Windstream has told me on multiple occasions by multiple reps that 60% is their acceptable minimum. Funny thing is when I moved out here everything was great, but they haven't oversold, there's just "More people using more internet than they used to".

Completely different. An ISP is by definition a service that cannot simply be bought and used without ongoing maintenance or "service". It's also a shared resource, so in order to have a priority over my neighbor (faster speeds) I should pay more than my neighbor.

Adobe CC is only solving a perceived (won't debate about legitimacy) piracy issue by punishing the very customers who were paying for it. This is like all these single player games that I can't play when my ridiculously unreliably ISP (who I have successfully made refund money for failing to deliver service), doesn't work for a day or two at a time. They do this because they're afraid of missing out on some money, but they take it out on the ones who are paying while the ones who don't still play for free.

Car manufacturers charging a service for onstar makes sense. Charging a service for an MP3 player makes about as much sense as AT&T selling you the AT&T Navigator on an Android phone with the absolutely 100% required "android phones can't work without data, even just as a phone" data plan.

But you forgot about the chrome "Limited" logo. That's another $8.95 at Wal-Mart. You get one for the back and both sides and now you're only $11,773.15 ahead of paying for the upgrade in the first place. And the way kids are learning math these days. . . . .

Um, what makes a language efficient and understandable for white males? I would buy your argument if it said "English speakers" - because absolutely most languages are designed for English speakers using English keywords, etc. But there are plenty of women and minorities that speak English natively, and I would argue that since these tests are all based in the US, most (not all) of the test takers (minorities and women included) probably spoke English as their native language.

So tell me exactly how we're supposed to use a different style for different demographics, and how is that not discrimination? Are you suggesting women are capable of procedural programming, but not object oriented programming? In that case, they're not allowed to work on the same projects. We'd have the object oriented server, written by white men, the procedural client, written by women, and then the functional data services, written by minorities?

This would seem to imply we should also require a different text book written in some kind of stereotypical dialect for the non-white-male in school.

This really comes down to opportunity and desire. Desire is an internal factor, and if they don't want to do it don't force them, as long as they are getting the opportunity (and yes, I realize when it comes to school there are all kinds of socioeconomic issues at play).

Is there a law against using the bus stops? (I don't live there, I truly don't know.)

I get that we're saying they're for public buses, but how are they "specifically" for public buses any more than the roads are only for public transport? Just because no other buses have used it before? It seems to me a bus stop is simply a short term stopping point for drop offs and pick ups that happens to be large enough for buses and sometimes have benches or shelters for people. Private traffic impacts the performance of all kinds of city services. It can slow down fire trucks, ambulances (not always city services, where I live they are privately owned and operated). Some cities deal with these by putting in emergency lanes that actually do have laws that enforce nobody else using them, but unless that law exists for the bus stop I don't see a problem here. Either add more bus stops or enlarge existing ones due to usage patterns, or pass a law (if it's not already passed) stating that the stops are only for publicly operated city buses and then fine accordingly.

I have several one time passwords printed on a protected paper that is stored in a place that is private, yet still something me or my family (in the case of my demise) would be guaranteed to come across when going through my estate (think safe deposit box). It says nothing about what it is, but I have a few key people that know about this paper and what it is. It's not going to be easy to access without my knowledge, and if I awake from a coma I would find it pretty quick (though granted I may not know what it is, that's what my friends are useful for), unless I was like BK and didn't even know where I lived or was from anymore. I hope someone would claim me, but in that situation nothing I could do would help and probably be of little concern anyway.

Another option would be to randomly mail yourself clues, since you never know when this may happen to you. Like a letter with an extra stamp which will get your attention due to the envelope having excess postage. In that stamp under a microscope there are subtle picture alterations with clues. Then it's just a game of connecting the dots!

But the flat tax with a prebate (essentially a variation of fairtax.org) *IS* progressive. With the plan OP proposes, everyone gets $1000/month. Enough to live (depending on area), but not enough for most to not want to do better. You're getting $1,000/month or $12,000/year. At the hypothetical 25% you would have to have an income of $48,000 before your NET tax rate was even 0%. 25% becomes the upper limit of the very wealthy. A $250,000 income pays $62,500 in taxes - $12,000 prebate = $50,500 OR 20%. A person earning $75 pays $18,750 - $12,000 prebate = $6,750 or 9%. Below $48,000 you're essentially getting tax credits / welfare / scholarship / whatever you want to consider it as. It's yours to just stay out of the way and/or invest in yourself.

I know there are problems with this approach too, but it seems like a fairly good approach to me, and it completely eliminates the holes that people constantly encounter now. For instance, I know people that have deliberately sought pay cuts because their last promotion put them over the income limit and they lost financial aid for children / medical / etc. Now, despite bettering themselves and being more productive, they have taken a net loss in income that they cannot sustain. I would also rather unemployment / welfare / etc not punish people for finding work. A prior neighbor did everything in her power to avoid getting hired. Her unemployment required her to look for work, but her unemployment paid better than any jobs in the area during the recession, and was more dependable (most jobs were part time / seasonal around that time as we'd just had a big manufacturing plant shut down and flood the market with workers). As a tax payer, I'd rather her take a job at BK and keep *half* her unemployment, and we'd both win. She'd take less of my tax money AND she'd have more money at the end of the day.

This also prevents the situation of it not being worth it to work. Yes, you already have a minimal lifestyle provided for nothing, and I know people that literally want or need nothing more. But even a minimum wage, part time job that plays, for fun math, $12,000/year, still gives you a $9,000 year gain over not having done anything (in the above scenario). So they now have $21,000/year. Yes, they are taking tax money, but if that's what we do as a society to provide for those that will never and can never do better than wiping tables at McDonalds so they have enough to hopefully not feel the need to mug us in a dark ally, I think everyone could walk away a winner. Automation will destroy the jobs at the bottom, and even if we provide education not everyone can do better, no matter what your second grade teacher said. We can't all be astronauts.

Then who brought the snakes back in? I'm tired of these mother f'in snakes in my mother f'in universe!

Games are the only thing keeping me from moving. And (as pointed out earlier), NetFlix, but that's less of a problem. Everything else on my linux install is fine. I have used OpenOffice and now Libre nearly exclusively since 2003 (I say nearly because work still requires Office and file formats still don't perfectly interchange, but there's nothing I need out of Office or any other windows apps that aren't available to me in Linux, with the exception of high end gaming support).

You're right, the cards are all the same. They're just a piece of plastic with a magnetic strip that has a bunch of software flags. Considering that the software is the entire way any of this works, yes, changing some flags makes it different.

Only because we would have given the benefit of the doubt to the cop. There would have been an "internal investigation" and he would have been free after his 2 week vacation. . . I mean "administrative leave". Zimmerman stood the trial by jury and was found not guilty. Whether you think he was innocent or not doesn't matter. A jury that saw way more facts than any of us armchair lawyers found him not guilty.

There are more questions in the mind of he public than there would have been with the average copy, but there WERE more questions in court than there would have been with the average cop as well, which was OP's point.

I really don't think technology is causing us to reproduce at such absurd levels. In fact, refusal to use technology, such as numerous forms of birth control, is likely a bigger cause of reproducing at such levels. Now if you're factoring in lowered mortality rates due to technology, that's valid. In the past, people had 10 kids because there was no readily available birth control, kids and large families were necessary to work farms, and mortality rates were higher. Heck, diarrhea used to be a serious life risk.

Now, there are so many ways to avoid pregnancy (yes, I understand they occasionally fail), the kids (mostly) aren't working the family farm, and nearly all of them survive to adulthood. But we still have people that want to have 18 kids so they can get a reality show. I am all for funding any type of birth control a person wants to use. I'd rather my taxes pay for your IUD or surgery (if you want it, not shooting for forced sterilization here), than the kid that you didn't want.

Ok, bad day for me. . . . that's pretty obvious now that you point it out. . .

Shouldn't a warrant be required to even get the drives to attempt to decrypt them? Even TFS says he hasn't even been charged with a crime yet, so how do they even HAVE the drives? IANAL, but sounds like a pretty easy case for dismissal of evidence.

The Nexus 7 and Nexus 4 have almost the same resolution despite the screen size difference. The 4 has a higher density. The Nexus 4 also offers 2GB RAM vs 1GB for the Nexus 7, and 4 also includes wireless charging, a Barometer, and Ambient light sensor that are not included on the Nexus 7. 4 has also a Snapdraqon quad core 1.5Ghz processor, compared to the 7's Tegra 3 quad core 1.2 Ghz processor (I am not sure of direct benchmark comparison between these two chips). So, there are other differences, and the Nexus 4 is only $300 for 8Gb / $350 for 16Gb. Though with that said, the Nexus 7 is seen on sale periodically as low as $140 (refurbished).