Fair enough. I suppose the punchline is my Samsung device is unblocked. Back to the comment above where someone said (paraphrasing) caveat emptor.

I remember hearing about this a while back though, and I believe it all actually started before the budget crisis.

That said, I live in Texas, and am pretty incensed that my state is trying to do the same thing a few other states have to companies that do business on the internet. The end result is they've cost quite a few jobs, meaning they've actually eliminated some tax revenue (no state income tax, but jobless people buy fewer things, so less sales tax). Also, that when I buy something from Amazon it's likely it will take a little bit longer to get to me (not a big deal, just me whining a little).

I think your friends left out the fairly high property taxes in most parts of the state... it's sort of how they make up for no income tax. Then there's the state lottery which pays something like 80% into a general funds pool.... ugh. Plus my ex police officer wife agrees most fines (speeding etc... minor stuff) are for revenue rather than punishment, but that's probably true in most if not all states.

Its 106 miles to Chicago, weâ(TM)ve got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarretes, someone elses zip code, itâ(TM)s dark and weâ(TM)re wearing shades. Hit It!

Or XDA. They're how I'm running Froyo on my AT&T Captivate now.

Argh, I just ran out of mod points to give your post a +1.

Not to mention illegal in many places. Juvenile law is a pretty different animal, which is why you often see news reports about teenagers with no name or picture associated.

That's no big deal. The engineering team at Energy Transfer ran a server rack off of a cheapo power strip... someone stepping on it brought the rack down and a 300 person office lost comm for about 15 minutes.

That's well said. I was going to add that the term social engineering has been used for decades, and is still one of the most prevalent ways that "hackers" get in.

I used to argue with directors/CIOs over the use of the term software engineer vs. developer, programmer, systems analyst. Over time I've given up on the definitions, and just push the title that earns more :)

Now, the etymology of the word hacker is a topic all by itself....

Pandora moved to an hour cap per month right around the time I was at the Blackberry developer conference and met one of the Slacker devs. I checked it out and loved it.

Since then I've tried other services but continue to use Slacker. They seem to get what people want.. .free service with commercials or paid service.

The only downside is I can't find Trailer Park Troubadours or Sisters Morales (two bands I played with) on Slacker while I could on Pandora... but in due time I'm sure.

You've just learned a valuable lesson. Democrat or Republican, they're *Politicians*. They will tell you what they think you want to hear in order to get elected.

JAKE 671 at 5:25 AM February 07, 2011

AOL absorbs AH, forming AHOL. PERFECT!

If this is real, it was really social engineering.

Whether or not the results were tainted by google or by SEO folks, they were tainted. Google having done it means to me they can change results any time they want in any fashion they want.

Not that I believe their company should be democratic by any means, but the next time I consider buying adwords I'll be thinking twice.

In fact it is different. The article makes it seem as Microsoft is actively screen scraping results from google.com and pushing the results into their own indexes.

Instead, they are grabbing (purposefully or otherwise) results from users who opted-in to try to make their results better. If any of the other search engines had poisoned their results they could be making the same accusation.

Sadly, Google seems to have admitted that it's possible to poison their own results which is something they've been denying for some time now.

Either way, I still get better results from google than bing, albeit lately with a flood of useless/repeated blog bosts to weed through a bit.

I use Bing when I want a smaller more concise resultset, and Google when I want a boatload of results.

I actually do use other engines as well, but not as often as the big 2.

If your friends haven't heard of Bing it's because they don't watch TV. Microsoft has spend a vomit inducing amount of money in advertising on network TV.