If you broke your two year contract, you had to pay an early termination fee, which was usually around $350 for a smartphone. During certain pricing promotions, it was actually cost effective to, for example, sign up for a Galaxy S3 and intentionally break the contract to get the phone for a lower price than the full retail cost.

Now, on T-Mobile, you can either buy your phone outright (which is essentially like paying the termination fee upfront!) and leave anytime you want, or sign a contra..... er, finance agreement and if you break the con..... damn it, I mean... agreement, then the remaining balance becomes immediately due. Since most of the down payments are pretty low on T-Mobile, the remaining balance can be quite large depending on how soon you cancel after signing up and the full price of the phone you'd purchased.

In a nutshell, they've gone from a "fixed" early termination fee to "variable" and put a marketing spin on it. They're also mostly focusing promotions on their "low down payment" aspect of their handset financing, rather than running sales that lower your total effective cost. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

About the only good that came out of T-Mobile's un-carrier strategy is that they forced AT&T to finally lower their prices and spawned AIO (recently re-branded as Cricket). AT&T's network sucks substantially less and for $35/mo for unlimited talk, text and 500MB of high speed (w/ unlimited throttled) data is a good enough value for me.

So, you're telling me someone who can afford to drop $70,000 on a car is going to want to be seen driving it 8 years later? Sure, there's probably a handful of people who scraped together their pennies to buy their Model S, but by and large it's a toy for the rich who will trade in and replace it for a newer model long before the battery is ever a problem. Hey, it works for Apple with their iDevices.

I'm not entirely convinced "economy of scale" even applies much to Lithium Ion batteries. Their cost these days is largely related to mining and processing the materials that go into them. Sure, Tesla will be able to stabilize their supply of batteries and squeeze out profit that would've went to a middleman, but unless they've developed Star Trek-style replicator technology, they're not getting the prices out of the "WTF?!" zone anytime soon.

I really hope for AMD's sake that gamers are looking to snatch these things up, because GPU-based cryptocurrency mining is looking pretty abysmal at the moment. Assuming this card can do about 2MH/s, that's 0.0108 of a Bitcoin each day (by CleverMining's pump-and-dump pool). Of course, you aren't mining Bitcoins, you're mining altcoins that are being dumped onto exchanges where fools buy them with Bitcoins, in the (most likely false) hope that one day they'll be worth more than they paid. As the supply of fools dries up, profitability goes down.

Altcoins only have what little value they currently carry because not everyone who mines them, immediately sells. High end Scrypt ASICs will concentrate the distribution of coins to people who are only interested in cashing out. If a larger proportion of coins are dumped onto exchanges rather than held, well... Supply and demand - you do the math.

Between the new IRS rules and the supposed drama in China, Bitcoin has been on something of a downtrend the last few days. I've personally tried to accept Bitcoin as payment for some electronics I sold online, but by the time the buyer paid, I actually lost about $5. I would've actually come out ahead by accepting PayPal, fees and all.

I've come to the conclusion that cryptocoins are more-or-less a stock market fantasy game being played with real money. This isn't to say the concept of cryptocurrency can't work, but I don't think stability can be achieved if you're relying on a decentralized approach where people are only willing to run the a coin's P2P network when there's something in it for them.

I'm sure Mt. Gox didn't start trading cryptocurrencies with the intention of screwing people out of their of Bitcoins, either. How a company starts and where they end up isn't always about their initial intentions. The Facebook deal was an insane amount of money for a company working on a product that, quite frankly, has been unproven in the marketplace because people simply don't want to wear bulky VR goggles. It's not a stretch to imagine they sold out to Facebook to cash in on something that may have not sold very well (outside of the vocal minority of hardcore gamers who do actually want VR goggles).

It seems every other week some genius thinks he can solve the stolen phone epidemic with a magical "kill switch". These people need to be slapped repeatedly with a clue-by-four, because as long as phones have value as parts or can be resold to fools, they will still be stolen.

But okay, let's imagine for a moment that all cell phones are suddenly equipped with a kill switch that makes them disappear upon being reported stolen. So, you believe desperate criminal types who are mugging people for valuable electronics are simply going to throw their hands up and shout "Curses! Foiled again!"?

This kinda reminds me how Bitcoin fans can go on and on about how secure the blockchain is and how amazingly difficult it would be to game the system. So, of course, the criminals simply resort to good old fashioned scams and schemes to nefariously obtain Bitcoins.

Or, it could just be a pump-and-dump scheme where they get a prototype working just well enough to woo some rich investors and then they take the money and run.
Not that that's never happened before in gaming hardware, no siree!

VR sucks because until it works like this, you still just feel like an idiot with a glorified 3D TV strapped to your face. The future of gaming is likely more of this, not this.

Why is it that something that actually would save electricity, forcing people to upgrade to more efficient lightbulbs, got shot down, but the government still insists on fucking with our clocks twice a year?

You want more daylight at the "end of the day"? You get up earlier. If businesses want to change their operating hours, (like many do each weekend anyway, for somewhat ambiguous religious reasons) nothing is stopping them.

I'm sure DST does wonders to reduce the energy use of mining cryptocoins, though. Oh, no, wait, it doesn't. Mining rigs suck down juice 24/7 and imaginary currency could care less about an imaginary time change. I think the moral here is that if people have a financial incentive to waste electricity (such as light bulbs with a cheaper initial purchase cost), they will - regardless of what the clock says.

So, this is to prevent cheap Chinese knock-off phones from being usable? Well guess-a-what, most of them already include a helpful utility to set the IMEI to whatever you want. All the fix will be is a couple of lines of whatever the Portuguese equivalent of "Engrish" is called, instructing the buyer:

Much enjoy new DroidPhone Galaxy 5!
For luck of happiness, user set IMEI copy basicphone
Please IMEI set application WRITE IMEI
Excellent signal received all times!

The only laughing is being done by the people who are getting a cheap source of replacement parts thanks to Apple's iCloud lock feature. Everything but the logic board (motherboard) is still fully usable.

Ironically, even the locked logic boards still seem to have value on eBay. I can only assume there's some recyclers in China where they're swapping out the flash memory chips with ones from logic boards that were water damaged.

I always imagined it looked more like this.

Except most of these pay-to-win games are specifically designed to require a significant amount of grinding to generate in-game currency (Plants vs Zombies 2, Subway Surfers, as examples) or won't let you progress at all after a certain point, unless you buy power ups (Deer Hunter Reloaded, Candy Crush).

Or, in other words, most of the top "free" games are simply crap designed to extract money from people.

Mainstream acceptance implies the car will actually be affordable to the average car buyer at some point in the future. According to a quick Google search, that's $31,252. The question is, can they really shave enough off the cost of batteries (keep in mind a lithium battery is made from materials that must be mined and processed, it's not really about recouping R&D at this point) and still turn a profit at that price?

Or, maybe if they're implying I can use a cryptocoin generator and convince Elon Musk my OMGPoniesCoins are worth at least three Model S cars. Yeah, that's the kind of "mainstream acceptance" I'm down for.

If you have 70k to drop on a Model S, you'll get a tax rebate back because it's electric and it will save you money over the long run in "fuel" costs. Though, if you have that kind of disposable income, the cost of gas probably isn't stopping you from taking that vacation to Disney World. If you're like me and you cringe every time you stick your credit card into the pump, you probably view the Tesla as just another way that being rich helps the rich stay rich (okay, a game of Monopoly teaches that, too).

In the grand scheme of things, if you care absolutely nothing about being "green" and just want to drop a few grand on something that'll give you a return on your investment, a few computers stuffed with high end ATI video cards mining the crypto currency du jour (probably Dogecoin for the moment) will probably line your pockets way better than the fuel savings of a Tesla Model S. Which leads me to believe people are buying these cars not because of the fuel savings, but because it's a smug status symbol and a decent enough car for its price.