Screw big-media mergers. We need more competition as the current oligopolies have some of the worse customer service records there are, and high prices compared to the rest of world, even in denser population areas where the "rural long wire" argument doesn't hold up.

Oligopolies & monopolies almost always result in crappy service/products/prices.

The "economies of scale" argument for defending them is weak. That claim was used to protect the Detroit Big 3, but the Medium 7 from Japan came along and kicked the Big 3 in the ass.

I'll take the downsides of (alleged) lack of "economies of scale" over the sloth of oligopolies.

I have only 2 realistic ISP choices in my area, and it's not rural by any stretch. It's a hefty suburb right next to a major city. And both suck. The pushy sales persons on the phone eventually admit their service sucks when presented with undeniable evidence, but will blatantly make the argument, "Okay, we suck, but we can get you crappy service at a better price than the other crappy guy". Even they know they suck; they just claim they suck for less $ (at least until the "special offer" period runs out).

It's like two satan's arguing, "Okay, yes, we are hot here and your ass will indeed get burned off. BUT, we have better elevator music to listen to while you fry."

This is a general problem with devices that are "paired". How do you securely establish the initial connection, when neither side knows anything about the other?

The secure solutions involve some shared secret between the two devices. This requires a secure transmission path between the devices, such as typing in a generated key (like a WPA2 key) or physically carrying a crypto key carrier to each device (this is how serious cryptosystems work).

Semi-secure systems involve things like creating a short period of temporary vulnerability (as with Bluetooth pairing). There's a scheme for sharing between cellphones where you bump the phones together, and they both sense the deceleration at close to the same time.

- just because you are economically illiterate doesn't make something "a lie".

- if it could and it were economically advantageous for companies to provide it, they would have done it. Nobody had to force the gas stations in the past to provide the service, it was in their best interest to do it because it attracted more customers and there was a competitive pressure to do it.

- precisely why the service can not be "absolutely provided" and what makes you not only economically illiterate but also so confused as to make 2 separate completely contradicting statements in the span of 2 paragraphs.

- that's the propaganda line, sure. The reality is of-course completely different. The wages of the workers have been destroyed by inflation, not by 'corporate profits'. The inflation is created by the Federal reserve bank of America buying up bad USA debt from the Treasury (and the rest of the market) for decades following Nixon's default on the US dollar in 1971.

The corporate profits are driven up by the inflation as well, unless those corporations are selling worldwide and not only within USA itself. It is quite frustrating to be surrounded so tightly by so many people with so little knowledge and so much desire to talk.

Apple's reputation management service is reacting faster now. It used to take them an hour to mod criticism down. Now it only takes 15 minutes. Who are they using?

Maybe you can tell me this, oh wise one, just how many people are supposed to be on welfare provided by a few companies in the world exactly? Let's say the companies make it possible for people to buy enough food and energy and shelter and clothing and medical help to sustain 70 billion people, not 7, should the companies be forced to provide these 'human wages', however you define them or maybe the companies should be forced to pay everybody welfare (the way it is done now)?

Ok, so let's have a 1 working person to 10 parasites ratio, how about 1 to 100, 1 to 1000? The parasites that are given free stuff never fail to procreate, so the ratio will never decrease, it will always go up. So in your generous estimation, do you think that at some point if one person runs a bunch of factories that produce everything that everybody needs, should he be forced to subsidise everybody?

1 to (ALL-1) ratio? Interesting, what if he decides to stop and blows up all of his factories and all of these people are only alive and eating because he is so productive to feed them all? 99.99999% of them will die from starvation, right? Good plan. Let's turn one guy into the slave of the all. That's basically your idea, if not that extreme in the beginning.

Seems like every Galaxy owner I've talked to has their own list of twenty things their phones does really shittily.

20 things? Wow... I've been entirely happy with my S3. My only complaint was the battery barely made it through the day, no matter how little I used it.

My new S5, solves that problem amply.

And really my only complaint about it, is a complaint about android in general... the UI is a bit schizophrenic (google vs touchwiz vs ??? ) and it shipped with two browsers ("internet" and chrome, two voice control systems, (google and s voice), multiple IM apps... messenger, hangouts, chaton, etc... so its a bit overwhelming.

As a linux enthusiast, schizophrenic ui, and overwhemling app redundancy is par for the course. After all, only on linux is "yet-another-X" a common naming pattern. :)

But i still see it as a flaw in the new user experience of the device.

I guess if i had to have another complaint about it, its that i don't much like or trust google*, and want to do more with the phone without being herded into giving google access to everything, and loading everything onto the cloud, but that's not a flaw of the phone.

* so what am I doing with android if i don't like google you might ask? Well... its simple...I see the walled gardens from Microsoft or Apple and they are even worse.

This may be the backdoor known as DROPOUTJEEP, which was described in some Snowden-leaked documents last year.

Looks like Apple sold out, put in a backdoor, and then lied about it.

Wouldn't you expect someone who runs privacy organizations to have already rooted his phone?

It sounds like the bloatware is his biggest problem, and I just got a Moto X for the same price as an LG Optimus. Vanilla Android and no bloatware.

- unions pushed for this legislature, normal people did not need any of it. The democracy is broken specifically because it allows large organisations to destroy individual rights of people that are not organised that way, which is why those laws were passed though they benefited very few at the expense of many. These laws prevented people with a lower socio-economic status (at the time mostly non-whites) from competing with the union workers for the jobs.

Union organisation is obviously there to represent the union, not anybody else, not employers and not people outside of the unions. Unions destroyed competition in the job market. You can yell 'hogwash' all you like, but the people who lost the jobs that unions were after actually didn't "pull that trigger" and it wasn't their "finger" either. The finger was given to them.

- actually USA was not the leader in this fight of the unions against disorganised minority labour. New Zealand introduced the first minimum wage laws, those were directed against the aboriginals competing for jobs with the whites. Then it was time for Australia.

Once the precedent was established, the UK stepped into the action, realising that this was a powerful way to gain political support from the unions. USA tried this in 1912 first, then it was deemed unconstitutional, which it was! It was discriminatory and unconstitutional. In 1938 it was pushed through, as many other horrific things that were pushed through during the FDR, where the excuse was always 'Great Depression' (started as a bubble that was inflated by the Federal reserve buying bad UK debt from France and which became the depression during Hoover and FDR due to all of the government meddling and attempts to 'save' the economy from the much needed recession, which was realigning the mis-allocated resources).

When you tell me to "try again", I will most certainly do and tell you exactly what is what, so that maybe you can pull your head out of you know where.

- maybe you should read my comments and my journal entries, I do not like democracy, I can appreciate the difference between a democracy and a republic, which USA was supposed to keep, but it didn't. Democracy is mobocracy which I specifically not only 'do not like', I abhor it. I completely disagree with allowing a majority to destroy rights of a minority, which is what democracy does, which is what destroys the economy when the majority (employees) are pitted against a minority (employers). Employees, business owners will never have the same number of votes allocated to them, so in a democracy first the individual rights of people in the minority are destroyed by the mob and the politicians, who are only too happy to oblige to stay in power and second the business owners then have no choice but to use whatever leverage they can to corrupt the system further by throwing money at it.

If the democracy did not provide the politicians with the method of destroying the Constitutional rights of individuals then the business owners would not be able to use their money to buy any favours, because there would be no favours to sell. Government must not be able to pass business related and money related laws and thus destroy individual freedoms. Government must not be able to tax income, it must not be able to create any type of labour or business related regulations. Once it can do it, then favours for some can be bought at the expense of others. No, I do not like democracy specifically for those reasons. I do not believe that all people are entitled to vote for example simply by birth right, they have to earn that privilege by for example being part of the tax base (not income or wealth related taxes, that again goes against individual freedom, but import taxes and duties, sale taxes, things of that nature.)

- I am not part of the majority on anything, when you find yourself to be 'part of the majority' that is the time to reform yourself. Majority rule is 2 wolves and a sheep voting for what is for dinner.

- right, the point is that it is recognised that minimum wage as a law prevents some people from competing against other people for reasons other than their ability, it prevents people on both sides, those who want to offer their labour for sale and those who are willing to pay a price for that service from finding each other and agreeing on their own terms. It prevents people from working. Those who need labour will find somebody, it will be suboptimal, however those who have really nothing to offer at the level of the legal minimum wage stand no chance to move up in your version of economy.

- the facts are in, I am an employer and I have some people working for me above what you consider 'minimum wage' and some people below it. There is nobody that qualifies to work at any exact artificial number anyway. If I am forced to pay everybody a minimum wage, those who are currently employed below it will not have those jobs. I will have to search harder to find those, who are around that level and hire fewer people of-course (money does not grow on trees here, that's a fact).

- unfortunately you being economically illiterate (regardless of whatever you believe your 'education' is, AFAIC most so called economists today are illiterate economically, including the fakes with the PhD behind their names, the likes of Krugman, who only proves that illiterate fools can too get Nobel prizes) is the actual expensive (not cheap) attack against the economy and society.

This is (largely) true; but the question is why?. It is expected that cheap phones will suffer from somewhat inferior hardware; but it is less clear why they should suffer from inferior software, doubly so if the very same vendor or the AOSP has software without whatever flavor of broken is causing the issue. It's also particularly weird with something like autocorrect making dumb mistakes: that's far too high level to be a 'well, we went with the cheapest SoC vendor, and you wouldn't believe what total shit their BSP is...' problem, it's not something that the guy buying the expensive phone is going to be spared because he has a faster CPU and more RAM, and it's not something where there's any good reason for the vendor to be trying to roll their own.

I suspect that the thesis about 'hard to quantify' stuff getting squeezed first is true, and one would be foolish to expect market mechanisms to work in the absence of good information, which 'hard to quantify' largely assures; but it still surprises me that cheap hardware (and even some expensive hardware) is routinely shipped with software that actually cost somebody money to make worse than 'stock'. Carrier shitware on cheap phones, I understand, because carriers exert most of the control over what phones will be made available 'free' with contract, and so OEMs will suck it up and preinstall whatever they demand; but any other area where the experience is worse than stock android of the equivalent version just seems weird.

It's not the human *touch* that people crave in a complicated interaction with a system. It's human *versatility*.

Thus more personnel does no good, if those personnel are rigidly controlled, lack information to advise or authority to act. The fact that they're also expected to be jolly and upbeat as they follow their rigid and unyielding rules only turns the interaction with them into a travesty of a social interaction.

What would work better is a well-designed check-in system that handles routine situations nearly all the time, along with a few personnel who have the training and authority to solve any passenger problems that come up.

If you don't mind looking ridiculous, the helicopter market has had this for ages (since there's nothing quite like sitting under a propeller going fast enough to keep you in the air when it comes to noise...) Nice, sturdy, over-the-ear headphones with substantial protection from outside noise, along with a mic which gets piped to everyone else's headphones so they can hear you as though you were speaking in a more normal environment(the ability to mute individual users would, of course, be vital in broad application).

I'm pretty sure birth control exists.

First of all this wasn't "society", unions supported the very idea of the minimum wage in order to get rid of cheaper (and at the time blacker) competition. Minimum wage is a vestigal expression of racism in the US. Secondly there are plenty of people that "society" ( in quotes, this is a political creation, society loses because of it) says do not have to be limited by this artificial barrier to entry into the job market. The minimum does not apply to various categories of people, for example the mentally retarded (medical term). An employer would not hire somebody with that type of legal disability if he has to pay the same minimum wage to that person as to any normal one.

Interns in the US cannot be paid. It is either 0 for them or at least minimum wage, which is quite interesting. You cannot pay 1-2 bucks to an intern who is doing a good job even to cover their expenses to get to work and back under the system. Society doesnt give a shit about your silly notion of "differentiating" all of this is a political ploy to give you something to vote on, and since majority of the people are employees and not employers and vast majority (95%) make above the minimum wage, it is a safe "feel good about yourself" economically horrid idea that gives you a fake reason to vote one way or another while hurting those on the lowest end of the economic ladder. Unions still make much more than MW but they will always vote to raise it, it prevents competition and the likes of you are so economically illeterate, you actually believe it is good for society and will vote accordingly.

I'm afraid to google "fat aggie".