So a customer 'bought' a busted phone. Not getting updates is one of the downsides. Buy unlocked or from a different carrier.

I think I'm one of the two who bought from Amazon. I don't care if you put it up for free. If it really bugs you that much, take the two bucks and give it to the next homeless person you see, or in the tip jar somewhere, or whatever. (Actually, I thought I said before that you could do that :)

Charging for caller ID on landlines is a scam (like pretty much everything about telecommunications billing), but I've never seen cell phone service without caller ID.

I'm guessing you're not old enough to have ever had analog cell-phone service. I don't recall if caller ID was even offered as an add-on service, but I know I didn't have it with my phone and my service. Vibrating call alert and an 8-character dot-matrix alphanumeric LED readout (so you could attach names to the phone numbers stored in memory!) were expensive enough.

Jeep, as a brand, almost died simply for having non-round headlights.

Brand association is a powerful thing. Probably an evolutionary thing, actually; if it doesn't taste, sound or smell like what it's supposed to, it's not the same thing, so don't risk it.

Here's a link to one of their articles which shows the contents of a cartridge. Hopefully that'll work?

And Cmdr Taco

moot is now free to join Sherrod DeHippo in obscurity.

If the American public truly believed, so overwhelmingly, or cared, Congress wouldn't have an incumbency rate of somewhere between 96 and 85 percent (depending on how you count.)

America doesn't have elected officials, they have an aristocratic class, and a few political dynasties.

Gleaming the Cube

Which can be rewritten as 'Microsoft specified it would only be free for the first year, which I interpret to mean that there will then be a yearly fee.'

The other, more logical, interpretation is 'After a year, even if running windows 7, 8 or 8.1, you'll need to purchase an upgrade at standard retail.'

In my state, they have to post a surety bond or have a certain amount of liquid assets or something along those lines in order to offer their services.

As I said, good points and bad points. A single platform can be good, because every program can leverage all features of that platform. Counterpoint: maybe there's no incentive to develop new and interesting features in future versions of the platform.

Multiplatform is good, because they're all competing. Counterpoint: no point in using feature of platform X if it locks you out of all other platforms, or you're coding lots and lots of platform specific code paths. Remember when games, say, would have the software renderer, the directX 9 renderer, the 10 renderer, the NVidia openGL renderer, the ATI openGL renderer, and maybe a vanilla openGL renderer?

I bet starving people would pay more for a meal than a fatted American like myself.

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.

One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.