Dealextreme is like BG Micro. Sure, they buy stuff to stock and sell, but much of what they sell is some crap that someone else couldn't sell, which they got for a song. Just because DX got a bunch of tablets nobody wanted to buy in a store for $20/piece doesn't mean someone will sell you new, supported ones for that.

I have the same experience with a Nexus 7 2013, but only since upgrading to kitkat.

That's not at all interesting or relevant. They build offices where their employees can't afford to live, which is why we're even talking about them at all in this discussion.

Or, you know, they could build offices in cities with free capacity.

And yet, I am not amazed that in your world, straw man arguments are considered valid. I must not be new here.

Unfortunately, the very same thing happens in proprietary software. And "isn't supposed to happen" is a misunderstanding. It's just supposed to happen less, and it's supposed to get fixed easier. The latter, at least, has been proven out.

Given how simple USB wiring is, that's trivial to fix. Get a nice buck converter for a few bucks on eBay, and wire in a USB power injection cable.

That's what I put in my truck. You can't listen to optical media in it unless you have a heavy load, because the suspension is too hard. So I have a $20 amplifier with stereo in and four outputs.

Yes, if I had perfect foresight instead of excellent hindsight, I'd have kept my 1960 Dodge. It got over 20 mpg on the freeway and it was stupid simple. But I didn't know how to rebuild a brake system then (dirt simple, as it turns out) and so I couldn't afford to keep it.

It's more reliable. Bluetooth Audio is miserably finicky. The only thing that ever worked right with my JVC was AT&T Fuze. With a couple different Android devices now including the Nexus 4 I get occasional skips. I used to use an Xperia Play, that skipped a lot. Flawless using the headphone cable in my truck instead.

I'm going to try adding bluetooth to my car anyway, switching into the line inputs from the changer with an audio signal relay, and using an ultra-cheap receiver. but i'm also going to have line in, just in case.

So lobbying can have good outcomes.

It is difficult to separate the feelings that someone bought a result you don't like from an objective analysis of whether what you wanted them to do was rejected after an analysis of the issues. In this case, a "tell me how much I owe" version of federal taxes -- I seem to recall that there was such a system in place many years ago (1970's?) where the taxpayer would send in a form saying "tell me what you want" and the IRS did. I don't hear much about that anymore, so I suspect that it died, and why it died may give a clue to why it wasn't a good idea to bring it back. I don't know.

Why not? If you grant that there are sometimes good outcomes from lobbying, just how do you write this new law prohibiting buggy whip makers while still allowing the useful lobbying?

What SHOULD be the rule is that decisions are made based on merit, and anyone who wants to lobby should have the right to make that speech.

The people who this simplified "let the government figure it out and send back what they think I deserve" plan wouldn't apply to the vast majority of people who use accountants or probably even most of those who use TurboTax. They're using an accountant because they want every penny back that they deserve. Yes, I said deserve -- the legal amount.

There are already several free tax filing systems. TaxACT Online, H&R Block, The IRS, and even TurboTAX, the very company that is being slammed for allegedly standing in the way of free tax filing. If you are a die-hard, you can download the forms and send them in for the price of a stamp or two (my state forms, seven pages of paper, cost $0.70 to mail.)

Just wait, the city will start to tax you for evaporation for water released into the outside world...

I let my C64 go already. Still have a 1541, can't bear to actually throw it away but they're not really worth much and who knows if it even still works.

It's not just the country, it's the states, too. I moved to Texas for a while, and California had enough information to know this. You're not required to file if you don't owe, but they decided to tax me for my Texan income and then I did owe according to them, and then they came after me for back taxes of thousands when they actually owed me over a hundred bucks.

Corruption weakens governments. We're ripe for plucking.

That should not be possible. If it is, then both the update and the OS are broken.

Yes. Apt-get is really pretty miserable. It just happens to be better than everything else. Although, to be fair, there is no permission-fixing tool, something that commercial Unixes had back in the 1980s. That's horrendous. Having to reinstall all packages on the system to fix perms is insane.

Nobody claimed that. You wrote that whole comment just so you could wind up by attacking a straw man? I see why you didn't log in.