Bring back Scotti. Also, Tori sucked. Grant and Scotti are all you need. Tori is a tool, good for comic relief when you need a doofus to eat a chili pepper, and Kari was just T&A.

Time to scrub the "...best known for his/her work on DC" from WP.

I think two hosts are plenty, BTW. Dilution always hurts a brand when carried too far.

An even bigger issue than buying replacement batteries is replacing batteries in cell phones that are said to have batteries that aren't replaceable.

It shocks me that companies can be so hostile to their customers as to force them to buy new cell phones after the inevitable degradation of the batteries.

Well... not really. It just came across- or so it seemed originally- as a bad hybrid of stock cliche Italian and Chinese accents (which may well be considered racist now, but it's not like *I* was the one doing them! Mind you, we can't blame Jeremiah Cornelius for that either, at least not in intent- his only crime was being very bad at Scottish accents :-) ).

On reflection, though, it's *not* actually that much like Chinese at all- not even the most offensively stereotyped version- and it only looked cod-Italian because of the vowel at the end of "need(a)"- not sure how that's even incorrectly reminiscent of a Scottish accent!

Now that I think about it, I'm not sure *what* the fsck it *does* resemble, to be honest.... oh yeah, a very bad Scots accent. :-)

I'm sure google won't tell anyone about your interests in such things...

I'm sorry that such hell holes persist in 21st century USA, but that has nothing to do with my comment. We have fiber criss-crossing the entire state, including the remotest northern towns. Yes, the money may have originated primarily from the cities, but it's being spent statewide. And we have impoverished areas, But public money can only pull fibers just so far. We can't drag one up every driveway in the state.

If you want to fix your state, start by voting to raise taxes by an order of magnitude across rich and poor alike. If you're always led by selfish people who won't ever raise taxes, nothing will continue to happen.

Anker products.

As you note, the problem with batteries is there's just so much undifferentiable import crap. Lots of it has fancy packaging.

Anker is no doubt trafficking in generics as well, but they do have their own design department (even goods like their Qi chargers that are made out of glass and metal have logos embedded in them and don't look like everyone else's generics) and when I posted a lukewarm review on Amazon ("Seems to work, nothing impressive, but good that it works.") about a phone battery, a rep with native English contacted me immediately and asked if there was anything they could do or offer to improve my experience from lukewarm to stellar.

So that at least is indicative of a company that cares. Note that I don't work for Anker, but since that experience (the phone battery was my first purchase of their products) I've purchased a number of subsequent products and none of them performed more poorly than the original OEM equipment, so that's at least something in this world of mostly fake batteries.

Sure. Sometimes.

How much does it cost to screw your mom? Is it true that she is a cheap whore?

(Note to mods: I am being instructive here.)

You don't have to put up with jerks.

• Internet provider - Sonic.net DSL. No packet filtering, good support, no nonsense.
• Phone - Caterpillar B15 ruggeized Android phone.. Bought from Caterpillar dealer, not carrier. Declined Google account at first power up. Google services disabled. No updates from Google.
• Cellular carrier - T-Mobile. Has no control over phone. No carrier apps.
• Email - IMAP server. SpamAssassin spam blocking.
• Main desktop machine - Ubuntu 12.4 LTS.
• No Google account. No Twitter account. No pay TV. Ad blocking on all browsers.
• Main news source - Reuters. (More news about Ukraine and ISIS, less about Bieber and Apple.)
• Main food store - Trader Joe's. No "club card" required. Good prices.

For almost every crap business, there's a competitor that isn't crap. Find them.

When I got my second iPad a few years ago, I got a Verizon model. That way I had an ATT phone and a Verizon iPad so there was some redundancy. What I did not realize it that the Verizon iPad had no SIM card so that traveling was a hassle. Sure a Verizon product is supposed to provide a higher level of customer experience, as long as you are always in a home region.

I probably will buy an unlocked phone when I upgrade so I can immediately use it to travel instead of having to keep an older unlocked phone around. But for home use, it really makes no difference. Everyone has the same crappy $50 plan. No one is really that helpful. Honestly I find ATT to be a little more helpful than others, and the coverage is good where I am.

I think the reality is that we are all expecting top level personalized service at bare bones rates. It is like those who fly Southwest and complain that there is no food. Or those that recieve a free service such as facebook and then are surprised that people, who are the product, are being monetized.

Having anything placed under my skull in direct contact with my brain sounds a little invasive to me.

Asks an ignorant troll...

Considering it was made with 25 year old footage, it was probably one of the cheapest movies ever made.

The U.S. spends $324 billion dollars a year on entertainment*. tThe cost of the Voyager II program ($865 million dollars*) over 40 years is equal to about 22 millon dollars per year. A drop in the bucket. The Pioneer and Voyager missions have spawned an entire cottage industry of "science-based edutainment shows" on TV like "Through the Wormhole" and "Cosmos". That program has paid for itself many, many times over.

I have no idea. But the Voyager mission has certainly paid for itself many times over.

*CONSUMER EXPENDITURES--2012; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

**Voyager, The Interstallar Mission; NASA

Get your own training. If I have to train you to do your job properly, I damn well don't want you.

If I wanted to run a training program, I'd open my own version of DeVry University or University of Phoenix. I am in business to do what my business does, and as we are not a vocational education institution, get your freaking vocational education somewhere else.

Not only is it that the guys making big bucks making decisions are horribly undereducated: they won't pay for security because that would cut into THEIR compensation (to have to pay competent engineering staff). So not only are they undereducated, they have a conflict of interest that promotes horrible engineering practices.

What you say is partially true.

Companies are not interested in making over someone who isn't a good employee into one. It's the same reason you don't buy burnt out light bulbs, and remanufacture them into working light bulbs yourself, when there are perfectly good light bulbs sitting on the next shelf.

The idea that companies should provide vocational training to potential employees because the educational system has failed to provide them with the ability to be an asset to a potential employer is wrong headed. It is not the responsibility of the employer to make a person employable, it is the responsibility of the person to make themselves employable.

IF we were talking about blue collar manufacturing jobs, or sales/cashier/hamburger jobs, then yeah, apprenticeships and on the job training make sense; in technical areas, it doesn't make sense, any more than it would ti hire someone at a hospital, and on-the-job train them until they were a doctor.