Not really. It's because, by offering a 0% loan, they are subsidizing the phone sale with revenue from the service agreement. If you decide you want to back out of your service agreement with them, they allow that but they don't want to continue to subsidize the phone. It is of course a bit of lock-in, but so much less so than others that this should be a non-issue. To be honest, this case just shows that Americans have been so badly treated by their phone companies for so long that they no longer understand common sense when it comes to the difference between purchasing a phone and purchasing a phone service.

Fortunately for me, here in third-world Indonesia there are no service plans, and we can all buy as many phones and SIM cards as we want. Result -- people in cities have two, sometimes three phones, and use them a lot very cheaply. People are generally very satisfied with their phone company. Phone companies keep upgrading their infrastructure, and are quite profitable. I don't know what's wrong over there...

You're very vehement for someone so incorrect. Use of a road is so different from asking for help from the fire department that I don't see what could possibly make you think they're similar. Okay, they're both public services, I get that. After that, nada.

The way to get the most efficient system is to have supply meet demand, and that cannot be at a price point of zero forever. Having to pay some amount for a service encourages or forces people to make choices, including whether they should work from home that day in the short term. Longer term it might influence their choices in place of employment or residence. That allows the taxpayer you seem so concerned about to maximize the public benefit of the whole system. Mass rapid transit is paid for by the taxpayer, so presumably that should be free also? Let me guess, you only drive so that's not relevant.

There is also a finite amount of land to be built upon, a finite amount of public money to use to build roads and so on. In general the people who plan urban transportation are not idiots. They know the costs to the economy, and their political bosses hear the complaints of the public and businesses. They don't set out to underbuild a road system just to piss you off. They try to maximize the effectiveness of the whole system given their constraints due to availability of money, land issues, political realities and so on. It seems that you understand that the number of drivers is not infinite, but you think that everything else is, or should be. That is irrational.

Sure, sounds good to me. If we're thinking big, make mine the flying car I've been waiting for ;-)

Well, sure, three is right out -- only a religious nut would pick three. Now if you had said 3.2 or something...

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/805/did-a-state-legislature-once-pass-a-law-saying-pi-equals-3

I think you are misinterpreting the summary. I suspect the author was editorializing a bit and meant to talk about "vile infections." God knows they can knock you around, even with a good placebo.

As I understand it, and nothing I've read makes this perfectly clear, this shutdown is part of gearing up to move from shooting protons around to shooting much heavier shit around, lead nuclei. The bangs when they hit get much bigger. Bigger bangs have to be better, so this is a good thing.

My bank, HSBC in Indonesia (but I suspect their web framework is the same around the world) requires a user ID, a password (must be characters and numbers IIRC) and a one-time key from a dongle. I'm generally happy with it. But... the user ID is case sensitive and the password *isn't*. I just know this because in the early days I was assigned an upper case user ID and I never changed it, and I sometimes forget to hit the caps lock key to unset it before entering the password. I just hope they convert the password to a consistent case then hash it for comparison to a hashed password in the DB

Mod parent up please. Lots of these apps have been around for a while, and some of them are open source and usable. The government integration would be useful, but really the key is just getting everyone using the same thing. Random Hacks of Kindness has spent some time on this field also.

Yeah, what you said. In fact my computer here in Indonesia says this was posted at 07:40 am on Friday. So is the meetup on Thursday or Friday? It would be nice if people, you know, thought.