Well basically, and of course when you have to explain something like this it loses its bite...Verizon is what all the guys want, and knows it, so it gets away with acting as bitchy as it wants to. I only repeat the saying because it seems to aptly describe Verizon, not because I'm personally a fan of gender-stereotype humor.

FYI even a Verizon customer service representative told me that on the Pacific coast, AT&T coverage is better.

The proposed AT&T+T-Mobile merger made sense, because they both use GSM over similar wavelengths. But how would Sprint and T-Mobile combine their network services? Their voice data at least is on completely different infrastructure.

Now I know that Sprint and T-Mobile don't have the best wireless coverage, but you're going to have to try a little harder to justify the claim they have the worst customer service. I was under the impression it was just a universally accepted fact that Verizon's customer service is the worst in the industry despite their otherwise excellent network service. As I've heard someone say, Verizon is the hottest girl at the prom, and worse, she knows it.

Your MP3 argument doesn't stand. It's been proven that a well-encoded 128kbps MP3 is indistinguishable to the human ear from lossless content. Of course not all 128kbps MP3s are well-encoded, and in fact most of them probably aren't.

But I'm not trying to disprove your argument. I'm simply highlighting the fact that the only people that make such arguments tend to pepper the argument with falsehoods, like your MP3 comment. And the point isn't that the comment is false so much as it is that many well-educated people will point out that it is so, unintentionally weakening the larger argument that there is a better quality available.

Unfortunately the "hight quality" side of the argument tends towards audiophilia, and it's easy to dismiss true HD when it's associated with gold-plated Monster cables.

I'm not normally one to defend DRM, but in what way is the Blu-ray DRM "awful"? As far as I can tell it doesn't require an internet connection. Is CSS also awful? Because as far as I can tell the only difference is that AACS is more effective. The only way I can make sense of the statement is if you mean to say that all DRM is awful, and you're just being redundant.

My post was definitely not the best I've done on Slashdot, and much of it came from not really knowing much about Europe. My ideas are vague and intentionally intensified to provoke some kind of meeting in the middle. Thank you shitzu for actually knowing something.

I think though that my original point may have some merit thinking about how everyone in Europe uses GSM. Didn't American cell carriers have fragmented technologies because the technology still wasn't mature yet? Maybe it goes back to the 80s and not the 90s, but generally the first adopters don't have the kind of standards to work off of that formed the basis of Europe's cell networks.

Fleecing the customer is more dominant in the US because the US networks are shitty. Somebody said T-Mobile essentially has a 1990s network in the 2010s. Well, there are no 1990s networks outside of the US. Everything was built up later, after the tech was more mature. It's the same reason internet speeds are slower in the US than in Europe, and the same reason they still cost more regardless. The infrastructure is old, the pricing structure is old, and the customers have to pay for that somehow so they might as well get shiny new technology at the same time to make up for it.

Either that or the EU is socialist and regulates its industries better.

Running obsolete systems isn't quite on par with typical security through obscurity. It's not a matter of guessing the right URL to access elevated permissions. It's a matter of procuring 50-year old technology, which by the way nobody outside of the US ever actually got good at producing. How exactly would you go about hacking into a system not connected to any networks and controlled by 8" floppy disks? Especially since, in addition to the obscurity, there are armed guards everywhere?

It's also important to note that newer is not always better. Newer is most often more complex, and in computer security, complexity is the enemy. Add to that the much higher engineering standards of software more than 30 years old, and I'd say it isn't really just obscurity that makes an obsolete system more secure.

If like me you want to know what the "procedural mistakes" were, and not read what is almost certainly someone's unnecessary diatribe about why the end result is wrong (hint: it's wrong, so, so wrong, and we all know why), let me help you find them. Use the last link in the summary, copied here:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140416/06454126931/lavabit-loses-its-appeal-mucking-up-basic-procedural-issues-early.shtml

Summary: The case is about whether Lavabit should have been held in contempt, which hinges upon whether the court had the right to demand what it was demanding. However, Levison did not make any legal argument against the demand at the time. Therefore, it was justifiably held in contempt. The issue of whether the court had the right to demand private keys is important, but the issue needed to be raised sooner and with more force. Now it's irrelevant to further proceedings.

I am not a lawyer and I have not actually finished reading the article yet.

I suppose you'd rather we read about it on Conservapedia. Well I tried to read about a few things there once. After only a couple hours of reading I had long passed the "don't trust Wikipedia, this is what *really* happened" stuff and had wandered strangely into a "nerds suck, jocks rule, god hates fags" shithole. Which is what happens when a web site based on countering perceived "bias" operates for years without any of the kind of (admittedly draconian at times) quality controls Wikipedia has in place.

That's not true. A placebo is absolutely mildly effective at treating a wide variety of diseases. It will even work if you don't believe homeopathy is any better than a placebo!

You say that governments print money and control the money because government wants more of it. In America, my friend, the government is the people. In the words of the great Republican Abraham Lincoln, "government of the people, by the people, for the people". Our government is not an entity of its own, clawing away for every advantage. Our government is a body of leaders representing all people living within our nation: a Republic.

Therefore when one thinks of the ways that our government takes away our wealth, takes away our freedoms, takes away our dignity, we must not think of it as a great leviathan, secure in itself by virtue of its ability to lay waste to the lesser people. It is not some abstract deity that takes from us. It is ourselves. It is the political circus we have all become part of. And whether or not all the elephants recognize them, every circus has ringleaders.

Who benefits from all this taking? Who benefits from the government printing money while still taxing it from the people who earned it? Who really holds the power that is being sucked into Congress? You're right about one thing: it's not us. But I guarantee you that if the government itself reaped the benefits, we would not have a deficit in the trillions.

*sigh* no mod points today. I may disagree with the basis of roman_mir's assertions, but I don't think the post should be voted down. It's not nasty; the closest thing to vitriol is calling the book a "piece of shit" (which reads more like a thesis statement than an ad hominem). I know that a lot of fucking crazy Republicans (or more likely trolls masquerading as such) have been posting some pretty steamy piles of shit around here lately, but this post definitely is not one of them.