If they're really truly free speech people? Probably most of them. Long as you aren't doing it in a public space, not because of the bible, but more because of the defecation.

In any event, disregarding the difference between drawing a picture of something and taking a *dump* on it, there's an event huger difference between saying "taking a dump on something I hold dear is massively disrespectful and I will be angry if you hold a rally and encourage people to do it", and "taking a dump on something I hold dear is literally grounds for me to go up to you and shoot you to death". One is reasonable, the other is... not so much.

Good for her. Why should she? Maybe it made sense when women were expected to stay at home, but these days, just getting married doesn't in any way remove any part of a woman's identity any more than it does a man's, so why should one lose their last name and not the other? (When we got married, we were totally going to hyphenize, until we actually looked into how much effort it'd be, and decided to just both keep our original names, at least until/unless we ever have kids. Note: I'm male.)

Because engineers, sysadmins and tech support drones are generally still doing the job they were hired to do initially. Maybe they've been given additional responsibility they didn't deserve, but it's still the same *type* of job. Management is the weird one out, because it's so common for a company to say, "you are an excellent engineer/sysadmin/tech support person/etc., so we are going to 'promote' you to a job you are totally unqualified for, have no desire to do, and that isn't why we hired you." That doesn't generally happen with other jobs.

I'm very happy that I've so far managed to avoid that fate (by very clearly and consistently announcing to basically everyone just how much I like engineering-type work, and how much I would not like to be given a job where my primary responsibilities were not actually directly creating things.) It has come up several times. I really don't understand the sadly-common feeling that programming is for peons, that if what you want to do with your life is program, you are somehow limiting yourself, and that people who want to program should instead want to tell *other* people what to do and fight office politics fights. Both are essential, but they are not even remotely the same type of job.

I feel like most companies that would pull that to begin with, would go more like this:
Management: "train your replacement, or you do not get any severance."
Entire IT staff: "you try to pull that bullshit, and we all walk out"
Management: "fine then, you're all fired, we'll just hire your replacements and not train them, we don't give a crap."

My complex has never signed for packages; there wouldn't even have ever been that ability, nobody would be there to sign for it. If a package can be dropped off without signature, they'll just leave it in the lobby sometimes (occasionally they don't feel like it, which is annoying).

However, given that I have a job and am thus not there during the week during the day, if I know a package will require a signature, I have it *sent* to my work. My work receives packages all the time, so it doesn't mind occasionally signing for an employee's package and having that employee drop by the mailroom at the end of the day to pick it up. You could see if yours does that too.

"...as it attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces my butt..."

Well, that about sums it up, IBM-wise.

That would be "grinds" (or "ground"), not "grounds".

I saw your post title, and was super confused. Normally when someone says "Link to the Onion", it looks more like, say, this.

That'd be nice - even if I have no desire to ever touch Comcast with a 100 foot pole (unless it had a dagger on the end and I could touch them... forcefully), just having them in the same city would force whoever was already there to stop sucking so much themselves. Sadly, there are usually laws specifically designed to protect whichever ISP is already entrenched, because competition hurts whoever already has a local monopoly, and money can do almost anything. Amazingly, not this time, but still, this was an outlier.

You know the content will still be uploaded to thepiratebay literally within seconds of release (or sometimes before... thanks, anonymous GoT leaker!), right? And everyone who wants to pirate it will just do that still? So this is only going to hurt, or at least vaguely annoy, people who weren't going to pirate it anyway?

Now I'm imagining "competitive Comcast customer support calling", where teams compete to see who can get Comcast to actually fix their problem fastest.

I would totally watch that over football.

From Consumerist, where I got this news a couple hours ago: "Comcast wonâ(TM)t want to sit idle; theyâ(TM)ve got $45 billion burning a hole in their pocket and will want to spend it on something."

Gee, maybe if they would take that 45 billion dollars and invest it in not totally freaking sucking at everything, the public wouldn't hate them so much and want to block their attempts to get any bigger than they already are? Maybe invest in internal infrastructure and better processes so that they don't keep getting egg on their face for yet another boneheaded thing they did every other month?

That said, it is pretty impressive that the US government is actually doing their job for once, of protecting us against corporations with giant moneybags wanting to come in and screw us over for their profits, instead of just taking the bribe^Hdonation and rolling over like normal. Good job! (Until next time.)

MSIs are indeed pretty great, in my admittedly small experience of one machine. My current laptop is an MSI - I was a little hesitant at the time to get a machine from a moderately unknown company, and one with, I've heard, pretty crap support, but the price and specs were fantastic at the time, I figured it couldn't *possibly* be worse than the HP I was replacing.

4 1/2 years later, this is the longest I've gone on a single laptop yet, since I got my first one... dang, almost 20 years ago. Haven't had to call support even once, and this is a machine I use daily. (I did have to replace the keyboard a few months ago, but it was a 10 buck ebay purchase and an easy self-swap. The plastic around the bottom of the screen is also cracking, but all the mechanical and electronic parts seem to still be working perfectly.) I would absolutely buy another MSI when my current machine eventually did die (other than, I'd be sad, that I would be forced to buy a stupid 16:9 screen no matter where I looked...)

MSIs are pretty cool... still sad Fujitsu pretty much completely got out of the "desktop replacement" market. My first couple laptops were Fujitsus, and that was a quality brand. Now they mostly just make ultrabooks and stuff.

Heh. It just now occurred to me just precisely how appropriate Harry Dresden's name is, given the frequency with which he, intentionally or unintentionally, burns down buildings.

Just use Ting.

Ting was also a Sprint-only MVNO, until a few months ago, when they started supporting T-Mobile as well. They do allow you to do use any device that is capable of connecting to either of those providers, and their plan is, while not quite the same as Google's, the most similar of any existing provider.