"They are a shitty, greedy company, and that's all they'll ever be."

But here lies the problem. AT&T is indeed a shitty, greedy company, but what of the competition?

Verizon is an equally shitty, greedy company; if there's one thing we've learned from the way they use BREW, they'd be more restrictive with apps than AT&T, not less. Plus, they use CDMA as of right now and the LTE shift is years away.

Sprint and T-Mobile are less shitty, less greedy companies - but Sprint has committed itself to CDMA and wimax with no intention to change course, while T-Mobile's 3G is on bands that aren't used anywhere else in the world and therefore require special radios. And both companies have less extensive networks than AT&T or Verizon.

This leaves regional carriers, who would be the most illsuited to Apple. The remaining regional carriers - Cricket, US Cellular, metroPCS et al - don't have coverage in most major cities, where there are more youths and more businesspeople - customers who have craving for technology, the need for a data plan, and the disposable income for both. Even Alltel, the largest regional carrier before it was acquired by VZ, was missing from the major, urban markets, and metroPCS is just entering major cities now. Regionals have their networks centered in the country, where populations are older, poorer and less tech savvy. The other reality is that now that Dobson and SunCom have been acquired, all regional carriers are CDMA - which is the very reason that Sprint and VZ were scratched off. Finally, using many regional carriers instead of one large carrier isn't the way the Apple 'experience' works: it lacks the simplicity of "this is the one carrier, these are the only plans" that Apple gets with a national.

Unless the mobile market radically shifts, Apple is tethered to AT&T.

I have to doubt that Palm has the resources to make an iTunes quality media player. Pre and all - they are not yet that much furhter from bankruptcy than they were twelve months ago.

More importantly, iTunes is fully integrated with other OS X applications - why should I use one program for phone music and one program for every other OS X program?

My library provides a free subscription to the online version, which has the advantages of not needing a disk and having a more pleasant UI.
Many libraries, especially school and university libraries, do too.
Check with yours.

Does not compare.

Happy Canada Day

More to the point of the post, my school didn't give us Macs.
They didn't give anyone any computer. They didn't have laptop racks.
The classrooms each had one computer for the teacher, but the students used books.

I go back and forth, half the year in Canada and half the year in the US, so anything with a contract is out of the question.

It's funny, and I couldn't help but think as I read this article:
That's ridiculous!
Data caps, lack of competition, extortionist pricing....
Oh, wait... it's just like Canada!

PBS never shows up as what you're watching tonight...
No one else wants to find out how Madoff did it on Frontline tonight?

It's fine, even impressive - so long as it doesn't get anywhere near my T-Mobile phone.

PBS has also been better than other networks at posting videos. They had shows online far before any other network - I remember watching Frontline online TEN YEARS ago - and they never take old episodes down. The only bad thing was that before now you had to go to each show's individual site.