I'm of the opinion that it highlights one of the disadvantages of the dealer model, you often have to go from one dealer to another, haggling and bullshitting, before finally settling on the car you want at a price you feel comfortable with. I'd rather have one place in town that sells what I want, with a clearly marked price, skip the haggling, and do a transaction. Maybe some people enjoy the car buying "experience" but I look at it like any other purchase. I want to do some research ahead of time, walk into the store, buy the product I came for, and leave. It's 2014, it's no longer reasonable to expect consumers to waste an entire weekend trying to buy a car.

If you live in the region that I suspect you do, 911 was down because massive amounts of rain flooded utility easements and fucked up some copper that AT&T is replacing. If you have any modicum of evidence tying an Apple software update to the problem, take it to the media, I'd sure love to see that story.

Skeet skeet!

Powering off the cable/DSL modem and changing the MAC address of whatever's plugged into it (NIC, router, etc.) is often sufficient, and much faster. When the modem powers back on, your "new device" will get a new lease with a new IP.

Fuck the FCC, fuck the FBI, fuck the CIA, I'm living in the motherfuckin' USA.

Maybe someday this total information awareness nonsense will stop.

Would you look at that differently if you were making an NFL player's salary? I'd happily toss my Android phone and my iPod Touch and replace them with whatever shitty Microsoft devices my boss wanted me to use, if he started paying me a million bucks a year.

So, bullshitting about bull shit?

Well they do say that the "Philae lander opened one of its robotic eyes," so the inference of a one-eyed something or other is there, probably on purpose.

Preferably in as few messages with as many envelope recipients as possible. There would be epic fallout from all the Re: Re: REMOVE ME FROM THIS LIST.

So that's your kid playing Minecraft in the Amazon Fire phone commercial! I guess they really did have a target audience after all.

Throw in some TittyCoin and you have a great night ahead of you!

Well it's easy enough for pretentious 9 year olds to use for playing Minecraft, at least that's all I got out of the commercial. Pretty sure the blame for this phone's flop lies squarely at the feet of Amazon's marketing department or whoever they hired to produce the TV ad. The phone itself barely makes an appearance in the commercial, it's just a couple of kids yammering about how they're going to stream stuff and play games, followed by a double plug for Amazon Prime, which I'm still scratching my head over. I don't need to buy a new phone to get Amazon Prime.

Is Amazon trying to sell an actual product here, or just selling the idea of a digital babysitter? Either way I guess I'm not their target audience and I sorta wonder who is.

Regardless, most of us really don't need to stream HD from our homes.

True enough. But a lot of people do like to do that (or have to, for work), they sit around streaming themselves or their gaming sessions on Twitch or LiveStream, or conferencing via Skype and GotoMeeting all day long. Plenty of people have jumped onto the cloud backup bandwagon, and it shouldn't have to take several hours to upload today's differentials to Carbonite or Mozy. And like you mentioned, even digital photos these days can easily hit the 4MB range, so shipping the rugrats' birthday party gallery to grandma can take an hour all by itself.

Whether ISPs like it or not, the upstream is becoming just as important to residential consumers as the downstream. The days of an ack-traffic-only upstream are done.

So the government did not actually ban books and films that were seen as pro-Soviet? Or that just isn't viewed as censorship in Finland?

I, for one, welcome our new pecion overlords. I'd also welcome some better OCR software.