news that the decision is going to be repealed. I think I'll still send the letter to my MP as an encouragement to make sure his party leader comes through on his promise.
The fox guarding the henhouse
Many other people have written articles and commentary about the CRTC's decision to allow Bell to force its wholesale customers to accept usage-based billing (UBB). This is my take on it.
I've been a very happy customer of Teksavvy for the past few years. Teksavvy's prices and policies are fair and reasonable. Teksavvy provides jobs to Canadians. Teksavvy has been one of the companies leading the charge to protect customers Bell's dishonest and anticompetitive practices. Currently I pay $32 per month for DSL from Teksavvy, which gives me 200GB per month of data use.
Thanks to the CRTC's decision in line with Bell Canada and against Canadians, my monthly cap is going to be reduced to 25GB. In Ontario, the cost per gigabyte of overage is going to be $1.90. Fortunately, my base rate will also be decreasing in acknowledgement of the fact that my bandwidth allotment is being reduced by 87.5 percent. No wait, I lied. Of course it's not. This is just a cash grab by Bell, sanctioned by the CRTC, at the expense of Canadians.
How much is this extra bandwidth going to cost? Bandwidth needs for HD movies range from about 1.5-2 GB per hour. Therefore a two hour movie will cost about $6.70 to stream in overage charges. Put another way, if you stream one hour of HD TV a day, you'll use about 53GB of data a month, just in video streaming. That's before you've done things like check your email or the weather. You'll be looking at about $52 in overage charges. That pays for a reasonable cable or satellite TV plan. I use this comparison because, of course, Bell also provides satellite television and does not want you to stop paying them $50+ per month for that in order to watch your TV online. I'm reminded of Roger's announcement last year of a reduction in bandwidth that they publicized the day after Netflix announced they were coming to Canada. An interesting coincidence.
Back to that $6.70 in streaming charges. If you rent a movie on iTunes, you'll pay $6 to rent the movie. That means if (when) you're over your bandwidth cap, to actually watch a movie, you'll be spending $12.70. That's completely ridiculous!
I read somewhere, I think in a post from Teksavvy, that this is over one thousand times the actual incremental cost that Bell incurs. In other words, Bell pays less than one fifth of one cent per GB, yet the CRTC thinks it's fair to charge consumers almost two dollars. To use another comparison, it costs Netflix at most about $0.03 per GB to stream videos. If the owners of the network between Netflix and me are able to make money off Netflix by charging them $0.03 per GB, how is it even remotely approaching fair that Bell is allowed to charge me $1.90 for that same data?
I'll admit, I'm a heavy user. I'm not sure exactly how much bandwidth I use, but it's a lot. I'm a self-employed e-commerce consultant and I work at home. My job involves me regularly uploading and downloading very large files of several gigabytes each. We have two children and probably watch about an hour of TV per day that's been streamed or downloaded off the internet. We cancelled our satellite service as we found we were paying about $15 per hour of TV actually watched, and all our video entertainment comes from the internet. We subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from iTunes. Of course Bell doesn't like people like me, as I've given up on paying for their last-century business model of paying huge monthly fees for television to be broadcast to me on the network's ag
You're right, that UBB as a concept isn't a bad thing. As a heavy user, I think it's reasonable I pay more than someone who hardly uses the internet. However, pricing excess usage at $1.90 per GB clearly shows what this is really about. It's not about providing appropriate plans for different segments of users, but about grabbing more money from internet consumers, and protecting their TV businesses. If the pricing was something more in the $0.05 per GB, that would allow Bell to make a healthy profit of probably around 66%, and it wouldn't be gouging users.
On the other hand, you apparently managed to parlay your time at Microsoft into a job as CTO at a $100M company. Whether or not Microsoft sucked (I believe you), it sounds like it was a stellar career move.
Of course there are a lot of people who dropped out of high school who are smarter than those who attended college. If you'd read and understood the point of the article, you'd realize that this is an innately obvious piece of information that in now way detracts from the point of the article.
Statistically, people who attended college now are more likely to make more money than high school dropouts than was the case in 1987.
Firstly, the point you should have been making if you'd wanted to be at least partially on topic is that there are high school dropouts who make more than people with college degrees.
Secondly, the term "more likely" does not mean that ALL college graduates make more than ALL high school dropouts. Therefore, pointing out that you know high school dropouts who make more than college-educated people should elicit a "yeah, so what" response. Of course that's the case. These are statistics we're discussing, not anecdotes.
The article also doesn't state that people who go to college are smarter than people who drop out of high school. In fact, it attributes the inequity to a number of factors, including school quality, education of parents, upbringing, geographic region, and yes, intelligence. The point really is that on average, from a financial point of view, sucks more to be smart, born to poor parents, and living in a poor area than it does to be dumber, but born to rich parents in a good neighbourhood.
1. It was on sale.
2. My time is worth something to me. A Drobo is dumb easy to set up, and a DIY Linux box doesn't seem so cheap when I've spent hours building it that I could have spent billing a client and buying a few Drobos.
3. It works.
4. I add a drive, it adds capacity. I remove a drive, I haven't lost my data. That's without spending hours on configuration.
5. It uses less power than a full computer.
6. I can use it out of the box for Time Machine backups (although I'm not, currently).
I agree, it's way overpriced. For now though, it's the only game in town that I know that does all that.
You're very wrong on this point. I'll use my alma mater as an example: the University of Waterloo in ON, Canada. Please see their software engineering home page: http://www.softeng.uwaterloo.ca/. Waterloo also had the largest Math & Computer Science programme in the world at one point, although now that they're (AFAIK) broken into two separate faculties that's probably no longer the case.
The University of Waterloo also happens to have been Canada's top-ranked undergraduate school for something like 18 of the past 19 years by Mclean's magazine, so I'd hardly call it a "diploma mill".
I'll even give you a little quote from UW's software engineering home page:
Software engineering is a systematic and disciplined approach to developing software. It applies both computer science and engineering principles and practices to the creation, operation, and maintenance of software systems.
At the University of Waterloo, Software Engineering is an independent, interdisciplinary program supported by both the Faculty of Mathematics and the Faculty of Engineering. Graduates of this program will earn a Bachelor of SoftwareEngineering (BSE) degree.
There is a reason that one of the most highly regarded engineering AND computer science schools in the world sees the need to have separate programmes for both computer science and software engineering. It's because they are different. They are similar, but not identical.
If you think that the term "software engineering" is a meaningless, self-appointed term, then you're right. It's because, in most of the US at least, "engineer" is not a regulated professional term whereas maybe it should be. Generally, I'd say that most people calling themselves software engineers are not software engineers. That doesn't mean that it's not a valid profession with valid differences from being a computer scientist or a programmer. We just need better ways of weeding out the people who like to call themselves software engineers from those who actually are.
Haha, I guess you don't drive GMs. Plus, usually when the engine wears out you usually aren't "selling" the car, which provides a bit of a false choice in your question.
Anyway, if you're given to buying used Pontiacs (which I'm not), the engine wearing out is a fairly common end result.
Ford can just put in a higher capacity alternator if they need to. They can also set the start/stop tech to not stop the vehicle if the battery's amperage is low, which measn the engine can keep running to recharge the battery if necessary.
Some companies, including VW and BMW, are putting out some innovative hybrid-like systems in their non-hybrid cars. For example, one model of the new Passat has regenerative braking which is used to charge the battery. The battery is slightly larger than in a normal gas vehicle, although nothing like it would be in a hybrid. There are also systems that recharge the battery through a photovoltaic system built into the moonroof. Then the batteries run systems that are usually run hydraulically off the engine, like the power steering system. This reduces engine load which increases fuel economy. This is a much cheaper system than a true hybrid while providing many of the same fuel economy benefits in the real world. The point is, there are lots of ways of dealing with the increased battery draw from the additional starts.
Do you honestly need someone to explain this to you?
1. You don't have store a private key. You store a passphrase. If you can't manage to remember a passphrase, see point #2.
2. It's easier to store a piece of paper with a private key somewhere than it is to store a rotating pile of hard drives. Duh.
3. For most people, it's easier to sign up for an online backup service than it is to find a friend to peer bandwidth with, set up sftp, rsync, cron, etc. It's also easier to use an online service than it is to remember to back up your data regularly, ship the drives to your secure location, etc. While you're running around setting all that up, I already have my backups in place and running.
Like the Canadian advisor to the PM who recently called for the murder of Julian Assange?
You mean, like the FORMER advisor to the Prime Minister? If you're going to state "facts", get them straight: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/12/01/flanagan-wikileaks-assange.html. Here we have a guy, who has an opinion. BFD. He doesn't reflect the Canadian government's opinion in any way; he's a guy who said something on TV.
Jungledisk will encrypt your files on your computer, with your private key. Your private key never gets sent to Jungledisk, so I believe that answers your first concern.
I'm just not sure if Jungledisk can do differential updates when you're encrpyting your files. I am not using their latest products so I'm not sure. A lot of the data I'm storing is just my iPhoto library so I am not encrypting that. That's the only potential problem I see for you, if you are changing large files very often and the differential copy is incompatible with encryption.
Jungledisk has very extensive archiving features. They've thought of that already.
Dropbox is also a good solution that might do everything you need. I mean this in a good way, but you want what a lot of people want, which means that there are several companies who provide it.
It seems to me that you're making far too big of a deal of the time to upload your files. I currently back up about 175GB to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk, and I only have a 600kbps uplink. Granted I did a lot of the initial backup from a client's office with a 10Mbps uplink, but that was also 3 years ago and I've been keeping the backup current from my home internet connection ever since.
Jungledisk uses differential copying, so once you have your original data up there it only needs to copy the changed parts of a file. It's very likely that once your data is backed up for the first time you'll never notice the slowdown on your internet connection. You'll be able to pretty much back up all your data within a weekend. I fail to see what the problem is here. It took me probably a month, but JungleDisk handled it just fine. And, it's backed up off-site now.
On a touchscreen like this that can be used for a keyboard, I wonder if they considered putting bumps on the glass panel where the F and J key go. It seems to me that that might help touch typing quite a bit on a touch keyboard, while not being terribly annoying when used for other purposes.
Yeah. I live in Canada and will no longer travel to the US if I can at all avoid it. I'm actually going to a conference in Edinburgh instead of Dallas, TX in a couple months, in large part to avoid the US. It will cost me less and be more fun too. Citizens of most countries (Canada included) seem hell-bent on bending over and letting our governments shaft us, but as in most things, America seems to be leading the way.
I think this whole idea is colossally stupid and unworkable for a number of reasons, but this isn't one of them. It would be simple for "them" to keep phones enabled for emergency calls, just as mobile phones with no plan are currently enabled for emergency calls.
Does it need to make sense to you how regularly someone else needs extra battery life to make it a worthwhile consideration? I don't fly that much so I get by with the 2 or so hours of my 3 year old Macbook Pro. However, if I flew a bit more I'd consider a laptop upgrade to be a worthy purchase, just from the standpoint of being able to get a couple more billable hours in when otherwise I can't. It doesn't take a whole lot of that to pay for a new laptop.
My biggest use for it though would be for the occasional day when I go to a client's office and forget my power adapter at home. Fortunately it doesn't happen much any more since I'm fairly paranoid about it. Plus of course, almost all offices have someone with an Apple laptop these days.
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You're right, but in about 3 years of running that PC I never played a video game. No big loss. It also won't let me surf the net but I have lots of other ways to do that.
I'm likely going to be flamed and modded into purgatory for this, but I use iTunes for most of this-at least, for music and videos. Some PDFs are starting to go in there if I want access to them on the go on my iPhone or iPad.
I understand that Apple's universe isn't perfect, but for me it all works together pretty nicely. I replaced my high-maintenance, increasingly noisy, power-hungry media PC with a second-generation Apple TV. This works great except that it won't play many video formats. Therefore, I've had to go through the obnoxious step of using VideoDrive to transcode videos into an Apple-approved format. However, it's not the end of the world.
Otherwise, I guess everyone's different, but personally I want to spend my time doing fun stuff like riding my bicycle or spending time with my family, not categorizing my "vast media collection". I guess I'm just getting old, but iTunes does a good enough job, with less work than any DIY system I've successfully maintained in the past.
I bought a 2.3GHz 15" on launch day. It crashed twice unexpectedly within the first week or so. I presumed it had to do with the 8GB of 3rd party RAM I installed, but a night of memtestx86 didn't turn up any problems. The computer's been mostly sitting idle since then as it's mainly just my computer for when I'm travelling, so I can't really say if it's been an ongoing problem or not.
It's a bloody fast computer though (when it isn't crashing). The quad core Sandy Bridge CPU clocks faster than my late-2008 8 core 2.8GHz Xeon Mac Pro.
Apple is not about enterprise.
That was my point.
It's about selling expensive trinkets to teenagers, nouveau riche, and "me too"ers.
That's a pretty stupid comment.
It still makes me sad that Apple didn't buy Sun instead of Oracle. It would have taken less than 20% of Apple's cash reserves, so in one sense wouldn't have even been a particularly big purchase.
Apple has no significant enterprise division, and Sun was almost 100% enterprise. Apple could have merged its own chip fabrication division with Sun's, and picked up significant engineering talent along with it. Apple would control Java, which would have put it in just as strong of a position against Google as Oracle now has, which would have made sense strategically, as far as I can see.
Sure, there would have been some Java vs. Objective C questions, as well as Mac OS X Server vs. Solaris, but I think overall it would have been a healthier relationship for everyone than Oracle's purchase. Oh well, what do I know. I'm not a billionaire CEO.
I wrote this blog post yesterday and planned to send an edited version to my MP as well, before I read the news that the decision is going to be repealed. I think I'll still send the letter to my MP as an encouragement to make sure his party leader comes through on his promise.
The fox guarding the henhouse
Many other people have written articles and commentary about the CRTC's decision to allow Bell to force its wholesale customers to accept usage-based billing (UBB). This is my take on it.
I've been a very happy customer of Teksavvy for the past few years. Teksavvy's prices and policies are fair and reasonable. Teksavvy provides jobs to Canadians. Teksavvy has been one of the companies leading the charge to protect customers Bell's dishonest and anticompetitive practices. Currently I pay $32 per month for DSL from Teksavvy, which gives me 200GB per month of data use.
Thanks to the CRTC's decision in line with Bell Canada and against Canadians, my monthly cap is going to be reduced to 25GB. In Ontario, the cost per gigabyte of overage is going to be $1.90. Fortunately, my base rate will also be decreasing in acknowledgement of the fact that my bandwidth allotment is being reduced by 87.5 percent. No wait, I lied. Of course it's not. This is just a cash grab by Bell, sanctioned by the CRTC, at the expense of Canadians.
How much is this extra bandwidth going to cost? Bandwidth needs for HD movies range from about 1.5-2 GB per hour. Therefore a two hour movie will cost about $6.70 to stream in overage charges. Put another way, if you stream one hour of HD TV a day, you'll use about 53GB of data a month, just in video streaming. That's before you've done things like check your email or the weather. You'll be looking at about $52 in overage charges. That pays for a reasonable cable or satellite TV plan. I use this comparison because, of course, Bell also provides satellite television and does not want you to stop paying them $50+ per month for that in order to watch your TV online. I'm reminded of Roger's announcement last year of a reduction in bandwidth that they publicized the day after Netflix announced they were coming to Canada. An interesting coincidence.
Back to that $6.70 in streaming charges. If you rent a movie on iTunes, you'll pay $6 to rent the movie. That means if (when) you're over your bandwidth cap, to actually watch a movie, you'll be spending $12.70. That's completely ridiculous!
I read somewhere, I think in a post from Teksavvy, that this is over one thousand times the actual incremental cost that Bell incurs. In other words, Bell pays less than one fifth of one cent per GB, yet the CRTC thinks it's fair to charge consumers almost two dollars. To use another comparison, it costs Netflix at most about $0.03 per GB to stream videos. If the owners of the network between Netflix and me are able to make money off Netflix by charging them $0.03 per GB, how is it even remotely approaching fair that Bell is allowed to charge me $1.90 for that same data?
I'll admit, I'm a heavy user. I'm not sure exactly how much bandwidth I use, but it's a lot. I'm a self-employed e-commerce consultant and I work at home. My job involves me regularly uploading and downloading very large files of several gigabytes each. We have two children and probably watch about an hour of TV per day that's been streamed or downloaded off the internet. We cancelled our satellite service as we found we were paying about $15 per hour of TV actually watched, and all our video entertainment comes from the internet. We subscribe to Netflix and rent movies from iTunes. Of course Bell doesn't like people like me, as I've given up on paying for their last-century business model of paying huge monthly fees for television to be broadcast to me on the network's ag
You're right, that UBB as a concept isn't a bad thing. As a heavy user, I think it's reasonable I pay more than someone who hardly uses the internet. However, pricing excess usage at $1.90 per GB clearly shows what this is really about. It's not about providing appropriate plans for different segments of users, but about grabbing more money from internet consumers, and protecting their TV businesses. If the pricing was something more in the $0.05 per GB, that would allow Bell to make a healthy profit of probably around 66%, and it wouldn't be gouging users.
On the other hand, you apparently managed to parlay your time at Microsoft into a job as CTO at a $100M company. Whether or not Microsoft sucked (I believe you), it sounds like it was a stellar career move.
Why does the White House need (sticks pinky to mouth) ONE MILLION electric cars?
While I wholeheartedly agree with you, I can only imagine that "Lego Czar" is supposed to be making fun of that.
Of course there are a lot of people who dropped out of high school who are smarter than those who attended college. If you'd read and understood the point of the article, you'd realize that this is an innately obvious piece of information that in now way detracts from the point of the article.
Statistically, people who attended college now are more likely to make more money than high school dropouts than was the case in 1987.
Firstly, the point you should have been making if you'd wanted to be at least partially on topic is that there are high school dropouts who make more than people with college degrees.
Secondly, the term "more likely" does not mean that ALL college graduates make more than ALL high school dropouts. Therefore, pointing out that you know high school dropouts who make more than college-educated people should elicit a "yeah, so what" response. Of course that's the case. These are statistics we're discussing, not anecdotes.
The article also doesn't state that people who go to college are smarter than people who drop out of high school. In fact, it attributes the inequity to a number of factors, including school quality, education of parents, upbringing, geographic region, and yes, intelligence. The point really is that on average, from a financial point of view, sucks more to be smart, born to poor parents, and living in a poor area than it does to be dumber, but born to rich parents in a good neighbourhood.
1. It was on sale.
2. My time is worth something to me. A Drobo is dumb easy to set up, and a DIY Linux box doesn't seem so cheap when I've spent hours building it that I could have spent billing a client and buying a few Drobos.
3. It works.
4. I add a drive, it adds capacity. I remove a drive, I haven't lost my data. That's without spending hours on configuration.
5. It uses less power than a full computer.
6. I can use it out of the box for Time Machine backups (although I'm not, currently).
I agree, it's way overpriced. For now though, it's the only game in town that I know that does all that.
Why?
Clearly, the GP has "too much to do" to sit around waiting for conference calls all day in his/her office.
Seriously, expand your mind about how a lot of business is done. Or don't. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be out enjoying our lives and our work too.
The University of Waterloo also happens to have been Canada's top-ranked undergraduate school for something like 18 of the past 19 years by Mclean's magazine, so I'd hardly call it a "diploma mill".
I'll even give you a little quote from UW's software engineering home page:
Software engineering is a systematic and disciplined approach to developing software. It applies both computer science and engineering principles and practices to the creation, operation, and maintenance of software systems.
At the University of Waterloo, Software Engineering is an independent, interdisciplinary program supported by both the Faculty of Mathematics and the Faculty of Engineering. Graduates of this program will earn a Bachelor of SoftwareEngineering (BSE) degree.
There is a reason that one of the most highly regarded engineering AND computer science schools in the world sees the need to have separate programmes for both computer science and software engineering. It's because they are different. They are similar, but not identical.
If you think that the term "software engineering" is a meaningless, self-appointed term, then you're right. It's because, in most of the US at least, "engineer" is not a regulated professional term whereas maybe it should be. Generally, I'd say that most people calling themselves software engineers are not software engineers. That doesn't mean that it's not a valid profession with valid differences from being a computer scientist or a programmer. We just need better ways of weeding out the people who like to call themselves software engineers from those who actually are.
Haha, I guess you don't drive GMs. Plus, usually when the engine wears out you usually aren't "selling" the car, which provides a bit of a false choice in your question.
Anyway, if you're given to buying used Pontiacs (which I'm not), the engine wearing out is a fairly common end result.
Ford can just put in a higher capacity alternator if they need to. They can also set the start/stop tech to not stop the vehicle if the battery's amperage is low, which measn the engine can keep running to recharge the battery if necessary.
Some companies, including VW and BMW, are putting out some innovative hybrid-like systems in their non-hybrid cars. For example, one model of the new Passat has regenerative braking which is used to charge the battery. The battery is slightly larger than in a normal gas vehicle, although nothing like it would be in a hybrid. There are also systems that recharge the battery through a photovoltaic system built into the moonroof. Then the batteries run systems that are usually run hydraulically off the engine, like the power steering system. This reduces engine load which increases fuel economy. This is a much cheaper system than a true hybrid while providing many of the same fuel economy benefits in the real world. The point is, there are lots of ways of dealing with the increased battery draw from the additional starts.
Do you honestly need someone to explain this to you?
1. You don't have store a private key. You store a passphrase. If you can't manage to remember a passphrase, see point #2.
2. It's easier to store a piece of paper with a private key somewhere than it is to store a rotating pile of hard drives. Duh.
3. For most people, it's easier to sign up for an online backup service than it is to find a friend to peer bandwidth with, set up sftp, rsync, cron, etc. It's also easier to use an online service than it is to remember to back up your data regularly, ship the drives to your secure location, etc. While you're running around setting all that up, I already have my backups in place and running.
Like the Canadian advisor to the PM who recently called for the murder of Julian Assange?
You mean, like the FORMER advisor to the Prime Minister? If you're going to state "facts", get them straight: http://www.cbc.ca/politics/story/2010/12/01/flanagan-wikileaks-assange.html. Here we have a guy, who has an opinion. BFD. He doesn't reflect the Canadian government's opinion in any way; he's a guy who said something on TV.
Jungledisk will encrypt your files on your computer, with your private key. Your private key never gets sent to Jungledisk, so I believe that answers your first concern.
I'm just not sure if Jungledisk can do differential updates when you're encrpyting your files. I am not using their latest products so I'm not sure. A lot of the data I'm storing is just my iPhoto library so I am not encrypting that. That's the only potential problem I see for you, if you are changing large files very often and the differential copy is incompatible with encryption.
Jungledisk has very extensive archiving features. They've thought of that already.
Dropbox is also a good solution that might do everything you need. I mean this in a good way, but you want what a lot of people want, which means that there are several companies who provide it.
It seems to me that you're making far too big of a deal of the time to upload your files. I currently back up about 175GB to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk, and I only have a 600kbps uplink. Granted I did a lot of the initial backup from a client's office with a 10Mbps uplink, but that was also 3 years ago and I've been keeping the backup current from my home internet connection ever since.
Jungledisk uses differential copying, so once you have your original data up there it only needs to copy the changed parts of a file. It's very likely that once your data is backed up for the first time you'll never notice the slowdown on your internet connection. You'll be able to pretty much back up all your data within a weekend. I fail to see what the problem is here. It took me probably a month, but JungleDisk handled it just fine. And, it's backed up off-site now.
On a touchscreen like this that can be used for a keyboard, I wonder if they considered putting bumps on the glass panel where the F and J key go. It seems to me that that might help touch typing quite a bit on a touch keyboard, while not being terribly annoying when used for other purposes.
Yeah. I live in Canada and will no longer travel to the US if I can at all avoid it. I'm actually going to a conference in Edinburgh instead of Dallas, TX in a couple months, in large part to avoid the US. It will cost me less and be more fun too. Citizens of most countries (Canada included) seem hell-bent on bending over and letting our governments shaft us, but as in most things, America seems to be leading the way.
I think it's hiding behind the giant "I think everything is a conspiracy" badge I just awarded you.
I think this whole idea is colossally stupid and unworkable for a number of reasons, but this isn't one of them. It would be simple for "them" to keep phones enabled for emergency calls, just as mobile phones with no plan are currently enabled for emergency calls.
I take it you've played with the new Macbook Air? I'm making this presumption because you're calling it "flimsy", despite the original article stating that the aluminum unibody is extremely solid despite its thinness.
Does it need to make sense to you how regularly someone else needs extra battery life to make it a worthwhile consideration? I don't fly that much so I get by with the 2 or so hours of my 3 year old Macbook Pro. However, if I flew a bit more I'd consider a laptop upgrade to be a worthy purchase, just from the standpoint of being able to get a couple more billable hours in when otherwise I can't. It doesn't take a whole lot of that to pay for a new laptop.
My biggest use for it though would be for the occasional day when I go to a client's office and forget my power adapter at home. Fortunately it doesn't happen much any more since I'm fairly paranoid about it. Plus of course, almost all offices have someone with an Apple laptop these days.