Also, from the email, it seems not to be "We won't support your Playbook because we're mean" but "We cant support it because of licensing issues."

Which makes the blog author look even more like a "I spend money at your store, how dare you not support X" over-reactionary.

That's also the reason that Verizon can afford to have outrageous business practices. A lot of us have the "choice" of Verizon, or no service at home.

They know they are going to be undercut by other carriers in populous areas, so they overcharge the customers that they cannot lose.

Star Wars fans should know better by now when something from that franchise is "restored"

Alltel had about 800,000 customers.
T-Mobil has 33,000,000.
Not really on the same scale there.

The money would be taxed at least once in your scenario: When you take the money out of the bank/cash your paycheck.

Apparently, if everyone kept doing transactions the way they do, there would be more tax income than there is now. I don't think they accounted for the huge reduction that would follow though.

When I heard of this way back when, this kind of tax was supposed to replace most other taxes. That part seems to have been lost somewhere along the way though.

This may be more difficult than you'd imagine.

I doubt we currently have the infrastructure to manufacture the drives, or else some manufacturer would be doing just that and hugely advertising "Hey, we've still got drives!" Considering production of hard drives is only supposed to be down for a year or so, by the time the ones here were ready to go, so would the foreign ones. Domestic can't keep up with cost, and were back to where we started.

You make it sound like Froyo is really out of date. Granted, Gingerbread should be available, but Honycomb is for tablets only, and Ice Cream Sandwich isn't out for anything at all yet. So you're really only one version behind.

My phone only got updated to Gingerbread in September, and when I bought it Gingerbread had already been out for a few months. It takes time for updates to get pushed out, mainly because of how every phone is different, so there is a lot of testing time involved. But it does happen sooner or later. I think the only reason that an update would never happen is planned obsolescence on the carriers part, not the device manufacturer.

You're missing the best one by far

I went last year. It was okay.

No, he's lost interest now.

You can sign in and change you password now if you live in the northeast. Only thing up now is online games.

At a press conference earlier today, they announced passwords were hashed.

I got an email earlier today. It was mostly a verbatim copy of the recent announcement, but actually had details about the applicable laws in my state regarding identity theft and protections, credit freezes, etc. They might not have finished one for your area yet.