I have Verizon (I have had T-mobile and various rebranded AT&Ts over the years as well) and have found the Big Red to be the best overall for a few reasons:

- Coverage
- Data sharing
- Cost

I think my wife and I pay about $150 for our two lines which include unlimited voice and text with 4GB of data shared between us and our chosen devices.

AT&T was less money (about $130/month) however we had 450 anytime minutes/1000 night/weekend with rollover and no SMS plan. Being that my wife is using around 1000 SMSs a month, the cost savings from that alone is worth it.

Now, Verizon's 3G is noticeably slower than AT&T and while that doesn't matter much in the metro area where our primary residence is located as there is LTE, at our lake home (which has LTE about 500 feet outside of the cabin) we are stuck w/pokey 3G service that is comparable to the 1300/700 DSL service we get there.

For me I dropped more calls in dead zones with both T-mobile and AT&T than I have noticed w/VZW but the single biggest advantage Verizon has over any other carriers is coverage. I should NEVER, EVER, EVER have No Service show up along major interstates yet with both T-mobile and AT&T I did. I have never been w/o VZW service in the last year I've had it.

To me the $150/month is well worth it. YMMV.

Back in late 2009 and early 2010 I was scraping jail inmate registry records for Scott and Dakota County, MN. This was simply a script which incremented the ID numbers by one several times a day and put them out into a CSV. I uploaded these to Google Docs and had Docs Widgets build simple charts based on those data for a rolling ~6 month window of inmates.

As I started looking deeper into the data I started noticing I had ages lower than 18. Odd I thought but sure enough, Scott County was including their juvenile records in the data mixed with the adults even though it wasn't shown on their public website.

I contacted the County and they fixed the bug (you can read about that here: http://www.lazylightning.org/scott-county-quickly-fixes-juvenile-jail-roster-issue) but I was still surprised at the relative lack of security for juvenile records:

Within mere minutes of my e-mail they were on the phone with me and informed me they closed the hole. After mentioning that the only way someone may have been able to retrieve a juvenile record is if they âoeguessedâ the booking number, I replied that the booking numbers are sequential and thus âoeguessingâ is as simple as incrementing by 1. After our short discussion they asked me to let them know immediately if I noticed anything else with their data and the call was ended.

It's surprising how lax security is anywhere and to the poster elsewhere in this thread that said this is what you get when you outsource to India, this particular web stuff was not performed with outsourced talent so that comment was nothing short of asinine.

Their poor policy and the public's perception of that company. The more people hear about PayPal's poor internal decision making the better off everyone is about avoiding their biggest vulnerabilities.

Woooooosh

As someone who has Amazon Prime (I got it for like $39 as a grad student and it's still good until this summer) and uses a Roku, I can tell you that I would definitely not be paying for a "KindleTV" + Prime if they dropped my Roku.

Why? Because their library sucks, the interface is fucking terrible, and the way they don't group show seasons together into one show is just wrong.

Amazon doesn't need to work on a Roku replacement, they need to work on a Prime Video replacement and pronto.

If they could now re-design a furniture store where customers would buy furniture which would be then delivered to their homes already assembled would be a huge step forward. Oh wait...

School districts do this to when levies don't pass. They immediately cut athletic programs and bus service.

My bad, I meant to include the source: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/budget_bib_fy2011.pdf

Behavior Detection Officers (BDOs): An increase of $20M and 350 BDOs (210 FTE) is
requested to further enhance TSAâ(TM)s Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques
program. The FY 2011 request includes a total of 3,350 officers, to enhance coverage at
lanes and shifts at high risk Category X and I airports, and expand coverage to smaller
airports.

[...]

Transitioned validated multi-cultural indicators of hostile intent, and demonstrated a
mobile device that enables TSA Behavioral Detection Officers to record observations,
automatically calculate behavior-based scoring, and share information among peers
and with supervisors in near-real time. This potentially saves TSA an estimated 60 -
120 FTEs.

I did my masters thesis on this subject and the TSA is doing the same thing the Israelis are. In fact, they spend a lot more than you would think on doing it. The problem seems to be that because people A) don't recognize this effort, B) because it's just as expensive as the machines, and C) it's just as ineffective because it ignores the fact that terrorists could walk into the building strapped with explosives in front of the screening area and kill hundreds+ of people.

So I was bored and decided to watch a few of the pilots. As someone who loved Netflix's House of Cards, I was excited to see what Amazon had in store for us of similar caliber. Well, suffice to say that spreading their dollars across numerous pilots instead of one single show gets you what you expect: utter trash.

Those Who Can't, a story about three teachers (gym, history, and Spanish) was utterly terrible. They hated a jock in the school who was constantly annoying them and being the stereotypical douchebag. The script was jerky, the acting was bad, and the entire premise was overdone. Not impressive in the least, in fact in many instances it was downright painful.

Alpha House starts out great with Bill Murray getting arrested and John Goodman watching as he freaks out but it goes downhill from there mostly because Murray is not on the show after that first 45 second cameo. The vulgarity (something I don't mind in the least and use regularly myself) is there for vulgarity's sake, not because it makes sense in the dialogue. The show itself is slow, boring, and pointless. It's like Amazon was trying to make fun of House of Cards on SNL but failing as SNL tends to do so well.

While I haven't watched all the pilots yet, I really don't think I have much desire to do so. I am still waiting for more House of Cards and certainly more Arrested Development on Netflix but this Amazon shit is just bad. They need to get their shit together and up their game if they think they're going to compete with Netflix's first-run flagship.

I am a SAS developer and have never run into any such problems but I won't say I don't believe you. However, the benefit of that large licensing fee is the easy access to SAS help resources (real live people living over there in Cary, NC) who get back to you VERY QUICKLY for ANY level of technical question you have.

Their employees, at least the hundred or so I've met over the years when presenting at SAS Global Forum, have been INCREDIBLY friendly and helpful.

Because it's blank; as in, I don't have cable TV nor will I ever have it again because streaming is what I prefer. Once HBO stops just putting feelers out to the public so the cable companies can realize the hold HBO has over them and they could move their catalog to streaming only, maybe I'd have a clue what Game of Thrones is even about.

HBO: streaming++; current business model--

So buy an old one. I have both an old and a new Roku (the new one was $50 on sale around Christmas and we plan to use it at our vacation home).

I mean, do you really expect them to support devices which few people use anymore? I didn't have a HDTV until a few months ago but most people haven't had a need for component input for a VERY long time.

Are companies really supposed to support dying technologies just to make a handful of geeks happy? The device is tiny and cheap as it is, continuing to hold out on these old technologies drops the ability to have support for other things people want.

Move along, nothing to see here.

I guess it depends on the DRM that comes on your e-books. In the case of the courses I took over the last 3.25 years for my masters program, it was generally as simple as printing the chapters to PDF from the reader application.

Yeah, it put my e-mail address on every page but they were then searchable PDFs and easily transferable. Being that the books were 'free' as part of my program, it was a no brainer to choose that route over regular books (my preferred method). It was doubly important being that I worked for the University and my entire tuition, up until the time I left just over a year ago, was covered as part of my employment.

YMMV.

Listen, I understand that Google's services are free and they are a business and need to do what they feel is necessary to make money; however, I am not sure why some of these went away.

Let's take for instance the fact that Google has killed off their RSS discovery plugin. I was a die hard Google Reader person and made the move to Feedly when Google Reader was killed. Killing Google Reader may have made sense to them; after all, they were supporting traffic and crawling feeds, and doing all those things that take money, time, engineering resources, and bandwidth. No worries there. But killing off the RSS plugin? I just can't fathom how that matters.

Leave the damn tool out there for people to use. It really doesn't harm anyone if it's something that works and can continue to work client side.

But I digress. Yes, Feedly (or any of the tools that will ultimately replace Reader) could make their own but killing it off in some misguided attempt at pushing users to use G+ (what I assume is their reasoning for it all) is just going to drive people farther away from Google's tools.

No, G+ (or any social network for that matter) does not operate in the same way Reader (or any RSS reader) did. I don't give a fuck what other people find interesting for the most part; I want to be able to pick and choose and provide that content back out to people on those networks, not the other way around.

Make your money in the way you see fit but I hope they're not surprised when there is a backlash against those changes. Oh and open source the damn RSS app and even Reader so people can continue on w/o Google's backing. That would fit the "do no evil" mantra.