It's the complete reverse in the rest of America, too. Everyone else is pushing for online payment and electronic billing because it saves on paper and postage costs.

Verizon is the first company I've seen try to pull an asshat move like this. I think why Verizon is trying it now involves a couple things. For one, large telecoms like Verizon and AT&T have for years felt entitled to licenses to print money hand over fist, and whenever revenue drops due to market changes or technological development, their biggest priority is to find somewhere else to recoup that lost revenue. My guess here is that Verizon noticed that a majority of their customers were already paying their bills online, so they decided to start charging a fee to do it, knowing that their customer base already appreciates the convenience of online bill payment and inertia would prevent them from paying by mail. Other service providers, public utilities for example, likely have much older, entrenched, and less 'tech-savvy' customers so they need to provide incentives to move towards online billing and its associated cost savings.

Doesn't make much business sense, but at least the community can actually benefit from HP's blunders this time.

I wasn't looking for pity, I was just trying to provide a dose of perspective. Supporting or taking part of the OWS protests does not automatically make you a whining leftist, nor even significantly increase the probability that you ARE a whining leftist. There are plenty of productive, hard-working people that are pissed off too.

Sorry, that was a typo. It should read "6 months of them"

I relocated when I received a job offer, which happened to be only a few hours away. My job search was nationwide, and relocation was pretty much inevitable as I attended a rural and remote campus.
And I used the term "DC Metro area" which would imply, yes, I did mean "Arlington, etc." The DC-MD-VA Metropolitan Statistical Area has an unemployment rate of 6.1, well below the national average.

My whole point was the fact that the economy is totally different, I'm not interested in pity. I'm thankful to have a job that affords me a comfortable standard of living. But that doesn't diminish the fact that over the last 5 years, wages have shrunk while inflation has barely slowed. Look back further, and real wages have been dropping for decades.

It's not about "protesting Wall Street." Protesting on Wall Street is a symbolic gesture, but the anger is directed at politicians more concerned about campaign donations and lobbyist bribes from the financial sector than the interest of the American middle class. The wolves were able to eat the sheep because the shepherd was more interested in the stripper that the wolves hired than watching his flock.

For the entire population. But even for those with college degrees, the unemployment rate for those 18-35 (i.e. recent graduates) is in excess of 20%

I recently graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, easily one of the most "Useful and Marketable" undergraduate degrees you can have. I am also a veteran who spent 2 years serving his country, 6 of them getting shot at in Kandahar. I have relocated to the DC-Metro area, one of the areas of lowest unemployment in the country. I BARELY found a job, and at a significantly lower salary than what my peers were being offered in 2007. My tuition costs more than doubled while I was in school. All the while, we've been dumping trillions of dollars to cover the asses of bankers and insurers underwriting ridiculous risks in order to make a quick buck.

But sure, OWS is a bunch of whining leftist hippies. Seriously dude, get fucked.

I really resent this pervasive attitude that anyone who complains about being saddled with student loans is some kind of jobless hippie with a philosophy degree and a total lack of judgement.

I studied Electrical Engineering at an in-state public university. For 3.5 years of my student career I was on a "full" ROTC scholarship. I worked full-time every summer, and spent the last several semesters of school working 25 hours a week. When I wasn't able to complete the ROTC program and commission as an officer, I was called up for 2 years in my enlisted grade, 6 months of which I spent getting shot at in Kandahar, and upon my return to school to finish my degree, I had 80% eligibility for the GI Bill. I shouldn't have any student loans, right? Except I managed to rack up about $45k in student debt after all the interest capitalization.

How, you ask? Well for one, the "full" ROTC scholarship only covers tuition and fees, but not room and board. Which was actually more than half of the cost of college for the 3 years or so. I was required to be part of a full-time, on campus senior military college, and thus on-campus room and board was not an optional cost. I got jack-diddly squat from my parents, since my father had managed to bury himself under ill-advised consumer debt. I also got nothing in Federal aid beyond minimal, unsubsidized stafford loans since my father, despite being debt-poor, had a high income on paper. Tuition and fees alone, during my time as a student increased from about $2200/semester as a freshman in 2003 to about $4000/semester in Spring 2011. And let's not forget the costs of books, software, computers, equipment for labs, etc.

Thankfully, I was able to relatively quickly find a decent paying job, which in this economic climate is difficult even with a BS in Electrical Engineering. However, my finances still feel the drag of tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. This is money I could be spending, that my home state could be collecting sales tax on.

But I guess it's a waste of tax payer dollars to make higher education affordable. After all, anyone with $50k in student loan debt is obviously a lazy, liberal hippie wasting their time pursuing a worthless degree and will never contribute anything to economic growth.

Huh? Is malaria infection a big problem with European cattle? Is there some other disease ravaging European cattle herds that could easily be prevented with a vaccine that isn't used?

I don't quite understand what point you are trying to get across. Could you clarify?

I am mostly cutting and pasting from a reply to a post I made earlier in this thread, but signal strength is only one of many factors they care to measure. In addition the numerous variables that affect any NLOS radio system, LTE adds MIMO techniques, which means you also have to care about the spatial correlation in your multi-antenna set up and how it varies with other conditions and your location. Also, MIMO relies on some rather sophisticated digital signal processing, and the implementation of this processing is left up to the individual device manufacturer and thus its performance will vary among not just RF conditions, but among different devices. Throw in the fact that LTE has no in-built capability for voice calls, and now you have a slew of devices that have to fall back to the CDMA2000 network to make or receive a phone call.

Looking at the setup as described in the article, I really doubt it's terribly interested in signal strength at all. All you need for that is a single radio on a single antenna, paired with a GPS receiver. But in these setups, they're collecting data through several different consumer handsets and devices, so I think they are more interested in evaluating their performance and behavior under less-than-ideal RF conditions. They're interested in how the devices perform handovers, fall backs, how their MIMO implementations handle various real-world conditions, and generally how nicely they devices play with their network.

First of all, signal strength is only one of many factors they care to measure. In addition the numerous variables that affect any NLOS radio system, LTE adds MIMO techniques, which means you also have to care about the spatial correlation in your multi-antenna set up and how it varies with other conditions and your location. Also, MIMO relies on some rather sophisticated digital signal processing, and the implementation of this processing is left up to the individual device manufacturer and thus its performance will vary among not just RF conditions, but among different devices. Throw in the fact that LTE has no in-built capability for voice calls, and now you have a slew of devices that have to fall back to the CDMA2000 network to make or receive a phone call.

Looking at the setup as described in the article, I really doubt it's terribly interested in signal strength at all. They're collecting data through several different consumer handsets and devices, so I think they are more interested in evaluating their performance and behavior under less-than-ideal RF conditions. They're interested in how the devices perform handovers, fall backs, how their MIMO implementations handle various real-world conditions, and generally how nicely they devices play with their network.

You only see a few that wear religion on their sleeves? Romney and Ron Paul may not do it, but pretty much every other candidate does. Perry, Gingrich, Bachmann, Palin, and Cain are all theocratic lunatics. Hell, Romney's biggest challenger to date, Perry, stared his campaign with a fucking prayer rally.

Because letting the states determine person-hood worked out so well in the past.

Nah, if he sucks at it, sports could turn him away from athletic activity for a lifetime.

Much better to just get the kid a dirtbike. Nothing like a few wheelies to prevent intellectual burnout.

CDMA is a multiplexing/multiple access technique. GSM is a standard (and a rather old one at that). UMTS/HSPA, though they use SIM cards and were developed by the same standards body as, and somewhat backwards compatible with, GSM, they are not GSM. GSM is a 2G standard like cdmaOne. UMTS is a 3G standard like CDMA2000 (the actual standard that Sprint and Verizon use).

Good thing someone actually recognized the technical merit of CDMA though, because UMTS/HSPA ditched the TDMA scheme used in GSM for a CDMA-based scheme.

They may stop pushing WiMax, but the article makes no mention of repurposing the 2500Mhz band that spring/clearwire use for WiMax. The only thing I've seen about anything being turned off is their legacy iDEN equipment, the spectrum for which they will use for LTE rollouts. I haven't seen any indication that Sprint plans to turn off their 2500Mhz WiMax, or deploy LTE on that spectrum.