There is no such thing as a pay TV monopoly. You can watch GoT as it airs on Dish or DirecTV. Just saying...the fact that one company owns the cable franchise in a given town is not the reason that prices for pay tv are exorbitant.

You allude to satellite in your post (Ie. the 2 year contract bit) but I just don't see what your point is.

I heard a stat that cable companies pay $6 per month for ESPN/ESPN2. That's just two channels. Most channels are not that expensive, but if you have 100 channels....it is not hard to see how you're going to get a lot of that money going to content providers.

Other note I would make is that it is not exactly new to have "dry" cable internet. There are millions out there with cable internet and no TV -- and the cable companies do it willingly; I don't think they would do it if it really caused significant price pressure on the TV side of the house.

Indeed -- for the lay man not briefed into this kind of world, the distinction between an NGO and an NPO is highly irrelevant. I think the addition of the .ngo TLD is a solution looking for a problem.

If you have insurance, no reason not to get a doc's advice. That said, I have been using the workrave app for about 5 years now and I think it has saved me from significant deterioration. It has both 'nix and Windows implementations. Basically reminds you to take a micro break every 5 minutes and a coffee break every ten. I manage to keep working during these breaks. Usually it is a phone call or a convo with the boss or a colleague. And you can always count on a meeting as a good opportunity for a break.

Best piece of nagware out there IMHO.

If it is me - and this guy sounds just like me - he needs to take that time and do anything but be on a computer. Take 5 minutes for longer breaks to grab a coffee or make a phone call you have been putting off. Or if you need a short break, sort out your desk or stare out the window for 30 seconds.

Your wrists will thank you - if you are an information worker, you are at risk of being seriously debilitated in mere years if you don't take steps now.

Yeah, MVNOs are really the best way to get away from such corporate policies.

The list that is linked to does not include Stanford...but that is where Swartz started college. The suggestion that he did not have access to an elite education is rediculous under the circumstances. So not only is the premise of the idea that people as alums of certain schools would not be prosecuted for pulling every journal off JSTOR and putting it out on the web laughable but the particulars not really compelling. Stanford is a pretty good school.

So you're saying you agree that it is a surface-level write-up. Okay. Thanks!

In other words, this article is crap. It's not even an article -- it's a write-up. You see a multi-page write-up and expect some actual information and facts; instead, you get nothing but what could only honestly be called whining:

From TFA

Okay, so the development contractors were chosen based on low price. That is one fact.

Okay, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian coders were used. That is another fact.

But beyond that...no other facts. The article alludes to "bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills." But what bad code?

It alludes to "project managers in Finland, [taking] measures to repair the errors and poor quality."

Examples of errors? No where to be found.

My wife and I have lived for years in a apartment in the middle of the city. It's not high-rises block after block -- but it's dense enough to have some of the most frequent bus service in the region outside of downtown proper and everything is walking distance. (Light-rail exists here, but for whatever reason does not flow through the core of the city. Makes no damn sense since the entire neighborhood was built in the 1910s as a Streetcar suburb, but whatever. On-street light rail would probably conflict with parking, which is all the business interests that run the show in this neighborhood here care about.)

Where we live now, we walk to any restaurant we want and have a $10 cab ride to downtown to catch baseball game or whatever else. There is a small market walking distance and the grocery store is a 10 minute bike ride through a very comfortable grid-patterned streets with 25 MPH speed limits. It is basically paradise for the carless.

Unfortunately in the United States, people do not know how to live in apartments in a civilized manner. Growing up, I assumed I'd be living in dense developments forever -- never was a fan of long drives and I've had an environmental streak. I enjoy being able to walk to grab a latte and running into people randomly in the streets, etc. But to do that, I have to deal with noisy neighbors constantly. The place where I live is not cheap -- the people that I live with are mature adults who are wholly normal people. But they have no respect for the impact of what they do on people that live 5 feet above/below their head. My upstairs neighbor loves having friends over to play Xbox connect on their wood floors with shoes on. They also love to run laundry at 11 at night.

Neighbors downstairs a few nights ago started BBQ with friends with the pit 10 feet below my bedroom window. This -- in a town going through a heat wave where no one has A/C. So I'm having to close the window and keep the house at 80 degrees because he wants to BBQ.

None of these things are anti-social behaviors. These are thoroughly normal people and if I asked them to cut off the BBQ'ing and the X-Box Connect because I want some peace and quiet, they would probably do it -- but it's awkward to walk down and ask. People in the US just don't know how to live dense.

So...we are now ditching the apartment life in this great neighborhood a 10 minute walk to anything to move to the other side of the city where buying a single family home is affordable. We can walk to exactly 0 restauraunts, our only option for a stroll for coffee is 7-11 brewed black coffee a half-mile away, and the closest grocery store 2 miles away. The bus theoretically runs through the neighborhood, but we'd be looking at four connections to get me to work. However, I will have some peace and quiet.

We are just back from short trip through Europe -- staying in a hotel for half the trip and with a friend in another. The guy we stayed with lived in one of the major "brand name" cities in a 10-story apartment building that your average 20-something with a job lives in. I swear -- we didn't hear a peep from others that lived there unless we were on the elevator with them. Later, we were on the train running through Germany and everyone whispered to each other, even on phone calls. Some cultures know to be polite with the understanding that someone is always within earshot -- we just don't have that sensitivity in the US yet.

High gas prices will probably fix that.

MOD UP -- lots of people defend T-Mobile/MetroPCS merger by citing ATT/Alltel, but this key qualifying detail isn't easily found. Thanks!

How do you know this? Please cite sources on how the "tower equipment T-Mobile is using and deploying is capable of running all four with either a software update or very little hardware changes." I am not doubting your assertion; in fact, I logged on here looking to see someone make exactly this assertion because I assumed that most cellular technology was very similar from the hardware dimension. Can you expand a little and point us to a link on this?

I was wondering the same thing all yesterday when this popped up on the wire. In fact, I had a similar concern back a few years ago on the ATT-T-Mobile linkup. After all, although ATT and T-Mobile both use GSM, they use different frequencies to do so. T-Mobile phones will work on an ATT network and vice-versa for regular calls, texts, and slow data -- but not at 3G speeds. (For the record, that is now changing: T-Mobile is now doing some 3G on the 1900MHz band that is compatible with most phones, namely the iPhone. It used to do 3G on 1700MHz, which only phones sold by T-Mobile are configured to use. But that was not happening at the time. See this article).

Moving on: PC Mag reported on a presentation the two companies released indicating that the MetroPCS CDMA network will be largely turned-off and dismantled with all customers transitioned by 2015. The brief seems to claim that customers replace MetroPCS devices so quickly as it is, there won't be a difficult public relations situation:

From what I have read about MetroPCS, most of its customers use cheap feature phones. The idea then is that they'll tire or break their cheap phones and T-Metro will be able to take advantage of that trend to shift them over to equally cheap GSM phones to run on the legacy T-Mobile network. There are certainly a share of customers that use more expensive phones that they expected when they purchased them to be more durable and last longer than 2015 -- I would suggest that that number is small given the focus of MetroPCS on those that want what is now considered to be bare minimum for cell phone service. (talk/text/30MB BREW/WAP web).

All of this said, I will note that when AT&T/Cingular acquired Alltel, Alltel also used CDMA. I don't know how AT&T was able to make that acquisition work, but they did manage to do so -- T-Metro looks to be pursuing this transaction with a page out of that playbook.

Why can't I mod "ironic"?

The great thing about Straight Talk is that is uses the AT&T network. Because most unlocked phones are built to use AT&T frequencies for 3G, you'll generally get faster data speeds than T-Mobile -- if your phone is built to use the AT&T frequencies. This would generally be an argument against using Simple Mobile.

It's $45 a month for unlimited everything.