Trust me it is hell! First, try to cancel using the options or settings in your Xbox, you can search for it but you won't find it. You must go to a PC to even find an online option to cancel but if you try to use the webpage it will gray out your option to cancel, or will give you an error that basically says "it didn't work" with no explanation or link. There is no way to cancel online go ahead and try, I guarantee it won't work. Then you go to support page and it won't give you a phone number, first it tells you to follow all these steps that don't work. Then when that doesn't work it suggest alternate steps that don't work. Still it won't give you a phone number, then it might show you an option to contact a representative with one of those enter you e-mail and phone number and your problem and "well get back to you" things (if you can correctly click through the maze of support links and don't forget to be logged in because you can't get to this without being logged in). And guess what, cancelling or even account management isn't an option for you to enter as your reason for contacting them. Then when they respond you, some time up to two hours later, it is an automated phone call that puts you on hold then redirects you to finally a real person, who asks you a ton questions and keeps hassling you to keep the service with offers of free games and things. They also survey the fuck out of you about why you are cancelling and won't stop even if you say you just want to cancel and not continue. THen, remember all the information you entered online? Ofcourse the person that called you doesn't have it. Remember, they called you with the online form you had to be logged in to use, and still ask for your phone number and other information to confirm that the account is yours. Just search on google for unable to cancel xbox live and you can find a ton threads and complaints.

I will never buy xbox live again because it was so impossible to cancel the last time.

Suggesting that the act of talking to someone through a phone is causing the distraction would be grounds to outlaw Bluetooth or hands-free systems in the car as well. Why are phones singled out as impairing? Is it because it takes a hand off the wheel? If so, I guess we should stop allowing people to drive manual transmissions, change their radio while moving, and ban anyone with 1 arm from driving.

Cell phones have never seemed more distracting to me than changing the radio or taking a sip from a cup. I will admit when you see someone drive erratically or make a mistake, then look and see them on their phone, you realllly want to blame the phone. Fact is though blaming the phone might as well be the same as blaming them for being Asian or a women. A lot of people only drive automatics with 1 hand anyways. Manuals take a hand off the wheel and on acceleration and deceleration, arguably the most important times to be prepared. Maybe we should start banning manual transmissions? I have a friend with only 1 arm that has a valid drivers license. He talks on his Bluetooth while driving and drives perfectly fine. If talking on a cell phone is so impairing, surely the use of only 1 arm is impairing him too much to give him a drivers license because he must drive as bad as someone with a hand to their ear.

The summary gets it exactly right when it says something like 8 lawnmowers doesn't equal a Ferrari engine. The trouble is it is so difficult to find an actual benchmark for processors that measures speed and reliability. The average person does not get into the details and looks at something like higher hertz is better or more cores is better. All else being equal, this is true. I would confidently say that 50% of the population would buy "8 Core" machine that uses Pentium 1 processors over a single core Pentium 4. Consumers shoot themselves in the foot when they don't do their research before buying a computer. There are so many "features" on current processors that are completely incomparable that buying the best processor becomes a crap shoot unless you want to spend hours searching for real benchmarks.

I think the only result that you can derive from that is that people like try marijuana around ages 16 to 19..

Your making it seem like games and menus are difficult to navigate. 95% of the time they only need arrows (dpad) and a mouse (thumbstick), with a few other buttons. Sure it's hard to play World of Warcraft on a controller, but I doubt big picture makes a game that gives the user 50 spells any easier to use them all. I won't be using big-picture and I play tons of steam games, it's over-hyped marketing for "games from your PC on your TV" which is already very easy to use, counter to what you have said. No one does it because it is simply impractical to hook your TV in your living room up to your PC in your office or bedroom.

It's good marketing, but the thing is that anyone could already connect their computer to their TV and there are already ways to make a controller act like a keyboard. The youtube video for Big Picture received way too much attention for what amounts to a patch to allow controllers to be used without a third party app. Props to Valve for slightly improving their product and some how getting news websites everywhere to recognize this as revolutionary.

Religion is often just a beautiful idea that is pleasant to think about. Maybe it's pleasant because it brings certainty or because it gives someone a goal or purpose. This is great and a conversation about spirituality could definetly be brought up in school but not as a truth. The purpose of school is to learn from history and those before us. Our own experiences build on eachother just as society builds on previous societies. Why is "religion" exempt? Religion doesn't need to deny what people see with their eyes and feel with touch. That moves beyond religion or faith and into lunacy.

A password should not be given as that allows the information to be modified, falsified, and comprises security of passwords on other accounts (bank accounts even). The information on facebook should still be provided, by entering the password and monitoring a evidence collector, to allow the accused party to prove their innocence. If the accuser of sexual harassment said to a friend (or on facebook in this case) "I wasn't harrassed I am making it up" that is evidence that can be included in court as proof of innocence to the other party. However, if the accuser says to a friend (or facebook in this case) "I was harrassed" that evidence will not be admissable as proof of guilt to the other party.

I can't count the number of times that I've thought of a great idea and it turns out it exists already and is patented. The point of the patent system is to prevent copying but in a world of 7 billion people, 300 million in the united states, many ideas are going to overlap and occur independently. Each and every one of us has had great ideas and then looked it up only to find that it already exists; this is proof that the patent system is broken. In order for something to be patented it needs to be truelly original. It is criminal to allow the patent office to issue patents only based on the fact they assume other people are to stupid to think it or haven't filed paperwork to patent it because it is so obvious. Sure the average person might be, but I bet there are literally hundreds of thousands of coders would replicate the same algorithm if they worked on the same problem. So how can they patent something so rediculously easy to create for so many people? Because they assume everyone is average when they approve these patents. The patent office needs to take into account that a patent must be original to experts in the field, not just an average person, which doesn't appear to be the case. If we can make the patent process legitimate in the first place we would not have to worry about these battles over a few lines of code or patenting a 5 cent additional part and claiming it's an original idea. The patent offices need to take into account the value. How valuable is that algorithm? E.G. how much would you ahve to pay an expert before he thinks of it? For something like this, maybe $500, or a week or less worth of work/coding by one person. Could you replicate that process with any other expert? If so, then don't grant that patent. Is it really so valuable of an idea that every person in the US should be banned from implementing it? They should be ashamed to give patents for something so easily replicated and should think much harder about what it means to invent something. Inventing isn't being the first or only one to submit a piece of paper with specific words. Inventing is finding something that not one in the other 300 million people (or 7 billion) could think. If it doesn't pass that test, don't give it a patent!

Remove Texas and bring in Puerta Rico so we don't have to change the flags.

In most cases those tax breaks require a certain level of employement and if they don't have enough employees then they will lose them.

This is exactly what I was thinking! I guess now we need to get our data FDIC insured also?

Google's foundation is their search, but it isn't a search company it is an advertising company. They give away search functionality to the general public but what they SELL are ads. You are not a customer of Google because you use their search. The customers of Google are all of the corporations and small business that want to advertise. And Google dominates that market, even more severly than you think. Sure they have 66% or whatever number of the search market but they have a much higher percentage of the online advertising market. Their ad service is spread out throughout millions and maybe billions of websites with trillions of page views. If someone wants to make a profit selling advertising, they have absolutely no way to compete with the prices google offers unless they already are a giant. Google will sell 1 billion views of an advertisement for your company so cheaply it is impossible to even find a competitor. Lets say your website gets 1 million views a day, well the advertising money you will make is practically NOTHING, thanks to google's cheap prices. I'm not saying Google is a monopoly legally speaking but I don't think we should just look at their search feature to make the determination.