People would be fighting for unlocking laws like that in the US, if it actually mattered. The only providers that use SIM cards are T-Mobile and AT&T, and they use different 3G frequencies so most phones aren't (fully) compatible between them anyway. Europe has choice, the US doesn't really. You choose a provider, you're stuck with their phone options, for the most part.
This is the missing piece for me. I still want to own the physical book, but I would love the convenience of being able to load a bunch of books on my Kindle and take it on a trip or something.
Plus, think of the lock-in that the stores are missing out on. As a Kindle owner, if Amazon offered me bundles, I would probably never buy another book at Barnes & Noble.
People were invested in Myspace with updates, photos, page customizations, etc. Now they're all on Facebook. There's no reason to believe they won't move again if the right feature set comes along.
This works great until 10 years down the road you pick up an old Mac at a thrift store and discover that the internet recovery for Lion has been ended and the newer OS's aren't supported by the hardware.
The Shuttle fails in its primary objective, that of being a "reusable" vehicle. I attended a presentation by a NASA employee that explained the Shuttle process from landing to launch, and I was amazed at how much of the craft is replaced. I think we would have been far better off extending the Apollo program to new missions, similar to the Soyuz (which is still flying although much improved from the moon landing era).
The limitation on housing is the key to the game's structure. Most people don't seem to play it this way (letting players build hotels if they have the money, regardless of the number of actual plastic houses remaining), and it screws the game up. Not to mention house rules like "free parking" artificially adding money to the game.
Flip built an interesting product, but it just doesn't offer anything anymore.
I came close to buying one a number of times, but never pulled the trigger because it would have been another device to carry and I wasn't sure how much I'd really use it.
Now, both my phone and my iPod Touch offer everything the Flip did, and I'm already carrying them around with me.
Google should be fixing some of these accessibility issues themselves. As for the actual GMail client though... nothing prevents the user from using the third-party client of their choice, so nothing has really changed from before.
One concern I would have, with more people using iPads instead of computers, is the middle of the night "I dropped my iPad and now it won't turn on, how do I save my data?" call. Apple really needs to get on the ball with some sort of backup that doesn't require plugging it into a PC.
I think the author is referring to the "slide to unlock" explanation, with a reference to the infamous Win95 "Click here to Begin" that used to appear above the start button.
I don't necessarily agree that it's a horrible design decision, but it is very unlike Apple to invent a control that needs on-screen instructions instead of just being intuitive.