yeah, I actually built a business model on this concept:

1. Purchased DROID w/ contract
2. Break contract, keep phone at $185 net profit
3. Sell phone on eBay
4. New user of phone activates phone on Verizon (because they have no choice of carrier when they buy the DROID) and pay Verizon a bunch of money that I wasn't going to pay
5. New user changes their mind, sells the phone on eBay, and new-new user runs off to sign up with Verizon

Ha! Ha! Ha! I really screwed Verizon over!!

Hey, wait...


Point is, no matter how much Verizon sells a phone for, that phone can only do one of two things: be used to make Verizon money, or go in the trash. Is it justifiable for a CARRIER-LOCKED PHONE to be contractually *fully* subsidized by the purchaser? If this was AT&T, T-Mobile, etc. I could see the point - I take my phone and run, screwing the company out of money. But with Verizon's phones, regardless of how long I am with them - the phone will keep making them money!

Oh no, nobody saw this coming!

Damn, I'd mod you up but my mod points got stuck in traffic...

Sounds like the computer did the math just fine, but with a flawed clock.... That's classic GIGO!

Here's what the summary was supposed to read (revisions in bold):

...the Droid is the most sophisticated mobile device to hit the market to date from a hardware standpoint. However, when you combine that with the Verizon network and the Verizon 'so severely crippled as to render every feature worthless and cumbersome to use' software, you've got something that is most definitely a worthless piece of could-have-been-good-but-fucked-over-by-greed-and-lousy-QA SHIT like every other phone they make.

I am so sick of Verizon taking EVERYTHING good and finding ways to make to make it pointlessly crippled and useless.

Will this phone have tethering? Probably, but it's going to be disabled unless you pay $79.99 a month.
Will this phone have contact and calendar syncing? Probably, but it's going to be disabled unless you pay $5.99 a month.
Will this phone have music support? Definitely, but it's going to be severely crippled unless you pay $12.99 a month.

Take your network and SHOVE IT.

Something tells me that the majority of these accounts were probably never really used. They are probably throw-away emails, created to get that "One day free pass" to various porn sites, or as general spam-traps.

I think it ought to be policy that derelict accounts, ESPECIALLY those which have weak passwords, be 'locked' after a period of inactivity. Reactivation could be accomplished with, say, a series of difficult CAPTCHAs so the account is always able to be 'revived' but not hijacked like this.

It just seems irresponsible to have such a lack of control over these kinds of things...

I only clicked on this article to see how far down I'd have to scroll to find this exact reference. Well done, sir. Well done.

This already exists, and it's called Loopt. Support for all major phones/carriers + web browser, links with twitter & facebook. What's the big deal here?

Not to mention, the last time I checked IE was still not open source. So FF has a clear win there.

Or teenage hacker boyz stealin' ur garbage filez. LOL I gotz proof!!!!111!11one!!1!1!

A Process for Obtaining Legal Ownership of Certain Intellectual Property

ABSTRACT
An application is submitted to a government run office which oversees the process of granting and protecting intellectual property rights. Applications contain explanations of methods, design, and applications for said creations, and are often accompanied by diagrams and figures representing the proposed creation for which the applicant ("the Owner") will seek to obtain exclusive rights to create or sell. Once such rights are granted, any facsimile or copy produced by anyone other than the Owner, without express permission of the Owner, will been deemed a forgery and they will be prosecuted pursuant to U.S. intellectual property laws. The following rules shall be applied to any application under consideration:

1. Prior Art will never be acknowledged. It is irrelevant to the money-making scheme.
2. The most obscure, ridiculous patents will be approved first.
3. The process shall never be permitted to be explained, documented, made public, or revised.
4. All complaints and obvious ill effects on society and technology shall be disregarded.
5. No actual usable device must ever be produced so that rights may be granted for things one could never actually reasonably expect to produce in any quantity.
6. Regardless of whether or not the Owner intends to use the granted rights for anything meaningful, or any purpose other than to hinder progress and make money off of the hard work of others, the application shall always be considered valid.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
None. I thought of it first and no one else had ever even conceived of such an invention. Take my word for it, no research necessary. Don't even bother Google'ing it.

DESCRIPTION OF PRIOR ART
Not that this is at all relevant, but see the previous section.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Uselessly over-abused process of rewarding those who deserve it the least and providing consistent unfair advantages to those who will hinder progress where progress is often needed the most.

FOR OFFICE USE ONLY-
Patent Application No. 7,512,440
GRANTED 3/10/2009

***WOOOOOOSHHHH***

Wow, did Chuck Norris just go by, or did you miss a joke?

Is it just me, or is someone with an agenda/grudge not the kind of person we should be putting into a position of power? Last time I checked, the purpose of the government is to serve the will of the people, and I have not heard too much of a public outcry against Google.

Besides, aren't these claims kind of... libelous? It seems, at the very least, extremely inappropriate.

First of all, I paid $12,900 for the car -- there was a $500 fee from the dealer. However, I don't think that paying $13,400 for a car which, at the time had a (minimum) resale value of $16,500, is 'overpaying.' Even counting the $750 shipping fee, and $1,200 registration/title fee, I am still $1,200 under resale value. That's an 8.96% savings. Thanks for playing.

I used to build network telemetry equipment for a company, and the VP was all about "documentation!"

Being cheap as they were (and having a boss who hasn't learned anything new about computers since the 1980s), we recorded everything in MS Word. Using bullet-point styles we would create "checklists" and procedures for everything we worked on which were printed out and kept as hard copies with the product. It was a little bit messy; having such a large number of parts and steps involved resulted in, if I remember correctly, 9 documents (between 1 and 15 pages each) for the product which was my main focus there.

Eventually they bought a cheap camera and photos were added to provide supplemental instruction.

However, no matter how many times I revised and updated and tweaked every stupid detail, the idiots I worked with would find ways to do things completely wrong, get confused, or just make a mess of things.

The problem is that no matter how many instructions you give someone, it's up to them to actually FOLLOW them -- and more often than not, they wont. Anecdotal evidence suggests that people prefer intuition, regardless of their experience level (usually extremely sub-standard).

My next move was to automate as much as I could. Instead of booting form a disk and making the user click through various prompts to copy a drive, I wrote a script to fill in all the blanks for them. Rather than trusting the user to setup a test, I built a plug-n-play rig and scripted the software so all they had to do was answer some simple, stupid questions.

So my advice to you is... TRAIN the people properly (and supervise/inspect everything they do until they get it right -- this is where the reliance upon intuition would come into play: it works if you condition it to work correctly), or automate it so even the typical, lazy, careless, and rather dumb person can figure it out.

Good luck.