Whether or not to play in Apple's iOS garden is a business decision companies like Amazon or B&N will have to make. There's no reason for them to offer iOS versions of the e-readers. Oh, except for the large customer base. If that customer base is big enough I'm sure Amazon and B&N and others will agree to Apple's rules. 70% revenue for a customer pool of millions of iPhone and iPad users is better than 100% revenue for zero of them.

Apple is offering others the ability to take advantage of their platform. How many Nook books can you buy from B&N on the Kindle, or Apple iBooks on the Nook? None. Apple is creating a place where Amazon and B&N will be able to compete with iBooks on price using the same e-reader. Neither Amazon nor B&N open their gardens to competitors.

Cops are using head-mounted cameras to record everyone and everything they come in contact with. They like this tool because they control the video. That's what it's really about, controlling information. But when ordinary people record street scenes, that's "bad".

Cops are out in public engaging in public-viewable activity, just like the rest of us. They should expect being recorded and do their job appropriately.

Actually, it's a rebirth of the Newton eMate 300.

There is no way to know if the open wifi networks are open intentionally or not. Just ask Bruce Schneier. Saying they're "open to criminals" is biased, maybe "open to visitors" would be more appropriate. How come coffee shops and other businesses with open wifi aren't called out for letting criminals access the network?

That one day, little iPhones, and little Android phones, may one day access the same content.

That was, essentially, Steve Jobs argument in his letter slamming Flash. His view is that the Web should be based on standards.

The truth is Flash is not a standard, it's a convention. A huge amount of Web content may be in Flash, but it's a closed system. Only one company, Adobe, decides how it works. Ten years ago you could say the same thing about RealPlayer. Shouldn't the iPhone support Real video? What about ActiveX?

The iPhone platform is closed, sure. But it's not delivering content to others, it happens to include a way to access web content. If it does a poor job of that the market will reject it, but the only ones who seem up in arms are Flash developers who are mad about their favorite tools not working on some shiny, popular platform.

...where would the PC world be without interoperatability and standards?

Since USB-IF assigns unique vendor IDs to its members, Palm cloning Apple's vendor ID is in fact breaking the USB standard. Imagine if vendors didn't respect their uniquely assigned IDs with other hardware, such as ethernet. That would be a nightmare for driver writers.

I don't see how Palm forging a vendor ID in direct violation of the USB standard is a good thing for the industry. It renders that portion of the USB standard meaningless.

You've always been able to buy Mac OS X separately, usually for $129. So if you started with 10.0 and upgraded to each version to 10.6 you would have paid at most about $775 over seven OS versions (including Snow Leopard) and eight years.

Of course, that's not going to really count since Intel Macs weren't introduced until 2006 under 10.4 (Tiger). And all Mac purchases come with the latest OS, even if Apple has to slap an upgrade disc on the outside of the box (my Intel Mac mini came that way).

Murdoch bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million. Not such a hot property these days. I wouldn't put any money into Murdoch's internet instincts.

This reminds me of Bill McNeal on News Radio trying to be "cool" with his Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor promos:

"Gazizza, dilznoofuses, this is Bill McNeal saying, get with the crazappy taste of Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor! Rocket Fuel's got the upstate prison flavor that keeps you ugly all night long. So when you wanna get sick, remember: Nothing makes your feet stank like Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor. Damn, it's crazappy!"

Boxee consolidates the indefinite number of online content services into a single viewing experience. Kind of the best of all worlds, the content providers get to try and make their own walled gardens but the users get a simplified experience. So Hulu decides no, that's not good enough. We want to force everyone to buy our hardware too, so they can pay $$ for the hardware to watch our "free" service on their teevees.

Yeah, no.

Or maybe Hulu's goal is to keep people using a crappy web browser experience on their computer display while the 60" flat screen HDTV across the room sits dark.

The real issue is that all light bulbs really do need to have the rating of lumens. Wattage is power use, lumens is light output (obviously). Saying "40-watt equivalent" is empty marketing speak, no wonder they were disappointing. And then there's the whole light temperature issue, which is very difficult for a consumer to determine.

For my LED experience, I went with these LED bulbs for my chandelier (I was looking for a "25-watt equivalent") and have been very pleased. It may help that it's a cluster of bulbs in my fixture. Considering the lifespan of LED bulbs, I'm willing to pay a lot more per bulb providing the light output falls in the appropriate range.

I hope stations switch anyway. The February 17 deadline is three weeks away. Stations have already scheduled their work crews and support staff, have made plans for the hardware cutover, etc. Now they're expected to suddenly halt everything, add an additional four months of dual-service costs and redo all of their plans?

Seems to me this move does nothing to help people prepare for the switch, but will succeed in making the stations unprepared. So it'll be a bigger mess than sticking to the original date.