I for one would be happy to have a system that could detect the bozos who call into meetings, never say a word, and don't mute their phone. I can do without the loud breathers, dogs barking, kids yelling, typing, static, etc. I don't feel like I should be the mute-police, and the people running the meetings (at least at my company) rarely say anything. A little common courtesy would solve the problem, but an automated system is probably a much more realistic solution.

And if this particular crime isn't listed in the patent, then consider this prior art that I am contributing to the public domain in hopes of serving the greater good.

Somehow people think different about digital THINGS that you buy.

The difference between a physical THING and a digital THING is that it is easier to make a copy of a digital THING than to lend out a single instance of it. In effect, there is no single instance of a digital THING. If your friend wants to "borrow" a book from you, you actually give them a copy. You'd have to go to the extra step of deleting your own copy to approximate actual lending. This is why publishers want DRM, but DRM is a very poor way to mimic the lending properties of a physical object.

Evaluating teachers is extremely hard to do.

As an example, I'm very happy with my 4th grade daughter's teacher this year, yet at least three kids have been pulled out of her class by their parents. I'm choosing not to believe that this is because she is black in an area that is excessively white (I'm white for sake of disclosure). Rather, I think it has much more to do with the personality of the teacher, which is very compatible my daughter's personality. My daughter hasn't been compatible with all of her teachers, and we had to move her to a different class in the past. She had a very bad experience with that particular teacher.

So is one of these teachers better or worse than the other? From the perspective of my daughter's education, emphatically yes. But ask a different parent and you might get exactly the opposite answer as to which teacher was better. In both cases, these two teachers could be either the worst or the best in the school depending on the mix of kids they get. And since we're talking about humans (both the teachers and the kids), personality is an important and very difficult to measure aspect of performance.

So while I think it would be wonderful if there was a better way to evaluate teachers, it might be an untenable proposition. Kind of like reforming the tax code in the US.

Why would you not specify an OS that did the job, but had far fewer (or no) viruses already out in the wild?

While I generally agree with this sentiment, the flip side is the uproar when the project hits cost overruns that are blamed on the Military's insistence that a less-prevalent OS be used for which there are fewer developers (not saying such blame would be accurate, but when has that ever mattered?). There is no end of stories about $600 toilet seats or hammers or whatnot, with little or no understanding of the requirements that might have legitimately led to high costs for military equipment. The first instinct is to call it all wasteful spending (which is true in some or even many cases, but not all).

Being loyal is admirable, but it can easily go too far. I felt the same way as you do now, all the way up until I was laid off. While looking for a new job, I've found that I was being paid at the low end of the scale, and even though I was the only "expert" in the areas I was working on, I was let go simply because I was not working out of the main offices (or out of India).

You need to seriously consider how much loyalty your company has to you. You don't work for your colleagues or even your direct manager, you work for the company. If the loyalty isn't nearly equivalent in both directions, then you need to bring it into balance on your end, which most likely means scaling back your own sense of loyalty.

As others have said, that the non-touch Kindle doesn't have a touch-based keyboard is a tad on the obvious side.

As for the 3G browser, this discussion is the first time I've heard it was available at all. When I got my Kindle, Amazon made it very clear and obvious that the browser was only supported over WiFi. It made sense to me that the free 3G connection was contingent upon the fact that very little bandwidth is used downloading books and checking the Kindle bookstore periodically. It just doesn't make sense that the 3G providers would allow a very low one-time fee for effectively unlimited data usage. If Amazon did open up 3G browsing, then I suspect they only did it because no one uses it. That might be different with the Kindle Touch, I suppose.

My first thought on reading the summary: they're splitting off the DVD service so that streaming users no longer see just how much content they don't have access to. I just switched to DVD-only, but with the prior DVD+streaming plan, I was constantly irritated that the vast majority of content I searched for was only on DVD.

On the flip side, now that I have the DVD-only plan, I won't have to see that I could be watching that movie right now if I had streaming. That means there is no enticement for me to consider getting streaming again. Good for me, bad for Netflix/Qwikster. Another aspect of the "didn't think it through very well" supposition.

I'm glad they made this change. Now musicians will finally have a worthwhile incentive to create good music knowing they can reap the rewards for 70 years. Everyone knows there's been nothing worth listening to in the last 50 years since all the musicians have been holding back their best works for a longer copyright period. This is how copyright is intended to work, right?

That's my plan, although looking at the Netflix website, I don't see a way to sign up for just DVDs. It appears that you need to sign up for streaming, then you can add 1 DVD at a time for $7.99. Guess I have to call and ask, but they're not making it easy. I'd actually like to go to 2 DVDs at a time and drop the poor-selection streaming.

Seems like they're trying to get current customers to bankroll future deals with the content providers to increase the selection. Since there are no contracts, I'll let someone else pay and then jump back in when the selection is better than "sucky".

Don't forget about the manufacturer of the servers, network gear, cabling, racks, etc that CNET uses. And the contractor that built the building the equipment is in. And the local restaurants that provide sustenance to the people that keep the servers running. And the local governments that profited (via taxes) from the ill gotten gains CNET took in as a result of the blatant infringement. And the parents of the children who receive public education payed for by those taxes. And the ...

I've been getting hit by the ATT "$2 button" (TM) most billing periods. This Verizon settlement should make it easier to get them to refund all those back charges. What's really annoying is that to be able to use the *free* unlimited MMS messaging service I have (I have a teenager, ugh), I have to have a data plan. So I have the pay-as-you go plan, which exposes me to the cost of the inadvertent data fees (and no, it doesn't all come from the teenager, her mother and I get hit with it as, if not more, often).

I know someone who had cable internet, phone and TV. They canceled the phone line (the cable co's voip was awful at the time), and somehow the internet charges were canceled as well, even though the internet connection continued to work. That went on for something like 18 months, during which service went out several times and technicians had to be called. That was one case where the unexplainable chasm between the service and billing departments was an advantage.

It all eventually came to an end when a phone service person noticed it and reinstated the billing. I think they didn't want to deal with the hassle of paperwork, so there was never any mention of payment for the previous service.

Not that I would ever want to defend a cable co, but just to show that there's at least one case where a mistake was significantly in the favor of the customer.

The question is, would the company have said anything if the mistake was in *their* favor (they had over read the meter), or would they stay silent and only deal with it if the customer complained?

No. Over the course of time, I've had to "upgrade" my leased laptop at work. The progression of the equivalent laptops has gone from 1600x1200 (1.92M pixels) to 1680x1050 (1.764M pixels) to 1600x900 (1.44M pixels). Sure, you can spend more and get 1920x1440. Oops, even that has dropped to 1920x1080 in newer laptops.

There are monitors with high resolutions (1920x1200) now that are remarkably cheap compared to even just a few years ago, so we should thank the TV industry for driving volumes, but I'm still going to complain about having a display designed for watching movies on my laptop where I don't watch movies. I have a 55" HDTV for that.

If the only place code was ever looked at was in an editor with adjustable TAB sizing, you just might have an argument. But it isn't, and you don't.