Star Trek has a damn good wiki. Two, actually; one for canon stuff and one for the rest. Perhaps a bit heavy on the quotes but whether it's in-universe trivia, production details or information about occurrences in the series you seek, they have it. Nauseatingly detailed, indeed, but they truly are one-stop-shops for everything related to their niche, which is exactly what they should be. If Wikipedia was of such high general quality, well, it would be a whole lot better than it is today.
I think Wikipedia could profit from moving most of of its articles to Wikia and just sending people there through something like a shared namespace that lets them present information from external wikis right along with theirs. Local admins can't power-trip as easily, articles can be as detailed as they want and deletonism doesn't remove information, it just moves it around. Perhaps that way they can even get people to participate again - unlike today where Wikipedia is almost purely a spectator sport because the admin team isn't exacly sportsmanlike.
Good. Articles should only show up on the "main" Wikipedia when they're known-good. The first thing to do after creating the ShadowWiki (as another poster has called it) would be to move all articles there. Then the editors get to vet each one (probably using robots to weed out obviously unworthy articles) and move the good ones there. Things like episode lists or fictional characters/items should stay on ShadowWiki unless they're really that significant (Darth Vader is a cultural icon, Ned Flanders isn't). Leave Wikipedia for the well-researched big topics and use ShadowWiki for stuff that isn't well-cited, not obviously notable or in some other way deficient.
However, these wikis shouldn't be separate. Being in the main "wiki" is just a bit of metadata that can be added or removed at will and searches span both "wikis" by default. Essentially, being a "proper" article would be like the little stars they hand out to good articles now, just a lower tier. The "wikis" also automatically redirect to each other. Wikipedia could also cross-reference other wikis like the stuff hosted on Wikia. This would lose a lot of chaff but keep the information accessible: People looking for Class 2 shuttlecraft get informed that Wikipedia just has an article on Star Trek but that Memory Alpha has the article they're looking for. Or they look up Star Trek on Wikipedia and there's a little box in the article that tells them to go to MA for more detailed articles.
Essentially, Wikipedia would become three-tiered: The admin-approves articles on top, the acceptably good articles below that and below those a directory service that caters to niche knowledge. This would also make the deletionism problem easier: If there is a specialized wiki of acceptable quality, articles can be moved there where they will probably get more and better attention anyway; Wikipedia proper gets more streamlined and the information is neither lost nor hidden away. All sides win.
Well, except for those who care more about how many articles they don't dislike Wikipedia has so they can feel better about their collective e-peen. Not saying that all WP admins are like that but I bet a few are.
I read through, well, a good chunk of the discussion before I couldn't take it anymore. He was repeatedly called on having a COI which he deflected by saying he doesn't have one. Discussion over, deletion appropriate.
Yes, the discussion involved a lot of brickwalling.
*: Yes, you may cite this post as need be in future discussions, Wikipedia or not, as to the degree to which Ben Schumin is a little bitch.
Unfortunately, we can't because you never actually qualified the degree of him being a bitch. Does he wag his tail when he's happy? Does he sniff the butts of dogs he passes by? Did he play Daikatana against John Romero? Those are important questions, you know.
N = 3
S = 1, but would've been 5 if not for warranty issues.
Looks scary until you see that three of the shop trips would've been because of my old iBook's power plug desoldering itself (the G4 iBook was built shoddily) and the other two were my first MacBook Pro failing because of the Geforce packaging flaw (which Apple had no control over).
I've had no Apple-attributable hardware failures since switching to an MBP and no hardware failures at all since getting a unibody MBP. Those things really are built well. Of course it's concerning to see that they shipped a unit built to such low standards but it remains to be seen if that's actually common. The new MBP might be a lemon or it might not and a single sample isn't going to tell us everything.
Of course Slashdot doesn't do followup stories anymore, else we could've gathered teardowns and, well, done one.
Having at least one X chromosome makes you female enough for hating John Norman's works. Actually, I don't care about the content but that man's infernal writing style is bad enough that the Goreans (in-book, not the BDSM subculture) could use it to break their slaves' minds... Well, if they needed anything more than a few stern words to do that.
It's similar for me although paradoxically I have a good short term memory. It's just that apparently I'm bad at prioritizing what goes into long-term storage - the stuff most people remember gets discarded almost immediately but random junk I may or may not need sticks.
When I was in school I could give you a synopsis of every single book Terry Pratchett had written to that date but I needed half a year just to get my classmates into my head. Of course, as soon as I found out how good my short-term memory was I used that to cram for tests two minutes before they started. It worked. Since then I know very well that short-term memory performance and long-term memory performance are entirely unrelated.
Given that a god number of them aren't even interesting in what they show you get the feeling that an agent rummaged through the basement and just took photos of everything he saw. Plus the terse, dry descriptions suck the last bit of fun out of the photos.
I stopped looking after the third page - not because spy gadgets aren't cool but because these are presented in a boring fashion and mixed in with random stuff that just happens to have some kind of connection to the CIA. Oh my god, a trowel once held by President Eisenhower! Truly, no other intelligence agency could stand up to that!
They should've made several albums: One with generic CIA memorabilia for those who care about the history of the agency that much and one with cool spy gadgets for those who care about, well, cool spy gadgets. As it is you have the equivalent of some old guy sitting down and saying: "I've had a long and fulfilling life and these slides will prove it." Even if parts of his life are truly interesting, they're buried between dozens upon hundreds of holiday photos.
Well, they have a lot of kludges that only make sense because Microsoft needs to support ages-old software. Which is why some people had hoped that Win 7 would go the way of OS X and just be an entirely new operating system with a cut-down Windows XP inside. That way they could've cleaned up the whole thing without completely sacrificing compatibility.
Of course the way they went is probably easier for them so from now until forever will home users see every drive as a separate filesystem root - because it wil continue being easier for Microsoft.
OS X self-defragments HFS+ volumes but that can fail if the volume is excessively full for prolonged time. I've experienced that once, ending up with a volume the largest contiguous block of which was about ten megabytes in size. (My remedy: Moving everything off and back onto the partition. That was faster than a full defrag run.) Of course that problem can be avoided by not filling the volume to near capacity - something most file systems can't handle without some kind of performance degradation.
My guess (and it's just that) is that he failed to keep the screws keeping the camera attached clean enough. Germs creep in and he has a nasty inflammation on his hands. Well, on the back of his head.
The body does, in fact, reject most anorganic materials. Implants have to be made from specific materials or they will be covered in a cyst.
Of course I expect him to be smart enough to have thought of that. However, the cavity his implant resides in is still connected to the outside world (like that assembly at the back of his head) and that means he has a risk of germs entering it through the connection. Like others have pointed out, it's likely to be an inflammation. (IANAPhysician)
His own fault for installing half a dozen eye cameras just because the old ones weren't cool enough for him. And he didn't even think of investing in a datajack...
That works for corporations but not for normal people. What if Hubert Kniedel from Germany wants to register a domain for himself only to find that "kniedel" is an obscure traditional Jewish pastry and some bakery in Tel Aviv has already registered the name so they can sell internationally? With ccTLDs that would be kniedel.de or kniedel.name vs. kniedel.il or kniedel.com.
I'd just stick to a what we have today. It works reasonably well.
It's less that the masses suck at gaming it's just that traditional gamers aren't the majority of the market anymore. We have to face the fact that what used to be the video game market is now just a niche rarely catered to (although some companies like GSC seem to thrive there).
As for regenerating health, I agree that you can argue that it compensates for the lack of quicksave on consoles, just like the aimbot compensates for analog stick aiming. Of course that doesn't help when it comes to PC ports - either you have regenerative health and quicksave (making the game stupidly easy), you have regenerative health without quicksave (and everyone will mock that) or you get to redesign major aspects of the gameplay.
The developers tend towards the easy route because that way they can appeal to a wider target audience while avoiding a costly redesign. Also, writing cross-platform games as PC games and then doing a half-assed console port isn't cost-effective but doing it the other way around apparently is - so the gameplay will usually be console-centric. Since permanent health is unpopular with console gamers PC gamers don't get it either.
Actually, that does make regenerating health a symptom of consolitis and not haloization - unless someone develops the game entirely for the PC and still puts in regenerating health.
I think the dumbing down of games (let's call it "haloization", although "nothing shall be more complex than Doom" would be more appropriate) is different from consolitis.
Consolitis leads to horrible interfaces, non-user-controllable cameras in third-person games, gameplay appropriate for someone who has to aim with an analog stick and occasionally restricted saving. It happens because the restrictions of consoles are carried over to the PC when the game is ported.
Haloization leads to stripped-down gameplay, omitting complex gameplay features like permanent health (cf. Halo), inventory management (cf. Deus Ex 2), character building (cf. Bioshock vs. System Shock 2) and scarcity (again Bioshock vs. SS2). It happens because it is assumed that the masses want the gameplay to be as simple as possible.
Both have different symptoms and causes. The root cause is the same in both cases (both rewriting significant parts of the game for the PC and making complex games runs counter to today's risk-averse gaming industry) but they can occur independently of each other.
You provide a great analogy yourself. The most prevalent theory is that the hive collapses are linked to a biological cause, some kind of plague. So if someone retaliates on some members of a group sharing the property of being bees (being anonymous) by using this against them that means he effectively unleashes a plague capable of wiping out most bees on Earth (dismantling anonymity for everyone).
I don't think your analogy means what you want it to mean.
There are leaders. Those leaders just aren't universal. Anonymous DDOSes Scientology? Someone thought up and directed that scheme. Anonymous sends some old guy a lot of birthday cards? Someone thought up and directed that, too, but it's probably not the same guy who came up with the DDOS.
If you can figure out the leaders behind one particular activity then you have figured out the leaders behind that one activity. No more, no less.
Well, it was him and everyone else. Like every big disaster there was a long chain of circumstances that culminated in a giant meltdown: Hitler unsuccessfully trying to get into art school. Him living in a dormitory which was a hotbed for antisemitism at the time. Him fighting in WWI and getting injured. Things like those form a man.
On the other side we have Germany being so eager to fight someone, anyone, that they agreed to attack anyone Austria attacked. A network of alliances causing all of Europe to get involved. France imposing reparations heavy enough to cause serious economic trouble for Germany. Germans without food, work or a perspective so that anyone offering them food, a job and a chance to get back at France would be someone they'd listen to. The Weimar Republic lacking a lot of safeguards like election thresholds, which lead to an overly fragmented and largely ineffectual parliament - not to forget that half the parties didn't like democracy all that much anyway.
Nazi Germany didn't occur because one guy from Austria was charismatic. It was because one guy from Austria was charismatic and he had picked up a lot of crazy ideas along the way and Germany was poor and we had a traditionalized hatred for France and our democracy was shaky anyway and we were still spoiling for a fight and that crazy Austrian offered easy solutions for complex problems.
Of course that doesn't change that fact that us having been so poor we had to import our dictator makes for a good joke.
I mentioned this in a comment in another smartphone topic in the past week. Someone replied recommending buying an extra battery, even if this is an external battery that recharges the internal battery.
So I avoid the hassle of having to put two items in my pocket by putting two different items in my pocket. May make sense for some people but I'd still stick with discrete devices.
Unless you get into Android PDAs, which Google hasn't been officially allowing onto the Market in the United States. Archos 43, for example, is limited to the much smaller AppsLib. The only PDA I can think of that shares an app store with a popular smartphone is Apple's iPod touch.
Ah. Of course, the iPod touch is prefectly adequate in my opinion and it's not even particularly expensive if you can make use of some special offer - but YMMV, of course.
It all boils down to what your needs are. If what you want from your device could theoretically be fulfilled by a stock Palm V you don't need to shell out hundreds of $CURRENCY just to gain access to some app store. If you need mobile internet or certain high-profile apps only found on some smartphone app store you need a smartphone. If you really need an SD slot you want neither an Apple device nor one running WinPho 7.
My point is that the statement "devices such as an iPod [MP3 players and PDAs] are an anachronism" is false - there are use cases where a dedicated MP3 player or PDA makes sense, for instance when you want maximal uptime for one or more devices or when you simply don't need the smartphone-specific features (mobile internet, Android app store) enough to warrant the dramatic mark-up.
For instance, there are plenty of students with MP3 players. Paying 30 bucks for a basic MP3 player is easily done on a moderate allowance. Paying 200 bucks for an iPod touch that doubles as a handheld console requires a lot of saving but it's realistic. Paying 500-700 bucks for a comparable smartphone that offers not much over the touch besides mobile internet? Not unless you have a comparatively large income; even mobile plans including such phones would cost enough per month for most students to reconsider.
Sweeping statements have this tendency to be wrong as people often look at their immediate surroundings and then assume that the rest of the world works the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia has very detailed guidelines about notability. I think they are there in case two admins disagree.
Star Trek has a damn good wiki. Two, actually; one for canon stuff and one for the rest. Perhaps a bit heavy on the quotes but whether it's in-universe trivia, production details or information about occurrences in the series you seek, they have it. Nauseatingly detailed, indeed, but they truly are one-stop-shops for everything related to their niche, which is exactly what they should be. If Wikipedia was of such high general quality, well, it would be a whole lot better than it is today.
I think Wikipedia could profit from moving most of of its articles to Wikia and just sending people there through something like a shared namespace that lets them present information from external wikis right along with theirs. Local admins can't power-trip as easily, articles can be as detailed as they want and deletonism doesn't remove information, it just moves it around. Perhaps that way they can even get people to participate again - unlike today where Wikipedia is almost purely a spectator sport because the admin team isn't exacly sportsmanlike.
Good. Articles should only show up on the "main" Wikipedia when they're known-good. The first thing to do after creating the ShadowWiki (as another poster has called it) would be to move all articles there. Then the editors get to vet each one (probably using robots to weed out obviously unworthy articles) and move the good ones there. Things like episode lists or fictional characters/items should stay on ShadowWiki unless they're really that significant (Darth Vader is a cultural icon, Ned Flanders isn't). Leave Wikipedia for the well-researched big topics and use ShadowWiki for stuff that isn't well-cited, not obviously notable or in some other way deficient.
However, these wikis shouldn't be separate. Being in the main "wiki" is just a bit of metadata that can be added or removed at will and searches span both "wikis" by default. Essentially, being a "proper" article would be like the little stars they hand out to good articles now, just a lower tier. The "wikis" also automatically redirect to each other. Wikipedia could also cross-reference other wikis like the stuff hosted on Wikia. This would lose a lot of chaff but keep the information accessible: People looking for Class 2 shuttlecraft get informed that Wikipedia just has an article on Star Trek but that Memory Alpha has the article they're looking for. Or they look up Star Trek on Wikipedia and there's a little box in the article that tells them to go to MA for more detailed articles.
Essentially, Wikipedia would become three-tiered: The admin-approves articles on top, the acceptably good articles below that and below those a directory service that caters to niche knowledge. This would also make the deletionism problem easier: If there is a specialized wiki of acceptable quality, articles can be moved there where they will probably get more and better attention anyway; Wikipedia proper gets more streamlined and the information is neither lost nor hidden away. All sides win.
Well, except for those who care more about how many articles they don't dislike Wikipedia has so they can feel better about their collective e-peen. Not saying that all WP admins are like that but I bet a few are.
I read through, well, a good chunk of the discussion before I couldn't take it anymore. He was repeatedly called on having a COI which he deflected by saying he doesn't have one. Discussion over, deletion appropriate.
Yes, the discussion involved a lot of brickwalling.
*: Yes, you may cite this post as need be in future discussions, Wikipedia or not, as to the degree to which Ben Schumin is a little bitch.
Unfortunately, we can't because you never actually qualified the degree of him being a bitch. Does he wag his tail when he's happy? Does he sniff the butts of dogs he passes by? Did he play Daikatana against John Romero? Those are important questions, you know.
N = 3
S = 1, but would've been 5 if not for warranty issues.
Looks scary until you see that three of the shop trips would've been because of my old iBook's power plug desoldering itself (the G4 iBook was built shoddily) and the other two were my first MacBook Pro failing because of the Geforce packaging flaw (which Apple had no control over).
I've had no Apple-attributable hardware failures since switching to an MBP and no hardware failures at all since getting a unibody MBP. Those things really are built well. Of course it's concerning to see that they shipped a unit built to such low standards but it remains to be seen if that's actually common. The new MBP might be a lemon or it might not and a single sample isn't going to tell us everything.
Of course Slashdot doesn't do followup stories anymore, else we could've gathered teardowns and, well, done one.
Having at least one X chromosome makes you female enough for hating John Norman's works. Actually, I don't care about the content but that man's infernal writing style is bad enough that the Goreans (in-book, not the BDSM subculture) could use it to break their slaves' minds... Well, if they needed anything more than a few stern words to do that.
It's similar for me although paradoxically I have a good short term memory. It's just that apparently I'm bad at prioritizing what goes into long-term storage - the stuff most people remember gets discarded almost immediately but random junk I may or may not need sticks.
When I was in school I could give you a synopsis of every single book Terry Pratchett had written to that date but I needed half a year just to get my classmates into my head. Of course, as soon as I found out how good my short-term memory was I used that to cram for tests two minutes before they started. It worked. Since then I know very well that short-term memory performance and long-term memory performance are entirely unrelated.
Given that a god number of them aren't even interesting in what they show you get the feeling that an agent rummaged through the basement and just took photos of everything he saw. Plus the terse, dry descriptions suck the last bit of fun out of the photos.
I stopped looking after the third page - not because spy gadgets aren't cool but because these are presented in a boring fashion and mixed in with random stuff that just happens to have some kind of connection to the CIA. Oh my god, a trowel once held by President Eisenhower! Truly, no other intelligence agency could stand up to that!
They should've made several albums: One with generic CIA memorabilia for those who care about the history of the agency that much and one with cool spy gadgets for those who care about, well, cool spy gadgets. As it is you have the equivalent of some old guy sitting down and saying: "I've had a long and fulfilling life and these slides will prove it." Even if parts of his life are truly interesting, they're buried between dozens upon hundreds of holiday photos.
Directly from the manufacturer, of course.
Well, Keynote is fairly nice. And, well, yeah. Keynote.
Well, they have a lot of kludges that only make sense because Microsoft needs to support ages-old software. Which is why some people had hoped that Win 7 would go the way of OS X and just be an entirely new operating system with a cut-down Windows XP inside. That way they could've cleaned up the whole thing without completely sacrificing compatibility.
Of course the way they went is probably easier for them so from now until forever will home users see every drive as a separate filesystem root - because it wil continue being easier for Microsoft.
OS X self-defragments HFS+ volumes but that can fail if the volume is excessively full for prolonged time. I've experienced that once, ending up with a volume the largest contiguous block of which was about ten megabytes in size. (My remedy: Moving everything off and back onto the partition. That was faster than a full defrag run.) Of course that problem can be avoided by not filling the volume to near capacity - something most file systems can't handle without some kind of performance degradation.
My guess (and it's just that) is that he failed to keep the screws keeping the camera attached clean enough. Germs creep in and he has a nasty inflammation on his hands. Well, on the back of his head.
The body does, in fact, reject most anorganic materials. Implants have to be made from specific materials or they will be covered in a cyst.
Of course I expect him to be smart enough to have thought of that. However, the cavity his implant resides in is still connected to the outside world (like that assembly at the back of his head) and that means he has a risk of germs entering it through the connection. Like others have pointed out, it's likely to be an inflammation. (IANAPhysician)
His own fault for installing half a dozen eye cameras just because the old ones weren't cool enough for him. And he didn't even think of investing in a datajack...
That works for corporations but not for normal people. What if Hubert Kniedel from Germany wants to register a domain for himself only to find that "kniedel" is an obscure traditional Jewish pastry and some bakery in Tel Aviv has already registered the name so they can sell internationally? With ccTLDs that would be kniedel.de or kniedel.name vs. kniedel.il or kniedel.com.
I'd just stick to a what we have today. It works reasonably well.
It's less that the masses suck at gaming it's just that traditional gamers aren't the majority of the market anymore. We have to face the fact that what used to be the video game market is now just a niche rarely catered to (although some companies like GSC seem to thrive there).
As for regenerating health, I agree that you can argue that it compensates for the lack of quicksave on consoles, just like the aimbot compensates for analog stick aiming. Of course that doesn't help when it comes to PC ports - either you have regenerative health and quicksave (making the game stupidly easy), you have regenerative health without quicksave (and everyone will mock that) or you get to redesign major aspects of the gameplay.
The developers tend towards the easy route because that way they can appeal to a wider target audience while avoiding a costly redesign. Also, writing cross-platform games as PC games and then doing a half-assed console port isn't cost-effective but doing it the other way around apparently is - so the gameplay will usually be console-centric. Since permanent health is unpopular with console gamers PC gamers don't get it either.
Actually, that does make regenerating health a symptom of consolitis and not haloization - unless someone develops the game entirely for the PC and still puts in regenerating health.
I think the dumbing down of games (let's call it "haloization", although "nothing shall be more complex than Doom" would be more appropriate) is different from consolitis.
Consolitis leads to horrible interfaces, non-user-controllable cameras in third-person games, gameplay appropriate for someone who has to aim with an analog stick and occasionally restricted saving. It happens because the restrictions of consoles are carried over to the PC when the game is ported.
Haloization leads to stripped-down gameplay, omitting complex gameplay features like permanent health (cf. Halo), inventory management (cf. Deus Ex 2), character building (cf. Bioshock vs. System Shock 2) and scarcity (again Bioshock vs. SS2). It happens because it is assumed that the masses want the gameplay to be as simple as possible.
Both have different symptoms and causes. The root cause is the same in both cases (both rewriting significant parts of the game for the PC and making complex games runs counter to today's risk-averse gaming industry) but they can occur independently of each other.
You provide a great analogy yourself. The most prevalent theory is that the hive collapses are linked to a biological cause, some kind of plague. So if someone retaliates on some members of a group sharing the property of being bees (being anonymous) by using this against them that means he effectively unleashes a plague capable of wiping out most bees on Earth (dismantling anonymity for everyone).
I don't think your analogy means what you want it to mean.
There are leaders. Those leaders just aren't universal. Anonymous DDOSes Scientology? Someone thought up and directed that scheme. Anonymous sends some old guy a lot of birthday cards? Someone thought up and directed that, too, but it's probably not the same guy who came up with the DDOS.
If you can figure out the leaders behind one particular activity then you have figured out the leaders behind that one activity. No more, no less.
At the moment words are all I have...
Write a book. It might actually sell and whether it does or not, at least you will have written a book.
Well, it was him and everyone else. Like every big disaster there was a long chain of circumstances that culminated in a giant meltdown: Hitler unsuccessfully trying to get into art school. Him living in a dormitory which was a hotbed for antisemitism at the time. Him fighting in WWI and getting injured. Things like those form a man.
On the other side we have Germany being so eager to fight someone, anyone, that they agreed to attack anyone Austria attacked. A network of alliances causing all of Europe to get involved. France imposing reparations heavy enough to cause serious economic trouble for Germany. Germans without food, work or a perspective so that anyone offering them food, a job and a chance to get back at France would be someone they'd listen to. The Weimar Republic lacking a lot of safeguards like election thresholds, which lead to an overly fragmented and largely ineffectual parliament - not to forget that half the parties didn't like democracy all that much anyway.
Nazi Germany didn't occur because one guy from Austria was charismatic. It was because one guy from Austria was charismatic and he had picked up a lot of crazy ideas along the way and Germany was poor and we had a traditionalized hatred for France and our democracy was shaky anyway and we were still spoiling for a fight and that crazy Austrian offered easy solutions for complex problems.
Of course that doesn't change that fact that us having been so poor we had to import our dictator makes for a good joke.
I mentioned this in a comment in another smartphone topic in the past week. Someone replied recommending buying an extra battery, even if this is an external battery that recharges the internal battery.
So I avoid the hassle of having to put two items in my pocket by putting two different items in my pocket. May make sense for some people but I'd still stick with discrete devices.
Unless you get into Android PDAs, which Google hasn't been officially allowing onto the Market in the United States. Archos 43, for example, is limited to the much smaller AppsLib. The only PDA I can think of that shares an app store with a popular smartphone is Apple's iPod touch.
Ah. Of course, the iPod touch is prefectly adequate in my opinion and it's not even particularly expensive if you can make use of some special offer - but YMMV, of course.
It all boils down to what your needs are. If what you want from your device could theoretically be fulfilled by a stock Palm V you don't need to shell out hundreds of $CURRENCY just to gain access to some app store. If you need mobile internet or certain high-profile apps only found on some smartphone app store you need a smartphone. If you really need an SD slot you want neither an Apple device nor one running WinPho 7.
My point is that the statement "devices such as an iPod [MP3 players and PDAs] are an anachronism" is false - there are use cases where a dedicated MP3 player or PDA makes sense, for instance when you want maximal uptime for one or more devices or when you simply don't need the smartphone-specific features (mobile internet, Android app store) enough to warrant the dramatic mark-up.
For instance, there are plenty of students with MP3 players. Paying 30 bucks for a basic MP3 player is easily done on a moderate allowance. Paying 200 bucks for an iPod touch that doubles as a handheld console requires a lot of saving but it's realistic. Paying 500-700 bucks for a comparable smartphone that offers not much over the touch besides mobile internet? Not unless you have a comparatively large income; even mobile plans including such phones would cost enough per month for most students to reconsider.
Sweeping statements have this tendency to be wrong as people often look at their immediate surroundings and then assume that the rest of the world works the same.
Although it is amusing to picture them strangling Verizon customers while shouting: "THROTTLING OCCURS AFTER TWO GIGABYTES OF TRAFFIC PER MONTH!"