Not really; the problem is that every carrier has phones with Android images that are customized for them...so OS lifecycle responsibility lies ultimately with the carrier. Fragmentation is the main root cause here, along with the fact that the carriers frankly don't give a shit about pushing updates. They'd much rather that everyone buy new phones anyways...not for the profit of the phones per se, but because the less they have to straddle cellular standards (EDGE/3G/4G/LTE) the less money they have to spend operating parallel sets of equipment to service each of them. And customer tech support is easier (i.e., cheaper) with less legacy phones in the wild as well.

There's another problem with his theory as well; as we all know, Android phones don't get many OS updates, if any at all. Every study that checks (using real methods) the Android versions currently in use based on hardware, vendor, or general population finds that unless you bought your phone very recently, there's almost no chance you're running the latest version of Android. So how is it that Google is managing to slow down old phones with code in the new versions of Android in the first place?

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.