I use about 70 to 150 GB per month.

ok... Verizon's taking a real risk with this, Oh, and they'll lose my $700 cash infusion that I supply them approximately yearly, oh, and my $200/month (family-wide) cellular bill... Oh, plus the fact that I've successfully convinced tens of people in the past,

  Hope they can live without that, too.

You bet they can. say 3000/year? For 70-150GB per month? I pay $1500/year at least, and use maybe 15-20GB per YEAR.

So yeah, you make them twice as much $, but use 10x as much bandwidtih. That makes people like ME 5x more profitable than you are.

They'd be happy to lose you, and anyone like you.

If you don't, look to lose about $10,000 per month in revenue by the time I get done canceling my service and talking to my connections about Verizon and they start pulling the plug.

In reality, your connections are mostly in contract, and cant switch anyway. Plus despite your outrage, they are satisfied with their service.

I'm a very convincing and influential person.

And the guy in the mirror agrees with you, so you must be right.

I wonder how many other people like me out there are souring to your business by your anti-consumer practices.

Less than a fraction of a percent of its least profitable paying customers. Your better than people who don't pay their bill, that's about it it.

that the planet's orbit be stable over thousands of years

Very low thousands is plenty if the timing is right. If anything say a few thousand years pre-Copernicus contained astronomical accounts that deviated wildly from what we "know" today, we'd put it in the same category as the artwork and accounts of the flat earth resting on the back of a giant turtle.

If you read this paper, you see they settled on a moon the same mass as Kalgash but with the density of Saturn! How could such a system possibly arise?

Gas Dwarfs?
http://blogs.discovermagazine....

As for the how, with 6 suns dancing around, you've got plenty of candidates to provide the required components, and lots of opportunity for freak events, collisions, etc.

Honestly, I think, after you add in 'freak occurrences' we'll eventually find some pretty spectacularly improbable planets.

No one is paying $200 for a phone they can get for free with a contract

Not true. The 2ndary market for last years premium phones (iphone 4S, galaxy 3, galaxy 4 ...) and they do go for ~$150-250.

There are a few niches where used premium phones really shine:

kids phones -- kids want imessage/sms, games, youtube, and parents don't want to spend $50-80/mo for phone contracts for their kids, so they'll 'get' an older premium phone and stick a pay as you go text messenging plan on it.

This is a popular setup parents go for around here, and its usually put on 'hand-me-down phones' or phones picked up 2nd hand.

For example, I put my daughter on 100$/year unlimited SMS plan, on my old iphone 3GS, and then after she had it a year it gave out, and wasn't worth fixing - so I bought her a used iphone 4S for $180. I think this is a pretty common situation, as everything from small computer shops to ebgames deals in used premium phones and there's always 10+ iphone 4, 4S, samsung SIII and S4 phones in stock at any of these places.

If Verizon was really going to give her a new iPhone for nothing (but a contract extension), she should have still paid Apple the $100 to fix the screen on the old one, and then sold it immediately.

Meh... depends on what phone she had and has now. She probably has a 4S. $100 to repair it and then maybe sell it for $200... $100 net profit whooo... still worth it assuming you value your time less than whatever grief is involved dealing with putzes on craigslist. :)

The Mediaite page is still not quite kosher. At the end of the first paragraph:

"There's significant evidence to suggest that they're also inundated with Thetans."

So....yeah.

Actually, the NSA attempted this, and didn't have consistent success. At least, not according to what Snowden revealed.

Let's say on Monday you are ordered to bomb a large military base. You want a warhead with the largest lethality radius possible- to kill as many enemy soldiers and destroy as much equipment as possible.

On Tuesday you're ordered to bomb a house occupied by an enemy commander, and you notice that it's a block away from a school. You now want a different warhead that contains its destructive force to a much smaller radius and just destroys the target without killing nearby civilians.

If used properly, the concept is actually the opposite of what a mass murdered/psychopath would want.

Which large reptiles are those? And which dinosaurs are they descended from? And how did dinosaurs, which were all killed at the KT boundary, manage to have descendents?

Dinosaurs are reptiles with their legs under their bodies. This makes them distinct from other reptiles (the kinds we have today, which are not descended from dinosaurs) which have their legs off to the side.

Mammals also managed the legs-under-the-body trick, and birds (which are descended from dinosaurs, unlike all modern reptiles, none of which are descended from dinosaurs, what with dinosaurs all being extinct without issue at the KT boundary.)

http://i.imgur.com/oE3jel6.png

Now you've seen it.

Actually, you're right...up to the point where the police might get involved. Also, the power that flight attendants and gate agents have (which is backed by the FAA, whereby refusal to comply with their orders is a felony...I kid you not) also crosses the line between private entity/government. Since Kimberly *cough* fucking cunt *cough* had that power backing her up, I would say this does indeed become a First Amendment situation.

better to deliver it to where it's needed (i.e. Phoenix) than sell it to southern California or let it flow into Mexico unused.

Because God forbid we actually let those dirty beaners get the water we promised to them by treaty, right?

The guy had already shown his willingness to publicize his dissatisfaction by tweeting about a minor inconvenience,

You know who reads the average persons tweets? Their moms.

https://twitter.com/DuffWatson

300+ tweets, to 400 followers (and I wonder how many of those followers are post-him-being-on-the-news). Seriously this guy is a nobody.

The tweet itself? That was just the catalyst, if the employee hadn't escalated it by pulling him off the plane, nobody would have given two shits about random nobody from minnensota posting his brain diarrhea on twitter where next to nobody cares. He may as well have threatened to tell his sewing circle.

Is this the same Lawrence Krauss who polluted the Scientific American for years with his leftist political diatribes? I have no problem with Comgress cutting the political dead wood from the Energy Department or any other department of government. There are enough activists in the bureaucracy.

Less CPU is a bonus for underpowered systems like mobile phones. I see it as less priority for a desktop/laptop. It may be part of a longer strategy to use more ARM processors in the future.

"identically specced" Only for very liberal interpretations for "identically specced". The problem is that when you actually try to build one identically-specced, in some cases, you'd find you spend more money on a PC than a Mac. There are specs you may not care about: small form factor, workstation processors, etc which may drive the price down. However ignoring them means you don't have an identically specced machine.

Take for example the cost of the video chips in the Mac Pro. It is actually cheaper to buy a Mac Pro upgrades than discrete cards. The D300 cards are roughly equivalent to the FirePro W7000 (~$750) while the D500 is almost equivalent to the W8000(~$1250). The D700 is roughly equivalent to a W9000 (~$3200). The prices are newegg prices. To upgrade from D300 to D500 is $400 on Apple. If you had two W7000 discrete cards, the upgrade price to dual W8000 would be $800. To upgrade to D700s would be $1000. To upgrade from dual W7000 to dual W9000 is $5500.

Now you make say you don't need workstation level cards, but that's the problem with your argument. Using a consumer level card would be cheaper; however, a Mac Pro is not designed for consumers. It's designed for professionals.