A fast way is call on pretense of cancellation. Due to unreliable service and time lost on endless hold, I would like to cancel service.

A quick transfer to customer retention end in accepting to try a replacement modem, a faster tier, and a $10/month discount for 6 months.

I would love this if it was used as part of 2 part authentication. A card and phone must be present to make retail purchases. A stolen card would trigger red flags if it is used without detecting the phone nearby. Online purchases could be validated by SMS Pin. No phone, no Pin reply, red flag to the bank.

Unfortunately it is open for abuse which is the main fear uncertanty and doubt on the system. Did a little FUD stop Linux? It's source code can be seen by hackers and may be abused. LOL FUD all over again.

I've moved to SIP long ago.

SIP to SIP is free.
With a free DID number inbound calls are free unlike Skype in.
Outbound has many vendors and price plans unlike skype.
3rd party hardware is common. Panasonic, Cisco/Linksys, Grandstream, Snom, unlike Skype.
My free SIP account has free voicemail, multi presence, voice to email, conference calls, Skype gateway etc.
An INUM is standard
I have many PC & tablet softphones to choose from. Ekiga, Jitsi, Twinkle, etc. Some support video like Skype.
I can choose codects such as GSM, G711, G722, etc for low BW to high fidelity.
Not locked in to a single vendor.

Skype is the AOL of VOIP

Spoken like someone who missed a lot of what Palm brought to the table at the time, and whose first PDA was an iPhone...

1.) Taking time to input data has always been a part of a pocket reference. If you were carrying around a Day Timer, you were doing data entry by hand to create your schedule. If you were carrying around a pocket Rolodex, you were adding contact names and numbers with a pencil. Palm took about the same amount of time at worst.
2.) Palm facilitated data entry by syncing with Outlook (for those who had existing data) or Hotsync Manager (for those who didn't) and allowing all of that data to be stored and backed up.
3.) It did seemingly trivial things like "sort alphabetically" - it's maddening to open a pocket phone book and be out of room to add a new person where they belong. Similarly, A Palm that was kept for 3-5 years (back then, they were, in fact, kept that long) was pretty close in cost to replacing a DayMinder annually - those things are NOT cheap.
4.) Alarms when things were coming up. A pocket calendar didn't chirp an hour before an event.
5.) Multiple calendar views. Wanted to see your paper calendar at a weekly level? Hope you bought it that way!
6.) Trading contact information by holding down the 'contacts' button and lining up the IR sensors. To this day, I've only seen weak attempts to recreate this - Bump, QR Codes, costly NFC tiles...nothing beat the simplicity of line up. hold one button. done.

Trivial as these things are to us now, the days of doing these tasks on paper saw them as a much bigger leap, because they were problems that went from 'unsolved' to 'solved', rather than 'solved' to 'optimized'. Also, keep in mind that battery life was measured in "weeks".......

I added a transistor in line wirh the voltage reference on a 24 to 12 volt power supply. With a zener diode and resistor that progressively brought the output up with input between 22 and 28V, I made it into a solar charge controller for a 60 cell 240 Watt panel for the motorhome. It worked great and closely matched the panel peak power curve keeping the panel voltage high for any input power. It has been running trouble free for a couple years now.

Not electronics, but related. Converted disposable Freon tanks into high power t shirt cannons for an engineering challenge. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Klxqav_6NM Free tanks counted as part of the bill of materials, where cost was part of the contest. I'm in the blue shirt with the initial prototype at the end of the video.

Salvaged a 0.001Mhz crystal osc to use in an electronics shop. Used it for a reference for adjusting tape decks for speed and wow and flutter. A free crystal audio reference was much better than a reference CD with a short tone track. It was mush more stable than any shop function generator we had at the time. In a pinch it doubled as a stable square wace source to use for TDR with a scope.

A Hall sensor from a broken PC fan coupled with a 9V battery and a couple LEDs made a quick magnet sensor to check relay states in equipment for quick troubleshooting. Coupled with a scope, doubled as a tach for brushless DC motors.There is more I can't think of at the moment.

Cable companies originally offered a larger seclection of channels which wre commercial free. I cut cable when they drove me nuts with time/life commercials and raised the reate from 12.95/mo. Haven't subscribed since. Netflix is eating their lunch for programming.

I guess I get the 3rd competing story for how it most likely happened..

A man poisoned his cronically ill wife and placed more poisoned pills on store shelves to produce the doubt he didn't murder his wife.

Who actually did the poisoning was not proven due to the number of cases.

"As the tampered-with bottles came from different factories, and the seven deaths had all occurred in the Chicago area, the possibility of sabotage during production was ruled out. Instead, the culprit was believed to have acquired bottles of Tylenol from various supermarkets and drug stores over a period of several weeks, added the cyanide to the capsules, then returned to the stores to place the bottles back on the shelves. In addition to the five bottles that led to the victims' deaths, three other tampered-with bottles were discovered."

Source Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Many of that generation have already cut the cable. High price and ads is causing retention issues in this age of internet choices.

Two genuine questions here. First, if a disproportionate reason why a person has cable at all is for HBO, then $15/month is less than what they're paying for HBO + everything else, so it may well be worth it. How many users fit this particular category?

Second, how much of HBO's back catalog is included? The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Dead Like Me are all still highly regarded series that have a good amount of rewatch value. HBO has also produced a wide array of well produced documentaries. Yes, everyone says "zomg Game of Thrones and True Blood!!11" because they're trendy at the moment, but if HBO Go gives on-demand access to virtually every piece of HBO produced content, in 1080[i/p]...that may well be a worthwhile number.

Bonus round: Once all the major draws have been binge watched over the next year, the dropoff rate will likely be noticeable, for the very reason you specify.

And equally as newsworthy.

You missed the key word: RETAIL. Tesla isn't a retail store. Tesla is a vertical market - they sell their own product in their own stores, and their product is relatively unique that they have additional liberties as a result. JC Penney doesn't make their own clothes, they sell other people's clothes for more money than they spent on acquiring them, and those same clothes are also being sold by other retailers. It's a completely different ballgame.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

J.C. Penney tried this. It's become a textbook case study in retail management as to how not to run a retail store. Unfortunately, the "feeling of getting a bargain" is a powerful psychological motivator to purchase; treating customers like rational people is not.

A satellite running Linux is contingent upon a spontaneous reboot to function again? Great, now we'll never hear from that satellite again.

Clearly, the plan should have been to run the device on Windows 98. That way, it would only be out of commission for 49.7 days.

The people who actually believe in the bearded man in that lives in the sky are indeed concerned about living conditions in the third world. That's why they're building wells, providing medical assistance, and working to end child sex trafficking. Admittedly, I don't have a faith based charity off the top of my head that deals with food specifically, though I'm sure that some exist. Point is, the Christians on the receiving end of your condescension certainly exist...but the Christians who are actually working to combat poverty and poor living conditions in the third world are too busy addressing those problems to try and market themselves at a volume that can be heard above the Westboro Baptists.

Two things here. First, your condescension is misplaced. I don't see how believing that life is valuable is somehow an undesirable trait. Don't get me wrong, I understand that it's common for Christians to place more value on a fetus than a death row inmate, but the abstract concept of "life is sacred" does not seem like a terrible stance to have. That being said, let's roll with your idea for a minute, and have an annual "Russian Roulette Day", where everyone has a 1/6 chance of being shot, because resources. Is it not advantageous for society to keep alive a doctor who won the lottery and heals the poor for free? Is that person truly an equal loss to society than a convicted serial killer? Either we run the risk of losing 1/6 of our core human infrastructure, or we start issuing 'exemptions' for world leaders and decorated veterans...and everyone else with money and/or connections to get on that list. As an added bonus, we know that the drug lords and mobsters aren't going to show up for Roulette Day, so a decade of this plan, and chaos starts getting ever closer to actually happening.

Better yet, don't kill anyone, and incentivize population control. Oh, wait, that would offend the people who believe that bearded men live in the sky.

While sure, many of the people who have absurdly large families are also devoutly religious, that doesn't necessarily make it a direct comparison. I'm fully aligned with the concept of removing all government-based fiscal incentives for having more than three children - got a fourth? Great. No tax deduction after the third, and you pay for schooling out of pocket. If you can pay for 'em, you can have 'em, but if someone is going to get offended by the requirement that the money come from somewhere, that's not something that religion alone is responsible for.

Personally, I'm with you on that. Plenty of people disagree with me, but I do believe that people should be able to make their own decision to pull their own plug if they want to - and can reasonably prove that they are competent enough to do so out of their own free will without coercion or duress, then go for it. Now, the problem of course would be truly proving it. If medical bills start piling up to the point where insurance is about to run out, and the person makes the choice to die for the purposes of not passing the cost on to their children...is that 'duress'? Those kinds of situations tend to get messy, but I'm speaking in the abstract here for a reason.

The App Permissions seem to be missing the crucial ability to deny internet access to an app. There are apps where network data connectivity is the problem. Similarly, I wonder if Google will have this permission setting capability on its internal applications. I know that I have a rather tightly worn tin foil hat when it comes to Google and the information they get, but the Xprivacy 'deny' list on my phone is a mile long, and that's with most of their apps frozen or forcibly pulled out, I find that Google's data access on the platform demands a tight leash, leading the 'privacy' and 'permissions' charge to ring of hypocrisy - "we'll make sure that only we have your location" doesn't mean much to me :/