Check cards require a PIN to get cash out of an ATM. They require a signature for purchases over $25 in most places. Most check cards are also now actually VISA or Mastercard backed... ie you can dispute the charge just like a credit card. In some respects they are really just credit cards secured by your bank account... you post a transaction via credit and it gets processed by VISA et al whom draws from your bank account to cover the charge.
IMHO it's much better than cash if you like to have a paper trail to help do your taxes later.... receipts always fade and are difficult to store.. logging on to your bank website and downloading your transaction data is much more convenient and easier to run reports on.
Yes Apple is a corporation, publicly traded and must answer to their stock holders via profit profit profit.... I would say they are every bit as good if not better at it than Microsoft.
OTOH as a corporation that double deals, treats their own individual customers as second hand citizens compared to large corporate customers... I'd say they are much worse at it than MS.
Gen1 Macbook Pro w/ a straight upgrade (not archive-install or clean install)
I run a variety of apps. Parallels DT2 w/ XP sp2, Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Flash IDE, Flash Encoder, Dreamweaver), Apple apps (Safari, Mail, iCal, Keynote, iLife07 pack), Firefox, Opera, Eclipse IDE w/ Websphere and Flex plugins, XAMPP web server pack
I open files directly off a Samba file server running on Ubuntu Linux - large 200MB InDesign files w/ 100s of imported files in them (word docs, images, photoshop docs, pdfs, illustrator files, excel docs) make edits, save... all while encoding flash video from 1GB MPEG2 files, reading tutorials in Safari 3, hand coding actionscript in BBedit over an FTP connection to a server in New York (I'm in CA) and working on a Sharepoint 2007 website via IE7 in XP on Parallels.
Yes I have a 30 in. ACDisplay and my laptop screen, I'd soon have a seizure from tabbing through apps continuously otherwise.
The only thing I haven't done yet is turn on Spaces for Leopard. It was buggy the first time I ran it and I haven't had time to try it again after the 10.5.1 update.
I did once get a beachball cursor when I opened a large corrupted video file in VLC. I force quit it and re-copied the file from the server... opened again, no problems.
When it's wet... before turning to mud, there will be a fine coating of water, which will have surface tension... and there's probably minerals in the soil that enhance that surface tension.
Ever put a cup on a wet table? It slides around with the smallest breeze. If it gets as windy as described, then the combination of surface tension and wind is probably the cause. AKA hydroplaning... in fact the tracks may only be the gouges left when the rocks stop hydroplaning... they may start their slides meters away from the 'trails'.
Uhh... unfortunately for your facts, here in the US we still have at least 400 years of coal still available to us... there's even more in China. Oil from current locations is at peak production, which means that from now on it will start costing more to extract it than before, that's all. There is still a hundred years or more of oil left, not counting new locations (which might be more difficult to extract > higher cost though technology keeps making that stuff less expensive).
SO. Cheap oil is gone, oil is not gone. Cheap coal is still plentiful and it better be, cause we need it to make coke which we need to make steel. The alternative to steel is plastic, which AFAIK is a petrochemical derivative (though not necessarily from the same stuff they make gasoline from).
In general you are correct... they are NON-renewable resources, but this is common sense. Eventually the stuff that took millions of years to condense from organic materials is going to run out and it's replacement won't be available for another million years.
I'm all for consumer grade renewable energy sources... not for the environment specifically but as a general economic and standard of living improvement. Renewables carry a one time cost of R&D and manufacturing... w/ very low ongoing maintenance overhead. Non-renewables cost us time and energy for each and every ounce we extract. Renewables can be home-grown ie: you can put windfarms in windy places, solar farms in sunny places, hydro farms in wet places, biofuel farms in fertile places, etc. There are no additional transportation costs and the local community can be largely self-sufficient which leads to a dynamic where a community can only support as many people as it has natural energy for (which would be ideal). We can go back to living off the land in a sense.
The EFF has created a fund to defend victims of the RIAA... if you ever get charged, give them a call. If they turn down your case? You've been a naughty monkey indeed.
Send me the laptop and I'll go buy a Dell and send it back to you... I'll even get it with XP installed and preinstall Office 07 for you;-p no worries, I love helping out people....
We're plenty intelligent enough... we just don't have enough data and probably never will, but we can make guesses - more educated guesses than those made by early philosophers (religious academics and natural academics). Personally I don't see the disconnect between early science/religion and modern science. They sought answers with what information they had available.. we do the same. Just because some cult of people want to believe that we were at the pinnacle of understanding some 2 - 3 thousand years ago, doesn't discount the efforts made at the time.
Those Rabbis, Greeks and monks were very smart people - they also had to deal with politics and ignorance however and sometimes the best way to deal with that is to dumb it down to a lowest common denominator. "That's right, God made that happen. Don't go to war over it... it was a miracle. Now give us money so we can keep teaching your kids how to read/write and count to ten."
This is a patent on a system to provide tiered service.. nothing more, nothing less. However it is worded in it's summary or abstract has nothing to do with the method it implements other than to provide an example of how it COULD be used, not how it WILL be used. In fact this could be implemented to provide tiered internet service, tiered data provisioning among servers... ie: it could be used as a clustered server farm system management policy - wherein a server that is not doing so well (DOSed, traffic bound naturally or just in need of an upgraded nic card) would not be sent as many requests to handle.
To truly get an idea of how a patent WILL be used, you have to look at what problem the patent holder is trying to solve (which is probably going to be difficult to guess)... and then generalize a method to fit that problem's solution. A good way to do it is to swap out the nouns with a variety of potential objects and see what would fit. The server farm example is just one that would fit... there are many others.
Actually that small startup/upstart will be Adobe.
And FYi, with Adobe Air, Google Gears and with Safari leading the way on HTML 5 local storage APIs for web apps... those online apps will soon be getting a version that works while you're offline as well, then will update and sync when you do have a connection.
i thought it was just called XML... and it pretty much allowed anything. It allows binary data to coexist with textual data to coexist with structured data, etc etc.
Now if you're talking about an open document format, that's a whole different beast, but I believe there is already a standard for that as well... ODF right? and it should focus on the things that are needed for documents, which seems to me should only include at most a way to reference binary data and structured data and should mostly be just about formatting textual data and including those references to placed media. Anything more and it's no longer a document, it's an application.
I for one like the method which uses special directories as documents, with any images, media or other non-textual data files included in the directory... along side the textual data and using an xml file to define the structure and a stylesheet to define the styling of the formatted document. An application reads the xml file, which references each of the media assets, and displays all the information per the transformation style sheet. It's all very obvious when you look inside the directory, everything is separate but unified, everything can be repurposed - aliases can be used for references if desired, any application can READ the data as it's all in it's original format.
EMP will make a comeback... as will attaching devices that over-charge the batteries and cause them to explode...
What's more worrisome by far is that car chase scenes will no longer have revved up engine sounds... going fast no longer means a loud engine. It'll be like watching space movies that let you hear the explosions in space while the camera is not inside a ship...
Cheap Solar energy would make a lot of problems go away. Problems like water desalinization, air pollution, expensive and damaging personal and mass transport, environment control (heating and cooling) for those who are sensitive - think heat waves killing the elderly... even making a lot of science and technology a lot cheaper to develop and maintain.
Remove fuel costs from our economy and replace them with one-time batter expenses and everything would get a lot cheaper real quick. Food production, manufacturing, transportation, anything service oriented that relies on the above..... fuel costs are huge and pervasive in our lives... whether they come from gasoline, (bio)diesel, coal, or nuclear.... we have a giant fusion reactor beaming us energy each and every second of every day for free and we have hundreds of viable ways to capture it - thermal, photovoltaic, active thermal (sterling), even wind is really just thermal gradients in our atmosphere.
I'm no die-hard green freak... just practical and there's nothing more practical than accepting a free gift.
#111 if this comes true, there will subsequently be a lot of rich men, recently divorced by their smart Android wives, who are 50% less rich than they were before... honestly why would you want to "Marry" an android? There's little enough benefit for men to getting married to a real woman (having a stable family is the only one you might hope for) much less an android woman who's going to be smarter than you and guaranteed to outlive you.
If CA had allowed them to do this, without bringing suit, then the CA gov would be liable if there were ANY problems - real or imaginary, which could somehow, anyhow be traced back to this discrepancy. The State Sec or State is doing the right thing both for the people and for his job security.
A court may find that the damages are too great, who cares... he brought the suit and is now off the hook for anything that may or may not have happened come election time.
How many Business Professionals want Vista? They are the users AND the people who will influence the decision. IT Pros already use an alternate OS... Linux, OS X or at least dual boot or use a virtualized Windows as needed. Unfortunately IT Pros don't get to decide what OS gets used.... they just have to support it. Until there is a perfect replacement for Office and Exchange on Linux or OS X (which is half way there), the business users will be using Windows.... eventually they will use something newer than XP.
Uh you're forgetting the fact that is is high resolution and lasts 30 hours on a 2 hour charge. A good eBook reader should have twice the resolution of the iPhone (which is already much higher than your average PDA/Laptop). Here's a link to one with 1200 x 1600 http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/e_ink/seiko-high+res-super+thin-ebook-reader-323502.php.
So you are correct that amazon's offering is less than ideal but don't discount the idea of a good ebook reader... prices will fall when people start buying them and the tech will improve at the same price point.
I'd like to see Apple's version of an eBook reader... some say a tablet form factor is in the pipeline... maybe it has high res display and can be a good reader (but will probably cost more than $399!)
Whom owns the corporations? Stock holders. You want to change how corporations influence the government... then buy some stock, find a forum of stock holders and start campaigning.
Indeed. It's a good thing we live in a democracy and not in a fascist dictatorship, contrary to some opinions on the current state of the union... an election is coming up and the current leadership simply isn't allowed to stay in office.
Of course you can pull out a bunch of old straw man / bogey man arguments... but do you have an original one which is applicable?
The EFF is wrong. There is no difference because they are one and the same, meaning that the Government does provide us with services, in fact it is their only job to provide us with services... that's why we pay taxes and elect officials.
If we want to protect our privacy in the new age of information, we must have policies in place which reflect the real world, not a fantasy world where you can be an anonymous citizen (which is impossible BTW) who simply goes about his/her business without interference from some agency or another. Just being a U.S. citizen guarantees gov interference in your life... it's part of the social agreement we all participate in and some people don't even think of it as interference or intervention.... they think of it as guidance, assistance and public service.
Non-participation in elections, public functions and other types of government activities does not absolve you as a citizen from being accountable or from the limitations or responsibilities of being a citizen. You simply don't gain the benefits of active involvement and yet still bear the burden.
So rather than ignore reality, we should embrace it. We should make sure that despite the government knowing about our personal and private activities... they can not stop safe and sane activities only regulate abusive versions of such where they begin to impede on others right to such things. I'd go so far as to say we should repeal many laws which govern personal liberty and at the same time enhance penalties for behaviors which impede upon others liberties. What I'm talking about is removing laws about DOING drugs and making more strict laws about ABUSING drugs or acting out while on drugs ie: violent behavior, negligent behavior, etc. The same should be done regarding things like decency laws, laws related to sexual behavior (stop prohibition on sex for hire and start regulating it so it is safe for the public)....
This type of limited regulation of course has been impossible up until now... better to ban it completely when we don't really know and can't find out who is abusing what... but now we have the ability to monitor without interfering unless and until it is necessary to regulate an abusive situation. As long as such monitoring is open and transparent to the public as well as the government no one agency (in the general sense) can over-regulate or abuse the use of the information without several other agencies checking and balancing them.
There's nothing more free than the truth. If everyone knows what everyone is doing and becomes accustomed to it then everyone can freely do as they will without fear of punitive judgement, as long as they don't break any laws... which is another discussion (see recommendations above).
Hmmm my current phone which is a S/E t610 and 4 or 5 years old has these same problems.
When the network is down I can't use it and if they ever change the network I'll have to upgrade (some older phones just won't work on a modern cell network).
If I go roaming it costs me a fortune unless I pay for an extra roaming tax that lessens the charges but still costs me more than local coverage.
My phone downloads SMS messages even when it's off and when I don't want them and since I dont' have an unlimited SMS plan it costs me $.99 per message to receive the damn things???
My phone doesn't really let me install anything and if it broke I'd have to get a loaner (not even sure if that's possible...) while they fixed it
My phone also doesn't have advanced features (though custom ringtones are allowed - but that's not really advanced)
My phone cost $200 when it first came out.
SO how is the iPhone any different from other phones out there? I'm fairly certain that all of the above applies to 99% of the phones on the market, depending on the service plan you get.
Slashdot Mirror
Check cards require a PIN to get cash out of an ATM. They require a signature for purchases over $25 in most places. Most check cards are also now actually VISA or Mastercard backed... ie you can dispute the charge just like a credit card. In some respects they are really just credit cards secured by your bank account... you post a transaction via credit and it gets processed by VISA et al whom draws from your bank account to cover the charge.
IMHO it's much better than cash if you like to have a paper trail to help do your taxes later.... receipts always fade and are difficult to store.. logging on to your bank website and downloading your transaction data is much more convenient and easier to run reports on.
Bling
Jiggy
Fresh
Bad
Gnarly
Dude
or any of the popular slang words from our childhood... of course those were all 3-5 years old by the time they reached nationwide popularity too..
It does represent the shifting focus of teen age pop culture however... surfer, skater, rocker, DJ Mixer, hip-hopper, Rap Star, Nerd, Hacker
What's next? ask the kids... they know.
Yes Apple is a corporation, publicly traded and must answer to their stock holders via profit profit profit.... I would say they are every bit as good if not better at it than Microsoft.
OTOH as a corporation that double deals, treats their own individual customers as second hand citizens compared to large corporate customers... I'd say they are much worse at it than MS.
Gen1 Macbook Pro w/ a straight upgrade (not archive-install or clean install)
I run a variety of apps. Parallels DT2 w/ XP sp2, Adobe apps (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Flash IDE, Flash Encoder, Dreamweaver), Apple apps (Safari, Mail, iCal, Keynote, iLife07 pack), Firefox, Opera, Eclipse IDE w/ Websphere and Flex plugins, XAMPP web server pack
I open files directly off a Samba file server running on Ubuntu Linux - large 200MB InDesign files w/ 100s of imported files in them (word docs, images, photoshop docs, pdfs, illustrator files, excel docs) make edits, save... all while encoding flash video from 1GB MPEG2 files, reading tutorials in Safari 3, hand coding actionscript in BBedit over an FTP connection to a server in New York (I'm in CA) and working on a Sharepoint 2007 website via IE7 in XP on Parallels.
Yes I have a 30 in. ACDisplay and my laptop screen, I'd soon have a seizure from tabbing through apps continuously otherwise.
The only thing I haven't done yet is turn on Spaces for Leopard. It was buggy the first time I ran it and I haven't had time to try it again after the 10.5.1 update.
I did once get a beachball cursor when I opened a large corrupted video file in VLC. I force quit it and re-copied the file from the server... opened again, no problems.
Just my anecdotal review.
Has a client and server, open source, server runs on Tomcat... http://chandlerproject.org/
Compatible with OSX, Windows, Linux (I believe the client is Java based)
You can also use the client with a Darwin calendar server... or you could use a CalDav client, like iCal or Sunbird w/ the Chandler server.
When it's wet... before turning to mud, there will be a fine coating of water, which will have surface tension... and there's probably minerals in the soil that enhance that surface tension.
Ever put a cup on a wet table? It slides around with the smallest breeze. If it gets as windy as described, then the combination of surface tension and wind is probably the cause. AKA hydroplaning... in fact the tracks may only be the gouges left when the rocks stop hydroplaning... they may start their slides meters away from the 'trails'.
Uhh... unfortunately for your facts, here in the US we still have at least 400 years of coal still available to us... there's even more in China. Oil from current locations is at peak production, which means that from now on it will start costing more to extract it than before, that's all. There is still a hundred years or more of oil left, not counting new locations (which might be more difficult to extract > higher cost though technology keeps making that stuff less expensive).
SO. Cheap oil is gone, oil is not gone. Cheap coal is still plentiful and it better be, cause we need it to make coke which we need to make steel. The alternative to steel is plastic, which AFAIK is a petrochemical derivative (though not necessarily from the same stuff they make gasoline from).
In general you are correct... they are NON-renewable resources, but this is common sense. Eventually the stuff that took millions of years to condense from organic materials is going to run out and it's replacement won't be available for another million years.
I'm all for consumer grade renewable energy sources... not for the environment specifically but as a general economic and standard of living improvement. Renewables carry a one time cost of R&D and manufacturing... w/ very low ongoing maintenance overhead. Non-renewables cost us time and energy for each and every ounce we extract. Renewables can be home-grown ie: you can put windfarms in windy places, solar farms in sunny places, hydro farms in wet places, biofuel farms in fertile places, etc. There are no additional transportation costs and the local community can be largely self-sufficient which leads to a dynamic where a community can only support as many people as it has natural energy for (which would be ideal). We can go back to living off the land in a sense.
The EFF has created a fund to defend victims of the RIAA... if you ever get charged, give them a call. If they turn down your case? You've been a naughty monkey indeed.
Send me the laptop and I'll go buy a Dell and send it back to you... I'll even get it with XP installed and preinstall Office 07 for you ;-p no worries, I love helping out people....
You'll never get your average Windows user to install Perl... but it's in OS X by default
We're plenty intelligent enough... we just don't have enough data and probably never will, but we can make guesses - more educated guesses than those made by early philosophers (religious academics and natural academics). Personally I don't see the disconnect between early science/religion and modern science. They sought answers with what information they had available.. we do the same. Just because some cult of people want to believe that we were at the pinnacle of understanding some 2 - 3 thousand years ago, doesn't discount the efforts made at the time.
Those Rabbis, Greeks and monks were very smart people - they also had to deal with politics and ignorance however and sometimes the best way to deal with that is to dumb it down to a lowest common denominator. "That's right, God made that happen. Don't go to war over it... it was a miracle. Now give us money so we can keep teaching your kids how to read/write and count to ten."
This is a patent on a system to provide tiered service.. nothing more, nothing less. However it is worded in it's summary or abstract has nothing to do with the method it implements other than to provide an example of how it COULD be used, not how it WILL be used. In fact this could be implemented to provide tiered internet service, tiered data provisioning among servers... ie: it could be used as a clustered server farm system management policy - wherein a server that is not doing so well (DOSed, traffic bound naturally or just in need of an upgraded nic card) would not be sent as many requests to handle.
To truly get an idea of how a patent WILL be used, you have to look at what problem the patent holder is trying to solve (which is probably going to be difficult to guess)... and then generalize a method to fit that problem's solution. A good way to do it is to swap out the nouns with a variety of potential objects and see what would fit. The server farm example is just one that would fit... there are many others.
Actually that small startup/upstart will be Adobe.
And FYi, with Adobe Air, Google Gears and with Safari leading the way on HTML 5 local storage APIs for web apps... those online apps will soon be getting a version that works while you're offline as well, then will update and sync when you do have a connection.
i thought it was just called XML... and it pretty much allowed anything. It allows binary data to coexist with textual data to coexist with structured data, etc etc.
Now if you're talking about an open document format, that's a whole different beast, but I believe there is already a standard for that as well... ODF right? and it should focus on the things that are needed for documents, which seems to me should only include at most a way to reference binary data and structured data and should mostly be just about formatting textual data and including those references to placed media. Anything more and it's no longer a document, it's an application.
I for one like the method which uses special directories as documents, with any images, media or other non-textual data files included in the directory... along side the textual data and using an xml file to define the structure and a stylesheet to define the styling of the formatted document. An application reads the xml file, which references each of the media assets, and displays all the information per the transformation style sheet. It's all very obvious when you look inside the directory, everything is separate but unified, everything can be repurposed - aliases can be used for references if desired, any application can READ the data as it's all in it's original format.
EMP will make a comeback... as will attaching devices that over-charge the batteries and cause them to explode...
What's more worrisome by far is that car chase scenes will no longer have revved up engine sounds... going fast no longer means a loud engine. It'll be like watching space movies that let you hear the explosions in space while the camera is not inside a ship...
Cheap Solar energy would make a lot of problems go away. Problems like water desalinization, air pollution, expensive and damaging personal and mass transport, environment control (heating and cooling) for those who are sensitive - think heat waves killing the elderly... even making a lot of science and technology a lot cheaper to develop and maintain.
Remove fuel costs from our economy and replace them with one-time batter expenses and everything would get a lot cheaper real quick. Food production, manufacturing, transportation, anything service oriented that relies on the above..... fuel costs are huge and pervasive in our lives... whether they come from gasoline, (bio)diesel, coal, or nuclear.... we have a giant fusion reactor beaming us energy each and every second of every day for free and we have hundreds of viable ways to capture it - thermal, photovoltaic, active thermal (sterling), even wind is really just thermal gradients in our atmosphere.
I'm no die-hard green freak... just practical and there's nothing more practical than accepting a free gift.
#111 if this comes true, there will subsequently be a lot of rich men, recently divorced by their smart Android wives, who are 50% less rich than they were before... honestly why would you want to "Marry" an android? There's little enough benefit for men to getting married to a real woman (having a stable family is the only one you might hope for) much less an android woman who's going to be smarter than you and guaranteed to outlive you.
If CA had allowed them to do this, without bringing suit, then the CA gov would be liable if there were ANY problems - real or imaginary, which could somehow, anyhow be traced back to this discrepancy. The State Sec or State is doing the right thing both for the people and for his job security.
A court may find that the damages are too great, who cares... he brought the suit and is now off the hook for anything that may or may not have happened come election time.
There is a few new features in the DOM, CSS and Javascript (including a good subset of XPath and XSLT) which will help offload some parts of the big script libraries to the browser.... now if only they'd get up to speed on the things that Webkit is doing!
;-(
Not that it matters really when IE7 is still light years behind
How many Business Professionals want Vista? They are the users AND the people who will influence the decision. IT Pros already use an alternate OS... Linux, OS X or at least dual boot or use a virtualized Windows as needed. Unfortunately IT Pros don't get to decide what OS gets used.... they just have to support it. Until there is a perfect replacement for Office and Exchange on Linux or OS X (which is half way there), the business users will be using Windows.... eventually they will use something newer than XP.
Uh you're forgetting the fact that is is high resolution and lasts 30 hours on a 2 hour charge. A good eBook reader should have twice the resolution of the iPhone (which is already much higher than your average PDA/Laptop). Here's a link to one with 1200 x 1600 http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/e_ink/seiko-high+res-super+thin-ebook-reader-323502.php.
So you are correct that amazon's offering is less than ideal but don't discount the idea of a good ebook reader... prices will fall when people start buying them and the tech will improve at the same price point.
I'd like to see Apple's version of an eBook reader... some say a tablet form factor is in the pipeline... maybe it has high res display and can be a good reader (but will probably cost more than $399!)
Whom owns the corporations? Stock holders. You want to change how corporations influence the government... then buy some stock, find a forum of stock holders and start campaigning.
Indeed. It's a good thing we live in a democracy and not in a fascist dictatorship, contrary to some opinions on the current state of the union... an election is coming up and the current leadership simply isn't allowed to stay in office.
Of course you can pull out a bunch of old straw man / bogey man arguments... but do you have an original one which is applicable?
The EFF is wrong. There is no difference because they are one and the same, meaning that the Government does provide us with services, in fact it is their only job to provide us with services... that's why we pay taxes and elect officials.
If we want to protect our privacy in the new age of information, we must have policies in place which reflect the real world, not a fantasy world where you can be an anonymous citizen (which is impossible BTW) who simply goes about his/her business without interference from some agency or another. Just being a U.S. citizen guarantees gov interference in your life... it's part of the social agreement we all participate in and some people don't even think of it as interference or intervention.... they think of it as guidance, assistance and public service.
Non-participation in elections, public functions and other types of government activities does not absolve you as a citizen from being accountable or from the limitations or responsibilities of being a citizen. You simply don't gain the benefits of active involvement and yet still bear the burden.
So rather than ignore reality, we should embrace it. We should make sure that despite the government knowing about our personal and private activities... they can not stop safe and sane activities only regulate abusive versions of such where they begin to impede on others right to such things. I'd go so far as to say we should repeal many laws which govern personal liberty and at the same time enhance penalties for behaviors which impede upon others liberties. What I'm talking about is removing laws about DOING drugs and making more strict laws about ABUSING drugs or acting out while on drugs ie: violent behavior, negligent behavior, etc. The same should be done regarding things like decency laws, laws related to sexual behavior (stop prohibition on sex for hire and start regulating it so it is safe for the public)....
This type of limited regulation of course has been impossible up until now... better to ban it completely when we don't really know and can't find out who is abusing what... but now we have the ability to monitor without interfering unless and until it is necessary to regulate an abusive situation. As long as such monitoring is open and transparent to the public as well as the government no one agency (in the general sense) can over-regulate or abuse the use of the information without several other agencies checking and balancing them.
There's nothing more free than the truth. If everyone knows what everyone is doing and becomes accustomed to it then everyone can freely do as they will without fear of punitive judgement, as long as they don't break any laws... which is another discussion (see recommendations above).
Hmmm my current phone which is a S/E t610 and 4 or 5 years old has these same problems.
When the network is down I can't use it and if they ever change the network I'll have to upgrade (some older phones just won't work on a modern cell network).
If I go roaming it costs me a fortune unless I pay for an extra roaming tax that lessens the charges but still costs me more than local coverage.
My phone downloads SMS messages even when it's off and when I don't want them and since I dont' have an unlimited SMS plan it costs me $.99 per message to receive the damn things???
My phone doesn't really let me install anything and if it broke I'd have to get a loaner (not even sure if that's possible...) while they fixed it
My phone also doesn't have advanced features (though custom ringtones are allowed - but that's not really advanced)
My phone cost $200 when it first came out.
SO how is the iPhone any different from other phones out there? I'm fairly certain that all of the above applies to 99% of the phones on the market, depending on the service plan you get.