Comcast swore up and down that they didn't do traffic shaping on their networks. But now that Netflix has paid Comcast not to do traffic shaping and they've stopped. Doing what they said. They weren't. Doing. I don' geddit.

I assumed that. I know "robbed" technically implies a home invasion, but I was assuming he meant "mugged". (Which I agree may not be a valid assumption.) My comment meant: If the crime rate in the area where you live is so high that being robbed for something as trivial as a cell phone (it used to be tennis shoes...) is common, you might consider relocating to some place where that's less likely to happen. Parenthetically, I think this (not robbed for cell phones but crime rates in general) might have been the original reason people who could afford it moved out of the city into the suburbs.

I travel around the continental US for work, was an early adopter of cell phones, (worked as a contractor for a provider for awhile) and I've never had a phone stolen. Not once. Of course, (a) I always have my cell on me, so stealing it would involve interacting with me in some fashion (and I'm pretty big...) (b) I tend to buy a little better than I need and then keep it for a very long time, so the cell I'm carrying at any given moment is pretty beat up, and (c) I've never owned an Apple mobile device. I think they're trendy nonsense and I'm not surprised that they get stolen a lot. Like trendy overpriced tennis shoes used to be. But mostly, I try to stay out of areas where crime is common. (That time in Miami was an accident....)

I couldn't upgrade to 8.1, let alone 8.1 update 1. 8.0 installed fine, but got massive acpi errors with 8.1 that neither Microsoft nor the hardware manufacturer could fix. (Which, I'd like to say, was a bit annoying after waiting for hours for it to download and install.) For that and other reasons, finally gave up and reinstalled Win7. My copy of Win8 gathers dust on the bookshelf.

It looks like at least some early adopters may be stuck. I don't know of a solution, except perhaps waiting for Microsoft to issue build disks that already contain some future update that sets things right. If such a beast ever materializes.

What a mess. I'd like to submit, this seems to prove that Ballmer wasn't all that's wrong with Microsoft.

Wow, you might consider moving.

Pi = "three and a bit"

Or, wrap a tape measure around a tin can, and then stretch it across the largest distance from lip to lip. Divide one into t'other.

I'm assuming you mean small rocks, and not department stores, which would be much more difficult to drop on a quarter circle. (But not impossible with adequate preparation.)

The simplest answer to your question is "because shotgun shells go bang".

I agree with that. It's a classic problem -- a high cost of living in a given area tends to either drive wages up beyond national average, or drive living conditions down compared to the same career opportunities in other areas. Usually a combination of these.

I still keep in touch with a few people in the Bay Area, and the only ones who own a home live many miles to the east and endure an hours-long daily commute. Most are still renting apartments well into middle age. A few have invested in condos, which in most cases are repurposed motels and apartment complexes.

I've never lived in New York, but from personal experience living in SF, $33/hour isn't exactly rolling in cash.

The problem with this thinking is that outsourcing jobs reduces the number of people, holistically, who can afford to buy non-essential products. So eventually, your sales go down anyway. Perhaps not right away, especially if you were on the leading edge of the outsourcing curve, but it's inevitable.

A "gaming mouse" (to use your example) assumes people who (a) have the free time to play games, (b) have the discretionary income to buy games, (what are computer games, still $60 per seat?) and (c) have enough discretionary income left over to buy a gaming mouse. And it is a certainty that some of the young people manning your call center are in that demographic. Except they can't afford that anymore, because you just outsourced phone support off shore and they're back living with their parents.

Of course, there isn't a 1:1 correlation, but the example above illustrates how, on a macroscopic level, every reduction in the number of locals working reduces the number of purchases made by locals. And if you're not exporting, that probably includes consumers in your sales demographic. It's a downward spiral, and it only seems like a fun ride if you're leading the pack. And then, only for a short time.

Ok, so, apocryphal stories, check. Stats with no useful contextual data, check. (The number of deaths by falling pianos is up 100%!!)

A cell phone kill switch is still a phenomenally bad idea. Let's not let the media sell us on it with heart rending stories about some random person being robbed for their smartphone.

That's a truly excellent question. Not as far as I know. It's possible that the phenomenon has not been going on long enough for the effects to be apparent from outside the company. Big corporations tend to have a lot of inertia. I think that's the only reason HP still exists as a company.

Then it might be time to move. Back in the nineties I moved out of the San Francisco bay area, where I had lived most of my life, because I took a hard look at the cost of living and the chances of ever owning a home, and decided that my salary as an engineer would never get me out of the apartment, much less raise a family. Finding a high tech job at the same salary in an area with lower cost of living was like getting a huge raise. And the quality of life is higher, the level of crime is much lower, and there's significantly less traffic. Of course, the temperatures and weather vary dramatically from the bay area, but the other things made it worth the trade, and we can always visit.

Mine sees wages continuing to deflate. Of all my friends during dot com boom, only two of us kept our houses after the bust. He, because he fully committed his salary at the time and now owns it outright, and me because I bought a smaller house in a child friendly neighborhood, and managed to find enough work post boom to keep up payments. Those who bought huge show pieces in gated hives are all gone now. Living in apartments or had moved out of state looking for work, or in very rare cases moved into sales or management. And don't let the rhetoric fool you -- sales and upper management are worked like dogs, constantly aware that they need to justify their inflated salaries or be replaced at a moment's notice.

My crystal ball sees a continuing flood of third world workers willing to accept convenience store salaries, and a lot more locals out of work. My boss actually brags in status meetings how much money he's saved with H1B workers, and how he intends to hire them whenever possible. (I'm a "legacy employee" grimly determined to hang onto my job.) In the meantime, morale has never been lower, communication suffers, and project continuity is almost nonexistent. But as long as the practice looks profitable on the short term, it will continue.

Part of me thinks that business is running mostly on inertia at the moment. Eventually we'll reach the point where consumers can't afford the non-essential trinkets that make so much money, because there aren't jobs anymore that pay enough to afford them. Currently it's a downward spiral, with companies paying less, causing consumers to have less to spend, reducing sales, which cause companies to find more cost cutting measures. (Currently, the biggest fad of which is hiring third world workers.) In the meantime, it's just a different kind of race to the bottom.

Oh, and I'm not just sitting around waiting for the axe to fall. I'm working on starting a new business in a completely different kind of work, one that involves directly interfacing with people, a skill that H1B employees generally lack. As a local, communication skills are your biggest advantage. Don't forget that, it might become useful some day.

Or you have, say, a family, and your children have a desire and aptitude for fields that really do need a college degree. Or should only the children of the ruling class get to aspire to something other than a phone tech gig?

Oh there are lots of candidates, but they want to be paid first world wages. That's the real issue.

Oh, I had to suffer through a Windows Mobile phone for awhile, (Never, ever again.) so I have had experience with the bastard children of Windows. Thing is, now they're all bastard children. They've thrown out the wheat and kept the chaff. In trying to enter a market in which they have very little penetration, and very little experience, and in keeping with this insane policy of "one GUI to rule them all", they've absolutely screwed their core. That's not the way to be successful.