As long as you are connected to Wi-Fi, you can be on a call and still use data. At home I have Wi-Fi, at my office I have Wi-Fi, nearly every restaurant downtown has Wi-Fi. The point is Wi-Fi is ubiquitous.

One thing that I don’t understand about this debacle is that every other Verizon phone has this same limitation and no one seems to be up in arms about it. My original Droid had this “problem” and my current Palm Pre Plus has this “fault” (as I’ve seen it called in online comments).

The only time this has been a problem for me in real world usage is when using the personal hot spot feature while traveling or you’re dealing with spotty wifi coverage. Even then, is it really a huge deal to stop getting data on your laptop for 5 minutes if you absolutely must take a call? It hasn’t been for me, it’s a minor issue when you put it in perspective.

I would like to clear up one more thing. There seems to be confusion of , when you receive a call the data connection will be dropped and your phone call will go through. To think of it another way; Imagine you’re laptop is connected to a router, but someone pulls out the ethernet cable going to the modem. Your laptop would still be connected to the router, but you wouldn’t be online.

What do you think? Feel free to email me Editor@codesketch.com.

This is why I’m excited for a magazine that’s designed for the iPad from the get go. Best of luck Branson.

Project magazine cover video from Project on Vimeo.

It was just last week that New York based company Adafruit had announced that they would be offering $2000 for the group or individual who can come up with an open source driver for Kinect: i.e. base-level software for Kinect that would make it possible to use it for purposes other than dancing like a girl in front of your Xbox 360 + TV.

That bounty has, possibly, been answered today. In a video uploaded on YouTube, you can see its motor being controlled by a Windows 7 PC. The software is also shown to be reading data from Kinect’s accelerometer.

via: redmondpie.com

I was watching TechCrunch’s coverage of the “Back to Mac” keynote today and clicked on a story that was just published. There was only one comment and it read

“can u install it ilife on a pc MG.”

Typically I don’t even look at comments, but I had an extra 30 seconds to kill and felt like being helpful to a guy who is still learning English. I wrote back

“Nope. OS X only.”

He wrote back with a trollish retort to the author of the article MG Siegler saying

“lol,,I wanted to know if MG knew? cos i think he don’t have a clue about tech&he uses only cut&paste. But thank you for your reply.:D”

Sure any community will have trolls, but TechCrunch has them in spades, and worse; is passive in dealing with them. I clicked on his profile and he had these insightful things to say:

Obviously this is only one story, but read any of MG Siegler (other authors have this same problem, but especially MG) posts here, and you will see trolling to tenth degree.

Compared to the quality of discussion over at news.ycombinator.com, TechCrunch just seems indifferent and lazy.

Below is word for word their policy on comments. If you break these rules, you’re punished.

Be civil. Don’t say things you wouldn’t say in a face to face conversation.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. “That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3″ can be shortened to “1 + 1 is 2, not 3.”

Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them.

Please don’t sign comments, especially with your url. They’re already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

Please don’t use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

Please don’t submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the “flag” link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don’t also comment that you did.

If your account is less than a year old, please don’t submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It’s a common semi-noob illusion.)

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don’t bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

These guidelines don’t squash intelligent debate. It helps people to disagree civilly, something TechCrunch should really look into to. This bugs me. Just treat people better. Anonymity isn’t an excuse to be a troll. Internet, go forth, and comment well.