Not until I read your post. Now that horrible image is burned into my brain. Eww! Thanks a lot, dude!

Unfortunately, it won't happen because many stockholders aren't interested in the long-term health of the companies they invest in. All they want to see is an increase in the price of the stocks they're holding only for as long as they're holding them. That's why you see companies so reluctant to invest in capital expenditures. Sure, those expenditures are good for the long-term competitiveness of the company, since they're often investments in updated infrastructure, but they cause a short-term decrease in profits. If profits fall, stock prices almost always fall, and that can lead to company management and even board members getting sacked. And, since no one wants to lose their job, they're going to do whatever is necessary to keep the stock price up. Sure, the company may sink in a few years, but that'll be someone else's problem.

A perfect example of the current investor mindset is when Carl Icahn bought a huge chunk of Yahoo a few years ago. The only reason he did it was because rumors were circulating that Microsoft was interested in buying the company. Icahn bought up a bunch of stock and then immediately started pushing hard for a buyout, and he just about went ballistic when the Yahoo board refused to go along and sell. Icahn wasn't interested in the long-term health of Yahoo. Hell, he wasn't even interested in the short-term health of Yahoo. He was (and is) just a big parasite hoping to buy in, get the company sold, and make a tidy profit, never mind the fact that most employees would have lost their jobs and a competitor would have been removed from the market.

Short-term greed is, unfortunately, the name of the game these days. Get in, get a quick stock price appreciation, and get the hell out.

No, their GSM voice services and GPRS/EDGE data services use the same bands. 3G does not. For 3G, AT&T uses 850 and 1900, while T-Mobile uses 1700.

Although the Vibrant only officially supports 3G on 1700, it's been said that it can also support it on 1900. That's probably what you were seeing. However, my understanding is that the Captivate will not do 1700.

Is anyone really surprised here? AT&T was going to raise prices anyway, no matter how this deal went. The only difference is, had they gotten T-Mobile, they would have probably raised rates even more, since there would have been one less competitor in the market for people to go to. All they're doing is trying to justify this increase in light of the deal falling apart. If the deal had happened, they'd have said that the rate increase was coming anyway, but it would have been larger had they not gotten T-Mobile.

And, in case anyone still thinks this had anything to do with the T-Mobile buyout not happening, consider this: big companies rarely change their prices on a whim. Before they do it, there's going to be market research to determine what they can change and how much, there will be discussions in upper management, and there's got to be time to change billing systems, point of sale systems, and advertising. This isn't something they cooked up overnight. There simply wouldn't have been time.

In short, AT&T was planning this price increase all along. Any rationalization for it is pure spin.

Yes and no. You can take the phone if you get it unlocked (call AT&T and tell them you need it unlocked because you're going overseas and want to buy a prepaid SIM while you're abroad--they should do it if your account is in good standing). Then, you can use it with T-Mobile, but only EDGE data will work. Since AT&T uses 850 and 1900 for 3G, and T-Mobile uses 1700 for 3G, 3G data will not work on T-Mobile with this phone.

If you want a similar phone that supports 3G on T-Mobile, you can pick up a Samsung Vibrant, which is almost identical. However, I'd highly recommend looking at something new. Both the Captivate and Vibrant are pretty old devices now, and you aren't going to get any more major updates to them from Samsung. Plus, compared to other phones, GPS on the Captivate is truly awful. Don't get me wrong, it's not a terrible phone. I know because I had one when I was with AT&T, but there are many better handsets available now.

I agree with you completely, and I'll add that I think, with elementary and high school, you don't really get to choose your friends, especially at a smaller school. You're sort of thrown into this group of people who you have to see every day, whether you like it or not. Sort of like work, except that, with work, at least most folks have developed the maturity level not to be complete assholes most of the time

The big thing I've noticed is that, once one person from high school finds you on Facebook, the rest will soon follow. I've had practically zero contact with the folks I went to high school with in the past 23 years after graduation, and I'm inclined to keep it that way. But then someone found me and friended me, and I foolishly accepted, probably because that person was someone I didn't despise. Then more showed up...and more...and more. Then I was getting friend requests from people who I really didn't like too much. Those are sitting out there in friend request limbo, where I plan on leaving them until the day I finally quit Facebook, which, given this whole Timeline thing, may be coming soon.

...is why your company is in this mess right now. Was your predecessor incompetent, bad at documenting, or so busy putting out fires that he never had a chance to do things properly? You also need to know if the reason he was putting out fires all the time was because he never had the resources to run a proper IT department. If that's the case, you have to prepare yourself for the real possibility that management either doesn't understand the need to properly fund IT or the fact that they do understand and are just too cheap to do it. A lack of understanding is fixable; being a bunch of cheapskates often isn't. And if they're too cheap, especially considering that you work for an e-commerce company, then you're in for a rough ride. Believe me, it's no fun trying to do your job when you can't get the tools you need to actually do it. If you find yourself in that situation, then you can only do what you can do. After that, you're going to be frustrated as hell. Perhaps that's why the last guy left.

And one word of warning. You're going to have to make an assessment of how likely it is that you can keep this ship afloat. If you're unable to get things in order, and the best you can do is stay one step ahead of a disaster, then you need to get the hell out before the inevitable disaster does happen because, when it does, it's entirely possible that you're going to get blamed, especially if management is too cheap to get you the resources you need. Fix the leaky boat as best you can, do whatever improvements you can manage, then polish your resume and start looking.

Have the Firefox developers gone entirely mad? I thought their rapid release schedule was stupid, but this is just plain asinine. No, in a perfect world, we would all be happiest and more productive if we were using the newest version, but we don't live in a perfect world. New versions introduce new bugs, they break addons, and, even if the new version is completely bug-free, it may not play nice with a Web site that has problems with its content or Web server.

And, as someone else already said, IT departments aren't going to like this. It's not that they're inefficient or resistant to change, but, when you're supporting several thousand desktops, you have to make sure that shiny new release isn't actually a polished turd or that it won't break something else. If something goes wrong, it may be easy to fix a problem if you're only concerned with a few machines, but what happens when that update you just pushed out to 3,000 desktops has a show-stopping problem you never saw coming? And yes, it happens. Just ask HTC about the disastrous update to the HTC Thunderbolt that caused the phone to start randomly rebooting, sometimes several times a day. I have no doubt the update was tested, and both they and Verizon were confident it was ready for deployment. Well, it wasn't. Bugs, often serious ones, can get by the most stringent testing.

Someone at Mozilla needs to put the brakes on this harebrained idea immediately, if not sooner.

That is only true if you have a multitude of independently-controlled routes data can take to travel from one point to another with no one central point that can fail, either accidentally or deliberately. That was the original idea of how the Internet would be constructed, but it isn't how it works today, at least not on the consumer side. So, unless you have multiple connections not controlled by a single entity coming into your house (and a government counts as a controlling entity, so getting connections from multiple providers under its jurisdiction doesn't count), and, unless the site you want to visit is networked the same way, your statement means nothing.

Actually, this old meme, IMHO, is dangerous. It implies that censorship can't happen, which is most certainly not true. This leads people to take threats of censorship less seriously because they mistakenly think that the censorship efforts will be futile, which is also not true. Sure, someone with enough knowledge and determination might get around it, but most folks won't. Ask the North Korean authorities about that. I'm sure they know that information still leaks in, but enough people are prevented from getting at it to make their censorship regime effective.

It isn't as simple as "oppressing the citizenry". That isn't how it works. The problem is that many people want to feel "safe", whatever that means. Look at all the gated communities out there and the hysteria that arises whenever the topic of crime, sex offenders, or terrorism comes up. Hell, my in-laws just moved into a house in a lower middle class, racially-mixed neighborhood in town, and a friend of mine went to great lengths to tell me that they shouldn't be buying that house because of all the crime there. If this person doesn't live in her little garden home, nestled in a neighborhood of garden homes outside of the city proper, she wouldn't feel safe. You get the idea.

OK, so you have all these people who are afraid that someone is going to come along and hurt them and/or take their stuff. So they demand action from their elected officials to protect them. So the politicians, being the pandering whores that they are, promise to keep them safe by any means necessary. And therein lies the problem. Since the danger is most often imaginary, it can't be reduced or eliminated by reasonable anti-crime measures. It's like trying to cure a hypochondriac of their disease. Since the disease isn't real, a cure won't work. And, just like a hypochondriac, the public demands more and more extreme measures be taken because, to them, the danger is real and the measures already in place obviously aren't working to reduce it. And the politicians go along because they know that, if they don't, someone else will come along promising to be tougher on crime, and the fearful public will elect them instead.

Oh, yes they do understand them. Social networks are a powerful communications tool, as powerful as the "official" media. Why do you think the first thing many Middle Eastern countries where protests erupted did was to block access to these services? The trouble with this is that, once you've set the precedent for blocking them in one situation, it becomes easier to do it in others. Riots? Sure. OK, what about during big protests that are turning ugly? Sounds good. Then what about big protests that might turn ugly? Probably would be prudent, you know, to keep the potential troublemakers from organizing. And if it keeps the protest small, so much the better.

Why wouldn't people go? People travel to Dubai all the time. And Jordan is much closer to Europe than the United States is, so Europeans would have an easier time going there than here, especially if the park were in, say, California. And you're also ignoring all the other things that can be staged in and around the park. They could put on the biggest Star Trek convention you've ever seen. And even if the thing only manages to break even, the boost to the local economy could be huge.

And who ever thought a theme park in the middle of a central Florida swamp would attract any visitors?

The answer is quite simple: It's because China is a huge market, and Western companies want to be there much more than they mind being attacked.

I can give you a perfect example of this. I have a buddy who is an engineer with a major auto manufacturer. A few years ago, he was telling me how the Chinese car companies are blatantly ripping off the designs of other companies. He even said that GM found that Cherry Motors was doing such a good job of it that their parts were identical to and interchangeable with Chevy parts. Still, the big car manufacturers were lining up to enter into partnerships with their Chinese counterparts. I asked him why they would do this, knowing full well that their designs would be ripped off. He said that, yes, they knew this would happen, but the Chinese market was so big that they felt they could still make money there, and besides, the Chinese companies were going to rip off their designs whether they were partners or not, so they might as well form partnerships and at least make some money.