Completely agree
I have a Blackberry purchased SIM free (i..e without contract) and that I happen to use on Vodafone in the UK.
Turns out that the Podcast app's auto-download and syncing function is disabled by Vodafone!

WTF? My phone and my money; I pay for 1GB of data it should be my choice if I want to use all of that on Care Bears podcasts for all I know.

I love my BB but RIM is just bending over backwards to carrier requests. The Storm was also a half-assed attempt at a touchscreen phone from a Vodafone request as they had missed out on the iPhone (o2 was exclusive at the time).

RIM grew half a testi with the playbook's bridge function, but the operators gave them a black-eye and decided not to sell the tablet.

Rim needs to realize that customers buy phones now, no longer just corporate purchase departments.
I don't give a rat which network my phone's on, but I care about my terminal.

I am your client RIM, listen to *me*, I'm your customer, the carrier's not your customer.

I know that there are countries in Europe that have lower VAT rates for computers, as opposed to game consoles.
I suspect that by adding the Linux option to their PS3s, Sony was able to switch to the reduced VAT level, as hence bag more profits for the same retail price.

This may have been revoked/no longer valid/overturned/whatever recently and hence Sony has no further incentive to offer this feature.
Could also be that being classified as a computer made the console eligible for government subsidies to buy "computers" (such as in the UK the Home Access Program - http://www.becta.org.uk/homeaccess)

The reality is that cracking word passed passwords is even simpler than what you are pointing to, even in cases where special punctuation has been used mid word. No need for crazy wizardry, simple Markov chains technique tell you that there is a probability of using a given character after another. You just need to work your way through the decision tree in descending order with some algorithm. For instance, In English language there is a y% probability that a "n" character follows a "e" character etc. If you know which languages are spoken by the person who chose the password you can already zoom in very quickly

Your words should fit perfectly here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-purchase_rationalization

in TFA there is no mention of Citigroup looking to buy Redhat; just a mention that a Citigroup stock analyst upgraded his target share price to $17 and kept the recommendation to "hold".
Once again everybody on ./ has gone and commented on how Oracle culture would be compared to Citigroup's whereas that's not even the point..
Sheesh people, the linked article is probably under 250 words. Could you not have given it a read? Did it not strike you as something strange that a bank would want to buy a software vendor?

a) publishers and Co make sure that ther are less middlemen, but however the prices to the consumer are the same --> more margin for the publisher and hardware vendor

b) you won't be able to rent your games from BB, Netflix etc anymore. Just shut-up and pay full price, no more renting. "Demos should be enough for anybody to make up their mind on a game; if they like it, buy it"

c) forget about re-selling your games or trading them in for new ones. this is just like those nice little DRM tunes from iTunes. no transfer nada. How this works with the first sale doctrine I don't know. "Just shut-up and pay".

It's funny how this is supposed to costs billions in the UK however in France they were able to roll out Fibre with 1000mbs products showing up almost everywhere for a sub 1bn investment (can't locate the source of this at the moment).

Funny how every other country with a successful Internet deploment strategy (France, Sweden, Finland, Japan, Korea, etc.) are all able to get this deployed without anybody getting out of business. The old dinosaur BT however needs oodles of cash. Yeah right.

Guess the old "Rip-off Britain" adage is still true (and I should know for living there!)