no games, no netflix, or any other useful application
I think you are forgetting about the incredibly useful application that millions of e-ink kindle owners are incredibly satisfied. Or do you need all of your entertainment spoonfed to you through a bunch of blinky lights?
I'm not a bitcoin user but I don't think Romney publishing his bitcoin address would really work.
I could set up a bunch of extra bitcoin accounts and toss the money around. A seller might be wary of accepting bitcoins that *just* came from Romney, but what about bitcoins that came from Romney 5 transactions ago? 20 transactions?
Not to mention--not all of those transactions are going to be through shell accounts either. Somebody selling black market items through the silk road probably doesn't care too much about accepting the tainted money since the FBI already hates them. Obviously you can't move all of the million dollars at once but a few small transactions to launder some of the coins plus a bunch of fake transactions to launder the rest and then you can start using them to pay for services where your shipping address gets involved or linking the coins back to a real bank account as you try to pull the money back out of the system.
Self reply...but I think it goes without saying that if you weren't doing this by hand (e.g. you wrote a bot to buy and sell the items for you) then I support action being taken against you.
Someone doing it thousands of times either wrote a bot or spent so much buying and selling that I question their sanity...maybe a 3-day break from the game would be good for their mental health.
It is a game. If you choose to spend your hours in the game right clicking on a weapon in one vendor menu and then turning left 90 degrees and right clicking on the same weapon to sell it to another vendor, that's your choice. I personally choose to spend my hours in the game chasing monsters and following the storylines.
If you really want to make money clicking between two screens, I can help find you a job doing data capture. It will equally boring and will give you the same carpal tunnel syndrome...but the hourly wage will be significantly better.
Did he really? That's pretty funny...and I couldn't blame anyone for taking advantage of an arbitrage opportunity if it was put into those words.
Diablo 3 had all kinds of "too easy" farming holes at launch that could never have been caught in testing. One that I used a few times (although I was too low level for it to be actually valuable) was a magic chest hidden in act 2. You could set your checkpoint to the first checkpoint past the test and then keep restarting. The chest was there like 80% of the time...just run past the monsters and enter the room (which was a separate mini level so the monsters vanish) and then run past the monsters in the room and open the chest. It was pretty obvious this chest wouldn't be around for long so when I heard about it, I hit it 20-30 times. The next day blizzard patched the game and listed in the patch notes that they had nerfed the spawn rate on a magic chest in act 2. Nobody got banned for it since they were just farming a valid chest in the game...its really no different than if I found out that the liquor store on the other side of town has my favorite thing for a ridiculously low price. I don't walk in and tell them that they are charging too little for it...I stock up. And then I come back and stock up some more. And then maybe the third time I go back they have sold out and the 4th time they have gotten in a new shipment but decided to raise prices after noticing how much they were selling.
Sure, it was an unbalanced transaction but it is really arenanet's fault and its not like someone was actually working a dupe bug or spoofing their way into someone elses account to steal virtual goods. I get that there is a real money transaction element to the game now...but isn't that why D3's RMT auction house was put on hold until they could clear up some of the bugs?
1. Tax differences - Aussie GST is 10%. No US state has a sales tax that high. Aussie prices are quoted with tax included. US prices are not.
Clearly you've never been to Chicago (yes I know its not a state but more people live here than in many other states). Ok, fine, so its not 10.25% general sales tax anymore after the county lowered rates a bit--now its just 9.5% unless you are buying prepared food near the center of the city in which case its back up to 10.5%.
I always wonder why the Apple store on Michigan Ave does so much business...You could order the same thing from amazon (and have it tomorrow with Prime) and save an extra $100-200 in taxes. You could even order it online from Apple (or drive to an Apple store across the county line) and only pay the 6.5% state tax which still saves you a decent amount on a $2000 MBP.
I've noticed similar things when buying from DealExtreme. I can often buy things from them (which they ship free from Asia) and the total price is less than it would cost me to ship the same item to a neighboring state. How they manage to sell these things for less than anyone local *and* ship it from Asia...I have no idea.
I don't think microsoft particularily minds people buying a mac and then running windows on apple hardware.
Sure, they may only be bootcamping or VMing it for specific situations, but it beats the alternative which is the customer learning to live completely without windows.
The only problem I have with the kindle (applies to ipads/nooks/or any other ereader) is that the screen can get scratched.
Tear or bend or accidentally mark a page in a book and it won't matter in 30 seconds when you turn the page...but if you get a little nick in the middle of an e-reader's screen, it is going to be in the middle of every page of every book you ever read until the device is replaced. Ipads are less susceptible to scratching but more susceptible to cracking (the kindle doesn't care much about being dropped).
So basically...get a case for whatever you decide on ASAP. I got a scratch on my first kindle in the first or second book--luckily it had a networking issue so I was able to exchange it for a new one a couple of books later and I immediately bought a sleeve for it. The amazon-branded cases are a perfect fit and provide good protection but I prefer to hold the device by itself so I got a thick leather sleeve from saddleback that I can slide it into for storage.
For just plain reading, the kindle is where it is at. Even with a retina display, an ipad doesn't feel right.
It won't be great for techinical books, but for reading novels, the cheapest kindle is just awesome. eInk is super comfortable to read and it doesn't force you to read with an overly bright backlit display. The "page" is about the size of a normal book (the ipad screen is a little too wide to support a good reading speed IMHO).
In most class actions, the lead plaintiff is just a figurehead, often recruited by the lawyers who saw an opportunity for a class action and needed to find someone who was actually a customer/shareholder in order to be eligible to sue.
The lawyers for the lead plaintiff may end up better off than the lawyers for other plaintiffs (since they got to be in the drivers seat for the negotiations) but AFAIK, the lead plaintiff themselves must submit to whatever is defined in the class action suit. If everybody gets coupons, the lead plaintiff gets coupons.
I think I am pretty close to the default settings. Something like a short 30ish second break every 10 minutes and a 5 minute break (where it gives 3 guided stretches/eye exercises for the first minute and a half) every 50 minutes. Because the timer only ticks when you are actively typing/mousing, it doesn't actually interrupt me every hour...If I get up and walk away or do something else it stops counting down the timer (and if I leave for 5 minutes or more, it counts it as a break.
Unfortunately I am not in a position where I can set a maximum daily timer. Nor would I really want to... when I am done with work, I still want to use the computer for personal use (I am mostly using workrave so I can use the computer MORE than I could if I used it without breaks since as long as I keep taking breaks, I can use the computer all day without any wrist issues).
So is the answer that if you are using a digital path, it doesn't matter?
My main music and video source is an HTPC (with an amd llano apu) and all of the sound and video goes into a receiver from the integrated hdmi port. My assumption has always been that as long as I am getting an unadulterated source signal (not trying to add some digital EQ to the stream or something), there would be no benefit to dedicated sound hardware. All the processing would be handled by the DACs in my receiver and thus a soundcard would be useless.
I suppose its possible that a $50 soundcard has better DACs than a low end receiver and thus using a $50 soundcard and a decent amplifier might have a better result for less money than no soundcard but a $2-300 receiver. I've been perfectly satisfied with the sound over HDMI but if I am missing out on something that a $50 soundcard could fix...someone please let me know!
As someone who has only barely touched a few quickbooks install (although I spent a couple years tracking personal finances with gnucash) and who has used turbotax's website as well as many other cloud services...that sounds terrible.
Not so much from a security standpoint (small business accounting records are not really a security risk) but from a UI standpoint. You end up hopping back and forth between a LOT of forms and entry boxes and reviewing different reports/charts/invoices. Unless you have the lowest latency connection in the world and quickbooks online is coded a lot better than turbotax, doing a hour or two of accounting work is going to suck. I don't mind (well I do, but not too much) waiting around for a slow connection and some web2.0 javascript wizardry when I am doing my taxes since I usually spend more time looking for documents than I do entering data. When it comes to an organized accounting system where you sit down to rip through a pile of invoices, you are going to keep running up against the wall of cloud-latency and it will suck.
Heck, don't even get the VM, just get a cheap laptop for quickbooks. One place where I worked was all Macs but the part time accounting person who would come in occasionally preferred the windows version of quickbooks. The laptop cost about the same amount as the quickbooks license and it made for a semi-dedicated accounting machine.
Yeah, but he was talking about artists who have a top 5 album in the UK.
If you have a top 5 album, you can probably pull off a tour of a bunch of midsize all-ages venues and pack the hall with screaming teenagers at a $30 ticket price.
Sell them a bunch of $20 t-shirts and you might do alright for yourself before either your 15 minutes are up or you are able to pull out another album.
So what happens if you are cruising along, surfing the internet on 4G and all of the sudden you hit a 4G dead spot for 30 seconds. The phone will handle the handover to 3g (or god forbid...edge or gprs), your netflix stream will have a drop in quality, and then what?
Will you get hit with a $15 tether-roaming charge since you left 4G and now they can charge you? If the failover mode on 4G is to use one of those other chunks of spectrum...would the rule have to follow the 4G connection onto the other connections?
I think verizon had a bunch of unlimited stuff coming into 4G and even a few backdoor methods to get unlimited data after they stopped offering it--I remember seeing it reported somewhere that you could enable some business-tethering unlimited feature for a month and then ask a support person to take off the tethering part...they would take off tethering but the unlimited data would stay on the account (I use AT&T so I can't verify if this still works).
I'd be happy paying for overages instead of a monthly tethering fee...The only time I ever tether is to do work (otherwise I try to avoid random internet browsing when traveling and things like looking up a restaurant for dinner reservations can be done just fine from the phone interface) and I would just get reimbursed for any charges incurred. Having a $10 charge every month even when I am not traveling and working (or coming anywhere near the data cap I pay for) is a much more obnoxious situation.
I'm always confused by posts like this (which pop up every time there is a topic about use of work hardware).
People use their work computer to do personal things all of the time in ways that are allowed by policy. Your company may not allow personal/incidental use but are you so thick-headed that you can't realize that most companies do?
Same with the old data. Is it not conceivable that IT might move the user's home directory and similar things to a new machine? I thought this was pretty much standard practice. I certainly have files on my current desktop dating back to when I was in middle school...maybe its a carpenter's hammer type of thing ("its my favorite computer, I've had it for 15 years, and only replaced the OS 6 times and the hardware 4 times") but its certainly not unreasonable to have a large accumulation of stuff on a "new" machine after 10 years. What kind of slashdot poster wouldn't realize that this kind of stuff is easy to transfer to a new system?
Then again, you say your work computer is 10 years old so maybe your company really doesn't have a clue what its doing and yet you continue to work there.
I guess I am missing the point here...If anything it is the rich that have less privacy. If you own your own plane (and can reasonably be assumed to be the person using it) then you can be tracked by this method.
If you do anything "below" that, then your information is still hidden from the public. If you fly on an airline you might show up in some ticketing and monitoring databases but those aren't available to the public like tail numbers (and air traffic transmissions) are. Someone might see you in the airport and know what plane you are getting on, but this will apply only to movie stars, not VCs on their way to make a deal. If you charter a plane, then there's no way to tell who is on the plane from its tail numbers and you can probably board it from somewhere outside of the public eye. If you are a fractional owner (like netjets) there is still no real way to tell who is on the plane.
I don't see any real good argument for why we should try to encrypt or eliminate the air traffic control transmissions...that just seems like a bad idea. The issue here isn't really that any individual's whereabouts are being broadcast...the tail numbers are something that is reported and tracked on every flight that goes anywhere...it just so happens that if it is someone's personal jet, you can pretty accurately correlate the jets movements to the person's movements. If you have enough money to buy a private jet, you also have enough money to charter a jet from a pool or just fly first class on those days where you need your movements kept a complete secret.
Yeah like when Lenovo moved the T4XX series from 16:10 to 16:9 ( think between the T410 and T420).
Both computers are almost identical in form factor...except the "upgraded" model has almost an inch shorter screen. Its pretty easy to notice since they just put in a shorter panel and made a really thick bottom bezel that looks weird. I think for the newest model they have adjusted the form factor so the whole computer is a little shorter...but in the T420, all you got was less screen.
Amazon already does this. The kindle comes with a USB cable and you have to pay an extra $5 or something for a wall charger.
Of course you might argue that they aren't giving the savings back to the consumer (although if they are selling at a loss, then I suppose it doesn't matter) but we are all benefiting from the environmental savings since they didn't have to manufacture another power brick. I already have several phone chargers and a whole host of devices with USB ports that are all up to the task of charging my kindle.
Don't forget...approximately half of the market is women. A large % of women carry purses.
If I never had to carry it on my pocket, I would be ok with a 5" or 6" display and enough thickness to have decent battery. I don't deny that the big screen can make the phone easier to use and more convenient for many tasks. Have you seen the size of some of those hybrid iphone case/wallets that some people have? My mother carries a wallet that is probably 8"x4"x1.5"...she *always* carries a purse so size isn't really an issue. She's started wearing reading glasses lately so maybe she would even benefit from having a larger screen.
I personally prefer a phone that easily slips into a small pocket. I don't even like to carry it in my pocket and will usually keep it in a jacket pocket when it is not the middle of summer...but I can totally understand why a large market of people don't care about this and thus grab the biggest one they can find. The problem is that the non-Apple phone makers are seeing this data and saying "Look, we sell lots of big phones so lets make all of our phones bigger" and then the girls keep buying them and the guys who want a high-end phone are forced into buying them since now all of the small phones are cheap low end phones (or they go to apple and buy a reasonably sized iphone).
Or maybe you just wear dad-jeans and double-pleated khakis...
I used to be able to fit a TI-83 in my pants pocket in 8th grade and wander around and sit without knowing it was there...but I was wearing baggy pants that if I look back upon it now just look sloppy and unkempt. Anything the the size of a nook either wouldn't fit or would be uncomfortable (and create an ugly bulge) in my pants nowadays--and I'm not talking about some skinny-jeans either, a properly fitting pair of flat front wool dress pants or something as simple as a pair of Levis 501s.
The problem is that there aren't equal big and small phones. When I bought my galaxy S (which is about the maximum size I would want have in my pocket...) the choices that were smaller were all junk aimed at the bottom end of the market. Poor feeling plastic cases, low quality screens, dated versions of android (with no active development of something like CM7 since nobody who cares uses them), they were basically an extension of feature-phones aimed at getting people to pay extra for a data plan. Even now that the Galaxy S is "old", I would prefer it to any of the smaller 3.5-4" phones I have seen in stores. I much prefer android, but if the situation doesn't improve by the time I upgrade my phone, I might choose to fall back on the iphone instead of get some 4.5"+ screen monstrosity.
Well, I probably wouldn't use this on two phones which would mostly be silly (other than being able to choose which phone I want without 10 seconds spent swapping cards)...but I would totally use it so that I can share my phones data plan with a tablet or laptop with a 3G modem.
I think that's what the carriers really don't want you doing. You see all of those people using iPads on the train? Yeah, those people are all paying for a dataplan for their phone plus an entire data plan just for their tablet (unless you root it and tether).
Slashdot Mirror
Are we missing something? I'd love to buy an entrenched business for one year's worth of revenue...even if revenues were slowly declining.
I think you are forgetting about the incredibly useful application that millions of e-ink kindle owners are incredibly satisfied. Or do you need all of your entertainment spoonfed to you through a bunch of blinky lights?
I could set up a bunch of extra bitcoin accounts and toss the money around. A seller might be wary of accepting bitcoins that *just* came from Romney, but what about bitcoins that came from Romney 5 transactions ago? 20 transactions?
Not to mention--not all of those transactions are going to be through shell accounts either. Somebody selling black market items through the silk road probably doesn't care too much about accepting the tainted money since the FBI already hates them. Obviously you can't move all of the million dollars at once but a few small transactions to launder some of the coins plus a bunch of fake transactions to launder the rest and then you can start using them to pay for services where your shipping address gets involved or linking the coins back to a real bank account as you try to pull the money back out of the system.
Someone doing it thousands of times either wrote a bot or spent so much buying and selling that I question their sanity...maybe a 3-day break from the game would be good for their mental health.
It is a game. If you choose to spend your hours in the game right clicking on a weapon in one vendor menu and then turning left 90 degrees and right clicking on the same weapon to sell it to another vendor, that's your choice. I personally choose to spend my hours in the game chasing monsters and following the storylines.
If you really want to make money clicking between two screens, I can help find you a job doing data capture. It will equally boring and will give you the same carpal tunnel syndrome...but the hourly wage will be significantly better.
Diablo 3 had all kinds of "too easy" farming holes at launch that could never have been caught in testing. One that I used a few times (although I was too low level for it to be actually valuable) was a magic chest hidden in act 2. You could set your checkpoint to the first checkpoint past the test and then keep restarting. The chest was there like 80% of the time...just run past the monsters and enter the room (which was a separate mini level so the monsters vanish) and then run past the monsters in the room and open the chest. It was pretty obvious this chest wouldn't be around for long so when I heard about it, I hit it 20-30 times. The next day blizzard patched the game and listed in the patch notes that they had nerfed the spawn rate on a magic chest in act 2. Nobody got banned for it since they were just farming a valid chest in the game...its really no different than if I found out that the liquor store on the other side of town has my favorite thing for a ridiculously low price. I don't walk in and tell them that they are charging too little for it...I stock up. And then I come back and stock up some more. And then maybe the third time I go back they have sold out and the 4th time they have gotten in a new shipment but decided to raise prices after noticing how much they were selling.
Sure, it was an unbalanced transaction but it is really arenanet's fault and its not like someone was actually working a dupe bug or spoofing their way into someone elses account to steal virtual goods. I get that there is a real money transaction element to the game now...but isn't that why D3's RMT auction house was put on hold until they could clear up some of the bugs?
1. Tax differences - Aussie GST is 10%. No US state has a sales tax that high. Aussie prices are quoted with tax included. US prices are not.
Clearly you've never been to Chicago (yes I know its not a state but more people live here than in many other states). Ok, fine, so its not 10.25% general sales tax anymore after the county lowered rates a bit--now its just 9.5% unless you are buying prepared food near the center of the city in which case its back up to 10.5%.
I always wonder why the Apple store on Michigan Ave does so much business...You could order the same thing from amazon (and have it tomorrow with Prime) and save an extra $100-200 in taxes. You could even order it online from Apple (or drive to an Apple store across the county line) and only pay the 6.5% state tax which still saves you a decent amount on a $2000 MBP.
I've noticed similar things when buying from DealExtreme. I can often buy things from them (which they ship free from Asia) and the total price is less than it would cost me to ship the same item to a neighboring state. How they manage to sell these things for less than anyone local *and* ship it from Asia...I have no idea.
Sure, they may only be bootcamping or VMing it for specific situations, but it beats the alternative which is the customer learning to live completely without windows.
Tear or bend or accidentally mark a page in a book and it won't matter in 30 seconds when you turn the page...but if you get a little nick in the middle of an e-reader's screen, it is going to be in the middle of every page of every book you ever read until the device is replaced. Ipads are less susceptible to scratching but more susceptible to cracking (the kindle doesn't care much about being dropped).
So basically...get a case for whatever you decide on ASAP. I got a scratch on my first kindle in the first or second book--luckily it had a networking issue so I was able to exchange it for a new one a couple of books later and I immediately bought a sleeve for it. The amazon-branded cases are a perfect fit and provide good protection but I prefer to hold the device by itself so I got a thick leather sleeve from saddleback that I can slide it into for storage.
It won't be great for techinical books, but for reading novels, the cheapest kindle is just awesome. eInk is super comfortable to read and it doesn't force you to read with an overly bright backlit display. The "page" is about the size of a normal book (the ipad screen is a little too wide to support a good reading speed IMHO).
The lawyers for the lead plaintiff may end up better off than the lawyers for other plaintiffs (since they got to be in the drivers seat for the negotiations) but AFAIK, the lead plaintiff themselves must submit to whatever is defined in the class action suit. If everybody gets coupons, the lead plaintiff gets coupons.
I think I am pretty close to the default settings. Something like a short 30ish second break every 10 minutes and a 5 minute break (where it gives 3 guided stretches/eye exercises for the first minute and a half) every 50 minutes. Because the timer only ticks when you are actively typing/mousing, it doesn't actually interrupt me every hour...If I get up and walk away or do something else it stops counting down the timer (and if I leave for 5 minutes or more, it counts it as a break.
Unfortunately I am not in a position where I can set a maximum daily timer. Nor would I really want to... when I am done with work, I still want to use the computer for personal use (I am mostly using workrave so I can use the computer MORE than I could if I used it without breaks since as long as I keep taking breaks, I can use the computer all day without any wrist issues).
My main music and video source is an HTPC (with an amd llano apu) and all of the sound and video goes into a receiver from the integrated hdmi port. My assumption has always been that as long as I am getting an unadulterated source signal (not trying to add some digital EQ to the stream or something), there would be no benefit to dedicated sound hardware. All the processing would be handled by the DACs in my receiver and thus a soundcard would be useless.
I suppose its possible that a $50 soundcard has better DACs than a low end receiver and thus using a $50 soundcard and a decent amplifier might have a better result for less money than no soundcard but a $2-300 receiver. I've been perfectly satisfied with the sound over HDMI but if I am missing out on something that a $50 soundcard could fix...someone please let me know!
Not so much from a security standpoint (small business accounting records are not really a security risk) but from a UI standpoint. You end up hopping back and forth between a LOT of forms and entry boxes and reviewing different reports/charts/invoices. Unless you have the lowest latency connection in the world and quickbooks online is coded a lot better than turbotax, doing a hour or two of accounting work is going to suck.
I don't mind (well I do, but not too much) waiting around for a slow connection and some web2.0 javascript wizardry when I am doing my taxes since I usually spend more time looking for documents than I do entering data. When it comes to an organized accounting system where you sit down to rip through a pile of invoices, you are going to keep running up against the wall of cloud-latency and it will suck.
Heck, don't even get the VM, just get a cheap laptop for quickbooks. One place where I worked was all Macs but the part time accounting person who would come in occasionally preferred the windows version of quickbooks. The laptop cost about the same amount as the quickbooks license and it made for a semi-dedicated accounting machine.
If you have a top 5 album, you can probably pull off a tour of a bunch of midsize all-ages venues and pack the hall with screaming teenagers at a $30 ticket price.
Sell them a bunch of $20 t-shirts and you might do alright for yourself before either your 15 minutes are up or you are able to pull out another album.
Will you get hit with a $15 tether-roaming charge since you left 4G and now they can charge you? If the failover mode on 4G is to use one of those other chunks of spectrum...would the rule have to follow the 4G connection onto the other connections?
I think verizon had a bunch of unlimited stuff coming into 4G and even a few backdoor methods to get unlimited data after they stopped offering it--I remember seeing it reported somewhere that you could enable some business-tethering unlimited feature for a month and then ask a support person to take off the tethering part...they would take off tethering but the unlimited data would stay on the account (I use AT&T so I can't verify if this still works).
I'd be happy paying for overages instead of a monthly tethering fee...The only time I ever tether is to do work (otherwise I try to avoid random internet browsing when traveling and things like looking up a restaurant for dinner reservations can be done just fine from the phone interface) and I would just get reimbursed for any charges incurred. Having a $10 charge every month even when I am not traveling and working (or coming anywhere near the data cap I pay for) is a much more obnoxious situation.
People use their work computer to do personal things all of the time in ways that are allowed by policy. Your company may not allow personal/incidental use but are you so thick-headed that you can't realize that most companies do?
Same with the old data. Is it not conceivable that IT might move the user's home directory and similar things to a new machine? I thought this was pretty much standard practice. I certainly have files on my current desktop dating back to when I was in middle school...maybe its a carpenter's hammer type of thing ("its my favorite computer, I've had it for 15 years, and only replaced the OS 6 times and the hardware 4 times") but its certainly not unreasonable to have a large accumulation of stuff on a "new" machine after 10 years. What kind of slashdot poster wouldn't realize that this kind of stuff is easy to transfer to a new system?
Then again, you say your work computer is 10 years old so maybe your company really doesn't have a clue what its doing and yet you continue to work there.
If you do anything "below" that, then your information is still hidden from the public. If you fly on an airline you might show up in some ticketing and monitoring databases but those aren't available to the public like tail numbers (and air traffic transmissions) are. Someone might see you in the airport and know what plane you are getting on, but this will apply only to movie stars, not VCs on their way to make a deal. If you charter a plane, then there's no way to tell who is on the plane from its tail numbers and you can probably board it from somewhere outside of the public eye. If you are a fractional owner (like netjets) there is still no real way to tell who is on the plane.
I don't see any real good argument for why we should try to encrypt or eliminate the air traffic control transmissions...that just seems like a bad idea. The issue here isn't really that any individual's whereabouts are being broadcast...the tail numbers are something that is reported and tracked on every flight that goes anywhere...it just so happens that if it is someone's personal jet, you can pretty accurately correlate the jets movements to the person's movements. If you have enough money to buy a private jet, you also have enough money to charter a jet from a pool or just fly first class on those days where you need your movements kept a complete secret.
Both computers are almost identical in form factor...except the "upgraded" model has almost an inch shorter screen. Its pretty easy to notice since they just put in a shorter panel and made a really thick bottom bezel that looks weird. I think for the newest model they have adjusted the form factor so the whole computer is a little shorter...but in the T420, all you got was less screen.
Of course you might argue that they aren't giving the savings back to the consumer (although if they are selling at a loss, then I suppose it doesn't matter) but we are all benefiting from the environmental savings since they didn't have to manufacture another power brick. I already have several phone chargers and a whole host of devices with USB ports that are all up to the task of charging my kindle.
If I never had to carry it on my pocket, I would be ok with a 5" or 6" display and enough thickness to have decent battery. I don't deny that the big screen can make the phone easier to use and more convenient for many tasks. Have you seen the size of some of those hybrid iphone case/wallets that some people have? My mother carries a wallet that is probably 8"x4"x1.5"...she *always* carries a purse so size isn't really an issue. She's started wearing reading glasses lately so maybe she would even benefit from having a larger screen.
I personally prefer a phone that easily slips into a small pocket. I don't even like to carry it in my pocket and will usually keep it in a jacket pocket when it is not the middle of summer...but I can totally understand why a large market of people don't care about this and thus grab the biggest one they can find. The problem is that the non-Apple phone makers are seeing this data and saying "Look, we sell lots of big phones so lets make all of our phones bigger" and then the girls keep buying them and the guys who want a high-end phone are forced into buying them since now all of the small phones are cheap low end phones (or they go to apple and buy a reasonably sized iphone).
The problem is that there aren't equal big and small phones. When I bought my galaxy S (which is about the maximum size I would want have in my pocket...) the choices that were smaller were all junk aimed at the bottom end of the market. Poor feeling plastic cases, low quality screens, dated versions of android (with no active development of something like CM7 since nobody who cares uses them), they were basically an extension of feature-phones aimed at getting people to pay extra for a data plan. Even now that the Galaxy S is "old", I would prefer it to any of the smaller 3.5-4" phones I have seen in stores. I much prefer android, but if the situation doesn't improve by the time I upgrade my phone, I might choose to fall back on the iphone instead of get some 4.5"+ screen monstrosity.
I think that's what the carriers really don't want you doing. You see all of those people using iPads on the train? Yeah, those people are all paying for a dataplan for their phone plus an entire data plan just for their tablet (unless you root it and tether).