Thanks, I should have taken better care proofreading. That's the trouble with spell checkers, they make me sloppy.

I agree about Romney, he would have been worse than Shrub. As to income inequality, making the haves richer and the have-nots poorer has been his career; his job is firing people, dismantling companies and selling the parts for a huge profit.

As for McCain, he sounds reasonable when he talks; he's on the Sunday morning news shows a lot. As to Palin, I'm sure there was some dealing done by someone to get her on the ticket, because McCain just doesn't seem stupid enough. Someone must have made him an offer he couldn't refuse. I see someone like Koch saying "Palin is going to be VP. Fight me on this and [primary opponent] will be the next President".

Out of the entire House and Senate, he and Durbin are the only two I have any respect for at all. Durbin, unlike Obama, isn't from Chicago, he's from central Illinois. The first ballot he was on was for Mayor of Springfield. I can actually vote for him, because he doesn't want to put half the people I know in jail for an activity that harms no one but perhaps themselves.

Since I knew that Illinois was going to be overwhelmingly for Obama I voted Green in both Obama elections, but told my daughter, who lives in Ohio, to vote Obama (although there was no need for me to).

When you say "President Obama has brought disastrous neo-liberal economic policies and neo-conservative foreign policies" I'm not sure what you mean.

I have to agree 100% about Reagan. As to Carter, he only held one term because he did such a bad job in his first term. The economy got even worse under him, inflation was bad but did worse under him, ditto unemployment. Lots of negatives and no positives at all, as weak as Obama's positives are. And Carter hurt me and everyone like me; I was a poor, struggling college student working part time, like thousands more, not going hungry because we had food stamps. Carter took them away, adding a rule that if you were in college you were ineligible no matter how poor you were. I wonder how many bright but poor kids dropped out because of that? We may have lost another Faraday. I might have dropped out had I not been married; my wife was a waitress (most waitresses are dirt poor).

Tom Wheeler is Reason #1438 that Barack Obama is the worst president in the last half-century.

Do you think Romney or McCain would have appointed anyone better? And "worst President in 50 years?" Dude, when he took office the country had its largest budget deficit in history, the economy was in its worst shape since the Great Depression, and we were fighting two wars. Now the economy has improved greatly although it has a long way to go, particularly among working people, the unemployment rate is lower than when he took office, one war is over and the other will be over in a year, two states have legalized marijuana and he hasn't siced the DEA on them, and he gets no help whatever from Congress.

Contrast that with his predecessor, who took office in boom times and left it in the worst recession since the great depression, ignored the previous administration's warnings and his own FBI agent's reports and got our country attacked, started the longest war in our history and then started another completely senseless war that has resulted in Civil War there, rammed through the misnamed PATRIOT act, started the TSA and all the NSA bullshit Obama is (rightly) condemned for using, rammed through "No Chid Left Behind" which should have been "Leave them ALL behind"... name ONE positive thing Bush did for this country? Obamacare is a clusterfuck, but it's better than what we had.

Bush was the worst President in my 62 year lifetime and likely the worst in history. No other President damaged our country (indeed, the whole world) as badly as Bush.

Hell, with the exception of Bush, Carter was the worst president in fifty years. IMO the only decent President I've seen since Eisenhower was Clinton, who turned HW's recession into a boom, presided over the end of generational welfare, took office with until then was history's largest deficit and left office with a balanced budget, and put 100,000 more cops on the streets... coincidence that the crime rate started dropping then?

Wake up, friend. Both parties suck, and neither produce very good lawmakers or executives.

That may be the case, but it's a moot point considering that some cards received in the mail (such as Discover IT cards) are now switching to flat printed (unembossed) formats. It's no longer an issue of how expensive embossing machines are.

Here's an article on the subject from MSE Money: http://money.msn.com/credit-cards/4-ways-credit-cards-are-changing

Yes, exactly. That "Wandering POV" annoyed me to no end in the only Patterson book I read (I wanted to see why he was so popular, I still don't know). In Mars, Ho!" the first person part is Knolls' report itself. Chapter 22 will be the CEO and Bob on the golf course, with the CEO only having read half of the report. The last chapter (or last chapters, I don't know yet) will be Knolls meeting with the CEO again and will be third person. I think I can make it work without jarring the reader. I hope so, anyway.

All that is true, but monopolies like Amazon's often don't last. Look at Microsoft, they had the browser market and OS market sewn up fifteen years ago, now more people are on iOS and Android than Windows. MS can hardly sell a phone or tablet. Or look at IBM, who owned the computer market in 1985.

B&N remind me of the old ads for Avis rent-a-car, "we're #2, we try harder". Any publisher or manufacturer who gets a nasty note "why isn't [product] at Amazon?" would likely send a polite reply that "we are sorry, but we cannot force a retailer to carry our product, but you can obtain it at [list of Amazon's competitors]." At least, that's what I'd do if I got a note like that (although my books are at Amazon so I have no worries about that). Me, if I can't find it at Amazon, I figure "so what?" I can always get it elsewhere. I wouldn't be annoyed at the publisher or manufacturer, I would be annoyed at Amazon (but yeah, I agree that most people are irrational and emotional).

I won't order anything but books and movies from Amazon since I bought a replacement battery for my laptop and had to return it; it was the wrong battery. I got the right one directly from Acer, which is what I should have done in the first place.

I read a library copy of Andy Weir's The Martian. The only versions available at Amazon are ebook and audiobook, at B&N all versions are there, so it must be a publisher that Amazon is fighting with. I hope Baen isn't on Amazon's blacklist, I'm going to try to get them to publish my next book, self-publishing a hardcover is a whole lot of work and expensive for both writer and reader. It's a real PITA.

IINM, ebooks that are Amazon Only are usually if not always ebook-only books that Amazon itself publishes.

There job is to look for threats.

For FSM's sake, why can't you kids handle homophones? Sorry, kid, but I take no stock whatever in what a semiliterate who very obviously never reads anything not on the internet says.

A little unwanted education, you fucking football player who probably doesn't belong here, it's THEIR. The possessive. THEIR. "There" is a place.

For other aliterate dumbasses (look up "aliterate"), it's "They're angry that their car is over there."

Someone please mod me offtopic, this is meant for the ignorant kid alone. This is a fucking nerd site and I don't like seeing comments that belong on Reddit or Fox or Yahoo where the ignorant, non-reading dumbasses usually hang out.

Sorry, this stupidity pisses me off. Our education system sucks donkey balls or that guy wouldn't be such an ignoramus.

Kid, just shut the fuck up. You should be ashamed at your lack of BASIC writing skills (like third grade, idiot).

I think Amazon is getting arrogant and stupid, and think they own the market and have no competition. My books aren't affected, they're available at Amazon. But they're cheaper from Barnes & Noble, and B&N listed them in their catalog two days before Amazon did (I'm my own publisher, no hatchets are war nerd brothers).

I think it's dumb, B&N will eat their lunch. Want a WB movie or Hatchette book? B&N. And probably a hundred other places.

The only multi-tasking ability I wish they would add (back) to the Kindle is the MP3 player/audio. I hate having to use a second device to listen to music while I'm reading

Why? The Kindle is a "second device", you have a phone in your pocket that is perfectly capable of playing MP3s (and radio) already.

Free as in "over the air radio" which isn't really free, having commercials in it is what you pay to listen. TuneIn has an audio ad that plays every time you turn it on, and video ads at the bottom of the screen. That's a fair enough price, but they want to raise the price by adding my address book to the payment. Nope, it's like cable TV. Cable stations used to have no commercials, Now there are ads on-screen even when the content is playing. It's really stupid; OTA TV fed from cable used to be a lot better picture and sound, no static, ghosts, or snow so you were paying for the content by watching ads and paying the cable company for clarity, as well as extra programming, mostly excellent and without commercials. Now that it's digital, over the air serves a better picture than cable. And cable may have hundreds of channels, but hundreds of channels I have no intention of ever watching. They think I'll pay for that? They're insane, I dropped cable over ten years ago.

I can drop TuneIn just as easily, and if it stops working without the update I'll just uninstall it*, which will make their real product less valuable. They surely have competitors.

*Then I'll email radio stations I listen to and let them know they lost a listener, and why. Most stations have their own apps anyway, TuneIn is really only useful because you only have to install the one app.

When I first saw this I thought "finally Apple has given folks a good reason to shell out the extra cash. Now if they were only waterproof and shock resistant like my cheap Kyocera..."

I keep location services shut off as well, but on my phone turning it on or off is just a swipe and a touch. And it's extremely annoying that apps with no real use except stalking me keep nagging me to turn it on. It's why I refuse to upgrade my TuneIn app, the upgrade wants my address book! WTF? Stupid developers writing stupid apps for stupid people. I wish they'd knock off their intrusive, annoying, STUPID stalking. But it seems that most businesspeople these days are sociopathic morons with absolutely no respect for their paying customers (there are places here where they demand that elderly people show ID to buy beer. Guess what? They don't get my business, I prefer to keep my money away from arrogant morons who insist on insulting the very idea of intelligence).